Massive New Surveillance Program Uncovered by Wall Street Journal
slate.com
slate.com
...where on the line did these guys lost the "innocent until proven guilty" part?! (the possibility of your government handing personal data of innocent civilians to foreign governments sounds "out of your freakyn minds" even for a foreigner like me! Imagine someone coming to the US in attempt to flee from an oppressive government and data about his whereabouts getting to a contract killer via an "en masse" exchange of data about "suspicious" civilians between governments...)
...keep it like this and the USA will be the last place on Earth someone would want to emigrate to, either to work or to open a business!!!
My brother was turned back when he flew to Miami with his family to take his children to Disney World.
It turned out that because he had been arrested aged 19 and failed to declare it that the border people felt that he had answered fraudulantly when challenged on "Have you ever been arrested?".
My brother answered no because whilst he was arrested he was never charged or convicted. He had attended a demonstration in the North of England and when a few people caused trouble the police had just arrested everyone only to release the vast majority some hours later.
He'd forgotten about this because nothing had ever actually come of it and it was over 20 years ago, yet there he was being confronted by it at a US border.
Clearly the UK authorities already share data with the USA on its citizens, even those never charged or convicted.
That it may happen more does not surprise me the least. The only part that surprises me is that the data flow might go the other way too.
This is what Churchill meant by "special relationship" and the agreement which Tony Benn oversaw when he was in office. The price set for the Polaris was Her Majesty's subjects' data. All of it.
My brother answered no because whilst he was arrested he was never charged or convicted
-> http://craphound.com/littlebrother/
http://techtv.mit.edu/videos/21783-the-government-is-profili...
Tony Blair wasn't around Nassau (Trident, the successor to Polaris, was signed off by Thatcher, and it also precedes Blair).
youtu.be/rokTiJfL4WY
Certainly, the presence of nuclear weapons on their territory involves, for Europeans, multiple risks. Many of them are similar to the risks and dangers faced by the citizens of any of the countries possessing an atomic arsenal. The usefulness and desirability of which may be subject to debate. Including whether the risks are worth to be taken in the service of a politico-military strategy of national defence (or, conversely, must be rejected in view of universal peace and total disarmament). It is up to each and everyone to take a stance according to their beliefs, their world views, their perception and ranking of hazards, et cetera. For us here, all this is irrelevant. Because in this case, the question does not even arise. Thanks to another dimension of NATO nuclear "sharing", which is highly reflective of transatlantic relations. Whereas in the nuclear power countries the debate can focus on the articulation of the nuclear force with an overall strategy (importance attributed, or not, to the concept of deterrence), here, to the contrary, the (U.S.) nuclear force, and the myth of the protective umbrella that accompanies it, is a pretext used to justify the lack of (European) strategy. As well as providing a comfortable smokescreen that allows the governments of the old continent to stay, ultimately, flawlessly aligned on the United States – even if this means to become accomplices of a nuclear strategy in the development and implementation of which they cannot even dream of having a little bit of say. Alas, they already feel happy when they are, more or less correctly and more or less timely, informed on the subject.
What interpretation should they have taken from it?
So this could easily happen to me. Or, it could happen to me if I still came to the US, which I don't.
I don't know the specifics, but you always have to declare the equivalent of felonies, but for misdemeanours you can lawfully not declare them after some period of time in which your debt is considered repaid and the record spent.
The whole of the EU has such laws. I think most people within the EU would regard this as just a part of living in the civilised west.
And the most simple part of that is that if you arrested and never charged, or even charged but acquitted during trial, or even arrested and cautioned... then you never need to declare it. You can quite literally forget about it after some relatively short period of time, I think it's a year or 3.
Going back to my brother. Never charged, never cautioned, never went to trial, released without any impact whatsoever... just a bad day, worth forgetting and after 20 years definitely forgotten.
I think almost everyone I know would've said no to the question quite honestly believing that it's a perfectly reasonable and honest answer.
Every thing that you ever do is recorded somewhere. Every person has a file whether they think they do or not. This file will only ever be used against you.
And Europe remembers such a thing... it was only 1990 that the Stasi was dissolved. Yet here we are constructing an even more powerful and permanent version of "a file on everyone".
My brother's demonstration was a worker's one, not political. But don't you see that if attending a political rally risks arrest and permanent repercussions, even if you were innocent of everything save for having an opinion... then are we not already at the point in which to hold an alternate political view is to risk inserting something into your file (it exists anyway) which could permanently affect your life.
Who knows what the future holds, but for my brother it's unlikely to involve working for a company that ever expects travel to the USA. Thus, one is forced to modify their behaviour to avoid being penalised by the current system.
Isn't that what the effect of the Stasi was?
I mean, being European, I find it hard to see how history isn't repeating itself on an ever grander scale now that there are tools that allow it to do so.
In a lesser forum, you would likely be dismissed out of hand for mentioning the Stasi, even though your reasons for mentioning it are very sound. How can we hope to avoid the past if we refuse to talk about it?
CIA agents acquired the records after the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall
only to return them, when they became only a piece of history (I wonder about any copies)
America today is an excellent example of that. The founders came from a time of tyranny and oppression, and worked hard to try to prevent that in their new country. And yet a lot of how our government today works is, I imagine, very much contrary to what the founding fathers envisioned.
You can be detained for seemingly no reason by police almost anywhere (see the ACLU's "constitution-free zone"), prisons and courts have become a means of revenge, not justice or rehabilitation, the president is increasingly seen as a king-like figure ("Something's wrong with the country? Must be the president's fault. What's he going to do to fix it?"), and--without much exaggeration--we're a small jump away from a total surveillance state, as this article emphasizes. In many ways we're already there, and that's just the stuff we know about.
In Europe, as you mentioned, the Stasi were around until just recently. There are still grandparents alive who remember what the continent went through during WW2. (My own is one of them.) European society's memory is still fresh, and they won't repeat mistakes they remember. I think that's why there are so many privacy-protecting laws enshrined in the EU.
We should pay attention to how countries recently emerging from oppression or war, like Romania, Serbia, or Bosnia, handle the internet. I'll bet they'll be the bastions of internet freedom in the coming decades.
But what of the US? Maybe we're trapped in cyclical history. Maybe in 50 years things will be bad enough for people to get up in arms, and we'll start over just like we did a few hundred years ago. Who knows.
A few hundred years? Try a few decades.
In the 1940s, the USA fought totalitarianism. Then we had a major fight against Communism. In both struggles, a major part of our self image is that we, unlike the totalitarian states we struggled against, were a free country. If, in a movie in the 70s, you saw the German officer saying, "Papers, please", that was a sure sign that they were the enemy - not living in a free state.
Today we live in a state that would be instantly recognizable as a totalitarian state. Just like past totalitarian states, the excuse is our security. Do you think that I'm exaggerating? 20 years ago it was common to not need an ID to board a plane, with it being reasonably common that the person whose name was on the ticket was not the person holding the ticket. (That would generally be because someone had bought someone else's return ticket because that was cheaper than buying a one-way ticket.) Today you not only need ID, you go through a thorough search and most take it for granted that we might go through a virtual strip search to get onto the plane.
Can I make this worse? Actually, I can. Nobody will show you the law requiring ID to fly. There was actually a lawsuit filed about this. John Gilmore lost, and STILL didn't get to see the law. (See http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/news/techpolicy/2004-03-... for random verification.)
This also has a bearing on discussions whenever someone talks about freedom of expression.
The US is not all that different. You'd get a court order for the record to be expunged. Although each state has its own laws
It wasn't any of their business in the first place, but since they were nosing around where they shouldn't my money would be on 'forgetful'.
For eg. they already know the date, your flight number, your passport number, your history - it is all about getting you in a situation where you answer questions and can be analyzed.
The Isrealis are really good at it. They realized that security through innspecting every person and every square centimeter of luggage is too expensive and isn't as effective.
A lot of their security at airports depends on picking out people and just asking them a random question or two ('why are you here') and seeing the response. If you have ever been asked the time, or the directions to the mens room, or about a flight from a tourist looking person at an Israel airport, chances are that they may have been an agent. There is a front-line of plain clothed who look around on the ground and pass on potential targets to uniformed officers.
There was a paper I remember reading sub-titled "Can you really catch terrorist by asking them if they are terrorists" and the conclusion was that yes, you can - and you do - and not because you know they will answer 'no', but by how they answer and their body language, among other factors (much of which modern governments keep secret).
There was sometime in how your brother answered that steered them towards not allowing him in. There are a lot of people who also make similar mistakes on immigration forms and are still let in.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1336571/Terr...
When you grow up here you get used to being around all kinds that you previously never fully visualized as actual, walking-talking flesh-and-blood people. There's the Russian-speaking section to which I belong, the local Palestinians, the Ethiopian section, quite a lot of the Moroccan people, as well as many small _Iraqi / Druzi / some part of Europe that speaks not-quite-Russian_ escapees. They all have their quirky chains of characteristic behaviours and you sort of learn to place people in those groups pretty fast.
And yes, all of them have children that've grown up here, and fuck all knows what group any of them belong to (unless they look and act like their parents).
Israel is a sort of an ISLAND, and as anyone who visited Japan will tell you islanders are WEIRD. And sensitive to foreigners.
That's nonsense. Ever commit "moral turpitude"? You'd need to be a historian of the law to know what they're on about, and the peons behind the desks certainly don't know all the answers.
They also didn't know how to interpret my H-1B after my division was purchased by another company, even at the supervisor level, though I had a thick binder from the company lawyers to explain it all - I didn't use it in the end, I did the visa waiver instead.
I'd maintain that almost all people would be turned back by CBP if their lives were inspected closely enough and the laws and questions interpreted literally enough. It's a game; you need to know which questions they think they have the answer to, and answer as expected for them; and admit no wrongdoing elsewhere. And you may still end up with a jobsworth behind the counter - though my experience of most CBP personnel is that they are reasonably cheerful and pleasant.
edit: I don't have the link with me atm, but there was a Wired (I believe) story about the center that is responsible for collecting all the data in pre-screening and the technical challenge. As inputs they have airline data and data exchange agreements with governments that are part of the visa waiver program, amongst others
They still ask stupid questions, whether it's on a website or on paper.
"Are you a drug abuser or addict"? - I think almost every adult has abused alcohol at some point.
Etc.
Are you a mind reader?
If not how do you know that?
All I see is an overzealous border guard refusing a family to enter a country to spend their money on a holiday.
Lose-Lose.
And dumb to boot.
Will TSA consider me "suspicious" just because I tweeted articles such as this one? Or maybe some Wikileaks-related articles or some OWS articles? That is ridiculous, and I don't even want to risk that by flying through the country, let alone want to live there (which is something I really wanted to do before). The world's view on America is changing fast and the view is increasingly more negative.
The world wants America to be its role model, something to aspire to, and a place where they want to live in. It doesn't want to see an America as the bully of the world, or a bully even of its own citizens. So yes, I do think this will impact tourism, cloud businesses, as well as other type of businesses, if they keep going down this road of increasing surveillance and more government abuses, not only against Americans, but against foreigners, too.
There is nothing inherent about security measures that cause annoyance. Security theater measures on the other hand...
So, no my opinion never budged before, during or after 9/11. In fact, it hardened. But, I'm afraid the terrorism worked. We lost freedoms, rights and principles all due to the 9/11 attacks and US reaction to it. Terror won. Bin Laden won. We became more like them.
Just last week david cameron had to apologise for the UK security forces' actions in passing information to terrorist groups to enable the murder of, amongst others, a lawyer. He also had to apologise for cases where the security forces had prior knowledge of murder and did nothing about it and for the wilful destruction of evidence by the police and the army. Is that the 'iffy' stuff that you refer to?
Edit: link to youtube of apology http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcS_FswjqrM
This article about an incident in Northern Ireland may be interesting to you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miami_Showband_killings
The basic assumption that we all hold about our opinions is that everyone else would believe in them too if they knew the facts we did, so it is best to accompany all statements of opinion with a logical argument for their validity.
Anyway, out of the numerous reasons I believe 9/11 was an inside job, here's my favorite:
1. On 9/10 David Rumsfeld, the US secretary of defense, hold a pres conference (it's on CNN.com, etc.) and stated there are 2.3 trillion dollars, that the Pentagon cannot account for.
2. On 9/11 a part of the Pentagon, including the budget analysis department rooms, was destroyed. Most of the victims were accountants.
3. Same day WTC building 7 (not mentioned in 9/11 commission report, not investigated by any other authority) was destroyed in NY. Pentagon's primary financial information backup site was inside.
One out of the many, many "coincidences" on 9/11 ...
Are you claiming that the government 'whipped up' the terrorist attack in under 24 hours?
Are you implying our government funded the IRA? Also, it's pretty rich being criticized by a Brit for the surveillance state. You guys have a camera system that would have made Orwell proud.
You know what annoys me? How many tax dollars are spent on a full body scanner, when the airport bar right on the other side is full of breakable glass. Nevermind the tests that showed that a knife, gun, or even high explosive could be snuck through the checkpoint; a determined attacker could just make their weapons after passing through security. This is not to mention the large, densely-packed crowd of people waiting to go through the checkpoint, a prime target for terrorists.
"If this was the 12th of September 2001 would your opinion be different and if so, why?"
People were talking about terrorists making their weapons after passing through airport security in 2001. People were talking about the crowd of people waiting to pass through security being a target. People were talking about the corruption, the friendly contracts that pour tax money into well-connected companies' coffers, in 2001.
http://www.historycommons.org/timeline.jsp?timeline=complete...
I've done exactly that.
Too bad, there are a lot of really nice people there that I consider close friends.
EDIT: Removed leading "Honestly?". Am serious if an experience led to this.
The specific incident that made me decide to stop visiting the US took place at an airport but that merely made the bucket overflow, it was already pretty full.
No.
> I haven't been to the US for over a decade now and only pick up things on the news here and there...
My last visit to the states was in 2005, so we're getting to that decade. I used to go at least once every year, sometimes more often. But until the madness is brought under control (probably not within my lifetime) it's not going to happen again. Too bad, really.
We will:
1) Open source all submitted ideas.
2) Let the community choose the top 5 and we will hold an internal review process for the top spot.
3) Fly the winner(s) to our office in Atlanta, GA to discuss the winning submission in details with some of the top information security experts in the world.
4) Work to get press around the winning idea.
5) If we get north of 50 submissions we will help seed (with an additional $5,000) an IndieGoGo campaign to see the idea developed.
Email me (adam | socialfortress.com) or respond here to discuss.
That may be a bit prohibitive, given that they will still have to use air travel, possibly to and at least within the USA. I figure the people that come up with a mitigation against a system like this would be very smart to stay the hell away from claiming credit for it.
And the top information security experts in the world are working for what we'll loosely designate 'the other side' here, I don't think they'll be on your discussion panel.
I think that would be accurate if it read:
And some of the top information security experts in the world are working for what we'll loosely designate 'the other side' here
There are some pretty goddamned smart people in the cypherpunk / hacker community, who would (and do) find this kind of surveillance crap abhorrent and who will work to resist it. I certainly would not say that all of the best people are on "the other side". Maybe time will prove me wrong, but I doubt it.
Yes, there are indeed lots of smart people who find this crap abhorrent and who will work to resist it. But I don't think they're the majority. Not even close. Individuals such as Phil Zimmerman are making a real difference.
But money is a powerful motivator. Lots of people will do very stupid things when offered enough money. Governments print money. Nationalism is another such powerful motivator. Press the combined buttons of nationalism and piles of cash and a lot of people will start seeing things your way.
The NSA is currently the largest employer of mathematicians in the United States, and that probably makes them the largest employer of mathematicians planet wide.
There are lots of counterparts of the NSA in other countries. And those mathematicians are not too upset about not being able to publish their results, so I'm thinking there is something to counterbalance that, such as abundant financial compensation.
For now this is an unbalanced situation.
Agreed. I was just trying to point out that there are at least a few talented folks on "our side".
That is optional for the winner(s) :)
However, our company actually does have some of the foremost information security experts as investors (Founders / CTOs / CEOs of PGP Corp, Internet Security Systems, CipherTrust, PureWire, NitroSecurity among others).
We also work closely with some of the leading researchers at the leading engineering universities in the area of cyber security.
Always open to suggestion regarding the structure of the overall process for an event such as this!
Thank you.
However, the "data flak" approach has limits. It is only doable with discretionary data, and even that might be problematic. But it would work well to make access logs useless. While I don't want the system to spam hacker news with nonsense posts about building nuclear weapons, I might be able to harmlessly incorporate intentionally explosive phrases in a post just to annoy them (hah, see what I did there?) For things like flights and credit card usage, there is no way to introduce flak, or really minimize exposure.
Of course, the best mitigation technique is to raise Cain over this and get the entire system dismantled. There is simply no excuse to be doing this sort of thing. The fact is that it would be pretty hard to organize an attack and not trigger (local) alarms. Local police have a feel for the community, for what's what. They can call in the feds if they need to.
Systems like this are going to always have three serious problems: a) bringing the hammer down on the innocent (false positives), b) failing to detect actual plots (false negatives), c) be abused (used as a weapon for politically or personally motivated attacks). And in the long run a) and c) are going to grow monotonically, and that is not acceptable. It's one thing to have the asshole local cop bust down your door for no good reason, it's quite another to have a bunch of feds fly in to nab you based on some data in their computers. They've never met you, don't know you, don't know your relationships to the people around you - but based on data will ruin your life. That's a nightmare scenario if I've ever heard one!
Our president committed crimes his justice department jails people for (illegal drugs). Drug testing is a perfect example of the surveillance state. The people who don't get tested? The testers. The legislators. The people in charge. I know there are technical problems with that analogy - but you get the point.
It doesn't matter if the person is known to the general public or not. Money/power/influence is what matters in our present world.
Whether it was a gainful use of resources given the origin of the tip is dubious, but they weren't actually violating the judicial oversight requirement, as far as I understand it.
Unknown individuals should be assumed to have privacy rights. You can't break into someone random person's house, then find out that they committed a crime, and say that the warrant-less search was now a-ok.
This 5 years the article talk about. Do anyone really believe than in 5 years, they won't extend it further? It will continue to the point in which either everything is stored forever, or push back actually takes away this pandora box from the government.
No goverment ever want to be with less information about the population. If they could predict who is a criminal before a crime is committed, social benefits could be rerouted away. If they could predict who is going to become political candidates, they could adjust information flows away or towards that person. If they can predict who is voting for who, they can direct support/anti-support to "encourage" the right result.
This is why I am worried about a surveillance state. With a large enough database of population information, and prediction models, democracy will be eroded to the point of destruction.
Surveillance is no replacement for legwork. They're not catching that many criminals (or "terrorists") with it right now, and in order to have an effect like you describe they need to catch most if not all of them. Surveillance isn't a panacea like that (even if you ignore the freedom aspect), even with perfect total information awareness, there's a ceiling of efficiency.
The thing you describe, to run smoothly is just about the same amount of trouble and effort for a government, as it would be to rule with actual justice, civil liberties, privacy, etc.
The truth is, all this surveillance shit is NOT really about protecting the public and reducing crime. It may be useful but not that useful, definitely not billons-of-dollars useful, the amounts that are being invested in this tech. It's about the state protecting its place, keeping the status quo and people covering their asses. In a healthy country, those two goals are aligned. In many countries, including the USA, they aren't. Also, money and power. Actually it's just power, money is secondary.
Here we are again : authoritarianism being rationalized.
"Normal" behavior doesn't include jumping off a bridge. But I and friends have, as a lark. Is that then suspicious? Or from the article, normal people don't buy explosive chemicals and a timer in the same week ... except if the person's teen wants the chemicals for a science experiment and the timer replaces the broken one for the lawn irrigation system.
There are a huge number of these low-probability events, and it overwhelms the signal of any truly suspicions behavior. Should the authorities investigate all of these? Some of these? What sets the limit? The lack of funding or the law?
"Authoritarianism" comes into play because the authorities do come in and investigate. That's their mandate. And innocent citizens are compelled to submit to the investigation, or at the least get the clear signal that the government thinks they are suspicious. Some will stop doing legal things (like traveling by air) in order to not be subject to increased scrutiny by the authorities. This might be low-level authoritarianism, but it still is a higher level of submission to authority than I would like.
There's always going to be some false positives, where innocent citizens are investigated, accused, and even put into prison, so it's not like I'm saying that we can have a non-authoritarian government. But do say that this has nothing to do with authoritarianism is only focusing on the collection of the data, and not the likelihood that someone in authority will do something with it.
It seems to me that so long as you don't take it further than "being ready", done right it could be a good thing.
Done right, Marxism is a good thing. Done right, a dictatorship is the most efficient form of government.
But we are, in fact, dealing in sloppy reality, where many things - by their very nature - cannot be done right. No matter how hard we try, or how earnestly we believe in fairies, these things will not be done right. They will inevitably devolve into tyranny.
So the day I see a reindeer with a glowing nose landing on my roof, I will consider allowing the elves to collect all the information they want, as long as the storage center is at the North Pole.
In the meantime, invasion of privacy will continue to be done wrong.
However, the bill of rights is based upon a default distrust, and he may want to research why that was the case.
As clearly evidenced by the bill of rights and the US government, you don't have to implicitly trust your government to grant them power without finding yourself in the middle of a dictatorship police state.
(Yes, I know, some people believe the USA is a police state, but IMO they are the fringe and have never experienced a real police state)
All of these things exist like this today. Now give them nearly unlimited information about the citizenry. I find it hard to fathom, when the government has done so poorly with what it's been given today, that they will suddenly turn around and become true protectors of the people once they have that kind of information.
And I don't think anybody (except maybe protesters in large cities who suffer police violence, and of course black people anywhere in the country) thinks the United States is a police state. Similarly, I am not suffering a heart attack as I'm typing this. I still eat salad instead of cheeseburgers for every meal. Analogously, I think it's important to keep an eye on excessive power grabs by the government.
The Bill of Rights is only self-government if it's used to limit the government, you see.
> some information "might seem more relevant later," says Mr. Joel
So, hindsight is 20/20, you say?
>The central role played by the NCTC in determining who should be killed ... the NCTC operates a gigantic data-mining operation, in which all sorts of information about innocent Americans is systematically monitored, stored, and analyzed
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/24/obama-te...
I Ctrl+F-ed for Philip K. Dick's name, didn't find anything, I'll be the first one to copy-paste this:
> Paradoxes and alternate realities are created by the precognition of crimes when the chief of police intercepts a precognition that he is about to murder a man he has never met. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Minority_Report)
Cory Doctorow has said in his "war against general computation" talk [1] that it's becoming cheaper and easier for authorities to just monitor everyone and store information about everyone, and then use algorithms to catch them, than focusing on who they they need to catch and following just that one. Now it's up to the people to stop this from becoming legal or from being done even illegally, not just in US, but in all countries, as I'm sure many others will try doing it, too. The ironic part is that the developed "democratic" countries may be the first to do it, because they are more advanced technologically.
Sure, it works sometimes, but just look at some of the wacky stuff Amazon, Google, and Netflix derive from such things. Now replace search results and product recommendations with waterboarding and extraordinary rendition based on the results of those dot products and hilarity ensues...
But I'm curious as to why you place such faith in the sooper top sekrit(tm) basis vectors for these dot products? It seems to me that it's politically expedient for such a system to generate false positives rather than risk letting the terrorists win(tm) and that's where I think things go wrong. Because it would appear from the outside that the powers-that-be have decreed that it's better to torture the occasional innocent than risk letting the guilty slip through their fingers.
You thought it was a movie, now it's reality. Soon, it'll be something you get arrested for. Mark my words.
Is the reverse true?
My money is on "it is very unlikely", and that is a problem.
The world is not black and white. These are things that must be weighed and considered rationally with real data, not emotionally with fabricated absolutes. You don't get to discard half of your equation because when you include it the results don't make you feel warm and fuzzy.
P(A|B) = \frac{P(B | A)\, P(A)}{P(B)}
Not a hard concept.
As an extreme example demsonstrating the necessity of considering P(A|B), suppose we observe that 100% the 9/11 hijackers had black hair (P(black hair|terrorist) = 100%). That observation is worthless because P(terrorist|black hair) is stupidly low.
Just because we can say something about the traits a terrorist will likely have does not mean that we can rationally use those traits to detect terrorists.
If you are proposing a P(B|A), it is on you to show that the P(A|B) is sensible. Just pointing at a high P(B|A) alone is worthless. That's how you make good "Tonight at 11', is [common household objects] killing you slowly?!?" headlines, but that is about it.
P(B|A) will never be 100% anyway though, so even if the terrorists were unable to adapt it would not matter. The point is that even in the absurd event that you found a P(B|A) that was 100%, it doesn't mean it is useful. Or do you actually think that screening for black hair in the example would be worthwhile?
Sorry for the delay in responding, I gave up yesterday because there was no option to reply even after a very long time.
Not when we have people who were charged with sex crimes because when they were 17 years old they dated a 15 year old, and who now have to register as sex offenders. The law has become completely out of control -- saying that someone has broken laws in the past is no more of a justification than saying that a person breathes air.
So where does it stop? Phone records. Addresses. Aliases. Friends. Fingerprints. Is it wrong that they want to put in all in place? Would we be happier if they had to run around to 25 different government agencies / 25 private corporations to get the information? What if the information is lost before the need to use it to aid an investigation. Wouldn't it be easier if they just aggregated it ahead of time and looked at it when they needed it?
I guess personally I'm just not seeing the problem. As long as they are simply gathering all information that is legally knowable, what do I care? Why should I care? I'd like to know I have the freedom to do the same thing and I assume large corporations are doing it already. Should it be illegal to gather information on people simply because they didn't authorize it? Should individuals have the power to control what others do with the information that is publically knowable about them? I, personally, say no.
You seem to be operating under the assumption that there is a definitive answer here. There isn't, and this is completely subjective. The idea that 300M+ people will agree on such a question, to me, is ridiculous. It is really a matter of 2 questions:
1) How many false positives are acceptable?
2) Are we willing to accept the consequences if this information falls into the wrong hands?
Reasonable people will disagree on the answers, and I believe the U.S. was the last country founded (granted, on the lands of others') upon the idea that freedom and individual rights (over the collective) should be maximized. More and more, as the U.S. has matured we've seen and continue to see the collective rights being prioritized.
To be clear, I am not sure where I stand personally, but I am simply trying to objectively point out what I see.
The law is out-of-date. When the law was written, constructing a dossier on a person required effort -- officers in the field, following the target around, interviewing people, etc. Today, the dossier can be rapidly assembled, assuming it has not been already by some private company that "specializes" in constructing such things.
We need an update to the law, to protect our rights from government use of new technologies.
"Phone records. Addresses. Aliases. Friends. Fingerprints. Is it wrong that they want to put in all in place? Would we be happier if they had to run around to 25 different government agencies / 25 private corporations to get the information?"
Yes, I would be happier if the bureaucracy slowed the police down, as a basic protection against tyranny. We have far too many laws, and far too many prisoners -- anything that slows the expansion of our prison population and renders absurd laws unenforceable should be welcomed. Do you really think that these databases will be used solely to catch murderers and rapists? Most of people targeted by these sorts of programs will be nonviolent, non-dangerous offenders who will be charged with dozens of crimes and told to either take a plea bargain or risk a longer sentence if they exercise their right to a trial (and if even a tenth of them were to demand a trial, our court system would be overwhelmed by the case load -- yes, that is how extreme things have gotten).
"I'd like to know I have the freedom to do the same thing"
You do not. Go ahead, try to go around your town collecting these sorts of details -- you'll be arrested for harassing people, being a public nuisance, resisting arrest, and probably multiple other crimes.
"Should individuals have the power to control what others do with the information that is publically knowable about them?"
We are not talking about any other random people, we are talking about the police. The police are a special class of people. We let them arrest people, holding people against their will at gunpoint. We do this because some people pose a danger to society, but we must be careful with just how much power the police have, in both firepower, information collection, and budget (currently, the police can recycle the proceeds from certain kinds of arrest back into their budgets; unsurprisingly, such arrests are more common than any other, and our prisons are filled with people who were targeted for such arrests).
If you begin to allow your freedom and liberty to be eroded bit by bit, you're not going to notice it when it's totally gone. There's a reason why the freedom to privacy is important, and there are reasons why it was (and is) a good idea to follow the "innocent until proven guilty" line of thought.
Now I'm unsure where I stand myself, between the 2 extremes: allow a murderer walk due to lack of evidence or allowing the government to lock up innocent civilians just based on an algorithm's "suspicion" without charge. There has to be a middle ground somewhere. What I do know is, with the way things are going, it's moving faster and faster towards the later...
I don't have the answer but I think we agree that the citizens of the country that will be put under surveylance should have a say on whether they are OK with it, not signed into law behind their backs. I mean, I thought that's what democracy is all about.
In either case, since I don't live in the US, all I can really do about it is talk. It's up to you guys to have meaningful discussions and take action (or not) on this. But just know that this will end up affecting the way other world power treat their citizens. The world will definitely be keep an close eye on this.
I think this is the third time I'll make this post on HN, but it's been relevant every time.
Privacy is not about having something to hide, or about keeping things secret. Giving the government the power to store all this data about you isn't bad because they might learn embarrassing things; after all, it will most likely only be read by a computer.
But it gives the government enormous power to make decisions about you -- decisions about whether you may take a commercial airline flight, get a security clearance, or even get a job -- without your knowledge or consent, and without you knowing how they make the decisions. It's not Orwellian, it's Kafkaesque.
In short, a lack of privacy gives the government the power to be even less transparent in its decision-making, and gives it yet more power over its citizens. It's not a question of discovering your fetishes or being embarrassed, and we shouldn't respond to the "but I have nothing to hide" argument as though their conception of privacy is right and having nothing to hide really is an excuse.
There's a rather good paper I can recommend on the subject:
sounds like...anyone doing information extraction or sentiment analysis from the web? If investment is the only thing to raise a red flag, you have to worry about a lot more companies than that:
His answer: by enabling agencies to properly apply the data they already have, Palantir's products reduce the pressure to further erode civil liberties in the pursuit of more data.
<strike>Innocent until "terrorist".</strike>
<strike>Innocent until suspected "terrorist".</strike>
<strike>Innocent until surveillance indicates you use encryption, therefore "terrorist".</strike>
<strike>Innocent until our surveillance predicts you might commit some sort of crime, therefore "terrorist".</strike>
Innocent until we say so.
All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
The only possible way to stop it is to starve the beast of funds to spend. Cut the government in half, and let's see if they can still afford all the shiny new big brother toys.
Second, "Europeans" are a myth. The French, Germans, Italians, Danes, Brits, Spaniards, Hungarians, Greeks, Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Romanians, Dutch, Belgians, Irish, and so on trust each other about as far as they can collectively throw one another. No one country can possibly get much centralized control. Not that they don't try.
Third, Americans have that exceptionalism thing: no matter how dangerous a course of action is, an American will succeed because, gosh darn it, God loves us and we're great! So something like TIA, well, sure, if Castro tried it or even some trustworthy but lesser nation like English did, it'd be terrible tyranny - but we can be trusted because we're Americans.
There is a problem, more precisely a risk, but it is not in collecting the data and processing it to detect a plot. It is in the usage and control of usage of the data. This is the heart of the problem and the secrecy around this information gathering and processing is not a good sign. Who controlls and how is this information controlled are the core problem which is absolutely not properly addressed.
The need to collect the information to ensure security is on the other hand obvious, at least to me. Not doing this is stupid.
Big data isn't the future, its today.
Hacker new indeed....
Has anyone's been following dunno, wikileaks or Appelbaum or... Hacker news that are not on hackernews (which usurpates its name because what it really is is startup news) ? Eagle, the Athen Affair (http://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/security/the-athens-affair/...), or more generally this : http://wikileaks.org/the-spyfiles.html ?
It's our liberty that's slipping out of the (gaping a..)hole of democracies, which is not democracies fault because they are by definition are "representative governements", based on election. Tocqueville knew that back in the XIXth, so did all theoreticians of "governance", and not a single one called a "representative government" a "democracy".
Anyway. What it boils down to is : if you're not strictly speaking living in a democracy (which i'm sorry, the US, UK, France,... Aren't by historical, philosophical, and semantic definition), the only thing that matters is keeping power at bay. Try and elect representatives who truly understand that too much power in to few hands always leads to disaster. Only. There are none. There haven't been for decades. The latest in france was General de Gaulle (though his ego was high, he was the sort able to step down from power after a people's vote) , and I guess, on the US side, Kennedy.
I wouldn't trust my shoes to the state. And to facebook ? (non existing) Jeez again ! This is so scary to realize nobody - at large - realizes...
WWII is far away, the days of the cold war too, and people become lazy. Even (so called) hackers.
But see that it has also been understood by your ancestors that it is a price to pay to ensure security of the people. Because while they look at what you do they also look at what bad people do and will detect them most of the time.
The same change is taking place at a country and hopefuly at a world scale by using the new tools available.
Now back to the police patrols. While this has a proven positive effect on ssecurity, this is also a risk because these armed forces walking among us may also be subverted and they may abuse people. This is a real danger and by society evolution and learning mechanisms and rules have been put in place to avoid this.
All I say is that police patrols are unavoidable and needed to ensure security. Our concern should be to focus on the mechanisms and rules put in place to ensure it doesn't go wrong, gets misused or abused.
So I think we agree that there is indeed a danger with this. We may disagree on what the danger is and what we should focus on. This is in par with democracy.
Things have gotten excessive:
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/06/cops-military-gear/a...
To further your/my/our point(s), you can read Bruce Schneier's latest "Crypto-Gram Newsletter" (https://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-1212.html). He rephrases the problem with a feudal/serf paradygm, which is quite appropriate imo.
(Of course that's if you're lucky. If you're unlucky, it's the Russian FSB or Chinese PSB).
My question, then, is how are orders of magnitude more data going to help? I honestly think it will make our predictive power worse, not better, at least for decades to come until we have learned enough to start making sense of data on the scale we are talking about here.
It is really just a case of doing it because our technology will allow it, and a general hand-waving of "more is better" and "it will make everyone safer", than facing the reality of actually detecting a terrorist threat.
It is, in fact, just more security theater.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAF_Menwith_Hill
I went on site there to install some engineering management software and you are escorted around with an SA80 pointing at you most of the time and told "no questions".
(and Start TLS for mail, does a pretty good job of that for the mail space)
In another view, you have to ask what this would do to society? A public so paranoid of being harassed by the government that they barely do anything, or, actually do go out and commit crimes. Despite our "intelligence" we're still animals and will behave so put under the right amount of strain. This is a time bomb.
I think it's just that they place zero or negative value on privacy, so any perceived incremental increase in identifying threats justifies any amount of increased surveillance.
That all said I understand what they are doing and why and it does make sence and if anything will make people realise that online is the same as in person, just better documented.
Just Google the full title of the WSJ article and the WSJ link in the search results will let you read the whole thing.
Please vote, and please run for office if you have the fortitude to help us deal with this problem.