What We Don't Know About Spying on Citizens: Scarier Than What We Know
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
I am utterly disgusted with this administration. Any good he has done is wiped out by being far worse than Bush with the domestic spying and whistleblower prosecutions.
How are we any better than China - because we at least eventually find out? Because people don't get disappeared off the street?
You remember that feeling of incredible relief when we saw Bush finally being flown away in the helicopter on his last day? Well that feeling is going to be deja vu in a couple years.
I just hope the next president doesn't try to do a one-up like Obama did to Bush. Obama's library/museum is going to be even more hypocritical than Bush's.
dont worry, the legal frameworks are in place for that to start happening too.
The future looks obvious: don't fight the state, don't disagree with the state, or else. It's a fascism model, very similar to what Russia currently has (how ironic is that end result?!?). We have the widening rich / poor issue and oligarch class to go with it (which is very common under highly industrialized fascist nations).
Yes, he's Canadian, but still.
> Because people don't get disappeared off the street inside the U.S.
Fixed that for you.
Getting all, "Thanks, Obama!" over what the NSA was up to long before he was elected — if not before Bush was elected — is giving the people who actually did this, and are still doing it, a complete pass.
He also has the power to bring to light any bill that is put on his desk for signature.
Obama grew everything Bush did. The TSA, the NSA, all have become far bigger and more "powerful" under Obama.
I'm not an idiot, I know congress is as much at fault. He is at fault for not fighting it - it's his job as president of this country.
While we should hold everyone involved - even peripherally - responsible, it's not appropriate or productive to compare Obama to Bush.
We need to frame the objection as, "This is wrong!" not, "This is worse than/just like $OTHER_PERSON." It's implicitly partisan.
This shows very strong common threads running through two parties which are presented to us as drastically different. That, in turn, exposes the fact that there is another "power" that completely supercedes our democratic process and the very notion that we actually have a representative form of government.
Now, what we do with that information is another story. Talk raises awareness, but it's not enough to just talk about it. There needs to be a viable third party and protests aimed solely and specifically at reform such as removing the money from politics, term limits, closing the revolving door between industry and government, etc.
Obama could stop all of this. He does not want to.
http://thehill.com/blogs/floor-action/house/303869-house-vot...
http://thehill.com/blogs/floor-action/house/303803-house-vot...
I too would sort of prefer that the President function as a benign dictator but Congress can exert much more fine-grained control over the Executive than the Executive can over legislative excess - Clinton actually got Congress to give him a line-item veto but the Supreme Court declared that unconstitutional only 2 years later.
He just looked like a progressive choice against the backdrop of Bush and Cheney and McCain tied to the horror of possibly having Palin represent the lunatic fringe.
BUT, even if he did want to, if he tried to stand firm, everything else would grind to a halt. He'd burn all political capital he's got.
You are misremembering. Before 9/11, domestic spying and the warfare state was primarily part of the left wing platform. Bush was elected on a platform of "humble foreign policy" (as compared to Clinton/Gore's interventionism) and Republicans generally opposed domestic spying.
Only a few years before 9/11, it was paranoid gun toting right wing conspiracy theorists who defended crypto and turing machines, opposed the first patriot act (pushed by Biden and Clinton), and generally opposed the government.
(They dropped this opposition the minute Bush was elected, of course...)
The goal was to prevent piracy, encryption, child pornography, violent video games, and all the other bad things that the internet was enabling.
The president has the sole power to go the media every single day and say "this is wrong".
'Obama holds America hostage.'
I typed the above as a tongue-in-cheek response to your argument, but then I did a search on it out of curiosity and got >35k results. I sympathize with your point, but as of last summer about 1 in 6 Americans still thinks Obama is a Muslim. Historically, Presidents back into issues rather than planting their feet on them, because political capital is not unlimited.
http://www.pewforum.org/Politics-and-Elections/Little-Voter-...
Last time Obama reauthorized the Patriot act (passed by a veto-proof supermajority, incidentally - 72-23 in the Senate and 250-153 in the House), Republicans complained about the fact that he used an autopen to sign it remotely:
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/theoval/post/2011/06...
I don't mean it as a personal attack, but I think your expectations are a little unrealistic.
I like how you said "opposition" rather than "public opposition" because it's what makes the statement true. Fox News will spend all day and all night discussing how Obama is probably a Muslim from Kenya and then "let you draw your own conclusions" regardless of what Obama actually does. That's going to happen whether he does the right thing or not, so why should it stop him from doing the right thing?
I'm really not sure what you're even trying to argue here. It sounds a lot like an argument that because someone somewhere can be found loudly disagreeing with us that we ought to give up. People disagreeing with you is part of democracy. You fight for what you think is right in the court of public opinion and at some point we have an election -- and if the people we elect don't do what we want we get to try it again in the next round, and threaten them with the boot in the meantime. That's what we're doing right now. We're expressing our grievances in public and kicking up our own shitstorm so that more like-minded people will express their views to elected officials and otherwise try to make change.
There are a lot of people who think that ocean levels aren't rising or who deny evolution. Are we supposed to let the lie win just because a nontrivial number of people have been misled?
And the people in Congress know perfectly well what they're doing. It's not a coincidence that the set of Congressmen who most ardently refuse to close Guantanamo are the same Congressmen who take significant campaign contributions from defense contractors.
To some extent you can. Cost benefit analysis, statistics and evidence point against the effectiveness and scale of our existing security posture. Obviously people can ignore all of those things if they please (cue Upton Sinclair: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it"), but at some point you have to find a way to cause the people who are wrong to cease being wrong so that they stop fighting and start helping.
>This is why I think the long game is strengthening constitutional protections through amendment.
That's fine. But I'm sure you know how difficult it is, and how long it takes, to amend the constitution. We can surely approach the problem from other angles in the meantime.
For all his faults, George W. Bush never campaigned as a civil libertarian.
Or does it just make him a liar?
Look, my point is this: as long as we waste our time bickering over whose fucking fault this mess is, no-one is doing a damned thing to fix it. I'd rather people spend their time and energy on the latter. If you think finger-pointing is a better use of yours, more power to you, and have fun with that.
Actually, yes. Because back when people were angry enough about the issue, they focused all that anger on Bush. Then comes Obama and all that energy gets transformed into support for him because people honestly believed that he was different, that he was against ever-expanding warfare abroad and ever-shrinking civil liberties at home. And when he won in 2008, the people of this country, who were outraged at everything Bush had done, got their satisfaction.
There was vast public sentiment against this kind of thing. Obama subverted it and destroyed it.
The anger people are feeling comes from their having been duped, yet again, by yet another of these creatures.
The fact that he talked such a good game, was given such a golden opportunity to talk that game, and inspired so much hope — going so far as to make the word a centerpiece of his campaign — just made it that much worse when those hopes were dashed, even flouted, so completely.
Welcome to American politics. You can hate the player, or you can hate the game.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_faith_%28existentialism%29
Yes, you can say his ethics (such as they are) are consistent, but it's a weak form of ethics that do not govern one's actions.
Obama passes for an idealist but actually acts like a Bush in disguise. That's way more despicable. That's called deceit and fraud.
End the game, not the players.
End the game? No. Revolutions usually wind up with a much worse game as a result.
I don't buy that's a better picture.
We like to romanticize the few revolutions that had positive outcomes (America), but also downplay the utterly disastrous consequences of others (France).
We also like to ignore that today's terrorists are often what we used to call revolutionaries. (Was 9/11 was not Act 1 in a revolution in US governance?)
My point is that violence exists, and revolutions happen. But they exist to destroy, not to create. Annoying, compromising, good old politics haVe to clean up the mess and replace it with something better. That's rare.
(In spite of his contemporary reputation, Ashcroft was proponent of civil liberties. He ruled that Stellar Wind was illegal (leading to Bush firing him), fought in the senate for encryption and turing machines, opposed racial profiling and protecting 2nd amendment rights.)
The Patriot Act was reauthorized in 2009 without a single modification, despite there being a bi-partizan bill on the floor of congress that looked to implement many more checks and balances, as Obama wanted.
Here is what candidate Obama said in opposition to the FISA extension bill in 2008:
> "I am proud to stand with Senator Dodd, Senator Feingold and a grassroots movement of Americans who are refusing to let President Bush put protections for special interests ahead of our security and our liberty."
Guess what he did when he became President ..
He also said he would kill warrantless surveillance, but by extending the FISA Act. they changed the warrantless period from 48 hours to a week, at the same time banning states from requesting information and plugging a lot of other loopholes that legal challenges to FISA and warrantless wiretaps could have used in courts.
Obama did a complete 180 on civil liberties (there were other issues as well - Gitmo, habeas corpus for enemy combatants, the coke/crack sentencing disparity, assassinating US citizens with drones etc.) and for some reason seems to enjoy the tough on crime/tough on terrorism stance.
Call me a conspiracy theorist all you want, but look at the reality.
So fucking what?
What does identifying him as an accomplice to the surveillance actually do? Does it make the surveillance somehow magically stop? Does it delete all the data the NSA, CIA, FBI, and other TLAs have about you from their databases? Or does it just serve to stoke your righteous indignation over getting fooled by yet another politician?
When can we stop bickering over whose goddamned fault it is and start, you know, fixing it?
Conveniently, he is saying that every time somebody merely mentions a name.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that not many Obama voters are disappointed in Bush for this, because they didn't think highly of Bush, and never voted for him. In fact, their landslide for Obama seemed primarily a response to policies just like this from his predecessor. Now, they see those confirmed escalated, rather than ended or even slowed. That's a threat to the entire idea of American democracy.
So when are you going to stop bickering about who's fault it's not, and start fixing it?
It's not irrelevant at all. It's a real pragmatic issue. The president (all of them, I mean) has advisors, pressuring him to do this or that. He has lobbies going for some things. He can be blackmailed or exposed for some peripheral BS (think of Clinton). He has pressure from his party. He might be complicit and make a quick buck (thing of Halliburton and such). In the end, if he's too difficult to work with, he might even be shot (some presidents have. Was it all the work of "madmen"?).
The fact is: the president is the president only after he is elected. And to get to that point, he is vetoed himself so much by the party, lobbyists etc, he has to pass so many "loyalty" tests, he is screened so well in order to get campaign funds and support, that nothing really unpredictable can come out of him against the whole system.
Despite the BS "profile" articles, it's not like any random guy gets elected president. Even if he is a "Chicago community organiser", the above process makes sure he is the RIGHT "Chicago community organiser" -- a tame one, that will satisfy all requirements, and wont affect much change.
As a practical matter, I don't think Obama can take on the Patriot act until after the war in Afghanistan is brought to a close and the AUMF terminated.
The reason being is that if the President disagrees with the law and Congress overrides his veto, then the President can state he has nothing to do with the potential negative outcome of the law. If Obama didn't like these laws then he should have manned up and told Congress to own their decision for themselves.
I also seriously doubt the Patriot Act will ever go away without some form of major effort because too many people find it useful for their needs regardless of whether that need has anything to do with terrorism.
That Obama and this Obama are like alternate dark universes.
The desperation to completely absolve Obama based on claims of his office's powerlessness, Congress, or Bush is bizarre. It's also Greenwald's primary political critique, (not) coincidentally.
Obama has been involved with this from the first day of his presidency until today, it's in his branch, he fought for immunity for telcos and reauthorized PATRIOT. If he had absolutely no ability to effect it, we should just stop having elections.
I'm not giving Bush a pass here, either. He tarnished the name of the Republican Party -- the party of Abolition, Civil Rights, Reagan, freedom, etc. -- and grew government with the best of them.
Maybe the behavior of these last two administrations will wake the people from their stupor and cause them to realize that the God-given liberties described by our Constitution have been under assault for quite some time.
I never cease to be amazed at the uncritical association of Ronald Reagan with freedom. Take a good look at the graph below, especially the labels on the axes.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/54/US_incarc...
I don't want to get into a political derail because a) I see the larger point you're attempting to make and b) Reagan was extremely effective in advancing US itnerests and thus pretty successful in that aspect of his job, but in my view he treated freedom very much as a transferable commodity rather than a universal grant.
The best work on "the carceral state" being done right now is by a UPenn professor, Marie Gottschalk. Check out her books.
Reagan? You mean the President that secretly sold weapons to a "terrorist" state to buy weapons for another U.S.-sponsored terrorist group, knowing full well it was an impeachable offense? The one that raised payroll taxes on the middle class to pay for tax cuts for the rich and tanked wages? The guy that deregulated banks and cause the savings and loan crisis? The President that generated huge budget deficits (3x Carter's) to fund Reaganomics? The one that claimed credit for destroying the "Evil Empire" when most analysts were saying the USSR had been in decline since the 1970's.
That Reagan? He's definitely a credit to the Republican Party.
This raises an interesting question: to make it big as a company, and not yield to whatever gov't requests ask of you, is it possible to for a company to survive here in America?
In May 2006, USA Today reported that millions of telephone calling records had been handed over to the United States National Security Agency by AT&T Corp., Verizon, and BellSouth since September 11, 2001. This data has been used to create a database of all international and domestic calls. Qwest was allegedly the lone holdout, despite threats from the NSA that their refusal to cooperate may jeopardize future government contracts,[10] a decision which has earned them praise from those who oppose the NSA program.[11]
...
Former Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio, convicted of insider trading in April 2007, alleged in appeal documents that the NSA requested that Qwest participate in its wiretapping program _more than six months before September 11, 2001_. Nacchio recalls the meeting as occurring on February 27, 2001. Nacchio further claims that the NSA cancelled a lucrative contract with Qwest as a result of Qwest's refusal to participate in the wiretapping program
I've gotta say, although it sounds conspiratorial to question the validity of the allegations, recent events do make one think if there's more to the story of the charges and how they were brought about.
You're in great error thinking this has something -- anything -- to do with a president in particular, or with a few people at the top of the decision-making chain. It doesn't. My own country changed two dictators (and a handful of "democratic" regimes afterwards) without this matter being solved.
It's a combination of two things:
* A large block that supports such decisions and even actively pushes for them. The elected President will only be there to implement them for two terms at most, but the people supporting them have no cap on their term. Since two presidents from two different parties (it doesn't help that they're basically the only two parties you have...) did similar shit, it's only safe to assume that either both parties have such groups, or that the groups who are supporting them aren't affiliated to any party in particular. * Woeful lack of alternatives from your voters and, quite possibly, misinformed voting (although the second is something I can only intuitively state, as I don't live in the US). The people who deal in power are greedy; if they had any reason to believe this kind of stuff would have their asses bust out of office, they'd stop doing it. However, my own experience tells me what they feel is that this kind of crap actually ensures their continuous tenure in their offices.
Also, while we would all wish everyone realized how dangerous this is, the sad truth is most people don't care, or don't realize the atrocity of it. We are a minority; a handful of well-educated people who can think for themselves and who can fully grasp the intrusiveness of such surveillance. Most people simply don't realize enough to care that "the State" (whatever the hell that is) knows who they were calling and when -- after all, who in the world has time to sift through all those pages of phone calls, eh?
On the other hand, I can't suspect people like Mitt Romney or Sarah Palin of being smart enough (or of not being blinded by their sheer arrogance) of being able to dodge a puppet role. In fact, if I were an evil overlord and had to choose a set of figureheads to deploy as autonomous, but ultimately manipulable characters for my puppetmaster role, I'd choose people like them.
It's scary that folks also seem to vote for people like them, though.
Perhaps this doesn't happen that much within us borders, but it routinely happens to others, including EU citizens. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khalid_El-Masri
"[t]he security of the Nation is not at the ramparts alone. Security also lies in the value of our free institutions. A cantankerous press, an obstinate press, an ubiquitous press must be suffered by those in authority in order to preserve the even greater values of freedom of expression and the right of the people to know." - Judge Judge Murray Gurfein declining to issue such an injunction against the publishing of the Pentagon Papers.
Monitoring information is arguably a light form of suppression, isn't it? When someone is being monitored they get worried, they're more conscious about their actions. It has a chilling effect. I don't think finding parallels between the two is an exercise of ridiculous hyperbole.
Not if it isn't widely known.
Obama took the other side of this argument. A vote for him was a vote for favoring the liberty side of that tradeoff. His actions in office are a clear demonstration that we can't translate our widely held preferences into implementation through the mechanism of our election system.
You don't have all of the information. The big picture regarding cyber-security and national security in general is very complicated, please lets work together to come to a logical solution rather than blame one political party or candidate.
Policies are never perfect, especially when you involve a technology as new and complicated (technically and ethically) as the internet.
Most people are fully aware of the ability of the US government to spy on all communications. How can you expect the NSA, which has the mission of protect the US security systems and provide foreign intelligence, to have limits on it's information sources?
Is the real concern whether or not the FBI and other agencies have full access to the data the NSA collects? Patriot act might have allowed them to have more access.
Q: What's the difference between the kind of transparency that Wikileaks et al. tries to promote, and the kind of transparency that Mark Zuckerberg wants Facebook users to adopt?
A: The former asks transparency of powerful entities, helping to check their power. The latter asks transparency of relatively powerless individuals, enabling the modern surveillance state and making individuals even more powerless.
The most important thing that we should keep in mind when we talk about any sort of justice in the context of information is how possession of information alters the balance of power in the world. Because politics, ultimately, boils down to who has how much power over whom. It's not about embarrassment. It's all about the loss of authority that public scrutiny and embarrassment can cause.
"Knowledge is power": knowing something about somebody gives you power over that somebody. This rule of thumb even works when we interact with physical objects (if you know how something works, you have the power to use it to your advantage), and it works just as well when we interact with other people. Asymmetric transparency leads to asymmetric power because they know enough about you to take advantage of you but you don't know enough about them to take advantage of them.
This is why I firmly believe that powerful entities should be required to be several orders of magnitude more transparent, and therefore open to public scrutiny, than the average chump would ever need to be. The only thing that can balance off the asymmetry of power that complex social organization usually entails is an asymmetry of knowledge in the other direction. Example: Who I talked with on the phone last night is none of your fucking business. But if you're in a position of considerable power, every meeting you ever have with every lobbyist in the Universe should be damn well everyone's business. This is not unfair at all. Clinton had no right to get secret blowjobs in my opinion. Nobody should be allowed to have both power and privacy, because the combination is a recipe for tyranny.
Man, if Bin Laden were still alive he would be salivating right now.
This is freaking unbelieable: the Administration is (has been and seems to be going to be) simply TERRIFIED. They may not believe in God (I do not know) but they do certainly believe in the Devil and they call it 'Terror'.
So, they have won, and they have won big. The classical thrashing of the enemy.
Has the Administration really learnt nothing since McCarthy?
These people talk about due process but they really know (or willfully reject) anything about it.
"Get all that Roman Law and burn it, it is useless: what is that about citicens? WE RULE, and WE RULE THE WORLD."
S.H.A.M.E-O.N.-Y.O.U. NSA and the Administration (whatever the party, whatever the President).
Thankfully, there was someone with a conscience out there.
This, this, a thousand times, this.
I don't live in the US but I casually told this news to a 'normal person' I met yesterday [my parents] and they weren't even flinching. Almost like it wasn't their problem. I wonder if the 'not living in the US' part has anything to do with this.
The reason I'm worried about this is, now that USG has this tech, they won't hesitate to sell this to other countries.
EDIT - To the person who downvoted me, I am not upset but can you tell me why my post does not contribute to the discussion? It is a known fact that any tech the US researches and implements is soon commercialized and sold to other countries, and as compared to weapons, surveillance tech sales is definitely a walk in the park.
Which won't work very well at all in such a well armed, and better armed every day country (for the last several years every month has had higher gun sales from licensed gun stores compared to the month a year ago, details can be found at http://www.nssf.org/). Also makes a very big difference that policing is primarily under local control, and the central government can't stop state prosecutions without explicitly acknowledging the target is a government agent (see the squashing of the state prosecution of Lon Horiuchi http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lon_Horiuchi#Manslaughter_charg...).
Of course, also in light of Nazi Germany, any serious national effort at gun confiscation will instantly spark the civil war we seem to be sliding towards. On the likelihood of that (kudos to you for acknowledging the systematic "squashing" of dissidents), let me quote the recently woken up Peggy Nonan (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732441260457851...):
"What does it mean when half the country—literally half the country—understands that the revenue-gathering arm of its federal government is politically corrupt, sees them as targets, and will shoot at them if they try to raise their heads? That is the kind of thing that can kill a country, letting half its citizens believe that they no longer have full political rights."
She's using "shoot" in a metaphorical sense (tellingly, American English has a lot of shooting and gun metaphors).
To put this in perspective, here are two other 501(c)(4) "social welfare" organizations: the NRA's lobbying arm, the Institute for Legislative Action, founded in the late '70s, and Organizing for Action, what Obama's campaign Organizing for America became. And ironically the latter's first effort was post-Newtown gun control.
Besides ignoring all the other abuses, not all from the IRS, it sounds like you're confounding tax exempt with non-profit. E.g. donors to the political efforts of 501(c)(4) do not get to donate tax free. The organizations are allowed to be non-profits, they aren't established to make a monetary profit.
Well, they were, this abuse hasn't stopped, you know, despite all the apologies from the IRS for "poor customer service".
You're right and this is what I'm actually scared of. Unlike the past, they don't need to cast a wide net and hope it catches someone. Today's tech allows for pinpoint accuracy with data and would allow them to act in such a way that all cases (i.e. abduction, kidnapping, arrests etc.) look like one-off cases to the public.
They're squashing insiders who betrayed the government that trusted them with sensitive data. Sometimes that betrayal is the right and noble thing to do, but whistleblowers are ultimately people who were placed in a position of trust and violated that trust.
If the US Government were pursuing nonviolent dissenters who aren't also government employees that'd be a different story.
To compare what the US government is doing to a truly oppressive regime is insulting. People in the world today live in fear of physical harm from their own government. They aren't worried about phone call meta data or blanket call logging. They're worried about being taken by force with no trial, no ACLU or EFF to help them. Just gone.
Ai Weiwei served months in jail for art projects that were critical of the government. Can anyone imagine that happening here, in the country where flag burning is constitutionally protected? There are dozens of countries in the world today that have a near 100% conviction rate for political dissidents. Here in America confessed terrorists have the right to an attorney and god help the prosecution if there was any missed technicality during the arrest.
Don't dare be a girl trying to go to school in many middle eastern countries. Might get run over by a tank if you openly oppose the chinese government. Offend the king of saud with your actions and you'll be literally stoned to death in the street. And we're worried about phone call meta data?
I think a lot of this is ignorance about how modern counter terrorism works. The most effective tool we have is social network analysis. Find a terrorist and see who calls them, then see who calls those people and out and out. Look at the vertices and edges and dependency networks and we can learn a lot about complex organizations without risking any lives. It's understood that this is offensive to many people's privacy beliefs, but it's the best tool we have.
If you want to know why government agency's are engaging in this wildly unpopular behavior, here's the answer: On 9/11 a lot of people swore to god that it would never happen again. That might sound like a joke to people who never held up their hand and vowed protect and defend. People give their fucking lives to stop threats that you'll never know about. Question their methods all you want, they aren't going to listen.
Also: Save the slippery slope nonsense. There is a 0% chance of the US government becoming an oppressive regime, surveillance or not. Those things just don't happen in times of peace and prosperity. No country has ever gone from being an advanced democracy to being a tyrannical regime. Obama can't even pass a law without 37 votes to repeal.
Well, that feels sort of disingenuous. From the POV of a scheming politician in power, harmless gestures would certainly seem much less important than agents of your potential downfall communicating in ways that you can't penetrate. In most cases, those loudmouths are the devils you know.
I think a lot of this is ignorance about how modern counter terrorism works. The most effective tool we have is social network analysis. Find a terrorist and see who calls them, then see who calls those people and out and out. Look at the vertices and edges and dependencies networks and we can learn a lot about complex organizations without risking any lives.
I believe that's exactly happened half a year before 9/11. Then, someone thought, "what an interesting scenario, let's file it into our record system".
If you want to know why government agency's are engaging in this wildly unpopular behavior, here's the answer: On 9/11 a lot of people swore to god that it would never happen again.
OK, I'll bite: Didn't lousy healthcare kill more people in the US in the last decade (certainly, possibly even in a year) than 9/11 ever did? Do people swear to god that this must never happen again? I don't think so. It's the salami slicing effect, only with people. As long as it's not visible, nobody cares (or extremely few are actually bothered by it to any extent).
Ditto for people killed by burning all that coal.
We're getting very far off-topic, but don't you remember the huge political battle over Obamacare?
Those are equivalent in your mind?
Remember, for terrorists bombing and killing are only means to the end. The goal is political/social change; deaths are only collateral damage.
Basically, in this case one should shut up and multiply [0]. And [1], since we like Schneier around here.
[0] - http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Shut_up_and_multiply
[1] - http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/01/the_comparativ...
If we spent the same amount of effort reducing car fatalities, we'd have so many more saved lives.
It's an uncomfortable but unavoidable fact that most people expect the government to protect them from things like terrorist attacks too, which is why government oaths office include a clause about protecting the United States from enemies 'both foreign and domestic.'
Moreover, this is completely wrong reaction to the terrorism threat. The right reaction is to ignore it completely. Terrorism is not about blowing stuff up, it's about scaring people into changing their society and politics. By overreacting like this, America (and others) pretty much did exactly what the attacks were supposed to achieve.
By that logic, disbanding the police and court systems should bring crime to a swift and sudden end, because everyone knows that there was no crime before the creation of institutional policing.
> Terrorism is not about blowing stuff up, it's about scaring people into changing their society and politics.
Organized terrorism has a particular goal in mind, and killing people is only a particular way to achieve it. If you won't let acts of terror influence your policy, they will have to chose another way to pursue their goals.
It's a grown-up, serious version of school bullies problem; the best way to get rid of them is to either ignore them 'till they get bored, or hit them by surprise in hope they'll be so shocked to never think of attacking you again. What you don't want to do is to walk around scared and yield all the time, as this only invites more attacks.
No one said ignore the victims. The point is don't make everyone a victim by a cure worse than the attacks. 9-11 killed a few thousand. We've lost thousands by entering Iraq and Afghanistan.
We've spent a trillion dollars that if spent on heart disease treatment and research, or cancer research, or even just reducing the number of automobile related fatalities, would have saved more lives each year than we lost in 9-11.
> so I'd say your theory doesn't match up very well with events in the real world.
How can you say it doesn't match up? The terrorists changed US politics. They've made our country less free and they've drained us of a TRILLION dollars (1,000 Billion). Our country is turning into a hollywood caricature of the U.S.S.R circa 1985 -- secret police spying on citizens. These are self-inflicted wounds. We have shown there are huge rewards for terrorist action.
It doesn't matter. Deaths are deaths[0], and terrorism threat is pretty much neglectable in comparison with cars, murders and suicides[1].
[0] - http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Shut_up_and_multiply
[1] - http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/01/the_comparativ...
Well, I do, but only very vaguely; after all, it took place thousands of kilometers from where I happen to live and it's not like we don't have enough of our local issues to take care of.
Historical terms? 237 yrs is a relative piss in the bucket as far as historical terms are concerned. Talk to me once they get 800 yrs of stability under their belt.
There are cultures which are older, but many of these have existed under multiple different governments. Nations such as Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Czecheslovakia (since rendered into the states of Slovakia and the Czech Republic), much of the Balkans and Baltic countries, etc., simply didn't exist as national entities at the beginning of the 19th Century. Neither did the states of the Middle East (Ottoman Empire), Africa (colonies, prior to which: native tribal regions not structured as we'd consider modern nations), the Americas, etc.
Yes, you'll find England, Spain, and France in much their modern form dating to ~ 1000 - 1400 AD, but only just.
There are a few modern countries which have occupied much the same area (though with different governmental forms) more or less continuously: Persia/Iran, Vietnam, Japan, and China, with as I recall Vietnam being the oldest as I recall.
But no, "nations" as such really aren't all that permanent.
Because America kills people without trial, abducts suspects and tortures them, very often they turn out to be innocents. To say nothing of the support, if not wholesale installment, of the very kind of regimes that you guarantee me the US will never become.
Comments like yours seem to say that all of this doesn't matter, because we are not doing it to Americans! (At least not white ones and only if they happen to be outside the country.)
That does seem to be the general sentiment of your typical statist american.
Governments are allowed to abuse people that are "owned" by other governments, unless those people are americans. Or something.
Which means precisely nothing. Laws are just an illusion of order that only exists if the enforcers make it so. Photographing cops is also protected, yet if you do it you might end up in the hospital with your camera broken, charged with assaulting a police officer.
People in the US mostly aren't afraid of their government. Maybe they never will be. But the US government does unspeakable things inside and outside the borders of the US. The majority aren't afraid because they aren't yet effected. Maybe the majority will never be effected or never know it.
One thing I would ask you; we know the government gets support from the press in the form of omissions. Is it completely impossible that someone inside the US has been "disappeared" without us knowing? How would we know if it wasn't reported? A lone family crying about a missing loved one can be ignored pretty easily if the media doesn't blow it up for all to see.
Your main argument is that Americans should not be upset about this because it's not actually oppressive, and the United States will not become oppressive.
I think this is wrong in two ways.
1. We should hold our government to a much higher standard than "oppressive." We should not even let them come close to it. I realize this is an axiom; why should we do that? Reasons like "because of the Constitution," "to protect people," "to keep the United States a place of refuge for oppressed people," are all good reasons, but I think the best is simply that it is evil to allow a good thing to be compromised or abrogated, so it is good to resist a compromising or abrogating force. I cannot justify this by logic (why anyone should be good or want good) but I cannot be persuaded otherwise, and thankfully, many other people are the same way.
2. Our government is already oppressive to certain people, and there is a chance that the list of people it oppresses will grow. Most of them are foreign but a few are already domestic. The systems being built today are designed to increase our capacity to treat people this way, so it is reasonable to expect more people will be treated poorly. Additionally, history provides ample examples of nearly utopic nations, including republics, that did go on to commit atrocities and reduce the quality of the lives of their own people. It is not a slippery slope to want to take precautions to avoid the same. But again, this is all secondary to point #1 above.
Cameron D'Ambrosio - held in jail for weeks without bail for posting rap lyrics the government found offensive. [http://cms.fightforthefuture.org/teenager/]
Peaceful Occupy protesters - subjected to beatings and pepper-spraying at point blank range [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UC_Davis_pepper-spray_incident]. (Note that no one was actually run over by a tank in China; OTOH, the US has the legacy of the Kent State Massacre [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings]. ETA: there have been worse massacres of protesters elsewhere, but the point is that the US is not exempt from this.)
Bradley Manning - held for nine months in solitary confinement under conditions that at times could only be described as torture: naked and without his eye glasses, permitted to read or watch TV for only one hour a day, not permitted to exercise. [http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/manning-treatment-i...], [http://solitarywatch.com/2012/08/11/defense-motion-describes...]
North-west anarchists - accused of no wrongdoing but refused to testify for a grand jury. Held in contempt of court and sent directly to jail. Spent 5 months in jail, much of it in solitary confinement during which they were permitted no visitors and had only one 15 minute phone call a month and limited access to reading and writing materials. According to the judge who both sent them there and then released them, "their physical health has deteriorated sharply and their mental health has also suffered from the effects of solitary confinement." [https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B4hDq2p2PpMKRDRDQzViLWJTUmc/...]
None of these people are even suspected terrorists. What they share in common is that they did things the government didn't like.
As for suspected terrorists, they are not guaranteed due process. See Jose Padilla [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Padilla_%28prisoner%...]: U.S. citizen, held from 2002 to 2006 as an "enemy combatant" and denied due process. Finally transferred to civilian court and convicted anyways, showing that criminal defendants do not get off on "technicalities" as you claim. Look up "harmless error analysis" if you want to learn the truth about "technicalities."
The United States is not exceptional, and we need to stop pretending that it is.
No protestor was run over by a tank at Kent State, either; OTOH, China has the legacy of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, in which at least (even by the official government counts) 50 times as many civilians were killed as at Kent State.
(I support your overall point.)
I would say that the restrictions placed on him were overly harsh, but people have tried to hang themselves with their clothes and blankets before.
Just to give another perspective - say you're in charge of the prison that Bradley Manning is held at. He's in a very fragile state of mind and is facing life without parole. If he gets treated too poorly, then it's your ass. But if you give him too much freedom, then he could use that opportunity to kill himself.
That being said, the US is not exceptional about this. But I'd much rather be in the US than many other countries if I were charged with terrorism.
Also, I believe we should make these assessments based on what's the right thing to do, rather than on what minimizes public relations fiascoes or best covers the asses of prison officials.
[1] http://articles.latimes.com/2013/feb/28/local/la-me-ff-priso...
"The most effective tool we have is social network analysis."
tl;dr : massive surveillance is real, there is far more, blow the whistle if you can, take precautions
If you see something, say something. There are many people in the U.S. that will appreciate and admire you. "
That said, it appears that any American who communicates with someone overseas also gets to join our special club.
This feels like a fairly large loophole. Does replying to this comment count?
Far from giving up the EU is engaged in strengthening the directives far beyond what's required now: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regulat...
But hey at least when China rises to be a world power it will become even worse.
Here are some ideas they could come up with: 1. Intel is the biggest distributor of computer chips, lets target them 2. Microsoft is the biggest supplier of desktop software, lets target them. 3. If we can pick up signals from distant galaxies can we not make our own special network out of those thousands of desktops running those powerful computer chips today?
Problem: If someone at intel/MS directly works with us, we will be found out.
Solution: Let's target a high level exec, he wont do anything other than allow them to employ a few of our special programmers.
Take the chip plans from Intel. Make some modifications to add another core, which is activated in a special mode and instruction running its own Operating System/wifi etc.
Deployment: Tell the high level exec, tell us when your next upgrade to manufacturing hardware will arrive. Just give us the date and the shipping information.
Intercept the hardware and modify it's software to dynamically change the plans, with a new one.
For MS, hack the build system using something similar to the Ken Thompson hack.
If I was into spying, with a govt agency I would definitely do this. Which is why I always assume my computer is compromised.1) They have and will be spying on citizens forever. Anybody who believes mission statements, officials, and that they "follow the law", is extremely naive.
2) More important than any terrorists to them, are dissident citizens. Not of the gun-totting, hillbilly mountain militia type. The kind that can effect political change to the system type, from Joe Hill and Mother Jones, to MLK and Malcom X, to Occupy Wall Street (if that thing ever got anywhere coherent). People making waves.
He even ended with a call to action.
Unfortunately, one of my senators is Dianne "It's called defending America" Feinstein, and she's got her job for another 5 years, so I'm not expecting much in her case.
If you want to change the US at this point you're going to have to do what the founding father's did: become the government you want.
Fight or flight.
1) Speak out, set up organizations like the EFF or similar to fight for privacy. Or advocate on behalf of such organizations. Work the politicians however you can, to whatever extent that might help. Encourage the people you know to do the same; encourage people to give a shit again. Explain why it's important to fight this.
2) Try to leave the US, or at least begin disappearing yourself. Leave less of a trail. Communicate as little as necessary over the phone or digitally, and keep it strictly business (so to speak). Use good encryption wherever you can. Encourage the people you know to do the same.
Either option is valid, both are entirely personal, moral choices. Some people stayed when the Iron Curtain went up in Russia and tried to fight it, some fled; ditto Germany, China, Vietnam, Venezuela, Cuba, and so on.
"And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family?
"Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?
"After all, you knew ahead of time that those bluecaps were out at night for no good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you’d be cracking the skull of a cutthroat. Or what about the Black Maria [Government limo] sitting out there on the street with one lonely chauffeur — what if it had been driven off or its tires spiked.
"The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!"
* The minimum gun is a military grade bolt action rifle with a 5 round or greater magazine, anything like the Mauser 1898 (sic) or the many guns inspired by it or that evolved in parallel. The last remaining cheap, military surplus ones are Mosin–Nagants (you should be able to get one for $150 or so, just make sure to buy non-corrosive ammo). Buy Jeff Cooper's The Art of the Rifle (http://www.amazon.com/The-Art-Of-Rifle/dp/1581605927/) to learn how to wield it effectively.
There's lots of discussion on how the people have no power since this problem isn't an issue of voting for one side or the other - there's only one side represented by politicians, and it's the pro-spying activity side. (Side note: I don't mean to diminish those people's concerns, I'm sure majority of them are honestly trying to protect us the best they can.)
The only way for real change to come about this style of government is for the media to demand it. They've sat idly by watching it (ore more appropriately, ignoring it) for over a decade now. It's time for them to put up or shut up. Hopefully the AP/Reporter spying by the DOJ was enough to put a fire under their butts about it. Hopefully this is just the start to intense scrutiny by all media outlets (not just foxnews, not just msnbc, ie: not just one party's mouth piece, but all of them.) Unfortunately we just have to wait and see. The media has a chance to redeem themselves for the past decade+ of caring more about what is trending on Youtube and Twitter than protecting their viewership. Hopefully they rise to the task.
That's funny. That's the slogan they have plastered all over New York's subway system.
http://www.dhs.gov/if-you-see-something-say-something-campai...
What they are doing is bad, it shouldn't happen, all who support it need to be kicked out..full stop...no excuses...
If they went to these lengths with tech companies can't we assume that surveillance in place within financial institutions is even worse than what we know it is? It could hint at another angle beyond having lots of money where Wall Street has leverage over Washington. I can imagine bank execs threatening leaks should things not go their way.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smedley_Butler#Allegations_of_t...
James Bamford
Not just governments but any institution when starts hurting those who can not hit back, you know they are on decline.
If US interests are under threat from anyone then it is not Afghanistan or Iran or Syria but China. US government wont get anything by spying on US citizens but by standing upto China.
How can you wish Happy Birthday to President Obama - just tell it on the phone while talking to a friend - Erik Holder will already be listening and will send the greetings.
If you see something, say something.
and it's directed to potential whistle-blowers.
Users need to be able to encrypt their data such that the cloud providers can't ever see it. The web as it stands is just not designed to be used like this; even if all my google docs data is encrypted and google does not have the key, it will need to be decrypted in-browser to be displayed which means a) broken javascript crypto and b) the page can then send all the data back to google anyway.
A further problem is the economics of the web: it's largely based on providing services that are free to use but paid for by advertisers. You can't target advertising if you don't have data about user habits. Economically Google can't exist without tracking people and recording as much data as possible.
Free services means the loyalty is NOT to the users but whoever pays the bills (usually ad merchants).
That's why there are "privacy policies" and not "privacy guarantees".
I think there are big problems with the ad supported business model -- but I don't think it is that central to spying.
Remember Hushmail?
On the merits, I do think he's right to highlight the importance of secure channels for whistleblowers in the current climate.
Here are my objections to his position:
1. Schneier is calling for people to break the law at great risk to themselves on the ground that the government's current position is immoral (but not illegal).
2. While saying that it's scary what we don't know, he makes no effort to educate his audience on what we do know, such as how this sort of activity comes to be legal and constitutional in the first place, the answers to which lie in the 1970s (see my other comments on Smith v. Maryland today, for example).
3. Schneier has absolutely nothing to say on how this state of affairs might be fixed, or what it is that US citizens should demand of their senators and state representatives to repair the situation through democratic means. My answer to that question is that that we need a constitutional amendment that creates an explicit right to privacy and another that narrows the power of Congress to abdicate its oversight of the Executive branch, which latter is conveniently required to maximize its defensive capabilities. I also think it's high time that the AUMF was rescinded.
4. Schneier has made a fine career out of complaining about the security state but shows no leadership when it comes to rolling it back. We all hate the TSA's instrusive searches and silly rules, yes? But when the TSA proposed loosening the restrictions on what you could take onto a plane, to allow practical exceptions like small pocketknives and so on, airlines lobbied heavily against it on behalf of their staff (who, in fairness, would be facing an elevated risk). Despite years of complaining about the TSA, Schneier did not AFAIK write anything about the proposed changes, let alone express support or encourage others to do so. Although the proposed rule change was pretty small, it would have represented at least a minor victory for common sense instead of security theater. But when it was offered up from public debate, Schneier didn't even consider it worth mentioning to his readers.
Schneier's great at stoking readers' outrage - not so good at educating them or helping them channel it effectively. In my view, his punditry is emotional rather than analytical.
Apologies - I should have noticed that.
Having said that, I stand by my call for evidence of application of critical facilities if that's what's being claimed - a call to which you're risen with flying colours.
I _broadly_ agree with all of your points - but in my opinion you're selling him short with your final summation sentence "In my view, his punditry is emotional rather than analytical."
As I see it, he's built a reputation (and career) about being well-informed on security issues, and also being able to communicate those issues at a "popular media" level - perhaps sometimes oversimplifying, but almost always informing enough that a curious reader has enough knowledge and keywords to search for further information (and, like in this article, often providing many many more detailed and specific links). And while it would be even better if he provided solutions to some of the problems he writes about - educating the wider general public that the problems exist at all does a nett good for society.
Expecting him to "show leadership" (or even have any solutions) as a prerequisite to pointing out problems seems unduly onerous.
Man do I hate this objection. Would you have behaved the same in Nazi germany? "Come on! You're asking people to break the law! It's illegal to tell anyone about our plant for murdering disabled people.". Well, yes. Because a corrupt entity has control of the laws and is making it illegal to point out the illegal activities said entity is engaging in.
See, this is why I object to what Schneier is doing. He has you equating the confidentiality of phone records with human lives.
And we don't need to put ourselves as the mercy of the worst people in government. We don't need to allow this stuff as it buys us practically nothing. Terrorism isn't a legitimate threat to America and never has been. Even if we utterly ignored terrorism it will never be more than line noise compared to things like heart disease, vehicular death and so on.
I suspect Bradley Manning, Julian Assange, and most of the people who've ever been inside Guantanamo Bay probably see that a little differently.