Stop Watching Us Gathers Over 100,000 signatures to fight NSA surveillance | Hacker News Reader

Stop Watching Us Gathers Over 100,000 signatures to fight NSA surveillance

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162 pointssethbannon58 comments

I guess I don't understand how government works.

If a significant portion of the electorate doesn't want something, how do they keep the government from implementing it? Because it's certainly not by voting. I'm dead serious. Why does a government do things that its people don't want it to do?

There are some things that the people may want to do, but that the government should still not do. This is why we're a republic, and not a democracy: to prevent the tyranny of the majority. The idea is that a constitution limits the power of the majority. The only deciding factor to any action by government (or lack thereof) is: is the act constitutional? In the US, this question is decided by the judiciary.

Since a court already opined that such surveillance is illegal, it shows how much stronger the executive branch is in comparison to the others. Since the legality of the surveillance is in question, in a fair and reasonable system, a court would order an injunction against the surveillance until the legality was settled. What complicates this matter, is the executive branch's position that even discussing the legality of their actions is classified and secret. Pretty sad from the administration that promised us transparency.

Contrary to popular belief, the American government does not actually represent its people. It represents special interest groups, which is a euphemism for "those who have money." Once your mind makes that paradigm shift, everything becomes incredibly easy to understand.

The fact of the matter is that the seeming irrationality and inefficiency of American government is a feature, rather than a bug. The inefficiency and general waste in government affairs actually serve to obfuscate the real functions and purpose of the state and makes reform vastly more complex and costly than it otherwise would be. The example I like to give is the tax code. The income tax started out as a tax on wealth and it used to be that only a very small percentage of households paid anything. Over time though, the burden of taxation shifted downward onto the middle class, while the elite simultaneously found alternative means of storing their wealth to avoid taxation almost completely. The problem is that the tax code is so complex now that most people cannot even comprehend the amount of loopholes in it. The only people who can are tax attorneys working for corporations and the ultra-rich. This is what I mean by the inefficiency and general waste serves to obfuscate the issue.

And the funny thing is, this is all working exactly as intended. The wealthy tightly control the system and the rest of the population is too distracted fighting for the crumbs to actually organize, form meaningful alliances and fight to change the status quo. What they do instead is share news articles and memes on Facebook and sign silly petitions on the Internet to be able to pat themselves in the back for fighting the good fight. They just want to feel good about themselves.

At the end of the day, this is because the vast majority of people don't actually care about the events that happen around them. They care about their self-perceived role in those events and their own feelings. You can actually see this type of behavior in many different cases outside politics. Take something as simple as exercise. A lot of people sign up for personal trainers, not because they actually want to exercise correctly and lose weight, but because the act of making superficial effort (such as paying a small amount of money) towards a goal is sufficient to make them feel good. And if they fail at weight loss, they can tell themselves that, well, they at least tried. Which is what the signers of this petition are going to tell themselves when it accomplishes nothing.

100k people who spent two seconds clicking on a link online are not representative of 300 million population of the US.

since most people probably haven't heard about it, I would say it is..

And you would be horribly, tragically, mistaken.

I don't think the American government is unusual in this regard.

In part because voters don't vote for those who maximally represent their interests. It's a rare opportunity to vote for a candidate I support; normally I vote for the least-bad, simply because a candidate I support isn't there.

Voters may prioritize one (or few) cause(s) over others, leaving them disenchanted when a low-priority issue gains importance.

If the American system hadn't been successful for centuries, I'd have guessed that it wouldn't work.

The primary system, where candidates for the general election are selected, emphasizes the core/extremal parts of each party. The general election emphasizes centrist views. The usual result are candidates who will tell people what they want to hear. This makes it more difficult to predict what a candidate will do in office. Furthermore, a candidate who aspires to greater office may not do an optimal job in his/her present position in order to tune appearances for the coming election. Term limits would go a long way toward addressing this latter problem.

We get the government we vote for, and we don't always (normally?) vote for those who might do the best job.

Don't forget about the White House petition to pardon Snowden. It now has 70,229 signatures but needs 100,000 to get a response.

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/pardon-edward-snow...

Pardon him from what? He hasn't been charged with a crime.

The temporary outrage of the internet over something they don't even have a grasp on is why no one takes these petitions seriously.

Technically, he can be pardoned preemptively by the POTUS, like Nixon was.

The power thus conferred is unlimited, with the exception [of impeachments]. It extends to every offence known to the law, and may be exercised at any time after its commission, either before legal proceedings are taken, or during their pendency, or after conviction and judgment.

resonator--

Please stop, these posts only add noise.

If I could down-vote I would not be doing this...

I know cynicism is not very productive, but I have never understood the point of petitions like this. Surely people know they are useless unless backed up by billions of dollars of funding?

> useless

Not to the NSA! With no effort at all, they've gathered the names of 100,000 subversives to put on a secret watch list!

(I hope I'm kidding.)

I hope you're kidding too. However, the cynic in me suspects that most of the signatories to the petition might already have been identified by the likes of PRISM as potential subversives and put on a secret watch list. This petition is probably just a confirmation of the majority of the names on that list.

Welcome to the new era of McCarthyism.

Where privacy is the enemy? Really?

I was referring to how in the McCarthy era, people were persecuted for mere association with any sort of "unpatriotic" activity or organization.

That's a dark place to which I hope we never return.

This petition is probably just a confirmation of the majority of the names on that list

It's far worse than "just confirmation." If the NSA is training a machine learning algorithm to identify subversives based on various features/activities of those people, they need a set of labeled (i.e. subversive = yes/no) training data for the algorithm to learn from. They now have 100,000 extra training samples to help the machine learning algorithm better tune its ability to identify subversives. So, not only have the 100,000 people moved from the "probably subversive" to "known subversive" column, but the NSA is better able to predict subversiveness for all of the people that didn't sign the petition by comparing their features/activities to those that did.

Well, time to get better AQUAINTed.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/military/nsa-police.html

That's a perspective I hadn't thought of, and will try to apply to other situations.

On the other hand, if the 100,000 people who already signed have now identified me as a subversive, I'd better go ahead and sign, in the hopes that it will maximize the odds of reigning in the NSA before they come get me.

A secret watch list? Holy shit, I wonder if they constantly surveil people on that list. Oh wait.

I hesitated signing it for a good 5 minutes because I didn't want my name on the list of subversives, but then realized that since they monitor everything, I was already on the list.

Oh well, I'll let you guys know how good the food is in the secret prisons.

I think you'll be proud to tell your grandchildren that you were on the list of subversives.

I made the subversive list, I kid you not, at the age of 12. Needless to say, I stopped caring long long ago. Didn't find out about it until years later, when I was silly enough to think about enlisting in the Navy's Nuclear Propulsion School.

On the subversive list years before it was cool. Dude, you are the real hipster.

Please tell me you've shared that story somewhere.

Trust me, everyone who knows me has heard the story. But you do make a point, I should write it up and put it up on a website to educate others as to some of the abuses that have been occurring for so long.

Hold on. Are you saying that being on the side of freedom, privacy and government transparency is now "subversive?" Where did America go?

The constitution used to be about restricting what the government could do. Now it's about restricting what the people can do.

Just to clarify - this is not simply a petition. We're using a script that the late Aaron Swartz wrote to deliver emails directly to Congress via the contact us pages on legislator's websites. That means there'll be hundreds of thousands of emails delivered to Congress in the coming days.

It's amazing how practical some of the things that Aaron worked on are.

So then, it's easy for them to have a consistent block of text to filter on?

Is there any data that sending template emails works? It seems like its too easy to write off as people investing minimal effort, and not sending a unique message.

I honestly don't know,, but this does not feel 'effective' to me.

So have you written your own personalized emails then?

I have. I got a form letter in response.

There's some irony there.

My experience as well, but at least I wrote a unique email.

I believe that the staffers of many elected representatives typically count the number of constituents who were agitated enough even to send a form letter.

Think of it like a poll. Would you make the claim that politicians are willing to write off people who respond to polls just because they all answer the same question or the question isn't somehow the "right" one? Probably not.

Of course, it's not a poll because people self-select. But even still, if the report to the representative says "this week, we had 37 letters about gun control and 43,742 about surveillance", well, it's clear what the politician wants to say that he or she is doing something about when he or she next sees a reporter.

Yet a phone call that takes a staffer's actual time probably is 1000x more effective than a form email that are easily ignored because it requires so little effort to actually generate.

If the most you can be bothered with is typing in your name and hitting send, why would any Congress member even believe you'll bother to vote in the next election? Or donate? Or convince other people to vote for their opponent?

And how is that supposed to help?

It would be great to have a program that does the same thing for telephone calls. A web app that let's you record a message, that is then called into a representatives phone lines.

I'm Paddy Mullen, and instead of donating $50 to your campaign, I donated it to the EFF. I did this because you ignore the rights of the citizens and haven't held the NSA responsible for the infringements on privacy.

Let the staffers get 100s - 1000s of calls that way.

I'm not sure it's a good thing to do. Because this can happen: https://christianengstrom.wordpress.com/2013/03/08/european-...

> Just to clarify - this is not simply a petition. We're using a script that the late Aaron Swartz wrote to deliver emails directly to Congress via the contact us pages on legislator's websites. That means there'll be hundreds of thousands of emails delivered to Congress in the coming days.

> It's amazing how practical some of the things that Aaron worked on are.

I predict such large-spectrum email delivery will:

- either arrive to the designated inbox, and get ignored

- or get stopped by a spam filter

If you want something to happen, at least write a personalized email, or better, call. It's more difficult to answer calls with a form letter.

So as the GP said; this is all a big waste of time.

People want to feel "empowered" cheaply. Like signing a petition or sitting (i.e. demonstrating). It never worked but doing the same thing all over again and expecting the different result is a habit of the crowds.

Now go ahead - downvote my post - feel the power :)

In a democracy you should expect a lot of signatures to have an effect.

You're assuming this is a democracy.

"100,000 signatures .. um ... wow big number. We didn't know so many people didn't like it. Sorry guys ... you opened our eyes. Sorry, again. No more spying"

- NSA

Of course, the idea that it's useless to try is guaranteed to accomplish nothing.

The NSA probably thinks that collecting everything and analyzing it later was "a neat idea." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_North#Iran.E2.80.93Cont...

I don't see the analogy with Iran-Contra.

Well it's a stretch I admit, but they probably really did think it was a "neat idea," which was a phrase that Oliver North used (quoted in the link) to describe his opinion of the arms for hostage deal that he was being investigated for.

A more direct if mundane line is that Oliver North worked for/with John Poindexter. Poindexter was allowed to resign in disgrace, North was fired. Poindexter later worked for DARPA, where he proposed Total Information Awareness, which was widely viewed with suspicion and back-burnered, and then came back bit by bit as cynically predicted at the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Poindexter

Oooh, and there was also the part where North "deleted" his emails and thought they were, you know, actually gone? He lied to Congress and then the emails were recovered from "backup tape". http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/white_house_email/index.html

I'd totally forgotten the Poindexter connection.

Comrades! Only enemies of the United States of America would ever sign a petition like this, and thus so such enemies should be rightly targeted for increased scrutiny given their increased risk of threat to the state.

And all were immediately added to Main Core.

The only thing politicians really care about is their ability to get elected. That is something we need to target in a threatening way.

So 100,000 people sleep better tonight. And if you ever read any of government responses, you know nothing changed.

I'd say only 100,000 that's it? I'm rather disappointed. There are 316,037,000 in your country, that means 315,937,000 who don't give a fuck ? Note to self: Never even set foot on USA soil.

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