The Day the Internet Didn’t Fight Back
bits.blogs.nytimes.com
bits.blogs.nytimes.com
What really hurts is loss of revenue to global companies. We need to collectively boycott firms until THEY resolve the problem. It is their tax write-down lobbying donations that keep these jokers we call senators in power.
If we really want to protest against say, monitoring, then we should be building free tools for people to easily move their email away from GMail or building something better than email as an alternative.
If we want to discourage Concast from throttling Netflix, then we should all collectively dump Comcast and move to a company that promises they won't.
If we want to discourage the NSA then lobbying government as individuals isn't going to cut it. That horse has already bolted. That horse needs a bullet to the head. Corporations are the only entities powerful enough to stop government. We need to empower them to fix the problem.
We think that protesting within the confines of the system will work. It doesn't. We think that protesting in the street will work. It doesn't (Iraq War protests anyone?).
It works outside the western world because they aren't kept within what I call "the sheep bubble". Western governments know how to keep the people within a bubble that provides just enough comfort to keep the vast majority happy. Places where we have seen revolutions haven't maintained that bubble.
Since we don't have direct control over the bubble in the western world, we have few options for collective revolt.
I would like to see this (very cool) system that you have collectively put together for yesterday's protest, to be pivoted and used to actively boycott companies that we collectively see as damaging to the us sheep.
Then we become the wolves.
There isn't a simple solution to mass surveillance but one mitigating strategy may be to encourage more people to run their own web services, a la freedombox/freedombone/arkOS, and encourage a "friends host friends" policy. If enough people went down that route then it could affect the bottom line of various companies, and hence apply some pressure for meaningful change.
No, that you can not guarantee. No one can predict the series of events of that this or any other form of protest might enable[1]. These social unrest situations initialize events that can only be approached by chaos theory since we can't even count the variables involved. In mathematics of chaos we have the notable butterfly effect. The 'Arab Spring' was initialized by a guy who set himself on fire on a small town after suffering what he considered to be a misjudgment (Mohamed Bouazizi[3]).
I know my examples are far-fetched by I'm trying to show the bigger picture here: When the police officer was harassing Bouazizi for the n-th time, even if he told that he will set himself on fire, I'm sure that she would not care less. She may even call some friends to enjoy the show... What she couldn't foresee is that a few months later Ben Ali would have to step down for something a corrupted, insignificant in the bigger picture police officer had initiated. We might argue that if it were not for Bouazizi something else would have happened to spin the wheels of the Tunisian revolution, but we don't know for sure and when you add to many 'if' you end up writing a romance.
[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxQX9fYf2aI
The US is also extremely stable since the American Civil War.
The Arab spring was different because the vast majority of the people had nothing to do and their government's used brutal oppression rather than the sheep bubble I talked about above.
Idle hands and brutality are are poisonous mix.
If we really want to protest against say, monitoring, then we should be building free tools for people to easily move their email away from GMail or building something better than email as an alternative.
Don't build better. Make what is there unusable. Remember the enemy can use it too.
If we want to discourage Concast from throttling Netflix, then we should all collectively dump Comcast and move to a company that promises they won't.
Stop buying Netflix. Steal all the films you want and start distributing them on USB sticks.
If we want to discourage the NSA then lobbying government as individuals isn't going to cut it. That horse has already bolted. That horse needs a bullet to the head. Corporations are the only entities powerful enough to stop government. We need to empower them to fix the problem.
Hang both the government and the corporations. Corporations and government are at one when there is as much inbreeding and crossover as there is.
We think that protesting within the confines of the system will work. It doesn't. We think that protesting in the street will work. It doesn't (Iraq War protests anyone?).
Very true but isn't that what you're promoting. Destroying infrastructure works well (Afghanistan war, not the US for example).
It works outside the western world because they aren't kept within what I call "the sheep bubble". Western governments know how to keep the people within a bubble that provides just enough comfort to keep the vast majority happy. Places where we have seen revolutions haven't maintained that bubble.
Make it uncomfortable for people. Take down their luxury items, their phone networks, their ability to pay for things.
Since we don't have direct control over the bubble in the western world, we have few options for collective revolt.
All we need to do is make it uncomfortable for people.
The only reason we as technology people don't do this is because we're comfortable as well. We're cowards. We're talkers, not do-ers.
There should be no wolves be it us or them.
Now I patiently await to be bagged and tagged.
I agree, but how do you do this?
I think that my point was hidden within my ramblings, so I'll try and condense it.
The singular power that every individual has, is to choose what they buy and what they consume. The whole system is built upon the premise that we consume.
Hence, I would like to see consumers work together as a powerful block, that can effectively combat the power of both government and corporations.
First we influence corporations to control the government. Once you've done that you can keep turning the screws on the corporations that don't fit to our ideal.
We are the populous. Collectively we have more power than any government and any corporation.
You just need to find a way to turn this picture upside down: http://i.imgur.com/yStRSPk.jpg
Move to black markets, move to stand-alone non-country backed currencies and swap things and services. Prevent consumption by making it impossible to do so by taking out the mediums for cash flow i.e. mobile networks, inter-bank transfer systems and large single points of failure like payment companies. Blockade roads and sabotage rail network signalling systems, fuel supplies etc.
When people are unable to consume and find eating at risk and can no longer move using sanctioned paths, the power balance will shift to a necessity based economy, at which point the representatives, government and economic systems which allow this to happen will collapse.
Nothing is going to change until everyone is in the same boat.
Someone has to say it though and it's only an adaptation of the motivation and procedure of declaring war.
It's exactly the same conversation people have before they invade a country so to be taken up on this would be hypocritical.
I have no intention of acting or inciting myself, as I'm quite comfortable, physically broken, a coward. Plus I rather would like to play with my new computer before the world falls down around me :)
Will it? What are some examples from history of this occurring?
Interestingly enough on the subject of networks and systems, many large commercial airplanes (air commerce and transportation are how much of the global economy?) are using a "totally unencrypted and unauthenticated" protocol [0][1] that can be used to transmit and inject packets (i.e spoof air planes) in the sky and wreak havoc on already worn thin aviation systems and controllers… available to anyone for under $50 and probably for free with some recycled gear lying around and ones local library… which should be fully implemented by 2020.
Also on the subject on making it real for the people, social networks have huge information leakages that people are only ok with until it ends up on a site that they never consented to or signed up for. Exploiting the fact that social networks and search engines can extract the vain behaviors of people, one or companies can easily exploit such phenomenon (for fun or for profit because corporations can have ability to absolve individuals of personal liability by exchanging capital gained from such endeavors to the State) to cause discomfort to such audiences that would not care or be aware of such things that are increasingly discussed on HN, thus opening up the discomfort surface for other issues to seep through.
All this to say, the means for The People (whomever and wherever they may be) to exhibit such control or sovereignty over themselves is already here (and always has, or so can be argued) if one looks around for just a little bit, so the time probably hasn't come but history suggests (especially in times of economic turmoil) that such times are always around the corner. But history also suggests that, in the aftermath of such things, they won't appear quite the same as they were looked upon before.
[0] http://dangerousprototypes.com/2013/02/28/defcon-20-renderma...
The thing is that NSA has the ability to attack the infrastructure. If for example they can go to carrier providers and monitor the pipe no matter what we’d do on top of that would be futile. Furthermore, they can backdoor cryptography algorithms-which to my opinion is the scariest from all the revelations regarding NSA. So even if we move everyone to SSL we wouldn’t know if that’s enough.
The financial pain you’re referring to cuts both ways. If you were to boycott commercial solutions then you’d have to go and find alternatives. Which could be relatively easy for tech-savvy individuals but what about companies? They wouldn’t do it. Simply as that. No one would go out of their way to install an alternative to Exchange Server in order to put pressure on Microsoft. It’s not realistic.
Basically what we need is a new Internet. We have to change everything. I don’t know if that’s even feasible but my guess is that even if it was it will take a lot of time.
> Building an alternative to Gmail? Nope. We can’t do that. We don’t have the resources.
When you think about it, most of the internet depends on open source software built by "us". Programming languages, databases, web servers, content management systems, statistical analysis, image manipulation, and yes, email clients/servers. Given all that, a self-hosted email application should be possible.
I suspect the reason we don't do it is not because we don't have the resources, but because... actually I don't know why we don't. Perhaps all the investment slush funds have made us lazy and selfish. Perhaps the social networks and mobile games have made us less creative. Perhaps some of the fanatical open source software wars have put us off doing the same thing.
However, I think the big problem with these will be adoption. I that first off before the masses move to such services, the current status quo needs to become quite bad. Bittorent adoption grew because the MPAA kept killing stuff like Napster and Kazaa, and then they got the government to seize all streaming website domains, to the point where nobody had an alternative except using Bittorent. If TPB can't be accessed anymore, it will push millions to use TPB's upcoming browser.
There's another problem with some of these. They are stand-alone apps. I think what will get us the "encrypted by default Internet" and much better privacy and anonymity will emerge out of the Bitcoin community.
Something like http://www.ethereum.org which plans to build an Internet-like platform might give us that. The reason this might become more popular is that it's not just an app. It's a platform on which you'll see all sorts of very secure and private apps appear, to the point where most of your "Internet usage" is done on that platform, whether it's for visiting your most important websites, or chatting with friends or e-mailing them. I think that's how we'll get that secure by default Internet.
I'm skeptical of IETF and the like fixing the current Internet, because I think there are too many stakeholders in the current Internet that will fight against any serious changes to how the Internet works. I fully expect Google, for example, to fight against any proposal for anonymity. So the real changes will have to happen bottom-up, rather than top-down, and grow naturally. Hopefully this won't take too long, though.
Personally, I ended up using Bittorrent because it was superior to the alternative that's popular in my country (DC++). Because it is peer to peer and because the client can download from multiple seeds at the same time, Bittorent makes it easy to saturate my download bandwidth.
From a publisher's perspective for legal torrents (e.g. think of Ubuntu.com) it's better to distribute a torrent link on your website, than it is to provide a direct download link or to upload your stuff on Kazza, or Napster, or Dropbox, or Megaupload, or whatever. Notice how bandwidth and finding a host for popular stuff is a problem, being the reason for why people still use SourceForge.
I cannot agree with you - people don't switch because of government-related actions. People switch when the alternative is superior. Let me give you another success story waiting to happen - Bittorent Sync makes it easy to synchronize stuff in your network. It's still rough, but if I were Dropbox, that's the competition I would fear.
Anyway, peer2peer when implemented right works better than the server-client model, at least on broadband connections that can afford the upload (sadly, doesn't work so well on mobile phones, either because of battery life or bandwidth limits, but these are limitations that are not going to exist in the future). If you implement something that works and is friendly to users, then it can win in the marketplace.
Taking Ethereum or any other "new internet" technology as an example:
Suppose this thing is actually sucessful, grows a critical mass and becomes a threat to the survivellance activities.
If nothing else helps, someone could just introduce a law that mandates all ISPs to allow incoming connections only to machines on a "national server list" - market the bill as "War against botnets" or something.
Getting put on the list is easy for every legitimate business owner - for a moderate fee of $2000/month, subject to renewal every three months.
The reactions to this would be mild. Apple/Google/Facebook etc would actually lose competition, so don't expect any protest from them. There'd be no public outcry either since you could still perfectly well watch cat videos, post photos of your dinner on Twitter or buy the latest flappy bird clone on the app store. But oops, no more file sharing, no more Bitcoin, no more Ethereum, no more peer-to-peer networks at all.
What I want to say with this is that this is not a problem that can be solved technologically - the NSA or whatever other services take their place have by far the stronger position here.
I wonder whether that could be a possible "fix" to get companies to push back harder against the government. If the various OSS licenses were amended to include a clause that forbade the use of the software to aid government surveillance, it would force providers to choose between continuing to leverage open source software and continuing to cooperate with the government.
Agreed. We don't have the resources.
> Basically what we need is a new Internet. We have to change everything.
But that would need even more resources!
The protocol is called IMAP and the client is called <insert-random-email-client-here>. Email is old and just about every email client does its job sufficiently good to achieve what it was made for: writing and sending emails.
With IMAP, everything is even synced across all devices. Gmail is actually the LEAST important thing to use in my opinion. If people are unwilling to sacrifice a relatively unnecessary software like Gmail, I don't see any chance in boycotting products/companies at all.
It looked like Internet Explorer was a permanent browser monopoly just over a decade ago.
The Spread Firefox campaign - a crowd marketing campaign - fixed that. Combined, of course with a well made browser.
The result was that Apple and Google could later compete on another level with Microsoft (without Spread Firefox, websites wouldn't have worked on iPhones or Chrome).
Something similar can absolutely be done again.
Thanks, almost entirely, to Google's money.
Yes, Mozilla gets most of its income from Google right now, but saying that Spread Firefox's success was almost entirely attributable to Google's money is tantamount to saying that Mozilla would've been unable to secure any other source of funding.
I remember noting it was odd in the late 90s that IE was free on computers (because they were all Windows...) yet half the people I knew paid money for this Netscape thing.
https://web.archive.org/web/19961115062838/http://merchant.n...
Anybody else remember the Internet2 push from the late 90's?
Yeah, probably not.
Still plenty of room for innovation out there.
Problem of creating new Internet lies in the infrastructure. We can't just build it upon current network to which NSA (and other agencies) already has an access. It maybe encrypted, but as you pointed yourself, encryption can be broken.
So, personally, i can see this new Internet only if there was a new way to send and receive data with less infrastructure overhead as there is now. And that might be possible in the future with stuff like quantum teleportation.
None of those are mutually exclusive (and neither is boycott). It's perfectly fine to do all of them. In fact that's probably the most effective thing to do!
(And I'm pretty sure most people who protested the war in Iraq didn't actually believe that their protest would stop the war. Sometimes you want to show the world you care about something because it's the right thing to do)
The people argue till they are blue in the face as to which one is right or wrong, but the differences between them are negligible. What's funny is that we waste unbelievable amounts of energy and time in making believe that there is a difference.
In the case of the US, politics is not too dissimilar to football or any team sport. You side with one or the other. Without both sides the game is boring. The US lowers the risk of dissent and instability by discouraging the possibility of more than two sides.
I have come to believe that none of the traditional routes are effective. They are merely a trap. They are simply a big brick wall to shout at.
What was to be expected? The offices of my Senators and Representatives were swamped all day with phone calls.
The author keeps paying lip-service to the comparison of this effort to SOPA/PIPA --- which was entirely different. Those bills were a direct challenge to the internet as we knew it, and everyone (including the big players) moved in to participate. That protest was about two game-changing bills with votes on the floor (all other paths for success had failed - if you're Google,Wikipedia, etc); this protest was about the status quo.
Our elected officials heard us today - from seemingly nowhere, that the status quo isn't acceptable. The verbiage directly called the kettle black on the supposed "FISA Reform Bill," reminding politicians that the powder is dry if head too far off course. And that (IMHO) makes a big statement.
I felt the post was unjustifiably negative[/defeatist] with a link bait title and lame observations. It would be great to see Google, Facebook, Wikipedia, etc. play a larger role and "see the bigger picture"-- especially given that companies like Microsoft have officially recognized dragnet surveillance as an "advanced persistent threat." [0] Again, it would be great, but it can't be necessary. We want their help, but we cannot need it.
PS - It's defeatist to say the following: "internet protests will never change anything in Washington."
"The Powerbroker," a Pulitzer-Prize winning biography praised by Aaron Swartz [1], conveys the following two lessons with regards to affecting change in government: 1.) the only thing which matters (from the perspective of a common man) is raising the political stakes in every manner possible, forcing the issue into the court of public opinion where politicians must pick sides in a very public affair. 2.) The other things which matter are in conversations which you are not a part of. . . ... dig in. This is a minor skirmish in a long war (of attrition) against the Est..
[0] - http://www.theverge.com/2013/12/5/5177554/microsoft-plans-se... [1] - https://zolabooks.com/list/aaron-swartz-reading-list/1
To many (read: The Majority) of people the above companies are the internet. In the same way the people who think this way used to think AOL was The Internet (Capitals important). It really is sad that this seems to be true and that a couple companies have so much influence on what the internet is and does. But it really did make it easy to downplay the whole thing by saying "If it was so important why didn't Google get involved?"
Lowercase "internet" refers to any network of networks, for example a router which lets machines connected via Ethernet talk to machines connected via WiFi.
Capitalised "Internet" is a proper noun referring to a particular network of networks which began life as the ARPANET.
"Wiki" refers to user-generated Web sites in the style of WikiWikiWeb; since you put it in a list of Web sites/companies, I'll presume you meant "Wikipedia", which is a particular Wiki.
So whilst AOL, Google, Yahoo, Facebook and Wikipedia aren't "The Internet", at least your hypothetical "Majority" have enough respect for the Internet to refer to it by name.
You can't deny that there wasn't any real, marketed involvement used by the top Internet companies to promote the cause.
Yes, the execution of this topic's awareness was very lackluster, so what exactly is your point?
For the record I wasn't 'complaining about words' I was pointing out that the lack of involvement by major players on the internet was a huge detriment to this cause because it failed to reach the 'less advanced' (and arguable majority of) users of the internet.
Generally speaking, HN promotes constructive criticism and bashes trolling in direct or indirect ways.
http://jacquesmattheij.com/The+Unofficial+HN+FAQ#downvoted
The FAQ there may be useful for you as a new user in general. :) Enjoy HN
Maybe because participating also means "telling people that they're constantly being monitored" (and further raising the perceived seriousness of the issue). And maybe the only solution to escape the madness is to simply drop big parts of the currently available technology.
Apple/Google/Microsoft/Yahoo/AOL/etc are after your money, they only protect your rights if it means "more money", not if it threatens to impact their profit.
So they have no ($$$) incentive to raise the issue. (Our culture is still immature, it favors money over ethical values.)
That's a wild generalization and baseless accusation.
First of all, collaborating with the NSA brings nothing to their bottom line, only infrastructure costs. Second, they are forbidden to be honest about NSA's demands and therefore this has hurt their image in the international market-place.
Maybe most of us were aware that our communications are intercepted, but we had no idea to what extent that happens. As a non-US citizen, I now think twice about collaborating with US-based companies. And it's not because I fear the NSA, I really don't, but rather because I'm thinking that the same backdoors these companies were forced to build can be discovered and used by other organizations that may be closer to home.
And even worse than that - as a non-US citizen I am not represented by any of your officials and suing anybody in the US would be totally unfeasible because of costs. The only thing I can do is to loudly complain about it on the Internet or to my acquaintances and that's about it. If it were my own government doing this shit - at the very least I'd have other options.
Make no mistake - the credibility of all US-based companies suffers and because of this you will see in the following years a lot of (1) proposals for country-wide Intranets, (2) governments switching to their own forks of open-source software and (3) businesses switching to local software providers and so on. You can already see signs of this happening and it's precisely companies like Apple/Google/Microsoft/Yahoo that will take the biggest hit.
And I fear that US citizens and officials aren't taking this seriously - as if us, non-US citizens should have expected this surveillance, without thinking that the US placed itself as the guardian of the Internet, that trust has now been eroded and the effects (e.g. country-wide Intranets, local software achieving monopoly by government intervention, etc) will be negative for everybody.
EDIT: speak of the devil - http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-14-142_en.htm
Global surveillence is (part of) these companies' business models. They don't support privacy, they just disagree on who should be allowed to do the snooping.
> They are forbidden to be honest about NSA's demands and therefore this has hurt their image in the international market-place.
The problem is that these demands are possible to fulfil in the first place. Solving that problem would force these companies to find new cash cows.
With NSA we are talking about something different. If the NSA can engage in subverting encryption standards, there's no end to what they can do. If they ask Google to plant a backdoor in the Chrome binary, or Microsoft to plant a backdoor in Windows, or Apple to plant a backdoor in iOS/OS X, thus removing Google/Microsoft/Apple in the connection between me and them - I'll never find out about it and my software will be defective "by design" and as I've said, my personal fear is not the NSA, but rather organizations that are closer to home. For example, if backdoors in the software that I use exist, then they can be discovered by organized crime syndicates that say, are in the business of stealing credit cards, or whatever.
Can Google/Microsoft/Apple/Yahoo promise to do the right thing with such possible exploits? Can they promise to fix them, as they are discovered? Of course not. Hence, I cannot trust them anymore, because it is not in them that I have to trust.
> The problem is that these demands are possible to fulfil in the first place.
Well, shit happens all the time, mail accounts get hacked and so on. To me the real problem is that the software that I use may be defective by design and I cannot trust these providers to fix it or to tell me about it. Voting with my wallet also doesn't work anymore, as long as the alternative is still a US-based company and in this regard I now feel that all US-based companies are equal. Yahoo even tried fighting warrantless spying and failed and we found out about it only because of Snowden's leaks. So even if they want to do the right thing, they can't.
* Jimmy Wales posted on his talk page inviting discussion on the issue [0]
* There was support for having articles on the main page all be related in some way to the topic of mass surveillance [0]
* A handful of editors then made a subpage and began plans for a request for comment (RfC)... [1]
Then said handful of people made a series of bungles and strange decisions (like naming the proposal "Surveillance awareness day" instead of associating with the protest) and ultimately didn't bring the RfC to the community for proper discussion.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Jimbo_Wales/Archive_...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Surveillance_awarene... (see history, talk page)
TL;DR Wikipedia didn't decide not to get involved in the protest, 2 or 3 editors dawdled and made bad decisions until we ran out of time to discuss it.
Due to their non-monetary goals, total reliance on volunteers, and transparent structure, they are more like the UN than Google, which inevitably leads to weird arguments.
As an aside the people that wrote the open letter (https://thedaywefightback.org/letter-to-wikipedia/) could have instead opened an RfC on-wiki (no account required). It would just take a few minutes to figure out the MediaWiki markup and read the relevant submitting an RfC help page. It's a shame there appears to be such a slender intersection between open internet advocates and Wikipedia editors.
Optimist in me says maybe if people realize how broken it is on small scale, they'd think how broken it should be federal government scale. Pessimist in me says there's absolutely zero evidence people would actually take any conclusion from it and not just use it as an excuse for not doing anything.
Drupal also had the same discussion and through informal consensus decided to run the banner.[1]
I was one of the developers on TDWFB and still wasn't 100% sold to run political movements on cdnjs.com.
The article in question is pretty misleading. There was significant discussion on Reddit[2] and with the help of the admins there was a pretty positive sentiment floating around too(No statistics but I'm guessing they were a huge source of calls, given all the reports on the thread).
The ending quote unintentionally gives credit to the protest I think . Of course everyone knows on-line petitions are a weak form of protest, which is why TDWFB focused very hard on phone calls and did quite well in that regard.
"“Online petitions,” one Reddit user wrote of the protest. “The very least you can do, without doing nothing.”"
So we drove 88k+ completed phone calls, this number does not include the 6k+ phone calls that we couldn't connect because some senators turned off their voice mail(Reddit comments suggest Feinstein was one of them). This would bring the attempted phone calls to just shy of 95k but the tool is still be used today so we hope to hit 100k attempted phone calls. Plus there were a tonne of untracked calls and we hope to get a full number soon.
Our figure on the homepage for emails is semi-misleading. We are actually delivering those emails to 3 reps per zipcode which brings the email count 183k to 549k.
244k international people signed the petition.
Including the day before and the day after, our traffic to the homepage is sitting somewhere over 1 million visitors.
We gained about 350k fb likes and 60k tweets(of the domain) on the 11th.
And according to Cloudfront and my credit card, we served about 1 billion requests. I don't have the numbers on how many times the banner was displayed just yet.
Edit: As pointed out by ronaldx, the article states that DuckDuckGo did not participate, their logo did change and remains so.
Also major thank you to Twilio for sponsoring the calls.
[1] https://groups.drupal.org/node/398548 [2] http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/1xm3qu/today_we_fight_...
Literally? I didn't know that.
It actually seems like this NSA stuff has been harmful to a number of large American internet companies, so I guess they haven't done a very good job of running things in their own interests.
That said, I disagree with the grandparent's point that Corporation literally are the government. Instead, the need for large media budgets for re-election campaigns drives the political process, which makes corporations and politicians cosy.
A large percentage of those are overseas, and the remainder are concentrated in Mountain View (yes, I'm aware of satellite offices in SF, NYC, Boston, etc.) Call it 15K HQ employees, which should be enough to make an impact. Right?
Except that their own senator, California's Dianne Feinstein, remains arguably the most vocal NSA surveillance enthusiast on Capitol Hill. She'll get reelected with or without the help of those 15K voters -- in a state with a population of 40 million. (In reality the number is even lower because not all employees are U.S. citizens eligible to vote.)
And those 15K concentrated employees are negligible compared to companies like AT&T, which has 243,000 employees which tend to be inside the U.S. and spread more evenly through congressional districts: http://finance.yahoo.com/q/pr?s=T+Profile
Of course AT&T has long had a cozy relationship with the NSA very different from left coast companies: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57589012-38/
BTW, compare to WalMart's 2.2 million employees: http://finance.yahoo.com/q/pr?s=WMT+Profile
"Literally" is certainly a stretch, but at least indirectly, corporations spanning many sectors are very heavily influencing the government - for example finance, energy, food, military.
Just to make a very immediate example, bankers who had a central role in the 2000s financial crisis, are now executives or advisors of the government.
Process-wise, the HSBC case showed who's in charge between governments and large banks.
That's why the US has the highest corporate tax rate in the OECD?
2. That profit isn't "hidden". It's in plain sight. It's not even a loophole. The money is still taxable - but only once it is repatriated.
2. The US corporations still pay more tax than do corporations in other nations.
3. US corporations with no foreign income tend to pay ~35% after deductions (per "independent" study cited above).
So yes, its easy to tell that US corp tax rates are higher.
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2012/02/27/433250/general-e...
I could probably find numerous such examples among the richest companies in the US. So something about your claims doesn't work.
"There are more ways to measure effective tax rates than there are to order coffee at Starbucks"
So tell me, what do you want? Lower taxes on corporations? They don't seem to be fleeing the US, and are reporting higher profits than ever.
Read the paper I linked. If you want to argue, argue with the points he makes (and which I've attempted to repeat here). The paper very specifically addresses the sorts of made up numbers which you've cited.
All taxes are distortionary. For maximum efficiency, all income taxes (which by definition punish income and saving) should be replaced with progressive VATs (thus encouraging income and saving). The worst distortionary taxes are the capital gains tax (which solely punishes saving) and the corporate income tax (which has no reason to exist at all - all disbursements are taxed as personal income tax anyways, hence the double taxation complaints).
And yes, some companies do leave the US:
...Bisaro also extolled the added benefit of lowering his company's effective tax rate, which he forecast would drop from 28% to 17%. Based on Bisaro's strongly-held opinions about U.S. corporate tax policy, that must have been a major selling point for the deal. [1]
And hey, guess what I bet you didn't know? It's actually illegal for US companies to leave the country! They have to "merge" with a foreign company to move out.
[1] http://features.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2013/05/21/actavis-the...
And what happens when they hit hard times? Let me guess, lower taxes? So just lower and lower taxes, all the time, no matter what?
The US has the highest statutory tax rates on corporate investment in the OECD. The effective tax rates on corporate income are vastly lower than that, and often actually zero — especially for those large and powerful enough to have sway over the government.
The GAO study you're citing is infamously incorrect.
1. Corporations (and humans) can carry losses forward: if they lose money in 2008 but make money in 2009, they get to even out the two years. This is only fair. Thus they can appear to pay zero tax in a year in which they made money.
2. The "effective rate" counts the aforementioned foreign retained profits as being taxed at zero. Which they're not.
3. An independent analysis found that effective corporate tax rates are "in the mid to upper 20's", and that corporations which operate solely in the US pay 35% corporate income tax:
http://taxprof.typepad.com/files/140tn0197.pdf
TL;DR The US really, really, really does have the highest corporate tax rates in the OECD.
Control of the government by corporations is a complex phenomenon, and taxation is only one part of many.
Lobbyists take quite commonly part in the administration, and once they do, they certainly don't start to act against their own interest.
Little steps.
You shouldn't characterize the dismissal of a single technique as ineffective to achieving a stated goal as some sort of a spiritual or moral failing (or whatever "defeatist" is supposed to mean other than 'a prediction of defeat.')
Would you say that the statement "your private prayers will never change anything about segregated schools" is defeatist?
Personally, I think that protests succeed through creating an intimidating public physical presence that actively prevents the behavior being protested against, or through the violent reaction of the powers being protested against to the protest causing outrage amongst passive supporters of those powers.
I don't see any way that banner ads fit into that.
That being said, it was a great effort to spread good and current information to people, and to remind Congress that we are a special interest group that needs to be catered to.
>Our elected officials heard us today - from seemingly nowhere, that the status quo isn't acceptable.
They hear this from abortion, gun rights, and immigration protesters on both sides every day, except for those causes, people are willing to fight to the death. For this cause, there's a webapp to help people send email. For a politician, choosing either position on any of the former issues will completely obliterate any influence that the latter will have on the vote.
We're really going to have to get together in real life, and make plans to make life unpleasant for specific people who oppose our goals and convince other people to do the same. The problem with that is that when you start doing that, you're going to go on a list, there are going to be informants that you think are your friends, and all of your communications and movements are going to be scoured for opportunities for parallel construction in order to imprison you or to blackmail you into becoming an informant. You may lose your job, you may go to prison.
There are a number of people who have committed to this lifestyle over the NSA issue. The strength of any effective movement is going to be measured by the number of those people.
As a lot of people have said, I agree that the most important thing that we can do is create channels through which they (and hopefully we) can communicate without being monitored. I think that a very close second is to create channels for the average person to be able to donate funds to the imprisoned without ending up on a list.
The next step is building effective organizations for these people to get behind, organizations that promote a minimalist tech/privacy platform - leave off controversial issues like immigration, as much as it tempts you. The purpose of these organizations should be that anybody who supports it gets reelected, and anybody that doesn't loses their job. This is the same principle that powerful unions and interest groups work on.
All other bullshit issues of the day have to become secondary importance, or this organization will never gain clout.
Until Feinstein is enjoying 7-day vacations every week, the job is not done. If you're thinking "OMG, that might mean a moderate California Republican took her seat! Think of the childrenz!" then you're not up for the task.
Don't be an idiot. It's defeatist to say that we can never change anything to rid ourselves of oppression. It's perfectly valid to say that online petitions and online protests are relatively useless because usually it follows from that that there are more effective alternatives.
Do you really think they didn't already know that? Do you think they give a fuck? Do you think they might just be doing whatever the hell they damn well please, despite all of it being against the people's will?
This isn't about calling "your" (read: "Wall Street's" etc) representatives. It's not about pleading for less intrusive and oppressive "governance". You know, letters or phone calls don't actually compel politicians to do anything.
This is about a small group of people being in power, and everyone else subject to it. Do you think you need a bunch of rulers? Can't you make your own decisions? -Should someone be "legislating" your life?
Would you like to have a personal law just for you that mandated eating your veggies and exercising regularly? Would you want that law enforced through violence if necessary? -No? What if someone decided to force you to exercise anyway? Would that be alright? It's for your own good, after all! -No? But.. why? Why would that not be alright, if the government forcing you to pay taxes or buy insurance is alright?
But this was also just a case of really lazy journalism. Nicole Perlroth failed to contact any of the organizations or companies involved before publishing her article, and it contained a number of factual inaccuracies, only some of which have now been corrected:
- "Sites like Tumblr, Mozilla and DuckDuckGo, which were listed as organizers, did nothing to their homepages."
None of them were "listed as organizers." Their logos appeared on their site, but supporting/participating != organizing. This would have been easily corrected if she'd asked.
DuckDuckGo changed their homepage logo yesterday, and Mozilla added a link and logo on the browser start page, which is visible every time someone opens a new window.
- "[List of large tech co's] only participated Tuesday insofar as having a joint website flash the protest banner."
Facebook, Google and Twitter also released statements in support, and tweeted/shared on social media.
- "Most of those [calls and emails] were directed to Senator Dianne Feinstein."
I have no idea where she got this from. Feinstein did receive 2420 calls, but saying she received "most" of them is just nonsense.
- "But on privacy forums and Reddit, significant discussions failed to materialize."
Over 4,000 comments were posted to the reddit blog post that announced their participation and contained the banner. At least another 3,000 comments were made on other threads.
You can also see a diff of changes made to the post later in the day here: https://github.com/sinak/sinak.github.com/commit/d8050c45633...
Why didn't larger tech companies didn't take part? I think that's an interesting question worth a journalist investigating. As with SOPA, companies like Google left their decision until the last minute. But this time around they decided to support the protest, but not take part by adding content to their home pages. I'm not sure any one thing explains it. Larger tech has added a significant lobbying apparatus since 2011 and perhaps that's part of it. They're playing the inside political game much more so than they did a couple of years ago. If it turns out to be more effective that online activism, I'm not sure we can particularly criticize them for it.
They've also banded together on this issue under the "reformgovernmentsurveillance.com" banner. That makes participation a more complicated group decision-making process.
While we branded yesterday as "the day" (which I know some of you take issue with), this is by no means the end. It's one in a series of actions. The actual votes on bills like the USA Freedom Act and FISA Improvements Act are yet to come. We made a dent, but this is a process.
An incomprehensible statement, more like. Would you mind replacing the cliché slaw with something more closely resembling what you are actually trying to say?
Yes a lot of call volume was made, but I think the general public didn't really know it was happening. With SOPA, sites went black. Content became unavailable. Users didn't get what they wanted, so they tried to figure out why.
70,000 calls are great, but the that makes up a minuscule portion of the elected officials' demographics.
I think the largest problem here was that the campaign's objective was contacting representatives, whereas the SOPA's objective was educating the public. One lasts a day, the other is sustainable.
The vast majority of Americans could recognize that SOPA was just plain bad: bad for business, bad for users, bad for everybody.
IETF Internet guardians say "pervasive monitoring is an attack": https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-farrell-perpass-attac...
$52.6 Billion yearly budget is feeding the attacker: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/national/black-...
Seems a political reform force is needed or nothing will change. SOPA/PIPA gave us the taste of blood..
Tech workers today are too caught up in mainstream political bullshit - "parental notification laws for abortion are basically rape" and etc. - to actually do this.
I personally have never really liked the framing of the campaign. "The Day We Fight Back"? As if anyone's going to solve this problem between breakfast and their evening snack? I realize it has a connotation of 'a day on which we start fighting back', which is clearly clumsier as a slogan, but I think building up the expectations on a single day is a bad move in this context. To me it seems that way the initiative gets more fragile than it needed have been.
My respect to the people arranging it though. It's great to see activism protesting these crimes. Keep it up!
Today Is A Day We Try To Take A Sliver Of Our Spare Time And Do Something About Mass Surveillance, and so is every tomorrow until success.
But when Europe came together on stopping ACTA (I helped organize an IRL protest) it felt like the world was much more united on the issue. Yesterday I did nothing mainly because I felt left out because my little country did not matter.
The demonstrations were covered in the media in my country pretty heavily and I think a bunch of people screaming on the streets, giving out flyers and so on gives a much better impression on the general public than some websites having a banner or some telephone calls.
Seriously, America should get together on the streets AND swamp their telephone lines.
Unlike much of Europe, where the streets are used for walking and small cars, we have these big roads and big cars. These roads are for driving. Even the town squares in all the cities I've lived in were optimized for vehicles.
Now, we can take this to the streets. But all that does is piss off every man and woman trying to live their life and work and get groceries.
Tiny streets like these? http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/oct/16/french-protests...
>all that does is piss off every man and woman trying to live their life and work and get groceries.
That's the same thing it does everywhere else. The reason you have street protests is to disrupt what people are doing and have them focus on what you are saying.
The reason street protests "don't work" in the US is because of a combination of the precariousness and conservatism of the middle class. It's too big a risk for middle-class people to participate in a protest, and the majority of them are racist law-and-order voters who have voted to eliminate most of the rights of the accused and to militarize their police forces out of their fear of black and hispanic people. Now that we're afraid of the Middle East, we've eliminated most of the rights of the unaccused.
Europeans have a different history, and the development of civil rights there wasn't entirely born out of race-based fear, so their situation is different.
Here, only poor people and students protest, and they are completely ignored by a monolithic media except to be taunted, confronted by police at a ratio of 10 cops to a protester, and carted off to jail if their permits aren't current or if they step off the sidewalk.
http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/General/Pict...
Or the union protest in Michigan?
http://images.politico.com/global/2012/12/11/121211_michigan...
http://www.bloomberg.com/image/iQN6PbfAWHDw.jpg
Yeah, it happens in the US too.
The truth is that you really don't matter to American politicians, and American politicians are (ostensibly) the only ones who wield power over the NSA. Our politicians don't even care about their constituents; why in the world would they care about you?
The general American psyche holds the rights of US citizens in high regard while ignoring or outright disparaging the rights of non-citizens. We have to be realistic. Our message is much more powerful when we focus on the crimes against the American people.
And that's why I think I feel left out, even by the group I would be supporting. I think the better way would be to describe the crime against the worlds population including the American one.
There is also mass surveilance going on in my country and they are basically forwarding all data to the NSA which of course is illegal. But I can't really join a fight which I am not a part of and probably never will be. I can't call American politicians, but I can call the representives in my country.
But it feels rather silly to call and complain and it will not matter if I am the only one who does it. I want the EU to take action against the US gov for their crimes, I also want the EU to take action against my government for their crimes. I want all mass surveiliance shut down. No matter where it is located. It's a bit like to try and take action on international crime in just one country.
There are two main camps visible to me, the indifferent and the frightened. I'm sure there are plenty of people in the spectrum between those two but I find observing these two camps rather interesting. Because one camp seems to be overwhelmed by all the revelations, usually this camp is not involved in IT at a professional or hobby level.
The indifferent camp seems to either believe it's a problem but that they can't do anything about it, or believe that this is status quo and they need to go on with their lives.
The other camp, the frightened, are usually IT enthusiasts. Even if they're not very skilled, they're now working on that. They're looking up information on Tor, GPG and PKI.
They seem to be bunkering down to defend their privacy from their own government.
Those are just my observations.
To make a company an effective advocate for any change, you need to threaten their revenue stream. That's really the only factor a corporation can be relied upon to respond to, and it was a motivating factor behind much of the corporate defiance to SOPA. SOPA included provisions that would have barred advertising and imposed costly bureaucracy, and it was thus valuable to protest it.
By comparison, any current relationships between such companies and government agencies, regarding their data, only makes them a party to pissing on the constitution and assisting in assassinations through the provision of metadata.
That doesn't cost a thing.
https://blog.twitter.com/2014/fighting-for-more-transparency
This is factually incorrect - the Duck was (is still) being watched by a surveillance camera.
So yeah, on the one side, the big players didn't participate; on the other, the banner was ineffective or confusing for a lot of people, and finally, a lot of people simply either didn't get the message or simply didn't care.
You know what happens when people do care? Open revolt, violent protesting, revolution. See also: middle-east. Whose people are a lot more emotional / angry than western countries are, and more inclined to take affirmative action for what they stand for.
In the case of the US, this should be the gross violations of the constitution's amendments, and the lack of action from the higher legal courts to stop it in its tracks. That's when the amendment of the right to bear arms kicks in, allowing the people to overthrow their own government. In theory, anyway.
Like Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi?
These people risked their lives every day for their causes, and lost them. That is not comparable to banner ads.
No, it's not comparable to banner ads.
Facebook and Google hoover more private data out of my life than the NSA ever will. They may have less sinister motives (I don't think Amazon intends to kill anyone with their drones,) but whipping up public ire about on-line surveillance will blow back on them.
So they go the Captain Renard route ("I'm shocked, shocked to see mass surveillance going on here!"): they put up token resistance, but they don't want to be too effective.
It was way too US-centric politically motivated anti-governement. The people behind claimed to believe in "privacy is a human right", but only addressed the privacy violations of the "Big Bad Gubernment".
I'm all for a pro-privacy protest, not for a libertarian anti-government protest disguised as one.
The SOPA/PIPA protests were about standing up to the copyright mafia as well as the authorities, something that was mirrored by the European ACTA protests.
This protest was totally one-sided, ignoring 50% of the privacy issue, especially as it is perceived outside the US, where Google, Facebook e.a. stand shoulder to shoulder with the US government in their efforts to tear down privacy rights.
"Fighting back" works as a slogan in countries where people are fed up or believe they have been abused long enough.
Americans are very placated and have an over-inflated sense of privilege. Calls to "fight back" sound like hard work that someone who already enjoys a comfortable life shouldn't have to do. I believe a better slogan might be something like "The day we reclaim our privacy" or "the day we renew our dignity" ... or something along those lines as long as the implication is that we are simply taking back what's rightfully ours.
Shouldn't those leakers be prosecuted, too? Shouldn't someone call for the assassination of those leakers?! Funny how nobody says anything bad about the leakers when the leaks make the NSA look good, isn't it?
But 70,000 annoying calls to legislators that cannot be ignored and/or attributed to telemarketing spam is probably the most significant result that might actually been noticed.
Although I have not been pushing the concept much, I would invite you to consider the model of my side project [1], wherein we use donations to charity to illustrate the importance of action. The donations can either be made immediately or pending completion of the task.
This gives a bit of financial weight to the activism, if not direct and acute. It also benefits charities and in some cases gets the charities involved in providing pressure from another angle.
To date, it's only been modestly effective with local tasks, but I've not been able to build the momentum behind the model to test it with something larger scope.
[1] https://usa.brianstaskforce.com/task/386/stop-unwarranted-su...
I believe you mean "how many American HNers". On the website, you were asked for an American ZIP code anyway... maybe should have been called thedayamericafighstback.org?
Those people probably carry some weight with American companies with which they may or may not do business, so that's probably their most likely angle of attack to effect change in the US.
PS: I ain't an American either
From my perspective as from xerophtye's, Americans have American representatives, non-Americans do not. There is no different perception involved.
Thanks for the "worthless garbage" mention, always appreciate it. ;-)
I believe you mean "It is my opinion and I do in fact have the perspective that it maybe should have been called thedayamericafightsback.org?"
Or did it really seem like I was calling them on picking the wrong domain name?
At best it's a Monty-pythonesque nod to the system that got us here in the first place. "I'll write a stern letter" or "down with that sort of thing".
Internet activism is at a high level, universally total bullshit.
Breaking things until businesses suffer is the only way people will listen because there is a financial consequence.
I think that not just Internet activism, but political solutions in general are, at high level, universally total bullshit. As you say, the only way people will listen because there is a financial consequence (people are extremely good at selling themselves out of their values). And a way to reliably inflict financial consequence is through business and technology (and occasional media shitstorms, but that doensn't seem to do much anymore), by redefining the optimization landscape people hillclimb right under their feet.
That's just another way that legislation allows stuff to be manipulated. Why do you think legislators are always all over business and technology? It's a short path to the goal. All that happens is more fuel is added to the fire.
It's gone past "happy happy joy joy" now.
More specifically political solutions beyond a certain modest scale fit that distinction. All of our political issues are scale issues.
It's just as effective at censorship as requiring a license to print a newspaper--something our Bill of Rights was explicitly designed to avoid.
It's possible to be watched without changing your behavior, but is beyond the capability of most humans.
Yes.
Do you belch out loud at school/church/office? Make other silly noises from your body? Do you scratch your nose when someone has a camera out? I think you probably try not to.
Now how about when you know you're alone, or at home? I certainly do. It's a basic part of being human.
As social animals, we humans have inbuilt awareness of social and private contexts. Some time in both contexts is necessary to be a well-adjusted adjusted individual, and providing room for individuals to have a bit of privacy is essential for a healthy society.
A human's well-being depends on having a break from constant surveillance. We can't be 'on stage' our whole lives.
As in, its a meaningless gesture.
The only way to get something done is to upset the apple cart. Meaning finding candidates who will pledge to fix it, this can mean funding people for the "other" party, something I know some will find any excuse not to. This can also mean creating a faction within both, the Republicans are already being whacked by the Tea Party its high time the Democrats had something similar, something not fake funded and orchestrated like OWS - a real movement within that strikes fear at sitting Democrats like the Tea Party did to Repubilicans
Send an email, gee whats next, we fight back by flipping them off or talking around the water cooler?
The majority of youth today (a demographic with the most free time and incentive to participate) do not like making calls or writing emails. Also, the emotion created by most of these campaigns is doom and gloom. Dark colors, threatening symbols, scary acronyms, powerful shadowy figures, walls of text. Raising awareness or gathering support through fear based campaigns is not going to work. The media has run that cart into the ground long ago.
The majority of people I know will be turned away or further made apathetic by these campaigns. Those of us who aren't, live in an awareness bubble.
Here is an idea I came up with just now (so don't take it too seriously) - organize a huge public BBQ at the park nearest your local representative's office. People only vaguely interested in the cause would show up for good food and fun, and may contribute to the perception of success of the event, while possibly learning more about the cause in a non-threatening environment. The representative's office is right down the street should they wish to support the cause in person. If these BBQs, were every Friday at lunch or something, I would be there for sure every time. Now I am hungry. Errr... hungry to end mass surveillance... right.
Maybe that idea is ridiculous, but the basic idea is that if you want people to spend time for a cause, it's easier if you let them have a good time while doing so.
For passive participation, I believe selling t-shirts specifically designed for different audiences is one the best options, way better than changing an avatar or creating an online meme. Donate the proceeds to the EFF and open source crypto and networking projects, and it is a solid campaign. The messaging should be simple and direct, but not overbearing. The key is for the design to stand on its own regardless of the message it carries. 99% of people don't care about the message, they want a sick shirt. If anyone here is interested in making a shirt related to this cause, you can email me about your idea and I will do a quick concept design for you for free.
HN had a header.
What more do you want?
I only heard about the Day We Fight Back thing a day or two in advance so when I saw the evening news and they talked about that Safer Internet Day I wasn't sure if there was some mix up or just bad reporting...
I didn't even notice what Reddit did. There was a blog post floating around the top all day. If that was all, great job.
We CAN pressure our representatives. Our representatives certainly can fight back.
Next time there is an online protest on the NSA there should be a better name for it.
There is a lot of lazy apathy out there on the interwebs. I think that this needs to be framed not around "our privacy" (while most of us are thinking we have nothing to hide anyhow) but around the "privacy of journalists, activists and people in important positions".
What if you knew that every news article was written by a journalist who was afraid for their family from the NSA? In the age of the internet we are all journalists and activists of one sort or another.
I know people who've been blacklisted by venture capitalists. I don't know anyone who's been personally affected by PRISM. I'm sure that some people have been; I just think it's rarer.
Top software executives are pissed about PRISM not because of the legality or the ethics of the program. They're embarrassed that, although they make gigantic salaries and are darlings at the Silicon Valley ball, they got pwned by nerds in Maryland making government salaries.
Don't get me wrong. There are principled civil libertarians who are raising these issues because they genuinely care about what is happening, and it's worth listening to them. But the indignation of the software execs and venture capitalists is just petty embarrassment and nothing more.