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Comment by samstave | Hacker News Reader

I find a Facebook signup page for anti NSA rally to be highly ironic and misguided.

Sure, I understand you want to have a good reach to people, but aren't we in agreement we don't trust anything that Facebook does at this point.

EDIT: Just to be clear - I 1000% support any and all protesting of the NSA, PRISM, FB and every other companies cooperation with this world-wide spying on all communications.

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"I find a Facebook signup page for anti NSA rally to be highly ironic and misguided."

I dunno, it's arguably a _very_ well targeted message… If I were running the Facebook page (and I weren't already an NSA terrorist suspect by virtue of being a non-US person) - the page wold say "to signup and/or indicate your attendance, please post 'anonymous undercover defcon ninja nerd' or any other combination of the words from this list: http://au.businessinsider.com/nsa-prism-keywords-for-domesti... to your Facebook wall."

But yeah - if you're upset at the government _taking_ this personal information, how do you reconcile that with giving it all freely to Facebook Corp. in return for "free farmville"???

"But yeah - if you're upset at the government _taking_ this personal information, how do you reconcile that with giving it all freely to Facebook Corp. in return for "free farmville"???"

There's a huge difference between what I give and what is taken from me.

That's true, but there's also different behaviour standards expected - a company like Facebook is expected to maximise the amount of money it makes ("generate shareholder value"), where a government has other objectives, hopefully somewhat more aligned with your own.

That's true, but 1) it's a hope we should be somewhat careful about relying on (government abuses happen), 2) there is a massive power difference (I am far less likely to wake up to a SWAT team because Facebook found something they don't like), and 3) data harvested from every organization may be qualitatively different than data harvested from a single organization (like "follow that car" vs. "follow every car", see http://www.schneier.com/essay-109.html).

> 2) there is a massive power difference (I am far less likely to wake up to a SWAT team because Facebook found something they don't like)

Replace you with Gizmodo's Jason Chen, and Facebook with Apple and the story becomes more plausible. [1]

[1] http://www.zdnet.com/blog/apple/gizmodo-editor-jason-chens-h...

Sure, but there's an additional check in "Facebook decides I am bad; Facebook convinces Govt I am bad; Govt attacks me" that is missing in "Govt decides I am bad; Govt attacks me."

Hopefully though, your government is accountable and overseen, and there are established avenues of appeal against decisions you see as wrong.

Hopefully.

I disagree. If they want to waste time and money spying on us then that just further proves our point because we are normal patriotic Americans with nothing to hide.

We're not going to play their game and go off and cover our faces in public or not use the most popular sites on the internet because its a stupid game and isn't worth playing when theres real problems this country faces.

I plan on holding a sign at this protest that says "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." Once everyday normal Americans realize theres nothing to be afraid of these clear violations of the 4th amendment will stop.

    Once everyday normal Americans realize theres nothing to be afraid of these clear violations of the 4th amendment will stop.

Problem is everyday normal Americans fully support these programs.

I really wish people were smarter in these situations and rallied around specific, actionable requests e.g. get rid of FISA courts and have the normal legal process with full transparency. Requests that ordinary people can think are sensible, common-sense improvements to make. But hey I guess people just want a fun day out instead of actually implementing meaningful change.

The demands are:

1. Senate committee to investigate unconstitutional programs, ala Church committee

2. Amend statutes to prohibit blanket surveillance

3. DNI Clapper's resignation for lying to Congress and the American people at the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

Glad to see you've done your research, and breathlessly awaiting the nationwide campaign you're organizing that will be "implementing meaningful change."

"Common sense isn't."

I remember an organization I joined the board of, where an earlier board had removed a section from the standing rules, leaving a gap. The board immediately before us decided this was silly, and obviously we should just re-number.

Except this meant going through and updating every document that referenced the standing rules, printing out and distributing the new versions, &c, for an entirely superficial change.

We rolled that back.

People need to be made to think about the consequences of policy, and unfortunately we don't have a good venue for that - protests aren't it, but our national discussion otherwise seems to be dominated by sound-bytes, gotchas, and the horse race.

How about a sign that says "if the government has nothing to fear it has nothing to hide"?

Alternatively, although this'd be a lot of work (and possibly not practical before the 4th) - how about the page organiser/owner publishes a GPG public key, and everybody posts encrypted content to the wall, and the page owner decrypts and reposts them anonymously (as in, without revealing which decrypted wall post came from which encrypted real-world-identity-connected post)?

We might get a bunch of people to become more familiar with GPG encrypted blobs, possibly encouraging people who haven't yet got around to working out how to use GPG/PGP to do so, all the while giving the big finger to Facebook and the NSA…

(You'd want some guaranteed buy-in first though - launching it and then only getting a handful of encrypted posts would send 100% the wrong message…)

Yep, very true. You certainly don't need to sign up on the FB page to attend.

Let's also remember how Nokia, Siemens A.G, and Twitter were all used to identify protesters in Iran back in 2009 [1].

[1] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124562668777335653.html

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