
N.S.A. Examines Social Networks of U.S. Citizens - weu
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/29/us/nsa-examines-social-networks-of-us-citizens.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&utm_medium=twitter
======
fsck--off
This program has Keith Alexander's name written all over it. Alexander has a
history of mining as much data as he can, even if it turns out to be
worthless.

From a Foreign Policy article [1]:

"When he ran INSCOM and was horning in on the NSA's turf, Alexander was fond
of building charts that showed how a suspected terrorist was connected to a
much broader network of people via his communications or the contacts in his
phone or email account.

"He had all these diagrams showing how this guy was connected to that guy and
to that guy," says a former NSA official who heard Alexander give briefings on
the floor of the Information Dominance Center. "Some of my colleagues and I
were skeptical. Later, we had a chance to review the information. It turns out
that all [that] those guys were connected to were pizza shops."

A retired military officer who worked with Alexander also describes a "massive
network chart" that was purportedly about al Qaeda and its connections in
Afghanistan. Upon closer examination, the retired officer says, "We found
there was no data behind the links. No verifiable sources. We later found out
that a quarter of the guys named on the chart had already been killed in
Afghanistan."

Those network charts have become more massive now that Alexander is running
the NSA."

[1]
[http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/09/08/the_cowboy_...](http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/09/08/the_cowboy_of_the_nsa_keith_alexander?page=full)

------
calcsam
I believe the Onion nailed it here a couple years ago:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqggW08BWO0](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqggW08BWO0)

------
bediger4000
The thing that irritates me is that this "examination" can only determine
guilt by association. That's specifically an un-American determination. Guilt,
in the USA, is supposed to be determined by a public trial, where everyone
knows the evidence. Concealed evidence is explicitly illegal. There's even a
clause in the constitution to allow the accused to confront their accusers: no
secret witnesses. Various laws exist to make prosecutors turn over exculpatory
evidence.

This whole thing is just totally un-American, at least from first principles.
It looks like the "intelligence community" has forgotten those same first
principles.

~~~
biafra
I presume this "evidence" is used for a parallel construction:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction)

~~~
bediger4000
Or to put people on "watch lists" or whatever. There's never been any public
information on how names make it on to the "No Fly" list, or the "Special
Search List" for air travel.

And there we plunge off the cliff into another un-American idea: the
government can allow petitions for redress of being put on a "No Fly" or
"Search Real Good" list, but it can't act on them: both method of determining
reason, and the evidence of reason for being on the list don't hold up to
reason. The government might allow petition for redress, but it can't
effectively redress that greivance. Completely un-American.

~~~
cdash
Maybe we should stop pronouncing things like this as un-American as it is
seems to be very American in any sort of recent history and I don't mean only
in the past 10 years.

~~~
bediger4000
Actually, I'm OK with that, as long as I don't have to "support the troops",
stand for "The Star-Spangled Banner" or say the Pledge of Allegiance, and all
copies of Lee Greenwood's "Proud to be an American" are relegated to the
trash. Oh, and the Republican's "American Exceptionalism" is laughed out of
existance. There's probably some other things that would seem ridiculous,
maybe all the pious preaching on July 4th, I dunno.

------
purpleturtle
The problem is that public outrage never amounts to effective activist action
unless people can physically see the government's oppression -- that usually
stirs people up.

With Internet spying, nothing changes -- we just now know what we sort of
assumed. It's really easy to just move on with your day.

The question is, What does it take to make policymakers take action?

------
davidp
From the article (emphasis mine):

    
    
        Analysts were warned to follow existing “minimization rules,”
        which prohibit the N.S.A. from sharing with other agencies names
        and other details of Americans whose communications are collected,
        unless they are necessary to understand foreign intelligence
        reports _or there is evidence of a crime_.
    

The NSA got a green light to dragnet Americans' communication on behalf of the
FBI. Simply stunning.

~~~
scintill76
There have been little hints like this throughout the recent articles. Yet
people say "stop whining about what they _could_ do; they're not actually
doing it."* Well, there's enough evidence they _are actually_ "fighting crime"
with intelligence data (see the Reuters story about DEA, IRS, etc. getting
tips from NSA.) Even if not, who can honestly think a system, where a spy
agency collects everything from everyone and is allowed to hand it off for
domestic criminal investigations, is a good idea?

*And yeah, I do try to keep in perspective life as an American is pretty good. But "we're not as bad as those guys" or "we're currently using our extraordinary powers pretty responsibly" are dangerous excuses to have when expanding power...

------
sbarre
Anyone else feel that Keith Alexander will be synonymous with Joseph McCarthy
50 years from now?

~~~
slashdotaccount
What people don't understand is that those public individuals (the front-end,
if you want) just doesn't matter. If Alexander didn't exist, it would be just
another name here and everything would be the same. People who decide things,
they are behind the curtains, mastering their puppets. Those two parties that
you think you vote for one of them is theatre of democracy, they are two hands
of the one evil. You would say this is another conspiracy theory? You would've
said it about Snowden's revelations one year ago. Open you eyes. Those who
have power, those several families, banks and the corporations, they will do
everything and anything to preserve their power and control over the people.

~~~
DerpDerpDerp
I've known about or guessed at the Snowden revelations for years now, and I
think you're personifying a complex system by saying "Surely some person must
be in charge!"

The truth is that it actually seems to just be a clusterfuck of many people
interacting, each pursuing their own (usually ambivalent to good) intentions,
and that no one really is running the show.

Which in many ways, is more terrifying: if someone is in charge, then all we
have to do is change who is in charge to fix the problem; but if the problem
is that even with good intentions, there are problems with scale and
complexity that mangle them in to monstrosities like this... what can we do
about it?

You can always behead a bad king, but what do you do about human nature and
the problems of scale?

~~~
droopyEyelids
I'm glad to see other people thinking this way, because I believe this is the
problem we're actually dealing with. Combine that with the fact that this cat
can not be stuffed back in its bag, and all I can think of doing is hoping the
surveillance is complete enough and disseminated widely enough that no one
asshole or cabal of assholes can seize control.

~~~
DerpDerpDerp
I mean, I would argue that any solutions have to be found in restructuring
things to be much more localized and decentralized.

A return to city-states, for instance, would deal with the problem of global
super powers that can spy on huge swathes of the population, because it would
require many independent groups who all have their own self-interests to
collaborate in a way that lessens their individual power.

To some degree, the kind of spying we see now is only possible because the
balance between the federal government and the states swung in favor of the
federal government - something the citizens can influence directly (if they
opt to do so).

------
pvnick
This is a gripping account of what these surveillance programs lead to written
by someone who saw when they go wrong:

I live in a country generally assumed to be a dictatorship. One of the Arab
spring countries. I have lived through curfews and have seen the outcomes of
the sort of surveillance now being revealed in the US. People here talking
about curfews aren't realizing what that actually FEELS like. It isn't about
having to go inside, and the practicality of that. It's about creating the
feeling that everyone, everything is watching. A few points:

1) the purpose of this surveillance from the governments point of view is to
control enemies of the state. Not terrorists. People who are coalescing around
ideas that would destabilize the status quo. These could be religious ideas.
These could be groups like anon who are too good with tech for the governments
liking. It makes it very easy to know who these people are. It also makes it
very simple to control these people.

Lets say you are a college student and you get in with some people who want to
stop farming practices that hurt animals. So you make a plan and go to protest
these practices. You get there, and wow, the protest is huge. You never
expected this, you were just goofing off. Well now everyone who was there is
suspect. Even though you technically had the right to protest, you're now
considered a dangerous person.

With this tech in place, the government doesn't have to put you in jail. They
can do something more sinister. They can just email you a sexy picture you
took with a girlfriend. Or they can email you a note saying that they can
prove your dad is cheating on his taxes. Or they can threaten to get your dad
fired. All you have to do, the email says, is help them catch your friends in
the group. You have to report back every week, or you dad might lose his job.
So you do. You turn in your friends and even though they try to keep meetings
off grid, you're reporting on them to protect your dad.

2) Let's say number one goes on. The country is a weird place now. Really
weird. Pretty soon, a movement springs up like occupy, except its bigger this
time. People are really serious, and they are saying they want a government
without this power. I guess people are realizing that it is a serious deal.
You see on the news that tear gas was fired. Your friend calls you, frantic.
They're shooting people. Oh my god. you never signed up for this. You say,
fuck it. My dad might lose his job but I won't be responsible for anyone
dying. That's going too far. You refuse to report anymore. You just stop going
to meetings. You stay at home, and try not to watch the news. Three days
later, police come to your door and arrest you. They confiscate your computer
and phones, and they beat you up a bit. No one can help you so they all just
sit quietly. They know if they say anything they're next. This happened in the
country I live in. It is not a joke.

3) Its hard to say how long you were in there. What you saw was horrible. Most
of the time, you only heard screams. People begging to be killed. Noises
you've never heard before. You, you were lucky. You got kicked every day when
they threw your moldy food at you, but no one shocked you. No one used sexual
violence on you, at least that you remember. There were some times they gave
you pills, and you can't say for sure what happened then. To be honest,
sometimes the pills were the best part of your day, because at least then you
didn't feel anything. You have scars on you from the way you were treated. You
learn in prison that torture is now common. But everyone who uploads videos or
pictures of this torture is labeled a leaker. Its considered a threat to
national security. Pretty soon, a cut you got on your leg is looking really
bad. You think it's infected. There were no doctors in prison, and it was so
overcrowded, who knows what got in the cut. You go to the doctor, but he
refuses to see you. He knows if he does the government can see the records
that he treated you. Even you calling his office prompts a visit from the
local police.

You decide to go home and see your parents. Maybe they can help. This leg is
getting really bad. You get to their house. They aren't home. You can't reach
them no matter how hard you try. A neighbor pulls you aside, and he quickly
tells you they were arrested three weeks ago and haven't been seen since. You
vaguely remember mentioning to them on the phone you were going to that
protest. Even your little brother isn't there.

4) Is this even really happening? You look at the news. Sports scores.
Celebrity news. It's like nothing is wrong. What the hell is going on? A
stranger smirks at you reading the paper. You lose it. You shout at him "fuck
you dude what are you laughing at can't you see I've got a fucking wound on my
leg?"

"Sorry," he says. "I just didn't know anyone read the news anymore." There
haven't been any real journalists for months. They're all in jail.

Everyone walking around is scared. They can't talk to anyone else because they
don't know who is reporting for the government. Hell, at one time YOU were
reporting for the government. Maybe they just want their kid to get through
school. Maybe they want to keep their job. Maybe they're sick and want to be
able to visit the doctor. It's always a simple reason. Good people always do
bad things for simple reasons.

You want to protest. You want your family back. You need help for your leg.
This is way beyond anything you ever wanted. It started because you just
wanted to see fair treatment in farms. Now you're basically considered a
terrorist, and everyone around you might be reporting on you. You definitely
can't use a phone or email. You can't get a job. You can't even trust people
face to face anymore. On every corner, there are people with guns. They are as
scared as you are. They just don't want to lose their jobs. They don't want to
be labeled as traitors.

This all happened in the country where I live.

You want to know why revolutions happen? Because little by little by little
things get worse and worse. But this thing that is happening now is big. This
is the key ingredient. This allows them to know everything they need to know
to accomplish the above. The fact that they are doing it is proof that they
are the sort of people who might use it in the way I described. In the country
I live in, they also claimed it was for the safety of the people. Same in
Soviet Russia. Same in East Germany. In fact, that is always the excuse that
is used to surveil everyone. But it has never ONCE proven to be the reality.

Maybe Obama won't do it. Maybe the next guy won't, or the one after him. Maybe
this story isn't about you. Maybe it happens 10 or 20 years from now, when a
big war is happening, or after another big attack. Maybe it's about your
daughter or your son. We just don't know yet. But what we do know is that
right now, in this moment we have a choice. Are we okay with this, or not? Do
we want this power to exist, or not?

You know for me, the reason I'm upset is that I grew up in school saying the
pledge of allegiance. I was taught that the United States meant "liberty and
justice for all." You get older, you learn that in this country we define that
phrase based on the constitution. That's what tells us what liberty is and
what justice is. Well, the government just violated that ideal. So if they
aren't standing for liberty and justice anymore, what are they standing for?
Safety?

Ask yourself a question. In the story I told above, does anyone sound safe?

I didn't make anything up. These things happened to people I know. We used to
think it couldn't happen in America. But guess what? It's starting to happen.

I actually get really upset when people say "I don't have anything to hide.
Let them read everything." People saying that have no idea what they are
bringing down on their own heads. They are naive, and we need to listen to
people in other countries who are clearly telling us that this is a horrible
horrible sign and it is time to stand up and say no.

-[http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/1fv4r6/i_belie...](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/1fv4r6/i_believe_the_government_should_be_allowed_to/caeb3pl)

If you found this post inspiring, please consider signing up for the mass
rally on Washington DC in October to protest these surveillance programs:
[http://rally.stopwatching.us](http://rally.stopwatching.us)

~~~
EGreg
I agree with you pvnick -- it's a little different this time though. More
dangerous. Because you can be observed by computers that can correlate your
activities from many different sources. The thing is, this technology is
becoming cheaper and more available, and it's not just governments that want
it. Corporations do too. Just like cellphones are addictive to PEOPLE, this is
like crack to organizations of any kind.

TODAY: Uploaded a YouTube video with copyrighted song in the background? Video
censored. Sent money to a friend on Paypal? Account limited. K-Mart figures
out girl is pregnant before her dad knows, based on her shopping. Exceeded
speed limit between toolbooths? Instant fine.

TOMORROW: Left a parking lot without entering restaurant? Instant towing.
Exceeded parking meter by 2 minutes? Instant fine. Exceeded speed limit for 10
seconds on the road? Instant fine. Surfing websites correlated to high
incidence of child abuse? Children taken away. Need to be arrested? "parallel
construction" will resultin "random" traffic stop and arrest. Facebook,
Google, all these companies want your data, not just governments. Credit score
and insurance premiums calculated based on your fb friends etc.

Truth is, the information is out there, and the cameras are going to be
smaller and more prevalent. So now what? We have to focus on making our
GOVERNMENTS more transparent. Presumably our privacy will shrink as cameras
will be more available.

Terrorism is a problem of technology. And this leads to the "solution" of
increased surveillance - which may prove to be worse than the problem.

~~~
spirals
Exceeded parking meter by 2 minutes? Instant fine.

^ This one is already a reality, there are digital meters in place in many
cities that do just this.

~~~
rhizome
Can you provide some examples? Which cities? I was not able to find any in
operation using the following google search:

[https://www.google.com/search?q=parking+meter+automatic+fine](https://www.google.com/search?q=parking+meter+automatic+fine)

------
runn1ng
I have to say, I am kind of numbed down by all the NSA revelations.

Yeah, they scan and read everything they physically can. So that's metadata
and the data themselves.

They hack into SSL authorities, they try to read SSL traffic as much as
possible, they try to get into Tor (and with such a little number of Tor
relays, they very well may own it already).

I stopped caring, since I am not even a US citizen and can't change it with my
votes anyway. Yeah, if they _can_ get to some data, because the data is in
plaintext sitting somewhere, they probably already did.

~~~
frank_boyd
> since I am not even a US citizen and can't change it with my votes anyway

You can vote with:

a) Your data (usage of the various products and services)

b) Your money (purchase of the various products and services)

~~~
CamperBob2
Short of dropping off the grid and moving to a cabin in Montana, I don't see
how any of us can exercise this vote.

~~~
glitchdout
The only thing I can really think of is donating money to the EFF. Still,
unless the American people take to the streets, nothing will change.

~~~
waqf
The entire budget of the EFF is only $3.8m at last count (
[http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summary...](http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summary&orgid=7576)).
I bet we could _double_ that just among the people reading this page.

------
aegiso
I love the undertones of public, unapologetic racism that permeates every
official response to the leaks. It's totally OK because we only shit over the
human rights of "foreigners".

~~~
erichocean
"Racism"? No. What you're describing is nationalism.

All nations spy on other nations to the degree they can afford to do so. The
US can afford to do a lot of spying, so it does.

It has nothing to do with people's race, and everything to do with their
nationality.

~~~
lukifer
Potayto, potahto. Racism and nationalism stem from a common root: fear of the
other (or tribalism). Whether it's triggered by skin color or cultural
differences, that fear still comes from a primal, irrational place. (It
doesn't help that any particular other you could name will likely hold a
similar bias against us.)

~~~
philwelch
That's an idealistic view of things. What's really happening is that human
beings banded together to protect their mutual interests on multiple, fractal
levels on the way up. Individuals formed families, which formed communities,
which formed towns and neighborhoods and cities, all the way up to nation-
states. The difference is, there's no stable mechanism, other than
humanitarian good feelings, for the people of the United States and the people
of Pakistan to respect each other's mutual interests, so they pursue their
interests in opposition to one another.

~~~
bandushrew
That is a very old fashioned way to describing 'tribal' groups. One of the
things that the internet has brought about is the aggregation of 'tribal'
groups that cut across the old boundaries.

This is, IMO, one of the things that governments are having real problems
dealing with.

~~~
philwelch
Cross cutting tribal groups have historically been difficult to deal with.
Just look at how much trouble the Jews have had.

------
codex
This is no surprise; if phone metadata of US citizens is legal to harvest,
then social network metadata collection, which is essentially the same, is
also legal to harvest. It looks like this collection is limited only to
metadata, if this can be believed:

"The legal underpinning of the policy change, she said, was a 1979 Supreme
Court ruling that Americans could have no expectation of privacy about what
numbers they had called. Based on that ruling, the Justice Department and the
Pentagon decided that it was permissible to create contact chains using
Americans’ “metadata,” which includes the timing, location and other details
of calls and e-mails, but not their content. The agency is not required to
seek warrants for the analyses from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Court."

So, as long as that 1979 Supreme Court ruling is not modified, this collection
is legal. I'm a bit surprised it's the NSA and not the FBI, but if you're
going to track the intersection of foreigners or U.S. citizens, one agency has
to be picked over the other, and they picked the NSA.

------
w_t_payne
It is with sadness that I announce the passing of Privacy. A cherished friend;
he will be missed by all, and remembered fondly.

I know that we all thought that he would live forever, so news of his parting
has been greeted universally with shock and with sorrow in equal measure.

For we who remain, we need to learn afresh how to survive in a world that -
without our late companion - is changed beyond recognition; to adapt, and to
survive without his comfort and protection.

Survive, of course, we will; and adapt to our loss also. We cannot have any
doubt though - we are weaker and more vulnerable as a result of our friend's
untimely demise.

------
j_baker
I'm curious, how much of this did the NSA learn from Facebook et al? There has
to be some overlap between the analytics Facebook uses and what the NSA is
doing. Did they learn anything from articles Facebook employees have written?
Has Facebook _assisted_ them with any of this? Or has the NSA basically had to
reinvent the wheel?

~~~
declan
The NYT is using "social network" in the term's pre-Internet era sense,
meaning, as the headline and story say, "social connections" and "large-scale
graph analysis."

Nowhere in their story do the reporters allege that the NSA has been bulk-
downloading private Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc. information with the
cooperation of those companies. (In fact, I would be very surprised if that
were the case, as it goes against what my own reporting has established.)

Instead, as the story says in the second paragraph, the NSA is building social
graphs based on its "analysis of phone call and e-mail logs." We know they get
phone call metadata via Section 215 of the Patriot Act from telcoms like AT&T,
VZ, Sprint, etc., which have long been in bed with FedGov. My guess is that
the email metadata comes from two sources: AT&T, VZ, Sprint, etc., and bulk
fiber taps (remember, "UPSTREAM" from the earlier Snowden slides) aimed at
email providers that do not fully support SMTP-TLS.

When I wrote about this in June
([http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57590389-38/](http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57590389-38/)),
only Google among the top mail providers was fully supporting SMTP-TLS, while
Yahoo Mail, Hotmail.com/Outlook.com, AOL, etc. were not. And for SMTP-TLS, it
takes two to tango.

A possible third source, also via UPSTREAM, is monitoring HTTPS connections to
Facebook itself, which was using 1024-bit RSA keys until recently, as I wrote
about here:
[http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57591560-38/](http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57591560-38/)

Finally, the NSA is supplementing its email-and-phone metadata database with
whatever it can vacuum up through public records (the article refers to voter
registration rolls, property records, and Facebook profiles) and non-public
data held by regulated industries that, unlike large Silicon Valley companies,
have little interest in litigating against FedGov on privacy. The article
refers to bank codes, insurance information, passenger manifests, billing
records, and "location-based services like GPS and TomTom" \-- odd wording,
that, and a hint that the reporters may not have understood all of their
material. Cell phone location metadata from carriers is probably included as
well.

In other words, Facebook can be reasonably criticized for moving slowly away
from 1024-bit RSA keys and not supporting SMTP-TLS, which have made it easier
for not only the NSA but other intelligence agencies to conduct surveillance
too. But this story is not about the NSA having direct access to Facebook's
servers or getting bulk dumps of direct messages from Twitter, and in fact
there's zero evidence that's the case.

~~~
jerrya
_In fact, I would be very surprised if that were the case, as it goes against
what my own reporting has established._

Which makes me wonder why they aren't.

At the least, I don't see anything illegal about their scraping public
facebook info, and they can easily gain access to the private stuff as we've
learned.

So why wouldn't they populate their old-school social graphs with new-school
social graph information?

~~~
declan
They absolutely would. As I said above, "the NSA is supplementing its email-
and-phone metadata database with... Facebook profiles."

The point I was making (perhaps poorly) is that the NSA is surely bulk
vacuuming up public Facebook profiles and using its relationship with
AT&T/VZ/Sprint/etc. to do fiber taps of poorly encrypted or unencrypted data
in transit. But there's no evidence of direct access to Facebook/Twitter/G+
servers or bulk downloads of private data from social networks.

~~~
eliasmacpherson
[http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2012/11/19/facebook-
https-t-...](http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2012/11/19/facebook-https-t-
shirt/)

Worth pointing out that Facebook only had opt in https as of 2011 and default
https came a long time after that.

------
contingencies
I have two things to contribute here:

(1) Image of Keith Alexander in relative youth (from a .mil personnel file
source) @ [http://imgur.com/CXU67Fn](http://imgur.com/CXU67Fn)

(2) AMDOCS is without question a major source of metadata. It amazes me with
all the coverage, nobody is digging at this. (New York Times is less likely,
since it's hosted at the only place in the world I've ever seen a _pro-
Israeli_ march! That was quite a shock, let me tell you!)

------
_yields
i live in a democracy yet i feel powerless.

~~~
saraid216
Do you know what power is? That's the first step to not being powerless.

------
RexRollman
It's funny. I never cared about the NSA one way or the other. Now, I hate them
a little bit more everyday.

------
return0
OK, we 're not really surprised, and as others say, the onion had predicted it
years ago. What are the results? Can somebody ask for anonymized copies of
these publicly-funded data? You know, for research purposes and all...

~~~
pavs
Please stop saying "we are really not surprised", whether you actually mean it
or trying to joke about it. It legitimizes such behavior for some people who
are not very privacy conscious and it really takes out the sting from the
gravity of such incidents.

~~~
Joeboy
You want us to lie?

~~~
pavs
No, I want you to acknowledge the gravity of the incident, by saying "oh I am
really not surprised", you are in fact lying because you have no way to know
for sure the extend of the privacy infringement. You might have thought "I bet
NSA is snooping my facebook activity" but thats not the same as saying "I know
NSA is snooping on my FB to such and such extend."

~~~
cinquemb
Now that the NYT (who has been known to collude with intelligence agencies in
the shaping of public opinion) has released something, we now know the _full_
extent of privacy infringement and the world will magically turn into a better
place…

When NSA whistleblowers have been trying to do outreach to the public for
_years_ prior to the Snowden leaks[0], to be upset because some people want to
take a pragmatic approach/perspective after witnessing an apathetic public for
_years_ at large, is pretty farcical IMO.

At this point, I don't expect anything from congress nor many of my "friends"
on social networks. If I want to be secure in my communications with them, I
will/have taken the steps to do so through means discussed at length plenty of
times on HN. If governments across the world want to go on witch hunts,
they'll only get more of what has happened because of them: "If you always do
what you've always done, you'll always get what you always got".

The way I see it, the point of no return was long ago…

[0]
[http://techtv.mit.edu/embeds/21783?html5=true&size=medium&cu...](http://techtv.mit.edu/embeds/21783?html5=true&size=medium&custom_width=432&player=simple&external_stylesheet=)

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frank_boyd
Which - once more - leads us to the question (amongst others):

Still want to use Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo mail, AOL mail etc.?

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o0-0o
If everyone created a few fake profiles, this might muck the waters.

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spirals
Unlikely, all social network websites have been full of fake profiles since
day 1, and their overseers have grown brilliantly adept at distinguishing the
real humans behind them.

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melange
Surely Google and Facebook do this too. Why are we surprised that the
government does it?

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GigabyteCoin
Because it's not their information to play with. If I willingly give my
information to Google or Facebook, I don't expect the government to get their
hands on it immediately and begin interrogating me via proxy.

There have been what... 3, 4 deaths from terrorism this year in the USA? And
6,000+ deaths by way of guns/criminal activity? Doesn't really seem to be
worth their trouble to be snooping through who I talk to and who I hang out
with.

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melange
Most people don't willingly give the information to Google or Facebook. They
give it _unwittingly_.

Also, by your logic, it's not your information anymore - you have given it to
Google and Facebook, which makes it _their_ information to give to the
government.

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GigabyteCoin
Exactly. I understand that if I give away my social profile and/or pictures to
a large corporation that they may be abused by said corporation. That's what
corporations do.

I choose not to do so, I don't use facebook or gmail, but if I did I would
only expect them to be using and abusing it, not some secret government
program.

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melange
But why would such an expectation be reasonable? Surely once you have given
the information away, it's their business what they do with it?

