There's a meme on Reddit that revolves around 'so brave': basically calling people/posts/comments out for obvious pandering.
This reads like a pastiche of Keith Olbermann, all bravado and empty gusto. Arrington writes:
What has these people, among the wealthiest on the planet, so scared that they find themselves engaging in these verbal gymnastics to avoid telling a simple truth?
and then acknowledges that doing so, if it meant breaking FISA, is illegal.
Because their lawyers might be telling them what they are required to do. But their soul should be telling them what they must do.
What the hell does this even mean?
Listen, I completely agree with the central premise that we need to have an actual conversation both about privacy in the age of Facebook and the Kafka-esque way the U.S. government has engineered these catch-22 gag orders. But given Arrington's experience both with AOL and with the overall notion of privacy, I'd expect something with a little more substance and perspective.
Y'know, I'd like to believe I'd do that in this situation, too. But people are more generous in theory than in practice. You have to realize: Mark Zuckerberg isn't just looking out for Mark Zuckerberg by posting what he did. He has a family, a social life, and a whole lot of people at Facebook who depend on him. To whom, perhaps, it would not be fair for Zuck to martyr himself on the great gallows of the United States of Atrocity in futile protest of its horrifying surveillance subterfuge.
It's very easy to ignore this sort of thing when it's not your ass on the line. Bradley Manning had a different kind of freedom, the kind that comes with nobody around you who can get hurt. The feds turned Sabu, the infamous LulzSec hacker, by threatening his three-year-old daughter. The United States government is not above such tactics.
I don't, frankly, believe that Arrington himself would behave much differently in the same situation. Life is not that easy.
I think the point the OP is making is that if it were someone like Mark Zuckerberg, the protest wouldn't be futile. It would likely trigger a nationwide debate about the constitutionality of the program and it would possibly be overturned in court.
The point of my post is that these people are surrounded by other people to whom they have obligations. You can't respond to two words without considering the context of the paragraph! It should be obvious that even a so-called "successful" action comes with extreme stress on one's associates. It means subjecting other people to risk. This cannot be considered lightly.
I don't get your point on obligations. He has a family ok, but nothing would prevent him from resigning from Facebook and writing a post explaining his reasons for doing so(unwillingness to spy on its users). He would still be a rich man able to provide for his family and there are tons of others who could step into his place.
I'm not saying he should do that but with the amount of money he has he can afford to lose a job and still don't worry about his financial future.
The government would go after Facebook as an entity when Zukerberg speaks out. This means other FB directors could be held liable, shareholders could sue him for breaching his fiduciary duty, his life could be made hell even if PR wise it's impossible to arrest him, etc. We are talking about the most powerful monopoly on force humanity has even seen here, a group of people who consider it their right to kill people or detain them indefinitely without a trial.
I support what you say in theory, but a sign of intelligence is to take longer term approaches to solving the issue. (I would hope they are furious at the government for doing this or at least for hurting their business, I know I would be.)
There is no evidence of anyone taking longer term approaches. There is much evidence of Zuckenberg, Page and other just surrendering.
It works the other way around than you say. Surrendering is short term win at the price of long term loss. Taking short term win at price of dooming us all is not nice behavior, even if being a dick might be intelligent.
>The government would go after Facebook as an entity when Zukerberg speaks out.
You honestly think the government is going to go after a multibillion dollar international corporation? Doing that is what gets the government into trouble, because the corporation has the resources to defend itself. And they're clearly not going to destroy Facebook and Google in any event -- can you imagine the public outrage, to say nothing of the economic damage?
Governments retain power through leverage. They don't actually have the power to destroy everyone, but they have the power to destroy one person, and the power to threaten everyone with the risk of being that one person. When the government is wrong, this relies on everyone being too afraid to do the right thing, and people not talking to each other and working together.
This is pretty basic stuff. If you stand up and no one else does, you die now. If no one stands up, you die later. If everyone stands up, you win. Which would you rather do?
More likely though they'd go after corporate officers for real or alleged criminal behavior (think of the "honest services fraud" charges against Jeff Skilling, reversed by the Supreme Court on the basis that the law was being stretched well beyond breaking point) and refer to the SEC for investigations....
The government has in the past gone after some extremely powerful corporations and when they had the endurance patience, and care, they have succeeded. We should remember that the government spent 50 years trying to destroy AT&T's monopoly on long distance telephone calls and eventually they succeeded.
Again, corporate officers of large corporations generally have the resources to defend themselves. They can harass you if you're the only one, which is why everyone needs to do it.
>AT&T's monopoly
They spent 50 years trying to break them up and within 20 years after that they had pretty much bought each other back up again and continue to do so as time passes.
You should also note that the public hated AT&T because they were the prototypical example of an abusive monopolist. It's a different story when the reason for the campaign is that the corporation is going to bat for the public against government overreach.
There is also the matter of Citizens United -- it's extremely unfortunate when the government legitimately wants to attack oil companies or other evildoers, but it works just as well (if not more so) when the corporation is doing right and the government is wrong.
Actually I think the breakup of AT&T was one of those moments when policy changed because all of the businesses got scared. When you look at the long history there, and it is a long history, it was right after that, that the government backed off from being aggressively pro-competitive.
We see a shift thus under Reagan from pro-competition to pro-oligopoly which continues and accelerates under Clinton, Bush, and Obama. It is an indication that in class warfare the elite always win.
As for AT&T getting back together, they still don't own a record label, broadcast/entertainment media, the Japanese telephone system or the major manufacturers of phones in the US and abroad to an extent anywhere near what they used to..... People forget just how big Ma Bell was at its zenith.
Isn't this exactly the reason why these companies, which are infinitely more influential than the person who leaked it, have a civic obligation to take a stand?
And this summarizes everything that's wrong with the current ethos. We expect everything to be safe, and we expect everything to be easy. Nothing is above our comfort level and safety. Maybe the knife hasn't cut deep enough, or maybe we don't have the stamina to get off our couch. Either way, sad.
I see nothing with this ethos and I'm a full blown anarcho-capitalist so it's not a lack of scepticism towards government that is to blame. The reason is that internet is winning over the state, which is now forced to a reactionary role adapting with regards to new technologies that come out at an accelerating pace.
Some examples: Youtube and social media make war crimes more difficult to hide, Silk Road makes the war on drugs irrelevant, Bitcoin will make monetary policy irrelevant, open transactions will make the law system irrelevant, 3D printing will make border tariffs irrelevant, etc. Every software commit is a sign of progress, a log of someone trying to make the world a more voluntary, peaceful and decentralized place.
Given all of this, please excuse me in not caring about the idiots in Washington, London, Brussels, Paris, Moscow and Bejing who want to make me believe they are worth my time and emotional investment.
Or they simply know more than we do. Maybe they've gotten the answers to "Why?" that we want and that convinced them? That's the "conspiracy" that almost worries me more. Not that I hold any real faith in such a thought.
That conclusion requires three things to be true simultaneously:
1) The government has some actual legitimate reason to do all of this which outweighs the danger of excessive government power.
2) Disclosing the reason to the public would eviscerate its effectiveness.
3) Allowing the government to say "trust us, we're the government" about anything from now on and get a free pass, because it could be this situation, will not result in the outrageous atrocities that governments have been known to commit when government accountability to the public is literally prohibited by law.
I don't even buy the first two as being especially plausible, but the third is why this cannot stand.
I 100% completely agree with you. Everything else aside, as I said elsewhere, I'm tired of being treated like a child and told to shut up and not question things. That's what repressive governments do. "Just trust us, we know what's best for your "safety"".
"First they came for the communists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.
Then they came for the socialists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for me,
and there was no one left to speak for me."
That's a reply to who you should fight for things that don't effect you (or your group), not for when individuals don't want to join a greater fight for the sake of their dependants.
But that's kind of the point; if you don't speak out, it WILL happen to you anyway. As they say, if you don't deal with politics, politics will deal with you.
Not a bad quote in context considering how things go for the Pandavas after the great battle that follows the Gita. That really is the sort of turning point from the harsh but adventurous world of the virtuous heros to the fallen world when the Pandavas fall from Dharma. Even Yudhisthira cannot stand by his principles to win the battle, and they suffer greatly as a result.
Whoah, hold on, I don't think anyone is saying this is easy or there aren't risks for Zuckerberg. However to say he shouldn't stand up against tyranny and abuse of government power because he has responsibility to parties x, y and z is exactly the line of thinking that allows totalitarian governments to thrive. Government power is not absolute, that power is derived from the people. No one person can stand up to the government, but the government can't fight everyone, and if Google, Facebook, et al stood up to them and signed some light on this issue it would not be so easily papered over by the spooks.
Beyond that, in terms of public surveillance, Zuckerberg has real power in this sphere. You could even argue that he has more power than any individual has ever had. Certainly there is no bigger global database of personal information than Facebook.
It doesn't matter if Arrington is being a hypocrite. It doesn't matter if I'm being a hypocrite. Zuckerberg, and indeed all technologists should stand up on this issue. If we love what computers can do, we owe it to the world to fight so that they don't become the Orwellian tool of control that totalitarian regimes have always dreamed of. We can't put the genie back in the bottle—data is going to be out there—but we can force the government to be more transparent. We can stand up and say that a handful of isolated terrorist attacks is not justification to ratchet up governmental power to something a thousand times more terrifying than any homicidal extremist ever could be. This is fundamentally one of the most important issues of our time, certainly far more important than the fate of any one company.
Risking one’s own well being to help the community is basically a definition of an altruistic behaviour. Nobody and i mean NOBODY can reach and keep the position of CEO of big international corporation by exhibiting altruistic tendencies. The environment is too competitive and it promotes egoism and punishes altruism. (BTW, The same reasoning stand for political leadership too). So, I don’t think we can really expect this call to be heard…
Properties of the world can still be problems to be solved. Gravity is a problem solved by rockets. What is the solution to the gravity of human avarice?
I'd say it is basic game theory and statistics.
If we have population of individuals who exhibit three types of behaviour:
A - altruistic (1% of population)
E - egoistic (1% ...)
N - Normal (randomly A or B 98% of population)
Let's them play a game where E - type has muuuuch better chances to win....
It is obvious that the proportion of E - types in the winner population will grow during the tournament.
This explain the current state of world affaires: Usually 'Supreme Leader' is the "biggest bastard of them all"...
It's basic extrapolating-without-data is what it is. You have a theory, well, let's call it a hypothesis ("a person who reaches CEO level is someone who will not behave altruistically"). You even have a simple model which mostly agrees with the hypothesis (not completely, I'll note) and which relies on several more untested hypotheses. Both the hypothesis and the model predict certain things about the world. You can check! Are those predictions borne out in reality? (˙˙˙ʎʃʃɐǝɹ ʇoᴎ :ɹǝʍsu∀)
Okay, let's not call on powerful people to do the right thing then. I mean they were the ones with the ambition to influence the world, so it's pointless to even ask them to have some morals.
It's not too hard to draw a line between using information your company collects for business purposes and government surveillance.
Also, it's worth noting that one of the key features that helped Facebook take off was much better privacy controls than anything that existed at the time.
Dan Carlin (more known for his Hardcore History podcast), also does a show called "Common Sense" and has been a political journalist for ~20 years. With this show, he seems to be fairly non-partison, railing against any side of the aisle that lies on hypocrisy (Left, Right, Libertarian, it doesn't matter, he tries to push at the "logic" or underlying issues and relates them to past political fallouts or successes).
Could a Martin Luther King Jr. even exist today? Could an activist "rise" pulling together masses for protests with the amount of surveilance and data scored on people (this is from 2011). It speaks to the issue of whether or not any individual could in this day and age lead such a large-scale movement, and when/how they would be curtailed nearly immediately due to infiltration and "dirt" that is so easily obtained, etc.
Also of note:
http://dancarlin.com/dccart/index.php?main_page=product_musi...Description: Another news story highlighting the growing "wealth gap" between the rich and poor in the USA has Dan discussing countermeasures. What if the rich and powerful made fixing that imbalance a priority?
I can't recall if the subject I am speaking to is the above, or below episode (probably below, his show notes are not linked to his site).
Dan Carlin goes into a very pessimistic (and somewhat realistic) description of why money in politics can only be solved by money, in politics. How if HE were to change policies, he would need (or wish to) see a cabal of billionaires. Ready to back actual reformists, and immediately cut them out of any re-elections if they are not holding to the reformist promises made (the below Ep). A political contract per se, with the most "good intentioned" billionaires. He also notes, this is rather unrealistic, as ones "good intentions" can be diametrically opposed to another (simplisitic example, The Koch brothers and Soros).
I'm not describing it well, but his premise is that you only change the top-levels by voting out the House/Senate that change their tune once in office, thus you need the consequences of uber-rich who can, and have the ability, to oust them in a semi-quick (election cycle) function.
Pretty sure its the below Ep.
http://dancarlin.com/dccart/index.php?main_page=product_musi...Description: The only way Americans can change federal government policy is by voting for new political candidates. But what if those candidates ignore the positions they ran on once elected? Also: the implementation Gordian knot.
I wonder if we will have a Bill Gates type billionaire who dedicates the power of his/her mind to reforming politics in such a fashion. I use Bill Gates as an example, re: his ruthless and intelligent business acumen, turning towards solving philanthropical concerns. That "moving of the cannons" would be stellar (searching is broken for older articles, their was a fantastic Reuters, or FT on Bill Gates when he stepped down from MS to turn towards philanthropic causes, and (paraphrasing), "it will be of awe to see the change his business mind, fundamental efficiencies in solving problems, will do for the world of [disease, whatever].")
I also think its silly to assume that though a billionaire has immense power/influence/'stability" to withstand ...
> You have to realize: Mark Zuckerberg isn't just looking out for Mark Zuckerberg by posting what he did. He has a family, a social life, and a whole lot of people at Facebook who depend on him. To whom, perhaps, it would not be fair for Zuck to martyr himself on the great gallows of the United States of Atrocity in futile protest of its horrifying surveillance subterfuge.
He also has over a billion people who would raise hell if the US Government came down hard on him for doing nothing more than tell the truth about a government program and laws that few people would agree make sense.
Having him put it all on the table to defend his user's privacy would say more about the company than any marketing or press release ever could.
We, as individuals, are utterly powerless against our government. That's a fact. Just try to go up against the IRS or even your local Labor Board.
People like him have the ability to really disrupt the surveillance state in ways we cannot. What would happen if all major 'net CEO's and founders agreed to tell the government to stuff it? They are going to arrest all of them? They woukd have angry mobs burning down Congress. These CEO's have real power. Perhaps it's high time they start exercising it.
I'm pretty sure most of the one billion people you are referencing wouldn't give a shit if Mark Zuckerberg was in jail so long as Facebook was still up and running.
To be fair, Khodorkovsky was a billionaire, too. He'll get a third prison sentence on more trumped-up charges shortly. The existence of various kangaroo courts ("military tribunals") in the US security apparatus since the Bush 43 administration suggests that Zuckerberg's money and influence are nowhere near enough to protect him.
The buck for such decisions stops at the Oval Office, and its current occupant has no reelection campaigns to worry about.
Exactly. Just because it's "illegal" doesn't mean it can't be done -- just as, just because what the government asks is "legal" (??!?) doesn't mean it has to be complied with.
"What will happen?" is an excellent question that is not even asked. Certainly not everything is an acceptable risk; if Larry Page seriously believe he would risk spending the rest of his life in prison for publishing national security letters, then sure, we'd all do the same.
But is this the case? How do we even know if nobody's testing it?
Besides, why can't Google or Facebook be a little creative, and (for example) declare that the only way they'll be able to send information is by fax...?
That's kind of what HN is doing (it will only accept DMCA requests via fax or regular mail).
The whole business model of Silicon Valley is based on not obeying the law. It's called "disrupting", and how it works is "let's break laws and regulations we disagree with until they're either changed or recognized as obsolete".
This is how Uber works, or AirBnB... but not only. Facebook or Google routinely ignore European privacy laws. Twitter ignores European laws about free speech (which you and I may consider "bad" laws, but which are laws nonetheless).
So why is it that suddenly everyone hides behind the "law"?
They should have at least remained silent. By issuing grossly misleading denials they look silly and dishonest. And yes, cowardly.
Had they said, "We do not comment on matters of national security," such would have been honest, careful, and truthful and it would have been darned hard to prosecute them or put them at risk for effectively revealing that the press was right.
I don't think it looked quite so good. The "no direct access to our servers" line spoken by all four CEOs sounded like something out of North Korea, but they all also had the option to send this message through a relatively faceless spokesperson instead of throwing their own credibility on the pyre.
None of them addressed the incongruity of having all the major news outlets contradicting them, after apparently finding the major points of the story supportable.
It makes sense to me that Zuckerberg and Page came out personally. The idea that all their data is open to snooping is an existential threat to their companies. If true, their user bases (and thus revenues) would plummet. They absolutely had to deny it in the strongest terms possible.
Isn't it too late to prevent the coming impact? Unless the news outlets backed down on the PRISM powerpoint, trust for American technologies and services for anything more serious than cat pictures is dead. Which prompts the question of why Facebook should be bothered by this at all.
I don't think we have enough information to come to that conclusion. Plain old FISA orders are lawful and constitutional. There's no good reason to disclose them, but there is a good reason to push for a limited term on their secrecy. As described, PRISM is far from a plain old FISA order. It sounds like they're collecting data broadly. If that's the case, that's worth leaking. Someone thought so.
Also consider this. They have a 51% confidence that the target is foreigner.
In the case of gmail, "please send me a random 10 users' info, data, and emails" gives you over a 70% chance that any given one in that sample is a foreigner. With Facebook it is closer to 85%.
So think about that. It means the filters could deliberately overinclude Americans and still meet their standards.
"Plain old FISA orders are lawful and constitutional."
Maybe that is currently true; jailing Japanese Americans also passed court muster. Secret orders from a secret court doesn't square with the ideals of America I was taught in civics class.
> It means that if telling the truth is illegal, they should have the courage to break the law.
The time for these companies to fight was before they gave away their user's info, not after they got caught doing so. If they weren't going to standup and do the right thing then, it's unrealistic to expect that they'd somehow find the courage now.
To challenge immoral behavior in court may be much harder than you think, and TBH I don't think it's even needed here (though IANAL so this is me speculating). I think it's enough to claim that what NSA did is unconstitutional.
I especially liked the fake incredulity: why would some of the richest people on earth not want to be turned into the next Bradley Manning? Well gee, I simply can't imagine their motivations!
I, for one, would love to see the government try to Bradley Manning Mark Zuckerberg for telling the truth. It would at least be more interesting than the current Orwellian dialogue we are having with our government and corporate leaders, and it would probably be more substantive too.
Although I agree with your point, Khodorkovsky is likely guilty as charged; Russia probably was just selectively enforcing the law until he started to threaten American oil interests.
(The real outrage in Khodorkovsky's case isn't that he has been repeatedly convicted while still imprisoned. The real outrage is that ExxonMobil and ChevronTexaco found a way to destroy their Russian competition.)
The whole premise is that the NSA is protecting the USA of terrorism by spying and that the USA is in a war against terrorism. Then the one who go against NSA is a traitor in a war time. Stop any rational argument here. BTW, I think you look slightly traitor to me...
On a side note, I see the whole xenophobia that's implied by all this. The NSA exists only to strip foreigners of their privacy, without any due process or supervision, and the only accusation here is that they might have stripped some of the 5% of the global population of their privilege of due process and constitutional rights. And there is a lot of suspicion that the NSA was used for economic spying in the war between Boing and EADS, and probably other cases.
If you don't want to be turned into the next Bradley Manning, don't join the Army and then violate the UCMJ. He's not some innocent private citizen they arbitrarily went after.
Why has this program been secret for more than a day, or a month? Are we to believe that the leaders of the most technologically advanced companies on Earth are so unsophisticated they can imagine the only way to let the world know a secret is to tell it directly?
Governments and companies know how to leak. The only logical conclusion is that these surveillance programs are not actually significantly upsetting to most of these folks.
“All it takes for evil to succeed is for a few good men to do nothing...”
― Edmund Burke
That's so true. If they came out now, the country would be better for it. But they are deciding to be accomplices of the out of control and abusive government. I thought Google, at least, would be better than this, after the whole China situation.
Yes, if Google don't stand up to the US government over this blanket gag order, it sort of invalidates their efforts over censorship with the Chinese government.
>to have an actual conversation both about privacy
Let us have a conversation about that:
Why should Mark Zuckerberg, et al., know things about you that the government shouldn't?
Or, to put it another way, shouldn't the very thing which represents You, the People, have as much information about you as, "They", the Corporations, do?
After all, Mr. Z, et al., can quite easily tell you things about yourself which, 3 words into the sentence, would give the government a lot of information it needs to optimize itself. To Serve You.
Whereas, the corporate stance is "we will own the consumers, all the consumers, and we will encourage them to endless consume our product", the government stance is: "how do we keep 240million people from cannibalizing themselves".
Mr Z., et al., are being mighty disingenous with this position, because the fact of the whole matter is, the Government would be the absolute BEST customer for him/them/et al., there is no better way to feed a consumer than to get the Government on your side, as we see with Pharmaceuticals, Farming, Oil, etc.
There are multiple points of view in this argument, is all I am trying to say, and by setting the above in word I hope to have at least set the scene for my real, tl;dr, which is this:
Privacy is a trap. Those who are fully exploiting the nature of the system, simply keep no secrets .. and trade never willingly with those who do.
> Why should Mark Zuckerberg, et al., know things about you that the government shouldn't?
1. Because the user decided to give their own info to FB, but not to the gov.
2. The gov has many more powers than FB. If FB knows something about you that "may be suspicious" they can't put you in jail for it, maybe even without a trial.
3. If some FB employee is able to steal data, it would have bad consecuences for the FB stock, so there is probably all kinds of barriers in place to stop employees to do just that. If some bureaucrat manages to sell off you data there is no consecuene for them.
1. You also chooose your participation in government.
2. Right, so because Mr. Z. et al., don't have a 'license to kill', there is a difference. This is the only difference.
3. Which do you trust more, McDonalds or Congress?
>1. You also chooose your participation in government.
If I don't want to be subjected to any country's taxes or laws, let me know how I can opt-out of this. You can relocate to a different country, but it is up to them to allow you to enter and/or settle, so the problem hasn't been circumvented.
On the other hand, I can choose to not have a Facebook account, and can use various browser plugins to stonewall their efforts to track me on the web.
The question is, trust more to do what? Not kill or imprison innocent people on a mass scale? I'm going to go with McDonalds on that one. But I wouldn't eat their food -- and notice that I have the choice not to.
> Because the user decided to give their own info to FB, but not to the gov.
This is not quite true. Facebook can make profiles even on people that don't have facebook and that have never logged in to facebook.
The tracking works just fine on a per-browser level. The practical upshot of this is that there is a good chance that facebook has data on you from before you joined and is able to track you after you leave.
>Why should Mark Zuckerberg, et al., know things about you that the government shouldn't?
Zuckerberg can't indict me. I don't pay taxes to Facebook.
There are powers that the government has that Facebook does not, and therefore there are things I would be comfortable telling Facebook and not the government.
If they are indeed aware of PRISM, I have a feeling that both Mark and Larry are avoiding legal action (or threats of legal action) made by the NSA. To me, that is the most likely reason for not "standing up" and coming out about the truth. To the best of my knowledge, they do fight heavily to keep their data out of government hands because these exact kind of situations are horrible for their companies' reputations.
I think the diatribe is sort of right, though - if they really wanted to end these kind of problems for good all they've got to do is come clean and go public. The second they get 'disappeared' the outcry will force something to actually be done. Likewise, if they really cared about their companies, they'd realize the huge PR advantage to not telling half-truths and going along with whoever's compelling them to cooperate like sheep.
Want to be the company that people flock to for storing their information? Want to gain the trust to win the coming market conflict over digital wallets and online payments? Defect, call the government's bluff. You will be aided and rewarded.
What if companies that do not wish to do evil adopted unspoken signaling mechanism for silent protests? What if every time n NSLs were fulfilled since start of year, they donated to EFF? What if $1 was donated to EFF for every 1 GB of data they shared? Would that be illegal?
Of course it would be illegal. Same as if they said "eway eceivedray one-a ationalnay ecuritysay etterlay." Any way they intentionally communicate information is a disclosure. English language isn't treated specially.
Edit: Now thinking about it, Dropbox was probably already hit with a request. Maybe we should focus on other services that may be of future interest to the government?
I'm sure an Adwords campaign offering information on FISA would net you some data on who and where requests are being made. It wouldn't be explicit and the people wouldn't have to tell you WHY they are looking for information on FISA.
However, when you saw blips from people paying $99 for your packet of case law on 4th amendment protections with respect to stewardship of online data, you'd have the start of a signal. That is, for all of about ten minutes until you couldn't find a hosting provider or payment processor on Earth who would return your phone calls.
Not that it would matter because a "Chinese PLA hacker nuked your box, your bank account, and your house from orbit."
[Insert relevant quotes regarding government requests on named individuals from Eric Schmidt here.]
I can't believe that people are getting mad these private enterprises. If you want your government not to spy on you, tell THEM. The governments was made to serve the people. The companies are going to do what they think is their best fiduciary responsibility. Get mad at your representatives in congress, not your email providers.
Amen. Perhaps it's because we expect so little of our government that we lash out at Zuck, LP etc as they at least answer to the free market, and therefore can effect change.
Asking your government to change the laws when your government has shown you have no power over it is a waste of time.
There's a growing intellectual understanding that corporations control the governmental processes from start to finish. Therefore, asking the government to change is stupid.
If the King rules your country, petition the King for mercy.
If an oligarch rules your country, petition the oligarch for mercy.
If a corporate elite rules your country, petition the corporate elite.
Democracy is, quite simply, completely dead. Gone. Done. The government does not institute change based on democratic opinion. You have no control over your government. They aren't the real seat of power in this society.
Having said that, most of the power resides on Wall Street and in the Military-Industrial-Security complex rather than Silicon Valley corporations. But these Silicon Valley corporations are now rich enough to change the laws. They can crown themselves King with the right kind of manoeuvring, and Arrington here is trying to get them to do so.
Petitioning Larry Page or Paul Graham to have a conscience is far more fruitful than voting for the government you want.
The corporate elite does not rule the US. We are governed by a hodgepodge of competing interests, including at least corporations, bureaucracies, states, politicians, special interests and yes the people through democratic instruments.
I'm fairly sure lp and pg have strong consciences, at least much stronger consciences that arrington, of all people.
People have grown so cynical regarding government that they can chalk this stuff up to "business as usual". Governments have been spying on us (or trying to) for as long as we've been alive, but their ability to do so is vastly increased by new technology.
So why complain about the companies? There is a much greater possibility of change in private enterprise, but they often can't escape the mandates that government imposes, either. Some would like to think that the Googles and Facebooks can be heroes, and resist whatever nasty thing the government is doing today. It isn't that easy.
Well, who donates more to get the lobbying ears? Individuals, or huge businesses? Do you think your congressmen will listen to you, or a man donating millions to campaign funds? Politicians don't mind being hated, but I bet the likes of Page and co very much do. Reading their statements reads like they don't personally like this at all.
Pressure the people paying donations. Its the best chance you have.
Yup, because instead of expecting politicians who made the laws and judges who approved the FISA orders, let's call out the CEOs.
I don't even understand the outrage that most US citizens are showing at the moment for the said firms even after realizing that any access that may have been provided was through the channels that the governments had 'legally' set up. And that at least some of the companies had resisted. It seems very unfair to me, largely as an outsider and yet a stakeholder, that the only people who are being held accountable in the piece are the CEOs who had little to do with the fiasco.
Just because the laws, judges and politicians are not behaving well, doesn't make CEOs' behavior admirable.
The allegation is that they are deliberately misleading. I don't know if it is true but that is what they are attacked for.
Heck maybe people perceive that a single CEO like Page or Zuckerberg do have more power to change things than those in Congress or Obama. That says something as well.
It is also a battle of expectations. Maybe many expect NSA, Obama and other secret government agencies to fuck everything, but they thought, heck at least the "Do No Evil" Google will stand on our side, or my buddy Zuck will.
The private henchmen that help make police states possible, should always be called out. The government could never even remotely come close to implementing their policies without vast help from the private sector.
> Or to put it another way, who the hell needs “direct
> access” or “back doors” when companies are building
> “secure portals” for them instead?
The primary argument against government agencies having direct access to private data is that it removes the data's caretaker from the decision-making process.
That is different from having an access portal for agencies to submit warrants or other legal requests. There is no obvious reason why a company should have an ethical obligation to resist lawfully issued warrants.
This article would have been much better if it had focused on the ethically dubious nature of FISA, and how problematic it is to interpret the fourth amendment as applying only to American citizens.
>> There is no obvious reason why a company should have
>> an ethical obligation to resist lawfully issued warrants.
>
> Then who will? Think about it: companies are the only
> entity who can challenge this kind of behavior in courts.
The concept of search warrants is built into the constitution, and is supported by countless judicial decisions. Challenging the ability for the government to demand customer data would take much more than a few tech companies.
Courts have proven that they are a lousy place to change national security policy. Courts established the principle of keeping things secret for the sake of national security (even though it later turned out that the case establishing this had nothing to do with national security; the gov't just claimed it did to avoid liability for negligence). Whenever someone tries to challenge secret, warrantless infringements of privacy, the courts throw out the case as lacking jurisdiction: since no one can publicly acknowledge that you are being spied on, you can't sue the government for spying on you.
The only way to change the policy on this is in Congress. If you really want to make a difference, call your Congressman and yell at them for spying on you. Call them daily, call your Senator, call other people's Congressmen. It still might not help, but nothing Google or Twitter or Facebook can do is going to.
All it takes is one. One person with strong sense of the natural order of life and the courage to stand up. It may be scary as hell... I can appreciate that. However, everyone is born with the ability to reason. From reason we can innately sense what is right and wrong (not based on emotions). Do what is right, after all... if doing the right thing was easy, EVERYONE would do it.
The system the NYTimes article outlines is still quite different from what the original leak suggested. According to the Times article, the requested data isn't placed into the locked mailbox until the FISA request is reviewed by somebody at the company. This is nowhere near the same level of access as what the PRISM leak suggested. So if what the Times article says is true, Zuckerberg and Page's statements weren't misleading at all. They really do "review each and every request."
The fact that they've built special systems for giving the government the data is not too surprising or scandalous. If I ran a site getting the same number of FISA requests that Google and Facebook presumably get, I'd probably also design a special system to make the process more convenient and secure. Short of openly challenging the NSA in court, this is probably the best response we could hope for. It gives the company control over what data is released and is much more secure than a back door which could be compromised.
But what if the FISA request is 'everything'. Yes they're complying, someone gives it a look over then adds everything and keeps it updated in real time.
They don't have direct access to the servers, they're complying with the law, they have everyone's data.
The worst bit is that this is all kept secret. If it's all so acceptable then why didn't the public at least get told.
You're confusing the two leaks (I did too, it's deliberately confusing). The PRISM project does not even require FISA approval. The reason it exists is to not require FISA approval. The analyst just has to check a box saying that they reasonably believe that there is a 51% chance that the target is foreign.
Did you even read the NYT article? They said requests can be very broad, like logs for certain search terms and people staying in the company building for weeks with all the data being gathered in government laptops. That is pretty much realtime and "direct access".
> In one recent instance, the National Security Agency sent an agent to a tech company’s headquarters to monitor a suspect in a cyberattack, a lawyer representing the company said. The agent installed government-developed software on the company’s server and remained at the site for several weeks to download data to an agency laptop.
Where in that paragraph or the ones surrounding it does it say that Google or Facebook was the company involved? Don't you think that if these incidents involved either company, that they would be named here?
I'd think most programmers can understand their reasoning behind creating "secure portals". If you're being forced to hand data over to the government you may as well do it securely and consistently.
Rather than some ad hoc process of burned CDs or USB drives, just create some simple software that makes the process secure, reliable, and traceable.
The alternative is USB drives and Fedex envelopes, which is harder to track and probably less secure.
I don't know if Arrington is saying they shouldn't have built the portals... I think he just wants them to openly admit it and be transparent about the work they're doing with the government.
They've clearly stated that they're complying with laws that require them to hand over specific user data. These companies are using secure portals as opposed to envelopes filled with CDs. So what?
An article that waxes poetic, yet is so very hollow and devoid of realism.
What would you have these companies do? Band together in a mighty ring of technological resources and begin a Privacy Revolution?
This is unrealistic. As an American, I am saddened and angered by the recent news of the past two days. I am disgusted with what our government has done - what it has hidden from us, to take advantage of us unawares.
But we need to consolidate our anger. We have to aim it precisely, and arm ourselves against the proper enemy. It will not help the tech community to bicker amongst ourselves and be disappointed with CEOs for what the NSA has done. This community has great resources. Let those resources stand. Experts from every tech center in the country, across industries spanning finance, security, engineering, and many more - we are all pooled here. We can make an impact.
But not if we are busy attacking those whose positions we cannot possibly corroborate. Their hands were tied. In an ideal world, every man and woman would be consumed with a righteous fury and ignore whips, imprisonment and even death for the greater glory of what is right.
This is not that world. This is not idealism. The government wronged us. The government made the first move. The government forced their hands, made them cooperate by ratifying unethical conduct and making it illegal (and treasonous, as a violation of national security) to resist. Who would have acted differently in their position? And what would it have achieved?
I recognize that it is discomforting that we cannot simply believe tech leaders after what today's events have shown us. I get that. But they are not the ones who violated our privacy. They were the medium. That is not fair to them. If they made a mistake, it was only in trying to navigate perilous waters somewhere between honor and law. Unfortunately, the law is not on their side.
With Mark Zuckerberg jailed or Facebook sued by an insurmountable public agency, or Google's assets seized and its constituent leaders punished, who would be benefitted? Should we ask them to suffer and violate laws just for a truth that has come out only hours later?
If you want a takeaway from this, it's simple. It's unfair to hold people to expectations of high moral standing when they have unknown pressures put upon them. And in light of that, we need to remember who the true wrongdoers here are. If Larry and Zuckerberg have made mistakes, so be it. But know that they paled in comparison to the NSA, and that is our prime prerogative.
Arrington was addressing the leaders of these companies, not the organizations themselves. While corporations obviously do not have consciences nor moral compasses, his point was that humans do, or at least they should. And I think he was pretty clear about what he would have those leaders do:
> Perhaps you could all get on a conference call tonight and double dare each other to do it all together, at the same time.
> “The NSA makes us do things that crush our Constitution, and then they make us never talk about it.”
> I hope one of them does
They don't need to lead any revolutions, or even leak classified information. The cat is out of the bag, so to speak. All he's asking for is for them to not lie to us, especially when they know that we know that what they're saying is demonstrably false.
See the people who are making these statements don't know. The only people who know are the ops teams, and they really can't tell, because they could fairly easily just disappear.
I think it's incredibly important that more people understand this. It was a somewhat obfuscated fact in the New York Times article, but it's still incredibly important to acknowledge.
The people who are making these statements aren't just winging it. They wouldn't actually make the statements before finding out if there was any substance to it. Both statements stopped well short of actually denying that the government has been wholesale mining their users data, and called for policy changes from the federal government. What do you think they found out?
The conf call double dare is unlikely, but imagine the commercial benefit of the one who broke ranks. The most likely is one with least to lose eg AOL or Yahoo or Microsoft.
If there's anyone to go after, it's the ranking members of the Special Committee on Intelligence, who wrote FISA and greenlighted this policy. Sadly, the ranking members are the near-80 Dianne Feinstein and lame-duck Saxby Chambliss; their successors are probably Jay Rockefeller and Susan Collins.
While I don't think single-issue voting is a good political strategy, in this particular case it seems prudent to consider that the reprehensibility of the whole affair and the complicity of those few most able to stop it calls into question their moral fiber. We can't -- and shouldn't -- hope to kick every pro-surveillance Congressman out of office, but when someone in a position of influence helps betray the country to this degree we should take notice.
They are service companies. If they believe in a service that takes care of their customers' / clients' privacy, they should act accordingly, yes.
They could pack up and leave. Make a statement. Be true to their customers. And they could pull it off, I think, being mostly software and service companies.
Yes, they, their employees, and a lot of dependables will probably lose out, at first. But they stay true to themselves. In the end, they make the decision to choose marketshare, power, money and all that over ideals. Not a bad choice, but be honest about it.
This is true to a point. However, a much more appropriate response would have been "We are aware of the reports that we have been sending massive data to the NSA. If this was the case, I would not be able to confirm or deny it. I would just like you to keep that in mind as you report on this story."
Simple, straight to the point, and contains worlds of meaning behind the plausible deniability. "No sir, I did not think I was confirming the existence of the program. I believed I was operating in compliance with all gag orders and just reminding people that these orders come with gag orders, so because everyone knows that I didn't think that would violate the gag order...."
By issuing silly denials that didn't withstand more than a few hours of public scrutiny they look silly, cowardly, and dishonest.
Nice. Quote the NY Times article describing how things work, and fail to quote the bit where the employees tasked with responding to FISA orders, and who were possibly involved in the program, were legally not allowed to inform the CEO of what they were doing.
CEOs who are not informed can release statements indicating the depth of their ignorance without being deliberately dishonest.
That said, the alleged situation frankly astounds me. The government SHOULD NOT have employees at companies devoting company resources to projects that the people running those companies are not allowed to know about. But that is exactly what the NY Times claimed.
First, since we do not know the information obtained, we can't say if the CEO or CFO should be informed.
If the scope of what they were required to deliver included information that could have an impact on the financial disclosures of the company[1] then, under Sarbanes-Oxley, they are at least required to put controls in place to communicate or prevent inaccurate financial reporting. This could also be why the CFO was not involved in the denials, because they've at least separated NTK.
As for the portal, the lowest common denominator would be an ftp server. Maybe they put it on fbiguy3@gmail.com's Google Drive so he had to log in. I'd like to think I'd encrypt it with a huge whopping GPG key, email it from a gmail to a yahoo address under my control, and ask,"Did you get that?" but I know I'd just piss down my leg and give them what they wanted.
Finally, Google is rather proud of the predictions or observations it can make based on (they say) trends in search queries. For example, it is now taken as fact that "Google can predict the flu better than the CDC/WHO/etc." I would not be surprised if Google and other companies could tell at least how many FISA requests have probably been generated by segmenting requests for related searches. (Of course, LexisNexis, FindLaw, and the like would have even better information when paying customers do their due diligence on compliance with unreasonable requests.)
[1] E.g., Send us all credit card information for customers from outside the USA.
"While handing over data in response to a legitimate FISA request is a legal requirement, making it easier for the government to get the information is not."
This is the crux of the matter, but this statement is not strictly true. If a company only sent information on 1.44MB floppy disks, or started requiring NSA agents to run an obstacle course or something, they would be held in contempt of court. These requests have an implicit requirement of ease of access, and what that means is ultimately up to a judge's discretion.
But it's the principle of the thing, even though we evaluate the risk of terrorism in terms of incidental probabilities, rather than the principle that you should be able to go about your life without being randomly killed. This is different because it's destructive of liberty, unlike corporations doing the exact same thing for profit.
A hidden/secret court order that can at times ask for broad thing like search term logs and
> In one recent instance, the National Security Agency sent an agent to a tech company’s headquarters to monitor a suspect in a cyberattack, a lawyer representing the company said. The agent installed government-developed software on the company’s server and remained at the site for several weeks to download data to an agency laptop.
> In other instances, the lawyer said, the agency seeks real-time transmission of data, which companies send digitally.
arrington needs friends in silicon valley a lot more than he needs your clicks. whatever you think of the man this is an honest and indignant post and it's an example of the courage he speaks of.
it is fascinating that this concept is so difficult for an otherwise intelligent community to grasp and a reminder of why we still need journalists.
Arrington is a drama queen IMHO, there are more important voices like the EFF, ACLU, et al to listen to on this issue. It's hard to trust where this indignation is clickbait fake, or real.
"What we have in our hands now is the first concrete proof of U.S.-based high-tech companies participating with the NSA in wholesale surveillance on us, the rest of the world, the non-American, you and me," he said.
- Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at Finnish software security firm F-Secure.
That is the most terrifying thing to me. The US government can do anything with their people. It's their government after all and they are responsible for running it. But US government doing wholesale surveillance on everyone else? Fuck them if thats what is happening.
> Will you do it, Marissa? Or you, Ballmer? Or you, Armstrong? Will anyone stand up and say the truth? Will anyone stand up to the secret organization with the secret courts and, simply, do what’s right? Despite the consequences? Despite what your lawyers tell you?
Silly man. Exactly how hard is it to ask someone else, with way more to lose than you, to be a martyr for a cause you feel strongly about?
I love the guilty-until-proven-innocent angle of these personal attacks against CEOs and companies.
There is literally no evidence anyone could produce which would prove to anyone's satisfaction that (a) Google, Yahoo, Facebook, etc don't hand over every last shred of data they have to the NSA, the KGB, and whatever China's equivalent is, or that (b) the CEOs of the respective companies didn't personally sign off on every single violation of privacy while kicking puppies. Corporations can't have alibis. Mark Zuckerberg can't say, "Oh, I was in Cincinnati for the last 5 years, and I don't have cell coverage there, so I can't possibly have been involved."
I usually avoid defending billionaires, because they can dry their tears on their giant stacks of money, but so far this is just a he-said-she-said, and if all of the tech companies are saying they're innocent, it's the responsibility of the accusers to pony up some evidence they're guilty. Slide shows are one thing, but if you want to prove to me that the system does what you say it does, we need a document dump: millions of random emails, Facebook messages, whatever that have been illegally accessed through this system, which could plausibly not have been accessed without the kind of far reaching access that the tech giants are being accused of having provided.
What sort of reporting mechanism? One of the articles (the one that Arrington thinks refutes the public denials of these companies, even though it does no such thing) talks about Google trying to organize a more efficient, standards approach to responding to lawful orders for specific data. That has nothing to do with this wholesale data pipe that is supposedly in place.
And, if given those document, why would you trust it? They could still be lying. If you don't trust what they are saying now, why would you trust any document created by them?
The fact that Google had very little market share in China, and made almost no money. Versus 3/4 of its $50 billion in sales coming from the US ad market.
*"It is further ordered that no person shall disclose to any other person that the FBI or NSA has sought or obtained tangible things under this Order."
But why is that stopping them? Do they really see themselves being dragged away, Bradley Manning style – to sit for years in a prison before even being given the dignity of a trial?
Because that’s not going to happen.
Please Google, hire Mike Arrington and task him to spill all your beans so he can put his butt behind his words instead of raindancing on the sidelines.
There are cowards and then there are people who willfully exaggerate. A backdoor implies unfettered access to data for batch collection and processing. That's what this story was about at the beginning - the government was indiscriminately collecting and possibly analyzing your private data using some sort of massive, sinister Big Data operation, the scale of which we can not even conceive, and these big web companies were essentially handing them the keys to their telecommunications networks and telling them to go wild. This has been downgraded again and again, now to a few websites constructing a "secure mailbox." Most of us, including Arrington, know exactly what that means. A secure portal/mailbox is exactly what it sounds like: it is the equivalent of sending someone e-mail with a curated collection of data, except for instead of sending an e-mail you are posting it to a private web page accessible through some sort of authenticated login page. And if this data is only in response to a FISA warrant or subpoena and only regarding data posted by non-citizens, suddenly your outrage begins to look a little melodramatic, and what's happening begins to look a lot like what we already knew was happening for years. Just because we've known about it for years doesn't make it right, but can we at least admit that the novelty of the original story is long gone?
CNET is claiming the Washington Post & Guardian stories were wrong and the whole thing was based off a leaked Powerpoint document. James Clapper said the stories contained numerous inaccuracies but didn't specify. This whole thing is hilarious, especially HN's reaction.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 279 ms ] threadThis reads like a pastiche of Keith Olbermann, all bravado and empty gusto. Arrington writes:
What has these people, among the wealthiest on the planet, so scared that they find themselves engaging in these verbal gymnastics to avoid telling a simple truth?
and then acknowledges that doing so, if it meant breaking FISA, is illegal.
Because their lawyers might be telling them what they are required to do. But their soul should be telling them what they must do.
What the hell does this even mean?
Listen, I completely agree with the central premise that we need to have an actual conversation both about privacy in the age of Facebook and the Kafka-esque way the U.S. government has engineered these catch-22 gag orders. But given Arrington's experience both with AOL and with the overall notion of privacy, I'd expect something with a little more substance and perspective.
It means that if telling the truth is illegal, they should have the courage to break the law.
It's very easy to ignore this sort of thing when it's not your ass on the line. Bradley Manning had a different kind of freedom, the kind that comes with nobody around you who can get hurt. The feds turned Sabu, the infamous LulzSec hacker, by threatening his three-year-old daughter. The United States government is not above such tactics.
I don't, frankly, believe that Arrington himself would behave much differently in the same situation. Life is not that easy.
Or, in the timeless words of Robert Oppenheimer:
"I am become Death, destroyer of worlds."
I'm not saying he should do that but with the amount of money he has he can afford to lose a job and still don't worry about his financial future.
I support what you say in theory, but a sign of intelligence is to take longer term approaches to solving the issue. (I would hope they are furious at the government for doing this or at least for hurting their business, I know I would be.)
It works the other way around than you say. Surrendering is short term win at the price of long term loss. Taking short term win at price of dooming us all is not nice behavior, even if being a dick might be intelligent.
You honestly think the government is going to go after a multibillion dollar international corporation? Doing that is what gets the government into trouble, because the corporation has the resources to defend itself. And they're clearly not going to destroy Facebook and Google in any event -- can you imagine the public outrage, to say nothing of the economic damage?
Governments retain power through leverage. They don't actually have the power to destroy everyone, but they have the power to destroy one person, and the power to threaten everyone with the risk of being that one person. When the government is wrong, this relies on everyone being too afraid to do the right thing, and people not talking to each other and working together.
This is pretty basic stuff. If you stand up and no one else does, you die now. If no one stands up, you die later. If everyone stands up, you win. Which would you rather do?
The government has in the past gone after some extremely powerful corporations and when they had the endurance patience, and care, they have succeeded. We should remember that the government spent 50 years trying to destroy AT&T's monopoly on long distance telephone calls and eventually they succeeded.
>AT&T's monopoly
They spent 50 years trying to break them up and within 20 years after that they had pretty much bought each other back up again and continue to do so as time passes.
You should also note that the public hated AT&T because they were the prototypical example of an abusive monopolist. It's a different story when the reason for the campaign is that the corporation is going to bat for the public against government overreach.
There is also the matter of Citizens United -- it's extremely unfortunate when the government legitimately wants to attack oil companies or other evildoers, but it works just as well (if not more so) when the corporation is doing right and the government is wrong.
We see a shift thus under Reagan from pro-competition to pro-oligopoly which continues and accelerates under Clinton, Bush, and Obama. It is an indication that in class warfare the elite always win.
As for AT&T getting back together, they still don't own a record label, broadcast/entertainment media, the Japanese telephone system or the major manufacturers of phones in the US and abroad to an extent anywhere near what they used to..... People forget just how big Ma Bell was at its zenith.
Some examples: Youtube and social media make war crimes more difficult to hide, Silk Road makes the war on drugs irrelevant, Bitcoin will make monetary policy irrelevant, open transactions will make the law system irrelevant, 3D printing will make border tariffs irrelevant, etc. Every software commit is a sign of progress, a log of someone trying to make the world a more voluntary, peaceful and decentralized place.
Given all of this, please excuse me in not caring about the idiots in Washington, London, Brussels, Paris, Moscow and Bejing who want to make me believe they are worth my time and emotional investment.
What more can one ask for than for the opportunity to live life on one's own terms?
meaningless, irrelevant words.
1) The government has some actual legitimate reason to do all of this which outweighs the danger of excessive government power.
2) Disclosing the reason to the public would eviscerate its effectiveness.
3) Allowing the government to say "trust us, we're the government" about anything from now on and get a free pass, because it could be this situation, will not result in the outrageous atrocities that governments have been known to commit when government accountability to the public is literally prohibited by law.
I don't even buy the first two as being especially plausible, but the third is why this cannot stand.
Beyond that, in terms of public surveillance, Zuckerberg has real power in this sphere. You could even argue that he has more power than any individual has ever had. Certainly there is no bigger global database of personal information than Facebook.
It doesn't matter if Arrington is being a hypocrite. It doesn't matter if I'm being a hypocrite. Zuckerberg, and indeed all technologists should stand up on this issue. If we love what computers can do, we owe it to the world to fight so that they don't become the Orwellian tool of control that totalitarian regimes have always dreamed of. We can't put the genie back in the bottle—data is going to be out there—but we can force the government to be more transparent. We can stand up and say that a handful of isolated terrorist attacks is not justification to ratchet up governmental power to something a thousand times more terrifying than any homicidal extremist ever could be. This is fundamentally one of the most important issues of our time, certainly far more important than the fate of any one company.
Also, it's worth noting that one of the key features that helped Facebook take off was much better privacy controls than anything that existed at the time.
A few older ep's of note re: billionaires enacting change and surveillance states: http://dancarlin.com/dccart/index.php?main_page=product_musi...
Could a Martin Luther King Jr. even exist today? Could an activist "rise" pulling together masses for protests with the amount of surveilance and data scored on people (this is from 2011). It speaks to the issue of whether or not any individual could in this day and age lead such a large-scale movement, and when/how they would be curtailed nearly immediately due to infiltration and "dirt" that is so easily obtained, etc.
Also of note: http://dancarlin.com/dccart/index.php?main_page=product_musi... Description: Another news story highlighting the growing "wealth gap" between the rich and poor in the USA has Dan discussing countermeasures. What if the rich and powerful made fixing that imbalance a priority?
I can't recall if the subject I am speaking to is the above, or below episode (probably below, his show notes are not linked to his site).
Dan Carlin goes into a very pessimistic (and somewhat realistic) description of why money in politics can only be solved by money, in politics. How if HE were to change policies, he would need (or wish to) see a cabal of billionaires. Ready to back actual reformists, and immediately cut them out of any re-elections if they are not holding to the reformist promises made (the below Ep). A political contract per se, with the most "good intentioned" billionaires. He also notes, this is rather unrealistic, as ones "good intentions" can be diametrically opposed to another (simplisitic example, The Koch brothers and Soros).
I'm not describing it well, but his premise is that you only change the top-levels by voting out the House/Senate that change their tune once in office, thus you need the consequences of uber-rich who can, and have the ability, to oust them in a semi-quick (election cycle) function.
Pretty sure its the below Ep.
http://dancarlin.com/dccart/index.php?main_page=product_musi... Description: The only way Americans can change federal government policy is by voting for new political candidates. But what if those candidates ignore the positions they ran on once elected? Also: the implementation Gordian knot.
I wonder if we will have a Bill Gates type billionaire who dedicates the power of his/her mind to reforming politics in such a fashion. I use Bill Gates as an example, re: his ruthless and intelligent business acumen, turning towards solving philanthropical concerns. That "moving of the cannons" would be stellar (searching is broken for older articles, their was a fantastic Reuters, or FT on Bill Gates when he stepped down from MS to turn towards philanthropic causes, and (paraphrasing), "it will be of awe to see the change his business mind, fundamental efficiencies in solving problems, will do for the world of [disease, whatever].")
I also think its silly to assume that though a billionaire has immense power/influence/'stability" to withstand ...
He also has more means to defend himself, move out of harm's way, get active support from other people.
> Bradley Manning had a different kind of freedom, the kind that comes with nobody around you who can get hurt.
This is just nonsense. Manning has a family too (parents).
He also has over a billion people who would raise hell if the US Government came down hard on him for doing nothing more than tell the truth about a government program and laws that few people would agree make sense.
Having him put it all on the table to defend his user's privacy would say more about the company than any marketing or press release ever could.
We, as individuals, are utterly powerless against our government. That's a fact. Just try to go up against the IRS or even your local Labor Board.
People like him have the ability to really disrupt the surveillance state in ways we cannot. What would happen if all major 'net CEO's and founders agreed to tell the government to stuff it? They are going to arrest all of them? They woukd have angry mobs burning down Congress. These CEO's have real power. Perhaps it's high time they start exercising it.
Defend their privacy so he can immediately sell it to the highest bidder?
The buck for such decisions stops at the Oval Office, and its current occupant has no reelection campaigns to worry about.
"What will happen?" is an excellent question that is not even asked. Certainly not everything is an acceptable risk; if Larry Page seriously believe he would risk spending the rest of his life in prison for publishing national security letters, then sure, we'd all do the same.
But is this the case? How do we even know if nobody's testing it?
Besides, why can't Google or Facebook be a little creative, and (for example) declare that the only way they'll be able to send information is by fax...?
That's kind of what HN is doing (it will only accept DMCA requests via fax or regular mail).
You obey the law. Period. And if you don't agree with it you lobby directly or encourage your users to do so.
This is how Uber works, or AirBnB... but not only. Facebook or Google routinely ignore European privacy laws. Twitter ignores European laws about free speech (which you and I may consider "bad" laws, but which are laws nonetheless).
So why is it that suddenly everyone hides behind the "law"?
When the law doesn't sit well with you, you should indeed choose to not obey, then fight the consequences.
Personally, I think they found a way to tell the truth without breaking the law.
They apparently said what they were required to say, to the letter. People found it transparently suspicious. Now the secret appears to be out.
Could be an accident, I suppose.
Had they said, "We do not comment on matters of national security," such would have been honest, careful, and truthful and it would have been darned hard to prosecute them or put them at risk for effectively revealing that the press was right.
None of them addressed the incongruity of having all the major news outlets contradicting them, after apparently finding the major points of the story supportable.
In the case of gmail, "please send me a random 10 users' info, data, and emails" gives you over a 70% chance that any given one in that sample is a foreigner. With Facebook it is closer to 85%.
So think about that. It means the filters could deliberately overinclude Americans and still meet their standards.
Maybe that is currently true; jailing Japanese Americans also passed court muster. Secret orders from a secret court doesn't square with the ideals of America I was taught in civics class.
The time for these companies to fight was before they gave away their user's info, not after they got caught doing so. If they weren't going to standup and do the right thing then, it's unrealistic to expect that they'd somehow find the courage now.
We don't need to have a "conversation". We need to challenge this behavior in courts, and win.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Khodorkovsky
(The real outrage in Khodorkovsky's case isn't that he has been repeatedly convicted while still imprisoned. The real outrage is that ExxonMobil and ChevronTexaco found a way to destroy their Russian competition.)
The whole premise is that the NSA is protecting the USA of terrorism by spying and that the USA is in a war against terrorism. Then the one who go against NSA is a traitor in a war time. Stop any rational argument here. BTW, I think you look slightly traitor to me...
On a side note, I see the whole xenophobia that's implied by all this. The NSA exists only to strip foreigners of their privacy, without any due process or supervision, and the only accusation here is that they might have stripped some of the 5% of the global population of their privilege of due process and constitutional rights. And there is a lot of suspicion that the NSA was used for economic spying in the war between Boing and EADS, and probably other cases.
Governments and companies know how to leak. The only logical conclusion is that these surveillance programs are not actually significantly upsetting to most of these folks.
"Legal" is worthless if it is inhuman. So one MUST stand against inhuman laws.
“All it takes for evil to succeed is for a few good men to do nothing...”
― Edmund Burke
That's so true. If they came out now, the country would be better for it. But they are deciding to be accomplices of the out of control and abusive government. I thought Google, at least, would be better than this, after the whole China situation.
It's easy to ask for other people to fight for your rights. What are you doing about it?
Getting the run-around for the IRS and the media seems to be the lot for those trying to get it together.
Let us have a conversation about that:
Why should Mark Zuckerberg, et al., know things about you that the government shouldn't?
Or, to put it another way, shouldn't the very thing which represents You, the People, have as much information about you as, "They", the Corporations, do?
After all, Mr. Z, et al., can quite easily tell you things about yourself which, 3 words into the sentence, would give the government a lot of information it needs to optimize itself. To Serve You.
Whereas, the corporate stance is "we will own the consumers, all the consumers, and we will encourage them to endless consume our product", the government stance is: "how do we keep 240million people from cannibalizing themselves".
Mr Z., et al., are being mighty disingenous with this position, because the fact of the whole matter is, the Government would be the absolute BEST customer for him/them/et al., there is no better way to feed a consumer than to get the Government on your side, as we see with Pharmaceuticals, Farming, Oil, etc.
There are multiple points of view in this argument, is all I am trying to say, and by setting the above in word I hope to have at least set the scene for my real, tl;dr, which is this:
Privacy is a trap. Those who are fully exploiting the nature of the system, simply keep no secrets .. and trade never willingly with those who do.
1. Because the user decided to give their own info to FB, but not to the gov.
2. The gov has many more powers than FB. If FB knows something about you that "may be suspicious" they can't put you in jail for it, maybe even without a trial.
3. If some FB employee is able to steal data, it would have bad consecuences for the FB stock, so there is probably all kinds of barriers in place to stop employees to do just that. If some bureaucrat manages to sell off you data there is no consecuene for them.
etc.
If I don't want to be subjected to any country's taxes or laws, let me know how I can opt-out of this. You can relocate to a different country, but it is up to them to allow you to enter and/or settle, so the problem hasn't been circumvented.
On the other hand, I can choose to not have a Facebook account, and can use various browser plugins to stonewall their efforts to track me on the web.
so don't relocate to a different country
The question is, trust more to do what? Not kill or imprison innocent people on a mass scale? I'm going to go with McDonalds on that one. But I wouldn't eat their food -- and notice that I have the choice not to.
This is not quite true. Facebook can make profiles even on people that don't have facebook and that have never logged in to facebook.
The tracking works just fine on a per-browser level. The practical upshot of this is that there is a good chance that facebook has data on you from before you joined and is able to track you after you leave.
Zuckerberg can't indict me. I don't pay taxes to Facebook.
There are powers that the government has that Facebook does not, and therefore there are things I would be comfortable telling Facebook and not the government.
Or perhaps that's the charitable interpretation.
Check out [2] for an example of one.
Perhaps we should be pressuring companies like Dropbox (whom was implicated as "coming soon" in the documents leaked) to implement such a system.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_canary
[2] http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt
Edit: Now thinking about it, Dropbox was probably already hit with a request. Maybe we should focus on other services that may be of future interest to the government?
However, when you saw blips from people paying $99 for your packet of case law on 4th amendment protections with respect to stewardship of online data, you'd have the start of a signal. That is, for all of about ten minutes until you couldn't find a hosting provider or payment processor on Earth who would return your phone calls.
Not that it would matter because a "Chinese PLA hacker nuked your box, your bank account, and your house from orbit."
[Insert relevant quotes regarding government requests on named individuals from Eric Schmidt here.]
There's a growing intellectual understanding that corporations control the governmental processes from start to finish. Therefore, asking the government to change is stupid.
If the King rules your country, petition the King for mercy.
If an oligarch rules your country, petition the oligarch for mercy.
If a corporate elite rules your country, petition the corporate elite.
Democracy is, quite simply, completely dead. Gone. Done. The government does not institute change based on democratic opinion. You have no control over your government. They aren't the real seat of power in this society.
Having said that, most of the power resides on Wall Street and in the Military-Industrial-Security complex rather than Silicon Valley corporations. But these Silicon Valley corporations are now rich enough to change the laws. They can crown themselves King with the right kind of manoeuvring, and Arrington here is trying to get them to do so.
Petitioning Larry Page or Paul Graham to have a conscience is far more fruitful than voting for the government you want.
I'm fairly sure lp and pg have strong consciences, at least much stronger consciences that arrington, of all people.
So why complain about the companies? There is a much greater possibility of change in private enterprise, but they often can't escape the mandates that government imposes, either. Some would like to think that the Googles and Facebooks can be heroes, and resist whatever nasty thing the government is doing today. It isn't that easy.
Pressure the people paying donations. Its the best chance you have.
I don't even understand the outrage that most US citizens are showing at the moment for the said firms even after realizing that any access that may have been provided was through the channels that the governments had 'legally' set up. And that at least some of the companies had resisted. It seems very unfair to me, largely as an outsider and yet a stakeholder, that the only people who are being held accountable in the piece are the CEOs who had little to do with the fiasco.
The allegation is that they are deliberately misleading. I don't know if it is true but that is what they are attacked for.
Heck maybe people perceive that a single CEO like Page or Zuckerberg do have more power to change things than those in Congress or Obama. That says something as well.
It is also a battle of expectations. Maybe many expect NSA, Obama and other secret government agencies to fuck everything, but they thought, heck at least the "Do No Evil" Google will stand on our side, or my buddy Zuck will.
That is different from having an access portal for agencies to submit warrants or other legal requests. There is no obvious reason why a company should have an ethical obligation to resist lawfully issued warrants.
This article would have been much better if it had focused on the ethically dubious nature of FISA, and how problematic it is to interpret the fourth amendment as applying only to American citizens.
But that wouldn't have driven as many clicks.
Then who will? Think about it: companies are the only entity who can challenge this kind of behavior in courts.
But that wouldn't have driven as many clicks.
Nice ad hom, but it's mistaken. Arrington is many things, but he actually feels the way he writes.
The only way to change the policy on this is in Congress. If you really want to make a difference, call your Congressman and yell at them for spying on you. Call them daily, call your Senator, call other people's Congressmen. It still might not help, but nothing Google or Twitter or Facebook can do is going to.
The fact that they've built special systems for giving the government the data is not too surprising or scandalous. If I ran a site getting the same number of FISA requests that Google and Facebook presumably get, I'd probably also design a special system to make the process more convenient and secure. Short of openly challenging the NSA in court, this is probably the best response we could hope for. It gives the company control over what data is released and is much more secure than a back door which could be compromised.
They don't have direct access to the servers, they're complying with the law, they have everyone's data.
The worst bit is that this is all kept secret. If it's all so acceptable then why didn't the public at least get told.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/08/technology/tech-companies-...
> In one recent instance, the National Security Agency sent an agent to a tech company’s headquarters to monitor a suspect in a cyberattack, a lawyer representing the company said. The agent installed government-developed software on the company’s server and remained at the site for several weeks to download data to an agency laptop.
Where in that paragraph or the ones surrounding it does it say that Google or Facebook was the company involved? Don't you think that if these incidents involved either company, that they would be named here?
Rather than some ad hoc process of burned CDs or USB drives, just create some simple software that makes the process secure, reliable, and traceable.
The alternative is USB drives and Fedex envelopes, which is harder to track and probably less secure.
Don't try to play us
What would you have these companies do? Band together in a mighty ring of technological resources and begin a Privacy Revolution?
This is unrealistic. As an American, I am saddened and angered by the recent news of the past two days. I am disgusted with what our government has done - what it has hidden from us, to take advantage of us unawares.
But we need to consolidate our anger. We have to aim it precisely, and arm ourselves against the proper enemy. It will not help the tech community to bicker amongst ourselves and be disappointed with CEOs for what the NSA has done. This community has great resources. Let those resources stand. Experts from every tech center in the country, across industries spanning finance, security, engineering, and many more - we are all pooled here. We can make an impact.
But not if we are busy attacking those whose positions we cannot possibly corroborate. Their hands were tied. In an ideal world, every man and woman would be consumed with a righteous fury and ignore whips, imprisonment and even death for the greater glory of what is right.
This is not that world. This is not idealism. The government wronged us. The government made the first move. The government forced their hands, made them cooperate by ratifying unethical conduct and making it illegal (and treasonous, as a violation of national security) to resist. Who would have acted differently in their position? And what would it have achieved?
I recognize that it is discomforting that we cannot simply believe tech leaders after what today's events have shown us. I get that. But they are not the ones who violated our privacy. They were the medium. That is not fair to them. If they made a mistake, it was only in trying to navigate perilous waters somewhere between honor and law. Unfortunately, the law is not on their side.
With Mark Zuckerberg jailed or Facebook sued by an insurmountable public agency, or Google's assets seized and its constituent leaders punished, who would be benefitted? Should we ask them to suffer and violate laws just for a truth that has come out only hours later?
If you want a takeaway from this, it's simple. It's unfair to hold people to expectations of high moral standing when they have unknown pressures put upon them. And in light of that, we need to remember who the true wrongdoers here are. If Larry and Zuckerberg have made mistakes, so be it. But know that they paled in comparison to the NSA, and that is our prime prerogative.
> Perhaps you could all get on a conference call tonight and double dare each other to do it all together, at the same time.
> “The NSA makes us do things that crush our Constitution, and then they make us never talk about it.”
> I hope one of them does
They don't need to lead any revolutions, or even leak classified information. The cat is out of the bag, so to speak. All he's asking for is for them to not lie to us, especially when they know that we know that what they're saying is demonstrably false.
While I don't think single-issue voting is a good political strategy, in this particular case it seems prudent to consider that the reprehensibility of the whole affair and the complicity of those few most able to stop it calls into question their moral fiber. We can't -- and shouldn't -- hope to kick every pro-surveillance Congressman out of office, but when someone in a position of influence helps betray the country to this degree we should take notice.
I strongly disagree. We are blessed with the right to vote. It's important to use it on things that actually matter.
They could pack up and leave. Make a statement. Be true to their customers. And they could pull it off, I think, being mostly software and service companies.
Yes, they, their employees, and a lot of dependables will probably lose out, at first. But they stay true to themselves. In the end, they make the decision to choose marketshare, power, money and all that over ideals. Not a bad choice, but be honest about it.
Simple, straight to the point, and contains worlds of meaning behind the plausible deniability. "No sir, I did not think I was confirming the existence of the program. I believed I was operating in compliance with all gag orders and just reminding people that these orders come with gag orders, so because everyone knows that I didn't think that would violate the gag order...."
By issuing silly denials that didn't withstand more than a few hours of public scrutiny they look silly, cowardly, and dishonest.
If I remember well Google was courageous enough confronting China.
CEOs who are not informed can release statements indicating the depth of their ignorance without being deliberately dishonest.
That said, the alleged situation frankly astounds me. The government SHOULD NOT have employees at companies devoting company resources to projects that the people running those companies are not allowed to know about. But that is exactly what the NY Times claimed.
If the scope of what they were required to deliver included information that could have an impact on the financial disclosures of the company[1] then, under Sarbanes-Oxley, they are at least required to put controls in place to communicate or prevent inaccurate financial reporting. This could also be why the CFO was not involved in the denials, because they've at least separated NTK.
As for the portal, the lowest common denominator would be an ftp server. Maybe they put it on fbiguy3@gmail.com's Google Drive so he had to log in. I'd like to think I'd encrypt it with a huge whopping GPG key, email it from a gmail to a yahoo address under my control, and ask,"Did you get that?" but I know I'd just piss down my leg and give them what they wanted.
Finally, Google is rather proud of the predictions or observations it can make based on (they say) trends in search queries. For example, it is now taken as fact that "Google can predict the flu better than the CDC/WHO/etc." I would not be surprised if Google and other companies could tell at least how many FISA requests have probably been generated by segmenting requests for related searches. (Of course, LexisNexis, FindLaw, and the like would have even better information when paying customers do their due diligence on compliance with unreasonable requests.)
[1] E.g., Send us all credit card information for customers from outside the USA.
This is the crux of the matter, but this statement is not strictly true. If a company only sent information on 1.44MB floppy disks, or started requiring NSA agents to run an obstacle course or something, they would be held in contempt of court. These requests have an implicit requirement of ease of access, and what that means is ultimately up to a judge's discretion.
Is this correct?
> In one recent instance, the National Security Agency sent an agent to a tech company’s headquarters to monitor a suspect in a cyberattack, a lawyer representing the company said. The agent installed government-developed software on the company’s server and remained at the site for several weeks to download data to an agency laptop.
> In other instances, the lawyer said, the agency seeks real-time transmission of data, which companies send digitally.
That is more than what they currently do.
it is fascinating that this concept is so difficult for an otherwise intelligent community to grasp and a reminder of why we still need journalists.
* Backbone route
* SSL, MIM hack
* indirect access like real-time backups.
* sudo RO access via vpn
* Remote Access to BigTable queries
* Team inside the company
* What china does.
Gotto love lawyers. They harp on the most ambiguous term.
Cowardice is an accurate term to describe ferengi, not to mention unpatriotic.
Who wants to give up the Jacuzzi ?
- Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at Finnish software security firm F-Secure.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/06/07/europe-surveillanc...
If all of them come out at the same time - everybody benefits.
But if 1 of them screws everybody over, the screwed will be royally screwed.
Silly man. Exactly how hard is it to ask someone else, with way more to lose than you, to be a martyr for a cause you feel strongly about?
There is literally no evidence anyone could produce which would prove to anyone's satisfaction that (a) Google, Yahoo, Facebook, etc don't hand over every last shred of data they have to the NSA, the KGB, and whatever China's equivalent is, or that (b) the CEOs of the respective companies didn't personally sign off on every single violation of privacy while kicking puppies. Corporations can't have alibis. Mark Zuckerberg can't say, "Oh, I was in Cincinnati for the last 5 years, and I don't have cell coverage there, so I can't possibly have been involved."
I usually avoid defending billionaires, because they can dry their tears on their giant stacks of money, but so far this is just a he-said-she-said, and if all of the tech companies are saying they're innocent, it's the responsibility of the accusers to pony up some evidence they're guilty. Slide shows are one thing, but if you want to prove to me that the system does what you say it does, we need a document dump: millions of random emails, Facebook messages, whatever that have been illegally accessed through this system, which could plausibly not have been accessed without the kind of far reaching access that the tech giants are being accused of having provided.
But why is that stopping them? Do they really see themselves being dragged away, Bradley Manning style – to sit for years in a prison before even being given the dignity of a trial?
Because that’s not going to happen.
Please Google, hire Mike Arrington and task him to spill all your beans so he can put his butt behind his words instead of raindancing on the sidelines.