Obama to urge tech firms to share data with government | Hacker News Reader

Obama to urge tech firms to share data with government

bbc.co.uk

31 pointsfidotron24 comments

What an egregiously terrible HN title.

The article's real title is Obama to urge tech firms to share data with government.

The word "order" occurs once in the story, referring to an EO the President is signing that (wait for it) urges firms to share threat info with the government.

The US President has no authority to order firms to share data with the government. And so he hasn't.

They changed it: http://www.newssniffer.co.uk/articles/910453/diff/2/3

> The US President has no authority to order firms to share data with the government.

Only the FISA court can do that. Otherwise the NSA has to steal the data fair and square under EO 12333.

We changed the title from "Obama 'to order' firms to share data" to the article title.

"Mark Zuckerberg and Marissa Mayer - chief executives of Facebook and Yahoo, respectively - and Google's Larry Page and Eric Schmidt all declined invitations."

Awesome. I wish the others would have done the same.

The simple fact that they aren't there takes a lot of the wind out of his sail's IMO.

I hope the ones who are attending are there to tell Obama "No".

Is this not the modern version of a government monitoring library records, and people's reading history?

http://www.globalissues.org/article/409/us-librarians-see-bi...

http://www.ala.org/offices/oif/ifissues/fbiyourlibrary

You mean like this: http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/feb/10/police-several-...

Well there are many who thought V for Vendetta was a bit over the top when it comes to a government wanting to monitor its citizens.

As for his speech he plans to give, I still see more face time to present a message he wants us to believer versus the actions they are doing behind the scenes and will continue to do forward. Its the typical "fake plausible dependability". The head of the organization says one thing while they know full well zealous members will do something else

We've expanded the wording of such threats from terrorism and cyber warfare to now cyber crime. While I'm glad we're not weakening terminology for more serious threats, it's concerning that we're now asking for broad partnerships to go after (petty?) crime.

Just like how legislators should be wary of what constitutes a criminal offense, in light of Eric Garner's death and similar tragedies, we should be careful about what we're having the federal government monitor.

And in some respects, I think news of things like PRISM was hard for people to fathom, whereas this will be pretty clear to anyone: the government is watching. And people are already acclimated to this. Eventually the government will be able to argue in court that nothing on the Internet has a reasonable expectation of privacy and that all surveillance is constitutional.

It's worth mentioning the history of 'coordination' or 'bringing into line' between the public sector and the private sector here, especially gleischaltung[0].

I'm not trying to make a direct comparison, but the executive branch's "calls for them to hand over more data" are fundamentally about totalitarian surveillance and control. That may not be the goal, stated or otherwise, but make no mistake: the effect is the same.

It's worth considering how we might feel if Russia or China were calling for something like this.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleichschaltung

If the government wants access to all our private information, and it would seem this is now becoming an inevitable outcome, perhaps the government should be required to make all the records they view public with references to the officials accessing them. After all, our government is "We The People", and to ensure it remains so, we the people need some safe guards against abuse of this power. If the government has to weigh the public availability of records and who's using them against the utility of records for security purposes, maybe that would be just enough to keep things on the up and up.

... David Cameron, who said in January that forms of communication that are resistant to surveillance measures should not be allowed.

No more whispering, folks!

Most transparent administration ever?

You have to admit, what they're trying to do is pretty transparent though.

> His comments were interpreted as a direct attack on encrypted communications, such as Apple's FaceTime and Microsoft's Skype, among others.

Wow, BBC is so bad at this. Law enforcement can get any type of data they want from Skype already. They don't need anymore backdoors for that. Facetime, at least the audio part I think is end-to-end, and I don't think they can get access to it.

I'm amazed that after all the Snowden revelations there are news agencies (and because ones at that) that still consider Skype "secure".

Not knowing much about the current standard for "best secure voice communication", could you (or someone) shed a little light on the best Skype alternative for the average in-the-field news reporter? I'm not a reporter- I'm just curious.

Redphone

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.thoughtcri...

The NSA recommends ZRTP.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/inside-the-nsa-s...

Here is a list: https://prism-break.org/en/all/#instant-messaging

Not comprehensive, but pretty good list. One thing I noticed that's missing from file storage: Mega.nz; they have free 50GB service with an interesting encryption scheme. And they should get better within the next year or so, I'd imagine.

Generally, any OTR based chat service should be a step ahead of NSA.

For a more traditional medium like e-mail, I'd recommend that you look into protonmail.ch. Couple that with PGP and it could take you pretty far.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com