Didn't even need to trace the call... a good investigation would check the trash cans, dumpsters, and storm drains in a 20 block radius after a large scale bombing or attack.
ISIS use the Telegram app on their smartphone or on their laptop with BlueStacks to communicate as shown in this report where a journalist try to become an ISIS recruit :
Most things around my life in the last 15 years fit familiar, cynical pattern that politicians spit in our face and get away with it. That leads to desperation and learned helplessness.
To give EFF a credit, they actually fight. Unfortunately, quixotically
~Desperation and learned helplessness is good! It's part of the plan!~
~I was thinking the other day, and I think I figured out the government's plan for ending terrorism. (Yes, I was wearing my foil hat. Thank you for asking.)~
~What is the goal of terrorism? To make people afraid.~
~How do you end terrorism? Option 1 is to stop the things that make people afraid from happening. But there is an option 2. You can just stop people from being afraid.~
~So who is not afraid of terrorism? Who doesn't even feel a twinge of anxiety about being attacked by terrorists? That's right--terrorists.~
~To stop terrorism, all we have to do is turn everybody into terrorists. Now we don't know how to actually turn an ordinary person into a terrorist, even though the federal TLAs are doing research experiments, but we do know how to treat everyone like they already are terrorists. Do it long enough, and people will eventually get the hint.~
~So it all makes sense now. They want everyone to become a terrorist, so that nobody will be afraid of terrorists, which will destroy terrorism utterly, and so nobody can ever be a terrorist again. Brilliant!~
~I'm sure the EFF means well, but if we stop treating everyone like terrorists, the terrorists win.~
I think these lies absolutely matter. It's a war of propaganda that can lead to real legislation. I think the "PATRIOT Act" (and the "USA Freedom Act", for that matter) show that the surveillance state has a way of turning its will into law.
To borrow a cliche, if encryption is outlawed, only outlaws will have encryption.
I don't think encryption can be outlawed, but it can be hamstrung by weakened implementations and requirements to decrypt for "lawful requests".
It certainly does matter to me, and your comment makes me wonder if it might matter to you and you don't know it. If you read it, the articles's thrust isn't largely about encryption, it's about mass surveillance.
The reasons it matters to me:
- The government shouldn't have the right to wire-tap all citizens at once. We already established that for analog telephones, but digital has become an excuse to undo the annoying requirement of establishing probable cause. If they have the right to listen to you through mass means, no encryption will help you.
- They are spending our tax dollars doing this. The money matters, and they basically taking our money and using it against us. At best it's a waste of that money.
- If they establish the right to curb strong encryption, you may be right in the sense that it doesn't matter to the criminals who use illegal and strong encryption. But it does matter to the vast majority of the law abiding world who get stuck with "encryption" that is readily readable by anyone who expresses an interest, and allows the govt to keep collecting mass surveillance unhindered.
It can be outlawed and as a result prevent access to encryption for a large part of the population. Then only technically capable people and motivated criminals would be in a position to use it. The govt would then conflate all encryption with terrorism. If you were found with encrypted communications you would be compelled to give up the key or face prosecution as a terrorist. In front of a jury with no knowledge of encryption other than what they heard on Fox news would guarantee a long sentence or the usual tactic of forcing you to take a plea regardless of your guilt.
> Encryption simply can't be stopped by governments.
They can try, and they can make your life hell for using it. It won't work, of course, but that has never stopped frightened people or those with an agenda.
This is why it is incredibly important that we not only use encryption pervasively, but that we also educate[1] the general public about encryption. Unless encryption is normalized into the popular culture, it will always be possible to harass "those troublemakers" that use encryption and the general public won't care. This crap will end only after people understand that "banning encryption" is as stupid as "banning envelopes/locks".
> This kind of thing doesn't matter.
Encryption doesn't protect you from traffic analysis. It is important to remember that so-called metadata is often more revealing[2] than the content, especially when you 0wn3d the backbone and can map[3] who everybody you talk to.
[1] specifically, we need to educate people to a similar level that people understand physical locks: "what is does" and "when/how it should be used" are key; the details can be left to professionals (i.e. like locksmiths).
> Encryption simply can't be stopped by governments.
Try spending couple of hours being beaten by government thugs just because you encrypted something (they won't even bother asking you decrypt) and you will sing another tune.
Lets assume that the relative physical safety that a person enjoys in the west in the hands of the LEO is the exception and not the norm worldwide.
Governments can stop anything they want if they are strong or desperate enough.
While true, moving the entire web to HTTPS with PFS-enabled configurations, secure cipher suites, and key-pinning is a huge challenge.
In any case, the strategy lately has been to force consumer ISPs to keep logs of who is connecting where (The UK government wants ISPs to log the URI of every plaintext page you visit, and will no doubt eventually want DNS logs and TLS SNI and TCP connection logs for other kinds of connectivity).
The best you can do today is ensure your TLS deployment is A+ rated at SSL Labs[0] and offer a Tor hidden service for your visitors. That said, if governments and ISPs legislate/cooperate to do active MITM attacks, then there's nothing we can really do to help Joe Public that wouldn't constitute a crime or get you put on a watchlist yourself.
No it can't, but laws against crypto can be used to mandate that only certain crypto be used in "professional" settings. That crypto will of course have to be certified, which will lock anyone but Fortune 500 companies and products certified by expensive consultants out of essentially all enterprise markets. Your browser will have to be certified to talk to certified SSL servers, etc. So forget about open source, open platforms, open standards, and startups competing with big companies in the enterprise.
That may well be the real objective. I wouldn't be terribly surprised if big players are lobbying behind the scenes for the government to mandate a new kind of FIPS for all consumer crypto, which would lock smaller players out of the market and of course make us all safer from 'terr (right?). Remember how SOPA was lobbied for by GoDaddy so they could sell a new expensive premium class of domain registration?
Using bloody crimes and tragedies to lobby for unfair market advantage. It's how business is done in Washington (and probably other capitols too).
It can't be totally stopped. But plenty of encryption-enabled apps can be subverted. I think it should be treated as a given that
1. a sufficiently clever and malicious person can implement broken encryption in a virtually-undetectable, and perhaps even deniable way
2. the government has the capability of exerting enormous pressure on app manufacturers and service providers
Given 1 & 2, it's reasonable to assume that an unknown and possibly great number of encrypted chat and encrypted email and encrypted etc are all subverted.
Why should we listen? France already massively ramped up their surveillance state after the Hebdo attacks (the perps were known to them beforehand anyway), and that did absolutely nothing to stop a much larger and more complex attack, also with known perps. A panopticon can't stop terrorists from lashing out violently, but it can certainly chill speech and promote totalitarian government.
That's their angle: use the panopticon to get blackmail material on 100% of people, then anyone who is inconvenient or needs to be controlled can be dealt with painlessly.
I can't understand how people can still give governments the benefit of the doubt when they've been exposed as liars repeatedly for years.
>That's their angle: use the panopticon to get blackmail material on 100% of people, then anyone who is inconvenient or needs to be controlled can be dealt with painlessly.
Right, France is a totalitarian government, no proof necessary. You cannot fight nonsense with nonsense.
I didn't say that they were totalitarian, merely that they had taken a step in that direction. Powers are abused, 100% of the time, even if you don't find out. Steps against free society add up.
Why? If laws are so complex that at any given time anyone is breaking at least one, then a surveillance dragnet gives you cause to indict anyone at any time.
Thanks to a spectacularly complex legal system, we all break plenty of laws each day. If our every action is recorded, then so are those currently inconsequential violations of law, giving whoever controls the panopticon the ability to pick and choose who to prosecute with near impunity.
We had an example not even a month ago. In many cities, there are enough parking spots for everyone, so many citizens will leave their cars for the night near their homes in places where they do not cause significant disturbance, and the police will tolerate this behavior and not ticket them for it. This is a win for everyone: the citizens have a spot to park, and the mayor doesn't have to spend public funds to set up parking spots.
In completely unrelated news, the city of Beauvais voted 67% against the municipal police force carrying weapons. The municipal police retaliated by not tolerating night-time parking anymore, resulting in a significant increase in parking tickets in locations that had been safe for years.
And while the mayor did apologize for this, the municipal police said it was "just doing our job".
Criminals do much more actual harm to society, and yet no is calling for local police to have access to everyone's email and phone records.
Imagine how many crimes local police could prevent if they did have access? Unlike finding small terrorist cells among tens of millions of people, busting local criminals is very easy if you can spy on their communication.
They could probably save thousands of children from serious abuse. They could definitely save some people from being murdered.
And yet, it's still not worth it because we would be living in a police state, not a free society.
> > no is calling for local police to have access to everyone's email and phone records.
> They are calling for mass video surveillance of everyone's encounters with police.
That's because there are serious problems with police accountability. Citizens benefit because bad police (which we hope are a minority) are discouraged from acting poorly, due to pervasive evidence, and the police benefit because there is a clear documented record of What Happened, which helps prevent spurious claims of police misconduct.
It's something that most of the police seem not to want, judging from reactions towards journalists and people with cameras, so it's not the __police__ asking for more surveillance. (Well, I mean, they are, but not in this way.)
There may come a point at which police officers have such powerful gear (see: spider drones from Minority Report) that they can effectively monitor the population, but that's nowhere close to what we have with current bodycams.
"Mass surveillance is the intricate surveillance of an entire or a substantial fraction of a population in order to monitor that group of citizens."
France is not totalitarian, at least for now, but their political system is statist with a tendency for enacting authoritarian policies without regard for individual liberties.
I have been following a lot of French people on Twitter following the terrorist attacks and I didn't sense from them any caution or worries of giving the govt and security forces a carte blanche with the state of emergency and even for the upcoming constitutional referendum.
They seemed very naive and trust their government blindly to the point of trading their freedom for the illusion of safety and not learning the hard lesson endured by their American peers with the Patriot Act and the ensuing mass surveillance following the 9/11 attacks.
Perhaps the argument is that they couldnt keep a close enough eye on the "known perps".
I feel like it is a fair/valid argument to support expanded/enhanced wiretapping of those with warrants ("known perps"). One could argue either way if it is the person's right to know if they are on a watchlist.
I DONT feel like the argument for expanded/enhanced wiretapping for everyone is fair/valid. Aside from the fact that it feels draconian and cowardly, there isnt any hard data to back up its effectiveness.
> I feel like it is a fair/valid argument to support expanded/enhanced wiretapping of those with warrants ("known perps").
If the police have a warrant then they can tap your phone, bug your house, install a hardware keylogger on all your devices, etc. etc. That has been the case forever and nobody is objecting to it.
The objection is to warrantless surveillance and mandatory backdoors.
"And that did nothing to stop a much larger, more complex attack"
Perhaps, but I think the best way to measure the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of the program is not the number of attacks that have slipped through, but the proportion of those that were prevented compared to those that slipped through.
This is impossible. One of the problems with the blatant misuse of forecasting is governments using it it to compare outrageous black swan futures against real history. It leads to claiming that "spying on everyone 24/7 to prevent an infinite number of terror attacks" is in everyones interest. The reality is that a limited number of black-swan terror attacks is actually a minimal cost compared to destroying social fabric modern western society is built on.
This type of false thinking is what allows government officials to manipulate public thought into agreeing to give up their rights. This has literally led to the FBI radicalizing young men in order to 'catch them' in the act -- thus justifying their existence by creating the very black-swan event they are supposed to stop.
Well, they did enable government to implement those surveillance programs. It was already in the works, but terrorism is a wonderful pretext (along with paedophilia, Nazism, and starving authors).
Those cases are handled in "secret courts" run by "secret judges" with "secret prosecutors".
Apparently the defense counsel is also secret since they don't come out afterwards to say what happened to their clients. Assuming the prosecuted had defense counsel.
Measuring how much something did not happen looks pretty tough. I have a lucky rabbit's foot, and I have not been attacked by a bear. How many bear attacks has my lucky rabbit's foot prevented? Seven? A million?
Either an informed electorate runs the country or the security services do. That sounds like a false dichotomy, but if all of the important information is classified, and voters are prevented from becoming informed (which is what the security services want)? I don't see how the system can continue to operate.
And that doesn't begin to address the catastrophic civil liberties problems the surveillance state brings. I'm just wondering who is in charge.
When developing complex and robust systems, the measure of effectiveness of a program is how little the original system changes in response to new stimulus. If the system constantly needs to change, it's not meeting the stating requirements.
"Trusting good people" is fine for children, but anyone who has observed the system for a few years knows better. The system has been exposed to "good people" before; it knows what to do with them.
Correct. My observation is: The good people that come into politics either stay small numbers in the back-row ... or they get corrupted by the system and the money and maybe end up as top politician, some even as president -- but they are no good people anymore.
That is the requirement for becoming somebody in politics.
I could be wrong on the facts here as I have not been following the story closely, but I believe that the unencrypted SMS found on a phone outside the Batcalan helped lead police to St. Denis where they killed the mastermind and several other terrorists and likely prevented a further attack. Between St. Denis and the raids in Belgium, it seems like the police likely (1) already knew a lot about many of the people involved and/or (2) were able to quickly piece together clues, both of which were probably aided by the ability to monitor digital communications. Look also at the number of targeted killings of terrorists over recent years (e.g. Jihadi John) which I would assume were aided by digital monitoring.
And the terrorists are aware of the above and are now training their followers to use apps like Telegram.
With 7 billion people in this world, preventing every single attack by mass surveillance alone is impossible. But I think its naive to believe that surveillance is not helpful to law enforcement or that the pro surveillance crowd is motivated by some sort of ulterior motive to blackmail people. If you are the head of the CIA or NYPD, you probably spend a lot of your time genuinely worrying about letting an attack happen on your watch and you would be strongly inclined to fight for every tool you can get.
The question is whether the benefits of dragnet surveillance and weakening encryption outweigh the negatives, and like others here, I'm inclined to think they do not.
Jaron Lanier writes about this problem in "Who Owns The Future" and calls it the Siren Server. People seem to continually mistake the mass collection of data and its generic processing with actual actionable intelligence. What you really end up with is a mass of data that has no meaning or function unless you already have an inclination where to look.
That inclination is likely going to fall along the lines of your biases unless its in direct relation to an already occurred or ongoing event.
"I can't understand how people can still give governments the benefit of the doubt when they've been exposed as liars repeatedly for years."
Because reasoning doesn't work that way, and many people don't grow up in nice conditions. AKA the vast majority of people are poor and have hard lives, aka no time for research. You're on the internet, you are in the top percentage of wealthy people on the planet.
>You're on the internet, you are in the top percentage of wealthy people on the planet.
I don't really think that's true anymore. Especially with cheap smartphones or tablets, LTE towers and solar panels you can reach even rural africa.
> I can't understand how people can still give governments the benefit of the doubt when they've been exposed as liars repeatedly for years.
Because in their model of the world, evidence derives from authority. They value phatic expression and hierarchy instead of deduction and reasoning. Before you can convince such people of anything, you must first learn to speak their language.
While this essay is concerned with creationists and evolution, I encourage everybody to read it as it's observations about phatic communication - and how to overcome that roadblock in education - apply generally.
"France already massively ramped up their surveillance state after the Hebdo attacks"
I don't think that's true. When France passed the big intelligence law this summer, the goal was to explicitly legalize the surveillance programs that were already in effect, but were until then in a grey area, legally speaking.
Nobody talked about actually increasing the surveillance, or you have information that we don't.
Well, I would assume any expansion would not be mentioned because anytime someone mentions that type of information they are immediately attacked as "helping the enemy". The conspiracy theorist in me suggests that making the then current levels of surveillance proper under the law just causes them to increase the levels again afterwards. I expect in a year or two there will be talk of making the new higher levels of surveillance, previously hidden, properly legal. Rinse, repeat.
Terrorists make common cause with established governments when they inspire fear in the governed.
The design goal of terrorism it to provoke overreach on the part of the authority being targeted. But you can't get an allocation of funds for your open-ended anti-terror programme if you say this.
After fiftyish years of television and 100 years of movies, people's willing suspension of disbelief impulse is ragged and raw. It's both hair-trigger and numbed. And since the mode of the terrorists is akin to blood sacrifice, it's even more profound.
I think that for things which are far away, people are free turn their beliefs in any direction which suits them. There's no obvious feedback to one's actions except for the reaction of others when they discover your political beliefs.
Well it mentions all the nice articles about how various talking heads wanting to expand surveillance in one place. But yeah, if you are up to date on other news sources its nothing new.
While I am not the OP (and support all of their agenda) - any organization that is payed to hold certain position becomes cynical because it is literally their job to spin any event into something that fits their agenda. It is the nature of the beast.
Are they payed merely to hold certain positions or to take action (legal challenges, software dev, spread awareness) on issues that are important to many of us?
I don't know about cynical (perhaps I'm the one who's cynical), but they're inconsistent about certain things. Old EFF: The government must stay away from the internet. New EFF: The government needs to regulate the internet like a public utility. Old EFF: Hacking is not a crime. New EFF: The government must stop the zero day menace. They used to be much more libertarian in spirit.
What I find cynical is the exploitation of tragedies by demagogue politicians and intelligence personnel in vying to curtail a few more of our civil liberties.
On the contrary, I find the EFF one of the few groups of optimists.
As a very deeply cynical individual myself, I like that EFF is not quite cynical enough to completely give up on trying to steer politics away from the slippery slope into 1984-style dystopia.
That one is pretty close to the slippery slopes that lead into Brave New World-style dystopia, Brazil-style dystopia, Walden Two-style dystopia, Atlas Shrugged-style dystopia, and Snow Crash-style dystopia.
We're damned if we do, damned if we don't, and doubly-damned if we do it half-assed.
So good for the EFF, and their noble effort to steer the train.
Did I call the EFF superheros? And my question about the FBI was more-general. In light of their use of informants against political dissidence, among other problems with their methods, is it even ethical, never mind cynical, to work with the FBI?
I don't think I would ever work with the FBI. I had to think about it for a second, because, obviously, there are a lot of crimes that the DOJ works on that we can all agree they should be attacking. But the kinds of crimes where they can most use the kind of help I can provide are the ones I'm least comfortable with them working on.
When I was much younger (in my late teens), I worked with prosecutors on a case in Seattle --- pro bono, not for money. It was such a bad experience that I wound up going on strike until they sent me a written apology.
All the stories I've ever heard about security people collaborating with prosecutors or the FBI or USSS have been horror stories.
Later: I should add that I don't grant the premise that the FBI uses informants to crack down on political dissidents --- the Hoover-era FBI surely did, but then, the FBI was not the worst part of the politics of the late 60s.
It sounds like the EFF is rather weakly cynical, if at all, compared to an FBI that now runs a network of 15,000 poor schlubs who have been bought or blackmailed into being the kind of informant network a Soviet-bloc state security outfit would build.
To be fair, Aum is the useful exception that proves the rule about WMDs and non-state actors. After all their efforts, they would have been more deadly with lo-cost improvised explosives. So that's something
Yeah no doubt this all feels familiar. Because they're(media & globalized governments, which are effectively a single entity) reading from False Flag Operations 101
What's surprising to me is that even the liberal media doesn't seem to question the assumption behind the questions that they're asking. They ask questions like should we give up our privacy in order to gain security? But of course this question assumes that it's possible to gain security by giving up privacy which is clearly false. Just look at totalitarian regimes - are they free of terrorist attacks? No.
Notice we don't see calls for more surveillance after domestic shootings/terrorism. Well, body cams for police is maybe an exception. But schools, churches, and movie theaters get shot up weekly.
I think the illusion that somehow the surveillance apparatus filters out white people and only focuses on terrorism lets Americans feel okay with it.
Also I don't think most people realize how almost every action and thought in their lives ends up on a computer or going over the internet. Everyone just focuses on cellphone metadata, maybe because the full truth of what's being surveilled is too painful to contemplate.
I would like to see some politician formulate a response the involves boosting these Middle Eastern economies and schools and "bombing" them with movies and music from LA. If we give these radicals some chance at a life then maybe they'll stop blowing themselves up and taking us with them. Also maybe we can consider that they're responding rationally to the endless intervention by the West into their affairs. Not that I'm justifying their actions, at all, but it's not healthy to dehumanize the enemy. It's what we did to the Japanese and we ended up fire bombing and nuclear bombing them.
> Notice we don't see calls for more surveillance after domestic shootings/terrorism.
I think the reasoning is that in domestic school/church/theater shootings, the perpetrator isn't engaged in long communications (and receiving instructions from) a leadership group.
It wouldn't be surveillance on you as part of a group, it would be on you as an individual. Most likely it would involve just enlarging the number of incidents or situations that would trigger a surveillance order on you.
Doesn't matter, that type of surveillance will be incredibly easy in the near future. Whether we want it or not.
Humanity and morality aside, maybe politicians are also respoding rationally when encouraging punitive millitary interventions. Looking "tough" does more for re-election than trying to brew long term solutions. It's an unfortunate coincidence of inventives.
> I would like to see some politician formulate a response the involves boosting these Middle Eastern economies and schools and "bombing" them with movies and music from LA.
Exactly. That is how you win an ideological war. Hollywood and rock music were perhaps the most powerful Capitalist weapons in the cold war. Culture and wealth. Thats how you win, not by humiliating and traumatizing entire nations.
There is this awesome party going on in the developed world, if we can just lessen the income inequality problem it's all just going to get better.
And now we even have a decent shot at mitigating climate change with the age of cheap solar pv.
But what are we offering the mideast? Bombs, drone strikes, hellscapes, failed states.
When the Khmer Rouge first got started, they only had 5,000 followers. It was only after Kissinger's massive bombing of Cambodia ("anything that flies on anything that moves") that they were able to attract 200,000 followers and take over.
That's what trauma does. When people feel violated they get angry and they want to take their power back. That is the engine that ISIS feeds on.
We had a small, isolated enemy in the form of Al Qaeda, and in response we managed to alienate and humiliate a huge swath of the world. Now we have too many enemies to deal with militarily.
That's what Obama is admitting when he says sending 50,000 troops to Syria won't work. Because what happens when ISIS starts up in Yemen, or somewhere else. All of this war is an expensive drain on the west, we will get spread too thin. The occupations don't even work.
And make no mistake, this soft target terror is going to be a huge economic drain on the west. The fear, the security spending. It's our economies that are really vulnerable to this kind of thing.
So far the war on terror has this perverse viral coefficient. We create more terrorists than we kill. We kill more terrorists, we make the problem even bigger.
"One major reason Congress ended the broader program is that it didn’t work. Millions of dollars and over 10 years of effort later"
That's the thing. They are convincing everyone that it's about security, but it's not. The military industrial congressional complex (the correct term before editing of DI's famous speech) has latched onto "cyber" as another money extraction through fear pipeline. We need to stop assuming their real purpose is security, and understand that instead it is about money and power.
William Binney is the perfect man to go to about this sort of thing. He designed a system that would cost in the two digit millions that would be placed at core nodes and would encrypt/anonymize American's data unless a FISA warrant was obtained. They scrapped his program, and implemented a multibillion dollar program that didn't protect privacy, didn't ingest or connect data as well, and this was from the very top of the Agency!
Corruption is a root cause of these issues. Congress isn't as dumb as they pretend, but they get big donations and re-election support when they pass stuff like this, and they are more concerned about that than any principles. All three branches of government are affected by this level of corruption and cronyism. Programs like this are designed for two things:
1. Make the middle-top MICC men (the startups in Mclean VA for example) lots of money.
2. While the middle men are rolling in that money, having torn up the constitution to get it, the oligarchy siphons the data through loopholes, and suddenly, they have enough data to plan the next evolution in the facist world government plan.
You remember the saying, follow the money? Well, at a certain point, when you have billions, another few million isn't that big of a deal. At that point, it's all about power. Be wary of future calls to world governmental style bodies to be formed, and remember centralization is a weakness, not a strength! Mark my words.
It would be pretty impressive if an algo existed which found most of the terrorists with relatively few false positives.
If you look at a population in the hundreds of millions and the set of terrorists planning an attack, maybe in the dozens (?), you need a pretty powerful test if you're to inconvenience fewer terrorists than ordinary people.
And that doesn't even touch on the issue of whether it's right to do so if it works.
Has anyone here worked on similar identification algorithms? The closest I can think of is a friend of mine who markets drugs for extremely rare conditions. But then those people tend not to be hiding and can be approached via search keywords.
IMO, there exist good arguments against surveillance. But why are supposedly rational geeks so irrationally prone to putting forward very bad arguments against it? See almost every reply in this thread to prove my point, but I will list a few:
1) If one took basic statistics, one would deem the proposition that "X is useless because [a target of X] has just slipped through" as outrageously wrong and a prime example of both selection bias and reliance on anecdotal evidence, yet somehow in the context of surveillance, this argument is taken at face value. You see otherwise smart people posting and retweeting this argument as if they thought it a valid one.
2) In almost any other context, a rational thing to do is to evaluate both sides and, if one seems beneficial but dangerous, propose laws to regulate it (aka: don't use surveillance for blackmailing political candidates since it contradicts democratic principles). Yet in the context of surveillance, a geek will talk in completely black-and-white terms, and not even consider proposing laws to regulate its impact. For an extended example, a common argument against surveillance is that places the entity wielding it "outside of law". Yet democracies have developed well-established methods for dealing with entities in power that try to place themselves outside of law. That is the reason why we have a president with a fixed term rather than a king, for example.
3) If surveillance can be used for blackmailing, then obviously it has to work quite well in the first place (be comprehensive, with ability to target specific individuals). Yet the same geek who argues that surveillance is dangerous because it can be used for blackmailing will also try argue, often in the same paragraph, that surveillance doesn't work, is not effective, or is very easily circumventable. To any impartial outside observer, the argument that "X is not effective! But X is dangerous because it is effective!" would seem like a contradiction, no?
4) Then there is the tired/insensitive argument that "more people die from furniture than from terrorism". First, this is probably only true in the West, and not in places like Nigeria or MENA (this is a good chart http://cdn.static-economist.com/sites/default/files/imagecac...). Second, almost all animals (and yes, humans are primates/animals) pay a lot more attention to predators and to acts of violence between each other than to random accidents, and there is an evolutionary reason for that (which specifically is left as an exercise to the reader). I would also argue that, since this behavior is so incredibly prevalent among animals of all kinds, it's almost definitely not an example of a "maladaptive" cognitive bias. Finally, even if it were maladaptive, one can't just simply discount it (an entire country experiencing a fascist freakout against a minority group is not a good thing IMO, whether a result of a cognitive bias or not).
5) For almost every other technology, geeks will argue (often obnoxiously/pedantically) that it can be both good and bad, depending on how it is wielded (see nuclear power). But surveillance is also a technology, yet you almost never see a geek saying "surveillance can be either good or bad" -- no, to a geek, surveillance is bad, period. It's like surveillance is this one thing that technology-loving geeks can feel justified to act luddite about.
1)
This is a good point, but there's very little evidence in favor that /any/ legitimate terror attacks are stopped by most mass survellience. In other words, we have no data points in favor of it, and every time an event like this happens, it's an additional data point against it.
2)
>if one seems beneficial but dangerous, propose laws to regulate it
Because there's no reason at this point for us to believe that the entities in power will adhere to those laws, as they haven't in the past.
Keep in mind that without Snowden et al there would be almost no one arguing against mass survellience compared to what there is today.
3)
The argument isn't that survellience doesn't collect massive amounts of information on everyone. We know it does that, and everyone should agree. The argument is that despite all of this information, it does not help to protect us in any notable way. In other words, mass survellience is effect at collecting absurd amounts of data on everyone, but it is not effective as a tool to protect us and stop legitimate terrorist threats.
1) If you were good at detecting terror attacks, wouldn't you want to keep it secret from terrorists about how you actually do it? This is such an obvious point (a direct counterpart to Dr. Strangelove's "the whole point of a doomsday machine is lost if you keep it a secret"), yet so many of those who argue against surveillance don't even consider it, thereby revealing that their primary concern is not even remotely close to actually solving the problem of terrorist attacks. Now, someone who completely doesn't care about whether terrorist attacks happen or not -- is that a rational party to have discussion with?
2) Don't democracies have well-established principles on how to deal with entities in power that try to place themselves outside of law -- without actually preventing those entities from wielding any power whatsoever? Wasn't that the entire point of having a president with a fixed term rather than a king?
Now, someone who completely doesn't care about whether terrorist attacks happen or not -- is that a rational party to have discussion with?
I doubt there is anybody who truly "doesn't care if terrorist attacks happen". But there are people (like myself) who can look at the numbers, realize that you are MANY times more likely to die by slipping and falling in your own bathroom, being in a car crash, drowning in your own pool, or being beaten to death by a cop, than you are to die in a terrorist attack. And after looking at that, I can say that I don't accept a trade-off that involves any loss of freedom, or increase in government scope/power, in order to reduce what is already a minuscule risk.
Don't democracies have well-established principles on how to deal with entities in power that try to place themselves outside of law -- without actually preventing those entities from wielding any power whatsoever? Wasn't that the entire point of having a president with a fixed term rather than a king?
Yes, and I will argue that it was the point, or at least part of the point, of the Second Amendment. (Yeah, I know this point isn't without controversy).
> But there are people (like myself) who can look at the numbers, realize that you are MANY times more likely to die by slipping and falling in your own bathroom
That's another example of a wrong argument often used. All animals (and yes, humans are animals) pay more attention to predators than to random accidents, and there is an evolutionary reason for that.
"Correct" is not the issue here. The issue is that the behavior exists, is powerful, and must be accounted for. If you have a country-wide fascist freakout against a minority group, it doesn't matter whether the source was "correct" (technical term: adaptive) bias or a maladaptive one.
So what argument would you recommend? You've clearly come out against using logic, and suggested to the "geeks" that vestigial evolutionary behavior "must be accounted for". How do you suggest that be done, emotional manipulation? What bloody shirt do we have to wave?
"Vestigial" is the wrong/insensitive word. If I make an appeal to evolutionary biology, it is because I am also a geek, not because I have some overarching pseudo-Darwinian worldview. When applicable, its not wrong to refer to biology to understand why humans work the way they do. When dealing with a software system, wouldn't you want to understand the principles upon which it is built?
Please don't tell me that you would feel the same way if a member of your family, for example, had died in a boating accident versus, say, had been beheaded with cold blood with a knife in some insane semi-religious ceremony (if you would feel the same way, a lot of people would qualify you as a sociopath, and they probably wouldn't be wrong). Vengeance is one of the primary drives of human behavior, it will always exist, it is very often a bad thing, but it must be acknowledged if you want to be taken seriously. Note for example that in rare cases when it is justified, lack of feeling of vengeance will make you look either like a cold-blooded psychopath or a complete coward.
It is rational to try to understand the limits of rationality. A perfectly rational being might rationally conclude that life is not worth living and commit suicide, leaving no progeny. Defending oneself and one's family from threats that have agency (predators, other members of your species) is and always will be categorically different from defending from threats that don't have agency, such as bad weather.
I recommend to consider the threat posed by terrorism as seriously as you consider global warming, or interplanetary exploration, or whatever it is you consider to be a serious issue. It may not be as serious to you, and that's okay, but at least respect the fact that it is a very serious issue to many other people. Then you can have a serious discussion over which steps are and are not appropriate.
As a coincidence, you will also find that people will listen to your arguments against surveillance more seriously when you respectfully acknowledge their own wants and desires, such as desire for peace/security.
WELL, I never. I'm offended at your offence to my insensitivity. I can be intransigent about the value of logic relative to emotion as well.
> When dealing with a software system, wouldn't you want to understand the principles upon which it is built?
That depends on what you mean by principles. If you mean the CS theory that underpins it all, sure - that level of knowledge is absolutely necessary in many cases. If you mean the designer's intent, sure - that can help, but that would certainly take a back seat to the cold hard CS logic of reality. Also, I wouldn't feel a compulsion to extend the poor coding practices of yesteryear that may be found in legacy codebases (hint: I'm not talking about code, this is a tortured metaphor).
> Please don't tell me that you would feel the same way if a member of your family...
The desire for revenge is derived from a perceived injustice, that is why one seeks revenge against people and not motorboats - motorboats can't reason. The same goes for wild animal attacks. I think you almost touched on this in your third paragraph. But you're conflating emotions and actions.
> ...respectfully acknowledge their own wants and desires, such as desire for peace/security.
Ok, I officially respect and acknowledge your wants and desires for peace and security. BTW, you can't have either in a world where there is any amount of free will. What next? Is that your recommendation - empathy? I'll save you some trouble and just let you know ahead of time that if somebody is irrational - no amount of reasoning, emotional or logical, will change their position. That leaves only three courses of action for the self-interested rational being:
1) Try reason, if it doesn't work then turn to page 2 or 3
2) Violence, but it works in only a super narrow band of circumstances
3) Attempt to minimize the damage done to you by the emotion driven mob, this might mean fleeing into the wilderness and becoming a hermit... Or promoting the benefits of logical thought in daily exchanges by demonstrating the wealth, happiness and playboy lifestyle that it has brought you. Either or.
One issue that I won't compromise on is that of compromise, which is usually where the emotional route leads. There are plenty of things for which compromise is just fine, but are generally unimportant and not worth the argument, modifications of properties and not attributes (attributes define kindness of objects, properties do not). Like if you wanted to paint our rocket red (change the color property) that is fine, a compromise of half red vs full red really makes no difference outside of personal aesthetic preference. If you wanted to replace the engine with a bag of pineapples, well we have a problem - it is no longer a rocket and there is no compromise between fruit and engine that would leave it a rocket.
Am finding your comment a bit difficult to read, and don't really have time to discuss this further, so I will only remark that I'm not at all offended by anything you said -- my mention of "sensitivity" was only to advise on how to act in such a way so as to make people listen to your arguments (in other words: people will typically shut down their aural response as soon as they hear something offensive to their core beliefs). A hypersensitive person would annoy me as much as he/she would annoy you, but the fact that such people exist is an unfortunate reality that has to be dealt with, and not something that can be changed by pretending otherwise.
TL;DR Just because I describe a situation does't mean I approve of it.
Well I'll summarize my perspective as well. If somebody needs emotional coddling in order to see reason - they aren't really going to see reason (not in the long term at least). It therefore makes no sense to deviate from a logic based approach in argument; the "geeks" are doing it right. A verbose argument is easily ignored (as I've apparently demonstrated), so adding emotional appeals can do nothing but distract.
Thank you. I share your view that logic/reason is superior to emotional appeal. However the two are often orthogonal. When dealing with public, it is possible not to sacrifice any logical soundness whatsoever while also ensuring that your message is not ignored b/c of seeming insensitivity to whatever bullshit people care about. Just because something is not often done does not mean it is impossible. Understanding what other people care about is called "emotional intelligence". Possessing emotional intelligence does not necessarily mean that one does not possess rational intelligence (heh, it would be a logical fallacy to say so). The two can complement one another. If you care about having influence in the world, you should attempt to acquire both. Just because some people only have one and some only the other does not mean that no person exists that has both. That was my point.
At least to point 2, with regards to outlawing encryption, it really is all-or-nothing. You either allow strong encryption, or you disallow all encryption and destroy e-commerce. There is no in-between when it comes to encryption.
I am probably the only person in the observable universe who thinks both that (a) a full ban on encryption is stupid and unenforceable, and that (b) leaking details on how surveillance is done in 2013 by certain Mr. S. was an incredibly stupid/egomaniacal thing to do.
Outlawing torture didn't make a lick of difference.
Anyone who trusts an institution which repeatedly lies, tortures, and murders with impunity, an institution responsible for millions of deaths, is insane.
So this may be considered hijacking, but here goes. What the EFF, and many others, get wrong is that this is terrorism aimed at the West because of 'our freedoms', or these are religious nutters who want to kill Westerners because jihad, porn, alcohol, the prophet told them to, it's in the Quran, etc.
The larger picture reveals that it's chickens coming home to roost (and I am not going to go into the long list of foreign policy actions that create the resentment). The Western public should not expect that their government's actions do not have consequences.
From a purely selfish PoV, you can expect that if your government is willing to kill/maim/oppress/steal/lie/cheat people of another nation, for whatever reason, that this will soon start happening to you (and it has - look around).
Pushing back against initiatives like this is futile. The fear your government sows will override any concerns for loss of civil liberties. So long as they get to use words like terrorists, Islamic Extremism, radicals and militants they control the conversation. And every time you use those words you set your argument back.
More pertinently, the West has a long, long history of violence against the other. Study that history as that is the only thing that will let you to question your presumption of superiority and allow you to open your eyes to the terrible suffering the West inflicts every day.
>What the EFF, and many others, get wrong is that this is terrorism aimed at the West because of 'our freedoms',
I'm not sure why that's relevant, I don't see anything like that in this article. I don't see any usage of words like 'freedom', 'islam', 'extremist', etc., either. As far as I can tell this article is neutral or just nonpresenting with regards to what you've mentioned.
FTA: "But terrorism is aimed, in part, at pushing us to jump to conclusions and take panicky steps that inflict more pain and misdirect our resources toward failed and dangerous ideas."
The most interesting part of this debate is how it mirrors the gun control debate, with the biggest difference between the two being the people advocating each position.
Both debates are about the attempt to restrict something which is very difficult to restrict. In both cases,there is a fundamental principle of liberty at stake, but only the advocates for that liberty appear to care about that principle. Relatively few could be argued to be harmed by the weapons/encryption (in the manner which proponents of restriction believe they can prevent), and even where governments have abridged those rights, the results do not clearly demonstrate that restrictions are efficacious. Proponents also make their strongest pushes for increased restriction in the face of great tragedies in both cases.
The only groups which seem to have consistent positions through these two debates are the libertarians, anarchists, and statists (; a strange list in my opinion).
Saying that surveillance doesn't stop all terrorist attacks so we should stop all surveillance, is like saying police don't stop all violent crime so we should fire all the police.
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 157 ms ] threadAfter Endless Demonization Of Encryption, Police Find Paris Attackers Coordinated Via Unencrypted SMS: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20151118/08474732854/after...
They actually had unencrypted text messages on their phones and used cars. Why don't we ban unencrypted text message applications and cars?
http://www.thedailystar.net/whatsapp-mypeople-line-also-bloc...
http://www.francetvinfo.fr/replay-magazine/france-2/envoye-s...
To give EFF a credit, they actually fight. Unfortunately, quixotically
~I was thinking the other day, and I think I figured out the government's plan for ending terrorism. (Yes, I was wearing my foil hat. Thank you for asking.)~
~What is the goal of terrorism? To make people afraid.~
~How do you end terrorism? Option 1 is to stop the things that make people afraid from happening. But there is an option 2. You can just stop people from being afraid.~
~So who is not afraid of terrorism? Who doesn't even feel a twinge of anxiety about being attacked by terrorists? That's right--terrorists.~
~To stop terrorism, all we have to do is turn everybody into terrorists. Now we don't know how to actually turn an ordinary person into a terrorist, even though the federal TLAs are doing research experiments, but we do know how to treat everyone like they already are terrorists. Do it long enough, and people will eventually get the hint.~
~So it all makes sense now. They want everyone to become a terrorist, so that nobody will be afraid of terrorists, which will destroy terrorism utterly, and so nobody can ever be a terrorist again. Brilliant!~
~I'm sure the EFF means well, but if we stop treating everyone like terrorists, the terrorists win.~
To borrow a cliche, if encryption is outlawed, only outlaws will have encryption.
I don't think encryption can be outlawed, but it can be hamstrung by weakened implementations and requirements to decrypt for "lawful requests".
The reasons it matters to me:
- The government shouldn't have the right to wire-tap all citizens at once. We already established that for analog telephones, but digital has become an excuse to undo the annoying requirement of establishing probable cause. If they have the right to listen to you through mass means, no encryption will help you.
- They are spending our tax dollars doing this. The money matters, and they basically taking our money and using it against us. At best it's a waste of that money.
- If they establish the right to curb strong encryption, you may be right in the sense that it doesn't matter to the criminals who use illegal and strong encryption. But it does matter to the vast majority of the law abiding world who get stuck with "encryption" that is readily readable by anyone who expresses an interest, and allows the govt to keep collecting mass surveillance unhindered.
Banning encryption is like banning breathing. Yeah, they can, but we all still have to do it.
They can try, and they can make your life hell for using it. It won't work, of course, but that has never stopped frightened people or those with an agenda.
This is why it is incredibly important that we not only use encryption pervasively, but that we also educate[1] the general public about encryption. Unless encryption is normalized into the popular culture, it will always be possible to harass "those troublemakers" that use encryption and the general public won't care. This crap will end only after people understand that "banning encryption" is as stupid as "banning envelopes/locks".
> This kind of thing doesn't matter.
Encryption doesn't protect you from traffic analysis. It is important to remember that so-called metadata is often more revealing[2] than the content, especially when you 0wn3d the backbone and can map[3] who everybody you talk to.
[1] specifically, we need to educate people to a similar level that people understand physical locks: "what is does" and "when/how it should be used" are key; the details can be left to professionals (i.e. like locksmiths).
[2] http://labs.rs/en/metadata/
[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/apps/g/page/world/how-the-nsa...
Try spending couple of hours being beaten by government thugs just because you encrypted something (they won't even bother asking you decrypt) and you will sing another tune.
Lets assume that the relative physical safety that a person enjoys in the west in the hands of the LEO is the exception and not the norm worldwide.
Governments can stop anything they want if they are strong or desperate enough.
In any case, the strategy lately has been to force consumer ISPs to keep logs of who is connecting where (The UK government wants ISPs to log the URI of every plaintext page you visit, and will no doubt eventually want DNS logs and TLS SNI and TCP connection logs for other kinds of connectivity).
The best you can do today is ensure your TLS deployment is A+ rated at SSL Labs[0] and offer a Tor hidden service for your visitors. That said, if governments and ISPs legislate/cooperate to do active MITM attacks, then there's nothing we can really do to help Joe Public that wouldn't constitute a crime or get you put on a watchlist yourself.
[0] https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/
That may well be the real objective. I wouldn't be terribly surprised if big players are lobbying behind the scenes for the government to mandate a new kind of FIPS for all consumer crypto, which would lock smaller players out of the market and of course make us all safer from 'terr (right?). Remember how SOPA was lobbied for by GoDaddy so they could sell a new expensive premium class of domain registration?
Using bloody crimes and tragedies to lobby for unfair market advantage. It's how business is done in Washington (and probably other capitols too).
1. a sufficiently clever and malicious person can implement broken encryption in a virtually-undetectable, and perhaps even deniable way 2. the government has the capability of exerting enormous pressure on app manufacturers and service providers
Given 1 & 2, it's reasonable to assume that an unknown and possibly great number of encrypted chat and encrypted email and encrypted etc are all subverted.
That's their angle: use the panopticon to get blackmail material on 100% of people, then anyone who is inconvenient or needs to be controlled can be dealt with painlessly.
I can't understand how people can still give governments the benefit of the doubt when they've been exposed as liars repeatedly for years.
Right, France is a totalitarian government, no proof necessary. You cannot fight nonsense with nonsense.
Nonsense.
Thanks to a spectacularly complex legal system, we all break plenty of laws each day. If our every action is recorded, then so are those currently inconsequential violations of law, giving whoever controls the panopticon the ability to pick and choose who to prosecute with near impunity.
In completely unrelated news, the city of Beauvais voted 67% against the municipal police force carrying weapons. The municipal police retaliated by not tolerating night-time parking anymore, resulting in a significant increase in parking tickets in locations that had been safe for years.
And while the mayor did apologize for this, the municipal police said it was "just doing our job".
http://www.leparisien.fr/beauvais-60000/beauvais-des-pv-pour...
Making common behavior illegal, and then tolerating it, is a great way to harass dissenters in a perfectly legal way.
Which, not coincidentally, is the entire basis for the war on [some] drugs [when used by some people].
"This is a win for everyone"
Except as you pointed out, it's not a win for everyone all the time.
Imagine how many crimes local police could prevent if they did have access? Unlike finding small terrorist cells among tens of millions of people, busting local criminals is very easy if you can spy on their communication.
They could probably save thousands of children from serious abuse. They could definitely save some people from being murdered.
And yet, it's still not worth it because we would be living in a police state, not a free society.
They are calling for mass video surveillance of everyone's encounters with police.
That's because there are serious problems with police accountability. Citizens benefit because bad police (which we hope are a minority) are discouraged from acting poorly, due to pervasive evidence, and the police benefit because there is a clear documented record of What Happened, which helps prevent spurious claims of police misconduct.
It's something that most of the police seem not to want, judging from reactions towards journalists and people with cameras, so it's not the __police__ asking for more surveillance. (Well, I mean, they are, but not in this way.)
"Mass surveillance is the intricate surveillance of an entire or a substantial fraction of a population in order to monitor that group of citizens."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance
I have been following a lot of French people on Twitter following the terrorist attacks and I didn't sense from them any caution or worries of giving the govt and security forces a carte blanche with the state of emergency and even for the upcoming constitutional referendum.
They seemed very naive and trust their government blindly to the point of trading their freedom for the illusion of safety and not learning the hard lesson endured by their American peers with the Patriot Act and the ensuing mass surveillance following the 9/11 attacks.
I feel like it is a fair/valid argument to support expanded/enhanced wiretapping of those with warrants ("known perps"). One could argue either way if it is the person's right to know if they are on a watchlist.
I DONT feel like the argument for expanded/enhanced wiretapping for everyone is fair/valid. Aside from the fact that it feels draconian and cowardly, there isnt any hard data to back up its effectiveness.
If the police have a warrant then they can tap your phone, bug your house, install a hardware keylogger on all your devices, etc. etc. That has been the case forever and nobody is objecting to it.
The objection is to warrantless surveillance and mandatory backdoors.
Perhaps, but I think the best way to measure the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of the program is not the number of attacks that have slipped through, but the proportion of those that were prevented compared to those that slipped through.
This type of false thinking is what allows government officials to manipulate public thought into agreeing to give up their rights. This has literally led to the FBI radicalizing young men in order to 'catch them' in the act -- thus justifying their existence by creating the very black-swan event they are supposed to stop.
Didn't think so.
Apparently the defense counsel is also secret since they don't come out afterwards to say what happened to their clients. Assuming the prosecuted had defense counsel.
Either an informed electorate runs the country or the security services do. That sounds like a false dichotomy, but if all of the important information is classified, and voters are prevented from becoming informed (which is what the security services want)? I don't see how the system can continue to operate.
And that doesn't begin to address the catastrophic civil liberties problems the surveillance state brings. I'm just wondering who is in charge.
The government is not the borg. They don't trust "the government", they trust various good people in the government.
That is the requirement for becoming somebody in politics.
They trust the idea of a paternalistic authority. They trust the government they want, not the government they have. It's wishful thinking.
And the terrorists are aware of the above and are now training their followers to use apps like Telegram.
With 7 billion people in this world, preventing every single attack by mass surveillance alone is impossible. But I think its naive to believe that surveillance is not helpful to law enforcement or that the pro surveillance crowd is motivated by some sort of ulterior motive to blackmail people. If you are the head of the CIA or NYPD, you probably spend a lot of your time genuinely worrying about letting an attack happen on your watch and you would be strongly inclined to fight for every tool you can get.
The question is whether the benefits of dragnet surveillance and weakening encryption outweigh the negatives, and like others here, I'm inclined to think they do not.
That inclination is likely going to fall along the lines of your biases unless its in direct relation to an already occurred or ongoing event.
Because reasoning doesn't work that way, and many people don't grow up in nice conditions. AKA the vast majority of people are poor and have hard lives, aka no time for research. You're on the internet, you are in the top percentage of wealthy people on the planet.
See the science on reasoning:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ
Because in their model of the world, evidence derives from authority. They value phatic expression and hierarchy instead of deduction and reasoning. Before you can convince such people of anything, you must first learn to speak their language.
http://scienceblogs.com/clock/2007/05/31/more-than-just-resi...
While this essay is concerned with creationists and evolution, I encourage everybody to read it as it's observations about phatic communication - and how to overcome that roadblock in education - apply generally.
"France already massively ramped up their surveillance state after the Hebdo attacks"
I don't think that's true. When France passed the big intelligence law this summer, the goal was to explicitly legalize the surveillance programs that were already in effect, but were until then in a grey area, legally speaking.
Nobody talked about actually increasing the surveillance, or you have information that we don't.
The design goal of terrorism it to provoke overreach on the part of the authority being targeted. But you can't get an allocation of funds for your open-ended anti-terror programme if you say this.
After fiftyish years of television and 100 years of movies, people's willing suspension of disbelief impulse is ragged and raw. It's both hair-trigger and numbed. And since the mode of the terrorists is akin to blood sacrifice, it's even more profound.
I find EFF to be a deeply cynical organization, even though I for the most part share their policy objectives.
On the contrary, I find the EFF one of the few groups of optimists.
That one is pretty close to the slippery slopes that lead into Brave New World-style dystopia, Brazil-style dystopia, Walden Two-style dystopia, Atlas Shrugged-style dystopia, and Snow Crash-style dystopia.
We're damned if we do, damned if we don't, and doubly-damned if we do it half-assed.
So good for the EFF, and their noble effort to steer the train.
They're not, like, supervillains.
When I was much younger (in my late teens), I worked with prosecutors on a case in Seattle --- pro bono, not for money. It was such a bad experience that I wound up going on strike until they sent me a written apology.
All the stories I've ever heard about security people collaborating with prosecutors or the FBI or USSS have been horror stories.
Later: I should add that I don't grant the premise that the FBI uses informants to crack down on political dissidents --- the Hoover-era FBI surely did, but then, the FBI was not the worst part of the politics of the late 60s.
We're very lucky to have the EFF.
EFF does some good things, and some things I think are less good. I think we're luckier to have the ACLU.
"If you give up your freedoms, we'll protect you next time."
Great, thanks. Pricks.
"No, sorry, those freedoms were not enough."
Both the Guardian and the NYT have articles calling BS on this sort of thing.
I think the illusion that somehow the surveillance apparatus filters out white people and only focuses on terrorism lets Americans feel okay with it.
Also I don't think most people realize how almost every action and thought in their lives ends up on a computer or going over the internet. Everyone just focuses on cellphone metadata, maybe because the full truth of what's being surveilled is too painful to contemplate.
I would like to see some politician formulate a response the involves boosting these Middle Eastern economies and schools and "bombing" them with movies and music from LA. If we give these radicals some chance at a life then maybe they'll stop blowing themselves up and taking us with them. Also maybe we can consider that they're responding rationally to the endless intervention by the West into their affairs. Not that I'm justifying their actions, at all, but it's not healthy to dehumanize the enemy. It's what we did to the Japanese and we ended up fire bombing and nuclear bombing them.
I think the reasoning is that in domestic school/church/theater shootings, the perpetrator isn't engaged in long communications (and receiving instructions from) a leadership group.
Doesn't matter, that type of surveillance will be incredibly easy in the near future. Whether we want it or not.
Exactly. That is how you win an ideological war. Hollywood and rock music were perhaps the most powerful Capitalist weapons in the cold war. Culture and wealth. Thats how you win, not by humiliating and traumatizing entire nations.
There is this awesome party going on in the developed world, if we can just lessen the income inequality problem it's all just going to get better.
And now we even have a decent shot at mitigating climate change with the age of cheap solar pv.
But what are we offering the mideast? Bombs, drone strikes, hellscapes, failed states.
When the Khmer Rouge first got started, they only had 5,000 followers. It was only after Kissinger's massive bombing of Cambodia ("anything that flies on anything that moves") that they were able to attract 200,000 followers and take over.
That's what trauma does. When people feel violated they get angry and they want to take their power back. That is the engine that ISIS feeds on.
We had a small, isolated enemy in the form of Al Qaeda, and in response we managed to alienate and humiliate a huge swath of the world. Now we have too many enemies to deal with militarily.
That's what Obama is admitting when he says sending 50,000 troops to Syria won't work. Because what happens when ISIS starts up in Yemen, or somewhere else. All of this war is an expensive drain on the west, we will get spread too thin. The occupations don't even work.
And make no mistake, this soft target terror is going to be a huge economic drain on the west. The fear, the security spending. It's our economies that are really vulnerable to this kind of thing.
So far the war on terror has this perverse viral coefficient. We create more terrorists than we kill. We kill more terrorists, we make the problem even bigger.
It's time to develop a new strategy.
That's the thing. They are convincing everyone that it's about security, but it's not. The military industrial congressional complex (the correct term before editing of DI's famous speech) has latched onto "cyber" as another money extraction through fear pipeline. We need to stop assuming their real purpose is security, and understand that instead it is about money and power.
William Binney is the perfect man to go to about this sort of thing. He designed a system that would cost in the two digit millions that would be placed at core nodes and would encrypt/anonymize American's data unless a FISA warrant was obtained. They scrapped his program, and implemented a multibillion dollar program that didn't protect privacy, didn't ingest or connect data as well, and this was from the very top of the Agency!
Corruption is a root cause of these issues. Congress isn't as dumb as they pretend, but they get big donations and re-election support when they pass stuff like this, and they are more concerned about that than any principles. All three branches of government are affected by this level of corruption and cronyism. Programs like this are designed for two things:
1. Make the middle-top MICC men (the startups in Mclean VA for example) lots of money.
2. While the middle men are rolling in that money, having torn up the constitution to get it, the oligarchy siphons the data through loopholes, and suddenly, they have enough data to plan the next evolution in the facist world government plan.
You remember the saying, follow the money? Well, at a certain point, when you have billions, another few million isn't that big of a deal. At that point, it's all about power. Be wary of future calls to world governmental style bodies to be formed, and remember centralization is a weakness, not a strength! Mark my words.
If you look at a population in the hundreds of millions and the set of terrorists planning an attack, maybe in the dozens (?), you need a pretty powerful test if you're to inconvenience fewer terrorists than ordinary people.
And that doesn't even touch on the issue of whether it's right to do so if it works.
Has anyone here worked on similar identification algorithms? The closest I can think of is a friend of mine who markets drugs for extremely rare conditions. But then those people tend not to be hiding and can be approached via search keywords.
1) If one took basic statistics, one would deem the proposition that "X is useless because [a target of X] has just slipped through" as outrageously wrong and a prime example of both selection bias and reliance on anecdotal evidence, yet somehow in the context of surveillance, this argument is taken at face value. You see otherwise smart people posting and retweeting this argument as if they thought it a valid one.
2) In almost any other context, a rational thing to do is to evaluate both sides and, if one seems beneficial but dangerous, propose laws to regulate it (aka: don't use surveillance for blackmailing political candidates since it contradicts democratic principles). Yet in the context of surveillance, a geek will talk in completely black-and-white terms, and not even consider proposing laws to regulate its impact. For an extended example, a common argument against surveillance is that places the entity wielding it "outside of law". Yet democracies have developed well-established methods for dealing with entities in power that try to place themselves outside of law. That is the reason why we have a president with a fixed term rather than a king, for example.
3) If surveillance can be used for blackmailing, then obviously it has to work quite well in the first place (be comprehensive, with ability to target specific individuals). Yet the same geek who argues that surveillance is dangerous because it can be used for blackmailing will also try argue, often in the same paragraph, that surveillance doesn't work, is not effective, or is very easily circumventable. To any impartial outside observer, the argument that "X is not effective! But X is dangerous because it is effective!" would seem like a contradiction, no?
4) Then there is the tired/insensitive argument that "more people die from furniture than from terrorism". First, this is probably only true in the West, and not in places like Nigeria or MENA (this is a good chart http://cdn.static-economist.com/sites/default/files/imagecac...). Second, almost all animals (and yes, humans are primates/animals) pay a lot more attention to predators and to acts of violence between each other than to random accidents, and there is an evolutionary reason for that (which specifically is left as an exercise to the reader). I would also argue that, since this behavior is so incredibly prevalent among animals of all kinds, it's almost definitely not an example of a "maladaptive" cognitive bias. Finally, even if it were maladaptive, one can't just simply discount it (an entire country experiencing a fascist freakout against a minority group is not a good thing IMO, whether a result of a cognitive bias or not).
5) For almost every other technology, geeks will argue (often obnoxiously/pedantically) that it can be both good and bad, depending on how it is wielded (see nuclear power). But surveillance is also a technology, yet you almost never see a geek saying "surveillance can be either good or bad" -- no, to a geek, surveillance is bad, period. It's like surveillance is this one thing that technology-loving geeks can feel justified to act luddite about.
Why is that?
2) >if one seems beneficial but dangerous, propose laws to regulate it Because there's no reason at this point for us to believe that the entities in power will adhere to those laws, as they haven't in the past.
Keep in mind that without Snowden et al there would be almost no one arguing against mass survellience compared to what there is today.
3) The argument isn't that survellience doesn't collect massive amounts of information on everyone. We know it does that, and everyone should agree. The argument is that despite all of this information, it does not help to protect us in any notable way. In other words, mass survellience is effect at collecting absurd amounts of data on everyone, but it is not effective as a tool to protect us and stop legitimate terrorist threats.
2) Don't democracies have well-established principles on how to deal with entities in power that try to place themselves outside of law -- without actually preventing those entities from wielding any power whatsoever? Wasn't that the entire point of having a president with a fixed term rather than a king?
I doubt there is anybody who truly "doesn't care if terrorist attacks happen". But there are people (like myself) who can look at the numbers, realize that you are MANY times more likely to die by slipping and falling in your own bathroom, being in a car crash, drowning in your own pool, or being beaten to death by a cop, than you are to die in a terrorist attack. And after looking at that, I can say that I don't accept a trade-off that involves any loss of freedom, or increase in government scope/power, in order to reduce what is already a minuscule risk.
Don't democracies have well-established principles on how to deal with entities in power that try to place themselves outside of law -- without actually preventing those entities from wielding any power whatsoever? Wasn't that the entire point of having a president with a fixed term rather than a king?
Yes, and I will argue that it was the point, or at least part of the point, of the Second Amendment. (Yeah, I know this point isn't without controversy).
That's another example of a wrong argument often used. All animals (and yes, humans are animals) pay more attention to predators than to random accidents, and there is an evolutionary reason for that.
Please don't tell me that you would feel the same way if a member of your family, for example, had died in a boating accident versus, say, had been beheaded with cold blood with a knife in some insane semi-religious ceremony (if you would feel the same way, a lot of people would qualify you as a sociopath, and they probably wouldn't be wrong). Vengeance is one of the primary drives of human behavior, it will always exist, it is very often a bad thing, but it must be acknowledged if you want to be taken seriously. Note for example that in rare cases when it is justified, lack of feeling of vengeance will make you look either like a cold-blooded psychopath or a complete coward.
It is rational to try to understand the limits of rationality. A perfectly rational being might rationally conclude that life is not worth living and commit suicide, leaving no progeny. Defending oneself and one's family from threats that have agency (predators, other members of your species) is and always will be categorically different from defending from threats that don't have agency, such as bad weather.
I recommend to consider the threat posed by terrorism as seriously as you consider global warming, or interplanetary exploration, or whatever it is you consider to be a serious issue. It may not be as serious to you, and that's okay, but at least respect the fact that it is a very serious issue to many other people. Then you can have a serious discussion over which steps are and are not appropriate.
As a coincidence, you will also find that people will listen to your arguments against surveillance more seriously when you respectfully acknowledge their own wants and desires, such as desire for peace/security.
WELL, I never. I'm offended at your offence to my insensitivity. I can be intransigent about the value of logic relative to emotion as well.
> When dealing with a software system, wouldn't you want to understand the principles upon which it is built?
That depends on what you mean by principles. If you mean the CS theory that underpins it all, sure - that level of knowledge is absolutely necessary in many cases. If you mean the designer's intent, sure - that can help, but that would certainly take a back seat to the cold hard CS logic of reality. Also, I wouldn't feel a compulsion to extend the poor coding practices of yesteryear that may be found in legacy codebases (hint: I'm not talking about code, this is a tortured metaphor).
> Please don't tell me that you would feel the same way if a member of your family...
The desire for revenge is derived from a perceived injustice, that is why one seeks revenge against people and not motorboats - motorboats can't reason. The same goes for wild animal attacks. I think you almost touched on this in your third paragraph. But you're conflating emotions and actions.
> ...respectfully acknowledge their own wants and desires, such as desire for peace/security.
Ok, I officially respect and acknowledge your wants and desires for peace and security. BTW, you can't have either in a world where there is any amount of free will. What next? Is that your recommendation - empathy? I'll save you some trouble and just let you know ahead of time that if somebody is irrational - no amount of reasoning, emotional or logical, will change their position. That leaves only three courses of action for the self-interested rational being:
1) Try reason, if it doesn't work then turn to page 2 or 3
2) Violence, but it works in only a super narrow band of circumstances
3) Attempt to minimize the damage done to you by the emotion driven mob, this might mean fleeing into the wilderness and becoming a hermit... Or promoting the benefits of logical thought in daily exchanges by demonstrating the wealth, happiness and playboy lifestyle that it has brought you. Either or.
One issue that I won't compromise on is that of compromise, which is usually where the emotional route leads. There are plenty of things for which compromise is just fine, but are generally unimportant and not worth the argument, modifications of properties and not attributes (attributes define kindness of objects, properties do not). Like if you wanted to paint our rocket red (change the color property) that is fine, a compromise of half red vs full red really makes no difference outside of personal aesthetic preference. If you wanted to replace the engine with a bag of pineapples, well we have a problem - it is no longer a rocket and there is no compromise between fruit and engine that would leave it a rocket.
TL;DR Just because I describe a situation does't mean I approve of it.
No, split key escrow is not an option. See OPM.
Anyone who trusts an institution which repeatedly lies, tortures, and murders with impunity, an institution responsible for millions of deaths, is insane.
The larger picture reveals that it's chickens coming home to roost (and I am not going to go into the long list of foreign policy actions that create the resentment). The Western public should not expect that their government's actions do not have consequences.
From a purely selfish PoV, you can expect that if your government is willing to kill/maim/oppress/steal/lie/cheat people of another nation, for whatever reason, that this will soon start happening to you (and it has - look around).
Pushing back against initiatives like this is futile. The fear your government sows will override any concerns for loss of civil liberties. So long as they get to use words like terrorists, Islamic Extremism, radicals and militants they control the conversation. And every time you use those words you set your argument back.
More pertinently, the West has a long, long history of violence against the other. Study that history as that is the only thing that will let you to question your presumption of superiority and allow you to open your eyes to the terrible suffering the West inflicts every day.
I'm not sure why that's relevant, I don't see anything like that in this article. I don't see any usage of words like 'freedom', 'islam', 'extremist', etc., either. As far as I can tell this article is neutral or just nonpresenting with regards to what you've mentioned.
Both debates are about the attempt to restrict something which is very difficult to restrict. In both cases,there is a fundamental principle of liberty at stake, but only the advocates for that liberty appear to care about that principle. Relatively few could be argued to be harmed by the weapons/encryption (in the manner which proponents of restriction believe they can prevent), and even where governments have abridged those rights, the results do not clearly demonstrate that restrictions are efficacious. Proponents also make their strongest pushes for increased restriction in the face of great tragedies in both cases.
The only groups which seem to have consistent positions through these two debates are the libertarians, anarchists, and statists (; a strange list in my opinion).