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.
Ah, what a brilliant future we have to explore as we introduce Bayes' Rule to the Analytics of crimes. Who needs a gelatinous liquid pool of psychics floating around when we can train a polygonal mesh of data points and extrapolate new data points after applying a laplacian smoothing function to it.
It will be just as wonderful as the voice-recognition software (like Siri) that runs on a similar principle, but this time it's for governing. And who wouldn't like Siri as mechanical a god?
Or a massive Sims like computer game based on real world data. Sooner or later someone is going to add controls that let the players subtlety modify peoples lives. Because winning the game is more important than the lives of the tiny little people.
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.
> 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.
Exactly. That way NSA can cross their fingers and say "No, no, of course they don't have 'dossiers' on everyone, that would be crazy!" while they fail to mention that they can run a query to build one at any time.
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.
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.
Entire data record of you over years, with `~non-finite' indefinitely long-term memory, with evolving code to sift and immediately provide answers to queries,
knows you better than you. Hitting the `Enter' key, you are pwned by some `See Clearly, Act Quickly' strange strangers in Maryland. Those animal experiment abominations, with wires in heads, involuntarily switching muscles, entrapped organisms reduced to spastic robot tools, we.
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.
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.
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.
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?
"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.
A dragnet of the civilian population kept in perpetuity and allowing a dossier of everyone to be conjured up with a query is obviously not primarily for stopping terrorism. Who would fall for that really? (The target seems more aligned to tax enquiries for a start...)
9/11 was enabled by box cutters - the message was that this was super low tech and you often can't stop the most awful terrorism if people are really determined and feel they have nothing to lose. The good news for you is that news events are by definition rare and there's actually so little terrorism (in the west at least) - that's because there's not nearly as much motivation to commit these acts as many seem to believe, not because of robocops peering into your drawers.
We vote, organize, protest. :) A few years ago I would have been right there with you, but since learning more about national security I have come to the conclusion that it really is a unique sphere where idealistic conceptions aren't always practical.
> There are people out there that very much want to cause regular citizens harm
And what happens if the government becomes the one that wants to cause regular citizens harm? How do you protest a government that knows everything, monitors everything?
Well that's the rub. Remember, we already live in the surveillance state. As it stands now, you're reliant upon the goodwill of the current government. If we put robust safeguards in place, we could ensure our rights more concretely.
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).
> 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).
Hm, but shouldn't we also count thwarted attacks into your statistics? (I don't believe no deaths were prevented by such a massive apparatus). But as I said, I don't support anything, I am not even American, but with such a huge issue (I mean that "collect it all" thing) - which doesn't seems to be easy to get rid of - I would just expect a more broad discussion.
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.
> 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.
Who says he has to? I don't agree with the notion that reporters are supposed to blandly report both sides of the issue and ignore their own views, nor do I think that leads to a more accurate representation of reality. I mean, when you see an article about a serial murder, does it include something like "Serial murder supporters claim that murder prevents overpopulation"?
Ok, I didn't explain myself good enough. Of course he doesn't have to, he can write what he wants, and I also don't say he is wrong. I just wanted to say that I miss other points of view in this story.
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). 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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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."
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....
> "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?
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."
