
Meet Jack. Or, What The Government Could Do With All That Location Data - G5ANDY
https://www.aclu.org/meet-jack-or-what-government-could-do-all-location-data
======
cjoh
It's easy to imagine the kind of data government has, imagine its ability to
process that data, and easy to interpret that they will do it. But it's also
important to recognize that this is conjecture.

From my experience in government: they _nailed_ the user experience (check out
[http://dsbs.sba.gov](http://dsbs.sba.gov) for some awesome gov UI), but
really overestimated government's capacity to build intelligent technology
like this.

I know this will make me unpopular amongst this crowd, but The truth is, I'm
far more afraid of data like this getting into the wrong hands because it's
being stored improperly or insecurely, than I am of government being malicious
with it. Heck, I'm more afraid of my insurance adjuster than I am a malicious
cop.

~~~
tikhonj
Part of the issue with government is that you ultimately have much less
recourse against the government than against anyone else. This exacerbates the
potential damage the government could do with any given technology.

~~~
antimagic
I think I'd be happier with the technology if the first deployment was used
specifically to track police officers in an effort to weed out corrupt police.
Let the program run for say 10 years, enough time to make police aware of how
this sort of data can be _misused_ by making them the victims first. As a
bonus, weeding out corrupt cops will make the system safer (but not safe) for
ordinary citizens.

Still, it's completely crazy. These types of system are a direct threat to
democracy and need to be shut down. In fact it's worse than that. At some
point a telecom is going to realize that they could make a tidy profit by
selling location traffic data to third parties, and that sort of thing needs
to be prevented in law.

~~~
_mulder_
>At some point a telecom is going to realize that they could make a tidy
profit by selling location traffic data to third parties, and that sort of
thing needs to be prevented in law.

The year 1990 called and wants it's comment back!

~~~
antimagic
You're saying that telecoms are already selling the data? Or that there are
already laws preventing the sale of such data?

~~~
hnha
They sell it. See eg Vodafone and tomtom for a publicized example.

------
nswanberg
This article attempts to show what a local government could do, but does
anyone have access to the sort of location dataset that could give one an
intuition about how likely it would be that individuals would be singled out
using the data shown?

The article uses maps of Peoria, IL, so let's assume we're dealing with
Peoria. There appear to be roughly 115K people between 18-64 in its metro area
([http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=population+of+peoria+il...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=population+of+peoria+il+metro+area+demographics)),
and 11 traffic cops. ([http://www.peoriagov.org/peoria-police-
department/police-div...](http://www.peoriagov.org/peoria-police-
department/police-divisions-units/))

These cops appear to arrest 23 people per month for driving under the
influence, and hand out about 1750 other traffic citations (not linking
directly to the PDF to save their server but you can find it under crime
stats).

The article implies that there would be more traffic stops due to increased
DUI suspicion, and it certainly seems that it could happen, but given these
population, police, and police activity numbers, and given that the article
itself gives a false-positive example, how likely would that be? Is it
reasonable to think that these cops currently have a lighter load and have
time to be dispatched to investigate a potential DUI?

I am not suggesting that it is of no concern for the government to have
unfettered access to data, and I can imagine a vast number of possible
scenarios in which the data could be misused, but possibly we can better
quantify that concern.

~~~
Bluestrike2
You're assuming that individuals would have to be singled out for analysis in
the first place. They wouldn't. With enough computing power, it'd be trivial
to run this sort of analysis in near real-time for everyone. A few years down
the line, this is even less of a concern: increased power, improved analysis
tools, and greater efficiencies will all come together to empower just such a
system at costs manageable by many local governments (particularly if they
start working together to manage costs).

This means you've got a practical means of confidently predicting potential
crime. Even better, the same mechanisms that help you predict potential
criminal acts also help you close active cases more efficiently. That
inevitably results in significant boosts to police productivity.

So armed, you now get to deploy your existing resources more effectively.
Instead of parking a patrol car at a "pretty good spot" to nail violators for
a few hours, you'll reposition yourself continuously to the location offering
the greatest probability of an arrest/citation at that specific moment in
time. Instead of passively waiting for violators to happen across your
location, you're actively positioning yourself to nail them directly. The
specific individual doesn't matter.

But you won't be dispatching patrollers in the current manner. Since you'll
also be tracking your own patrol cars, you can correlate the two and dispatch
each car to the highest probability incident nearest to them where they're
likely to catch a potential perpetrator. By having everyone under effective
surveillance, for every minute of every day, each of your resources will
always be deployed in the most efficient manner possible.

Where it really gets wild is when you start to consider traffic enforcement
automation along with the push for local government drone coverage. Along with
the existing red light and speed cameras, you'll have mobile platforms capable
of filling in for any holes in your patrol car coverage while also benefitting
from the same efficiency gains described earlier. And they'll be gathering
additional data (movements, facial recognition, automatic number plate
recognition, etc.) to send back to base while they're doing it.

It won't be like The Machine from Person of Interest, but all things
considered, it'll be closer to it than anything else to date.

~~~
toadi
Well hopefully the google car comes available. No DUI anymore because you're
not driving the car.

If it's all automated there are no traffic violations anymore. So the system
won't be used for this.

I'm all for safe traffic!

Things liken an Arabic Revolution are not possible anymore.

------
rtpg
Meet Jack. Or what the government could do with all these planes

>Article showing how half of San Francisco gets bombed

This argument can only hold on water by having a complete lack of faith in the
rule of law.

The biggest issue I have with this is that this describes a massive ,
coordinated system to use all this location data in ways that are way outside
the legal framework in place by the initial court order from the FISA court.

Stuff that has come out of these leaks have ranged from banal (oh, we listen
to the German Chancelor's cell phone? What else is new) to absolutely damning
(forcing companies to hand over SSL keys). But even in the most damning cases,
all of these happened within the legal frameworks given to them (such as the
National Security Letters) and maybe some overzealous law enforcement agents.
The illegal incidents can be explained more by incidents outside of how things
are "supposed" to work (LOVEINT is probably not sanctioned by the NSA), and a
lack of strong implementation of the framework given by the courts.

The narrative has always seemed to be "check out how the NSA is going crazy
over here!". But the reality is "check out how all these politicians are
voting in these new laws allowing this to take place!"

From the leaks you can even see how the courts are constantly reeling things
in, the system is actually working. We hear about old NSA programs that got
shut down because of the FISA court's rulings. This is how rule of law works!
We vote laws, and people follow them.

To actually come to this, given all we've seen from how courts rule on this
issue in general, and the FISA court's rulings, this sort of data sharing
would absolutely definitely not be allowed to exist. No judge would agree to
this being allowed to be set in place, as it so obviously goes against 4th
ammendement _in such a program 's intent_.

Just because the data is at the NSA doesn't mean they can use it however they
want, just like how Google would run into some problems if it tried to sell
the contents of your e-mails to somebody.

This anger at the NSA should also be directed at the congressmen voting for
these laws of large scope in the first place. Hopefully we can get rid of NSLs
too. But the NSA is just doing the most it can with the tools we give it
(which is what we expect). And rule of law is actually working, we just have
some shitty laws.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Lots of people have picked up on your thesis statement : _This argument can
only hold on water by having a complete lack of faith in the rule of law._

We aren't talking about 'law' here, we're talking about 'people.' That gets
lost some times.

Someone with access to these tools might decide the shake down Jack with a bit
of blackmail. They might decide to sell union organizing 'alerts' to business.
These are not legal but there are many people who work in an organization with
these tools available who could justify abusing them.

Consider another hotbed subject which gets argued the other way all the time,
gun ownership.

Now we can all agree that someone owning a gun who follows all of the safety
precautions, and doesn't wave it about irresponsibly Etc is no threat to
society. And yet the argument is put forward that _the capability_ is the
threat and people other than the owner may exploit that capability (a thief
steals the gun, a spouse grabs it in a fit of rage, Etc.) and that it is
"better" to not allow the person to own a gun because the risk of that gun
falling into the wrong hands and doing something bad are non-zero enough.

This is the same argument we should make on surveillance technology, which is
that the potential for its abuse and damaging the lives of innocent civilians,
out weighs the 'benefit' the law enforcement agency gets from having it. There
are other ways for the agency to do its job, just as there are other ways for
our homeowner to protect their property, that don't require this capability.

~~~
rtpg
>Someone with access to these tools might decide the shake down Jack with a
bit of blackmail. They might decide to sell union organizing 'alerts' to
business. These are not legal but there are many people who work in an
organization with these tools available who could justify abusing them.

The situation described in the article would require coordinating a lot of
data together. I have a hard time seeing how individuals could do that
properly without the institution noticing (especially considering how "Big
Data" it is). It's not just cell data that you need, but also license plate
scans, court records, etc. These are all fairly independent things, unlikely
to be stored in the same place.

Individuals will try to exploit systems, and we should work hard to avoid
things like LOVEINT happening (which shouldn't be hard in itself, but given
that Snowden walked off with all those documents, the NSA doesn't seem very
skilled in secure storage of documents).

If institutions work hard enough to make sure they're following the rules on
document access, then it'll be harder for people to abuse, since each
individual block of data is useless in itself. It would be the information
equivalent of N keys to launch the nukes. Abuse would be much,much harder if
somebody sat down and chmod'd some folders properly (nobody should have access
to everything in any system). A plus side (for gov'ts at least), would be that
Snowden-class events would be a lot harder to pull off.

Institutions can be built to be a lot harder to corrupt.

~~~
exarch
>The situation described in the article would require coordinating a lot of
data together.

Do you think the federal government cares more about protecting your personal
data, or their own top secret data?

Edward Snowden was able to single-handedly pull together reams and reams of
data on a cornucopia of the most highly classified top secret projects of our
government. He wasn't noticed at all, except for the fact that he outed
himself.

Had Edward Snowden actually been a spy working for a foreign government, he
probably wouldn't have been caught at all, and would still be working for the
government.

>It's not just cell data that you need, but also license plate scans, court
records, etc. These are all fairly independent things, unlikely to be stored
in the same place.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_fusion](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_fusion)
is the process of unifying disparate data sources in order to glean
information not readily apparent by looking at the sources individually. Guess
who is leading the charge in this budding field?

>Institutions can be built to be a lot harder to corrupt.

Once all this information is stored, its value is essentially incalculable.
Almost no expense at all will be too high for a foreign government or a
multinational corporation to pay for access to it - it is too profound a leg
up on Bob the competitor, Joe the union organizer, and Sally the investigative
reporter. The act of collecting and storing the information is, itself,
opening Pandora's box.

------
rayiner
I understand the importance of focusing on the government, but I think use of
this sort of data should be restricted for everyone, not just the government.
What happens when employers realize that you can filter out less desirable
employees by correlating the movements of their social groups and cross-
referencing it against credit history databases? We fear what the government
can do with the data, but as a practical matter its corporate America that's
more likely to actually screw over large numbers of people with this sort of
data.

~~~
john_b
This is what bothers me about most of America's large tech companies' recent
opposition to various NSA programs. They pioneered many of the techniques
(albeit independently...usually) yet now point their fingers at the
government.

------
inspectahdeck
Hey, that's not what the Palantir UI looks like!

------
neil_s
Am I the only one for whom the article had the opposite than intended effect?
I was expecting some real life horror story of a false positive or deliberate
framing, but instead I was given examples of how this data could be used
constructively to try and evaluate where there might be a high likelihood of
crime occurring, and trying to prevent it. In my eyes, using tax dollars to
prevent crime rather than punishing it a HUGE win!

~~~
aestra
There was a false positive in there. There was a "probable criminal activity"
that turned out to be a real estate agent.

~~~
msellout
Are we not willing to accept a certain number of false positives if the net
effect is good?

------
blah32497
This is fear mongering. You could have some person out in the field tailing
you and get the same info (maybe even more). You can also put up a camera and
tag people as potential DUIs based on how close to the middle of the lane they
are driving. So what?

What's important to ask is what can the government do with the data. And NSA
or not, what they are can do is limited by the law. No database changes that.

~~~
dwaltrip
It's not the same goddamn thing. The article describes programmatic policing.

THEY CAN APPLY THESE TECHNOLOGIES TO THE ENTIRE POPULATION AT ONCE AS THEY ARE
NO LONGER LIMITED BY NUMBER OF OFFICERS AVAILABLE.

This carries new, complex risks for society at large. How hard is that to
understand? Relying solely on unclear "policy" and "access controls" to
protect us from these risks is extremely foolish. Now, I'm not saying this is
happening now, or will happen tomorrow. But these thought exercises are very
useful and informative.

~~~
blah32497
You're not really explaining what's "foolish" or a "complex risk to
society"...

Why is it okay to do it to several thousand people (selected in some non-
systematic/statistical process more akin to voodoo than science), but not okay
to do to the whole population?

Shouldn't everyone be treated equal? Seems like the way we have it now, if you
get on some officials bad side you will get harassed by the TSA and maybe
audited (there aren't _that_ many tools at the disposal of the gov't to make
your life difficult) And most likely no one will notice or care.

Doesn't that illustrate a more fundamental problem with our laws? And
shouldn't we be addressing that?

------
rurounijones
For those thinking this is so far down the slippery slope as to be ridiculous:
[http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-
switch/wp/2013/12/10...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-
switch/wp/2013/12/10/new-documents-show-how-the-nsa-infers-relationships-
based-on-mobile-location-data/)

------
vezzy-fnord
A related experiment: [http://www.zeit.de/datenschutz/malte-spitz-data-
retention/](http://www.zeit.de/datenschutz/malte-spitz-data-retention/)

~~~
nswanberg
Nice. I was looking for that yesterday for the Google Location history
discussion.

Digging through this site's javascript I found this comment: "Für diesen
Quellcode komme ich nicht in den Himmel."

~~~
schoen
In case you don't know German: "Orpnhfr bs guvf fbhepr pbqr, V'z abg tbvat gb
urnira." (ROT13 for fellow non-native German speakers who want to think about
the meaning for a moment.)

~~~
rrattoo
In case you don't have time to waste: "Because of this source code, I'm not
going to heaven." (English for fellow grownups.)

------
lanaius
Setting aside all of the other existing information, the crux of many of the
arguments in the article depend on the government knowing the use of
particular addresses. That's data most city/county/state governments already
have laws that they should know (for tax assessments, occupancy limits, health
inspections, census, etc.) and yet they frequently have incorrect or
incomplete information on this.

While pervasive tracking is indeed a problematic state, I still find it
humorous at how competent we truly believe the government to be in retaining
accuracy in all this data given how often our interactions with government and
private businesses revolve around them FIXING their data about us.

------
api
This indirectly makes a great point. While everyone's been talking about the
danger of a turn-key totalitarian state -- the danger of _intentional_
totalitarianism -- much less has been made of the danger of an unintentional
totalitarian state arising from overzealous use of these systems by law
enforcement. I think that's a much greater immediate risk.

Replace "DUI pattern detected" with "likely child predator." Just the
_insinuation_ that a person is a pedophile can destroy a person's life.

------
Aaronneyer
Maybe I'm just a huge data nerd, but this article made me really excited.

------
puppetmaster3
That is not how this task is done by programmers, here's a newsflash: We use
Bayes! A lot of it.

(ref:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_network#Inference_and_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_network#Inference_and_learning)
)

Translated for 'non programmers: computers don't think the way we do, they
look at (big) data, there is _no causality_.

(ref: for example, if human brain can't diagnose disease, since we are limited
in thinking to causality, we use computers:
[http://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1287/opre.46.4.491?...](http://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1287/opre.46.4.491?journalCode=opre)
)

Please don't talk about how computers detect something in big data, if you
don't know some math, ex(' causal calculus')

Item to discuss: Getting pulled over and being told, we don't know why we
pulled you over, but there's a 85% chance you are non-compliant.

------
dredwerker
The police go to Jack's house and educate him on not drinking and driving and
give him a free taxi token.

------
at-fates-hands
This is why its important for people to get their respective states to start
writing laws which protect people's privacy and usurp the Federal Preemption
of states rights in regards to people's private information.

This is a great paper which addresses this in regards to environmental laws.
This kind of argument can also be made in protection of people's private
information. It's about restraining and balancing the federal laws with state
laws and not allowing the feds to overstep state laws.

[http://www.law.northwestern.edu/lawreview/v102/n2/649/LR102n...](http://www.law.northwestern.edu/lawreview/v102/n2/649/LR102n2Learner.pdf)

------
etanazir
Could? The government may know you better than you know yourself; and perhaps
the only reaction to be had upstairs is when you change a habit; i.e. quite
unexpectedly break the prediction model for your life.

------
aabalkan
I don't know why everyone is paranoid about unseen location data being
collected. They often blame proprietary software like iOS/Android collect
location data and send Apple/Google servers. That sort of transfer would be
evident by tracing traffic and there are tons of reverse engineers out there
intentionally keeping an eye on transferred packages that might contain
sensitive private data. That would be a huge breakthrough if it would exist
and be revealed.

~~~
eurleif
>That sort of transfer would be evident

It is evident:
[https://maps.google.com/locationhistory/](https://maps.google.com/locationhistory/)

Besides, the issue is also location data from cell tower triangulation. That
data is available to your cell carrier whenever you connect to their network.

------
diminoten
Setting aside morality for a moment, that's a pretty cool little system there.

What havoc would be wrought if such a system were public? Heh, the mind reels.

~~~
KrisAndrew
I would think a system like that being public would cause a great deal of
interpersonal problems until ways to circumvent the data collection were found
(even if it meant tearing GPS receivers out of mobile phones).

I remember reading a meta-analysis of lie detection and deception studies in
humans, and there was one social psychology experiment where the participants
were asked not to lie for the duration of the experiment. They couldn't even
use the tactic of "white lying."

Overwhelmingly the participants said it was extremely difficult not to lie and
when they couldn't lie, it ended up causing their stress levels to rise and
their relationships suffered. Lying, or much more fundamentally - concealing,
is a necessary process for maintaining social relationships. [You don't want
to tell Mary what you really think about her new dress, and in the same way,
you don't want to tell your boyfriend that you're throwing him a surprise
party, even if he asks you directly.] As technology becomes increasingly woven
into our social fabric, it's going to have to conform with our pre-established
patterns.

~~~
doctorshady
Trying to remove location tracking from a cell phone is essentially
impossible; they're capable of using a system called Assisted GPS which when
GPS isn't available, can use things like WiFi signals to help determine where
you are;
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assisted_GPS#Description](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assisted_GPS#Description)

Even if you were to build your own cell phone or dig out an old brickphone
without this capability (thanks to the FCC's efforts, basically no cell phone
made after 2005 is without it), you can still be triangulated by the network
with fair accuracy.

At this point, The Only Winning Move Is Not To Play.

~~~
aestra
Right, this was a requirement so if you dialed 911 the emergency responders
know where to find you even if you didn't know where you are. It is called
e911 or enhanced 911.

------
lstamour
Suddenly I'm not as sure I want a self-driving car.

Then again, if there are no tracking cookies, maybe they can't tell if I'm in
it? (Wishful thinking, I'm sure...)

Of course a self-driving car would defeat the need to catch someone after a
party perhaps, so bad example? :)

~~~
aestra
What exactly would a self driving car have to do with this? This is talking
about tracking by cell phone data and license plate, not car data. A self
driving car would be the same as a regular car, just with extra sensors, the
ones they have now are at least. Who is to say that it would have extra
tracking?

~~~
lstamour
Your car has a computer and needs to know both where it is precisely and if
the roads have changed since it was last there. This is always on and possibly
worse than a cellphone for tracking given how hard it would be to "throwaway".

------
shurcooL
Is Jack a celebrity? Why does anyone (other than a data mining algorithm) care
about him.

~~~
estebank
Is Bill Montgomery the cop performing the queries?

------
nl
Nice of the ACLU to spec how the NSA's software work and what it should look
like.

------
bazzargh
It feels like there's a game in here. The Sims meets Uplink.

~~~
rtpg
six degrees of sabotage
([http://dukope.com/play.php?g=six](http://dukope.com/play.php?g=six)), made
for a gaming hackathon, feels a bit like what this would be.

------
beardfu
Reminds me of the Big Brother pizza shop
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zh9fibMaEk](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zh9fibMaEk)

------
bane
Now imagine similar data in the hands of a private company,

"I see you like to go to a bar regularly, would you like to see this beer
advertisement?"

------
sharemywin
Couldn't google or apple build this?

------
tedunangst
So was Jack arrested or not?

~~~
2jgi7
You'll notice they prefer the term "interdicted" now. "Arrested" implies
rights.

~~~
KrisAndrew
They stopped his vehicle and summoned him an Uber (charging him stewed prune
surge pricing).

------
wissler
Yet another example of how the government can use this information to
"discredit radicalizers":

[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/26/nsa-porn-
muslims_n_...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/26/nsa-porn-
muslims_n_4346128.html)

~~~
csandreasen
Stewart Baker, who was quoted extensively for that article, had some
interesting words regarding it[1]:

 _When one of the authors, Ryan Grim, called me for comment, he said that
while Glenn Greenwald was transitioning to his new Omidyar-funded venture he
was temporarily publishing his Snowden leaks with HuffPo. So when he asked for
my take on the NSA story, pretty much the first words out of my mouth were,
“Why wouldn’t we consider doing to Islamic extremists what Glenn Greenwald
does routinely to Republicans?” The story quotes practically everything I said
to Grim except that remark, even though I returned to the point a couple of
times and emphasized that it summed up my view.

I don’t think HuffPo cut the quote because they ran out of electrons. The
article itself is so tediously long that I defy anyone to read every word in a
single go.

Nor because my remark was inaccurate. It turns out that Glenn Greenwald has
written an entire book devoted to exposing the contradiction between
Republicans’ ideology and their private lives. In Greenwald’s words, “While
the right wing endlessly exploits claims of moral superiority … virtually its
entire top leadership have lives characterized by the most decadent,
hedonistic, and morally unrestrained behavior imaginable …[including] a string
of shattered marriages, active out-of-wedlock sex lives, and highly
‘untraditional’ and ‘un-Christian’ personal lives [endless detail omitted].”
His book certainly makes the NSA memo sound restrained and cautious, but both
are motivated by the same idea.

Grim and Greenwald very likely cut the quote because it would have undermined
the narrative of the piece, which combines solicitude for the poor Islamists
whose sexual and financial hypocrisy might be exposed with outrage at the NSA
for even considering such a tactic. The quote would have made them look like,
well, hypocrites.

The incident makes me wonder what else Greenwald leaves out of his stories.
And why we should continue to trust snippets of documents selected by someone
who thinks that the difference between Islamist extremists and Republicans is
that one is an enemy that deserves no quarter and the other is sort of like
Martin Luther King, except for the part about wanting to kill us._

[1] [http://www.volokh.com/2013/11/27/understanding-
enemy/](http://www.volokh.com/2013/11/27/understanding-enemy/)

~~~
summerdown2
> “Why wouldn’t we consider doing to Islamic extremists what Glenn Greenwald
> does routinely to Republicans?”

I think this is disingenuous. Of course the US should do to extremists what
Glenn Greenwald does routinely to Republicans. I don't think anyone is saying
exposing hypocrites is a bad thing, and it's certainly good jounalistic
practice.

What people are upset about is the US spying on the whole internet to do it.

In addition, there's the slippery-slope argument that once this mechanism of
surveillance is in place, they'll use it to modify everyone's behaviour, not
just "the bad guys."

But it's hardly controversial that journalists reveal hypocrisy, is it?

~~~
csandreasen
Sorry, I wish I had seen your comment two days ago when you posted...

I don't think Mr. Barker's argument was based solely on whether or not the US
should be doing it, but also touched upon the journalistic standards behind
the reporting. As an analogy:

Headline: Hacker News commentors unfazed by NSA controversy

 _Discussion repeatedly turned in favor of the NSA 's targeting of Islamic
extremists on Hacker News, a web forum frequented by many of the internet's
technical elite. Summerdown2, a respected contributor, even went so far as to
say that "of course the US should do to extremists what Glenn Greenwald does
routinely to Republicans." Though also mentioning vague concerns regarding NSA
surveillance, he stressed that "it's hardly controversial that journalists
reveal hypocrisy" and even went so far as to say that it was "certainly good
journalistic practice."_

You and I (and anyone else reading this thread) can easily look at the source
comments and tell that my hypothetical news blurb is complete bullshit and the
crux of your argument was left out entirely. So if the authors are willing to
selectively quote from their expert source to avoid having their argument look
bad, what else are they selectively quoting to make their arguments? This
isn't like Reuters, AP, ITAR-TASS, Kyodo and half a dozen other major news
agencies are on the ground writing about what they see as events unfold -
Snowden chose which documents to gather, then chose Greenwald and Poitras
specifically to give these documents to. These guys have the ultimate control
over which documents get reported, what parts of the documents get shared with
the public, and which documents get shared with which news agencies. The guy I
quoted is stating that he feels Greenwald and the people he is working with
had no qualms about selectively quoting from an expert source in order to keep
their argument from looking weak. There's little risk to the authors in
misquoting Stewart Baker - how many people read his blog? How many people here
on HN know about the blog post before I linked to it? There's almost no risk
whatsoever in selectively quoting a document from Snowden to make their point
- no one has access to it except for the NSA and whoever Greenwald has allowed
access.

From the NSA porno article, they pull out a few paragraphs to make their point
- what's in the rest of the report? If the information regarding the
inconsistency in the public/private lives of those 6 individuals was
documented in a "previous SIGINT assessment report", why are they showing us
this report instead of that one? Was that other report sent to the Departments
of Justice, Commerce and the Drug Enforcement Agency, too? If the information
in that other report wasn't sent to them, what information on those 6
individuals was in this report that would have been of interest? Better yet,
why can't Greenwald just redact the identifying information and let us read
the whole damn report for ourselves?

And it's not just that one. Here's a paragraph from a recent Washington Post
article[1]:

 _One senior collection manager, speaking on the condition of anonymity but
with permission from the NSA, said “we are getting vast volumes” of location
data from around the world by tapping into the cables that connect mobile
networks globally and that serve U.S. cellphones as well as foreign ones.
Additionally, data are often collected from the tens of millions of Americans
who travel abroad with their cellphones every year._

I have no idea who is saying what in that paragraph, beyond the fact that an
anonymous collection manager said "we are getting vast volumes".

Why were the specific encryption systems that the NSA had compromised and the
countries targeted redacted from the source documents that we were shown[2] in
the BULLRUN leak? Everyone's up in arms about Dual EC PRNG, but that might not
even be what that document was refering to. It would be trivial for the media
to reveal it and end all doubt, but keeping it hidden and instead writing
about how the NSA is betraying our trust and compromising the security of the
same crypto systems that we all use makes a better headline.

Or one could ask why we only got a limited subset of the PRISM slides. What
else is in there? Why can't we see it? Would that information invalidate their
argument?

[1] [http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-
tr...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-tracking-
cellphone-locations-worldwide-snowden-documents-
show/2013/12/04/5492873a-5cf2-11e3-bc56-c6ca94801fac_story.html)

[2]
[http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/09/05/us/documents-r...](http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/09/05/us/documents-
reveal-nsa-campaign-against-encryption.html?ref=us)

~~~
summerdown2
What a great answer! Thank you for responding :)

I see it a little differently, though I agree with your basic point about not
being able to work out the whole truth from only partial information.

The reasons I'm happy to give Greenwald's NSA reporting a (qualified) pass on
this are:

1) He (and a few others) are the only source of information we have on the
level of surveillance we're all exposed to. Greenwald is a commentator
speaking up to power, and the justification I see is that there is a basic
asymmetry in that power. Without these stories, no-one would be challenging
the surveillance.

Note that I'm not giving him a pass because the stories are unsupported. I'm
giving him a (temporary) pass because so many have later been confirmed to be
true. In essence, we need a debate on the level of surveillance a democracy
will have, and without this as a catalyst, it would not be happening.

2) I suspect that a lot of these documents are highly sensitive. As much as
I'd like a debate, I don't want to risk people's lives. Hence, if Greenwald
produces the minimum documentation that still sparks reform, I think he's done
us all a service.

~~~
csandreasen
Thanks for continuing the conversation - I don't think I've ever seen a thread
continue on for a week here on HN. :)

I suspect that ultimately the truth lies somewhere in between the media's
portrayal of the NSA and the administration's own description - there are
likely privacy and/or oversight issues at play, but I don't buy the prevailing
attitude that the NSA is a rogue agency that is sweeping up everything it can
simply for the purpose of sweeping up everything it can.

As a journalist, any time Greenwald wants to release information he needs to
evaluate what effect his reporting will have on his journalistic reputation
alongside the profitability of his reporting. I think he's unlikely to ever
write an article that states that the NSA is doing something beneficial to
national interests - it won't bring in nearly as many readers as a story on
overzealous infringing of privacy, and it could potentially call into question
his previous reporting.

That's not to say that you can't have reporting that's both balanced and worth
reading. I've found some of the NY Times' reporting on the NSA to be fairly
interesting. In particular, "No Morsel Too Miniscule for Consuming NSA"[1],
despite the sensational title, was fairly balanced; definitely not propaganda,
but at the same time not falling into the trap of saying "the NSA is likely
watching you, your friends and your family 24/7". They go on for 7 pages
describing the NSA's problems and successes, inefficiencies, bureaucracy, etc.
They manage to ask the reader to call into question privacy issues and ask
whether we're getting our tax dollar's worth in terms of foreign intelligence
delivered - and they managed to do it without whipping their readers into
fear-driven frenzy. It astounds me that two different news agencies can look
at the documents that Snowden leaked and get such different interpretations.

[1] [http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/03/world/no-morsel-too-
minusc...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/03/world/no-morsel-too-minuscule-
for-all-consuming-nsa.html?_r=0)

