> allow databases about U.S. civilians to be handed over to foreign governments for analysis, presumably so that they too can attempt to determine future criminal actions
...where on the line did these guys lost the "innocent until proven guilty" part?! (the possibility of your government handing personal data of innocent civilians to foreign governments sounds "out of your freakyn minds" even for a foreigner like me! Imagine someone coming to the US in attempt to flee from an oppressive government and data about his whereabouts getting to a contract killer via an "en masse" exchange of data about "suspicious" civilians between governments...)
...keep it like this and the USA will be the last place on Earth someone would want to emigrate to, either to work or to open a business!!!
It's been happening in the other direction for a number of years now.
My brother was turned back when he flew to Miami with his family to take his children to Disney World.
It turned out that because he had been arrested aged 19 and failed to declare it that the border people felt that he had answered fraudulantly when challenged on "Have you ever been arrested?".
My brother answered no because whilst he was arrested he was never charged or convicted. He had attended a demonstration in the North of England and when a few people caused trouble the police had just arrested everyone only to release the vast majority some hours later.
He'd forgotten about this because nothing had ever actually come of it and it was over 20 years ago, yet there he was being confronted by it at a US border.
Clearly the UK authorities already share data with the USA on its citizens, even those never charged or convicted.
That it may happen more does not surprise me the least. The only part that surprises me is that the data flow might go the other way too.
If I want to fly to Latin America from Europe, I'd rather make the stop for the second plane in Europe, and then go straight to Latin America, than make the stop in US. I just don't want to deal with TSA in any way, especially after stories that now they even have data on what you tweeted and stuff like that, and they can take you aside or even arrest you for a while because of that.
Will TSA consider me "suspicious" just because I tweeted articles such as this one? Or maybe some Wikileaks-related articles or some OWS articles? That is ridiculous, and I don't even want to risk that by flying through the country, let alone want to live there (which is something I really wanted to do before). The world's view on America is changing fast and the view is increasingly more negative.
The world wants America to be its role model, something to aspire to, and a place where they want to live in. It doesn't want to see an America as the bully of the world, or a bully even of its own citizens. So yes, I do think this will impact tourism, cloud businesses, as well as other type of businesses, if they keep going down this road of increasing surveillance and more government abuses, not only against Americans, but against foreigners, too.
My company will sponsor $5,000 for the best idea submission for mitigation techniques against these types of systems. Any suggestion on the best service to use host this / receive submissions?
We will:
1) Open source all submitted ideas.
2) Let the community choose the top 5 and we will hold an internal review process for the top spot.
3) Fly the winner(s) to our office in Atlanta, GA to discuss the winning submission in details with some of the top information security experts in the world.
4) Work to get press around the winning idea.
5) If we get north of 50 submissions we will help seed (with an additional $5,000) an IndieGoGo campaign to see the idea developed.
Email me (adam | socialfortress.com) or respond here to discuss.
> Fly the winner(s) to our office in Atlanta, GA to discuss the winning submission in details with some of the top information security experts in the world.
That may be a bit prohibitive, given that they will still have to use air travel, possibly to and at least within the USA. I figure the people that come up with a mitigation against a system like this would be very smart to stay the hell away from claiming credit for it.
And the top information security experts in the world are working for what we'll loosely designate 'the other side' here, I don't think they'll be on your discussion panel.
There are two basic approaches to mitigating massive data collection efforts: reduce your digital footprint, or add noise to your digital footprint. The latter is far more effective, as you fuck them in three ways: you hide your data, you have plausible deniability, and you spam their databases with crap.
However, the "data flak" approach has limits. It is only doable with discretionary data, and even that might be problematic. But it would work well to make access logs useless. While I don't want the system to spam hacker news with nonsense posts about building nuclear weapons, I might be able to harmlessly incorporate intentionally explosive phrases in a post just to annoy them (hah, see what I did there?) For things like flights and credit card usage, there is no way to introduce flak, or really minimize exposure.
Of course, the best mitigation technique is to raise Cain over this and get the entire system dismantled. There is simply no excuse to be doing this sort of thing. The fact is that it would be pretty hard to organize an attack and not trigger (local) alarms. Local police have a feel for the community, for what's what. They can call in the feds if they need to.
Systems like this are going to always have three serious problems: a) bringing the hammer down on the innocent (false positives), b) failing to detect actual plots (false negatives), c) be abused (used as a weapon for politically or personally motivated attacks). And in the long run a) and c) are going to grow monotonically, and that is not acceptable. It's one thing to have the asshole local cop bust down your door for no good reason, it's quite another to have a bunch of feds fly in to nab you based on some data in their computers. They've never met you, don't know you, don't know your relationships to the people around you - but based on data will ruin your life. That's a nightmare scenario if I've ever heard one!
Why I'm worried about a surveillance state? Because the people in charge will have their records protected while everyone else gets the surveillance.
Our president committed crimes his justice department jails people for (illegal drugs). Drug testing is a perfect example of the surveillance state. The people who don't get tested? The testers. The legislators. The people in charge. I know there are technical problems with that analogy - but you get the point.
Case in point - the uk "contactpoint" database - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ContactPoint - a database mandated by MPs that should contains all information about every child under the age of 18. Anyone excluded? Yep you guessed it - MP's children.
As Eben Moglen said in his speech in Berlin. If we don't do something soon, we are going to be living in the age past forgetting. Nothing will ever be forgotten again. Everything one do, everything one say, everything one reads, listen to, or think about is recoded and saved for all eternity.
This 5 years the article talk about. Do anyone really believe than in 5 years, they won't extend it further? It will continue to the point in which either everything is stored forever, or push back actually takes away this pandora box from the government.
No goverment ever want to be with less information about the population. If they could predict who is a criminal before a crime is committed, social benefits could be rerouted away. If they could predict who is going to become political candidates, they could adjust information flows away or towards that person. If they can predict who is voting for who, they can direct support/anti-support to "encourage" the right result.
This is why I am worried about a surveillance state. With a large enough database of population information, and prediction models, democracy will be eroded to the point of destruction.
Good time to recall that up until 2012, it was legal for Congressmen to trade stocks based on inside information they received carrying out their duties.
This is a good point, although as we saw most recently with Petraeus, sometimes an expansive surveillance state can't help but ensnare its own leaders, and this often accidentally leads to its limitations (as a bill requiring warrants for emails is now making its way through the Senate)
This has nothing to do with authoritarism. It is method to detect behaviour not mathching "normal" pattern. This is used as a heuristic to detect suspicious behavior.
WSJ didn't uncover it. It has been talked about since October in the context of the "disposition matrix", which is to be used to search out possible candidates for the extrajudicial "kill list".
>The central role played by the NCTC in determining who should be killed ... the NCTC operates a gigantic data-mining operation, in which all sorts of information about innocent Americans is systematically monitored, stored, and analyzed
> The aim of the TIA initiative was essentially to create a kind of ubiquitous pre-crime surveillance regime monitoring public and private databases.
I Ctrl+F-ed for Philip K. Dick's name, didn't find anything, I'll be the first one to copy-paste this:
> Paradoxes and alternate realities are created by the precognition of crimes when the chief of police intercepts a precognition that he is about to murder a man he has never met. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Minority_Report)
People have warned that this will happen eventually, but I don't think that many believed it. We're witnessing the first real steps towards making pre-crime recognition a reality in the country. Good bye "innocent until proven guilty".
Cory Doctorow has said in his "war against general computation" talk [1] that it's becoming cheaper and easier for authorities to just monitor everyone and store information about everyone, and then use algorithms to catch them, than focusing on who they they need to catch and following just that one. Now it's up to the people to stop this from becoming legal or from being done even illegally, not just in US, but in all countries, as I'm sure many others will try doing it, too. The ironic part is that the developed "democratic" countries may be the first to do it, because they are more advanced technologically.
Since the predictive algorithms in use mostly come down to glorified dot products, I question their general validity.
Sure, it works sometimes, but just look at some of the wacky stuff Amazon, Google, and Netflix derive from such things. Now replace search results and product recommendations with waterboarding and extraordinary rendition based on the results of those dot products and hilarity ensues...
If you have a record then isn't it understandable that you might attract more attention than someone with a blameless past? It seems logical to me anyway. Obviously not to the extent that you'd be held but keeping an eye on you is fair enough imo.
I have an aquaintance that was falsely accused of vehicular homicide because he had a car whose description was close enough for the police and he had to spend a decade in the legal system fighting for his freedom. And all of this is made possible because the police have access to records of which cars are owned and by whom and they can look at it. Should we not let the police use this information since this one individual was the victim of a false positive match and it cost him 10 years proving it? I mean, he never committed a crime in his life, and yet the police had access to his vehicle driving history / cars registered to him / etc. The had collected that information in advance. But no one called it a "massive surveillance program"
So where does it stop? Phone records. Addresses. Aliases. Friends. Fingerprints. Is it wrong that they want to put in all in place? Would we be happier if they had to run around to 25 different government agencies / 25 private corporations to get the information? What if the information is lost before the need to use it to aid an investigation. Wouldn't it be easier if they just aggregated it ahead of time and looked at it when they needed it?
I guess personally I'm just not seeing the problem. As long as they are simply gathering all information that is legally knowable, what do I care? Why should I care? I'd like to know I have the freedom to do the same thing and I assume large corporations are doing it already. Should it be illegal to gather information on people simply because they didn't authorize it? Should individuals have the power to control what others do with the information that is publically knowable about them? I, personally, say no.
> Should it be illegal to gather information on people simply because they didn't authorize it? Should individuals have the power to control what others do with the information that is publically knowable about them? I, personally, say no.
I think this is the third time I'll make this post on HN, but it's been relevant every time.
Privacy is not about having something to hide, or about keeping things secret. Giving the government the power to store all this data about you isn't bad because they might learn embarrassing things; after all, it will most likely only be read by a computer.
But it gives the government enormous power to make decisions about you -- decisions about whether you may take a commercial airline flight, get a security clearance, or even get a job -- without your knowledge or consent, and without you knowing how they make the decisions. It's not Orwellian, it's Kafkaesque.
In short, a lack of privacy gives the government the power to be even less transparent in its decision-making, and gives it yet more power over its citizens. It's not a question of discovering your fetishes or being embarrassed, and we shouldn't respond to the "but I have nothing to hide" argument as though their conception of privacy is right and having nothing to hide really is an excuse.
There's a rather good paper I can recommend on the subject:
"As long as they are simply gathering all information that is legally knowable"
The law is out-of-date. When the law was written, constructing a dossier on a person required effort -- officers in the field, following the target around, interviewing people, etc. Today, the dossier can be rapidly assembled, assuming it has not been already by some private company that "specializes" in constructing such things.
We need an update to the law, to protect our rights from government use of new technologies.
"Phone records. Addresses. Aliases. Friends. Fingerprints. Is it wrong that they want to put in all in place? Would we be happier if they had to run around to 25 different government agencies / 25 private corporations to get the information?"
Yes, I would be happier if the bureaucracy slowed the police down, as a basic protection against tyranny. We have far too many laws, and far too many prisoners -- anything that slows the expansion of our prison population and renders absurd laws unenforceable should be welcomed. Do you really think that these databases will be used solely to catch murderers and rapists? Most of people targeted by these sorts of programs will be nonviolent, non-dangerous offenders who will be charged with dozens of crimes and told to either take a plea bargain or risk a longer sentence if they exercise their right to a trial (and if even a tenth of them were to demand a trial, our court system would be overwhelmed by the case load -- yes, that is how extreme things have gotten).
"I'd like to know I have the freedom to do the same thing"
You do not. Go ahead, try to go around your town collecting these sorts of details -- you'll be arrested for harassing people, being a public nuisance, resisting arrest, and probably multiple other crimes.
"Should individuals have the power to control what others do with the information that is publically knowable about them?"
We are not talking about any other random people, we are talking about the police. The police are a special class of people. We let them arrest people, holding people against their will at gunpoint. We do this because some people pose a danger to society, but we must be careful with just how much power the police have, in both firepower, information collection, and budget (currently, the police can recycle the proceeds from certain kinds of arrest back into their budgets; unsurprisingly, such arrests are more common than any other, and our prisons are filled with people who were targeted for such arrests).
I just want the point out that the reason that this is so scary is that your reasoning can be taken the other way. It's always a slippery slope. How much is too much? Anything that's now illegal to obtain, can be made legal and the process starts over.
If you begin to allow your freedom and liberty to be eroded bit by bit, you're not going to notice it when it's totally gone. There's a reason why the freedom to privacy is important, and there are reasons why it was (and is) a good idea to follow the "innocent until proven guilty" line of thought.
Now I'm unsure where I stand myself, between the 2 extremes: allow a murderer walk due to lack of evidence or allowing the government to lock up innocent civilians just based on an algorithm's "suspicion" without charge. There has to be a middle ground somewhere. What I do know is, with the way things are going, it's moving faster and faster towards the later...
I don't have the answer but I think we agree that the citizens of the country that will be put under surveylance should have a say on whether they are OK with it, not signed into law behind their backs. I mean, I thought that's what democracy is all about.
In either case, since I don't live in the US, all I can really do about it is talk. It's up to you guys to have meaningful discussions and take action (or not) on this. But just know that this will end up affecting the way other world power treat their citizens. The world will definitely be keep an close eye on this.
Problem is that errors are always going to occur. the stronger the data sets the harder it can be to prove your innocence. We have rights and the law not to prevent the bad guys from doing bad things, but to protect the citizens from the potential misuse of the governmental system.
>Is it wrong that they want to put in all in place?
You seem to be operating under the assumption that there is a definitive answer here. There isn't, and this is completely subjective. The idea that 300M+ people will agree on such a question, to me, is ridiculous. It is really a matter of 2 questions:
1) How many false positives are acceptable?
2) Are we willing to accept the consequences if this information falls into the wrong hands?
Reasonable people will disagree on the answers, and I believe the U.S. was the last country founded (granted, on the lands of others') upon the idea that freedom and individual rights (over the collective) should be maximized. More and more, as the U.S. has matured we've seen and continue to see the collective rights being prioritized.
To be clear, I am not sure where I stand personally, but I am simply trying to objectively point out what I see.
They're probably using Palantir. I wonder how Thiel resolves his libertarian/freedom philosophy with supplying the government with such a powerful oppressive tool.
Well there is also this company https://www.recordedfuture.com/ which has the CIA and Google as investors, like anything political the grey area covers a lot.
I had a chance to speak to one of the lead developers at Palantir a couple years back, and asked him about this apparent conflict of political ideals.
His answer: by enabling agencies to properly apply the data they already have, Palantir's products reduce the pressure to further erode civil liberties in the pursuit of more data.
Give a government trillions to spend in an era of massive government programs and vast new storage & surveillance technology, and it should be obvious what you're going to get.
The only possible way to stop it is to starve the beast of funds to spend. Cut the government in half, and let's see if they can still afford all the shiny new big brother toys.
I don't understand the critics. Do you think that terrorists or criminals are detected by oracles ? You ridiculed the security agencies after 911 for not beeing able to detect such a plot and now you are in shock because they do their job ? There is no way to detect a plot while staying eyes shut.
There is a problem, more precisely a risk, but it is not in collecting the data and processing it to detect a plot. It is in the usage and control of usage of the data. This is the heart of the problem and the secrecy around this information gathering and processing is not a good sign. Who controlls and how is this information controlled are the core problem which is absolutely not properly addressed.
The need to collect the information to ensure security is on the other hand obvious, at least to me. Not doing this is stupid.
Are we so spooked as a nation that we're really considering precognition-style crime fighting? Liberties aside, this really makes me wonder what the atmosphere is like inside the government. With all of this paranoia, only two paths come to mind: 1.) They're aware of a future threat so large that it threatens the stability of the country, or 2.) They're planning something internally to "take over" the country one way or another.
In another view, you have to ask what this would do to society? A public so paranoid of being harassed by the government that they barely do anything, or, actually do go out and commit crimes. Despite our "intelligence" we're still animals and will behave so put under the right amount of strain. This is a time bomb.
One way I'm reading this is that in effect it is illegal to hack a computer without permision; YET a computer can hack you without permision. When you think of it like that it does appear one-sided. This data centre could indicate you thru false positives of a crime and even present enough data to potentualy incriminate you even if you are innocent. Whilst we have managed to lock up innocent people in the past indicating the system is not perfect, the prospect of stepping closer towards automating that does not bode well.
That all said I understand what they are doing and why and it does make sence and if anything will make people realise that online is the same as in person, just better documented.
[+] [-] nnq|13 years ago|reply
...where on the line did these guys lost the "innocent until proven guilty" part?! (the possibility of your government handing personal data of innocent civilians to foreign governments sounds "out of your freakyn minds" even for a foreigner like me! Imagine someone coming to the US in attempt to flee from an oppressive government and data about his whereabouts getting to a contract killer via an "en masse" exchange of data about "suspicious" civilians between governments...)
...keep it like this and the USA will be the last place on Earth someone would want to emigrate to, either to work or to open a business!!!
[+] [-] buro9|13 years ago|reply
My brother was turned back when he flew to Miami with his family to take his children to Disney World.
It turned out that because he had been arrested aged 19 and failed to declare it that the border people felt that he had answered fraudulantly when challenged on "Have you ever been arrested?".
My brother answered no because whilst he was arrested he was never charged or convicted. He had attended a demonstration in the North of England and when a few people caused trouble the police had just arrested everyone only to release the vast majority some hours later.
He'd forgotten about this because nothing had ever actually come of it and it was over 20 years ago, yet there he was being confronted by it at a US border.
Clearly the UK authorities already share data with the USA on its citizens, even those never charged or convicted.
That it may happen more does not surprise me the least. The only part that surprises me is that the data flow might go the other way too.
[+] [-] mtgx|13 years ago|reply
Will TSA consider me "suspicious" just because I tweeted articles such as this one? Or maybe some Wikileaks-related articles or some OWS articles? That is ridiculous, and I don't even want to risk that by flying through the country, let alone want to live there (which is something I really wanted to do before). The world's view on America is changing fast and the view is increasingly more negative.
The world wants America to be its role model, something to aspire to, and a place where they want to live in. It doesn't want to see an America as the bully of the world, or a bully even of its own citizens. So yes, I do think this will impact tourism, cloud businesses, as well as other type of businesses, if they keep going down this road of increasing surveillance and more government abuses, not only against Americans, but against foreigners, too.
[+] [-] d0ne|13 years ago|reply
We will:
1) Open source all submitted ideas.
2) Let the community choose the top 5 and we will hold an internal review process for the top spot.
3) Fly the winner(s) to our office in Atlanta, GA to discuss the winning submission in details with some of the top information security experts in the world.
4) Work to get press around the winning idea.
5) If we get north of 50 submissions we will help seed (with an additional $5,000) an IndieGoGo campaign to see the idea developed.
Email me (adam | socialfortress.com) or respond here to discuss.
[+] [-] jacquesm|13 years ago|reply
That may be a bit prohibitive, given that they will still have to use air travel, possibly to and at least within the USA. I figure the people that come up with a mitigation against a system like this would be very smart to stay the hell away from claiming credit for it.
And the top information security experts in the world are working for what we'll loosely designate 'the other side' here, I don't think they'll be on your discussion panel.
[+] [-] javajosh|13 years ago|reply
However, the "data flak" approach has limits. It is only doable with discretionary data, and even that might be problematic. But it would work well to make access logs useless. While I don't want the system to spam hacker news with nonsense posts about building nuclear weapons, I might be able to harmlessly incorporate intentionally explosive phrases in a post just to annoy them (hah, see what I did there?) For things like flights and credit card usage, there is no way to introduce flak, or really minimize exposure.
Of course, the best mitigation technique is to raise Cain over this and get the entire system dismantled. There is simply no excuse to be doing this sort of thing. The fact is that it would be pretty hard to organize an attack and not trigger (local) alarms. Local police have a feel for the community, for what's what. They can call in the feds if they need to.
Systems like this are going to always have three serious problems: a) bringing the hammer down on the innocent (false positives), b) failing to detect actual plots (false negatives), c) be abused (used as a weapon for politically or personally motivated attacks). And in the long run a) and c) are going to grow monotonically, and that is not acceptable. It's one thing to have the asshole local cop bust down your door for no good reason, it's quite another to have a bunch of feds fly in to nab you based on some data in their computers. They've never met you, don't know you, don't know your relationships to the people around you - but based on data will ruin your life. That's a nightmare scenario if I've ever heard one!
[+] [-] dreamdu5t|13 years ago|reply
Our president committed crimes his justice department jails people for (illegal drugs). Drug testing is a perfect example of the surveillance state. The people who don't get tested? The testers. The legislators. The people in charge. I know there are technical problems with that analogy - but you get the point.
[+] [-] ragmondo|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] belorn|13 years ago|reply
This 5 years the article talk about. Do anyone really believe than in 5 years, they won't extend it further? It will continue to the point in which either everything is stored forever, or push back actually takes away this pandora box from the government.
No goverment ever want to be with less information about the population. If they could predict who is a criminal before a crime is committed, social benefits could be rerouted away. If they could predict who is going to become political candidates, they could adjust information flows away or towards that person. If they can predict who is voting for who, they can direct support/anti-support to "encourage" the right result.
This is why I am worried about a surveillance state. With a large enough database of population information, and prediction models, democracy will be eroded to the point of destruction.
[+] [-] joonix|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joshuahedlund|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ClayM|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pstuart|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oelmekki|13 years ago|reply
Here we are again : authoritarianism being rationalized.
[+] [-] chmike|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sliverstorm|13 years ago|reply
It seems to me that so long as you don't take it further than "being ready", done right it could be a good thing.
[+] [-] ibejoeb|13 years ago|reply
> some information "might seem more relevant later," says Mr. Joel
So, hindsight is 20/20, you say?
[+] [-] mcantelon|13 years ago|reply
>The central role played by the NCTC in determining who should be killed ... the NCTC operates a gigantic data-mining operation, in which all sorts of information about innocent Americans is systematically monitored, stored, and analyzed
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/24/obama-te...
[+] [-] paganel|13 years ago|reply
I Ctrl+F-ed for Philip K. Dick's name, didn't find anything, I'll be the first one to copy-paste this:
> Paradoxes and alternate realities are created by the precognition of crimes when the chief of police intercepts a precognition that he is about to murder a man he has never met. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Minority_Report)
[+] [-] mtgx|13 years ago|reply
Cory Doctorow has said in his "war against general computation" talk [1] that it's becoming cheaper and easier for authorities to just monitor everyone and store information about everyone, and then use algorithms to catch them, than focusing on who they they need to catch and following just that one. Now it's up to the people to stop this from becoming legal or from being done even illegally, not just in US, but in all countries, as I'm sure many others will try doing it, too. The ironic part is that the developed "democratic" countries may be the first to do it, because they are more advanced technologically.
[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbYXBJOFgeI
[+] [-] varelse|13 years ago|reply
Sure, it works sometimes, but just look at some of the wacky stuff Amazon, Google, and Netflix derive from such things. Now replace search results and product recommendations with waterboarding and extraordinary rendition based on the results of those dot products and hilarity ensues...
[+] [-] yid|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dendory|13 years ago|reply
You thought it was a movie, now it's reality. Soon, it'll be something you get arrested for. Mark my words.
[+] [-] barking|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hermannj314|13 years ago|reply
So where does it stop? Phone records. Addresses. Aliases. Friends. Fingerprints. Is it wrong that they want to put in all in place? Would we be happier if they had to run around to 25 different government agencies / 25 private corporations to get the information? What if the information is lost before the need to use it to aid an investigation. Wouldn't it be easier if they just aggregated it ahead of time and looked at it when they needed it?
I guess personally I'm just not seeing the problem. As long as they are simply gathering all information that is legally knowable, what do I care? Why should I care? I'd like to know I have the freedom to do the same thing and I assume large corporations are doing it already. Should it be illegal to gather information on people simply because they didn't authorize it? Should individuals have the power to control what others do with the information that is publically knowable about them? I, personally, say no.
[+] [-] capnrefsmmat|13 years ago|reply
I think this is the third time I'll make this post on HN, but it's been relevant every time.
Privacy is not about having something to hide, or about keeping things secret. Giving the government the power to store all this data about you isn't bad because they might learn embarrassing things; after all, it will most likely only be read by a computer.
But it gives the government enormous power to make decisions about you -- decisions about whether you may take a commercial airline flight, get a security clearance, or even get a job -- without your knowledge or consent, and without you knowing how they make the decisions. It's not Orwellian, it's Kafkaesque.
In short, a lack of privacy gives the government the power to be even less transparent in its decision-making, and gives it yet more power over its citizens. It's not a question of discovering your fetishes or being embarrassed, and we shouldn't respond to the "but I have nothing to hide" argument as though their conception of privacy is right and having nothing to hide really is an excuse.
There's a rather good paper I can recommend on the subject:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=998565
[+] [-] betterunix|13 years ago|reply
The law is out-of-date. When the law was written, constructing a dossier on a person required effort -- officers in the field, following the target around, interviewing people, etc. Today, the dossier can be rapidly assembled, assuming it has not been already by some private company that "specializes" in constructing such things.
We need an update to the law, to protect our rights from government use of new technologies.
"Phone records. Addresses. Aliases. Friends. Fingerprints. Is it wrong that they want to put in all in place? Would we be happier if they had to run around to 25 different government agencies / 25 private corporations to get the information?"
Yes, I would be happier if the bureaucracy slowed the police down, as a basic protection against tyranny. We have far too many laws, and far too many prisoners -- anything that slows the expansion of our prison population and renders absurd laws unenforceable should be welcomed. Do you really think that these databases will be used solely to catch murderers and rapists? Most of people targeted by these sorts of programs will be nonviolent, non-dangerous offenders who will be charged with dozens of crimes and told to either take a plea bargain or risk a longer sentence if they exercise their right to a trial (and if even a tenth of them were to demand a trial, our court system would be overwhelmed by the case load -- yes, that is how extreme things have gotten).
"I'd like to know I have the freedom to do the same thing"
You do not. Go ahead, try to go around your town collecting these sorts of details -- you'll be arrested for harassing people, being a public nuisance, resisting arrest, and probably multiple other crimes.
"Should individuals have the power to control what others do with the information that is publically knowable about them?"
We are not talking about any other random people, we are talking about the police. The police are a special class of people. We let them arrest people, holding people against their will at gunpoint. We do this because some people pose a danger to society, but we must be careful with just how much power the police have, in both firepower, information collection, and budget (currently, the police can recycle the proceeds from certain kinds of arrest back into their budgets; unsurprisingly, such arrests are more common than any other, and our prisons are filled with people who were targeted for such arrests).
[+] [-] jamornh|13 years ago|reply
If you begin to allow your freedom and liberty to be eroded bit by bit, you're not going to notice it when it's totally gone. There's a reason why the freedom to privacy is important, and there are reasons why it was (and is) a good idea to follow the "innocent until proven guilty" line of thought.
Now I'm unsure where I stand myself, between the 2 extremes: allow a murderer walk due to lack of evidence or allowing the government to lock up innocent civilians just based on an algorithm's "suspicion" without charge. There has to be a middle ground somewhere. What I do know is, with the way things are going, it's moving faster and faster towards the later...
I don't have the answer but I think we agree that the citizens of the country that will be put under surveylance should have a say on whether they are OK with it, not signed into law behind their backs. I mean, I thought that's what democracy is all about.
In either case, since I don't live in the US, all I can really do about it is talk. It's up to you guys to have meaningful discussions and take action (or not) on this. But just know that this will end up affecting the way other world power treat their citizens. The world will definitely be keep an close eye on this.
[+] [-] ThomPete|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 18pfsmt|13 years ago|reply
You seem to be operating under the assumption that there is a definitive answer here. There isn't, and this is completely subjective. The idea that 300M+ people will agree on such a question, to me, is ridiculous. It is really a matter of 2 questions:
1) How many false positives are acceptable?
2) Are we willing to accept the consequences if this information falls into the wrong hands?
Reasonable people will disagree on the answers, and I believe the U.S. was the last country founded (granted, on the lands of others') upon the idea that freedom and individual rights (over the collective) should be maximized. More and more, as the U.S. has matured we've seen and continue to see the collective rights being prioritized.
To be clear, I am not sure where I stand personally, but I am simply trying to objectively point out what I see.
[+] [-] aswanson|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wyck|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cheeseprocedure|13 years ago|reply
His answer: by enabling agencies to properly apply the data they already have, Palantir's products reduce the pressure to further erode civil liberties in the pursuit of more data.
[+] [-] shmerl|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wtfus|13 years ago|reply
<strike>Innocent until "terrorist".</strike>
<strike>Innocent until suspected "terrorist".</strike>
<strike>Innocent until surveillance indicates you use encryption, therefore "terrorist".</strike>
<strike>Innocent until our surveillance predicts you might commit some sort of crime, therefore "terrorist".</strike>
Innocent until we say so.
All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
[+] [-] adventured|13 years ago|reply
The only possible way to stop it is to starve the beast of funds to spend. Cut the government in half, and let's see if they can still afford all the shiny new big brother toys.
[+] [-] chmike|13 years ago|reply
There is a problem, more precisely a risk, but it is not in collecting the data and processing it to detect a plot. It is in the usage and control of usage of the data. This is the heart of the problem and the secrecy around this information gathering and processing is not a good sign. Who controlls and how is this information controlled are the core problem which is absolutely not properly addressed.
The need to collect the information to ensure security is on the other hand obvious, at least to me. Not doing this is stupid.
[+] [-] propercoil|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shmerl|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rglover|13 years ago|reply
In another view, you have to ask what this would do to society? A public so paranoid of being harassed by the government that they barely do anything, or, actually do go out and commit crimes. Despite our "intelligence" we're still animals and will behave so put under the right amount of strain. This is a time bomb.
[+] [-] kmfrk|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Zenst|13 years ago|reply
That all said I understand what they are doing and why and it does make sence and if anything will make people realise that online is the same as in person, just better documented.
[+] [-] Vivtek|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
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