Antiprism
antiprism.eu
antiprism.eu
I just spent about 40 minutes crafting a long email that I sent to about 40 family members and close friends detailing why I thought people needed to contact their elected politicians, sign the https://optin.stopwatching.us/ petition, etc.
Seriously, if we can, as individuals, each change several people's minds on this issue, that helps.
A stampede of users leaving the likes of Google, Facebook, etc. would put pressure on those companies to use their resources to fight it 'at home'.
I realise this is a relatively naïve POV, but you only have to see how quickly Instagram reversed their ToCs a few months back - after users started closing their accounts in droves - to see how this can prompt the big boys into action.
You could also argue that there's a real opportunity for a European competitor to launch a rival to these services, under the guise of our strong data protection laws (in the UK at least). So if a DropBox or Gmail clone (for example) started to get traction, again it would put pressure on.
The only thing companies like Google and Facebook can do to improve matters is to stop collecting and storing giant troves of personal data.
I'm not sure it's that simple, nor is that entirely practical. It's not the companies you need to put pressure on. I would image that some of them aren't entirely excited at the idea of working with the NSA, but they aren't given much choice.
The unfortunate truth is that lobbying DC is the most effective way to enact this kind of change. You can do this online to some extent by using services like Votizen.com. Lobbying by Silicon Valley and others in tech certainly worked for the JOBS act.
As a non-US citizen I can't.
What I do think might work, though, is a system added to it where every human query is logged & their human peers can ask, "WTF Carl? Why are you looking at data on your ex wife? Or, Why are you looking at your political enemies?"
I think the humans inside those institutions would not limit their power, but they would want to keep an eye on their peers to make sure their peers are not abusing their power.
Those query & access logs can be periodically reviewed by their peers, and their superiors, and those logs should be kept as long as the data is, & queryable just the same as any other data.
There has not been a shred of evidence that PRISM gives the government any capability that it did not already have with FISA. All we learned was the name of the system that some companies use to respond to FISA requests, a name that they weren't even aware of. There is no practical difference between the U.S. companies listed on the PRISM slides and U.S. companies that are not; FISA covers them all. The initial claims by Glenn Greenwald that PRISM gave the NSA direct access to company servers have been refuted a hundred times over and walked back by Greenwald himself. If you were just now appalled to learn about the changes made to FISA with the PATRIOT act, you are 12 years behind the times.
We all know that information can be leaked or misused. In fact, I think it is a truism: all 'secret' information is eventually leaked or misused.
The old process, where the government had to go to court to even start to collect information about a suspect was a completely different thing with less horrific side-effects.
And yes, we learned that the government may not have direct access to servers of the social media companies, but dispelling that claim brought the issue of internet backbone access to the fore.
And there's this story, also on the front page of HN now: http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/06/20/the-nsa-can-retain-...
The fact that "some of it was known in the past" does not make it any less worthy of our attention today.
No one cares about your arguments, and you don't seem to care about other people's arguments either. I think the best solution for everyone is if you just go and argue somewhere where people might care.
Here is one new thing - The president has admitted that this programme exists while before in congressional committees it was denied.
The president stated that nobody listens to your data when evidence has been presented to the contrary.
No one had ever before seen a FISA court order. Most of the public was not even aware of Fisa courts. Most of the public did not know that this court has granted all requests, but two. Most of the public was not aware of secret courts interpreting secret laws while handing down secret judgments. The public did not know that a warrant was not needed but mere policy in many cases.
Etc, etc, etc.
All of this is new. The leaked documents are TOP SECRET. If top secrets becoming public knowledge is not new then what is!?
From two such completely alien starting points, there is little possible useful argument. I've been in enough online arguments in my time to recognise a lost cause.
Asking EU governments to censure the US when they have their own programs (the UK clearly does) is just naked anti-Americanism.
The existing outrageous actions of the government were finally given attention by the media, a large slice of the populace finally seems to have noticed and the government has been compelled to actually admit and address the issue. [1]
We should be upset that these outrageous policies ever existed. We should be upset that it took this damn long for the media to treat the issue with the gravity it deserves.
And we should be happy as hell it actually 'took' as a news story this time, let alone managed to stay in the news for weeks.
To the privacy conscious, it's irrelevant whether Snowden told us anything "new". What's relevant is that (for whatever reason) this long-festering problem was finally brought to the forefront in a way that has demanded attention.
I suppose if you didn't mind any of the "old news" that the government was abusing the constitution, or had made your peace with it, this might seem a pointless story.
[1] Though that's a long way from a fix, it's significantly better than the dismissive "with us or against us" defenses of the past.
If we are going to have a debate on what the scope of electronic surveillance should be, it should be an honest one. I just feel like we're replacing the ridiculous unfounded "TERRORISTS GON DESTROY 'MURICA" sentiment with an equally ridiculous unfounded "GUBMINT OUT TA GITCHYA" sentiment. I don't like having to choose between those two options.
Calm and objective hasn't so much as slowed this down.
The series of "least untruthful" statements by the Obama administration, its allies in Congress, and the leaders of the NSA and FBI suggests that there is in fact a story here.
This is the #1 counter-comment to PRISM posts that I see, and I don't understand it. "Your opinion is invalid because I knew this all years ago"?
> There is no practical difference between the U.S. companies listed on the PRISM slides and U.S. companies that are not; FISA covers them all.
Which is exactly why the focus on the website is on Europe.
The leaked documents are TOP SECRET. By definition top secret documents are not public knowledge. If top secrets becoming public knowledge is not new then what is?
By the time the 2014 elections roll around, this issue will be all but forgotten by the vast majority of the electorate. At least, that's what both parties are probably counting on.
I sure hope you're wrong about that one. It's only a little more than a year away.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_Party_(United_States)
Seems like a stub in many ways (not the article, the party, considering the utter lack of any seats anywhere), but I think that is in line with the PP in other countries; they all learn by doing. Though in the US they might need extra love I think, to offset people being squeamish about the name :P
we have a rising fidelity stake in the politics of other nations
And vice versa. As glad as I am about some things in Europe, I would dread a world where the US actually "falls". I think it would be like the gulf stream stopping... The US could be more enlightened, sure, but it also could be much worse, and then I'd be (not) writing this from a Russian colony or something. So act local, too, you deserve it, and "we" want you to have it.
Go support it?
Can the EU issue the equivalent of national security letters? In the US, it seems like the exploitation of obedience to authority (1963) and the fear of federal prison helped keep PRISM secret. I can't imagine the same thing happening in the EU.
At the state level, I reckon it is possible that things are happening, but even in that case, how hard is it for an EU citizen to move across their nearest border and set up life their in order to whistleblow against their home country? Does the EU have whistle-blower protection laws where I could work in country away, move across the border to country B, blow the whistle on country A, and not fear extradition to country A since I'm protected under whistle blower laws?
No. The EU issues directives which EU countries have to turn into laws. The implementation details vary from country to country, but save a few exceptions, laws the meet the minimum requirements of these directives must be enacted. This doesn't always happen in practice but it's a violation of EU law. Sometimes the laws just aren't enforced, like the UK's implementation of the EU cookie directive.
No idea about any of the rest of your comment. Perhaps someone better informed will chime in.
http://uspirates.org/wiki_src/index.php/Pirate_National_Comm...
For our values, we have been derided as “pirates”. For our hope that every person may be free to access all of human knowledge, we have been called “pirates”. For our belief that one need not ask permission to participate in governance, industry, culture, and other aspects of society, we have been called “pirates”. For our insistence that citizens should not be surveilled and distrusted as if they are criminals, we have been called “pirates”. For our rejection of authority and profit-seeking when it does not serve the common good of all people, we have been called “pirates”.
We reclaim this label of “pirate” and abjure its derogatory, incendiary implication. We are Pirates. We stand for the liberty, equality, and solidarity of all human beings, and against all threats they may face.
I myself am not sure if I would like "Freedom Party" or something like that better. When someone calls themselves "The Good Guys" without irony, I get nervous. So at least given the choice between those extremes (which of course is not the actual choice, the PP could have plenty of names that neither "offensive" nor meaningless), I would prefer irony and alienating those who don't get said irony.
How can I pursue my own interests—how can I have freedom—if I have to serve some nebulous "common good," just as if I lived in a communist state?
The philosophy you're looking for is libertarianism.
I think the assumption here is simply the average human being, who is happy when in company with other happy human beings, not the alienated, necrophile collector of things and symbols who "lately" have become so numerous they actually think just wearing shirts and shoes while running countries or companies makes them a fully fledged fucking person, haha.
If you honestly cannot think of anything that profits you without hurting others, then wtf are your interests? How can others have freedom, whatever it is, when your interest, whatever it is, is profiting off them, instead of doing work that profits off, say, chaos and energy by making it useful at least to you, if not others as well? How can you yourself even have any meaningful development as a person that way?
If you plant a fruit tree in your garden, and only you get to eat the fruit, and it makes you happy, then we're all better off for you being happier, and those who create ideas and tools that last longer and reach farther than just their belly are considered cooler still. But the purely parasitic BS has to go, and since it tends to make people lazy and ignorant, there is fuck all they will be able to do about it once the kindling actually catches. Is that okay for you, can we move on now?
Why do some people understand that murder is not okay, but don't apply to the same into, say, deceiving others into self-harm from which they profit? I think it's privilege. It's mighty easy to have endless discussions about what a gun actually is when you don't have one pointed at you.
If I plant a fruit tree in my garden, I no longer buy that fruit from a local farmer. Thus, I hurt the farmer.
If I build Facebook, I hurt MySpace. If I build Spotify, I hurt iTunes. If I build assembly robots that save businesses and consumers millions, I take away jobs from factory workers.
Anything you build upsets the good of someone else; that doesn't make it wrong.
So really, I think picking something more neutral as you name would probably help showing that you aren't just a marketing institution.
However, I still think that the name is bad, because of what it stands for, historically. I can understand the reason behind it, but that's something really internal. You can tell that to people that already are interested into the pirate party, but even if there were people that would share your views the word "Pirate" simply does not make them sound like a serious alternative.
Of course, names are bad and for the sake of neutrality maybe they should be called after numbers. Not even colors are really neutral anymore.
So, the United States government funds programs that help secure the identity of the people and the government also spends money on surveillance programs such as PRISM. Can't the government just stop funding projects such as Tor any time they please? In such scenario, aren't we at the mercy of the very government to protect our identity that runs surveillance programs?
I mean, Germans know exactly what happens when surveillance gets out of control - the Wikipedia page about the Stasi [1] is pretty good, including lines such as "counting part-time informers, the Stasi had one informer per 6.5 people" and "As the GDR began to fall, the Stasi did as well. They began to destroy the extensive files that they had kept, both by hand and with the use of shredders. When these activities became known, a protest erupted in front of the Stasi headquarters". Can anyone imagine US citizens storming the NSA, or the FBI? Even today those files are being reassembled, because people wants to know what happened.
And yet, what happened during the conference [2]? Angela Merkel essentially stepping in defense of Obama. She could have said she didn't agree. She could have remained quiet. And yet she speaks (mildly, though) in his favor, even while by her own admission "the questions have not yet been satisfactorily addressed". That was disappointing.
[1]http://infowars.net/articles/september2007/050907Merkel.htm
[2]http://www.dw.de/german-chancellor-merkel-rebuffed-on-terror...
Any and all change begins with thought, speech and action in individuals, then in groups. Some things took a LONG time, and consisted of many small things. Even "reading and talking about an article about something that matters instead of watching cats on youtube or discussing font sizes" can help, IMHO. Unless you think it distracts you from doing something that would have even more impact, I don't see the problem? I get impatience, but not futility.
Since I'm living in Münster, where a lot of the German Pirates are and know quite a few of them, I'll be the first one to join any protest or demonstration they organize locally.
And as far as making the world a better place goes, I'm currently looking into the possibility of automated vertical farming with hydro- or aquaponics. Even if I just have a teensy bit of success with that it would probably have a larger impact than organizing protests, an activity about which I know NOTHING.
We are all aware that PRISM has been exposed to be nothing more than a user interface to information provided by companies that receive a search warrant after the request has gone through courts and lawyers, right? Surely 229 users of Hacker News cannot be that uninformed about PRISM, after so many front-page articles on the subject giving so many opportunities to hash out the details of what it is and is not, that they imagine it to be something nefarious?
This is particularly scary because people have so far been used to considering the Internet as a sort of borderless global place and when it comes to privacy from government snooping it definitely is not.
I knew this before of course. And before I assumed the snooping was low enough that I didn't care that I didn't have any legal standing to challenge it. Now I'm not so sure.
When a related warrant, having "gone through courts and lawyers", turns out to have been a blanket demand for all call data from all Verizon customers, I think it's reasonable to assume that perhaps the checks and balances aren't as robust as we'd hoped.
And for those outside the US, a response like this seems quite reasonable to me. After all item #2 is "Uncover the facts".
If the NSA were making individual wiretaps based on criminal suspicions, that would align with the Constitution. Instead, they are wiretapping almost everyone in the US.
Reference: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2007/05/mark_klein_docu/
The Obama administration is awfully worried about people knowing about the existence of that front end. There are high-ranking officials committing perjury before Congress in an attempt to cover this story up. Somehow I doubt that they are worried about a mere front end.
Really, your response follows the same line of reasoning as the least untruthful statements being made to Congress right now. You are being pedantically specific -- PRISM itself may indeed just be a front end -- while ignoring the real story here, which is the NSA's ongoing wholesale surveillance. You are ignoring the fact that the NSA is keeping information that might be indicative of criminal activity, a dangerous mixture of intelligence gathering with law enforcement. When members of the Senate are saying that this is the tip of an iceberg, I do not think you can just write off this story as some misinformed reporters hyping up a front end.
It is not just an interface. The NSA is collecting data and using secret courts. The programs are clearly unconstitutional. If they are needed and the people want them, let's pass a Constitutional amendment. That's how it's supposed to work.
http://www.pirateparty.org.uk/
Thanks guys.