Obama, tech executives met to discuss surveillance | Hacker News Reader

Obama, tech executives met to discuss surveillance

reuters.com

40 pointsmoskie48 comments

I was certain that Bush Jr. was going to go down in history as the worst president in my lifetime. But if Obama doesn't straighten this out soon, it's going to be him. Which is very disappointing, because he showed so much promise before he was elected. But under his watch, whether directly or indirectly, he's created the least free regime of any president ever elected in the US.

It's a mistake to think that the Presidents are really in the driving seat when it comes to issues like this. None of them since Eisenhower come out of the military establishment or have any deep background in security policy, so they're reliant on, and credulous of, advisers who are completely bound to the military-intelligence-security-industrial complex.

Obama has dozens of generals and spy chiefs and policy "experts" telling him that if he veers off course the sky will come crashing down on his head. So will the next President.

No one with the immense responsibility of a modern President is going to be able to bring themselves to overrule the expert "advice" of the entrenched mil-sec-intel establishment unless they're already very thoroughly acquainted with its failings.

It is folly to expect a single man to be able to fix this mess. The only way out is to fix the legislative and policy failures that allow the whole structure to exist.

That's fine, the problem is Obama is a liar and a hypocrite. Yes he didn't know that he was making empty promises, but usually when you sign up for a job you know ahead of time whether you can do the job.

Lying during the interview process usually gets you disqualified with prejudice, but he was elected again.

It'd be nice if he apologized after discovering that his promises were a bit excessive.

Obama is a liar and a hypocrite. Bush was a liar and a hypocrite. Clinton was a liar and a hypocrite. Bush Sr. was a liar and a hypocrite.

Did all of these individuals go into office intending to become liars and hypocrites? Or is it more likely that the political system is so dysfunctional that it's not possible for anyone who takes office not to become a liar and a hypocrite.

We've seen that electing different individuals to the same offices isn't solving these problems. It's time to start figuring out how to fix our broken institutions.

Here's a start:

Through the Electoral College, your vote changes without your consent. Entire states "turn blue" when 49% of it are in fact red. Democracy? Hardly.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_College_(United_State...

As a matter of official policy, elected politicians can define constituency boundaries and as such they can manipulate district boundaries at their discretion -- more often than not to their and their party's benefit. Democracy? Hardly.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering

Both result in hyper-majorities and as such the far left and the far right unilaterally wield power. Compromise is universally interpreted as capitulation, so there is no middle-ground where they meet. Unless, of course, it has to do with spying on Americans.

> Obama has dozens of generals and spy chiefs and policy "experts" telling him that if he veers off course the sky will come crashing down on his head. So will the next President.

True, but it's actually worse than that. Imagine how the public itself would react to a president who dealt with emerging security threats by saying things like "that's a real threat but we're not going to create anything new to deal with it."

The public would not be kind to them, even though it's the right answer in most cases.

It's probably not even right to say "...they're reliant on, and credulous of, advisers..." when it comes to organizations like the NSA. Many of the executive bureaucracies are probably well-equipped to act on their own initiative, and evade attempts from the White House to exercise direct control over their operations, regardless of whether the president is informed by advisors or acting on his own initiative.

Ironically, an overly-centralized executive branch is actually less adapt at ensuring accountability and transparency in its subordinate organizations, especially ones that have grown as large and complex as the modern federal bureaucracy has.

If we're not going to rein in the power and reduce the scale of the federal government, we're going to need to do something along the lines of making the department secretaries constitutional offices, elected independently, or implement some sort of collegial executive, like Switzerland's. Otherwise, we're going to wind up with a situation where the government is too complex to itself be governed by its constitutional officers (if it isn't already).

But if Obama doesn't straighten this out soon, it's going to be him.

Absurd. The NSA programs that have been in the news lately predate Obama's presidency and were either instituted as part of the Patriot act or existed earlier than that. Hell, when I was growing up in Ireland in the 1970s there were two NSA listening stations on a hill visible from my house, to listen in on the chatter of Russian pilots from the nearby airport where they had a concession.

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/109/265122067_954d74fa20.jpg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON

I mean, criticize Obama by all means, but 'the least free regime of any President ever elected'? GMAFB. During the Bush presidency that you mention, protesters against the Iraq war had to make their arguments from within fenced cages referred to as 'free speech zones.' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_speech_zone Other historical examples that spring to mind are the mass internment of Japanese-Americans during WW2, the red scare of the 50s, massive government overreach during the prohibition era, and so on.

I'm not asking you support Obama, but this sort of historical revisionism is just ridiculous.

These type of comments have shown that lately HN has jumped the shark. Calm down with the hyperbole and lets get back to talking about cool and interesting technical topics vs. rhetoric like this.

Less free than under Lincoln, who essentially governed under martial law? Less free than under Wilson, during whose presidency Bureau of Prohibition ran roughshod through the nation searching for illegal booze? Less free than under Nixon, who initiated the "war on drugs" and Reagan, who really militarized it?

Definitely less free than under Wilson. Prohibition was a failure on all fronts[1], and did significantly increase the prison population. But it has nothing on modern drug policy[2].

[1]: http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-157.html

[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._incarceration_rates_1...

Incarceration rates aren't the only measure, though. Prohibition agents invaded the privacy and property of ordinary mainstream Americans in a way that in the drug war has been limited mainly to minority communities.

If by "ordinary, mainstream" you mean white, you need to remember that the Irish, the Polish, etc. were not considered white at this time.

(not trying to be racist, just trying to accurately describe a racist system)

I don't mean white. Prohibition agents didn't just hassle the Irish and the Polish (though they did particularly focus on immigrants). The invasive nature of Prohibition extended to everyone, across racial lines. Arguably that's why the drug war has lasted so much longer than Prohibition--so far the major injustices of the drug war have been limited to people outside the social mainstream.

> Less free than under Wilson, during whose presidency Bureau of Prohibition ran roughshod through the nation searching for illegal booze?

Clarification: Wilson vetoed the National Prohibition Act, a.k.a. the Volstead Act, but the veto was overridden. [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eighteenth_Amendment_to_the_Uni...

All of these programs started under Bush. Obama has tried to give legal cover to some of the programs that Bush was conducting illegally. He has ended other illegal programs such as "enhanced interrogations", aka torture.

I guess which one is worse depends on which one you think is scarier, a reckless cowboy or a careful efficient crime boss.

http://breakingbad.wikia.com/wiki/Gustavo_Fring

To be fair, there's never been another presidency with the current combination of technological and societal factors on the scale there is today, so a direct comparison isn't easy to make.

We have had the tech ever since the internet was invented. Don't fool your self and try to find another way to defend our current sitting president.

Er, that's irrelevant - we've never had the societal forces provided by the technologies further up the stack from the actual networking(i.e. Facebook and the like).

But nowadays everyone is connected which makes a huge difference.

Right, nobody has ever engaged in any surveillance before Barack Obama. As someone who 'works for a large defense contractor' you are obviously expert in this area.

Quoting the hip-hop artist KRS-1: "Barack is like the manager of Burger King. All presidents are, including Bush. It's like this... When your fries are cold, if your burger's not done right... you go back to Burger King (America, or your government), and you say, "My burger's cold; I want new fries!" First, you go to the cashier... that's the courts. You argue to the courts... The courts... If you can't get no justice with the cashier, you say, "Let me see the manager! I want to go to Supreme Court. I want to see the president." The manager comes out, "Hi, what can I do for you?" Now the manager can override the decisions of the cashier, but you never get to see the franchise owner of Burger King. If you really have a problem with your burger, you need to go see the franchise owner. We need to go to the top. Or to the bottom [moans]. We need to go where the real architecture of government is. And it's not in a president. It's in a global scheme."

That's a pretty lucid description of the power structure. Except I'm not sure there's a "top".... unless you want to simply point at the whole system of US goverment and its culture.

What if it turns out that each is worse than the last?

A bunch of libertarians are fond of saying that each president eventually makes you nostalgic for the last one.

EDIT: It was actually Calvin Trillin, but I read it on a libertarian blog: http://archive.mises.org/16107/bushs-huge-budget-numbers-bla...

Execs -> Obama "You said no one would find out about this shit if we played ball! WTF! We pay you assholes a lot of money!"

Obama -> Execs "Relax, we have the NSA working on Lavabit to get Snowden's emails right now. As soon as we have some truth to mix in with our lies we'll have him discredited with false allegations of CP or some other horse shit. The pleebs' short memories and NFL football will take care of the rest."

Execs -> Obama "It had better or the Secret Service will fall asleep on the job one day."

Obama -> Execs "Cocaine and hookers on me!"

Just make up any wild story you want, that's great.

>"There was broad concern among privacy advocates and the private sector about the impact of the NSA's surveillance efforts. Several of the private sector representatives worried that the international backlash against NSA collection of foreign data would harm American global competitiveness," American Civil Liberties Union President Susan Herman said.

This is very encouraging. Though I doubt that civil liberties groups have much pull on the White House or Congress, hopefully having all these large tech companies on board will add some pull to the message.

Throw in "global economic competitiveness" and/or "jobs" and it can almost counteract the "terrorism" propaganda war.

I'm honestly surprised that no country has seen the massive opportunity to pull ahead here economically. Given the that the legal clusterfuck for tech companies continues to snowball, it is only a matter of time before more and more tech companies start asking themselves if the US is the right jurisdiction to set up shop. I would imagine that Lavabit and Silent Circle are having this conversation now.

If I were in the congress or parliament of some progressive country, I'd start outlining a ton of bills on privacy, patents, etc. with the goal of creating an economic safe haven for many types of tech companies. Since software is eating the world, it seems like it would be one of the most attractive economic opportunities to develop. Iceland is the obvious choice for this, but I would hope that Germany would jump on this. On top of bills that support the economic environment for tech, I would add a ton of bills surrounding support for foreign nationals who want to move to the country to found and build such companies. Give software and hardware engineers a fast track to citizenship and a decent tax structure on gains from the companies they build, then give VCs decent tax benefits on their gains.

This is as good an opportunity as any for some countries out there with a decent but still subordinate tech economy to take two steps forward.

It never helped much for health care; I'm not betting the farm on it helping for surveillance.

The people in charge already have theirs. They don't really care about America's global economic competitiveness because their buddies are as competitive as they need to be, and because they fantasize that if things get out of hand they'll just slam some small country up against the wall to show who's boss.

Oh, you might be able to convince some of the public. But in the end, who cares what the public thinks? What, are they going to vote for the Presidential candidate who takes a position against secrecy or something? Because I've been down that road, friend.

My cynical sense is that we're halfway through 3Q13, the leaks have been out for a month and a half, so it's time to take these companies' temperature about whether their earnings have been affected. If not, "we still good, guys?" After all, "competitiveness" is a synonym for revenue.

Who in the room was the advocate for open internet?

I don't want my future to look like the Apple Store or AT&T's closed network. I won't accept it.

First sentence mentions Vint Cerf. Founding father of the internet, recently wrote this: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/25/opinion/keep-the-internet-...

What has Cerf had to say about NSA spying on Americans? Has he expressed outrage? Concern?

No.

As a public spokesman for Google, he has offered no solutions to increase the privacy protections for Americans. Rather, he seems to claim that privacy protections can't be done. (http://gigaom.com/2013/07/09/internet-inventor-no-technologi...)

the first sentence..

Google Inc computer scientist Vint Cerf and transparency advocates also participated in the meeting [..]

Vint represents the interests of Google - a giant corporation who's very reason for existence is to track every aspect of your life. Google is Big Business and Big Surveillance all in one. At its core, Google is opposed to anonymity and privacy.

I would hope that Tim Berners Lee, Lawrence Lessig and Eben Moglen would all be there. Even Stallman should be present, since he most often is right despite coming across as a madman to some, and because he drops the anchor so far in the direction of privacy that people like TBL and LL look like the rational moderates that they are in this conversation. Unfortunately the radicals in favor of the surveillance state already have the ear of the President and Congress in this conversation. The presence of Stallman would add a much needed balance.

Who else does the HN community think should be present advocating on behalf of the free and open internet?

John Gilmore! http://w2.eff.org/Privacy/Gilmore_v_NSA/

"That's the kind of society I want to build. I want a guarantee -- with physics and mathematics, not with laws -- that we can give ourselves real privacy of personal communications."

"The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."

>Since the NSA's vast data-gathering programs were revealed in June, the president has repeatedly said he would encourage a national conversation on the need for U.S. surveillance while respecting people's right to privacy.

Let me build a straw man of what I think will be the argument:

"If you're against mass surveillance[1], your position isn't reasonable. We must protect our country. Protecting our country requires watching for people who want to do us harm. If you love America, you should let us protect the nation, and that requires the practices our agencies do. We guarantee data will be used only following the correct procedures and safeguards[2]. We cannot tell too much about the programs or the groups and individuals who want to harm us will use this knowledge to put those who serve the nation and all American citizens at risk."

[1] Of course the term won't be "mass surveillance", but some Luntzian/Orwellian expression: "protecting our communications"

[2] We will establish the procedures and safeguards.

Now that it's dawning on people that this is going to kill the US's international cloud computing business the big money lobbying will kick in and we'll probably see some action.

Don't worry, they will work it so that there is a very expensive and labyrinthine process for privacy "compliance" for companies operating in the US which will purely by coincidence be so expensive and convoluted that only the big companies will be able to afford it. Just to reiterate, this will be 100% accidental and will in no way reflect an intent on the part of the established players to create a de-facto barrier to entry for potential competitors. You know you can trust them because the meeting was behind closed doors and both they and the president refused to comment on it.

"...Herman added that despite such meetings, "It's not clear yet that the White House appreciates the need to scale back these surveillance programs substantially instead of just rationalizing or tinkering with them.".."

I welcome any attention the president can give this issue. I also acknowledge as Commander in Chief it is his role to be publicly responsible for this mess. As Chief Executive, at any moment he can pick the phone up and make substantive things happen n this issue. Having said that, what we really need is legislative relief.

Here's hoping we don't get a feel-good PR statment and posturing geared to divide the electorate instead of solving the problem. I have my fingers crossed.

It's time to start calling them "collaborators".

Wow, thats perfect....

Are you people stupid? This is PR! It's so transparent.

I'm downvoted, yet there's no evidence this meeting produced anything substantive, or was anything but a PR move by the president.

Vague statements about "dialogue" regarding a secret meeting, and people actually take this seriously? It's ridiculous.

I agree with you that it's probably PR, and that Obama isn't about to dismantle the whole NSA machinery that's been operating for years now under his administration. My guess is that you were downvoted for asking "Are you people stupid?", which is not a particularly civil way of addressing your fellow HN readers.

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