

Forget PRISM, the recent NSA leaks are plain: Digital privacy doesn’t exist - greyman
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/06/16/forget-prism-the-recent-nsa-leaks-are-plain-digital-privacy-is-a-joke/

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mpyne
Well, at least people are belatedly realizing this, even if the government had
to be the boogeyman that hackers/Facebook/Google/malicious ISPs/Mallory were
not.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
I was thinking about this same thing today.

I think the reason the government "won out" over all the other abuses is that
they are able to collect data willy-nilly from all the other corporations. So
whatever problems you might have with FB privacy, it's nothing with the abuses
involved with taking the problems of 50 providers and adding them all
together. Then storing the data forever.

~~~
mpyne
The government has always been able to do that though, albeit with a warrant.

Of course, a warrant is exactly what was needed for companies to hand over
information even on non-U.S. citizens into NSA's Prism system in the first
place.

Whatever else you might say about recorded phone calls and emails, Prism
itself was shown to require the company to buy off on the logic used in the
NSA NSL in order to obtain data, so Prism was hardly the problem people made
it out to be.

In fact, a little itty bitty tweak here and there and Prism would apply
directly to the FBI, who could then use it for _normal_ warrant compliance for
U.S. citizens. All the data just sitting there in their pretty little cloud
silos, and pretty little hosted email solutions begging you to use IMAP, just
waiting for the government to get a warrant (or not, unless ECPA gets
revised). It would all be completely legal, and that problem has been around
in some form for decades now.

~~~
Joeri
Collecting information prior to the delivery of a warrant is unreasonably
invasive. If you extend the reasoning then they could post a video camera in
your home, filming everything you do, and then get a warrant to obtain the
material at any point in the future. Our digital homes should have the same
safeguards in place that our physical homes have: nobody has access before a
warrant, and with a warrant they can only find out what's there now, not
what's been there in the past.

~~~
mpyne
Are you referring to Prism or the "beam splitting"?

Prism sends over data that was already generated; it's not the government's
fault that the company bothered to generate it but if they get a warrant why
should they pretend like it didn't exist? I'm not sure how you would even
begin to investigate things like 9/11 if you weren't allowed to collect
evidence from actions that occurred before the crime came to the attention of
the government.

If you're talking about beam-splitting then, well, I see your argument. But
that's not what I was talking about in my parent comment.

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codex
It's a bit ironic that the same technological "inevitabilities" that make
piracy possible and DRM hard are the ones which make spying possible and
privacy hard. Personally, I don't think either are inevitable (regulation is
the answer to both), but if you think one is inevitable, you should think that
the other is, too.

~~~
reedlaw
As the article made clear, the regulation already exists in the form of the
Forth Amendment. Speaking of tradeoffs between privacy and security seems odd
without reference to our prior adoption of the Bill of Rights and without a
call for its repeal.

~~~
saraid216
Regulation isn't just law. It's also law enforcement.

~~~
reeses
Regulation is a law written by people you don't get a chance to elect.

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return0
It didn't exist in the first place, but people pretend that it exists, as long
as different parts of our lives are stored in different companies (facebook
for fun, gmail for work, phone companies for personal etc). We considered that
in the name of competition this data would not end in a single silo in the
end. Little did we know

~~~
gwgarry
Real privacy doesn't exist. It's also a legal fiction. People assumed the
legal fiction of online privacy existed because they fear that big baby
government will fuck over innocents or people that are not a real threat to
society. Their fears came true.

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pointernil
It is funny to see how the internet "folks" concentrate on the
internet/virtual data being collected and analysed. What about all the real
world interactions driving? walking? shopping? talking in public places? The
(inter)banking traffic?

Scanning the license plates of ALL cars moving through New York?
Reconstructing their paths? Why not, right? That's probably even less raw data
that the facebook chit-chat.

I believe (no way to "know") that those infrastructures are in place and
working 24/7.

Misused? Seldom. A huge problem as any large data/info store. For sure.

The "balance" between utility and the price tho pay for it for us all ... in
the end that is politics. About to change?

