How Americans Were Deceived About Cell Phone Location Data | Hacker News Reader

How Americans Were Deceived About Cell Phone Location Data

theatlantic.com

125 pointsrosser40 comments

Once again I'm left with a feeling of "well of course they have this information". What I'm shocked about is the fact that not ONE new bill, legislation, whatever has been passed to curb NSA activities. No one has been fired or resigned and not one of the NSA officials who lied before congress have been held accountable.

So much for hope and change. So much for democracy.

Makes me wonder - will it ever end? We are nowhere even close to seeing this stop. Or is 1984 going to come out to be actually true rather than just a work of fiction? Orwell thought of the future in 1947-1948. Wherever he is now, I am sure he is going all "told ya so!".

We will have to start voting for people who will end it, instead of promising us free stuff (which often as not, is a lie too).

The problem is that you can't know wether they'll do that until after you gave them power, and after that there is no real recourse (not in practice anyway). That's kind of where the whole thing falls down, and the idea that wanting to get re-elected keeps politicians in line turns out to be naive and simplicistic.

Heck, if I buy a piece of bread and there is a dead mouse in it, I can actually return it and get my money back! So many small transactions have safeguards against fraud or fucking up, but handing over the keys to whole nations? Right this way sir, make yourself at home. Imagine hiring a babysitter, and they just eat your baby, clear your fridge, and the cops force you to pay them for their hours regardless. That's kind of where democracy is at.

The solution is to assume that anyone who gets power will act in a 100% corrupt, cynical, and self-serving way. It's a bit like building fault tolerance into a distributed system. Even if each of your servers will only be unreliable a very small percentage of the time, you must assume that at any given time, any given server could be down, or your whole system will be fragile.

Similarly, a government that relies on the moral character of its officials rather than institutionalized checks and balances is a weak and easily exploitable system of government.

If you have the checks and balances, you can still hope for politicians that will keep their promises, but when many of them inevitably don't, they will be limited in the amount of damage they can do.

That's right. The argument I often hear from people about the Snowden stuff is that, in contrast with a corporation, the government is there for "its people" and "will never abuse its power". What they forget is that the government is run by people, and people are by nature selfish and are looking for personal gain. So as you say, I think that "a government that relies on the moral character of its officials" is doomed to get corrupted and exploited, sooner or later.

You're assuming that NSA data is not yet being used to influence the outcome of our elections.

Voting is pointless when you can't trust anyone. If we want improved privacy, we have to do it on our own. That means improved, open source tools for encryption, anonymous browsing and messaging.

Well, why should they curb it? Some citizens want it curbed, but that's not always a good reason to curb something. I say look at it from a political perspective. What does a congressman have to lose politically by introducing such a bill? Here's a hypothetical: A congressman introduces a bill, the bill gets passed, and a month later extremists successfully detonate a bomb in a populated area killing several people. It's now election time. Guess what the opponent's platform would most likely include. Probably something along the lines of: "I won't vote on laws that will endanger American lives." Game over for the congressman.

This is just one possibility why we haven't seen any significant movement towards legislation. It sounds oversimplified, but it can make or break an election.

How about: because there is still something called the constitution, and those who lie are the ones who swore and with the highest duty to protect it?

Why does constitution get to be completely ignored now, together with all the unconstitutional acts by the highest in the government?

Well following the Median-Voter theory, it really explains this all. The median US voter seems not to care and so there is not enough political incentive to curb these practices (the same here in Germany: there is not enough incentive for politicians to challenge the US on this).

To me it seems there is only one thing left to do: Inner emigration.

I have given up. I ignore Government. I really do not want my psychological/emotional well-being depended on the next worst thing coming from "The Government (TM)".

My fellow citizens don't care. OK; fine with me. Heading into police state? OK; fine with me. When dictatorial police state finally arrives I am gone. Have fun you citizens who never cared.

Where do hell do you emigrate? What place has such laws that this scenario won't just repeat itself?

Since he said "Inner emigration" I think he means to say dropping off the grid. But I maybe wrong here.

I'm not sure how dropping off the grid would help you? If you don't d it all the way the others will find you. And living like that is impractical, while not preventing ability of authorities to find you (just minimizing).

Maybe because that congressman fears that any bills he proposes will be met with a NSA-powered smear campaign that leak will private information to the press revealing his drug habits, secret lover, moments of indiscretion, offshore bank account, whatever.

I keep seeing this theory. However, Occam's razor is best applied here.

> Well, why should they curb it?

Because ubiquitous surveillance undermines freedoms key to a functioning democracy. For example, freedom of the press: http://www.juancole.com/2013/11/censoring-scrutiny-mccauley....

I also think it undermines freedom of speech. When the Snowden stuff started coming out, I wanted to ask friends in government what they thought. But the only ways I can ask them are at risk from government snooping. Not wanting to put them at risk, there's no way I can ask them.

Basically, all of them took an oath. They should live up to that.

"I won't vote on laws that will endanger American lives" would preclude a politician from ever voting on anything, for or against.

That's what happens when you select a president based on a cult of personality combined with a practice of labeling critics as "racists". If the president were still GWB when all this stuff came to light there would be a constant drum beat of news coverage rolling into the next congressional and presidential elections where it would have a huge impact. Instead it'll take months and months of hedging around with the idea that maybe, kinda, sorta, perhaps Obama isn't the second coming and is actually responsible for instituting or retaining a lot of horrible government policies.

I don't think the president has much influence on such a situation, you should look at Keith Alexander, not Obama/Bush/whoever.

Apparently the president can direct government workers to ignore federal law, so I'm not buying your claim.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but Obama is kind of the CEO of the government, isn't he? So he's the person that should be held accountable for stuff going wrong (or right) in his government.

> That's what happens when you select a president based on a cult of personality

What President since World War I has not been elected on a cult of personality and lies?

> If the president were still GWB when all this stuff came to light there would be a constant drum beat of news coverage rolling into the next congressional

I don't think this is the right approach to the problem. Without getting too much into politics, if the general public didn't really care when torture was considered fair game nor when it was proved that the whole "WMDs in Irak" was made up (and let's remember that soldiers actually died because of that), I think they certainly wouldn't have cared about Snowden either.

The majority of the USA (outside of the HN echo chamber) neither cares one bit about this issue, or probably has even a close to remote understanding of the issue to care more than breezing over a column about it in the NY Times on the subway.

Thus what you actually believe to be a major issue upsetting the majority of Americans actually is not the case.

I'm tired of seeing the endless variations of this vapid comment.

This is a news article!

Guess what, this means other people care!

Wow!

There is also reporting every day about who ate the most elephant ears at the local fair. It doesn't mean more than a handful of folks either care, or read something just because it is in the paper.

I'd love to know where the fact(s) that support this "majority" come from.

The fact that you don't see any major movement besides small select groups here and there protesting about the issue and anything real being done about it.

I'm tired of hearing on HN "oh democracy is dead, the USA is run by the rich and by mega corporations". No, the issues your keep hearing endlessly brought up on HN every day are in fact not as popular to the rest of the USA as you think.

The Guardian is doing a great job improving their reader base by stretching out these Snowden revelations and keeping their traffic high for the minority of folks who care about the issue. So maybe that's why it seems to be bigger than it is, as each new release has 10 new HN stories posted about it and also how the NSA is the Most Evil Thing Ever.

Those statements are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

The NSA has stated that they cannot be effective at paying internationally without picking up data on Americans every so often. The effort to reduce the number of accidental collections to zero would be astronomical. Given that, Americans must decide if they want a foreign intelligence service like every other world power, or not.

As if they trully only collect on foreigners and the other stuff is "accidental". That's for small children who also believe in Santa.

The topic now however is lying and misleading the public on unconstitutional acts by the highest members of the government who formally are supposed to protect the mentioned constitution, not the possible technological problems of executing some specific spying actions and protecting the constitution at the same time.

The US Americans also need to decide if they would monitor the world-wide Internet traffic and other communication channels full-scale.

If so, the US will have less influence, less mindshare, less business.

The US will have the fate of an empire few need and which is not sufficiently funded: morally and financially.

We weren't deceived... Just think about what they could technically collect based on modern technologies and logically conclude that they do or will do.

"Remember when the administration said X? They lied." - seems to be happening quite often.

The almost funny thing is that at the time they also say they wouldn't have the authority to do that anyway, but when they get caught doing it, they always try to turn it around and say "but of course it's legal - and it's necessary anyway (implying that it doesn't really matter if it's legal or not)!"

And yeah, it's getting a little ridiculous how everytime one more of the leaks is unveiled, nobody is punished - in any way.

Does anyone know any preventative measures?

There is no preventing such a well-funded and pervasive adversary. There is only acceptance of the situation and after that we decide to what extent we're willing to react.

So far the answer to the latter seems to be "to no extent".

A properly informed and angry citizenry.

By the way, just a couple of thousand signatures needed for ECPA reform petition, and today is the last day (might be just hours, not sure):

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/reform-ecpa-tell-g...

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