In the nineties (and even later) I read a lot of cyberpunk set in near-future dystopias where government power had crumbled and evil megacorps ruled the world, usually at the expense of personal liberty and privacy (the two are closely related).
Now the megacorps are trying to defend our personal liberty and privacy from governments that have gotten too powerful (albeit mostly because it would improve sales)! That's... unexpected.
>Now the megacorps are trying to defend our personal liberty and privacy from governments that have gotten too powerful (albeit mostly because it would improve sales)! That's... unexpected.
Well, they make a show of it, they could not care less about our privacy actually. Most of them had collaborated just fine with the government before the revelations...
Matter of fact, if they could have all of our personal info for themselves as a competitive advantage they would be more than happy...
There was no way for them to win. Individually even companies as big as this can't take on the US government and expect to win and collective action between a group like this pre Snowden would have likely either been illegal or shot down by the "aiding terrorists" action.
Collaborated? Not so much. Each company was issued a gag order. Not all of these companies can be like Lavabit and spit it back in big government's face. I think this is an awesome development.
>Not all of these companies can be like Lavabit and spit it back in big government's face.
Sure they could. In fact, these companies are in a much better position than Lavabit to spit it back in big government's face...financially, legally, and politically.
This is a recurring talking point, but it's not entirely accurate.
Microsoft provides early information about known weaknesses, even before fixes are available, to MANY large customers, one of whom is the US government. This is done so that those customers can mitigate the risks ASAP, before the zero-day hackers can leverage the weakness.
So while your statement is correct, it implies a relationship that doesn't actually exist.
Are you saying that Microsoft provides no information to the NSA that it doesn't also provide to its other customers? If so, I'd love to see your source.
In response to the Bloomberg story that first described this situation, Microsoft's spokesman made no attempt to deny the specific accusation that the U.S. government has special access to MS exploits.
> Now the megacorps are trying to defend our personal liberty and privacy from governments that have gotten too powerful (albeit mostly because it would improve sales)! That's... unexpected.
Don't be too quick about it. Once the megacorps win the war, it's interesting to see who will defend our personal liberty and privacy from them.
Indeed. In the UK, we're wrestling with a rightwing _news_ junta with its own surveillace abuses, intertwined with the police.
The power to dig up every detail about someone's life then publish it for the adverse judgement of millions of people is capable of great destructiveness if abused.
In the UK, we're wrestling with a rightwing _news_ junta with its own surveillace abuses, intertwined with the police.
While that may be true, it's not really the same situation.
For one thing, it seems clear that the behaviour in question was illegal, and people are going to jail for it.
For another, guessing that someone won't have changed the default PIN to access their voicemail is not on the same technical level as, say, building backdoors into widely used hardware by being sneaky with state-of-the-art mathematics.
Fortunately, the mega corps haven't started hiring their own police forces and locking people up who break whatever rules they decide are appropriate. If they did that, then I might reconsider what data I shared with them.
The state is in a very different (privileged) position to commercial companies and we need an additional layer of protection from the state that is not necessary with companies.
> The state is in a very different (privileged) position to commercial companies and we need an additional layer of protection from the state that is not necessary with companies.
I'm definitely not disputing that. I also believe that the current state of affairs isn't OK.
What I am disputing is the notion that companies are somehow defending our privacy rights. No they're not. Microsoft, Google and Facebook not only do not battle for consumer rights, their entire damn businesses are based on eroding them as much as possible. If they could have legally collected the data NSA was collecting, they'd have done so without as much as batting an eye.
All they're doing in this context is trying to shift public outcry from their own dubious practices, for two reasons:
1. As people start sharing less and less personal data for fear of government surveillance, they're also sharing less and less personal data with the tech companies themselves. This means less personal data to sell and, consequently, less profits.
2. Average consumers typically don't notice how much of their data is in fact shared with the likes of Facebook and Twitter. The NSA scandal put this into a new perspective: they share enough data that even the government cares. The PR folks aren't stupid; they are predictably trying to shift public outcry towards the NSA, attempting to create the image that somehow these companies -- which otherwise deeply care for their users' privacy -- have done the best they could to protect the private data of their customers, and now need support to battle against this Bigger Enemy. Conveniently, the fact that they can still tap unlimited information for their own use is shielded away.
I'm not denying surveillance laws need to be changed, I'm simply denying the benevolent role of large corporations.
People here read too goddamn science fiction. And the problem with dystopia fiction is that it treats the masses of people as mindless sheep, easily placated by whomever the evil character happens to be (Big Gov, Big Corps). These characterizations don't match the agency exhibited by real people. They don't give sufficient credit to a people who animated the civil rights movement and survived the cold war. They fail to appreciate the inherent resiliency of democracy.
And yet, without fail, we elect one of two sides of the same coin every 2 years locally, and every 4 years federally, despite people like me telling everyone who will listen that it's a terrible idea, and that doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is moronic.
A smart sheep is still a sheep. That term doesn't imply stupidity, or lack of intelligence, only ease of manipulating.
You assume people are easily manipulated because you fail to appreciate what they actually want. You might, say, criticize a republican for wanting smaller government but voting for republicans instead of libertarians. But when arepublican says "smaller government" they mean "a little smaller." They don't want some breathtaking departure from the status quo. They want to cut back on teachers' pensions, not get rid of the Department of Education. Similarly, you might criticize a liberal for wanting less of a security state, but again fail to appreciate that what they mean by that is a "little less."
In my experience, people are quite broadly happy with the status quo. The complain incessantly about it, but very few would change it in a really fundamental way. It's hard to look at the American government and see it as anything other than an expression of the composite of American voters: financially irresponsible baby boomers who carry with them some of the liberal leanings of being teenagers in the 1960's along with the paranoia of being young adults in the Cold War.
This drives people who actually oppose the status quo in a fundamental way absolutely crazy.
I was recently reflecting on just how much Neal Stephenson got right with "Snow Crash" .. I mean, a whole class of society known as "The Feds", who have unlimited secrecy powers and have effectively formed their own state-within-a-state, accountable to nobody but their own internal power structures .. this is America today.
I look forward to the day when we've got The Feed to keep us occupied, anyway.
Really? How so? I just checked, and there is a class of society called "The Feds", they were the "remnants of the US gov't federal system" and they did maintain they were a separate legal entity. Hows' my reading of the book different from yours?
The cool thing in the book was that you could opt out of US government protection, choosing instead to live in an enclave with services provided by some private party.
IIRC, Stephenson presented it as a bit dystopic, but it sounded quite exciting to me.
It wasn't opt out. The US Federal government didn't exist. Hence the regions of the book where a guy working for the Mafia is noticing the pings of bullets bouncing off his car as he drives through a rough neighborhood, and idly wonders whether the stains on the road are people who've been smeared into nothingness.
It sounds exciting because you're not living it right now. And in the modern world, it is surprisingly easy to recreate that experience - just the cost of an airfare.
> "Now the megacorps are trying to defend our personal liberty and privacy from governments"
What is the first purpose of a megacorp (or any corp)? To increase shareholders' equity. Nothing wrong with that, but let's not fool ourselves thinking their primary purpose suddenly become something else than increasing shareholders' equity.
ONLY because of sales. That's the point of companies! Revenue!
But yeah it's interesting. It seems to go back and forth over the decades. Evil corporations, good government, good corporations, evil government.. if a god exists I'm sure he has a big bowl of popcorn.
In most Western countries today, it is much easier to vote with your wallet than to vote in a new government. It is easier for those who disapprove of the current situation to punish businesses than governments.
Moreover, wallet-damage is a sliding scale. A guy who wins an election with 75% probably gets the same end result as a guy who wins with 51%, but a business that loses 1/3 of its profits is in trouble. Thus a government can ignore a significant minority who disapprove as long as it doesn't tip the balance come election time every few years, but that same significant minority can cause real damage to a business and they can do it today.
... and thus, we get the demagoguery in today's politics. There's no reason for a candidate to actually be good. They just have to be one iota less evil than their major-party candidate. Then they ride in on the demagoguery, ensuring that no one dares vote for a 3rd party party for fear of the (slightly more) evil opponent winning.
And so they ensure that the cycle keeps going around, without any opportunity for real change.
Maybe it's because corporations care about their users more than the government does? After all, they make money from selling their products, not from coercion.
I'd say it's somewhere between 'selling' and 'coercion'.
“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country." - Edward Bernays
Something has gone wrong here, the contractors for the intelligence community were not thinking properly. This could have been avoided had there been more fake terror plots 'foiled' by the hard efforts of the snitches. The rationale for the mass surveillance could have been more credible had that happened. As it is nobody really believes they spy on us to catch the terrorists, paedophiles and drug kingpins.
Perhaps greed got in the way too. Had the intelligence community contractors outsourced some of their work to the 'normal' internet companies and not seen them as 'enemy' then it would have been harder for them to complain about what has been going on. They could have co-opted Microsoft to build their tools, got Google to build their data centres, helped out Yahoo and bought a few more Apple boxes, making Silicon Valley dependent on them for a large chunk of their revenue stream. They would then have towed the line that bit better, portraying themselves as good patriots for helping the government win The War Against Terror. As it is we now have two types of tech mega-corp, those wanting the surveillance state and those that don't want it. Had greed not gotten the better of the likes of Lockheed Martin this could have been avoided. This is a sad day for big brother.
This places them in direct conflict with Dianne Feinstein, the Democratic chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who is sponsoring a rival bill that would enshrine the right of security agencies to collect bulk data.
Feinstein, who represents California, has been accused by critics of being a cheerleader for Washington's intelligence committee but now faces opposition from her state's largest industry.
This is a start. Representavtives need to represent...+1 for stepping up and being heard.
About bloody time, is my immediate reaction. And Diane Feinstein should resign in shame. But I'd be more impressed with MS, Google, Apple et al if they had told the NSA initially to go Cheney themselves.
She should be recalled. She's done enough damage as the Chief of Intelligence Committee in Senate, and she's going to do more in the next 5 years if we let her. I still remember getting my stomach turned by how aggressively she pushed the FISA Amendments Act renewal, last year, before Christmas, with no real debate.
Before the revelations appeared, these companies did little to fight it. There are ways of acting against it proactively without breaking any NDA's and laws.
Only when confidence in their business declines because people found out exactly how complicit they'd been, they decide to do something about it.
We know where the priorities really are. In this case it's a publicity thing. They've been caught with their pants down.
If there's no source code or it's"cloud" based then I refuse to do business now.
There are ways of acting against it proactively without breaking any NDA's and laws.
I can't think of any. The system seems carefully rigged to neuter the checks and balances originally built into it.
What are some examples of effective legal actions against an omniscient surveillance state that, historically speaking, threatens politicians even more than it does the average citizen? Maybe I should do some more reading to understand how Hoover's FBI was finally reined in.
All signs point to a hasty implementation of this; seems like there was some pressure on the companies included, or an urgent turn around.
All the articles were clearly planned; The Guardian has already run two stories, each published exactly at midnight. That said, the www.reformgovernmentsurveillance.com site seems almost haphazardly thrown together; graph tags are butchered making sharing awkward with a terribly misleading preview, Apple's logo is left out of the first batch of supporters, the logos at the bottom are awkwardly aligned, etc.
I'm not exactly sure how to decipher all this; could the hasty implementation be good news? A sign that it's not taken seriously?
They were all collaborators. They collaborated. Lavabit was not a collaborator and Lavabit did not collaborate--in case it needs to be more clearly stated.
It is understandable why Google, Facebook, and the others want changes to US laws. They feel that the bad publicity is hurting revenue. It will be interesting to see stance of companies that gain from the bad publicity like those whose business is based on securing and encrypting private information. Many of them have used the government's bad behavior as a marketing platform.
Sweeping changes to privacy laws which presumably would apply even more so to them - has some one not told them be careful what you ask for any new laws will have exceptions for national security which will not apply to the Googles of this world.
Now the megacorps are trying to defend our personal liberty and privacy from governments that have gotten too powerful (albeit mostly because it would improve sales)! That's... unexpected.