It always starts with a desire to be safe. And that comes from fear. It seems Americans today are afraid of more things than ever: pedophiles, guns, terrorists, lawsuits. Some news reports are ridiculous by foreign standards: teachers not being allowed to shake hands with students out of fear of sexual harassment allegations, boys suspended from school for drawing guns, bystanders not administering first-aid to accident victims out of fear of lawsuits, and of course the terrorism hysteria for which I have no words. I'm fortunate enough to have visited the US and have met mostly great people, but going by news reports the entire society seems paralyzed by fear.
I always thought of freedom as inversely proportional to safety. If you want to be perfectly safe, you'll never leave your house in case you catch a germ, get in a car accident or even slip on a banana peel. You'll never eat store bought food without first running it through a spectrometer. You'll want everything controlled, predictable, seen ahead of time so that nothing unexpected gets thrown your way.
I guess this is what surveillance is trying to do. Rather than accepting a level of risk as the price for being free and handling disasters when they do occur, we seem to be increasingly trying to avoid danger at all costs. And the cost seems to be freedom.
It's almost as if the author of the US national anthem knew this when he ended it with "land of the free and the home of the brave" (correct me if I got that wrong). Maybe he knew you couldn't have one without the other. I guess the brave isn't home anymore...
The Ben Franklin quote is apropos here: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither."
While it's wildly misquoted on the interblags, you can't read out the word "essential." The point of the quote isn't that no trade-offs between freedom and safety are appropriate, but rather that we shouldn't trade away those freedoms that are "essential." It is debatable whether monitoring of the internet, a technology that didn't even exist for most of American history, is a trading off "essential" liberty, or whether its an "inessential" liberty.
Ben Franklin, like the other framers, realized that freedom versus security was a trade-off. Remember, the Constitution itself was a reaction to the Articles of Confederation, which created a government that turned out to be too weak to protect peoples' safety, both from external threats (Indians, European powers) and internal threats (domestic insurgents). The Constitution draw the safety versus freedom line a little closer to "safety" by creating a more powerful, more centralized federal government.
This balancing is also why the 4th amendment uses the wiggle word "unreasonable." Searches and seizures are okay, just not "unreasonable" ones. Well how do you decide what is "reasonable" versus "unreasonable?" You figure out how to appropriately trade-off freedom versus security! If the founding fathers didn't intend for us to engage in such balancing, they would've left out the word "unreasonable." No searches and seizures, even if necessary to solve a murder or kidnapping. After all, that would maximize freedom at some cost to security.
Here is an idea I have been toying with for the past few weeks:
Fear has become patriotic.
Before I say more, I'll say that I am not a fan of patriotism, I think it is a mild form of bigotry, but I recognize the positive connotations it has to the population at large. I think that patriotism has also traditionally been associated with traits that are seen as positive. Traits like self assurance, confidence, pride, and bravery.
You might be afraid that Hitler is going to cross the channel, but you are going to put on a hard face and proudly declare that the RAF will continue to kick ass and take names. That is how you make yourself look patriotic.
That has changed slightly though. Now, if you want to present yourself as a patriot, you must present yourself as a coward who fears the enemy first and foremost, even if you really don't. That's why you get nonsense like this prefacing editorials: "Our first priority is to keep Americans safe from the threat of terrorism." You think that terrorists are going to implement Sharia Law in your podunk town in Kansas? A wildly irrational fear. So is that cowardice? No, it is patriotism! Advertise this fear to the world with a giant decal on your pickup truck; show your neighbors just how damn patriotic you really are.
Framing the conversation as freedom vs safety is dangerous because it ignores the issue of government power.
The danger of mass surveillance is not due to some abstract need for privacy, but rather because of the immense power the government has. The founding fathers acutely understood the dangers of government overreach, and the constitution of the USA was designed to keep it in check. However these days, the very principles that the country was founded on are used as a shield to lull the well-fed and entertained population into a false sense of security about the benevolence of the government. Ironically people in oppressive third-world regimes would hold no such illusions, but in the English-speaking world we get "meh, what do I have to hide?". The insidious thing about this is that history's lessons on the subject can not be cited without sounding like a crackpot.
People like predictability and the illusion of security. I've had conversations about the Snowden stuff that ended with the other conversant saying that they would always choose security every time, and if the government wanted watch everything they did then all the better.
Their entire worldview seemed to be framed on a false choice though - you can either have security and safety or you can be free of government intrusion. I fundamentally disagree with this, total government intrusion and surveillance is not security, nor is it safety, you simply move the danger from 'terrorists' to 'government agents'. Either way (to steal a line from the libertarians) men with guns and bombs might show up and ruin or end your life.
The problem is not that they want to be safe, but that they are willing to give up all the rights even against the minimum amount of danger.
First off, never give up all of your yours in the name of safety. If you do, then you better make sure it's very temporary in nature, and/or for very specific targets.
Second, it better be to save something like 1 million people a year, not like 100 people per year on average. Make sure that the compromise of giving up all of your rights (if you can even accept such a thing), is done for a very real and major cause. If you're going to spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year, and infringe on everyone's freedoms, it better not be just to save 100 lives that year. It better be tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands at least. Otherwise, it's clearly not worth it, and that money and effort could be better used in some other place (such as healthcare, education, etc) where the return on investment is many orders of magnitude greater.
But even if it's worth it money wise, you still have to counter-balance it with the power you're giving your own government, and how much that government is going to abuse that power. Sure, the government will protect you from "terrorism", but is that worth the cost of losing your freedom, and having the risk of being arrested for anything you dare say against the government?
Many people in the past decided that they'd rather die than lose their freedom, so it's definitely not a clear cut choice, even if the government does save you from certain death. But the government is abusing all of this power today, and all of this money, and they have much less to show for it, to the point where the clear cut choice is to not accept what the government is doing.
"I guess this is what surveillance is trying to do. Rather than accepting a level of risk as the price for being free and handling disasters when they do occur, we seem to be increasingly trying to avoid danger at all costs."
Surveillance doesn't try to reduce the risk or anything like that. Surveillance institutions treat the whole population as suspects.
A side note on the anthem: The lyrics started as a poem written by Francis Scott Key after watching a battle in the War of 1812. Americans don't like to talk about the War of 1812 because we got our asses whooped by a handful of Canadians. The story of the music is even weirder: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Star-Spangled_Banner#Early...
I couldn't agree more. Security and freedom are inversely proportional. I was upset when the start of the second paragraph to this piece stated that the most important thing for the government to do is protect people from terrorists. I couldn't disagree with that more, safety is never a given and freedom and resiliency in the face of adversity and setbacks should be our goal, not a nanny state.
I think that the idea of surveillance is to increase safety with only a marginal decrease in freedom.
Additionally, one could argue that as our freedom grows the opportunities for surveillance increase. That is, if you use the same means of communication as available in 1776 you'll have just as much freedom as they did. But in 2013 you have much more freedom to communicate over various mediums. Your freedom has increased by a factor of x, but surveillance has decreased that freedom by a factor of y (where y is much less than x). The net gain is still positive, but less than unsurveilled access.
An interesting thought experiment is how well would an airline that does no security checks do versus one that does. Lets ignore the efficacy of security checks, and say that you're 10x more likely to die in the flight w/o security checks -- would most people be willing to endure the security checks (as they are today) for a 10x reduction in deaths (imagine the baseline is the number of deaths we see today). I think the answer is yes.
Likewise, I may well feel less free if there were no jails (maximizing actual physical freedom for prisoners) than if there is some.
Bravery doesn't equal stupidity. I'm not condoning the actions of the US government, but I think its unfair to assume increases in safety with an actual proportional decrease in freedom.
Our first priority is to keep Americans safe from the threat of terrorism.
It's like a feller can't even write a serious editorial in support of American liberty without kowtowing to irrational fear-mongering anymore.
The battle to keep us jumping at shadows has been won so conclusively that no one even bothers to stand up and say anything like:
You are safe. Your family is safe. You are safer now than you would have been at nearly any other time in American history. Your children will probably view these years of The Terrorist Menace in much the same way we view McCarthyism and the excesses of J. Edgar Hoover - a humiliating betrayal of everything that was supposed to make America different from the rest of the world.
There is nothing patriotic about being afraid all the time.
But that won't sell, and the Senators who wrote this know it. I don't fault their judgement, but it makes me really sad.
No kidding. I have tried to put it to people in terms of the cold war. The US faced the existential threat of hundreds of ICBMs aimed and ready to fire. Heck, the combined arsenals may have been an existential threat to all intelligent life on the planet. Those are stakes that could start to justify being afraid all the time and surveilling everyone (if it would help with the threat).
But terrorism? Not even close. The fear of it has already caused damage on us far in excess to what the pissant terrorists have accomplished. All we really should have feared was fear itself. Perhaps one can still make the claim that we are not descended from fearful men, but it will be quite a bit less true should our children try to claim it.
Senators have to go to the press to try to stop the government from doing what clearly breaks the law -- the Constitution, no less -- using up billions of taxpayer funds and undermines American business for no clear benefit.
Conventional wisdom says the Cold War was between the doctrines of Capitalism and Communism and that the doctrine of Capitalism won.
It doesn't look like that view was right.
The doctrine of the KGB and Stasi is winning over both of them.
No. Capitalism clearly won. But Capitalism is not Freedom, not democracy and is not the rule of the law. Capitalism is a way to conduct business by letting people posess the means of production, and the capital to produce as well.
It was not only rhetoric that in the fight between USA and UDSSR, there was a fight between freedom and authority. But mainly, it was a fight between different ways to regulate the means of production. Capitalism won, but that does not mean that freedom, democracy and the rule of the law will survive that victory.
China shows that you can have a capitalst economy in a (not a real one, but wanting to be) communist country.
“In this age, in this country, public sentiment is everything. With it, nothing can fail; against it, nothing can succeed. Whoever molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes, or pronounces judicial decisions.”
-- Abraham Lincoln
Can you justify your claim that a bulk collection of phone records "clearly" violates the Constitution? I don't think the jurisprudence is so obviously on your side there.
"Our first priority is to keep Americans safe from the threat of terrorism." There's the problem. Even by those protesting sweeping NSA collection, we're obsessed with this.
When the axis powers threatened to plunge the world into 1000 years of darkness, the only thing we had to fear is fear itself, now - that's not good enough - we must fear the unending threat of terrorism. Letting the NSA run wild is a logical result from this mentality.
I'm wondering whether it was stated as the first priority of the Intelligence Committee rather than the first priority of the Senate. I realize members of the Intelligence Committee are expected to bridge those two roles - but it also wouldn't strike me as unusual for the Intelligence Committee to prioritize things differently than the rest of the Senate.
I also came here to post this. Our priorities of late have been flipped. While providing for the common defense is one of many responsibilities, our primary responsibility and the oath taken by those in government is to the Constitution.
> "Our first priority is to keep Americans safe from the threat of terrorism."
Uh, no. The first job of a good, decent government is protect the rights of its citizens. It now seems that the first job of a citizen is protect him/herself from the government.
> "Our first priority is to keep Americans safe from the threat of terrorism."
bzzt!, oh, sorry, that's not the correct answer. The correct answer is set out in the oath that all US Senators take upon being sworn into office[1] which reads:
>"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter: So help me God."
So no, sorry, the first priority is to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, which includes the NSA. Their oath says nothing about terrorism.
>"If government agencies identify a suspected terrorist, they should absolutely go to the relevant phone companies to get that person’s phone records."
Are you done supplicating yourself fully before the police state? My copy of the Constitution (which does not contain the root password "thinkofthekids" or "terrorism") says you need not just suspicion, but probable cause for a warrant.
>"When the Bill of Rights was adopted, it established that Americans’ papers and effects should be seized only when there was specific evidence of suspicious activity."
bzzt!, again, so close! Let's look at what it really says[2], shall we (emphasis mine):
>The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Not only do you need suspicion, but you need probable cause for a warrant or the search needs to be reasonable some other way (border crossing, subject gave consent, search subject to arrest, etc).
>Our bill would prohibit the government from conducting warrantless “backdoor searches” of Americans’ communications — including emails, text messages and Internet use — under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
Again, so close! Read the fourth amendment again. Nowhere does it say "The right of US Citizens". It says "The right of the people". That means all people - citizens and non-citizens, and that distinction is important. The protections afforded under this amendment apply to everyone in the country and extend to those parties being contacted by someone from this country, otherwise the wording would be different.
What this editorial gets right is that the oversight regime for domestic surveillance is inadequate. What it misses, however, is that big piles of data are inevitable with the current trajectory of technology. It will not be possible to have the piles of data not collected. As others have written, the government surveillance agencies essentially saw what private industry was doing and said "I want a copy of that."
I think we need to rethink some things:
1. In the short term, one of the biggest changes that has to be addressed is the current court doctrine that privacy has not been violated if no people are actually looking at the data. Given that much of the surveillance is directed by automation, we need to recast that doctrine to include some of the automated analysis of the data. It's a thorny question, and one that will take some time and effort to get right, but there's no time like now to start.
2. We need more forceful and more transparent oversight of surveillance. There is a risk that the surveilled might change their tactics based on lessons from oversight reporting, but it seems clear at this point that the trade off is necessary. To quote the editorial: "The usefulness of the bulk collection program has been greatly exaggerated. We have yet to see any proof that it provides real, unique value in protecting national security." Trade-offs are only worth making if you get something. Time to revisit the trade-off.
3. We need to address both the big piles of data in the government's hands and those in private hands. This is going to require rethinking ownership of the data, and probably moving the US more towards an EU-style privacy directive. Again, a longer process, but one that needs to start now.
4. As a country, we need to start toward a more rational view of terrorism risk. Plenty has been written about how disproportional our response has been. Time to rebalance the scales.
In the end, we're going to continue to have big piles of surveillance data as long as we continue our technology trajectory. We need to start figuring out how to work with it, rather than try to stop it.
> "Severing ties with the NSA" started off with a NSA penalty but was so hugely popular it still got the #1 spot. However, it was quickly given an even bigger penalty, forcing it down the page. [1]
Supposedly, "N.S.A." will not trigger HN's keyword penalty :)
I think the bit about the single vote was about her? Does it mean they had just one vote in the committee or a single person quashed the bill?
Feinstein lives in an ivory tower, completely isolated from the needs of ordinary citizens in California. She gets six years in office with every election, and was just recently re-elected. She's totally safe, like those tea-party republicans in gerrymandered districts. California is too big of a state for a grassroots organization to challenge her in a primary and she placates enough of various groups with the funds to start an astroturf war and so they leave her alone. She's pretty much untouchable. She often starts on the wrong side of many issues, a notable exception being LGBT rights (good for her and us), and only with intense pressure from public opinion does she bow for appearances only. For example she was for SOPA, against meaningful health reform, and she's been a staunch defender of the NSA.
Senator Feinstein is a defender of the status quo. She's a conservative. Not a social conservative or neo-conservative, but someone who fights progress. Her office is in an actual giant tower right outside of the Montgomery Street Bart station and she wouldn't even come down to visit protestors and talk to them when we were there on behalf of OFA and there quite a few of us. It might as well have been built in ivory. That was the only protest I have ever taken part in. It wasn't even really a protest, just a show of support for Obama's health care plan.
Politicians like Feinstein make me cynical about politics. I feel helpless to be able to contribute change, so I just don't want to care anymore. Whatever, she's the boss. Great. Could be worse I guess.
I disagree with this quote, "There is no question that our nation’s intelligence professionals are dedicated, patriotic men and women who make real sacrifices to help keep our country safe and free."
I argue that the weight of evidence says the opposite. First the "there is no question" bit is wrong, because clearly there is a huge question. Further, people that want power tend to be attracted to positions that give it to them. We see this in things like police, lawyers, and politicians.
Note that I do no mention the military, because in the US the military is largely about subservience and not about control.
There is also little evidence suggesting that the men and women working for the NSA are patriotic. I argue that they are not. Patriotism involves holding up the rights of citizens as defined by the Constitution, especially against those who would change or remove these rights. Further, patriotism involves defining new law, as needed, explicitly in the spirit of the Constitution. Under this definition, it is very unclear that the people working at the NSA have been remotely patriotic. Quite the opposite, in my view.
Last, I believe we are fundamentally less free and less safe now than we were 13 years ago. The erosion of freedom and safety is often a very gradual process. When I say we, I do not refer to We as in The United States. I refer to all the people living under it, both citizens and non-citizens alike.
I have to be more cautious of what I say at 33 than I did at 21. I seriously consider alternatives to flying during the holidays because "safety" has become a physical impediment to travel. I have to think twice about what I should pack in my luggage, for the certainty that someone will search my belongings.
When I see police, I do not feel safe. I get more nervous and afraid. These are people walking around with weapons who can hurt, imprison, and murder people almost at will and we as citizens have almost no recourse to defend ourselves without being further harassed and harangued.
That is not how someone should view their police departments. Yet I do, because in my short life I hear more about police brutality than stories of police helping people. My own experiences were particularly forged by being arrested at a peaceful protest (FTAA) and trying to watch the inauguration parade in DC in 2005. I stopped respecting police officers a long time ago, though I view them as a necessary evil.
So to wrap. We are less free and less safe now than before, the people working for the NSA are working towards their own ends or the ends of people wanting power, and there is nothing patriotic going on. We are in pot being slowly boiled.
The senators are pushing a surveillance reform bill. It does them no good to question the motives of the intelligence community, the majority of which are employees like most of us. On the other hand, accusing them would just make them enemies instead of allies. Hence the paragraph.
Ending the NSA Dragnet is not the solution. The solution is to assume that there will always be a rogue agency wanting to spy and to come up with solutions that make it hard or impossible.
I think one of the complications is we have become used to historically unusual levels of security. Far fewer babies die in childbirth these days. Cars have airbags. Medical care is fast and reliable.
Not unreasonably, people expect their governments to provide the same level of predictability. And, not unreasonably, the majority of those politicians who want to preserve their jobs go along with it.
So what can be done about it? If this was a flawless AI keeping us all safe like in Iain Bank's culture universe, I think we'd be all happy. The problem comes when it's not clear if those charged with curating this information have other agendas.
I think this is a historically unique time, when we have the chance to put in safeguards and oversight while we can still see the cameras and the window of debate is still available.
But in order to do that, I think the debate has to be reframed not as security vs liberty but as structured oversight vs tyranny.
Unfortunately, for this opinion to make it into the mainstream conscious, it needs to be broadcast with the same gravity on Fox News and CNN where the large majority of uninformed Americans are spoon-fed their beliefs and opinions.
I'm glad these guys are here for us. I honestly can't believe some of the comments on the times site.
My main issue is that this has not become a debate, it's still an order. And it's an order that violates our fourth amendment right. This right was part of handshake for a new system, and it cannot be violated save for some rare situation we could all agree is reasonable.
No one should think this is reasonable... security is lax, control of the data is lax ("corporate store"? Are you kidding me?). The situation is flipped here. Without leaks, we would actually be suffering more. Security clearance is not protecting us, it's using and abusing us. It's being used to hide things that would harm us more if they were never leaked. And FISA courts are used to give us some illusion that rules will be followed while having it waved in our face that we're lucky to have them. This is crazy.
Try to accommodate any warrantless surveillance in the fourth amendment's text without creating either a comical contradiction that violates its entire spirit or removes it entirely. We know that being ok with these citizen data programs amounts to being ok with not having this right, but we're still talking about it. I want to keep my right. And since the amendment was added in response to writs of assistance, unchecked delegation of authority so scarily similar to this reasonable articulable suspicion thing we are seeing today in both this and Stop and Frisk, i think we'd all be better suited to start with our right and add any exceptions as-needed, not have them added for us. I'm assigned a threat score even before i'm suspicious? To find out whether i'm suspicious? To then act on me because of this suspicion? All while making money off of me based on my actions? You want to buy my actions? Ok, name a price, i'll consider it.
I don't want to start this privacy war this gang wants me to. I'd rather we follow the law and consider those who don't criminal. Privacy is a buffer against abuse, not a place to hide dirty secrets. We can't predict or even see or notice all of the horrible loss of self control that might come about because of this collection. The chorus of "Nothing to Hide" in response rings eery in my ears.
This is a Murphy's Law matter. The disaster cannot be prevented until it is technically impossible for it to continue.
If legislation were to declare that the names and numbers used to identify a computer on a network could not be legally used to identify either the physical location of the computer or the human that might have been using it, I think it likely that the number of VPN access points and Tor exit nodes would increase wildly overnight.
End-to-end encryption of all electronic traffic, everywhere, is the only reasonable solution.
[+] [-] dalek_cannes|12 years ago|reply
It always starts with a desire to be safe. And that comes from fear. It seems Americans today are afraid of more things than ever: pedophiles, guns, terrorists, lawsuits. Some news reports are ridiculous by foreign standards: teachers not being allowed to shake hands with students out of fear of sexual harassment allegations, boys suspended from school for drawing guns, bystanders not administering first-aid to accident victims out of fear of lawsuits, and of course the terrorism hysteria for which I have no words. I'm fortunate enough to have visited the US and have met mostly great people, but going by news reports the entire society seems paralyzed by fear.
I always thought of freedom as inversely proportional to safety. If you want to be perfectly safe, you'll never leave your house in case you catch a germ, get in a car accident or even slip on a banana peel. You'll never eat store bought food without first running it through a spectrometer. You'll want everything controlled, predictable, seen ahead of time so that nothing unexpected gets thrown your way.
I guess this is what surveillance is trying to do. Rather than accepting a level of risk as the price for being free and handling disasters when they do occur, we seem to be increasingly trying to avoid danger at all costs. And the cost seems to be freedom.
It's almost as if the author of the US national anthem knew this when he ended it with "land of the free and the home of the brave" (correct me if I got that wrong). Maybe he knew you couldn't have one without the other. I guess the brave isn't home anymore...
/disjointed philosophical rant
[+] [-] rayiner|12 years ago|reply
While it's wildly misquoted on the interblags, you can't read out the word "essential." The point of the quote isn't that no trade-offs between freedom and safety are appropriate, but rather that we shouldn't trade away those freedoms that are "essential." It is debatable whether monitoring of the internet, a technology that didn't even exist for most of American history, is a trading off "essential" liberty, or whether its an "inessential" liberty.
Ben Franklin, like the other framers, realized that freedom versus security was a trade-off. Remember, the Constitution itself was a reaction to the Articles of Confederation, which created a government that turned out to be too weak to protect peoples' safety, both from external threats (Indians, European powers) and internal threats (domestic insurgents). The Constitution draw the safety versus freedom line a little closer to "safety" by creating a more powerful, more centralized federal government.
This balancing is also why the 4th amendment uses the wiggle word "unreasonable." Searches and seizures are okay, just not "unreasonable" ones. Well how do you decide what is "reasonable" versus "unreasonable?" You figure out how to appropriately trade-off freedom versus security! If the founding fathers didn't intend for us to engage in such balancing, they would've left out the word "unreasonable." No searches and seizures, even if necessary to solve a murder or kidnapping. After all, that would maximize freedom at some cost to security.
[+] [-] Crito|12 years ago|reply
Fear has become patriotic.
Before I say more, I'll say that I am not a fan of patriotism, I think it is a mild form of bigotry, but I recognize the positive connotations it has to the population at large. I think that patriotism has also traditionally been associated with traits that are seen as positive. Traits like self assurance, confidence, pride, and bravery.
You might be afraid that Hitler is going to cross the channel, but you are going to put on a hard face and proudly declare that the RAF will continue to kick ass and take names. That is how you make yourself look patriotic.
That has changed slightly though. Now, if you want to present yourself as a patriot, you must present yourself as a coward who fears the enemy first and foremost, even if you really don't. That's why you get nonsense like this prefacing editorials: "Our first priority is to keep Americans safe from the threat of terrorism." You think that terrorists are going to implement Sharia Law in your podunk town in Kansas? A wildly irrational fear. So is that cowardice? No, it is patriotism! Advertise this fear to the world with a giant decal on your pickup truck; show your neighbors just how damn patriotic you really are.
[+] [-] dasil003|12 years ago|reply
The danger of mass surveillance is not due to some abstract need for privacy, but rather because of the immense power the government has. The founding fathers acutely understood the dangers of government overreach, and the constitution of the USA was designed to keep it in check. However these days, the very principles that the country was founded on are used as a shield to lull the well-fed and entertained population into a false sense of security about the benevolence of the government. Ironically people in oppressive third-world regimes would hold no such illusions, but in the English-speaking world we get "meh, what do I have to hide?". The insidious thing about this is that history's lessons on the subject can not be cited without sounding like a crackpot.
[+] [-] Nursie|12 years ago|reply
Their entire worldview seemed to be framed on a false choice though - you can either have security and safety or you can be free of government intrusion. I fundamentally disagree with this, total government intrusion and surveillance is not security, nor is it safety, you simply move the danger from 'terrorists' to 'government agents'. Either way (to steal a line from the libertarians) men with guns and bombs might show up and ruin or end your life.
[+] [-] salient|12 years ago|reply
First off, never give up all of your yours in the name of safety. If you do, then you better make sure it's very temporary in nature, and/or for very specific targets.
Second, it better be to save something like 1 million people a year, not like 100 people per year on average. Make sure that the compromise of giving up all of your rights (if you can even accept such a thing), is done for a very real and major cause. If you're going to spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year, and infringe on everyone's freedoms, it better not be just to save 100 lives that year. It better be tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands at least. Otherwise, it's clearly not worth it, and that money and effort could be better used in some other place (such as healthcare, education, etc) where the return on investment is many orders of magnitude greater.
But even if it's worth it money wise, you still have to counter-balance it with the power you're giving your own government, and how much that government is going to abuse that power. Sure, the government will protect you from "terrorism", but is that worth the cost of losing your freedom, and having the risk of being arrested for anything you dare say against the government?
Many people in the past decided that they'd rather die than lose their freedom, so it's definitely not a clear cut choice, even if the government does save you from certain death. But the government is abusing all of this power today, and all of this money, and they have much less to show for it, to the point where the clear cut choice is to not accept what the government is doing.
[+] [-] shitgoose|12 years ago|reply
"I guess this is what surveillance is trying to do. Rather than accepting a level of risk as the price for being free and handling disasters when they do occur, we seem to be increasingly trying to avoid danger at all costs."
Surveillance doesn't try to reduce the risk or anything like that. Surveillance institutions treat the whole population as suspects.
[+] [-] sp332|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DamnYuppie|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] netman21|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kenjackson|12 years ago|reply
Additionally, one could argue that as our freedom grows the opportunities for surveillance increase. That is, if you use the same means of communication as available in 1776 you'll have just as much freedom as they did. But in 2013 you have much more freedom to communicate over various mediums. Your freedom has increased by a factor of x, but surveillance has decreased that freedom by a factor of y (where y is much less than x). The net gain is still positive, but less than unsurveilled access.
An interesting thought experiment is how well would an airline that does no security checks do versus one that does. Lets ignore the efficacy of security checks, and say that you're 10x more likely to die in the flight w/o security checks -- would most people be willing to endure the security checks (as they are today) for a 10x reduction in deaths (imagine the baseline is the number of deaths we see today). I think the answer is yes.
Likewise, I may well feel less free if there were no jails (maximizing actual physical freedom for prisoners) than if there is some.
Bravery doesn't equal stupidity. I'm not condoning the actions of the US government, but I think its unfair to assume increases in safety with an actual proportional decrease in freedom.
[+] [-] Lagged2Death|12 years ago|reply
It's like a feller can't even write a serious editorial in support of American liberty without kowtowing to irrational fear-mongering anymore.
The battle to keep us jumping at shadows has been won so conclusively that no one even bothers to stand up and say anything like:
You are safe. Your family is safe. You are safer now than you would have been at nearly any other time in American history. Your children will probably view these years of The Terrorist Menace in much the same way we view McCarthyism and the excesses of J. Edgar Hoover - a humiliating betrayal of everything that was supposed to make America different from the rest of the world.
There is nothing patriotic about being afraid all the time.
But that won't sell, and the Senators who wrote this know it. I don't fault their judgement, but it makes me really sad.
[+] [-] nooneelse|12 years ago|reply
But terrorism? Not even close. The fear of it has already caused damage on us far in excess to what the pissant terrorists have accomplished. All we really should have feared was fear itself. Perhaps one can still make the claim that we are not descended from fearful men, but it will be quite a bit less true should our children try to claim it.
[+] [-] gknoy|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spodek|12 years ago|reply
Conventional wisdom says the Cold War was between the doctrines of Capitalism and Communism and that the doctrine of Capitalism won.
It doesn't look like that view was right.
The doctrine of the KGB and Stasi is winning over both of them.
[+] [-] onli|12 years ago|reply
It was not only rhetoric that in the fight between USA and UDSSR, there was a fight between freedom and authority. But mainly, it was a fight between different ways to regulate the means of production. Capitalism won, but that does not mean that freedom, democracy and the rule of the law will survive that victory.
China shows that you can have a capitalst economy in a (not a real one, but wanting to be) communist country.
[+] [-] ender7|12 years ago|reply
“In this age, in this country, public sentiment is everything. With it, nothing can fail; against it, nothing can succeed. Whoever molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes, or pronounces judicial decisions.” -- Abraham Lincoln
[+] [-] twoodfin|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dpweb|12 years ago|reply
When the axis powers threatened to plunge the world into 1000 years of darkness, the only thing we had to fear is fear itself, now - that's not good enough - we must fear the unending threat of terrorism. Letting the NSA run wild is a logical result from this mentality.
[+] [-] uptown|12 years ago|reply
I'm wondering whether it was stated as the first priority of the Intelligence Committee rather than the first priority of the Senate. I realize members of the Intelligence Committee are expected to bridge those two roles - but it also wouldn't strike me as unusual for the Intelligence Committee to prioritize things differently than the rest of the Senate.
[+] [-] scoot|12 years ago|reply
Maybe naively, but I would have imagined foreign policy reforms would be more effective, whilst eliminating the need for intrusive security.
Treating the symptom rather than the disease when the treatment is more harmful does not seem rational.
[+] [-] nateabele|12 years ago|reply
And herein lies the problem. Their job is not to keep us safe, it's to keep us free.
(I'm aware others in the thread have pointed this out, but less directly).
[+] [-] sailfast|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pilker09|12 years ago|reply
Uh, no. The first job of a good, decent government is protect the rights of its citizens. It now seems that the first job of a citizen is protect him/herself from the government.
[+] [-] FedRegister|12 years ago|reply
bzzt!, oh, sorry, that's not the correct answer. The correct answer is set out in the oath that all US Senators take upon being sworn into office[1] which reads:
>"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter: So help me God."
So no, sorry, the first priority is to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, which includes the NSA. Their oath says nothing about terrorism.
>"If government agencies identify a suspected terrorist, they should absolutely go to the relevant phone companies to get that person’s phone records."
Are you done supplicating yourself fully before the police state? My copy of the Constitution (which does not contain the root password "thinkofthekids" or "terrorism") says you need not just suspicion, but probable cause for a warrant.
>"When the Bill of Rights was adopted, it established that Americans’ papers and effects should be seized only when there was specific evidence of suspicious activity."
bzzt!, again, so close! Let's look at what it really says[2], shall we (emphasis mine):
>The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Not only do you need suspicion, but you need probable cause for a warrant or the search needs to be reasonable some other way (border crossing, subject gave consent, search subject to arrest, etc).
>Our bill would prohibit the government from conducting warrantless “backdoor searches” of Americans’ communications — including emails, text messages and Internet use — under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
Again, so close! Read the fourth amendment again. Nowhere does it say "The right of US Citizens". It says "The right of the people". That means all people - citizens and non-citizens, and that distinction is important. The protections afforded under this amendment apply to everyone in the country and extend to those parties being contacted by someone from this country, otherwise the wording would be different.
[1] http://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/briefing/...
[2] http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/bill_of_rights_tra...
[+] [-] jcromartie|12 years ago|reply
This has been true as long as there has been government, as far as I can tell.
[+] [-] petejansson|12 years ago|reply
I think we need to rethink some things:
1. In the short term, one of the biggest changes that has to be addressed is the current court doctrine that privacy has not been violated if no people are actually looking at the data. Given that much of the surveillance is directed by automation, we need to recast that doctrine to include some of the automated analysis of the data. It's a thorny question, and one that will take some time and effort to get right, but there's no time like now to start.
2. We need more forceful and more transparent oversight of surveillance. There is a risk that the surveilled might change their tactics based on lessons from oversight reporting, but it seems clear at this point that the trade off is necessary. To quote the editorial: "The usefulness of the bulk collection program has been greatly exaggerated. We have yet to see any proof that it provides real, unique value in protecting national security." Trade-offs are only worth making if you get something. Time to revisit the trade-off.
3. We need to address both the big piles of data in the government's hands and those in private hands. This is going to require rethinking ownership of the data, and probably moving the US more towards an EU-style privacy directive. Again, a longer process, but one that needs to start now.
4. As a country, we need to start toward a more rational view of terrorism risk. Plenty has been written about how disproportional our response has been. Time to rebalance the scales.
In the end, we're going to continue to have big piles of surveillance data as long as we continue our technology trajectory. We need to start figuring out how to work with it, rather than try to stop it.
[+] [-] znowi|12 years ago|reply
Supposedly, "N.S.A." will not trigger HN's keyword penalty :)
[1] http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really...
[+] [-] 001sky|12 years ago|reply
== Why isn't this adressed to Dianne Feinstein?
[+] [-] leokun|12 years ago|reply
Feinstein lives in an ivory tower, completely isolated from the needs of ordinary citizens in California. She gets six years in office with every election, and was just recently re-elected. She's totally safe, like those tea-party republicans in gerrymandered districts. California is too big of a state for a grassroots organization to challenge her in a primary and she placates enough of various groups with the funds to start an astroturf war and so they leave her alone. She's pretty much untouchable. She often starts on the wrong side of many issues, a notable exception being LGBT rights (good for her and us), and only with intense pressure from public opinion does she bow for appearances only. For example she was for SOPA, against meaningful health reform, and she's been a staunch defender of the NSA.
Senator Feinstein is a defender of the status quo. She's a conservative. Not a social conservative or neo-conservative, but someone who fights progress. Her office is in an actual giant tower right outside of the Montgomery Street Bart station and she wouldn't even come down to visit protestors and talk to them when we were there on behalf of OFA and there quite a few of us. It might as well have been built in ivory. That was the only protest I have ever taken part in. It wasn't even really a protest, just a show of support for Obama's health care plan.
Politicians like Feinstein make me cynical about politics. I feel helpless to be able to contribute change, so I just don't want to care anymore. Whatever, she's the boss. Great. Could be worse I guess.
[+] [-] f1nch3r|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] a3n|12 years ago|reply
And now it's up to us, having failed to elect enough people who support the Constitution. Elections next year, and in 2016. Just sayin'.
[+] [-] geuis|12 years ago|reply
I argue that the weight of evidence says the opposite. First the "there is no question" bit is wrong, because clearly there is a huge question. Further, people that want power tend to be attracted to positions that give it to them. We see this in things like police, lawyers, and politicians.
Note that I do no mention the military, because in the US the military is largely about subservience and not about control.
There is also little evidence suggesting that the men and women working for the NSA are patriotic. I argue that they are not. Patriotism involves holding up the rights of citizens as defined by the Constitution, especially against those who would change or remove these rights. Further, patriotism involves defining new law, as needed, explicitly in the spirit of the Constitution. Under this definition, it is very unclear that the people working at the NSA have been remotely patriotic. Quite the opposite, in my view.
Last, I believe we are fundamentally less free and less safe now than we were 13 years ago. The erosion of freedom and safety is often a very gradual process. When I say we, I do not refer to We as in The United States. I refer to all the people living under it, both citizens and non-citizens alike.
I have to be more cautious of what I say at 33 than I did at 21. I seriously consider alternatives to flying during the holidays because "safety" has become a physical impediment to travel. I have to think twice about what I should pack in my luggage, for the certainty that someone will search my belongings.
When I see police, I do not feel safe. I get more nervous and afraid. These are people walking around with weapons who can hurt, imprison, and murder people almost at will and we as citizens have almost no recourse to defend ourselves without being further harassed and harangued.
That is not how someone should view their police departments. Yet I do, because in my short life I hear more about police brutality than stories of police helping people. My own experiences were particularly forged by being arrested at a peaceful protest (FTAA) and trying to watch the inauguration parade in DC in 2005. I stopped respecting police officers a long time ago, though I view them as a necessary evil.
So to wrap. We are less free and less safe now than before, the people working for the NSA are working towards their own ends or the ends of people wanting power, and there is nothing patriotic going on. We are in pot being slowly boiled.
[+] [-] mixmastamyk|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] segmondy|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grej|12 years ago|reply
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
[+] [-] summerdown2|12 years ago|reply
Not unreasonably, people expect their governments to provide the same level of predictability. And, not unreasonably, the majority of those politicians who want to preserve their jobs go along with it.
So what can be done about it? If this was a flawless AI keeping us all safe like in Iain Bank's culture universe, I think we'd be all happy. The problem comes when it's not clear if those charged with curating this information have other agendas.
I think this is a historically unique time, when we have the chance to put in safeguards and oversight while we can still see the cameras and the window of debate is still available.
But in order to do that, I think the debate has to be reframed not as security vs liberty but as structured oversight vs tyranny.
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] balabaster|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrobot|12 years ago|reply
My main issue is that this has not become a debate, it's still an order. And it's an order that violates our fourth amendment right. This right was part of handshake for a new system, and it cannot be violated save for some rare situation we could all agree is reasonable.
No one should think this is reasonable... security is lax, control of the data is lax ("corporate store"? Are you kidding me?). The situation is flipped here. Without leaks, we would actually be suffering more. Security clearance is not protecting us, it's using and abusing us. It's being used to hide things that would harm us more if they were never leaked. And FISA courts are used to give us some illusion that rules will be followed while having it waved in our face that we're lucky to have them. This is crazy.
Try to accommodate any warrantless surveillance in the fourth amendment's text without creating either a comical contradiction that violates its entire spirit or removes it entirely. We know that being ok with these citizen data programs amounts to being ok with not having this right, but we're still talking about it. I want to keep my right. And since the amendment was added in response to writs of assistance, unchecked delegation of authority so scarily similar to this reasonable articulable suspicion thing we are seeing today in both this and Stop and Frisk, i think we'd all be better suited to start with our right and add any exceptions as-needed, not have them added for us. I'm assigned a threat score even before i'm suspicious? To find out whether i'm suspicious? To then act on me because of this suspicion? All while making money off of me based on my actions? You want to buy my actions? Ok, name a price, i'll consider it.
I don't want to start this privacy war this gang wants me to. I'd rather we follow the law and consider those who don't criminal. Privacy is a buffer against abuse, not a place to hide dirty secrets. We can't predict or even see or notice all of the horrible loss of self control that might come about because of this collection. The chorus of "Nothing to Hide" in response rings eery in my ears.
[+] [-] logfromblammo|12 years ago|reply
If legislation were to declare that the names and numbers used to identify a computer on a network could not be legally used to identify either the physical location of the computer or the human that might have been using it, I think it likely that the number of VPN access points and Tor exit nodes would increase wildly overnight.
End-to-end encryption of all electronic traffic, everywhere, is the only reasonable solution.
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] netman21|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gchokov|12 years ago|reply