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Comment by pfortuny | Hacker News Reader

"The idea that we have robust checks and balances is a myth."

Albeit to be taken with a grain of salt, this is what I was supposing: you cannot have such a huge organization working "properly" on a day-to-day threat-response basis without some "elastic" access control. Even less if you are a contractor like B-A-H.

This, in a private entity, is less dangerous. You can have a lot of sysadmins with some access to Google's data because the data is properly partitioned and especially because there are no "targets". When each individual is a target, it is too hard to get proper partitioning.

Also, Google's employees have little to no incentives to make those data "public." And I guess direct access to the real emails is pretty hard: Google's money is not there but in the analytics. So internal anonymization may be not only performed but even easy to do. And this is good for Google & its clients.

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The biggest phrase that I see missing from the private vs government discussion is "monopoly on force".

The Federal government has the authority to create regulations, create laws, collect taxes, send people to your house to enforce those laws, remove/restrict your rights, sentence you to a prison term, send in armed officers to take down civilians groups viewed as dangerous, etc etc all the way to declaring full scale war. And, perhaps most importantly, the government has the authority to coherence third parties to cooperate in information sharing. Google will never be able to force Facebook to hand over their data, but the Federal government can force both of these parties to hand over their data to them.

The catch with having a monopoly on force is that your hands are supposed to be tied by the will of the people. There is a tremendous and intentional asymmetry in power. This necessitates an equally tremendous system of transparency, accountability and oversight.

I think once a day I hear "people willingly give all there data to facebook, why do they care if the NSA is listening", people need to understand what "monopoly on force" truly means.

I wouldn't be so sure about Google vs. Facebook. All they need to do is hire away the right person (or simply conduct corporate espionage themselves).

But as you mention, that monopoly on force is tied to the will of the people.

If the government were to use force in a way other than approved by the laws setup by the peoples' representatives then you're already talking about something much worse on the totalitarian continuum than phone metadata.

And at that point, once the law has no limiting effect on the government anyways they could setup things hundreds of times worse. But they would hardly need to, as they could manufacture evidence of supposed "crimes" if need be and carry out sentences of their choosing for any reason at all.

They would only need things like Prism for dissidents, and dissidents would already assume that things hundreds of times worse were in place and take defensive measures accordingly.

So you're right that the monopoly on force is dangerous, but it has always been so. That's why it requires that tremendous system of transparency, accountability and oversight that you mention.

But given that we're able to provide those controls in the first place (controls which we cannot enforce on private companies, btw!) it makes sense again to ask the question of whether programs like these are both reasonable and effective, whether they can be properly supervised, and if so whether current systems are "proper supervision".

"Monopoly on force" is a warning about government, not the NSA. And especially not in the context of knowledge, where the government is mostly far out of its league compared with the private sector, and it's only getting worse.

I disagree. The impact of Facebook being discovered stealing data from Google systems is complete and utter destruction of the company, Enron-style.

The real danger of programs like PRISM, outside of abuse of power by the executive branch, is access to the data leaking from the national security realm to the normal law enforcement channels. The data collected by commercial entities is dangerous because unlike NSA stuff, its just a subpoena away from any police department.

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