
Google Says the FBI Is Secretly Spying on Some of Its Customers - wyclif
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/03/google-nsl-range/?cid=co6199824
======
kevinalexbrown
The scary part about surveillance is that we built it, the government didn't.

Instead of the government mandating some Orwellian telescreen that nefariously
records everything you write, or a national registry that lists who your
friends are, where you went to school, and where you log in from, we built
schemes that would record everything anyway for other purposes, like facebook
and gmail, and then handed the keys over. Evgeny Morozov pointed this out when
he mentioned that the KGB used to torture people for this information. But
we've voluntarily built and submitted to it!

I don't dispute the need for surveillance, so what can be done? The best I can
think of is a throwback to Bill Gates' emphasis on measurement. Transparency
is important precisely because if you can't observe something, you don't have
any clue what it is.

I know this sounds too political, but the very systems we're worried about are
ones that several people who frequent this place helped build, for different
purposes. There's no way to know exactly how something you build will be used,
but there is a way to monitor it, and that requires transparency almost by
definition.

~~~
cabinguy
Don't forget the beautiful, shiny tracking devices most of us pay a lot of
money to carry around.

~~~
baggers
I have no idea of the answer to this question but I'd like to hear from you
folks: Given that these lovely shiny devices aren't going away (phew!), is
there a technological fix to being tracked?

I mean, signals need to reach the phone so the location of the phone needs to
be known. What is out there that could allow us to use this awesome technology
without essentially handing our every waking movement to a 3rd party who can
be easily forced to hand the data over?

~~~
BCM43
As far as I can see, nothing. You need to authenticate to the cell networks to
receive phone calls, and when you do that they get your location. Even if they
don't know whose phone it is, it's not very hard to figure out based on where
they go.

I simply don't carry a cell phone. I've found it does not impact my life as
much as you would expect. I simply make plans ahead of time.

~~~
malandrew
Can we at least build a device that tunnels everything we do on the device to
one or more servers under our control in other jurisdictions via SSL so that
the only information that can be gathered from a device is GPS location data
and nothing else?

~~~
BCM43
Yes, that's already possible as long as you trust the operating system. But it
seems like people are really concerned about the GPS location data.

------
bherms
Why don't we stop working on petitions to the whitehouse to let us have more
fun with our cellphones and start putting more effort into holding our
politicians accountable for things like:

1) letting massive bank fraud slide at the expense of the taxpayer

2) murdering innocent civilians through massive amounts of drone strikes

3) allowing indefinite detention of American citizens

4) spying on all of us via internet and soon to come drones

5) all of the other countless civil liberty and constitutional violations
happening

We're the people who affect the most change in our country right now, but we
often focus more on the easy issues that benefit us directly and immediately
while glossing over the ones that slowly eat away at the principles our
country was founded upon.

edit: wanted to continue this rant a little more... I far more often hear
stuff like "OMG, I can't believe Instagram changed their user policy and now
they technically have a right to use a photo I uploaded in an ad for their
company! This is ludicrous and they should be ashamed!" than I do ones akin to
"I can't believe the government murdered an teenage American citizen without
trial or due process because they believed he might be connected to
terrorism." It's a bit sad, this echo chamber we live in.

~~~
javert
Why? Because our moral and political culture, as a society, is in the shitter.
It's probably too late.

~~~
dntrkv
When was the moral and political culture not in the shitter?

edit:

And when was it not "too late"?

~~~
javert
Before the destruction of the Enlightenment by philosophers like Immanuel
Kant.

~~~
burkean
When I read the 'science of man' and/or 'natural rights' accounts of political
society and morality, I am struck my how astute Kant's critique was--that what
we call conventional morality can't be found in anthropological conjecture.

But outside of the question of morality, his accounts of political society
rest heavily on Enlightenment doctrine--it's basically a tale of the passions.
That _was_ the Enlightenment, not so much the rehashed civic
humanism/republicanism playing itself out on the streets of Paris. And as for
his infamous maxim "Argue as much as you like, but obey" and his specific
engagement with questions about what the Enlightenment meant, I would say this
is pretty much the mainstream of Enlightenment thought. Sure, sovereignty
might lay with the nation, but to emphasize the will of the nation, rather
than its legitimate representation, is something fairly unique to Rousseau and
the hard-core of the Jacobins.

I know there is a body of scholarship that pins the end of the Enlightenment
to Kant, but I'm not familiar with it. Could I have the elevator version?

Edit: Perhaps I've overstepped the mark here. I'd be interested in any
recommendations that link Enlightenment to a positive discussion of virtue--
ie. not a discussion of Enlightenment and 'why virtue is no longer required
[compared to the classical republican polities]'.

~~~
javert
So, the original question was "Why is society and culture in the shitter," and
my answer was "Kant and his philosophical henchmen." I think the Enlightenment
was going in the right direction, but there was a lot of not-so-great stuff
there, too. So the Enlightenment is kind of secondary to the point I'm trying
to make.

Basically, there were two high points in Western society: ancient Greece, and
the Renaissance/Enlightenment* era. Right now, we're not on a high point, and
the slope is negative. That's because of the philosophers like Kant that came
towards the end of the Renaissance/Enlightenment era.

You are actually focusing on the politics of the Enlightenment, but I'm more
concerned with how Kant eventually underminded culture by corrupting things on
more fundamental levels. Specifically, the metaphysical level (especially the
metaphysics of man) and the epistemological level (especially the functioning
of man's mind).

I'm an Objectivist (i.e., I agree with Ayn Rand's philosophy). I know this
isn't a popular stance, but extremely few people who criticize it (or even who
profess it in the popular media) actually know what it entails, and world-
changing ideas are usually universally ridiculed at first, so I hope you'll
take me seriously, despite the unpopularity of the ideas I agree with.

So the elevator version is: Ayn Rand is a direct and complete rebuttal to Kant
(though not written directly in that manner). You'll have to read her
extensively to get the actual rebuttal. As far as supporting the claim that
Kant ended the best period in Western history, Rand states this kind of thing,
but doesn't try to prove it. Later people (specifically, Leonard Peikoff) have
taken up that challenge.

Among other things, Rand holds that man can perceive reality and (ultimately)
gain knowledge about it, starting via sense perception. Kant held that sense
perception itself acts as a filter that makes true knowledge of reality
entirely impossible, basically rendering man's mind impotent.

Rand also has a unique theory of concept-formation, which is critical to
establishing a solid epistemology.

Finally, Rand's ethical theory is based on the idea that the is-ought gap can
actually be bridged; what is good is what is good for a man. This eventually
leads to an actual justification for needing to impose individual rights (in
the classic, Founding Fathers sense).

Kant was completely against all the above, and actually made the rise of
Nazism, Marxism, postmodernism, and modern egalitarianism possible. In fact, I
just though of this, but it's probably right to say that modern "humanistic"
political thought is basically a reaction to fascism, but (unfortunately)
still within the underlying paradigm Kant made possible.

For example, you need to believe that man has no access to true reality, to
believe in dialectical materialism. Same thing to believe in the kind of Nazi
racism and nationalism that was rooted in the ideas of the "German
subconsciousness".

To elaborate on that: For Kant, the "reality" we experience was created by
people's minds. So the German reality (or even the "proletarian" reality) is
fundamentally different and incompatible with other "realities," and the only
"proof" you need to assert that it is superior is bald assertion that it is
so. I do think I'm essentializing a bit here; for example, other people after
Kant took his more fundamental ideas to their logical conclusions in ways that
may actually contradict other things Kant wrote, and other philosophers helped
pave the way for Kant himself.

Anyway, this is just my best (condensed) understanding. I hope to whet your
appetite, but don't take me as a representative of other people's ideas.

* And the high point of that era was the founding of the United States, which was the first country to be founded on the idea of the individual as sovereign.

~~~
philwelch
As a former Randroid, you have my sympathy and my sincere hope that you too
can recover.

~~~
javert
What's your specific criticism of Objectivism? I'm genuinely curious.

~~~
philwelch
Just to start with the low-hanging fruit, Rand contradicts herself by not
being an anarcho-capitalist: <http://www.isil.org/ayn-rand/childs-open-
letter.html>

Rand might respond by saying anarcho-capitalism doesn't make sense, which it
doesn't, but if it's the inevitable consequence of the rest of your philosophy
then you must have made mistakes further up as well. As Rand herself said,
"check your premises". Specifically, I think the unworkability of anarcho-
capitalism scuppers the non-aggression principle entirely.

Rand's (and your) reading of Kant is significantly flawed. From a historical
perspective I don't blame Rand for this, as it seems she may have learned this
misreading of Kant from her time in Soviet-era Petrograd State University.
Admittedly, this is not a criticism of Rand's philosophy but rather her
understanding of the history of philosophy, but it speaks to how misaimed your
statements are.

~~~
javert
Anarcho-capitalism is not the consequence of the rest of Objectivism, so
that's the specific flaw in your reasoning. (Sorry to be blunt here, it's just
easier.)

The letter you linked to is erroneous because, contra what it says, forming a
"competing government" is an initiation of force. It is retaliatary force for
the actual government to act to stop a "competing government."

(The next two paragraphs are kind of a tangent, the actual philosophical
response to your mistake is after that.)

I don't think this is an interesting issue, though. Rand's philosophy is
hierarchical: metaphysics, then epistemology, then morality, then politics.
Derivative issues in politics are largely "implementation defined." For
example, I don't think you can have a government without any taxes at all in
today's world, whereas Rand thought no taxes would be the ideal thing to aim
for. That issue doesn't have any bearing on whether Objectivism is correct or
not.

As another example, I also don't care about who builds the roads, and stuff
like that. If we had non-governmental roads from the start, we'd probably all
live in private cities, and the world would be vastly different, but we're
stuck with what we have, so who cares?

Let me change direction and go to a likely source of your error. Let me give
an example. Honesty is an Objectivist virtue, so some people think you have to
be honest all the time. That's not true: There is a certain context in which
honesty is applicable. You don't have to be honest to a robber asking where
your kids are. Likewise, non-initiation of force only applies under a system
of laws and government. It's a political principle. It would not apply to
people stranded on a desert island. It does not apply to a state of nature. It
doesn't apply to people seeking to initially form a government. It also
doesn't apply when the government is bad, past a certain "implementation
defined" point (i.e., Objectivism doesn't have a specific principle for where
that line is - it's too situational).

So, it's an error of context to say that the non-aggression is some universal
moral rule that implies that we all have to have anarcho-capitalism. It's not
a moral rule, it's a political rule. It's part of the next level up.

This is true in the same way (more or less) that honesty is not a universal
moral rule. Understanding the context for honesty requires understanding the
actual more fundamental principle it derives from, which is to always act in a
way that serves your own life and happiness. (Which, itself, even has a
context that depends on hierarchically previous ideas - Rand was not against
suicide in the case of losing a precious loved one, for example, if you can't
conceive of living happily without that person.)

> Rand's (and your) reading of Kant is significantly flawed.

I don't claim that I can provide evidence for the things I say about Kant,
because that evidence presupposes agreement on fundamentals of Objectivism,
and that's not something I can provide evidence for either, other than
pointing to reality and suggesting someone undertake a multi-year study of the
Objectivist literature. So, the stuff about Kant is just intended as a
"sampler," something to get someone thinking and maybe intrigued.

Putting the Kant stuff aside, I'd be genuinely interested to see what your
reaction (again) to what I've said.

(Two more tangential paragraphs follow.)

By the way, normal people do not have the epistemological background to _not_
make errors that have to do with disassociating abstractions (concepts,
principles) from the concretes they refer to. Ayn Rand calls that
"rationalism," and I think that's the category in which your mistake falls.
Many normal people (especially those drawn to programming) habitually think
this way. That's how I was for most of my life, and the only thing that kept
drawing me back to Objectivism was honestly realizing that nothing else made
sense, and knowing that there was more background to Objectivism that I still
lacked.

Most people who aren't rationalistic people just don't trust abstractions _at
all_. For example, pragmatists who say that there are no rules, or people who
say that no knowledge is really trustworthy. This is throwing the baby out
with the bathwater.

~~~
philwelch
> forming a "competing government" is an initiation of force

How?

> I don't think this is an interesting issue, though. Rand's philosophy is
> hierarchical: metaphysics, then epistemology, then morality, then politics.
> Derivative issues in politics are largely "implementation defined." For
> example, I don't think you can have a government without any taxes at all in
> today's world, whereas Rand thought no taxes would be the ideal thing to aim
> for. That issue doesn't have any bearing on whether Objectivism is correct
> or not.

Surely one derives from the other, and contradictory conclusions at one level
should indicate flaws at a higher level. "Check your premises."

> So, it's an error of context to say that the non-aggression is some
> universal moral rule that implies that we all have to have anarcho-
> capitalism. It's not a moral rule, it's a political rule. It's part of the
> next level up.

Then surely this defines Objectivist politics down towards nothing at all,
since it can be violated at the point where it's necessary for a government to
maintain monopoly over the use of force, and it can be violated before there's
a government, and so forth.

If you want to abandon Objectivist politics entirely you may, but the main
selling point of Rand is her ability to derive "privately owned roads" from
"the validity of the senses" (qua "concepts in a hat":
<http://mol.redbarn.org/objectivism/ConceptsInAHat/>)

> I don't claim that I can provide evidence for the things I say about Kant,
> because that evidence presupposes agreement on fundamentals of Objectivism,
> and that's not something I can provide evidence for either, other than
> pointing to reality and suggesting someone undertake a multi-year study of
> the Objectivist literature. So, the stuff about Kant is just intended as a
> "sampler," something to get someone thinking and maybe intrigued.

The stuff about Kant is, to give largely the same handwavy explanation,
utterly wrong as well. Rand may have built up Kant as a kind of straw man, but
this isn't an honest or realistic reading of Kant. Rand's misreading of Kant
is an honest mistake and a historical accident, not a useful introduction to
Objectivism.

> normal people do not have the epistemological background to _not_ make
> errors that have to do with disassociating abstractions (concepts,
> principles) from the concretes they refer to. Ayn Rand calls that
> "rationalism," and I think that's the category in which your mistake falls

I think it's Rand who makes this error by making measurement omission so
central to her epistemology.

> the only thing that kept drawing me back to Objectivism was honestly
> realizing that nothing else made sense

It's interesting that you have this psychological need for everything to make
sense to you within a comprehensive system. This is the biggest and most
problematic appeal of ideologues and systematists in philosophy, whether Rand
or Hegel.

------
dangrossman
Is Google allowed to disclose the number of FISA requests it gets? I was under
the impression NSLs were being used much less since the PATRIOT Improvement
and Reauthorization Act (2005) weakened them, and were largely replaced by
obtaining secret warrants from the FISA court.

FISA is scarier. Under that law, secret surveillance can begin before a
warrant is issued, warrants are issued by judges who keep no records of their
opinions made in complete secret, and the surveillance can continue even
during a challenge over and appeals of that warrant. When the EFF made a FOIA
request for information about the FISA court, it got an ominous response: a
letter saying there were documents they'd never see, zero court records, and a
completely redacted version of an investigation into FISA's constitutionality.
By completely redacted, I mean they returned pages where every word on every
line was blanked.

The only difference is that a FISA warrant has to be connected to a foreign
person or body in some way. That can be as little as "we think by wiretapping
this American, we'll learn something about this organization in another
country". For those not living in the US, it means
Google/Facebook/Microsoft/etc. can be compelled to surveil your communication
through their service secretly without an NSL.

~~~
trotsky
If you're a foreign national on foreign soil with data in us data centers held
by us companies I don't believe it's common practice for these companies to
require a warrant, fisa or otherwise, to share information with national
services.

Consider the case of the NSA warrantless wiretaps. The telcos were voluntarily
providing bulk access, there was only a legal issue because US citizens on
were involved.

~~~
rdtsc
Didn't they get around that by deciding that copying the data and storing
isn't considered "search", only when a person accesses and looks it when the
Constitution starts to get in they of "business".

I would pretty much guess that is the purpose of the data storage center NSA
is building in Utah -- to just archive everything sent anywhere.

It would also seem that when a warrant is obtained it is obtained for
historical data and there is no window. So if you commit some act that is
deemed dangerous enough to issue an warrant to search your history --
theoretically all your history since birth could be searched. Everything you
ever did online that was recorded becomes game.

------
btilly
None of this is a surprise. Google does business in the USA, and is forced to
follow US law. Which it does. Despite the USA not being nearly the country
that I wish it was on these matters, on the whole the USA is not horrible
either.

See [http://communications-media.lawyers.com/privacy-law/Your-
Ema...](http://communications-media.lawyers.com/privacy-law/Your-Email-isnt-
as-Private-As-You-May-Think-It-Is.html) for a glance at what is and isn't
protected here. See this article for an idea of how tiny the affected numbers
are in the USA.

What is far more troubling is that Google _also_ has to follow the law in
_other_ countries that it does business in. Many of those countries have
different laws and corruption levels than the USA. While Google did choose to
stand up to China, they don't in many, many other countries.

In fact I am personally aware of an HN user outside of the USA who was
physically tracked down through information coughed up by Google in response
to bogus legal requests. (I will not confirm or deny any information about
this case beyond what I just said, so don't bother asking.) My non-US social
circle isn't that big, so if I'm personally aware of it happening, how many
people does it happen to that I don't hear about?

Frankly the non-US situation scares me more than the US one.

~~~
ajross
Indeed. Also on the "bright side interpretation" is the fact that only about a
thousand of these NSLs are issued per year (and given Google's size, that's
probably a good guess at the total number of such investigations). A thousand
isn't small, but at the same time it's only a tiny fraction of the number of
law enforcement investigations. At least this is proof the NSL mechanism isn't
being used for blanket surveillance state activity. That's something.

~~~
olefoo
What if the questions being asked are more along the lines of, please give us
the full account archive of everyone who's ever emailed an address in a .ir
domain? Or, here is a semantic filter that you must apply to all mail that
transits your system, hand over everything related to any account sending or
receiving mail that it evaluates as a match.

Given the lack of transparency, and the fundamentally undemocratic nature of
the National Security Letters infrastructure. It would be a good idea if we
had a list of the sorts of things.

Personally, I'm comfortable with a few civil liberties being trampled in
pursuit of loose nukes and engineered plagues; but I'm much less sympathetic
to a policeman who wants updated intel on what a bunch of hippies are planning
to write on their signs at the next Occupy protest.

~~~
ajross
They appear to have counts for impacted users, which are of the same order. So
your worry about unbounded access is unsupported by the data.

I'm not saying this _can't_ be an infringement on fundamental rights, or that
it's a good program. I'm saying that, given the data at hand, it does not
appear to be the blanket surveillance program that many people (including you,
c.f. your first paragraph) think it might be.

That's a good thing, right?

------
kposehn
This headline is quite misleading. Nowhere in it does Google actually state
what the article claims in any way.

If anything, what makes me happy is that Google can even disclose any of this
at all. NSL's are a tool that has little oversight and a bit more awareness
may help keep them from being abused.

~~~
gojomo
I'm happy Google has found a way to disclose this, too.

The headline ("Google Says the FBI Is Secretly Spying on Some of Its
Customers") seems fair to me.

Google is reporting that it got more than 1 and less than 1,000 "National
Security Letters", about more than 999 but less than 2,000 of Google's
customers. Because the exact subjects of these letters can't be shared, the
FBI's actions are being done "secretly". Because they allow the FBI to receive
private information it wouldn't otherwise have without the subjects knowing,
this activity fits the colloquial meaning of "spying". All the elements of the
headline are supported by the reporting.

~~~
firebones
If we had an estimate of the number of in-links and out-links in the inbox, we
would have a more accurate sense of the number of people whose communications
were actually swept up under this surveillance. The number might be more
accurately portrayed as "greater than 49,950 and less than 100,000 people"
assuming the typical mailbox contains traffic from 50 people. Not all would be
Google's customers, but it would portray the scope more clearly.

~~~
stanleydrew
If you read the whole article closely you'll find this:

Google noted that the FBI may “obtain ‘the name, address, length of service,
and local and long distance toll billing records’ of a subscriber to a wire or
electronic communications service. The FBI can’t use NSLs to obtain anything
else from Google, such as Gmail content, search queries, YouTube videos or
user IP addresses.”

So inboxes are not being opened up for the FBI as part of these requests.

------
GHFigs
"Google says some of its customers are the target of authorized FBI
investigations, but we've got to sex it up for Threat Level"

------
will_brown
I tend to think these National Security Letters violate the 4th Amendment by
authorizing warrant-less searches and seizures - but is it really a secret the
US government is doing that?

Wireless searches of phone calls, Internet activity (Web, e-mail, etc.), text
messaging, and other communication has been public knowledge since Attorney
General Alberto Gonzales confirmed the existence of the program, first
reported in a December 16, 2005, article in The New York Times.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_warrantless_surveillance_co...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_warrantless_surveillance_controversy)

In 2006 EFF filed lawsuit against AT&T after the US government installed
monitoring equipment in an AT&T's switch room.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hepting_v._AT%26T>

Warrantless searches and seizures and monitoring? Please that is so...1984. On
August 30, 2010, the CCR and ACLU filed a "targeted killing" lawsuit, naming
President Barack Obama, CIA Director Leon Panetta, and Secretary of Defense
Robert Gates as defendants. They sought an injunction preventing targeted
killing of US citizens, and also sought to require the government to disclose
the standards under which U.S. citizens may be "targeted for death". Judge
John D. Bates dismissed the lawsuit, holding the claims were judicially
unreviewable under the political question doctrine inasmuch as he was
questioning a decision that the U.S. Constitution committed to the political
branches.

Back to the OP the only thing that shocks me is that Google and/or the
individual employees, who are being personally slapped with a non-court
ordered gag-order, have not sued the US Government. I am sure the EFF or ACLU
would join as co-counsel to defer some of the resources, and if Google keeps
complying maybe they will sue Google like EFF sued AT&T.

------
pohl
The FBI may be spying on some of Google's users, but the odds that they are
spying on Google's customers is pretty slim.

------
jasonjei
I don't know about you, but the article points out those complying with NSL
demands blindly even wrote NSLs for the FBI. That's pretty scary.

------
gabeio
Anyone else notice that the United states is more than __every other country
in data request and 14* in user accounts. The percentage of data produced
being almost 100% is just scary beyond belief.

------
rossjudson
Yeah, and I heard that the government used to get these things called wiretaps
to listen in on people's conversations, and THEY DIDN'T EVEN TELL THE PEOPLE
THEY WERE LISTENING IN. Imagine that.

Google is doing the right thing by publishing information that allows us to
see the scope of the activity by the government. If part of an active
investigation, then there's no need for anything further.

------
walshemj
So are Google saying that there should be ZERO ability for law enforcement or
TLA's to enforce the equivalents of HOW's (home office warrants) on their
customers.

If you don't like the heat don't run gmail G+ and get out of the phone biz.

------
sigzero
I would be surprised if they were not "secretly spying".

------
riazrizvi
It's headlines like this that make me wonder if my Give-a-fuck isn't just
broken.

