We do not provide direct access to our servers. We just have a system that sends copies of our data to their servers. We really do care about your privacy!
Lest people think this is a joke, this is EXACTLY what the telecoms did under Bush that lead to Congress passing retroactive telecom immunity. Predictable outrage this time looks to me like outrage then, and I have no reason to believe that we won't see a similar legislative response.
That said, in Google's case I believe them. This is the company that is going to court to stop the government from trying to get information about Google users with warrantless national security letters.
FB on the other hand, I would expect to see providing technical support to the FBI about how to use their in house tools to more quickly analyze the dumps...
| FB on the other hand, I would expect to see
| providing technical support to the FBI about
| how to use their in house tools to more quickly
| analyze the dumps...
"Having two identities for yourself is an example
of a lack of integrity"
[Only half-joking]
A very telling fact was that Obama was one of those voting for it as well. That told me at least who Obama was. I was never fooled by his hope and change rhetoric, that one action said all I wanted to know before he even started running for pres.
Here is Sen Obama's 2008 reason for flip flopping on the issue:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/06/20/obama-backs-bill-gi...
--- "Under this compromise legislation, an important tool in the fight against terrorism will continue, but the President's illegal program of warrantless surveillance will be over. It restores FISA and existing criminal wiretap statutes as the exclusive means to conduct surveillance - making it clear that the President cannot circumvent the law and disregard the civil liberties of the American people. ---
But what was the alternative? McCain missed that vote, but had been strongly for telecom immunity all along, and was much more vocal about it than Obama. Hillary Clinton's husband Bill ran Echelon and Carnivore, the odds she would be different were low to nil.
Incidentally in this case it is worth noting that Obama stayed in the letter of his promise. There was a warrant. Whether that warrant was properly obtained, or should be legal is a different question. But there actually was a warrant from the rubber-stamp FISA court.
Yap, it seems as if they got a set of "talking points". They can use certain words and phrases and still given some technicality get away with telling "truth" while effectively also telling lies.
Some say how NSL (national security letters) are pretty draconian and imply personal liability for disclosure. And that is true perhaps but at the same time these agencies do want to get some cooperation and are perhaps willing to "help out" their co-conspirators so PR departments I imagine get a cheat-sheet -- "use these phrases as responses".
Just think about the teams they have to put together to build even reasonably useful tools.
I think you give it too little credit.
The government does a bad job with citizen-facing software engineering. It's not clear that the same is true for defense and intelligence applications.
Take a look at successful teams that already work with "big data" like at Wolfram Alpha or IBM's Watson. It is not at all easy to build such teams today. There aren't enough PhD's around, unless you are outsourcing to China. And then to step it up a level to Google's requirements we enter personal chefs and segway territory. I cant find the quote but Eric Schmidt has said multiple time what is hampering progress is not the lack of cash or infrastructure but talent.
More than the privacy issues I have to wonder about the waste. Cause getting the data and the infrastructure to handle it is the "easy" part. Extracting actionable intelligence I doubt highly they will succeed. Will turn into a big cash sink, that no one will talk about as the costs need to be justified...until they cant be.
People with the skills to do the data mining needed at this scale already have better jobs at Google or on Wall Street. Are they really going to take a pay cut, worse benefits and "government job" bureaucracy for the privilege of spying on their friends and family?
I have family in military intelligence and the situation they are in right now is their branch of the armed service thinks they are just going to send their officers of below average mathematical talent to big data boot camp and expect them to just pick this stuff up, as if it's the same thing as learning Russian or flying a drone. Although the I'm as disappointed as everyone in that so many in the government seem think domestic spying is the wave of the future, I'm skeptical that the real motivations are anything beyond business as usual defense sector pork.
But even if this is the case it's irrelevant to whether or not the government should even be engaged in this practice.
Every single person I have dealt with at a three letter agency is that caliber of smart. They have entire buildings full of them. Sure you have tons of other mid-grade government paper pushers, but the sheer scale of smart people was overwhelming.
They have 10 Bram Cohen's to our one.
Once you are on the inside, you have daily interactions with technology that is 10 years ahead of anything on the outside, which is really hard to walk away from. Not to mention you probably married someone else with a clearance along the way.
If you do want to leave... all your accomplishments, achievements, and awards are locked up in an ISR (internal staffing resume), and you end up sending potential employers a half page CV listing something stupid like "Senior Computer Operator, Defense Department, Ft. Meade" that no recruiter is smart enough to parse.
I understand the feeling of purpose but starting at half the salary and having a cap of 155K (assuming you move into senior management (GS-15 step 10)) vs somewhere like Google where you start at ~100K and the limit for technical people seems like its the 400K+ range seems like a tough sell. Also maybe its just stereotypes, but it seems like antisocial behavior which seems somewhat prevalent in excellent technical types wouldn't really mesh with the command structure there.
On a side note do the top tier/brilliant software engineers at Lockheed/et al make Google level salaries? Actual technical people, not those who have moved into management that is.
A lot of people like myself just don't want to work for Google, regardless of price.
The people I know at defense contractors in the Bay Area all make more than what you would at Google.
Could you talk/link about what that means, exactly? In what ways, which areas? How do you compare these things? Thanks!
1. They can read all the publicly available journals, so they are not going to be any worse
2. They hire top researchers in CS and math, and have internal, classified journals on their cutting edge work
That doesn't make it sound like these are smart people to me. Being easily manipulated by bullshit is usually for the simple.
Not when you spend your first 20 years of life in school, being trained to follow instructions and being punished for questioning authority. Even very intelligent people can be turned into obedient workers.
These communications people are playing word games. These companies turn over and give access to whatever they are legally required to.
Regardless, they are purposefully missing the point. The average citizen isn't upset by the means of the private information sharing, but that it is going on in the first place. It is that 'providing only information required by law' sounds limiting, but if the law makes clever use of language to access a huge amount of data then that phrase doesn't mean anything.