Cowards
uncrunched.com
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This reads like a pastiche of Keith Olbermann, all bravado and empty gusto. Arrington writes:
What has these people, among the wealthiest on the planet, so scared that they find themselves engaging in these verbal gymnastics to avoid telling a simple truth?
and then acknowledges that doing so, if it meant breaking FISA, is illegal.
Because their lawyers might be telling them what they are required to do. But their soul should be telling them what they must do.
What the hell does this even mean?
Listen, I completely agree with the central premise that we need to have an actual conversation both about privacy in the age of Facebook and the Kafka-esque way the U.S. government has engineered these catch-22 gag orders. But given Arrington's experience both with AOL and with the overall notion of privacy, I'd expect something with a little more substance and perspective.
It means that if telling the truth is illegal, they should have the courage to break the law.
It's very easy to ignore this sort of thing when it's not your ass on the line. Bradley Manning had a different kind of freedom, the kind that comes with nobody around you who can get hurt. The feds turned Sabu, the infamous LulzSec hacker, by threatening his three-year-old daughter. The United States government is not above such tactics.
I don't, frankly, believe that Arrington himself would behave much differently in the same situation. Life is not that easy.
Or, in the timeless words of Robert Oppenheimer:
"I am become Death, destroyer of worlds."
I'm not saying he should do that but with the amount of money he has he can afford to lose a job and still don't worry about his financial future.
I support what you say in theory, but a sign of intelligence is to take longer term approaches to solving the issue. (I would hope they are furious at the government for doing this or at least for hurting their business, I know I would be.)
It works the other way around than you say. Surrendering is short term win at the price of long term loss. Taking short term win at price of dooming us all is not nice behavior, even if being a dick might be intelligent.
You honestly think the government is going to go after a multibillion dollar international corporation? Doing that is what gets the government into trouble, because the corporation has the resources to defend itself. And they're clearly not going to destroy Facebook and Google in any event -- can you imagine the public outrage, to say nothing of the economic damage?
Governments retain power through leverage. They don't actually have the power to destroy everyone, but they have the power to destroy one person, and the power to threaten everyone with the risk of being that one person. When the government is wrong, this relies on everyone being too afraid to do the right thing, and people not talking to each other and working together.
This is pretty basic stuff. If you stand up and no one else does, you die now. If no one stands up, you die later. If everyone stands up, you win. Which would you rather do?
The government has in the past gone after some extremely powerful corporations and when they had the endurance patience, and care, they have succeeded. We should remember that the government spent 50 years trying to destroy AT&T's monopoly on long distance telephone calls and eventually they succeeded.
>AT&T's monopoly
They spent 50 years trying to break them up and within 20 years after that they had pretty much bought each other back up again and continue to do so as time passes.
You should also note that the public hated AT&T because they were the prototypical example of an abusive monopolist. It's a different story when the reason for the campaign is that the corporation is going to bat for the public against government overreach.
There is also the matter of Citizens United -- it's extremely unfortunate when the government legitimately wants to attack oil companies or other evildoers, but it works just as well (if not more so) when the corporation is doing right and the government is wrong.
We see a shift thus under Reagan from pro-competition to pro-oligopoly which continues and accelerates under Clinton, Bush, and Obama. It is an indication that in class warfare the elite always win.
As for AT&T getting back together, they still don't own a record label, broadcast/entertainment media, the Japanese telephone system or the major manufacturers of phones in the US and abroad to an extent anywhere near what they used to..... People forget just how big Ma Bell was at its zenith.
Some examples: Youtube and social media make war crimes more difficult to hide, Silk Road makes the war on drugs irrelevant, Bitcoin will make monetary policy irrelevant, open transactions will make the law system irrelevant, 3D printing will make border tariffs irrelevant, etc. Every software commit is a sign of progress, a log of someone trying to make the world a more voluntary, peaceful and decentralized place.
Given all of this, please excuse me in not caring about the idiots in Washington, London, Brussels, Paris, Moscow and Bejing who want to make me believe they are worth my time and emotional investment.
What more can one ask for than for the opportunity to live life on one's own terms?
meaningless, irrelevant words.
1) The government has some actual legitimate reason to do all of this which outweighs the danger of excessive government power.
2) Disclosing the reason to the public would eviscerate its effectiveness.
3) Allowing the government to say "trust us, we're the government" about anything from now on and get a free pass, because it could be this situation, will not result in the outrageous atrocities that governments have been known to commit when government accountability to the public is literally prohibited by law.
I don't even buy the first two as being especially plausible, but the third is why this cannot stand.
"First they came for the communists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.
Then they came for the socialists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for me,
and there was no one left to speak for me."Beyond that, in terms of public surveillance, Zuckerberg has real power in this sphere. You could even argue that he has more power than any individual has ever had. Certainly there is no bigger global database of personal information than Facebook.
It doesn't matter if Arrington is being a hypocrite. It doesn't matter if I'm being a hypocrite. Zuckerberg, and indeed all technologists should stand up on this issue. If we love what computers can do, we owe it to the world to fight so that they don't become the Orwellian tool of control that totalitarian regimes have always dreamed of. We can't put the genie back in the bottle—data is going to be out there—but we can force the government to be more transparent. We can stand up and say that a handful of isolated terrorist attacks is not justification to ratchet up governmental power to something a thousand times more terrifying than any homicidal extremist ever could be. This is fundamentally one of the most important issues of our time, certainly far more important than the fate of any one company.
Also, it's worth noting that one of the key features that helped Facebook take off was much better privacy controls than anything that existed at the time.
A few older ep's of note re: billionaires enacting change and surveillance states: http://dancarlin.com/dccart/index.php?main_page=product_musi...
Could a Martin Luther King Jr. even exist today? Could an activist "rise" pulling together masses for protests with the amount of surveilance and data scored on people (this is from 2011). It speaks to the issue of whether or not any individual could in this day and age lead such a large-scale movement, and when/how they would be curtailed nearly immediately due to infiltration and "dirt" that is so easily obtained, etc.
Also of note: http://dancarlin.com/dccart/index.php?main_page=product_musi... Description: Another news story highlighting the growing "wealth gap" between the rich and poor in the USA has Dan discussing countermeasures. What if the rich and powerful made fixing that imbalance a priority?
I can't recall if the subject I am speaking to is the above, or below episode (probably below, his show notes are not linked to his site).
Dan Carlin goes into a very pessimistic (and somewhat realistic) description of why money in politics can only be solved by money, in politics. How if HE were to change policies, he would need (or wish to) see a cabal of billionaires. Ready to back actual reformists, and immediately cut them out of any re-elections if they are not holding to the reformist promises made (the below Ep). A political contract per se, with the most "good intentioned" billionaires. He also notes, this is rather unrealistic, as ones "good intentions" can be diametrically opposed to another (simplisitic example, The Koch brothers and Soros).
I'm not describing it well, but his premise is that you only change the top-levels by voting out the House/Senate that change their tune once in office, thus you need the consequences of uber-rich who can, and have the ability, to oust them in a semi-quick (election cycle) function.
Pretty sure its the below Ep.
http://dancarlin.com/dccart/index.php?main_page=product_musi... Description: The only way Americans can change federal government policy is by voting for new political candidates. But what if those candidates ignore the positions they ran on once elected? Also: the implementation Gordian knot.
I wonder if we will have a Bill Gates type billionaire who dedicates the power of his/her mind to reforming politics in such a fashion. I use Bill Gates as an example, re: his ruthless and intelligent business acumen, turning towards solving philanthropical concerns. That "moving of the cannons" would be stellar (searching is broken for older articles, their was a fantastic Reuters, or FT on Bill Gates when he stepped down from MS to turn towards philanthropic causes, and (paraphrasing), "it will be of awe to see the change his business mind, fundamental efficiencies in solving problems, will do for the world of [disease, whatever].")
I also think its silly to assume that though a billionaire has immense power/influence/'stability" to withstand more pressures by the government, this is still the US government which can bring down countries, much less a rascally tech billionaire.
(I am on meds for post-surgey, apologies if this is rambling or incoherent).
He also has more means to defend himself, move out of harm's way, get active support from other people.
> Bradley Manning had a different kind of freedom, the kind that comes with nobody around you who can get hurt.
This is just nonsense. Manning has a family too (parents).
He also has over a billion people who would raise hell if the US Government came down hard on him for doing nothing more than tell the truth about a government program and laws that few people would agree make sense.
Having him put it all on the table to defend his user's privacy would say more about the company than any marketing or press release ever could.
We, as individuals, are utterly powerless against our government. That's a fact. Just try to go up against the IRS or even your local Labor Board.
People like him have the ability to really disrupt the surveillance state in ways we cannot. What would happen if all major 'net CEO's and founders agreed to tell the government to stuff it? They are going to arrest all of them? They woukd have angry mobs burning down Congress. These CEO's have real power. Perhaps it's high time they start exercising it.
Defend their privacy so he can immediately sell it to the highest bidder?
The buck for such decisions stops at the Oval Office, and its current occupant has no reelection campaigns to worry about.
"What will happen?" is an excellent question that is not even asked. Certainly not everything is an acceptable risk; if Larry Page seriously believe he would risk spending the rest of his life in prison for publishing national security letters, then sure, we'd all do the same.
But is this the case? How do we even know if nobody's testing it?
Besides, why can't Google or Facebook be a little creative, and (for example) declare that the only way they'll be able to send information is by fax...?
That's kind of what HN is doing (it will only accept DMCA requests via fax or regular mail).
You obey the law. Period. And if you don't agree with it you lobby directly or encourage your users to do so.
This is how Uber works, or AirBnB... but not only. Facebook or Google routinely ignore European privacy laws. Twitter ignores European laws about free speech (which you and I may consider "bad" laws, but which are laws nonetheless).
So why is it that suddenly everyone hides behind the "law"?
When the law doesn't sit well with you, you should indeed choose to not obey, then fight the consequences.
Personally, I think they found a way to tell the truth without breaking the law.
They apparently said what they were required to say, to the letter. People found it transparently suspicious. Now the secret appears to be out.
Could be an accident, I suppose.
Had they said, "We do not comment on matters of national security," such would have been honest, careful, and truthful and it would have been darned hard to prosecute them or put them at risk for effectively revealing that the press was right.
None of them addressed the incongruity of having all the major news outlets contradicting them, after apparently finding the major points of the story supportable.
In the case of gmail, "please send me a random 10 users' info, data, and emails" gives you over a 70% chance that any given one in that sample is a foreigner. With Facebook it is closer to 85%.
So think about that. It means the filters could deliberately overinclude Americans and still meet their standards.
Maybe that is currently true; jailing Japanese Americans also passed court muster. Secret orders from a secret court doesn't square with the ideals of America I was taught in civics class.
The time for these companies to fight was before they gave away their user's info, not after they got caught doing so. If they weren't going to standup and do the right thing then, it's unrealistic to expect that they'd somehow find the courage now.
We don't need to have a "conversation". We need to challenge this behavior in courts, and win.
(The real outrage in Khodorkovsky's case isn't that he has been repeatedly convicted while still imprisoned. The real outrage is that ExxonMobil and ChevronTexaco found a way to destroy their Russian competition.)
The whole premise is that the NSA is protecting the USA of terrorism by spying and that the USA is in a war against terrorism. Then the one who go against NSA is a traitor in a war time. Stop any rational argument here. BTW, I think you look slightly traitor to me...
On a side note, I see the whole xenophobia that's implied by all this. The NSA exists only to strip foreigners of their privacy, without any due process or supervision, and the only accusation here is that they might have stripped some of the 5% of the global population of their privilege of due process and constitutional rights. And there is a lot of suspicion that the NSA was used for economic spying in the war between Boing and EADS, and probably other cases.
Governments and companies know how to leak. The only logical conclusion is that these surveillance programs are not actually significantly upsetting to most of these folks.
"Legal" is worthless if it is inhuman. So one MUST stand against inhuman laws.
“All it takes for evil to succeed is for a few good men to do nothing...”
― Edmund Burke
That's so true. If they came out now, the country would be better for it. But they are deciding to be accomplices of the out of control and abusive government. I thought Google, at least, would be better than this, after the whole China situation.
It's easy to ask for other people to fight for your rights. What are you doing about it?
Getting the run-around for the IRS and the media seems to be the lot for those trying to get it together.
Let us have a conversation about that:
Why should Mark Zuckerberg, et al., know things about you that the government shouldn't?
Or, to put it another way, shouldn't the very thing which represents You, the People, have as much information about you as, "They", the Corporations, do?
After all, Mr. Z, et al., can quite easily tell you things about yourself which, 3 words into the sentence, would give the government a lot of information it needs to optimize itself. To Serve You.
Whereas, the corporate stance is "we will own the consumers, all the consumers, and we will encourage them to endless consume our product", the government stance is: "how do we keep 240million people from cannibalizing themselves".
Mr Z., et al., are being mighty disingenous with this position, because the fact of the whole matter is, the Government would be the absolute BEST customer for him/them/et al., there is no better way to feed a consumer than to get the Government on your side, as we see with Pharmaceuticals, Farming, Oil, etc.
There are multiple points of view in this argument, is all I am trying to say, and by setting the above in word I hope to have at least set the scene for my real, tl;dr, which is this:
Privacy is a trap. Those who are fully exploiting the nature of the system, simply keep no secrets .. and trade never willingly with those who do.
1. Because the user decided to give their own info to FB, but not to the gov.
2. The gov has many more powers than FB. If FB knows something about you that "may be suspicious" they can't put you in jail for it, maybe even without a trial.
3. If some FB employee is able to steal data, it would have bad consecuences for the FB stock, so there is probably all kinds of barriers in place to stop employees to do just that. If some bureaucrat manages to sell off you data there is no consecuene for them.
etc.
If I don't want to be subjected to any country's taxes or laws, let me know how I can opt-out of this. You can relocate to a different country, but it is up to them to allow you to enter and/or settle, so the problem hasn't been circumvented.
On the other hand, I can choose to not have a Facebook account, and can use various browser plugins to stonewall their efforts to track me on the web.
so don't relocate to a different country
The question is, trust more to do what? Not kill or imprison innocent people on a mass scale? I'm going to go with McDonalds on that one. But I wouldn't eat their food -- and notice that I have the choice not to.
This is not quite true. Facebook can make profiles even on people that don't have facebook and that have never logged in to facebook.
The tracking works just fine on a per-browser level. The practical upshot of this is that there is a good chance that facebook has data on you from before you joined and is able to track you after you leave.
Zuckerberg can't indict me. I don't pay taxes to Facebook.
There are powers that the government has that Facebook does not, and therefore there are things I would be comfortable telling Facebook and not the government.
Rather than name-calling, let's learn how to fight for freedom. I posted yesterday, to NO upvotes,
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5840000
a link to the free online book From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation by Gene Sharp,
http://www.aeinstein.org/organizations/org/FDTD.pdf
an experienced activist and supporter of people power democratic movements that originated under some of the world's toughest dictatorships. We can learn a lot more from him and his writings and those of his collaborators
http://www.aeinstein.org/organizationsde07.html
than we can learn from anyone on Uncrunched or TechCrunch or any high-tech publication about how to win freedom even while under intense pressure from dictators. Try it. Don't decry anyone else for lacking courage. Build up your own courage. Build up your own effective communication with other freedom fighters, so that the movement for freedom has solidarity, unity of purpose, and resilience. Roll up your sleeves and get to work. (Anyone can participate: as a foreign student in Taiwan in the early 1980s, I was able to turn Chinese-language speech contests for foreign students into opportunities to express dissent from the dictatorship in the hearing of government officials of the dictatorship. This just takes courage and preparation.)
edit: We've seen how these ceos can react when they care, ie when something threatens their income.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_SOPA_and_PIPA
edit2: punctuation
That's a great problem and a great starting point for working on that problem.
But that isn't the problem here, because we aren't living under a dictator, not even a non-malicious dictator.
Rather, we have complaints about democratically elected officials. And many of us have given up on everything tied to that system and want to use non-democratic mechanisms (up to and including violence) to resolve our own complaints.
This has two major problems, of course. First, it means we are (illegitimately) overriding interests which should be democratically represented. Second, it opens the door to an arms race where those with competing opinions will do the same to us, and those who are peaceful will be marginalized unless they also embrace anti-democratic tactics.
Then they came for the whistle blowers, and I did not speak out-- Because I was not a whistle blower.
Then they came for the illegal aliens, and I did not speak out-- Because I was not an illegal alien.
Then they came for the hackers--and there was no one left to speak for us.
1. The US has killed many many more children in its retaliation for attacks than any so called 'terror' organization has. (http://www.policymic.com/articles/20884/is-america-like-adam...)
2. The fear of your children dying is the ultimate weapon for people to control you.
There is a strange dichotomy between the pride parents of soldiers have in their child's courage to defend liberty, and the 'do-anything-it-takes-to-protect-my-babies' mindset that seems to pervade the civilian population. One leads to people standing up, the other, cowering.
When they come for the whistleblower and illegal alien it becomes debatable whether they are pursuing a legitimate governmental role. It's very definitely an apples to oranges comparison there.
The government should not be allowed to deny human rights to anyone.
Also, a question: do you think there is anyone online reading HN that has not already heard this line of argument, that both governments and terrorists kill children?
Finally, not that I think it's necessary to rebut your post point by point, but: I'm not ok with the USG doing anything to protect my kids. But I am just fine with them going after actual terrorists.
Of course, now that communist parties are mostly a sad joke, the equivalence is absent, but back in the day I would say being a communist - especially outside of Communist block were you didn't have much choice and also almost always did not possess relevant information to make correct conclusions - was not much different on the substance than being, say, Hamas supporter now, even though I realize many people did not understand that. But many people don't understand it now too.
So? Does this make the argument wrong? Or does this mean that arguments that have been used once, cannot be used again? Arguments as toilet paper, in some way?
I'm French. France was occupied by Nazi Germany (as every American I ever speak to likes to remind me).
Resistants were ordinary French people who blew up trains in order to make the life of Germans in France as difficult as possible -- and of course German propaganda called them terrorists. I'm not putting this word in quotes, because of course that's what they were. They were trying to terrify the occupiers. It was a good thing.
Terrorists try to murder your children because your compatriots murder theirs.
The only way for the terrorists to win is to transform modern democracies into paranoid, self-centered, hysteric societies.
Terrorists appear to be winning so far, but it's a long game. We should really not play their game.
The problem with deciding that suspected terrorists don't deserve the same rights is that those rights are/should be inalienable. If we decided to start making exceptions, then those rights are no longer inalienable and it's just a matter of degree.
What is a terrorist but a murderer with a political agenda? So perhaps we shouldn't give murder suspects a trial either. And what about a suspect who's attempted to murder? Why give them a fair trial? And so on.
The degree of heinousness of the crime should determine the punishment, not whether the accused deserves a trial.
Do you not know about the drone "signature strikes" that bomb randomly in Yemen and Pakistan, followed by targeted strikes against first responders?
And do you not know that all it takes to become a "terrorist" is to be male, medium age, and killed in such a strike? Unless proven innocent?
Or are you under the delusion that you have to actually join AlQaeda for the US government to count you as a terrorist?
The part that gets me though is how the videos are always labelled. It is always "Gun battle with Al Qaeda" or "Taliban sneak attack"* or whatnot. I don't blame the camera man and company for shooting back or anything, but where are they getting the "Al Qaeda/Taliban" part from? It is not like the attackers are wearing uniforms (or can even be seen in most cases...) It really does seem to be implicitly assumed that anyone who sees value in shooting at foreign troops in their country must be members of Al Qaeda or the Taliban. This rubs me incredibly wrong.
Hyperbole is a fun game. But this is beneath you.
Communism has the utter breaking of current society as the only method to obtaining true communism and thus is not as far from being terrorist activity as one might think.
They even subverted the word "hacker" to have it mean something bad.
There is literally no evidence anyone could produce which would prove to anyone's satisfaction that (a) Google, Yahoo, Facebook, etc don't hand over every last shred of data they have to the NSA, the KGB, and whatever China's equivalent is, or that (b) the CEOs of the respective companies didn't personally sign off on every single violation of privacy while kicking puppies. Corporations can't have alibis. Mark Zuckerberg can't say, "Oh, I was in Cincinnati for the last 5 years, and I don't have cell coverage there, so I can't possibly have been involved."
I usually avoid defending billionaires, because they can dry their tears on their giant stacks of money, but so far this is just a he-said-she-said, and if all of the tech companies are saying they're innocent, it's the responsibility of the accusers to pony up some evidence they're guilty. Slide shows are one thing, but if you want to prove to me that the system does what you say it does, we need a document dump: millions of random emails, Facebook messages, whatever that have been illegally accessed through this system, which could plausibly not have been accessed without the kind of far reaching access that the tech giants are being accused of having provided.
The extent of his confusion is breathtaking. Apparently very few people get what this is all about. The real question is this:
Does the government (a) mine content and/or metadata in these service providers' databases for suspect activity, or (b) can it only access specific accounts after naming the account holder?
What happened at Verizon is (a). Page and Zuckerberg say it's not what happens at Google and Facebook.
What Page and Zuckerberg meant when they were talking about "scale" is that the government cannot mine their databases for suspects. Not directly, not indirectly, not through a secure portal or in any other way.
The government can and does make requests (lots of them) to have specific accounts opened, and what Google/Facebook apparently do is to make that process technically more efficient via a secure portal.
Moreover if the government is doing dragnet surveillance on telephone records it is only a matter of time before they expand the program to tech providers even if it hasn't already.
> FISA orders can range from inquiries about specific people to a broad sweep for intelligence, like logs of certain search terms, lawyers who work with the orders said. There were 1,856 such requests last year, an increase of 6 percent from the year before.
Imagine a 2x2 matrix of intelligence requests, with one side being "narrow" vs "broad" and the other being "short" vs "long" duration. Verizon was long and broad, the worst kind.
The tech companies are trying to imply that they were short and narrow, at least most of the time, and the journalists are trying to imply that they were long and broad, but never come out and say it because they have no evidence. If we had better transparency about FISA, we could answer this question ourselves. Just knowing how many requests were for individual user's data would be extremely helpful.
The fact that they've built special systems for giving the government the data is not too surprising or scandalous. If I ran a site getting the same number of FISA requests that Google and Facebook presumably get, I'd probably also design a special system to make the process more convenient and secure. Short of openly challenging the NSA in court, this is probably the best response we could hope for. It gives the company control over what data is released and is much more secure than a back door which could be compromised.
They don't have direct access to the servers, they're complying with the law, they have everyone's data.
The worst bit is that this is all kept secret. If it's all so acceptable then why didn't the public at least get told.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/08/technology/tech-companies-...
> In one recent instance, the National Security Agency sent an agent to a tech company’s headquarters to monitor a suspect in a cyberattack, a lawyer representing the company said. The agent installed government-developed software on the company’s server and remained at the site for several weeks to download data to an agency laptop.
Where in that paragraph or the ones surrounding it does it say that Google or Facebook was the company involved? Don't you think that if these incidents involved either company, that they would be named here?
CEOs who are not informed can release statements indicating the depth of their ignorance without being deliberately dishonest.
That said, the alleged situation frankly astounds me. The government SHOULD NOT have employees at companies devoting company resources to projects that the people running those companies are not allowed to know about. But that is exactly what the NY Times claimed.
If the scope of what they were required to deliver included information that could have an impact on the financial disclosures of the company[1] then, under Sarbanes-Oxley, they are at least required to put controls in place to communicate or prevent inaccurate financial reporting. This could also be why the CFO was not involved in the denials, because they've at least separated NTK.
As for the portal, the lowest common denominator would be an ftp server. Maybe they put it on fbiguy3@gmail.com's Google Drive so he had to log in. I'd like to think I'd encrypt it with a huge whopping GPG key, email it from a gmail to a yahoo address under my control, and ask,"Did you get that?" but I know I'd just piss down my leg and give them what they wanted.
Finally, Google is rather proud of the predictions or observations it can make based on (they say) trends in search queries. For example, it is now taken as fact that "Google can predict the flu better than the CDC/WHO/etc." I would not be surprised if Google and other companies could tell at least how many FISA requests have probably been generated by segmenting requests for related searches. (Of course, LexisNexis, FindLaw, and the like would have even better information when paying customers do their due diligence on compliance with unreasonable requests.)
[1] E.g., Send us all credit card information for customers from outside the USA.
What would you have these companies do? Band together in a mighty ring of technological resources and begin a Privacy Revolution?
This is unrealistic. As an American, I am saddened and angered by the recent news of the past two days. I am disgusted with what our government has done - what it has hidden from us, to take advantage of us unawares.
But we need to consolidate our anger. We have to aim it precisely, and arm ourselves against the proper enemy. It will not help the tech community to bicker amongst ourselves and be disappointed with CEOs for what the NSA has done. This community has great resources. Let those resources stand. Experts from every tech center in the country, across industries spanning finance, security, engineering, and many more - we are all pooled here. We can make an impact.
But not if we are busy attacking those whose positions we cannot possibly corroborate. Their hands were tied. In an ideal world, every man and woman would be consumed with a righteous fury and ignore whips, imprisonment and even death for the greater glory of what is right.
This is not that world. This is not idealism. The government wronged us. The government made the first move. The government forced their hands, made them cooperate by ratifying unethical conduct and making it illegal (and treasonous, as a violation of national security) to resist. Who would have acted differently in their position? And what would it have achieved?
I recognize that it is discomforting that we cannot simply believe tech leaders after what today's events have shown us. I get that. But they are not the ones who violated our privacy. They were the medium. That is not fair to them. If they made a mistake, it was only in trying to navigate perilous waters somewhere between honor and law. Unfortunately, the law is not on their side.
With Mark Zuckerberg jailed or Facebook sued by an insurmountable public agency, or Google's assets seized and its constituent leaders punished, who would be benefitted? Should we ask them to suffer and violate laws just for a truth that has come out only hours later?
If you want a takeaway from this, it's simple. It's unfair to hold people to expectations of high moral standing when they have unknown pressures put upon them. And in light of that, we need to remember who the true wrongdoers here are. If Larry and Zuckerberg have made mistakes, so be it. But know that they paled in comparison to the NSA, and that is our prime prerogative.
> Perhaps you could all get on a conference call tonight and double dare each other to do it all together, at the same time.
> “The NSA makes us do things that crush our Constitution, and then they make us never talk about it.”
> I hope one of them does
They don't need to lead any revolutions, or even leak classified information. The cat is out of the bag, so to speak. All he's asking for is for them to not lie to us, especially when they know that we know that what they're saying is demonstrably false.
While I don't think single-issue voting is a good political strategy, in this particular case it seems prudent to consider that the reprehensibility of the whole affair and the complicity of those few most able to stop it calls into question their moral fiber. We can't -- and shouldn't -- hope to kick every pro-surveillance Congressman out of office, but when someone in a position of influence helps betray the country to this degree we should take notice.
I strongly disagree. We are blessed with the right to vote. It's important to use it on things that actually matter.
They could pack up and leave. Make a statement. Be true to their customers. And they could pull it off, I think, being mostly software and service companies.
Yes, they, their employees, and a lot of dependables will probably lose out, at first. But they stay true to themselves. In the end, they make the decision to choose marketshare, power, money and all that over ideals. Not a bad choice, but be honest about it.
Simple, straight to the point, and contains worlds of meaning behind the plausible deniability. "No sir, I did not think I was confirming the existence of the program. I believed I was operating in compliance with all gag orders and just reminding people that these orders come with gag orders, so because everyone knows that I didn't think that would violate the gag order...."
By issuing silly denials that didn't withstand more than a few hours of public scrutiny they look silly, cowardly, and dishonest.
If I remember well Google was courageous enough confronting China.
> Or to put it another way, who the hell needs “direct
> access” or “back doors” when companies are building
> “secure portals” for them instead?
That is different from having an access portal for agencies to submit warrants or other legal requests. There is no obvious reason why a company should have an ethical obligation to resist lawfully issued warrants.
This article would have been much better if it had focused on the ethically dubious nature of FISA, and how problematic it is to interpret the fourth amendment as applying only to American citizens.
But that wouldn't have driven as many clicks.
Then who will? Think about it: companies are the only entity who can challenge this kind of behavior in courts.
But that wouldn't have driven as many clicks.
Nice ad hom, but it's mistaken. Arrington is many things, but he actually feels the way he writes.
>> There is no obvious reason why a company should have
>> an ethical obligation to resist lawfully issued warrants.
>
> Then who will? Think about it: companies are the only
> entity who can challenge this kind of behavior in courts.
The only way to change the policy on this is in Congress. If you really want to make a difference, call your Congressman and yell at them for spying on you. Call them daily, call your Senator, call other people's Congressmen. It still might not help, but nothing Google or Twitter or Facebook can do is going to.
I don't even understand the outrage that most US citizens are showing at the moment for the said firms even after realizing that any access that may have been provided was through the channels that the governments had 'legally' set up. And that at least some of the companies had resisted. It seems very unfair to me, largely as an outsider and yet a stakeholder, that the only people who are being held accountable in the piece are the CEOs who had little to do with the fiasco.
The allegation is that they are deliberately misleading. I don't know if it is true but that is what they are attacked for.
Heck maybe people perceive that a single CEO like Page or Zuckerberg do have more power to change things than those in Congress or Obama. That says something as well.
It is also a battle of expectations. Maybe many expect NSA, Obama and other secret government agencies to fuck everything, but they thought, heck at least the "Do No Evil" Google will stand on our side, or my buddy Zuck will.
This is the crux of the matter, but this statement is not strictly true. If a company only sent information on 1.44MB floppy disks, or started requiring NSA agents to run an obstacle course or something, they would be held in contempt of court. These requests have an implicit requirement of ease of access, and what that means is ultimately up to a judge's discretion.
Rather than some ad hoc process of burned CDs or USB drives, just create some simple software that makes the process secure, reliable, and traceable.
The alternative is USB drives and Fedex envelopes, which is harder to track and probably less secure.
Don't try to play us
There's a growing intellectual understanding that corporations control the governmental processes from start to finish. Therefore, asking the government to change is stupid.
If the King rules your country, petition the King for mercy.
If an oligarch rules your country, petition the oligarch for mercy.
If a corporate elite rules your country, petition the corporate elite.
Democracy is, quite simply, completely dead. Gone. Done. The government does not institute change based on democratic opinion. You have no control over your government. They aren't the real seat of power in this society.
Having said that, most of the power resides on Wall Street and in the Military-Industrial-Security complex rather than Silicon Valley corporations. But these Silicon Valley corporations are now rich enough to change the laws. They can crown themselves King with the right kind of manoeuvring, and Arrington here is trying to get them to do so.
Petitioning Larry Page or Paul Graham to have a conscience is far more fruitful than voting for the government you want.
I'm fairly sure lp and pg have strong consciences, at least much stronger consciences that arrington, of all people.
So why complain about the companies? There is a much greater possibility of change in private enterprise, but they often can't escape the mandates that government imposes, either. Some would like to think that the Googles and Facebooks can be heroes, and resist whatever nasty thing the government is doing today. It isn't that easy.
Pressure the people paying donations. Its the best chance you have.
Or perhaps that's the charitable interpretation.
Check out [2] for an example of one.
Perhaps we should be pressuring companies like Dropbox (whom was implicated as "coming soon" in the documents leaked) to implement such a system.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_canary
[2] http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt
Edit: Now thinking about it, Dropbox was probably already hit with a request. Maybe we should focus on other services that may be of future interest to the government?
However, when you saw blips from people paying $99 for your packet of case law on 4th amendment protections with respect to stewardship of online data, you'd have the start of a signal. That is, for all of about ten minutes until you couldn't find a hosting provider or payment processor on Earth who would return your phone calls.
Not that it would matter because a "Chinese PLA hacker nuked your box, your bank account, and your house from orbit."
[Insert relevant quotes regarding government requests on named individuals from Eric Schmidt here.]
it is fascinating that this concept is so difficult for an otherwise intelligent community to grasp and a reminder of why we still need journalists.
Is this correct?
> In one recent instance, the National Security Agency sent an agent to a tech company’s headquarters to monitor a suspect in a cyberattack, a lawyer representing the company said. The agent installed government-developed software on the company’s server and remained at the site for several weeks to download data to an agency laptop.
> In other instances, the lawyer said, the agency seeks real-time transmission of data, which companies send digitally.
That is more than what they currently do.
Both Google and Facebook hand over data for INDIVIDUALS when the government issues a lawful request (such as by subpoena or warrant). Subpoena's do not have judicial review the way warrants do, but they are not OPTIONAL. A company MUST comply under US laws if the government issues a lawful request.
Both Facebook and Google have lawyers on staff that carefully vet requests.
If you have an issue with how our F'in government asks for too much information, then take issue with our laws. You cannot fault Google or Facebook for obeying laws that you, through your representatives, put in place.
I am fully in support with restricting the power of the state to compel private information from corporations, but I certainly won't blame a corporation for obeying the law.
Now, let us tackle the issue of the so called "red carpet" rolled out for the government. When the government requests information Google and Facebook can send them the information on disk, on paper, on anything for that matter. The issue is that they want to keep YOUR information as secure as possible while handing it to the state. They want the state to have access to it, but NOT any third party.
How secure will your information be if they don't set up a secure drop for the government? Do you want them to set up one-off FTP sites? Do you want them to put the information on disk for hand over? We've already discussed that direct access to the source servers is a bad idea.
Do you see what I'm saying? This fucking author doesn't use his brain for two seconds. What options do Google and Facebook have to obey the law, and to keep your data as secure as possible from third parties.
Some people just want to cry wolf at every turn. And then when we really need to raise a fuss (like when Google removes XMPP support from messaging) we get no traction with the public, because the community just looks like a bunch of whiners.
- Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at Finnish software security firm F-Secure.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/06/07/europe-surveillanc...
Silly man. Exactly how hard is it to ask someone else, with way more to lose than you, to be a martyr for a cause you feel strongly about?
Just because it's not the most sensational story doesn't mean it's not the true one. If we're going the conspiracy theory route: what if the documents are phony? What if the leak was made up?
Basically, rather than wildly speculating based on he said she said and the framing of a sentence, why don't we try to be intelligent and wait for some real information. None of this speculation does any good.
Imagine someone urging CEOs of Big Oil / Pharma / [0] corps to do the same? Would you take it seriously? "Someone in the Oil Industry should stand up because what the US is doing in the Middle East is wrong!"
To be clear, my point is not that it's wrong to demand this, or even that it's stupid (it is naive, but understandable).
The point is that this is something that an actual democracy should be able to solve because its people demand it. Not by relying on CEOs of powerful corporations to do the right thing.
[0] or farming, weapons/steel, the US prison industry ...
In the intelligence world, this is an important program. It is “among the most important and valuable” programs. That makes it a desirable project to work on. If you're in this industry, you want your name attached to this project. To get that kind of assignment, in addition to being smart and capable, you need to be seen as dedicated and loyal.
It's not impossible that a leaker will end up on such a project (indeed it seems to have just leaked). But the culture will select against anyone seen as a potential risk, in a variety of ways.
This kind of entrepreneurial success is closer akin to being successful in finance and less about innovation than about mapping a set of ideas to a set of value props that appeal to holders of risk capital.
This is a highly "establishment" mindset... but since that doesn't make a compelling creation story, emphasis is placed on the riskiest and most personality-driven elements.
So it's perfectly expected that both firms act cautious and conservative in a situation like this.
They are already standing up for freedom in the way that we would want them to. http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57587005-38/justice-depart...;
Re: cowards, It's easy to say that when you don't have skin in the game. These guys do and I too expect more of them but I can't fault them, nobody wants to go to prison. Something completely legal, completely within their rights and abilities that they can do is lobby and spend and campaign to end the patriot act and they are billionaires...
so lets say Google admits, ok we give access to the gov to sift through your contacts...the vast amount of the population will say, that's messed up but will continue to use their services...who I do see leaving are the small segment of people who value their privacy and the technically savvy individuals who can roll their own services...those people could be the taste-makers of society and depending on whether you believe their influence, could pivot the market to a competitor.
of probably greater importance are the government and corporate entity of the world who now will be concerned with whether they should use Google for their own sensitive data knowing that a third-party (and in the case of nation states, an overly meddlesome competitor) can access it, who historically are also known to have difficulty holding onto data (ie, leaks). So there would be definite loss of trust there.
from my view, those are the greater risks for those particular CEOs...it could result in killing your own baby, as they are also the founders.
But why is that stopping them? Do they really see themselves being dragged away, Bradley Manning style – to sit for years in a prison before even being given the dignity of a trial?
Because that’s not going to happen.
Please Google, hire Mike Arrington and task him to spill all your beans so he can put his butt behind his words instead of raindancing on the sidelines.
If all of them come out at the same time - everybody benefits.
But if 1 of them screws everybody over, the screwed will be royally screwed.
> Meanwhile, the BBC has learned that Twitter was invited to join the Prism programme last year but rejected the approach from US authorities.
This.
Can somebody compile Non-US alternatives for email, search,etc?
On top of my mind : Search : yandex.com Google Docs : zoho.com Email : fastmail.fm (Paid)
We cannot say this more clearly—the government does not have access to Google servers—not directly, or via a back door, or a so-called drop box. Nor have we received blanket orders of the kind being discussed in the media. It is quite wrong to insinuate otherwise. We provide user data to governments only in accordance with the law. Our legal team reviews each and every request, and frequently pushes back when requests are overly broad or don’t follow the correct process. And we have taken the lead in being as transparent as possible about government requests for user information.
* Backbone route
* SSL, MIM hack
* indirect access like real-time backups.
* sudo RO access via vpn
* Remote Access to BigTable queries
* Team inside the company
* What china does.
Gotto love lawyers. They harp on the most ambiguous term.
Cowardice is an accurate term to describe ferengi, not to mention unpatriotic.
Who wants to give up the Jacuzzi ?