People with nothing to hide
twitter.com
twitter.com
1. Have you ever had an abortion?
2. Have you ever cheated on your husband / wife?
3. Are you currently looking for a new job?
4. Have you ever being diagnosed with a mental illness?
5. Are you currently on anti-depressants?
6. Were you ever sexually abused as a child?
7. Have you ever fancied someone of the same sex?
8. Have you ever had sex with someone of the same sex?
9. Have you ever criticised your current employer or boss to anyone else?
10. Do you love all of your children equally?
11. Have you ever fantasized about...
12. Are you planning to get pregnant in the next two years?
13. Have you ever lied on a cv/resume?
14. Are you mean to your wife / husband on a regular or semi-regular basis?
15. Do you have trouble acquiring or maintaining an erection?
16. Are you one of those women who’ve never had an orgasm?
17. What prescription drugs are you currently taking?
18. Have you ever cut yourself?
19. Have you ever attempted suicide?
20. Have you contemplated suicide in the past 2 weeks?
21. Would you be happy with your answers to these questions being made public? Or being read by your employer, local 23 year old policeman, or nosey neighbour?
I could go on and on. None of the actions mentioned in these questions are illegal, but for many/most people, the answers would be intensely private.
My suggestion would be a crowd funded campaign to doxx each one of them. Would be happy to donate a few hours of my time tracing their real names.
With some funded capital we could buy and publish for each one a personal background check sort of a personal gift to free them from the burden of anonymity.
Secondly, the fact that you would stoop to doing exactly the sort of thing you oppose, because these people are on the other side of a debate, shows exactly the sort of thinking that creates these problems in the first place. Even if they explicitly asked for it, which they didn't, you still shouldn't do it if you believe it is a thing that shouldn't be done to people.
To make people realize the possible consequences of surveillance.
One of the assumptions is that the people aren't completely aware of the extent of surveillance. They assume it's simple as "someone listening to my phone call to my mom" or something as innocent. Something like that hardly has consequences for them, but something like piblishing their private information and data surely has. If they have nothing to hide, they should be all okay with this. If they aren't however... then they should not be supporting surveillance.
What did I miss?
If there is a consequence of surveillance that would make these people change their mind, then publishing that information is hypocritical by somebody who thinks it is ethically wrong to expose information that a person might want to have kept secret. If there is no consequence, then the act is useless. If there is a consequence, then these people are using the precisely the mechanism that they argue is the reason we should have privacy.
I wanted the person I was replying to spell this out so I could make the point clearly using their own words, without them getting hung up over how I phrased it.
And you (and they) are assuming the government can keep private information private.
And the second part of what you said is compelling. I do wonder though whether the benefit achieved by the action stfu suggests might on balance overcome any detriment.
Yup, and that's precisely the argument the government is making- the benefit of catching terrorists outweighs any detriment to privacy that people might have.
For that matter that is why I mentioned elsewhere that I'm less scared of the government than I am of my fellow hackers, when this is the mentality that is all too frequently employed. :-/
I suggest the NSA to record them having sex to see how clean they are. Obviously the videos will be encryped so only intelligence agencies can watch them.
:-/
congratulations, you just stooped to the very same level of counter-productive-intelligence as those who are orchestrating the transparent monitoring of our society.
Just out of curiosity I went to the blog of one of the first mentioned twitter users (https://twitter.com/MeaniePants/status/342430468442042369 ) and found photos and stories about toilet training of her child. WTF.
>I also think it's histerical that I put a pic of Lily pooping on Facebook and it received the most likes ever. I think even more than her birth photo or Roman's homecoming pics.
The question of whether you have anything to hide is really the same as whether you're willing to put everything that you have ever thought under legal scrutiny. It's not about being on the "correct social and legal side" in all the tame scenarios that one has dreamed up.
(and, just curious, but why does it matter if the local policeman is 23 years old? :) )
So someone saying they "have nothing to hide" doesn't really mean they would answer all the above question publicly, but rather there is no electronic record/evidence of anything they know they want to keep private.
And, as another point of discussion, whilst the matters raised in those questions may be deeply personal for many people, frankly I wouldn't be concerned if my answers to those questions were in the public domain.
Example: the SMS messages I send to my wife tend to contain more sensitive info than the Facebook messages I publish for the whole world to see. This is because I trust my wife and when she's the sole recipient of a message, I tend to be more honest and open-minded with her than I am with the rest of the world. Plus, she knows me well enough to interpret my thoughts into context, whereas other people can only interpret my written thoughts out of context. N.B. the recipients of a message do matter for the enclosed content ;-)
And yet another important thing to recognize: even if you know that your communications may be wire-tapped, you still feel safe because why in the world would those in power be interested about your private life?
Example: when I send an SMS message to my wife, I know that my mobile career may record every message I send. It doesn't usually bother me, since I'm not doing or thinking of illegal activities, but then again, this may be a decision that will come back haunting me (and I'll stop here since I'm trying really hard to avoid Godwin's law).
Now your private info is public.
If anybody knows (and has experience) well enough about keeping data safe (indeed through doing quite the opposite), it's these guys. Whilst it's well established that in software there's not much we can do to avoid bugs and other vulnerabilities, there's rather something to be said for practical operational security in making it almost impossible for data of this form (and especially volume) to be leaked - good luck trying to get data across an air gap or indeed something monitored physically to the extent that this all is.
(caveat: spies and other infiltrators would perhaps, in certain circumstances be in a position to leak this sort of stuff - there is only so much that can be done to avoid this, of course (oh - and also others on the inside willing to leak information))
Also it's not just NSA doing this. Maybe in the US, but I assume that in Europe there are many similar centralized government databases full of information about people. And Asia.
The point is, given enough time the shit will hit the fan somewhere. No matter what. Don't try to deny this.
Also, whilst they undoubtedly keep data around awhile, it's not kept indefinitely, surely - it has a shelf life after all. Whilst someone might get this stuff wrong in the future, again, surely that would come about most likely due to some discontinuity in this process (like if they were forced to stop awhile and then continued, losing operational details in the process).
Also once again, I would guess that those with intent to cause disruption, fear or harm (even dissent) would probably have an easier time of things a dozen other ways. In building secure systems, it's always worthwhile to gauge the value of some data to an attacker and the cost to them of obtaining it.
I'd be more worried about an employee leaking data. Most telcos have many many employees and a carefully planned leak would be difficult to detect and prevent. In one installation I was involved in, we had access to all SMS messages in the system, in realtime, before the recipients got them. It would have been pretty easy to copy them to a memory stick and then leak them sometime later.
Lots of "probably". Indeed the whole eavesdropping story should have been secret, but it seems like it leaked from the same people that decided to protect you.
No, "having nothing to hide" means exactly that. Especially since we live in an age where everyone can google anyone.
> So someone saying they "have nothing to hide" doesn't really mean they would answer all the above question publicly, but rather there is no electronic record/evidence of anything they know they want to keep private.
"Nothing to hide" on the internet or IRL implies everything of one's private and public life, you can't change its meaning back to exclude some kind of private life (defined as what isn't electronically stored) after the facts.
"having nothing to hide" is the fallacious moral stance used by Schmidt when he says "maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place".
And for the record there is always a way to do all the listed things while being completely more or less naked (transparent clothing, frequent showerings, small discreet tatto, etc).
That said, I believe this is all irrelevant. Privacy is an end in itself, it doesn't need to be justified.
If you don't think governments can't change, I'd like to hear your opinions on how we went from a authoritarian (kingdoms) to democratic governments in the first place (or vice versa). Everything changes. Even societies change on micro (companies, clubs) to macro (governments or totality of the world) level all the time as new people arrive and old people leave.
US won't turn into Iran over night, it might take decades, centuries even to change into a totalitarian regime. But first sign is trampling your constitution. I'm not saying its going there but it could be going that way.
Imagine some crazy, hard-line politicians get elected and make a law that retroactively throws to jail women who get abortions. Or homosexuals. Or maybe it's a party that decides the 1% is due for some rich-shaming, who knows. Last century it was communists, and maybe the USA will feel nostalgia for that again[1] but, who knows who will paranoia strike tomorrow? This fellow at the NSA could be a very honest person that votes, say Remocratic, and you're a Depublican senator who's had an affair, so naturally this pious person decides to blow some whistles, should this pseudo-crime go unpunished.
Not to mention bullshit non-crimes like smoking pot, drug consumption, or possession of child pornography. They get your pot dealer, now they've got you, and so the government gets to enforce a ridiculous law much more tyrannically.
> If you think the problem is that the government could leak that information, anyone that is currently handling your data (e.g. Google) could.
Not everybody is okay with Google doing that either. That's why I, as an European, support stricter, better privacy laws at the European Union level.
[1] Don't laugh, it has happened. Some months ago, many Chinese nationals were fired from the NASA HQ in Virginia, then arrested, at the request of the Virginian senator. Their crime? Being Chinese, and thus suspects of espionage. Imagine what levels of paranoia this new technology could enable, if put in the wrong hands.
There are 2 possibilities here: 1) Democracy failed hard allowing MANY crazy people to get power without people allowing it. 2) The majority of people actually want those things and they vote for a candidate that will do them. If that's not ok for you (it isn't for me too) then you are questioning democracy itself.
Both are things that are not going to happen. If they will, I'll just leave my country of residence.
> Not to mention bullshit non-crimes like smoking pot, drug consumption, or possession of child pornography.
Dura lex sed lex. There is nothing you can do here, except for voting for candidates that promise to remove these laws. Until their election, if you think you're above a single law, then you entitle yourself to be above ANY law. If this argument was to be applied by everyone our society would descend into chaos.
Please list the names, addresses, dates of birth, phone numbers, and any private information you may have access to (SSN, credit card number, banking details) of your mother, father, brothers, sisters, children, and any other family members.
Might as well throw in all the info you have for any friends and acquaintances too.
And their private photos, too, because you don't care about hiding things that people have shared with you in confidence, right? You must not, because you said you have nothing to hide.
I tried to think of a persuasive, semi-automated way to use it and came up with this:
First, make a website where you would log in with Facebook or Google (and optionally give your Twitter handle) and then give answers to questions like the ones above. Filled-in answer forms would be stored and then (by default) accessible to the public (through a search form and a "latest" column on the front page). Include a small checkbox at the bottom to keep the filled-in form hidden from the public but available to the government upon request.
Now, when people say they "have nothing to hide" to you on-line do the following:
1. Link them to that website.
2. At this point they will most likely try to qualify their initial statement with a "from the government".
3. Bring to their attention the checkbox at the bottom.
4. "But the owner of the website might sell the data anyway!"
5. You are now at a good starting point for an in-depth conversation about privacy ("How is this different from Facebook?").
Of course, this is rather manipulative and could become obnoxiously overused, but would you rather this tool existed or not? Feel free also to suggest your improvements.
This a problem that's not exclusive to police states, it also affect western democracies and corporations. For the US right now the individuals at stake are the ones that go against and or scare the status quo: whisteblowers, hackers, political activists, etc.
If you want a concrete example the post on HN from just a few hours ago is a great one: https://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/05/15-7
The question to ask yourself is really how much risk is tolerable that some data point will be used in the future to discriminate against you.
The other concern is the conformity this attitude breads. Do you really think everybody should refrain from testing the boundaries and adjust their actions to whatever the mainstream is? This way "nothing to hide" is an easy attitude. What kind of society actively discourages edgy thinkers and innovators and where does this lead to politically and culturally? Certainly not a place I want to be part of.
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/06/all-the-...
Giving the government the power to read your email, tap your phone, and record your porn usage isn't bad simply because it's embarrassing. After all, the data will likely only be seen by a computer. But it gives the government enormous power to make decisions about you -- decisions about whether you may take a commercial airline flight, get a security clearance, get a job, or even be indefinitely detained -- without your knowledge or consent, and without you knowing how they make the decisions.
Recall the stories of people getting on the no-fly list with no appeals process and no way to find out what information had been used to put them there.
In short, a lack of privacy gives the government the power to be even less transparent in its decision-making, and gives it yet more power over its citizens. It's not a question of discovering your fetishes or being embarrassed, and we shouldn't act as though having nothing to hide really is an excuse.
There's a rather good paper I can recommend on the subject:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=998565
(I've posted this several times over the past few months, so this is half self-plagiarism)
If you have security clearance, the government is very interested in the private details of your life. For instancw, the assumption is people who cheat on their significant others are more likely to be a security threat for many reasons. They don't even need to prove it; just find anything from that point to call your character into question.
How would you like to have your entire life become more difficult because of a misinterpretation of correlation/causation?
I wholeheartedly agree with you. But I'd also point out that most people do in fact have something to hide. So not only is it wrong on principle for the government to invade your privacy - massive surveillance could end up becoming a real, practical problem for many people. Both are important.
Of course it is. Absolutely nothing about the principle of privacy and why it matters is specific to keeping secrets from governments.
The examples you gave are just a few things that can happen when someone finds out things about you that you consider private. Many of the same consequences, and plenty of other serious/life-changing ones, could also come about because an employer or union or family member or neighbour or insurance company or lawyer knew something they shouldn't.
What I'd want, if I didn't yet think privacy was necessary, would be an argument not that privacy is itself an inherent right, but that privacy is a reaction to the flawed nature of humanity. I'd look for why privacy is necessary and not innate, because that makes more sense to me than this abstract idea of a "right to privacy".
Even your argument takes about a dozen leaps to arrive at the conclusion that without privacy, governments can be more private. What you should be talking about is not the government's ability to hide things, but the idea that any government is a flawed entity which are governed by an imperfect set of laws built to represent a cultural morality. Without privacy, you should be saying, the inherent greed and cruelty that exists within every collection of people would run rampant over minorities.
If man were capable of not harassing minorities, then privacy wouldn't be such a big deal. So no, I don't think someone like me would want to hear that privacy is a human right. Someone like me would want to hear that privacy is absolutely necessary to combat the inherent evil that comes with collecting groups of people together. It's not about hiding what you have, it's about protecting minorities from the majority. That's all.
What the government can and can't do is limited by the rights granted to them by the constitution and other laws. They're extremely hamstrung.
I think your TSA example perfectly illustrates how the lack of privacy doesn't lead to an abuse of power; it's ironically a testament to how good our system is. To think there are people the government absolutely despises and whose lives they want to be extremely difficult and the best they can do is make them wait longer in line at the airport? That's awesome.
The real fight shouldn't be about privacy but about openness of the government and the expansion of our liberties. The real tragedy is not that these program exist but that they are trying to hide them.
(privacy isn't a liberty, because it doesn't allow you to do things. It disallows others from doing things.)
If you have liberty guaranteed by a legal system, then the government can't attack you.
I mean they can but they'd be violating your rights, and for the sake of this discussion we're assuming they will not do that (if you do assume they ignore laws then legislating privacy protections is meaningless)
Shouldn't the focus be on making sure the government doesn't have means to attack people? ie. That people are guaranteed rights and the power of the state is limited.
PS: Bringing up Stalin kinda makes my point. Privacy is only important in dysfunctional societies where the state is not going to abide by the laws that constrain it. No first world nation in the past 50 years has regressed to a totalitarian state.
Why does that follow? Can a government not have data about you and be transparent at the same time?
If you answered "no" to 1) and "yes" to 2) then, congrats! You've committed a felony (perjury) in the US. Even if you've done nothing else wrong, you can go to jail.
Also: Always take the 5th... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc (especially in light of infractions against the 4th)
and you know what it would show that were all the same ... HUMAN!
What if everyone's credit score was public or everyone knew how much time people spent on Facebook, watching TV, or similar activities? Would we become better?
Imagine if political and business leaders were elected on such characteristics, the truth. What if everyone was known for who they really were? Would crime and corruption go down? Would there ever be another war if people understood each other better?
It'd sure make dating easier...do you really want to start a life with this person now that you know what they are? Do you want this person to be the mother/father of your children? The bar would certainly be lower, because nobody is perfect and everyone has secrets.
Would the truth be beautiful once it’s universal? People who lived lives of quiet desperation (more than we think) would find out how many other people are just like them. Would people stop being ashamed of who they are? Would rates of mental illness, suicide, and depression plummet?
Would the world be better? I assure you it'd be more compassionate. People would be less likely to judge people based on unrealistic standards while quietly ignoring their own shortcomings.
I wouldn't be surprised if in the next 20 years we saw an 'Open' organization where people opt-in to share everything about themselves and make everything public. Maybe it'd be cathartic, maybe it wouldn't catch on, but with enough critical mass the social pressure would be interesting to see (i.e. how those running for political office are pressured to release past tax filings).
An interesting thought.
As far as I know, I'm also absolutely uninteresting to any 3-letter agencies. I'm still not a fan of omnipresent surveillance of my phone's activity… or any other activity, for that matter.
What does it really take to become interesting to these guys, and how might that impact my life? Is political speech critical of, say, the collection of citizens' phone metadata enough to catch their interest? Is unknowingly associating with someone they find interesting enough? Knowingly associating?
In an ideal world, if any of these things subject me to additional scrutiny, once I turned out not to be a legitimate threat, that'd be the end of it. I wouldn't even know anyone had been watching. But does it ever go further, even when it shouldn't?
How are we supposed to know when everything's done in secret?
10. yes - as far as I know, you either love someone or you don't, I don't think it comes in degrees.;
11. yes; 12. no; 13. no; 14. no;
15. yes, but [array of excuses];
16. no; 17. none;
18. Yes, but not intentionally [kitchen job for 4 years]
19. no; 20. no; 21. No, just indifferent.
Why is the policeman 23 years old? Seems like a strange number to pull out of a hat. Also I'm pretty sure lying on your CV is illegal - that would be some sort of fraud, wouldn't it?
Funnily, he demurred.
But if lots of people's answers are public, you will quickly see that everyone... is just human. The things we consider private and embarrassing are absolutely common and normal. It's absolutely normal to be abnormal. It's normal to be average. It's okay to have weird fantasies, other people have weird fantasies too. Everyone takes a shit.
It's the imbalance of information release that is more upsetting.
As for context, specifically with regards to prism, if I dial a wrong number that happens to belong to a terrorist, I may find myself guilty by association, with the burden of proof of innocence in my own hands. Quickly hanging up and dialing a similar number after might not be sufficient defense since that could be a strategy terrorists use to cover their tracks.
I don't really know how to respond to here. I believe that I see your point, but even though I wouldn't mind my answers to that questionnaire being made public, I still feel that both communal and personal interests of members of society would benefit from institutional pressure in support of privacy, and strong crypto for that matter.
22. What is your credit card number, expiry date and security code?
And on the subject of "nothing to hide from the government": the government in United States is - still - pretty good. But the trend, the trend is a worry!
As Nicholas Merrill, writing anonymously in 2007 for the Washington Post [1] puts it:
"Living under the gag order has been stressful and surreal. Under the threat of criminal prosecution, I must hide all aspects of my involvement in the case -- including the mere fact that I received an NSL -- from my colleagues, my family and my friends. When I meet with my attorneys I cannot tell my girlfriend where I am going or where I have been. I hide any papers related to the case in a place where she will not look. When clients and friends ask me whether I am the one challenging the constitutionality of the NSL statute, I have no choice but to look them in the eye and lie."
So its not only that some law-abiding citizens have something to hide; the NSA is legally obligated tens of thousands every year [2] to have do it.
[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03... [2] http://epic.org/privacy/nsl/
This is sure to make short work to any friendship, especially relationships. Disgusting and dehumanizing.
Imagine being legally required, by your government, to seem as though you are having an affair.
What would happen if 1000-5000 people who have been served NSL would come out at same day. Many of them working in big companies.
Oh wait, they didn't - from two super stupid criminals not even trying to hide what they were planning.
So WTF good are they doing for all the damage they've done to our society.
NSA has become just like the TSA, completely useless theater that hassles everyone and accomplishes nothing.
Just wait until they can park hundreds of drones over every city and track everyone's movements historically, forever - the logic will be you are in public so no warrant needed or there will be yet another secret warrant for the entire country.
I think it just comes down to the trade off of freedom vs. loss of life.
I mean that's what it's really about, isn't it? We are giving up the freedom of privacy for the potential of more security?
Yet, This is not the American Way
At one point we realized that in order to protect the freedoms of our people we had to die. That's why so many fought in the revolutionary war. To protect our rights and freedoms as citizens against the State (England, at the time).
If we just lay down like dogs now and let our government walk over us like dogs, all those lives will have been wasted.
So I'll believe that they stopped something when they produce the details for the press to investigate.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/bensmith/public-documents-contradict...
For example, if TSA being onerous convinces a significant number of people to drive for their medium distance trips instead of fly, more people will die because driving is more dangerous than flying.
Also, it's not exactly a 1-to-1 comparison, but for every 700,000 hours(ish) you force people to wait or delay their day in some fashion, you're causing an entire lifetime of inconvenience. It's better than taking an infant from its mother and shooting it, but it's still taking an entire lifetime of potential and destroying it through boredom and frustration.
I know I'm leaning pretty heavy on TSA examples here, but we've also seen they can't even reliably stop weapons from coming through security in predictable and repeatable ways. So, "we" decided that a trade off between security and freedom was prudent, we implemented that trade off, and then we found out we only received the downsides and none of the upsides.
Precrime is already here and nobody is batting a damned eyelid.
13 dead
30 + woundedWhen you point out the failures of the NSA to stop specific instances of terrorism, it only suggests that they need more resources and legal surveillance. The reasons for wanting the NSA surveillance to stop have to be that the innumerable injustices suffered by citizens under a surveillance state would be worse than the occasional extremist attack that would be preventable under such surveillance.
If it were the Stasi, Gestapo, or NKVD that noticed an Army major communicating with a Resistance element for any reason you'd have been able to count the remainder of that major's life in hours. FBI, on the other hand, went "Meh, not enough evidence to start an investigation".
So be careful about the conclusion you draw from that. All you've really said is that we currently have handcuffs too tight on the NSA and FBI.
For that amount, they should be saving in the order of 40,000 people's lives from terrorism a year to justify the spending.
(I've plucked the intervention per life-year saved from here: http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/~tedb/Courses/UCSBpf/readings/inter...
and assumed each life-save has 50 potential years of their life left)
If the NSA had a hypothetical program that didn't infringe on anyone's rights (likely impossible, but bear with me), but did consistently stop terrorist plots when they arose, even if all of the successful plots may kill a few dozen or a hundred people in total, most people would agree that spending $80 billion on that program is worth it due to the lives saved.
I don't personally think that $80 billion being spent to protect lives is wasteful, generally speaking. I do see how it is wasteful in this situation, because it has very questionable results, and when the collateral damage of the plan is so incredibly great.
There are much better reasons to oppose this than "To me it looks like they didn't stop every attack so it is useless".
I'm not American, so I can't really speak to the domestic angle. I am immensely concerned about the foreign angle, however -- if the US government can secretly demand information from firms like Google or Apple, that is extremely concerning from an espionage perspective (economic or otherwise). Every government of Canada employee involved in the F-35 procurement process (or the Keystone XL pipeline, or any other multinational discussion), for instance, hopefully don't carrying Android or iOS or Windows OS devices (back when Obama carried a Blackberry, a Microsoft rep pointed out how dangerous this was having the president carrying a foreign device. Every other nation on Earth needs to heed those words). Even if communications were end-to-end encrypted, simply knowing where each of the people were and who they communicated with -- without knowing the contents of those communications -- would provide simply enormous data to effectively flank any position.
It is ironic to look back to when Chinese firms like Huawei see great suspicion, when we know that the free and democratic United States may be just as dangerous.
Ugh.. what terrible reasoning. The absence of data is not somehow possible data.
>pointing out the failure in the Boston bombing is a poor counterpoint given that to many it would suggest that increased surveillance is necessary, not less.
It's actually a rather good counter point. It shows that the FBI/NSA/big brother already can't process all of the data it has in a meaningful amount of time. How does adding more data to sift through help? Unless there's some benevolent, magical AI that can pick terrorist patterns out of a colossal sea of data, I fail to see how more data is the solution.
When you don't HAVE the data, it is nonsense to make conclusions as if you have the data, which is exactly what you and others are doing. Terrible reasoning indeed.
shows that the FBI/NSA/big brother already can't process all of the data
Once again -- no data (you have absolutely no idea what data they have or don't have), but you can declare that the problem is processing data.
There is a trend here.
When you don't have the data and the data is kept completely hidden from you, the only reasonable course of thought is to assume that the data does not exist or is completely and totally flawed. When the NSA or gov't asserts that its data collection is protecting you, they must provide the evidence so that such a statement could be examined. If they do not provide such data, you can't assume anything about its existence or even its existence in the first place.
Well, that's not really true:
The FBI has confirmed that Russia alerted the agency in 2011 that Tsarnaev had ties to 'radical Islam' groups in his homeland. Homeland Security sources have also revealed the agency received tips in 2012 about his ties to extremists connected to a Boston mosque. (...) Tamerlan was said to have been named as one of the radicals that came to attention of an informant working with an agency attached to the Boston-area Joint Terrorism Task Force
just saying
And that is the problem. Zero accountability to the very populace they are taking liberties away from.
Like someone else said, we have no idea how much crap they actually catch, maybe the boston incidence is just one instance out of many others that were prevented.
I highly recommend you go there for further reading, it presents a lot of useful data about the FBI and the United States' breach of privacy and constitutional rights recently and historically.
The author is trying to send a message ironically and rally people against the NSA's abuses and the corollary fallacy of "If you have nothing to hide, why do you care?" which has also been debunked by Bruce Schneier[2].
Just wanted to put that out there.
They're not volunteering tweets are they? Surely the retweeting is without their knowledge or approval.
> The author is trying to send a message ironically and rally people against the NSA's abuses
A worthy goal, but I wonder if it might be self-defeating. It portrays this data-gathering as something a huge amount of people simply do not mind.
I also wonder that, it seems eerie how many people are "acting" as though the Twitter is not ironic.
Name
Address
Phone #
date of birth
SS #
credit card numbers+ expr dates+cvv
Routing and account numbers for relevant bank accounts
Logins/passwords to commonly used services
Your security question/answer combos
Pictures of all your keys on your keychain
If you ask a nudist to get naked in a non-nudist environment, he's probably going to refuse. The same rules don't apply to every context.
The world post-privacy is going to be totally different from the one we currently live in.
Yeah check out NK for a sneak-preview. And they seem to be on schedule with the prison work camps as well.
What are your profit margins? What is the maximum/minimum you're willing to pay for all of your current negotiations? What is the design/strategy for your latest products? What is your exact security plan + policy? Who are your best employees, and how much should they really be getting paid?
We probably won't share it with your competitors, promise, probably even if you're a foreign company, but regardless you won't know either way
I think it would led to much healthier and less wasteful freer market.
It would be interesting to see what would happen if the NSA offered free, nationwide, unlimited mobile voice/LTE data/SMS with a warning that all of it would be monitored and recorded. My bet is the adoption rate would be above 90%.
The Eternal Value of Privacy http://www.wired.com/politics/security/commentary/securityma...
Reddit comment from this week: http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/1fv4r6/i_belie...
Wow, probably the best story/argument against "I've got nothing to hide" I've read so far. I posted a link to an article with a convenient list of counter arguments yesterday[0], but this one, in the sense of direct, believable danger easily surpasses those (for me, at least).
That story is actually happening. Various parts of it have already happened in all sorts of civilized countries (US, UK, NL, DE ...), infiltration of completely innocent protest and activist groups, blackmail, he didn't mention agent provocateurs but things invariably get real messy really quick when the agency gets pressed for results of these expensive operations and the activists are in fact quite innocent, just exercising their rights to have meetings and organising protests, nothing more. And then everyone and their friends & family gets on a list.
The torturing, maybe not yet. Not in my country as far as I know. But that is actually going on, on large scale, in countries that seem otherwise quite civilized. And it is happening to the people that had "nothing to hide" just as much.
Probably even moreso because they do not realize what the stakes really are until it's too late to hide.
[0] http://chronicle.com/article/Why-Privacy-Matters-Even-if/127...
Especially nice it would be if that would get them fired (e.g a negative comment about their company boss in an email to a friend).
That might illuminate them about the value of privacy.
That said, they are not the targets of NSA, because they are useless to society anyway (they are not active citizens), and not a threat to any government.
But any activist, dissident, whistleblower, investigative journalist, hacker, writer, progressive politician etc, people that move society and laws forward, people from MLK to Aaron Swartz to Phil Zimmerman, are those that can and will be targeted by such measures. The same kind of people that today's J.E. Hoover's would target.
I didn't have anything to hide but I just felt so violated sitting there on a bench while he looked through my phone. It was pretty traumatic for me and I've gotten flashbacks to the event a few times - it will make me take precautions and think twice before traveling with my laptop and phone if the border patrol can just ask for the password - which, I don't think they can, but they could also stop me from entering Canada probably if I denied.
It's not as obvious when it's going on behind the scenes, but it's so different for me now that I went through this event. I just can't get over how violated I felt, and honestly - I ask any of the people Tweeting for that to happen to them, for some cold-eyed patrol officer to grab your phone, force you to unlock it, and just go through your mail, Facebook, snapchat, embarrassing photos, etc. Just because it happens behind the scenes doesn't make it better.
You're using Google - Google reads your stuff. Algorithms build a profile of you, select ads, etc.
You're using Amazon - Amazon knows and never forgets what you're buying and browsing for.
You're using Credit Cards - the CC company knows a lot about you.
You have a bank account - the bank knows a lot about you.
You have a mobile phone - the operator knows a lot about you.
Ever had the opportunity to look behind the curtains? Like how banks build customer profiles? Withdraw money from ATMs regularly late at night on weekends? You like to party, noted in your internal credit profile. Implemented that shit myself. The NSA has less impact on your life than your bank.
Etc, Etc, Etc. What do you think all those CRM systems out there are used for? Those are private intelligence tools, with next to no government oversight. No auditors coming in, no whistleblowers, nothing. There are rules of course, but who, ever, has really been caught violating them? Got fined? Went to jail? Right...
And now everyones's OUTRAGED because the government dared to do the same all these private corporations have been doing all along. I don't get it. It's aok if your stuff shows up in data.com, Binley's, etc., right? No outrage, ever.
All the shouting over the Internet, posting on Twitter, Facebook, HN, reddit, .. in plaintext, documented for eternity, in plain sight. No privacy concerns there, oh no. I have accounts in 56 privately owned, for-profit communication tools - but I deeply care about privacy. Here, have my baby pictures, and my current location. Did I tell the world what I think of that Mexican place yet?
You want privacy? Then shut. the. fuck up. Don't write it down, don't take pictures, don't use your credit card. As has been known for a long, long time.
But next week all of this will be over as Apple has WWDC and the OUTRAGE of the common neckbeard will be directed to another awesome topic.
It's still a notable event when huge amounts of personal data leave the different silos and is combined and exchanged. It's a breach of trust when you voluntarily give personal information to a company and then this information leaks to a third party where it's further exchanged with subcontractor companies. At this point accountability and transparency is completely lost.
If you have personal data on google and google abuses this information you have ways of dealing with it. You can change the service, out the company, sue, ... With an opaque shadow industry there is little you can do in case of abuse.
And please don't try to tell me that the government only targets the guilty with the data they collect and the observations they make. Many, many innocent people are caught up in the government's nets every day.
the NSA will not touch your life. your bank, your mobile operator, your credit card company - immediate impact. if the latter want to fuck you up, you're toast as well. see all the foreclosures, etc.
this focus on government is truly strange. just one of the players, but somehow special.
the NSA has accomplished, what a lot of fucking startups are attempting - your unified social media profile. linkedin is green with jealousy.
This should be a part of education. Maybe it is already in some parts of Europe that are more sensitive with privay breaches than US (France? Germany?).
Anyway, I live very far from my youngest brother, and have only few occasion to chat with him. Last time I felt the need to check his awareness of the matter (he is on Facebook and has the right age to share pics of drunk friends), and was happy to hear that he was under a pseudo and was using carefully the privacy features.
Sure, there's the philosophical loss of privacy and the threat of fear-based self-censorship. But the real people under attack are those with tenuous immigration status, low income and/or affiliation with minority communities. These are the people the US has been terrorizing since 9/11, yet don't have enough social capital to get the media (or HN) involved when they're illegally searched and wrongfully accused.
EDIT: Who sets the limit between what is implicitly private and public? Let's say I made the decision to add thermal vision to my left eye, and happen to see what you do inside your house. Am I hurting your privacy?
If your phonecall is as easy and neutral to observe as your face or height when you show up on the street you can no longer expect it to remain private.
Same way you coldn't expect conversation between two distant parties to be private before phone was invented an it could only be performed by shouting.
Taking a dump wasn't private act before toiled was invented and probably it won't again be when cameras will be as small as dust particles self powered wireless and everywhere.
Privacy of actions is noT some philosophical absolute. It's just function of what technology is available to how many people.
Also, I don't think my face or height are adequate analogies when playing against my wages, food preferences and trade secrets. All these details can easily give unfair advantage to "other parties" whereas my face or height couldn't help much except deciding I'm likely no good at basketball
Common sense. In most cases, it resolves the issue. Yes - if you are snooping on me inside my house, you are hurting my privacy.
> NSA wants to spy on me? GO AHEAD! You'll see some sick shit!!! #NSA #privacy #government #internetsex #bringiton
> I'm fine with the NSA listening to my calls, but god help them if they're reading my twitter drafts.
> I'm fine with the NSA listening to my phone calls. Maybe the next time I'm getting unhelpful advice from AT&T, they could jump in and help
I know this is just a novelty account, though some on here have already called to "dox" these people. Remember that when you see a Tweet, you are literally seeing 140 characters of text, with no context to what that person was referring to or the kind of flippant personality that person may have.
Judging someone you had no previous knowledge based on a brief message...hmm, sounds like what our government agents do from time to time.
Yet they've done nothing. Interesting situation.
This might be the only opportunity to shed cruft that accumulated in our laws and to give total surveilence some public legitimacy.
People are mostly afraid of surveilence because laws and morality nowadays are batshit crazy from all the cruft from previous times and you can't be sure if you are doing anything illegal.
What they really mean is they have nothing to hide from an entity with which they have a very special relationship. So special is it, that it's superfluous - perhaps even disrespectful - to mention it when saying things like "I have nothing to hide," "I pay my taxes," or "I'm law abiding."
It is the relationship between the owned and the owner.
People who do have secrets can be blackmailed. And whatever they're forced to do can potentially harm society. It doesn't even matter what the nature of the secret is.
Nobody should have that much power.
Fuck that.
"People that say they have nothing to hide from the government are making the mistake of assuming they know what the government is looking for. "
(http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/1fv4r6/i_belie...)
We learned to accept and tolerate most directly noticeable features of people. Maybe you don't want to communicate your skin color, your height, your gender or your location when walking down the street, but you still do and probably don't really care about it. It's socially accepted to communicate these features anyway.
How are more "private" information about you any different? After all, walking "naked" on a nudist beach is also normal and socially acceptable.
Tolerance has no limits. All it requires is some adaptation time. One day, people will be open about their sexuality, religion, political ideologies and feelings, and the world will be a better place.
You seem to be saying that I shouldn't hide them. My choice is to stop doing something I like doing, or accept that people will judge me and I will be treated a little worse. Why? Why should I have to do that? Why can't I keep going as I am? It makes me happier, it makes everyone else happier. What's so fucking wonderful about me being less happy?
People without secrets are perpetually putting on a show; removing privacy won't cause everyone to suddenly accept everyone's differences. You have some kind of utopian fantasy in which if everyone knows everything about everyone else, the world magically becomes a better place. It's not true. Tolerance has no limits? Have you met humans? How about that tribe where a boy becomes a man by being anally raped by other men? Or the neighbouring tribe where he becomes a man by orally servicing other men? There are cultures and societies in the world where anally raping children is simply not tolerated. How about gender selection? Killing a healthy child a few hours old because you wanted the other sex? The society I live in has a very low tolerance for drowning children in a bucket. Extreme examples, yes, but making it public won't suddenly make everyone tolerate it, and won't make everyone agree "oh, well they're different, it's okay for them to be like that".
We are different. Differences lead to disagreement and conflict. Privacy, amongst other things, gives everyone a means to shield their differences; be it something legal that society disapproves of, or something illegal that everyone does anyway, or something that's illegal in other cultures, or just odd. It's a necessary part of living in this world without either spending our time killing each other, or ending up a bland monoculture in which nobody ever steps outside the lines of society's accepted behaviour.
Privacy makes people think they're alone with their problems. If no one talk about theirs, I guess it's because they don't have any. Should we simply rely on stats to know we're not alone without knowing who is like us? Is anonymity the actual solution to privacy?
No, I don't. I think it's because significant differences we can easily see have already been exterminated. Zero privacy does not bode well for the continued existence of differences.
An example: If you work in support for anything like the general public, you either don't swear or keep it to a minimum. You may swear like a trooper in your private life, but it's not worth the social friction to "be open to everyone" in your support job.
Basically you're taking the argument to a purely theoretical level, where everyone needs to buy in for it to work, and that's just not feasible.
And in any case, whether or not we're open with each other is an entirely different argument as to whether we're open with an authoritative entity that doesn't always act in the best interests of the general public.
You soon won't have the choice whether you keep things private or not. Everything is going to become public at one point or another. Never underestimate technology.
Or some extremist party wins election and this information becomes excellent hit-list for persecution. It already happened to jews a few decades ago.
Let's say some crazy guy kill people that help others. Would you, as a person that help others, regret helping them because it resulted into your death? Nope.
If you don't like what they do, which is my case, fight them. Don't hide behind privacy.
I despise the government.
NO dude, people hide who they are because other people don't like who they are or because other people may wrongly interpret who they are without the proper context, a fact that is known throughout history to have lead to discrimination, marginalization and even genocide when taken to the extreme.
Who cares about your anti-depressants.
A program like this perhaps isn't that big of a deal to a white, upper middle class family in Cambridge, but it's a threat to a Muslim man with a minivan, wife and two kids in Michigan who is afraid to call his mother in Pakistan because he might get flagged. And that's just today -- tomorrow it could be a Chinese family, a Jewish one (countries have been there before), a Mormon one or whatever our democratic mob fears at any given time...
It's all fun and games until there's a fascist dictator.
- Edward Snowden
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
So many people clearly are too stupid to know that means you don't give up your rights now because you won't have them when you need them.
Or is the assumption in here that corporations are more trustworthy than government?
Nothing to hide http://danielsieradski.com/nothing-to-hide/14572
HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5848168
The problem is not publicity. It's the government.
Yes, because governments are the only entities that want your private data.
I don't believe you seriously mean it.
I suggest you spent some time reading about oppressive governments before you state you can't do it.
If I'd be pessimistic (and I am...) I'd say this is just a step in slow process that will have some drastic consequences for the freedom in the whole world.
I'm sorry but you can't blame the people for overreach of government powers ex post facto. It's not like people are perfectly informed of everything or that they deserve everything they get because they were at one point manipulated by propaganda. The fact is that it's a constant battle against the ambitious and power-hungry people that drive governments towards totalitarianism. To smugly throw up your arms and say it's the people's fault is to give a free pass the actual evildoers—the actual people who are sitting in backrooms selling out our freedom and liberty in order to get more control and leverage for who knows what purposes. Maybe some of them are actually well-intentioned (certainly many of the people they manipulate are), but those people are fools, utter fools who should pick up a history book.
But with the US I do have some sympathy. Trouble is, from my British European perspective, I feel that Americans only have two right wing conservative parties to chose from. One of the things that drives me mental is hearing Obama being described by Republicans as "socialist", even "communist", when Obama is politically further right and our Conservative party in the UK. US politics has no "left" what so ever. Obviously that is relative. But from a global perspective I think that holds.
On top of that money is everything in US politics, and the money goes to those two parties. A third party, more to the left, has zero chance. Then of course there is also the loud hysterical fear mongering right wing media. So, who can Americans vote for for real fundamental change? How could a new message even make it through to Americans? Obama was supposed to be that change, but it turns out he is merely a more intelligent looking President than Bush. His policies seem to have ended up as right wing as Bush's. I realise that his situation with the two houses has compromised him, but I don't recall all this spying and other things like killer robot drone murder being a big issue that he has to bend to. He chose to allow all that.
So, from my POV, its not clear to me what American voters can actually do.
Unless, these billionaire tech business men get their money together and "disrupt" traditional US politics with a new party. Which I believe they could fairly easily do. Especially as these people control the new media. While I'll happily mock the statements from google and facebook, I do get the sense that both really didnt like being roped in to the NSA's little scheme one little bit. Well, now may well be the time for them to get together and create a new political space for Americans, and possibly, the rest of us.
But, as things stand, and normally I would agree with your sentiment, I find it very hard to blame the American people. Here in the UK, and Europe, I believe we have far more choice, and can more reasonably be held to account for our governments. I feel that US government, with big business, has become more disconnected from the people than any other democracy in history.
Benjamin Franklin