
The crux of the NSA story in one phrase: 'collect it all' - uptown
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jul/15/crux-nsa-collect-it-all
======
fnordfnordfnord
What's being built is a mechanical god. It sees and remembers everything.
Until recently it has mostly ignored the affairs of the average person, or at
least operated in ways that have made observation of its activities difficult.
But, with closer integration to the other parts of government, it has and will
become more like a god who micromanages the affairs of its subjects by
punishing their indiscretions. There is nothing to stop it from imposing its
morality upon everyone.

~~~
ferdo
And idols aren't of much use unless people are being sacrificed to it in some
form or another.

~~~
contingencies
Preferably visibly, with lots of blood, to keep the others in line.

------
ecocentrik
We're already seeing the effects of this surveillance program on internet
behavior. Some people are switching to privacy conscious alternatives to
services, but these changes in service allegiance are mostly unimportant and
illusory. If blanket surveillance is allowed to continue it will effect the
types of information we feel free to share and even who we choose to interact
with; how we use the internet and how we perceive our personal freedoms. The
internet will become a very boring and much less useful place unless something
is done to address the total scope of the issue.

As I see it the scope of this thing is huge. It's an information arms race.
The French say they have similar capabilities (this is probably a bluff but
won't be for long). The Chinese probably already have the capabilities and
their society is aligned with a social morality to support it. Governments
have complained that the information being gathered includes trade secrets of
use to commercial interests. Finally, from the perspective of individuals, it
looks like something dreamt up by a paranoid totalitarian government to
enforce population control. This is a proper shit-storm.

I'm not sure where this is going but I'm hoping for some kind of global
blanket surveillance ban treaty. Something that applies to both governments
and corporations and regulates how long data can be stored and used. I'm
hoping for something totally unrealistic that completely averts the nightmare
scenario.

~~~
ferdo
> I'm hoping for some kind of global blanket surveillance ban treaty.

That would depend on trusting the people that are spying on us in the first
place to adhere to the treaty. I'm hoping that talented coders will continue
to produce possible defenses to the obvious infringements of our basic right
to be left alone.

------
ChrisAntaki
Collect it all now. Search* it later.

* Motivations for searching are subject to change.

~~~
b6
There's a lot of scary stuff they can do. I'm sure I'm not devious enough to
think of most of it.

If they have years worth of emails you wrote in your normal style to friends
and colleagues, it may be hard to write anything of length anonymously without
being recognized. They may have hundreds of hours of our voices recorded, and
that may be fingerprintable too.

~~~
sixothree
Every email you've sent, every chat, every site you visit, every bill you've
paid, every product you've bought in store, every note you store, every post
you create, every file you transfer, every place you physically go, every city
you visit, every route you take, and maybe even every file stored on your
computer or phone.

~~~
ChrisAntaki
... I'll be watching you.

~~~
samstave
Heh - we had the same idea... I adapted the lyrics:

\---

\---

"Every Post You Make"

Every call you take

Every post you make

Every name you fake

Every pic you take

I'll be watching you

..

Every single way

Every word you say

Every game you play

Every stat you update

I'll be watching you

..

Why can't you see

You belong to me

How my server aches for every byte you create

..

Every pal you make

Every one you meet

Every like you fake

Every thing you read

I'll be watching you

..

Since you've leaked I been exposed to such disgrace

I search ALL posts just to track your face

I tap all lines so you can't escape

Secret courts won't stop this trace

I keep spyin' 'bama, 'bama please

..

Every pal you make

Every one you meet

Every like you fake

Every thing you read

I'll be watching you

..

------
s_q_b
I understand this is an unpopular opinion on HN, but I'm not willing to give
up the advantages surveillance gives us. There are people out there that very
much want to cause regular citizens harm. Make all the comparisons you want
between bathtub falls and terrorism, but the fact is that terror attacks cause
market panic, meaning the damage they do is on the order of billions of
dollars.

On a personal note, I knew people at the Boston marathon finish line, as I'm
sure many of you did as well. My parents had friends in the World Trade
Center. If we could stop that in the future, that is worth a small sacrifice
in personal liberty. Again, this a personal opinion, one that many do not
share.

To me, the key is creating adequate oversight to control this leviathan. We
need a real court, with proper appointment procedures and adversarial process.
We need restoration of legislative oversight. Most importantly, we need strong
encryption on the systems that can only be unlocked with a court order.

In fact, this was the original design of Total Information Awareness. The
privacy tech got gutted somewhere in development, but there's no reason we
can't bring it back.

~~~
charonn0
Maybe you have a point. Maybe it is possible to install enough internal and
external controls for these surveillance programs to bring them back from the
outer edges of ethical and moral propriety. Maybe.

There's still, however, the problem of the Fourth Amendment. To my High-
School-Civics understanding of the US Government, these programs are patently
unconstitutional.

If these programs are indeed essential to our security, if they are to become
a permanent fixture of our civil society, then let the Constitution be amended
to allow them. Otherwise, no amount of oversight by any (or all) of the
branches of the government will be sufficient to legitimize any such programs.

~~~
s_q_b
There's two issues at play here that are legally distinct:

1\. Surveillance of United States Person (USPER) communication. 2\.
Surveillance of non-USPER communications.

With regard to (2), the Fourth Amendment does not apply to foreign nationals.
That's not very reassuring for those outside the United States, but it is a
well established principle of Constitutional law.

With regard to (1), the FISA court has carved out an exception to the Fourth
Amendment, relying upon Skillman and its progeny. Now, that's a very shaky
justification, and probably wouldn't hold up before SCOTUS.

So, at present they are within the bounds of the Fourth Amendment, under the
FISA court's interpretation of the law. However, that foundation is not very
solid. I agree that we need a data-mining amendment to the Constitution if
we're going to continue with these behaviors.

~~~
charonn0
_With regard to (1), the FISA court has carved out an exception to the Fourth
Amendment_

Power is not given to the courts to make new law. The legal contortions
required to twist the intent and letter of the Fourth Amendment so that it
agrees with NSA, without making new law would be obscene.

 _relying upon Skillman and its progeny_

Google wasn't helpful in locating a case/decision referred to as "Skillman".
Can you elaborate?

~~~
s_q_b
"Power is not given to the courts to make new law. The legal contortions
required to twist the intent and letter of the Fourth Amendment so that it
agrees with NSA, without making new law would be obscene."

Unfortunately that's exactly what happened. When the government went to the
FISA court and asked for approval to conduct broad monitoring, the FISA court
ruled that such monitoring, so long as it was limited to metadata and used for
certain purposes, was exempt from the Fourth Amendment under the "special
needs" doctrine.

The case they relied upon was Skinner v. Railway Labor Executives Association,
not Skillman as previously stated, which involved drug testing of Federal
railway workers. There the court ruled that, given the overriding interest of
protecting public safety, limited encroachments upon personal freedoms were
not violative of the Fourth Amendment's prohibition on "unreasonable"
searches.

Basically, the FISA court is writing its own Fourth Amendment jurisprudence in
secret, which can't be effectively challenged by surveillance targets as they
lack standing in the courts to sue.

Here's a nice summary from the NYT:
[http://http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/07/us/in-secret-
court-...](http://http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/07/us/in-secret-court-vastly-
broadens-powers-of-nsa.html)

------
greyman
What I am missing from Greenwald (or other journalists) is some serious
analysis regarding what would happen, if NSA will really not be allowed to do
"collect it all". I mean, whether it really isn't justifiable.

As an amateur, I am just thing aloud now: some "bad quys" are quite capable
nowadays, and without collecting the whole haystack, you would be allowed to
monitor someone only from some point in the future (after getting the court
permission), and you couldn't "hear" the past conversations, if you didn't
collect them. Moreover, if someone is very careful, it will be even difficult
to discover that that person is suspicious and should be monitored in the
first place.

Mind you, I am not defending the NSA strategy, I don't know if it is
justifiable, I am just saying that Greenwald doesn't make any effort to let
some opposing views to be presented. He just repeats the same arguments over
and over again, but doesn't discuss what would happen in other scenarios (if
NSA would be much less capable).

~~~
IsThisObvious
> Mind you, I am not defending the NSA strategy, I don't know if it is
> justifiable, I am just saying that Greenwald doesn't make any effort to let
> some opposing views to be presented.

Here's some fun statistics:

There are about 30,000 gun related deaths a year in the United States (19000
suicide, 11000 murders).

There are about another 30,000 vehicle related deaths a year in the United
States.

There are about 3,000 people who died in the 9/11 attacks - the deadliest act
of terrorism perpetrated against the United States.

Are you saying that we should use the massive spying apparatus - including
invading cellphone calls and emails - to stop even one third of murders? How
about stop one sixth of suicides before they happen?

Because that would save more Americans than stopping a 9/11 scale attack every
year would do - which is more than the NSA is claimed to have done.

In reality, it would take 10 9/11 scale attacks on the US each and every year
to rival the number of deaths caused by guns.

Do you support using the government spy apparatus to stop these gun deaths? If
not, why support something that isn't appropriate for a /larger/ problem to
solve a small one?

I think most Americans panicked when they felt attacked, and became total
cowards - as did their leadership at the time.

The correct response to terrorism is simply to shrug it off and ignore it (or
at least limit yourself to prudent measures) - the deaths, strictly speaking,
are a statistical blip on the radar - but the damage you can do to your civil
liberties and society at large can last decades and impact generations of an
entire nation.

tl;dr: America got sucker punched, and just like a bitch, got all fearful and
cowardly about how it acted. The NSA spying is a sign of that fear and
cowardice (possibly being used to nefarious ends by people exploiting it).

~~~
twoodfin
Number of people identified as having been killed by NSA surveillance: 0.

So no big deal: We should just shrug it off, right?

Obviously we worry about more things in this society than body counts, like
civil liberties and the liberty to live our lives out of the shadow of
bombers.

~~~
IsThisObvious
> Obviously we worry about more things in this society than body counts, like
> civil liberties and the liberty to live our lives out of the shadow of
> bombers.

Yes, all it really takes to stop the terror of terrorism is to not play along
by being scared of attacks.

It would take a 9/11 every month to cause as many deaths as gun violence...
which we don't use the NSA approach to, because we realize that would
massively destroy civil liberties.

If drastic measures aren't requires - if we can just shrug off as "freedom
isn't free", "you need to let some bad things happen to ensure freedom", etc a
10x number of deaths - we're probably taking drastically the wrong approach by
using the NSA style surveillance to battle terrorism.

This is literally us gutting out country on behalf of the terrorists -
something they could never have hoped to achieve by force - because we're
afraid and can't handle something dramatic happening now and then without
loosing our heads.

That's childish and cowardly, as a society.

------
jgrahamc
My reading of history is that this has always been NSA's (and GCHQ's) desire.

See, for example, Project Shamrock
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Shamrock](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Shamrock)).
From a SIGINT perspective you want to gather all the signals you can because
you don't necessarily know which ones will be 'interesting'.

I'm very disappointed in Greenwald's handling of this story. He seems to be
treading over the same ground over and over again without revealing anything
particularly new.

~~~
b6
> He seems to be treading over the same ground over and over again without
> revealing anything particularly new.

He has to, to have any chance of what he's saying actually sticking. Do you
follow his Twitter feed? People routinely accuse him of holding opinions
exactly opposite to his actual ones, even though he's been writing about them
and publishing in newspapers and books for years. There are a huge number of
confused, ignorant noisemakers twisting everything.

Maybe it seems slow to you, but there's been more groundbreaking stuff in the
last month or so than in all previous years of my whole life, so I'm willing
to give him and his collaborators time to triple-check everything before
publishing so that the stories are absolutely unassailable.

I think Greenwald is exactly the right guy to be doing this. I hope my life
and chance affords me the opportunity to help him someday, maybe one millionth
as much as he's helping us.

~~~
diminoten
What do you mean by "sticking"?

And what do you mean "more groundbreaking stuff in the last month or so than
in all previous years of my whole life"? What year span are we talking about,
here?

~~~
b6
> What do you mean by "sticking"?

People understanding. Unless you follow Greenwald's Twitter feed or watch him
interact with others in some other way, it's hard to imagine how many people
misunderstand the most basic facts of these stories.

> What year span are we talking about, here?

Does it matter? I'm 34, but I think my statement would still make sense if I
was twice that age. We're getting new stories with solid evidence of massive
criminality by the US government weekly. I've never seen anything like it.

~~~
diminoten
The WikiLeaks cables, I feel, are of more significance than the Snowden leaks,
if only because the American people a) kind of had some idea that the
government was spying on them already and b) the WikiLeaks cables contained
_much_ more direct data. Snowden has given us some data, such as the slideshow
on PRISM and the FISA court documents re: Verizon, but much of the outrage
regarding the NSA's pervasiveness is about what they _could_ do with that data
rather than what they _have_ done, as was/is with the WikiLeaks cables.

And I don't think this will _ever_ stick with the public, no matter how many
times it's repeated. Like I said, people don't tend to care about the final
step between the supposition that something's occurring "the government's
watching your every communication" and actual evidence of such a thing
occurring "we can show that the government has been watching your every
communication". Once the assumption has saturated the American consciousness,
it's not much of a news story when that assumption is "merely" proven to be
true.

~~~
gknoy
Previously, _serious_ belief (rather than a sneaking suspicion) that the feds
collected everything was considered to be ... eccentric. Similar to claims
that the government staged 9/11, or that we have alien bodies and hardware at
Area 51. Court cases that reference this have been thrown out on the basis
that "you can't prove that anything like that has happened to you".

Now, we have pretty concrete proof that that is NOT a silly belief to have,
and that the government really does record everything it possibly can. Pretty
much any nerd with sufficient understanding of the technology, and/or who has
read very much in the cyberpunk literary genre, has probably always suspected
this, but now we have proof.

I don't mean to belittle the Wikileaks cables: they showed that the US and our
allies were often lying to locals. In this case, however, Snowden's leak shows
that our government has been lying to US, about something that violates the
literal founding principles of our country. I think that why so many people
are considering this a Really Big Deal.

~~~
diminoten
ECHELON[1] showed us precisely what you call a "conspiracy" theory to be
provably true. If ECHELON is a conspiracy theory, then the Snowden leaks are a
singular whisper in a backroom, relatively speaking. We've had that "concrete
proof" (which the Snowden leaks are _not_ , by the way) for nearly fifteen
years.

As for the US government lying to its people, we've known about _that_ too for
at least 40 years [2]. According to one CBS article, lying politicians are one
of the "three things most Americans take as an article of faith"[3]. It's
simply _not_ a big deal. Take the Iraq war and WMDs as another example of the
US government lying to its people.[4]

Hell, if you've watched The Newsroom's first season, you'd have seen a whole
multi-episode story arc about an NSA whistleblower revealing extensive spying
going on at a level thus far unprecedented. [5] Did Aaron Sorkin and the rest
of The Newsroom writers have special information on PRISM, or is it just so
ingrained in the American psyche that it was entirely predictable and fully
plausible? Keep in mind this was MONTHS before Snowden.

Simply put, the Snowden leaks are a "no shit" for most people. The majority
now believe he did the wrong thing, according to a recent poll[6]. Also worth
noting in that same poll, "Forty-eight percent of respondents to the poll said
that they support prosecuting Snowden for his actions, while 33 percent were
opposed."

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON)

[2]
[http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2013/jun/24/guar...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2013/jun/24/guardian-
guide-us-government-whistleblowers)

[3] [http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162-57485776/lying-
politicia...](http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162-57485776/lying-politicians-
a-fact-of-life/)

[4] [http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/mar/18/panorama-iraq-
fr...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/mar/18/panorama-iraq-fresh-wmd-
claims)

[5]
[http://thenewsroom.wikia.com/wiki/Solomon_Hancock](http://thenewsroom.wikia.com/wiki/Solomon_Hancock)

[6] [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/05/edward-snowden-
poll...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/05/edward-snowden-
poll_n_3542931.html)

------
mathattack
This is a very large mega-trend to buck against. Look how much people (most of
us included) willingly give up to Facebook, LinkedIn, our banks and credit
card companies, etc....

~~~
charonn0
The difference being that Facebook, _et al_ ask for the information. NSA is
taking it by force and under the color of lawful authority.

~~~
mathattack
Maybe lawful should be in quotes. :-)

~~~
charonn0
I'm nothing if not deliberate in my choice of words and phrasing. :)

[0]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_(law)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_\(law\))

~~~
mathattack
Indeed - I learned something new today!

------
coldcode
Evisceration. A good word for what is being done to all of us.

------
saintx
"No Secrets, Anywhere"

~~~
jka
More like: "All secrets, available in our records, for current/future use"

------
mtgx
> "That is the definition of a ubiquitous surveillance state - and it's been
> built in the dark, without the knowledge of the American people or people
> around the world, even though it's aimed at them. How anyone could think
> this should have all remained concealed - that it would have been better had
> it just been left to fester and grow in the dark - is truly mystifying."

Maybe they didn't expect it to remain in secret forever - but just enough for
them to spent trillions of dollars on it, and make hundreds of facilities all
over the world, until it would be close to impossible to roll it all back,
even if everything does become public.

You only need to look at the ever growing military industrial complex to know
what I'm talking about. It used to be that wars kept the MIC expanding, but
now it's become the other way around - MIC is lobbying for more wars, more
militarization of the police internally and all over the world, just to keep
themselves well fed.

They've almost finished the Utah data center, if it's not finished already. So
what are they going to do now? Destroy it?

~~~
yk
Probably they did not even think that PRISM/surveillance is a problem. If you
look how the security establishment reacts, I think it is entirely possible
that no one in their circles ever thought that total surveillance may be
unjustified, when "we" do it to "keep America save."

------
JonSkeptic
Did this remind anyone else of the Pokemon theme song?

Gotta collect 'em aallllll!!!! (Your emails!)

