Majority Views NSA Phone Tracking as Acceptable Anti-terror Tactic
people-press.org
people-press.org
It's not OK if NSA is hoovering all communications in the US and sifting for national security issues, and that does appear to be what happened with Verizon/ATT/Sprint (though it does not appear to be true of Google and Facebook).
Right there with you. I've started digging in my heels at breaking stories simply for the speed at which people start jumping to conclusions.
Child porn is probably morally abhorrent enough (and genuinely rare; if >1% of people out there wanted to fuck 4 year olds, I'd probably try to nuke the planet from orbit) to not be an issue.
Maybe terrorism, if "terrorism" is badly interpreted enough to mean any contacts with terrorists, or advocacy of extreme political viewpoints.
Er, you should be wary in nuking only people who've done the crimes, not just those who 'want' to (even if it's something like child porn).
That aside, I'm a big fan of the philosophy that if X causes Y, and Y is something really bad, don't treat Y, do something with X. So, if you have a pattern of priests abusing kids, maybe we should focus on more underlying problems: coerce the church to nullify the moronic rules that prohibit priests from marrying women... and let them live as normal humans live with normal human urges. I know pedophilia strikes a certain chord for people... but everyone deserves justice and dignity, even criminals. The first focus shouldn't be on punishment for the sake of punishment, it should be an action intended to curb future occurrences by studying what causes the bad behavior and indeed tending to those underlying causes.
But what about counterproliferation? The USG has the world's largest and most capable nuclear arsenal. In terrorist cases, reasonable people can disagree about how the USG's interests line up; maybe those cases have just as much to do with energy security or corporate profits as they do with safeguarding innocent citizens. But the same isn't true of proliferation: it really is in the USG's interests to suppress nuclear proliferation. Not coincidentally, nonproliferation is the other objective to which FISA surveillance has recently been put to use.
How can we say that though, when we don't really know what the NSA is collecting, what they are doing with it, who they are sharing it with, etc.? The actual data collection per-se aside, one of the biggest problems with this whole setup is that we have allowed the development of a "shadow government" (not in the conspiracy theory sense, mind you) that lacks effective oversight (Congress is not sufficient oversight in my book), and is barely - if at all - accountable to the American people. Between the NSA, the CIA, the FISA courts, and FSM knows what other agencies - as well as "National Security Letters" and "gag orders" - we have a monster on our hands that we barely know anything about.
* Have a problem with the NSA getting wholesale access to telephonic metadata for all domestic phone calls.
* Generally do not believe NSA is using that metadata for purposes other than nonproliferation and counterterrorism, where "counterterrorism" means "pursuit of groups with active plans to kill American citizens".
* Agree that the shortcut NSA appears to be taking around existing due process is going to be a problem in the future if it isn't addressed and restricted.
Also, I find the number of acronyms we're tossing around --- NSA, FISA, FAA, &c --- comforting, not alarming. There's a lot of process here. Some of it is really bad and needs to be fixed. But in the 1950s, we had no process; the USG just listened to everything.
Who knows, maybe the political winds shift in, say, 5 years, and it becomes very dangerous to have certain ideological beliefs, or to have said certain things. I'm not crazy about making it easy for these guys (doing the whole "we were just following orders" thing, possibly) to go on a wholesale fishing expedition to find people to start giving the "yellow star" treatment.
I know, I know... way hypothetical, and you could argue "paranoid". Unlikely, even. But just because something seems incredible or unlikely doesn't seem, to me, to be a good argument for making it any easier for that scenario to come to pass. :-)
† IN 2013!
Anyway, to be clear, I don't think this is one of those "Why does America care about the Kardashians instead of this?!!" issues.
I'm not so sure about that. Roughly 90% of Americans use illegal drugs at some point in their lives[1], and supposedly the average American commits 3 felonies per day.[2]
[1] http://www.monitoringthefuture.org/pubs/monographs/vol2_2009...
[2] http://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp/...
Getting a clearance already means allowing a bunch of background investigations, medical records, financial records, etc. to be turned over.
You'd "voluntarily" wave the protection of that collected data, so it would be identical to "give us your last 10 years of email", except conveniently they would be the ones holding it for you.
(I could be wrong; I'm really not claiming any expertise on FISA or FAA or any of the secret court rulings determining its scope, just trying to figure out ways which collected information could be used to one's detriment. Plus, of course, FISA 2 is always possible, modifying FISA.)
Long-term storage of data is certainly a valid issue. Of course, under FISA, NSA is obliged to "destroy" all data they accidentally collect that can't be traced to a specific foreign intelligence purpose.
As the quote goes, in a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught. And when the government already has all the evidence it needs to convict everyone, then anything can essentially be made illegal by selective prosecution of unrelated crimes. Have you been protesting against the government's foreign policy? Suddenly you're in jail for the mistake you made on your taxes 5 years ago. Have you been active in an alternative currency like Bitcoin? Surprise, you're in jail for that movie torrent you seeded a few months ago.
Next: no matter who obtains information under FISA and how it's obtained, it can't be used as evidence in court unless the proceeding pertains to the objective of the FISA warrant, which itself must pertain to agents of foreign powers. If evidence of, say, drug trafficking is collected against you deliberately via FISA, you can move to suppress that evidence and courts are required to do so. If evidence is collected accidentally against you via FISA, the USG is required to destroy that evidence.
That's true (right now anyway), but I don't buy the idea that government agencies (or even branches) are distinct enough that we shouldn't be worried. Similarly, I wouldn't approve of the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service employing a network of domestic assassins, and the fact that they are currently not legally permitted to carry out assassinations would be of no consolation.
[0] http://nymag.com/news/9-11/10th-anniversary/patriot-act/
EDIT:
Or with even less mental effort they saw a question about privacy and didn't have an answer at hand so just substituted it with the question: do you like the President?
It's not double think if they never had an opinion on privacy :)
But I want to know about these trade-offs, and I don't care if that makes them less effective.
There's no way NSA should be looking at private email, phone, VOIP, social networking communication en masse.
Why? Someone looking to do harm doesn't use phones (maybe Burners) or other communication methods where they know they'd be easily tracked.
Sure they used pre-paid phones as well as pay phones, hotmail and were still using coded and hidden messages.
Today they'd be using that steganography over cryptography.
Few sources: http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-205_162-4985597.html
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/11/al_qaeda_secre...
I would call them complete morons but that is unkind. Incurious and ignorant and perhaps far too trusting is perhaps more polite.
But, for once, this guy wasn't insulting poor people. He was insulting average people. The average person has free time but finds it very very hard to use it for something socially beneficial. This is partially their fault but certainly not wholly their fault.
I've been a poor person. Shit, I'm poor now, with no real assets. I do love reading your assumptions though. Tell me more about me.
Most people who meet me find me rather average in pretty much every respect. Probably below average in quite a few. We all have choices we can make with our time and I know nothing about spectator sports, for example.
Maybe there needs to be special protection for certain classes of cloud service, computing service, or communication. Certainly allowing people to use an "exocortex" without fear of seizure would make people smarter. It might make some crimes harder to punish.
Luckily, technology gets a vote, too.
I think a clear/easy line is that anything which is "personal thought" or approximates thought should be immune to search, ideally though technical means. Notes (for yourself), a journal, etc. Maybe "quantified self" measurements. etc.
The line is probably in a different place than in the telephone era, or even the disconnected Internet era.
I'd prefer it be defined through legislation (and maybe through constitutional amendment) vs. through legal decisions. The problem with legal decisions is they tend to involve criminal cases, and "a person was keeping a personal diary of his child rapes" is an exceptionally hard thing to argue privacy for, even if that's only 0.001% of the use case enabled by making personal notes private.
The bit that really bothers me is the total lack of transparency and accountability.
It's meant to calm the masses.
I'm sure it's possible for people to be a bit apathetic and support widespread data snooping, but I'm wary of the inevitable attacks and possible drummed up support for current policies.
Given that, I don't really care so much what the NSA tries to do... I now realize that the real answer is promotion, advocacy and education around technological tools to evade their snooping (assuming, for the sake of argument, that they can't break strong crypto). My goal going forward is to dive into helping promote the use of, and education regarding, Tor, I2P, PGP, and their ilk. Part of that is going to mean educating myself to a considerable degree as well, as I've admittedly been too cavalier about this stuff in the past.
Nonetheless, I do agree with your basic point. When I get my hands on a TARDIS, I'll be sure to let Thomas Jefferson know how I feel about all this! :-)
(Crazy that anyone would have modded you down; did my part to try to fix).
Edit: Also, for anyone more interested in details of the FISC (some of which I obviously misremembered), here's a good resource:
(1) That FISA courts are not a meaningful check on the authority of NSA and the FBI to surveil people, or
(2) That the overwhelming majority of FISA cases involve prima facie legitimate surveillance targets.
I do not find (2) that hard to believe. I'm not a firm believer in FedGov competence, but I really don't think NSA analysts are making up random targets; neither, for that matter, does Snowden, who intimated as much when he was interviewed.
(Just because I don't think surveillance in the 2000's has been abusive, it does not follow that I think we should be unconcerned with checks on surveillance).
The FISA warrant process, because of its secrecy and because it is generally not subject to downstream adversarial process, isn't a meaningful check. If the judges on the FISA Court are extremely diligent, it might be better than nothing, but given the secrecy around it, its unlikely that anyone not directly involved will ever really know whether or not it is (which is one of the things that makes it less likely that it will be.)
I didn't say their could be.
Pointing out that the status quo structure doesn't provide a meaningful check doesn't mean that there is an easy framework that does provide a meaningful check while enabling the same scope of powers in "the right" kind of cases.
EDIT: To amplify: I've explicitly laid out why the existing FISC system is not a meaningful check, and I have explicitly declined to take a position on whether it would be possible to reform the system in a way which would retain its essential character as a judicial oversight system while fixing the problems that prevent it from being meaningful oversight. We haven't addressed any other (e.g., non-judicial) checks, existing or potential, nor have I commented at all on what should exist. So your inference that I must believe certain things about what should exist, or that I have a particular belief about what checks are possible on foreign surveillance, is unwarranted.
that yeah. its like if i had the right to sentence anybody on earth to death, but i wasn't doing it too often, and when i do it, nobody has any idea it happened. So people would think its ok.
The conclusion most people are likely to draw from it and apply it overarchingly, that is what I question.
"The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear" http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0430484/
Seems fear, ignorance and apathy is still working out just fine unfortunately.