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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

> That's just scare mongering. As a country we got by for over 200 years without government surveillance, and nothing has changed to make it necessary now.

I'd argue a lot has changed.

The U.S. has always militarily dominated everything that could hurt it. Soon after our independence, we were intervening in Latin America because in the 1800's, set off from the Old World by two huge oceans, Latin America is what could have hurt us. As the world became smaller, we built a bigger Navy, and by World War I we had the largest in the world. Ever since World War I we have maintained military supremacy in any domain that mattered (naval, air, nuclear, space, etc).

Arguably this is just a continuation of the trend onto the internet, now that the digital sphere matters.

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I disagree. By that logic the government should have been reading our mail and recording telegraphs, phone calls, and faxes.

I'm also curious what "threat" this is supposed to protect us from.

There are enough communication mediums to choose from that it's pointless to monitor any of them. It's trivial to find or create one that isn't being monitored. It's not stopping criminals, it's just taking freedom from normal citizens.

China can't attack us via telegraph and phone the way it can via the internet.

I don't think the government needs to be reading our text messages. I do think it's silly to pretend nothing has changed in 200 years. Electronic warfare is going to be a thing, and I want to live in a world where the U.S. has the upper hand in it, not China.

We're going to have to figure out a way that accommodates U.S. dominance over electronic networks while reasonably protecting everyone's' privacy. We're not going to do that by burying our heads in the sand and pretending nothing has changed in 200 years.

Nothing that matters has changed. Principles are principles, not something that are subject to the changing whims of the government, or even some fleeting public zeitgeist.

Principles are principles, but they are interpreted in context. It's not about "fleeting public zeitgeist" but about recognizing that American principles have always been about balancing security with liberty. A lot of people would have us read the word "reasonable" out of the 4th amendment, but it's there and it is what implements that balancing. The question is how to find that balance in a world where China can attack important economic assets digitally instead of having to cross an ocean physically.

I should note that I'm not arguing that the government should read text messages. I tend to think that if you're sending something in clear text so some flunkie at AT&T can read it, its no problem if the government can too. My point is that you can't just ignore the real security concerns. The U.S. has never been about liberty at the cost of security.

The problem with spying on clear text messages is that there's no indication to the user that they have no privacy. When the average person is texting their friend, their phone makes it look like a private conversation. It doesn't say, "Send message to Joe, the NSA, AT&T, and your neighbor's pet dog." It just says, "Joe."

Also, this is one rare case where I would accept reasoning by analogy with a physical analog: mail. People have an expectation of privacy when sending letters, and they should rightly expect e-mail and text messages to be treated similarly.

Electronic warfare is not on the same level as real warfare. Nobody will die if the internet is down for a few weeks.

Watching funny cats on YouTube isn't so important that I should give up my privacy. Some mega-corp's website going down for a day or two is less worrisome to me than knowing the government is watching me.

What about the Chinese government having access to US govt systems for several years without anyone knowing? Could leaking nuclear, space, or strategic plans to a foreign government hurt anyone? Yes. All of a sudden the plans for bombs and ships we've spent billions to develop are handed over and free to use. That's not a good thing.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-05-07/chinese-cyber-spyin...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic_bomb

and of course:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet

What about it? How will recording and data mining text messages fix that problem?

Furthermore, if the government has already screwed up their systems and made them publicly available in the first place, how can you be so sure they'll competently implement their surveillance systems?

Because for every spy program we know about, how many are out there that we don't know about?

Will an infinite number of spy programs solve the problem of the government putting critical infrastructure on the internet?

Just because you only use the internet to watch cat videos doesn't mean there isn't critical infrastructure that depends on the continued functioning of the internet.

Critical infrastructure shouldn't be connected to the public internet. Obviously some of it is, but I don't see how surveillance and spying on citizens is going to fix it.

I think you're wrong for a variety of reasons about how many people will die if the entire Internet becomes unavailable to North America for weeks at a time.

Maybe, but I'm willing to bet it's a very small number compared to how many could die if the electrical power grid went down or land line telephones or the water system. We didn't give up privacy and freedoms to protect those systems, why would we give them up for the internet?

Okay, I give up. Why is sacrificing privacy and freedoms a necessary condition of protecting the electrical power grid, land line telephones, or the water system?

I don't think it is. Just like I don't think it's required to give it up to protect the internet.

Actually, that's precisely the issue. If the entire internet goes down, it will start to impact things like the power grid and the water systems. Every year, utility companies put more and more of their infrastructure behind increasingly clever management infrastructure, and control it over the open internet. Hopefully none of it will fail-unsafe (though I bet something will), but if the management systems are offline for weeks?

And it will immediately, although not fatally, impact land line telephones, which I believe do significant backhaul over IP.

I'd imagine that taking a laptop to the control server and plugging in an ethernet cable would suffice to access the control panels if the internet is down.

> Electronic warfare is not on the same level as real warfare. Nobody will die if the internet is down for a few weeks.

The economic devastation would be huge. Banks could not process payments, utilities could not be managed in some areas, software companies would basically lose all productivity.

Heck even many hospitals would be unable to access medical records.

There would be serious wide spread repercussions that would leave a lasting impact on, if nothing else, our economy.

Have you ever been to China? I promise you it's not hordes of people saying "WE WANT TO DESTROY AMERICA" everywhere you go.

Can you please explain why "I want to live in a world where the U.S. has the upper hand in it, not China"?

I find it odd that many Americans tend to adopt this Us vs. Them mentality.

My personal perception is that China needs America to consume it's products and America needs China to cheaply produce the stuff it wants. So it's more give and take vs. outright rooting for the home team etc. etc.

> I promise you it's not hordes of people saying "WE WANT TO DESTROY AMERICA" everywhere you go.

Of course not. But like everywhere else it's full of people who see no problem using force abroad to further their own prosperity. The difference between Americans and Chinese is that Americans are in a much better position to do so.

> Can you please explain why "I want to live in a world where the U.S. has the upper hand in it, not China"?

Because China would be a far less benevolent world hegemon than the U.S. Because being a citizen of the dominant world power is, all else equal, better than being a citizen of a country that lives in the shadow of that power?

> I find it odd that many Americans tend to adopt this Us vs. Them mentality.

There has never been, in the history of the world, any sane population that thought: "gee, wouldn't it be great if some other country had military dominion over ours?" Now, most people have to resign themselves to that state of affairs, but Americans do not, which makes them particularly conscious of the fact that they do in fact enjoy many benefits from their place in the world.

> Because China would be a far less benevolent world hegemon than the U.S.

There are nearly a million Iraqi dead, killed in a war George W. Bush intentionally started, based on evidence he personally knew to be false.

> gee, wouldn't it be great if some other country had military dominion over ours?

You know, I rarely dream of military dominion over Denmark, or subjugation by. Maybe it's the civilization speaking.

The USA is a walking embodiment of a stereotypical second-amendment nut - "I need my gun in case someone else has a gun!". Better get two!

> most people have to resign themselves to that state of affairs, but Americans do not

You're trolling, right?

Because Switzerland is the example of a country that said "Don't tread on me".

The USA on the other hand has waged war on and committed horrible atrocities against its neighbors constantly. Quick, name two countries whose democratic government you haven't destroyed. (No seriously, you've destroyed many (ten? more?) peaceful democracies and attacked other countries for not being democracies.)

The USA is the bully. More than the bully, the murderers. The looters.

And you seem to have elected yourself their chief spokesman. What gives?

>Electronic warfare is going to be a thing, and I want to live in a world where the U.S. has the upper hand in it, not China.

It seems like "they're going to do surveillance so we need to do surveillance" is the wrong approach. All that does is increase the possibilities for abuse: By enemies and dictators, by corrupt bureaucrats, by foreign attackers who break into the domestic surveillance apparatus for their own purposes.

What we should be doing is to implement technology that will make surveillance harder for everyone. That leaves the U.S. at no disadvantage without invading everyone's privacy.

And it keeps us from having to fight an asymmetric war. If China has access to every U.S. company's trade secrets, the fact that the NSA has access to every Chinese company's trade secrets is a very poor consolation prize -- our trade secrets are more valuable. The economic damage that attacks on computer systems can do is greater against the U.S. than it is against its enemies. We don't need our government to do everything it can to exploit security vulnerabilities in order to conduct unconstitutional surveillance, we need it to help us (or get out of the way) in reducing the vulnerabilities.

And the two alternatives are pretty clearly opposed to one another. You can't have bureaucrats interfering with efforts to make the internet more secure in order to reduce the effectiveness of China's surveillance apparatus just because they're afraid it will reduce the effectiveness of the NSA's surveillance apparatus. You end up fighting a civil war instead of fighting the attackers.

Your approach is just so backwards.

The threat from the [insert latest bogeyman's name here] is no reason to limit the freedoms of US citizens or spy upon them. It calls for the administration to take decisive action to prevent unauthorized access to critics systems.

Systems can be easily isolated and access totally restricted to trusted persons only. The rest is for movies.

The real question is why is no one looking at the US administration and asking simply, "why are you not prepared for this?"

Solving these threats along with SPAM and DOS attacks is child's play if you are really serious, yet it is played out in he media as if we can't do anything about it other than restricting personal freedom and creating national citizen surveillance systems.

Blame the boogeyman not the admin.

This approach means that every US citizen is a potential threat the the system and is treated as such making total nonsense of the entire premise of keeping America safe by these means.

I feel lucky that I am NOT a US citizen after all...

Yep, Information Dominance is a real concept and we have to allow our government to maintain it.

There is a very delicate balancing act being preformed with peoples "rights" to privacy, but the US government is not going to stop monitoring because people want a false sense of privacy.

...and they especially won't stop just because people want a REAL sense of privacy!

By that logic, I suppose you agree with NYC's "stop and frisk" policy. Because, just in case.

It's like saying "There are lots of black people in prison, hence it's a good idea to stop and frisk them, just in case, because you know the track record". That sort of circular logic is why I feel my blood pressure go up every time I think about it.

The fact that you could get your blood pressure to go up over a civil liberties issue that isn't even the topic of the thread is as good an illustration as I can think of for why we shouldn't have HN threads talking about political and social justice issues like this.

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