The NSA is turning the Internet into a total surveillance system
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
I don't think the results are going to be impressive. See, for another example, the fingerprint collection at US airports.
> Collect it all
I wonder how many Americans know about the scheme to collect at airports the fingerprints of visitors to the US?
Here's an article from 2008 (http://www.reuters.com/article/2008/03/25/us-security-finger...), submitted to HN here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6196375)
> The U.S. government has been collecting digital fingerprints and photographs of nearly all non-citizens aged 14 and up entering the country since 2004, officials said, in a Homeland Security program called US-VISIT, at a cost of $1.7 billion.
> [...] On an average day, almost 14,400 international visitors undergo the fingerprinting process at Kennedy, officials said.
> More than 2,000 criminal and visa fraud cases have been detected by the screening process, introduced in response to security concerns following the attacks of September 11, 2001, U.S. officials said.
Roughly they've scanned fingerprints for 36,792,000 visitors (who may be repeat visitors), and caught more than 2,000 people. (Between 2001/9/11 and 2008/9/11.)
And was the stated reason for installing this program in the first place that they were going after criminal and visa fraud cases and if so is the damage that those people would have incurred post their capture greater than the cost of the system?
Preferably substantially greater. I no longer visit the US in part because I refuse to be treated like a suspected criminal simply because I'm not an American. As a one man boycott it likely won't have much effect but I suspect I'm not the only one doing this.
The TSA/US Customs combo is the worst possible way to welcome a new visitor to your country.
(I'm not trying to contradict you, just expanding on your point).
I'm not saying I agree with the system, but it's the argument that might be used.
Same argument applies to CCTV cameras, you would (and I think do) see a reduction in crime when CCTV are installed [citation needed] (though I believe it just moves to other areas).
It doesn't have to have much effect. It only has to matter to you. If you feel you're doing the right thing under the circumstances, that's enough.
So fingerprinting them means for sure that we know they came in. I'm not sure what that achieves though?
I don't know whether the problem is big enough to warrant this step though.
You'd also be amazed at just how many people still make it over in the back of trucks. Don't know if it amounts to a majority, but talking to a few friends who drive trucks across Eurasia, pretty much every time they do a France -> UK crossing someone either sneaks, or tries to sneak, into the lorry. Common tactic is cutting the pull cord around the edge and resealing it with a lighter, or cutting a hole in the top of the canvas.
I actually subscribe to the camp of "let them come", as I don't believe in nation-state protectionism as a concept, but find the topic as a whole fascinating, from the economic level down to the human.
How sweet.
My point is addressing the surveillance in Their own terms - "we do it to catch criminals" is the justification They give for the surveillance. But even that justification fails. The surveillance is unacceptable for all the obvious reasons, but it doesn't even do what They claim it does.
I believe this is a mistake. The core argument should remain that surveillance is immoral. That it doesn't work is just a bonus, but arguing on these terms could give proponents the impression that they're generally on the right track and that people just want them to work harder at it.
Unconstitutional is an argument that tends to have more weight. Immoral is a weak position to take when my opinion on morality and yours probably aren't the same - and for most people surveillance is full of grey areas.
You tell me.
At least surveillance can be dealt a blow by withdrawing funding.
I am sure there are drug cartels with a very rigorous process that they go through when they carry out a revenge killing --- first, extract the pancreas, then the spleen ....
Having an argument based on law is much harder to argue against than someone's personal set of moral values.
Looking into cultures where "legal" things are decided with a moral system (e.g., most theocracies) I see a lot worse stuff going on. I'm not trying to minimize the nasty and disgusting surveillance system the US has in place, I'm just saying that rule by morality is a double-edge sword.
"If you would just give us more money and leeway, we would:
- Catch more terrorists.
- Deliver the rest of those high tech fighter planes.
- Finish the new payroll system."
I'm assuming that with this system they are catching like 95% of all cases, since it sounds like the measure is an extremely effective one. Near as I can tell this crime occurs once in every 20000 border crossings. During those 7 years we effectively paid $850 million per person captured.
Now if all 2000 of those people can be demonstrated as terrorists. Heck if only 50 can be captured it may be justifiable. However I wouldn't be surprised if the overwhelming majority of those 2000 cases are absolute nobodies who want nothing more than to live and work in the US. The remaining legitimate criminals caught probably don't justify the cost of the system.
At the end of the day, if someone really wants to enter the US, they are probably not going to enter through our nation's airports. We have thousands of thousands of miles of unprotected border that someone could get across.
I wonder how many Americans know how subjective and error-prone that fingerprint analysis and other commonly used forensic techniques are?
" With few established scientific standards, no central oversight, and poor regulation of examiners, forensics in the U.S. is in a state of crisis. "
You do know what happens when law enforcement is judged on the basis of 'how many people have been caught', right?
They caught 2000 for 36.8 million people scanned, but how many people did they catch in the roughly 7 years prior to their installation?
Although it seems the government has no control over the NSA or even know what they're up too, it would be good to see the focus of this problem turned to the policy makers.
For your information, I believe that violence and destruction are counter-productive.
As with most people, I rely on a global system of trade and cooperation for my livelihood. I do not wish to disrupt that. Fundamentally, most people wish to simply get on with their lives; to spend their time, attention and energies on their own job, on feeding themselves and their family, on keeping a roof over their heads, on maintaining their relationships with their friends, and on pursuing whatever it is that makes each of them individually happy.
This political pissing-match is not something that they know or care about. Indeed, the pool is now so polluted, who would want to swim here? We did not ask for terrorists to come here and try to kill us ... just as we did not ask for the authorities to poke their noses into our private lives and threaten us with what they find.
However, as much as I would like both of these groups to go away and scw themselves, I have to acknowledge that we have no real choice in the matter. If some random psycho decides he does not like my religion or the colour of my skin, and decides to murder me and my family for it ... well, in all likelihood there is not much I can do about it. Ditto for the machinations of the uncaring zombie bureaucracies that we call the "Nation State".
In truth, we are utterly powerless, and these things are done to us with neither pity nor mercy nor any real thought for us as individuals whatsoever. I do not seek change, for in a massively connected world of billions, it cannot be but like this.
My bitterness and rage are futile; less than nothingness; feeble against the unstoppable forces of inevitability.
The thought that I might get up and do something is laughable -- at best it might tar me with the same disease that infects those responsible for all of this -- optimism, and a horribly, destructively misplaced belief that we have any power whatsoever to alter things.
Are they upset because they lack the choice of who is tracking them? Because I don't think people should be upset about their privacy when they know a company like Facebook already knows everything about you.
- because they said they didn't
- because we don't all live in the USA
- because we have some expectations of privacy regarding mail
- because the reason why ('terrorism') is a fig leaf
- because some people feel that surveillance can lead to a police state
And so on...
The mail one is tricky because somehow people expect that to carry over to email but email is an entirely different beast than regular mail.
The part that falls under "so on" is the scary one. From the article: "NSA reportedly is making a copy of nearly every international email. It then searches that cloned data, keeping all of the emails containing certain keywords and deleting the rest – all in a matter of seconds."
Note the weasel wording: "certain keywords". You don't know what those keywords are. You don't even know what topics they happen to cover. Once you somehow become flagged for suspicious activity, the NSA can go back in time and see everything you have said about _all_ of their "suspicious" topics. You are now an even bigger suspect.
And once you are a suspect, anything and everything in your past can be interpreted in the light of you seeking to commit the questionable activity. Thanks to NSA storing only the material that matched their keywords, they now have a stash of incriminating material that has a very strong selection bias.
I'm pretty sure even Franz Kafka would have been proud.
I guess the overlaps between the different groups are not large. The group of people who post everything to FB doesn't overlap much with the group of people who are annoyed at the NSA surveillance program.
At first glance it feels like a weird cognitive dissonance: People have been told for years that email is not secure, and you should treat email as you would a postcard that anyone can read. And now that we find out that people are reading all email we shouldn't be surprised.
But that misses some points. People feel a difference between a technician getting occasional glances at emails as they transit through the Internet and the government collecting everything. There's a big difference between a mail worker reading a post card and the government photocopying every postcard and storing these copies. And people feel rightly aggrieved that strict laws about surveillance seem to have been side-stepped to allow mass surveillance of totally innocent people.
Personally, I think I agree with you. I am more worried about all these other people having data about me than I am about the government slurping all my data into a big cache.
No, their point most certainly was not reasonable, even though it was polite. The only claim was of letting facebook know 'everything'. This is either mean to be as-written, in which case it's blatantly false, or it's hyperbole, but this is an argument that doesn't work in a weaker form, and a weaker form is still false.
But that isn't even the point for most of us. The bigger issue is the potential for future abuse. The next version of McCarthyism will, if it happens, be swift and brutal because they'll just get NSA to hand over the data they hold, and it won't matter if I used privately managed mail systems.
Or if you decide to become politically active, and your views are not aligned with those of the US power structures:
Just last night I was leafing through notes I wrote 20 years ago, as a teenager, when I'd just started being politically active. It only lasted 5 years or so before I got disillusioned and pretty much just dropped everything (except ranting online like a grouchy old man).
But during that period, I had a lot of correspondence that quite likely would have triggered interest from intelligence agencies: I was active in marxist organisation, and I spent a substantial amount of time contacting groups in various parts of the world to try to kickstart and international network.
That included contacts with several anarchist/communist/socialist/trotskyist groups in the US, as well as trade union organisers. It also included contact with other international groups and persons, some in countries where just expressing their political views to the wrong person could potentially get them imprisoned, and some of those countries are countries where the US is or were cosy with the incumbent regimes and where the CIA are known to have kidnapped and "rendered" people to for torture.
While there was undoubtably surveillance happening back then too, if I was in contact with these people today, I'd have to deal with the certainty of extensive surveillance, and the situation that the mere fact I was in contact with them ("metadata" would be sufficient to implicate these people as being in contact with people who'd label them as likely troublemakers) could potentially put them at risk of being imprisoned or worse because of US intelligence agencies. Despite the fact that none of the people I was in contact with ever planned anything that'd be illegal in any democratic country (though some were willing to face the risk of illegal peaceful demonstrations in countries that weren't).
Even just the knowledge of surveillance at this scale is stifling freedom of speech for those who does not know or are willing to engage in the hassle of taking technical measures to protect their speech, and will add serious restrictions for those who do know, and see it as important enough.
And here in Europe few people care - I've done consulting work work with defence institutions, for example.I might have a problem getting top secret clearance perhaps, though I doubt it - most countries don't consider the type of organisations I was involved with enough of a concern anymore. Now, if I were to lie about it when asked, I'm sure they'd find out and it'd be an issue.
There are certainly places I would want to be careful. The irony, though, is that politically I'd probably be seen with more suspicion in places like Cuba and China than in the US, as if these governments were to look into my political activity they'd find connections to groups they see as ideologically threatening (such as contact with Trotskyist groups like the Spartacists, which is a bigger ideological no-no). I've visited China, and did make very sure to keep my mouth firmly shut about politics for that reason.
The fact that a private company like Facebook knows a lot about you is not a problem as long as the company has a privacy policy and can be held accountable. The problem specifically is government access to the data. Unlike governments, companies like Facebook have never morphed into tyrannies. Facebook does not tax people, it does not prosecute, it does not put people in prison or fine them, it does not drone people, it does not go to war. Unlike Edward Snowden, an ex-Facebook employee who reveals Facebook's secret illegal activities does not have to fear for his life and take refuge in Russia.
It is just an entirely separate problem that is only superficially similar to the problem of the government knowing a lot about you.
And don't get me wrong, I understand that I can do stuff to stop these things, but I don't see why I should have to, quite frankly.
The point is that even if I have never visited Facebook, they more than likely know a lot about me already, unless explicitly going out of my way to stop it.
Which exist only due to the exact reason I described.
> The point is that even if I have never visited Facebook, they more than likely know a lot about me already, unless explicitly going out of my way to stop it.
Well, that's not what I was addressing. "Going out of your way to stop it" is simply becoming educated about what exactly it is we're doing when we use the Internet and societal institutions. Being prudent about what we enter into a form(either real or virtual) is key.
> Being prudent about what we enter into a form(either real or virtual) is key I agree. But then again, when I need to go out of my way to make sure that all of those little 'Like' icons aren't telling Facebook the sites that I visited, just because my browser loaded them, I think that's a line. Because where you are being explicit about the form being real or virtual, you also should be explicit about who or what is 'entering' data into that form... and even what that form looks like (because a lot of the time, it's just a lot of parameters attached to an image request).
Is there any evidence that privacy policies 1) are actually followed and 2) enable any accountability whatsoever and 3) are anything other than a meaningless token gesture?
I largely agree with your overall point, but this particular sub-point could do with a bit of modification in light of the history of company towns/stores. Unless you were including a division between social-network companies and the extractive industries in which companies towns were frequently found.
It's not a matter of whether or not the information is publicly available. We spend a significant part of our lives in (semi-)public spaces where people are free to observe us.
It's the collection, collation and use of that information that constitutes the violation of privacy.
To put it simply: thousands of people may be able to observe me going from A to B on a regular basis, which is fine. But not even my wife has complete knowledge of all my daily comings and goings. I even have a high degree of privacy from the person I've spent the last few decades with.
Compiling a complete record of all my public movements to the point where the owner of that database has better insight into my habits than even I myself have is a violation of that privacy. Unless I've given explicit permission to do so, and have a certain degree of control over what happens with that data.
The bottom line is, even people who post "everything" on Facebook quite rightly expect a certain degree of privacy. Doing something in public does not equate surrendering your privacy.
I like sex, I really do. But that doesn't mean I want to be drugged and raped by the police or stealth-humped by anyone. If anyone wants to have sex with me, I'd like to know before the act and definitely need to have a say in whether or not it'll happen.
I can only speak for myself, but my only sin is to still have an iPhone (soon to be replaced by an Ubuntu phone).
Apart from this, I have left all of the NSA partner companies' products/services in favor of open-source products (or else nothing). It's really not that difficult, much more of psychological "hurdle".
For those who missed it: https://prism-break.org/ is a good start.
There was once a ragtag band of traitors who felt the same way. Their names included: Jefferson, Adams, Hancock, Franklin, and 52 other signers of the Declaration of Independence from England.
One only needs to look at the influence of the British "Star Chamber" on the writing of our U.S. Constitution to understand exactly how our Founders would feel about a secret court with secret evidence chosen by only one man to decide which people get to violate their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination every single day... Or worse yet, to have a non-judicial secret court chosen by the executive that decides which American citizens to kill by drone strike.
Regardless of what party or president runs our country, many things must change.
It is extremely important to concentrate on up to now the most dramatic information. Discuss, write, ask.
Since they define the criteria for what is "interesting", it gives them the ability to inspect essentially all of the data they collect, and there is at present no real check on the loosening of what constitutes "interesting" over time.
Regards, the rest of the world.
America is the only country (so far) to have somebody brave and public spirited enough to stand up and blow the whistle, and the only country (so far) to have politicians with enough gumption and common sense to make the requisite fuss, and to start to stand up against the encroaching tide.
It might be ugly, but it sure beats the silent acquiescence we see elsewhere.
In other words, America is the only country where the political system is actually working to protect the general population against an overreaching security state.
As far as I can see, that puts America far far ahead of the rest of the world, thank you very much.
All communication will be captured all of the time.
The upshot -- we have the best excuse in years to begin purging our ruling class. Does the NSA have dirt on them? Did Snowden manage to get some of that dirt and hand it over to Putin?
Probably not, but as the mafiosi in Casino said, why take the chance?
Recent HN postings, political and newsy rather than technical, about the NSA, have included stories from: The Atlantic Wire (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6059446), Security Week (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6054198), USA Today (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5850606, article from 2006 but posted a couple of months ago), C-SPAN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5899226). Those were just the first few I found with a trivial Google search.
There are a number of stories from the Guardian. That would be because they (1) have run a lot of stories about this stuff and (2) have a good website. Do you see a problem with that?
Also, know that the rest of the main stream media don't seem to like the idea of discussing this mess and any possible solutions - probably b/c they're ultimately controlled by influential politicians or other moneyed interests.