
The NSA Can't Tell the Difference Between an American and a Foreigner - mehmehshoe
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/06/27/the_nsa_cant_tell_the_difference_between_an_american_and_a_foreigner?page=0,0
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ck2
Has anyone else become seriously depressed over all this?

I mean the TSA was one thing, they are still horrible but I never fly or take
a bus or train, I just hate the idea of them existing.

But since the NSA exposure, I just feel seriously depressed about the state of
who is running this country and the "just try to stop us" thug mentality. It's
a weight on my mind constantly this past month.

~~~
andrewljohnson
I haven't become depressed, but I've become angry, and thoughtful. I often
have new software ideas, and my more recent ideas have turned to ways to
organize voters to democratically overthrow the corrupt incumbents.

Basically, I imagine a political party, defined by the software it runs on.
The first incarnation of the software (website) focuses on organizing party
members (users) to win elections, but it then gets iterated to include tools
for distributed, direct democracy (i.e. the site will let the party members
cast votes on what the elected leader votes on, but I also imagine most people
proxy their power to others, which is a feature of the site).

The website first needs to get a few local leaders elected... city council,
uncontested state positions, maybe a state senator if the v1.0 launch goes
well. We need to both recruit people to run for office, then build the
software to help them get elected, then build tools to allow transparent
governance with direct oversite from the people.

It's hard to imagine capturing national congressional seats or the presidency
on the first go, but I think that applying iterative processes to the
formation of a political party and its infrastructure is one possible way to
overcome the existing machine.

~~~
cturner
The Australian Democrats had a deliberate structure along those lines,
although less revolutionary than what you're proposing. They'd been a
successful minor party for about thirty years, but imploded from in-fighting
about ten years ago.

They're a useful case-study for talking about ideas around direct democracy.
See
[http://www.adelaide.edu.au/apsa/docs_papers/Others/Gauja.pdf](http://www.adelaide.edu.au/apsa/docs_papers/Others/Gauja.pdf)

The causes of the party's decline is controversial. My take - that they ran
into scaling problems when their parlimentary party grew large. Parts of their
parliamentary party felt hamstrung by a membership who were free to take
positions on issues that weren't well-considered or practical. They needed to
move quickly on issues, and the direct democracy process stalled them. The
federal parliamentary party went rogue, and a large section of the membership
felt betrayed. This killed the collaborative culture that was the heart of
what they stood for, and the party collapsed in infighting.

I'm pretty frustrated with the way freedoms are being eroded in the west, but
direct democracy is not a strong response to this. It's complicated, ripe for
gaming and diffuses responsibility - bad qualities. When it fails, people will
look to a "strong leader" who "gets things done" to replace it. Danger.

Keep thinking though, because there will be better models out there. I suspect
that if you could draft a new constitution, you could produce a free society
with strong real democratic qualities using a structure similar to the old
Icelandic Commonwealth - basically lots of statelets.

The major weakness of this kind of system is that it's hard to fight big wars,
even to defend yourself. That's a reason that the awesome original Articles of
Confederation were replaced with the current US system.

~~~
demallien
Actually, I was fairly heavily involved with the Dems at the time (it's the
"dem" in my pseudo!), and what actually happened is worse. They had no
structure in place at all to gauge what the party rank and file wanted, no
structure for debate, and pretty much no structure at all. They got to be the
maximum size that a party can be before internal strains make them implode I
think. So when the Howard Government proposed the GST, the Democrat Senators
achieved a consensus amongst themselves on what would be an acceptable form of
the GST (they, in particular Natasha Stott Despoja, added in many of the
exemptions, such as on books, fresh food and so on).

There was no mechanism for the rank and file to state their resistance in a
timely fashion in a way that the leadership could hear, and of course the
membership itself was deeply divided on the issue - once again, there was no
mechanism for dissension amongst the membership to be dissipated. The result
was that the party blew up in spectacular fashion at the next elections,
unable to get the membership enthusiastic enough to put boots on the ground to
run election activities, with a consequent massive drop in the polls, leading
to a drop in funding, leading to extinction.

I was in the NSW branch and as a result of this mess became policy manager and
tried to put in place what we would call a crowd-sourced policy creation
system. But this was in the early 2000s, the Internet was still not entirely
ubiquitous, and management in NSW decided that we had to do this thing on
paper, not on the Web. It was slow, painful, and I moved countries before
getting to the end (and anyway, it was too little too late, the writing was on
the wall).

All of that to say that I don't think we can use the Australian Democrats as a
counterexample for direct democracy. They never really had the processes in
place to give such a system a chance. Today the story might very well be
different if a direct democracy party was tried with a correct set up of tools
to allow the rank and file a chance to meaningfully participate in policy
creation. I've often thought about trying to set one up on that basis, but
since I live in a country now where I'm not even a citizen, I've never tried.

------
btilly
Wow, the article managed to explain the comment that I had been holding out as
the most ridiculous comment ever. And I understand why it was said.

The comment was that it would violate the privacy of Americans to try to
figure out how many Americans were under surveillance.

The key to understanding this is that the NSA believes that it can avoid
having to follow the 4th as long as it never intentionally "searches
Americans" by doing any analysis on data collected about identified Americans,
and immediately throwing away analysis already done once the identification
was made.

Figuring out how many Americans had been caught up in the dragnet would
require doing analysis on identified Americans. That triggers the protection
of the 4th, and can only be done under their legal theories with a real
warrant. Which they don't have. Therefore attempting to answer that question
really does cross the line that they have set for what is and is not legal.

~~~
enraged_camel
At this point everyone knows that the NSA cares very, very little about what
is legal or not. They are confident that Obama will cover their asses in any
way he can, and any judge that tries to rule against them - including the
Supreme Court judges - will be branded an activist terrorist-lover.

~~~
pjmlp
Maybe that is my European view, but how can anyone seriously expected secret
services to respect any laws?

~~~
Qantourisc
Nope it's not European view, it's yours. Unless you men "secret" with no
oversight and such, so there is no judge on if they are following the law.

~~~
pjmlp
Like a few European countries in the last century, I got to enjoy what a
dictatorship means, secret services don't follow the law, they make the law.

------
rurounijones
As a "foreigner" (From the American POV) I am getting increasingly annoyed at
the whole "American vs foreigner" issue as if spying on normal people from
_other_ countries is perfectly ok.

Is it so much to ask that I be given the same privacy levels as a US citizen
and not be caught in overly-broad privacy invading dragnets?

~~~
krapp
I keep hearing this from non-Americans. And while I respect it, I always
wonder what country they come from that apparently makes no legal distinction
between its own citizens and anyone else, and which apparently has no
intelligence service at all...

This isn't really something that's unique to America, this 'us vs them'
attitude is something that's fundamental to the way nations operate, I think.

~~~
rurounijones
I would argue that most other countries to not have such far-reaching
interception programs with access to so much internet traffic[1] and
therefore, while their intent is the same, their capability is wildly
different which changes priorities somewhat.

[1] As the NSA presentation said, an awful lot of backbone traffic passes
through the US.

~~~
krapp
Yes, but the political and social barrier between 'citizen' and 'foreigner' is
still more or less the same wherever you go, especially where governments are
concerned. When I leave the United States, I become a foreigner. My money may
be welcome but my motives may be suspect, and I probably don't have the same
rights as the locals.

The internet shouldn't be a part of it, though. I agree with that 100%. The
internet is not America's, we don't own it, we can't act as if anything going
through our part of it belongs to us, to do with what we will.

~~~
rurounijones
Actually reading back I didn't make my point correctly.

I am naturally outraged at the antics of the NSA and similar organisations
(GCHQ etc.).

But right now I am really annoyed that the entire debate seems to have focused
on "This is affecting _us_ ". It seems to have been accepted by everyone
(Government, News, Public) that spying like this on _foreigners_ is fine and
dandy.

I just wish there was a bit more outrage / discussion on the "Is it actually
ok to spy on _foreigners_ like this?"

~~~
krapp
> _I just wish there was a bit more outrage / discussion on the "Is it
> actually ok to spy on foreigners like this?"_

Well, you can't really fault American media for focusing on Americans (or
maybe you can.) But it would be interesting to see that break into the
national consciousness.

I'm afraid, though, that if you asked most Americans their answer would be "of
course it's OK, as long as we're the best at it."

... I can see how that could be incredibly infuriating.

------
david_shaw
Isn't the fact that the NSA can't tell if you're American their _entire_
justification for harvesting everyone's data?

If they could tell the difference, then there would be no justification for
dragnet surveillance.

~~~
codex
You also have to presume that terrorists will attempt to look like U.S.
citizens (e.g. "John Smith" connecting from a U.S. IP via tunnel) to avoid
surveillance.

~~~
sneak
When you monitor all of the network traffic, you can easily deanonymize (even
encrypted) tunnels via simple timing attacks. VPNs don't help.

I keep getting into discussions with people this month about Tor, and they
keep bringing up the fact that "we don't know how many tor nodes are run by
the government or other attackers". Fact is, if you can monitor all of the
long-haul network traffic in full, you don't need to run _any_ tor nodes to
deanonymize all of the users. You can just watch the traffic flows as they go
into the tor network, bounce around, and pop out - encrypted or not.

~~~
codex
Agreed. But when you have "John Smith" coming in over VPN from a foreign IP to
a domestic email account, how can you tell if they are an expat citizen or a
masquerade? Presumably this is why the NSA monitors whenever at least one half
of the connection is foreign.

~~~
sneak
The number of expat citizens is small enough as to be statistically
insignificant at this scale of monitoring. For all intents and purposes they
can just be treated as foreigners.

I mean, what real American would ever deign to leave the homeland?! If you
leave the USA to go live in some stupid foreign land you must not want your
human rights anyway.

------
adventured
I think the NSA considers this a feature, rather than a bug.

If they can't tell the difference it makes it far easier to suspend rights
reserved for Americans in the process of spying.

------
dfc
Single Page:
[http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/06/27/the_nsa_can...](http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/06/27/the_nsa_cant_tell_the_difference_between_an_american_and_a_foreigner?page=full)

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Systemic33
There is a joke in that title somewhere...

~~~
mehmehshoe
Replace "foreigner" with "hole in the ground"

~~~
ivanca
Replace "foreigner" with "Jew" to remember a history lesson that America
should not repeat.

------
vasundhar
Not knowing what is self, and non self is called Immunity disorder than an
organisation protecting people.

In Human Body it causes death, in a System it causes Death of Democracy, In a
family it causes chaos.

------
joshuaellinger
It's a feature, not a bug.

They want to case a wide net.

------
o0-0o
E-X-A-C-T-L-Y

Although I would make a case for profiling based on names.

~~~
Ihmahr
Right one brother! Those arab named bastards.

Just like that??

------
alan_cx
Yet they can enough to deny foreigners any rights.

------
marze
Funny...

