Oh look MSM telling journalists to shut the fuck up or face jail time because the law is murky. If this is not censorship through threats, I don't know what is.
Again the conversation shifts away from the bureaucracy and towards those who threaten it. While TFA brings up an important and interesting subject, we would as a nation be better served by focusing energies on the NSA and the various other intelligence agencies.
| Again the conversation shifts away from the
| bureaucracy and towards those who threaten it.
Journalism is about presenting both sides of a story so that the reader can make up their own mind. It's also worth noting that you're bringing up a single article to show that "the conversation is shifting." By this logic, I could bring up any story in any publication that doesn't have anything to do with the NSA and claim that the MSM is trying to bury the story by reporting on Hollywood gossip or something else.
I agree that the focus should be on the NSA, but hopefully all of the stories about the subject matter keep the topic in the public's thoughts. Possibly enough for some people to do more research and change their minds (from "All the way NSA!" to "Hmmm. Maybe they went too far").
"Both sides"? What about Rashomon? Please don't fall in the bipolar disease typical of modern politics. All sides in a story should be covered.
Still, you have to agree that the MSM way too often derails the conversation towards personalism and unrelated issues and away from actual policy topics, usually following this or that agenda, just because novels sell better than political essays. This should be taught in journalism school, nowadays, but it's clearly not the case.
"Nowadays, all you do is hear the media's description of what the candidate is saying, and one of the strange things about it is that politics is now presented in terms of politicians and not politics. I don't think the media is interested in politics, they're interested in politicians, which is a wholly different subject... who's doing this, about their private life, about their background, about what they must be thinking, might be thinking when they said something, why did they say it; but what they say is very, very hard to hear. And I think this is, in a sense, indeed quite deliberately, destroying the genuine democratic base on which people are elected."
So I should let creationists speak on stage on the same level as everyone else?
There was an editorial by (I think) the EIC of Nature. In it he talks about how giving people the floor for discussion in some way validates their positions, no matter how absurd, so the best solution is simply not to give them the floor.
If someone knows what article I'm talking about , please link it, it was extremely interesting read.
That's not what I took toyg's meaning to be. All legitimate sides of a stories should be reported. Sometimes that's two sides. Sometimes it's one. There might be times when it's thirteen and there might be other times where it's zero. The disease of modern politics is assuming it's always two.
Journalism is about presenting both sides of a story so that the reader can make up their own mind.
This is the same line of reasoning that leads to fringe opinions being overrepresented in the name of "equal time". Journalism is about presenting facts in order of apparent importance, the channel editor picks the cutoff point, and the audience (vaguely) picks the seeds for the next iteration.
Lately there has been relatively less talk about what the security apparatus has done, and more about the people involved in the revealing of it. History won't care where Snowden is today, or whether Greenwald is successfully tarred and feathered. The only thing on the page is going to be that the third use of the Internet (after media delivery and catalog shopping) was spying on the entire world in a way that only a decade ago was inconceivable.
An attempt to report the news marred with shoddy
research, fact suppression, or a mere retyping of
the press release/talking points
Giving fringe views and wild theories equal space doesn't seem to apply to this definition. I'm not saying that it's good journalism, but I'm not seeing it at 'journamalism.'
On the same token, not reporting facts like, "some people are Holocaust-deniers," just because their views might be wrong seems to fit with the 'fact suppression' definition of 'journamalism.'
I think that depends on how it's done, and the context. For example, I believe reporting things like "some people think Obama is a Muslim spy" or, worse yet, "Is Obama a Muslim Spy? Find out at 11" fits that description fairly well.
At best, it's extra noise in the signal. At worse, it's a annoying way of "reporting" by appealing to the emotions and fears of the lowest common denominator. It's no more journalism than tabloid trash in my opinion. Actually, I'd say it's worse as the unwashed masses latch on to arguments like this and may ignore more important topics either because their minds are full of crud, or because their emotional response has already been tweaked- i,e,. "I can't trust this guy, he's a muslim spy!"
Fair and balanced does not mean you have to mix facts and conjecture; that's what editorials are for. The problem is that journalism today blurs the lines between the two.
Halfway between the truth and a lie is still a lie.
You got a bunch of replies already, but I think it's worth piling on. There aren't always two sides; if you always report there being two sides chances are you're doing irresponsible journalism.
Whether or not there are multiple legitimate sides to a debate that are best left to the discretion of the reader is something that depends on the facts of each particular story and is not something that can be assumed as some sort of metaphysical principle of journalism.
Golden Rule of the Internet: Someone will always be pedantic unless you write your post to be airtight and have copious amounts of text covering all edge-cases. People always have a compulsion to evaluate what you wrote while ignoring the current context.
Did I say somewhere here that all articles on the Holocaust require an equal amount of time presenting the views of Holocaust-deniers? If not, then why assume that I'm making some sort of absolute statement?
There's nothing "edge case" about this. Attempts to articulate the "other side" of the NSA scandal have been amongst the worst instances of reporting and the greatest sources of misunderstanding we've had to deal with, and they can be found right in the bullseye center of the NSA conversation.
I'd say a better candidate for Golden Rule of the Internet is the tendency of people to collapse meaningful distinctions, and think that policing those distinctions is pedantry relating to far-off hypotheticals, but not to instances of their own behavior.
I agree, but at the same time these journalists should be defended - sadly, I think only by us, because most of the media won't defend their own in this case, and they'd rather side with the government.
I think that's a misread. The purpose of the story is to make it appear that WaPo is on the case and to keep you on the edge of your seat, even though nothing has actually happened, and the article itself strongly suggests that nothing will. It's not supposed to shift the conversation anywhere, but to keep you talking and reading the news, even though there isn't any news to talk about.
Ezra Klein you might call a government watchdog. The Wonkblog is dedicated to data-driven investigative journalism of government policy and programs. I think you could read the article better as Ezra Klein wondering if Ezra Klein can be charged with a crime for doing his job (maybe it's more of a calling than a job, I don't know).
My view, the journalists are in a self-centered way raising the question of whether Greenwald should be charged with a crime because they see their faces in the mirror of his face.
The boundaries the national security state is setting on journalism are still very fluid. The Obama administration, unfortunately, has changed the status quo of what kinds of leaks and sources will be prosecuted. It is having a chilling effect on insider journalism. Naturally all the insiders are curious about who will be called an outsider and what the fate of the outsider will be.
The good news is that the law notwithstanding, the politics of arresting a journalist in a situation like this are unfavorable to the Justice Department. Holder recently gave Congressional testimony saying he thinks it would be a bad idea to charge journalists in leak cases. His words were: "That is not something I've ever been involved in, heard of, would think would be wise policy."[1]
Whatever you make of the rest of his testimony (and whether he lied about investigating Rosen), it would be harder for him to go after journalists after saying that to Congress.
I think even the public can comprehend the 1st amendment. Could Greenwald go to jail? Possibly. But then the justice department would have every lawyer looking to make a name for themselves chomping at the bit. A case like that puts you on the fast track to the Supreme Court.
Previously I would say the American public would riot in the streets should a reporter be charged with the crime of journalism. Based on the reaction to the revelation that the NSA is watching every single piece of Internet communication in the world, now I'm not so sure. The apathy to all matters beyond "Kim Kardashian is fat now" is so thick you could cut it with a knife.
Edit: Just wanted to add in a thought. The only thing keeping a lawless government from pulling stunts like this is the fear of citizen revolt, and even then they generally proceed if the projected revolution strength is sufficiently weak.
>Based on the reaction to the revelation that the NSA is watching every single piece of Internet communication in the world, now I'm not so sure.
Except that's not what they're doing. People actually care about nuance, and things aren't black and white.
I understand the notion of having principle, but it's been several weeks now and we need to stop having arguments in absolutes and start actually talking about what actually happens, what is actually useful and what should be changed.
I think when you consider the "upstream" portion of the prism slide titled "FAA702 Operations" (the one about splitting the fiber optic cables) that yes, my statement is correct.
No, I think the government is watching every piece of data and that the $20 million/year refers to some bit of information we are not privy to. Btw, we already know this infrastructure exists [1].
William Binney, a well-known NSA whistlebower, has stated that there are 10-20 such installations around the United States [2]
I guess I don't see how 20 installations would be nearly enough to track all or even most internet communications in the US. Given that core routers are on the very edge of feasible performance, I don't see how you could do substantial spying there, which means your spying has to be closer to the edges, which means a lot more than 20 installations.
Moreover, such a large scale program really wouldn't centralize data in giant data center in Utah. When you're dealing with this much data, you need to process locally because the costs of transmitting data volumes that large is prohibitive.
>Moreover, such a large scale program really wouldn't centralize data in giant data center in Utah. When you're dealing with this much data, you need to process locally because the costs of transmitting data volumes that large is prohibitive.
This is pure conjecture on my part, but I would presume that the government doesn't have to rely on civilian infrastructure to transmit data.
You mean you think there's a classified fiber network operated by the government that covers the entire country and transports about as much data as the real internet?
So, are those cables marked on maps or with signs (like legit cables are)? Or can any idiot with a backhoe cripple this secret network at any time? It seems that a secret network would have much much lower operational reliability because of how many idiots we let drive backhoes in this country.
Seriously, have you not heard of dark fiber? It's quite common for a network owner not to "light" many of the fibers in a particular run. Sometimes, this is because the capacity is not needed, but it's also common that the network owner's customers prefer to run their own multiplexers. Those customers could include the NSA or whatever agency in the government. Many such agencies certainly have built multiple classified networks this way.
Your average backhoe operator doesn't know what's in the pipe any more than the Dig-Rite spraypaint guy or even AT&T technicians do. The sign just says, "Buried Cable: Call Before Digging". Of course sometimes cables get cut anyway. That's why excavators get bonded. That's also why networks that aren't designed by "idiots" are redundant.
Sorry, no offense meant to professionals. I was thinking more of random guys who rent a backhoe for the weekend.
And yes, I know about dark fiber. Dark fiber networks don't have traffic but they're still on maps and have warning signs around them. There's a difference between burying fiber without using it and keeping the existence of fiber totally secret.
I guess I don't see how we could have a parallel internet whose existence was unclassified that no one noticed until now.
Well, I guess it depends on your definition. When I worked in telcom we called it "dark fiber" if the multiplexers at each end were operated by someone other than the owner of the fiber. This was "dark" in that the network owner didn't know anything about it besides who had access to the server closet in the CO.
The point is that the USA government leases a great deal of network capacity, both directly and indirectly through "cover" entities. Much of that is probably used to build any number of networks that carry "classified" data, including SIPRNet, NSANet, JWICS, and others so "dark" that we don't technically know they exist. Nobody would bother to deny the existence of these, nor the obvious fact that the actual fiber belongs to the same firms that own all other long-distance fiber: ATT, L3, XO, VZN, etc.
I suppose it's possible that some agencies operate the sort of "secret network" you were challenging, but since it costs at least ten times normal prices for spooks to do anything, they probably try to keep that self-built stuff to a minimum.
EDIT: Just so we're clear, the security of a network does not depend on no one knowing it exists or where it is. The NSA knows encryption: no one is going to "tap" their fiber and find out their deep dark secrets. A well-informed goat enthusiast with a backhoe could conduct a denial-of-service attack, but that doesn't scale and as I said these networks have redundancy built in.
The $20 million relates to PRISM, which is probably "just" the interface/analysis system for the FISA/NSL data that comes directly from the cloud providers.
The PRISM slide that mentiones splitting probably references the other program(s) that collect raw data.
Makes sense because tapping into underwater cables seems much more expensive.
"The NSA spent more than 15 years working to develop the technology to tap these cable strands. The Navy has almost finished outfitting the nuclear-powered submarine USS Jimmy Carter with state-of-the-art technology for undersea fiber-optic taps, according to people knowledgeable about it."[0, Wall Street Journal, July 17, 2003]
The NSA is wholesale collecting data and later using a secret court to authorize them to query their own databases [1]. PRISM is not just an interface. It is officially known as SIGAD US-984XN which means it intercepts and collects electronic communications.
> The apathy to all matters beyond "Kim Kardashian is fat now" is so thick you could cut it with a knife.
It is interesting you note this. This seems to lend credence to the 'Brave New World' theory over the '1984' theory of how the American people feel about the government.
Because rioting is an immature, knee-jerk reaction people in countries without proper avenues of political expression, e.g. the poor or uneducated, take? Riots are a way to signal the elites that the population feels some way. The U.S. has non-destructive ways of doing that, even if less emotionally satisfying than burning shit to make a point.
Note that present polling indicates Americans, while holding a positive opinion of Snowden, still feel he should be prosecuted.
However, the problem is not that elected officials are not listening to the people, it is that there is little concern from the electorate about privacy rights.
Ultimately, the country does belong to you more for understanding the problems of eroding privacy rights more than someone who doesn't. One could argue that rioting would change the conversation in a productive way, but I expect it would further the cause of authoritarians if a group of people behind a minority viewpoint tried to advance their cause through the violence of rioting.
I firmly believe that democracy can only function with transparency and a free press, but those are means to democracy, not a goal in themselves. It makes no sense to wish for riots, which are intrinsically anti-democratic when not expressing the will of the majority, for the sake of making a country safer for democracy.
Much as when our country was torturing people, the problem is less that of a disobedient set of elected officials, and more that of some really bad ideas that are held by a large portion of the population. Unfortunately, right now the problem is not politicians who can be easily demonized, but a population that for now is largely ignorant about the power of data.
I'm not necessarily wishing for riots with innocent shopkeepers' livelihoods being trashed.
But I am saying that the normal democratic methods seem to fail us here -- this is a real "don't blame me, I voted for kodos" situation. If Obama, who was the most strident advocate against this stuff out of both parties in the 2008 primaries (except for maybe Kucinich), doesn't follow through on this stuff, what are the democratic options?
Has anyone considered that maybe Obama felt that he was actually able to tamp down the excesses he railed against, and was able to be convinced of the use of the NSA once he took office and was able to be briefed on what they actually do?
America wouldn't have lasted very long if a minority group set the cities on fire each and every single time an unpopular decision was made public.
P.S. the democratic options involve letting your representatives and elected officials know that you are pissed, whether that's through letters, complaining to the media, peaceful protests, or all of the above.
Sometimes the people don't naturally do what jbooth personally feels is right for the entire nation. Welcome to Democracy.
Did you read the first line of my comment where I said I wasn't in favor of actual violent rioting? It's right up there.
I've knocked on probably 1,000 doors and made probably 5,000 phone calls for democrats over the last 10 years. I'm not some slacktivist, and I'm not saying that the whole world needs to agree with me, although the accusation of arrogance is well taken.
We've seen no evidence that Obama changed anything about NSA wiretapping and a fair amount of circumstantial evidence that he probably didn't (how those drone strikes coming, and the medicinal marijuana crackdown)?
When someone runs and is elected by a majority as being "the opposite of Bush", it'd be nice if he actually did something different.
> We've seen no evidence that Obama changed anything about NSA wiretapping
The FISA was changed to require warrants in 2008 (though Obama was a Senator then, not sure what part he played in that as I don't remember the discussion from the time it occurred). The "watch list" the NSA was using was gigantic when Obama took office and was shrunk down to focus on those who might actually impact national security.
> how those drone strikes coming
Better than what we used to do, invade entire countries and drop 1000kg JDAMs everywhere, which involved far more "collateral damage".
That is, of course, unless you're saying that we should simply wait until a group blows up something in America and then go destroy whatever state the operational cell was working out of. I personally prefer disrupting the cell and leaving the state intact (as do the states that we surreptitiously work with...) as it involves less human sacrifice on both sides, but that might just be me.
> the medicinal marijuana crackdown
Yeah, I got nothing. The sooner we move away from giving a shit about marijuana the better, as far as I'm concerned.
> When someone runs and is elected by a majority as being "the opposite of Bush"
They were both "opposite of Bush" so I hope you had more in mind than that when you voted. As it stands though, if you think Obama is just like Bush then you might want to re-evaluate history, as time has a habit of helping us forget the bad and remember the good. There was a reason that as far back as 2004 that Bush was already well down the road toward becoming the most unpopular President in decades, and that's because there was much worse things going on than drones...
> The FISA was changed to require warrants in 2008
No, it wasn't. FISA always required warrants for certain surveillance, and the 2008 FISA Amendment Act increased the time period for warrantless surveillance, and added new exceptions to the warrant requirements, and it explicitly blocked investigations of illegal wiretapping that had occurred before the Act.
Well, the democratic options are limited. Aside from calling your representatives in congress and encouraging everyone you know to do the same.
The electorate is uninformed and easily manipulated. Bias in the news media is generally to support the status quo and not rock the boat. Lively debate occurs mostly for easily understood and emotional issues. Covering complex issues with complex answers is not a winning strategy for aggressive ad revenue goals.
With an uninformed and easily manipulated electorate, elections are largely influenced by money. Corporations and wealthy people contribute the most money to election campaigns, and therefore have a significant amount of influence over policy decisions and positions. Gerrymandering is also a huge problem and further reduces the amount of debate and competition during elections.
Lawrence Lessig (through rootstrikers.org) is a pioneer in raising awareness on how damaging the above situation is to a healthy functioning democracy. Awareness is the best thing we can do to improve the situation. If you're interested, check out this TED Talk that Lessig did: http://www.ted.com/talks/lawrence_lessig_we_the_people_and_t...
American public opinion is for prosecuting Snowden. This can be because they are un-informed or have a different value set from the mean of HN. If the former, how can we educate enough people to form a critical majority in favour of privacy reform?
If the latter, the process is slower and more complicated. A starting point would be writing and paying visits to decision makers. My impression has been that the lack of communication from U.S. citizens to D.C. has left decision makers with the impression that this is, at most, a foreign relations problem.
Not all elites are in D.C., mind you. Speak with influential and high profile individuals you know. Encourage them to bring this up in the media or at the next conference they are at.
Sound difficult? Convincing people to change the status quo should be. Rioting to short-circuit this process is the equivalent of dialectical violence. Less charitably, it is the making of noise and commotion in the hope that someone else will pick up the baton and do the leg-work for you.
And we can't dismiss the majority's viewpoint as "apathy" just because we don't agree with it or find it appalling. It's not constructive to do so. We're better off having a discussion of why people think this type of surveillance is good. They'll probably say "reduces crime/terrorism," and we can counter with "that's questionable, but even so, your rights and liberties are violated." Most would probably shrug, but that doesn't necessary imply apathy.
> why people think this type of surveillance is good
There's a difference believing that this type of surveillance is good and believing that Snowden should be prosecuted for leaking in the way that he did.
If anything I believe it would go the other way around; there are people who feel the surveillance is bad and still feel Snowden should be held to the same law that the rest of us are bound to.
> "that's questionable, but even so, your rights and liberties are violated."
A more pointed example might be: indiscriminate surveillance can be used by corrupt officials for political persecution of their domestic political enemies. Look no further than the recent IRS scandal to see the willingness and ability of people in positions of power using the levers of power against political opponents, even when the stakes are low or petty. The NSA database of information represents an unbelievable trove of opportunity for the very real prospect of the arbitrary abuse of political power, both by people within the U.S. government and by anyone who manages to illicitly gain access to that information (e.g. foreign hackers—and there's some evidence that Chinese hacking attempts on Google were aimed at the interface Google set up to provide information to the government).
Funny that they don't mention that the Washington Post also published classified info, and that perhaps they "aided and abetted" Snowden, to some "extent"...
I don't know what the actual legal position on this is, but I think that public sentiment usually recognizes that:
1.) There is a legitimate need for classified information within a government;
2.) The purpose of classified information is not to cover up illegal activities by the government.
So when it comes to revealing classified information, if it is done to expose a crime, I think the US public generally supports that. But in this case, near as I can tell, no crime was exposed. Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't PRISM conducted within the bounds of the law?
So now there's the question of whether or not PRISM should have been legal, and whether or not exposing classified information to put a spotlight on that discussion is legit. And I don't know how I feel about that let alone what the public at large thinks about it.
Has there been a clear acknowledgement from a court that these programs violated the 4th amendment? Because I'm pretty sure that government's position is that PRISM was fully authorized under the law with the direct approval of a FISA Court.
I honestly don't much care what the courts say on this. My own personal opinion is that the 4th amendment is clear enough, and that "spy on everybody all the time" is not allowed, not even with a court order. If approval of a court were enough to allow this kind of thing, then why do police bother with specific warrants like "search address X for evidence of crime Y"? They could just get a single warrant that says "search everything for everything" and be done.
I fully expect this program to be upheld by the courts if it ever gets that far, but that's because I think the courts are largely corrupt, not because I think it's actually being done in a legal and constitutional manner.
Here's an analogy I've heard that makes some sense:
The government has been tracking postal letters and packages for decades. They don't open your letters (that we know of), but they certainly look at the to and from addresses and keep track of who is sending what.
Do you think this is a violation of your fourth amendment rights? Do you have a reasonable expectation to privacy for something you write on the outside of an envelope and drop in a public receptacle?
The government is essentially claiming that they're doing the same thing with phone and email records. They're keeping track of who is communicating with who, but not monitoring the contents of the communication for US citizens.
(And yeah, whether they are actually monitoring the contents of the communications is now up for debate, but the government's position is still that they don't monitor contents).
For one, if you write an encrypted letter, the government (at least not to my knowledge) doesn't claim the right to keep it indefinitely just in case you're using it to communicate with your terrorist buddies.
You can send letters without return addresses.
You don't have to use the recipient's real name when sending a letter.
Writing something on the outside of the letter makes it publicly visible, and thus carries no expectation of privacy. Writing an email to your friend is the electronic equivalent of a private one on one conversation, and thus carries an expectation of privacy. If you had wanted the government to know about it, you would have CC'd the NSA.
I can see why the government would take this position, as it portrays them in a more favorable light, but it's misdirection more than explanation.
Do you have information on this postal tracking program? Obviously the USPS has to know the destination (and purported source), but I wasn't aware of any program to save that information and aggregate it. I'd certainly call the existence of such a program a violation of the 4th amendment, if it's real.
Not technically, as they only get to search collected data with a warrant from the FISC. Now we're getting into the territory of strict vs. liberal interpretations of the Bill of Rights. In a world that could not have foreseen the ability of the US government to quite literally record everything, and thusly didn't include in the 4th amendment a protection against ex post facto search and seizure, something beyond even sci-fi at that point.
The process and procedure of an FISC warrant is one of the things that is being called into question. Not to mention the fact that there are challenges to the true accessibility of this data or if it can be mined without metadata information being attached to it.
Putting aside Prism, I don't see how the cell phone metadata is compatible with the fourth amendment at all. The 4A exists specifically to ban general warrants that allow the government to seize whatever they want without any specificity. That's exactly what the FISC order authorizing metadata collection is. There really isn't any strict vs. liberal interpretation here that I can see.
The interpretation is in the word "seizing." Nothing is taken. It's copied and collected. So does "seizing" mean to collect benignly, or to take possession from another?
Except this very issue about metadata was already deliberated in the courts decades ago when it first came up that phone companies maintained these metadata records, with the conclusion that they are phone company records, not your records, and that therefore the government could subpoena them if they wished, as long as they didn't individually identify people (which would require something more substantive).
I mean, that's what we would say when the RIAA comes at us saying that IP address umpty-squat was used to download a movie, right? "Must have been my neighbor on my Wifi". "My friend was browsing my laptop".
But either way, that's why the NSA must get a separate subpoena to get the subscriber information for a given phone number, if they don't already have it from earlier. And only after that can they get a warrant to allow for grabbing the data itself.
It's generally fairly easy for an ordinary person to find someone's identity with just their number, completely bypassing any sort of warrant/subpoena system. If I can do it, I'm sure the NSA does as well.
First of all, I don't find the IP address argument persuasive and I don't think most courts have either.
Secondly, given that it is quite common for DHCP to give a single computer different addresses and nothing like that happens to phone numbers (which are intended to be persistent and not transient identifiers), I don't think your analogy works.
This is an article designed to generate rage-views. Greenwald isn't going to jail.
Tim B Lee is HN's Rush Limbaugh, getting people into a lather about things that might happen (in the sense that they wouldn't violate any laws of physics) and getting them to freak out about that.
> "Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't PRISM conducted within the bounds of the law?"
If Americans had looked at the programs that preceded PRISM and the motivation behind them and instead asked "is this ethical?" we wouldn't now be asking "is this legal?". All sorts of crimes (in the ethical sense) have been legal throughout American history, and it's a sad waste of one's rights under a democratic republic to skip the ethical question and jump straight to the legal question.
It's baffling to me that country like America with strong 1st amendment and freedom of speech culture has people who think a journalist should be put in prison.
So, now, a whistle-blower needs to have strong anonymity and privacy to pass information on, and the newspaper needs to be strong enough to protect its journalists. And when this might mean that the editor goes to jail (contempt laws?) that's a lot to ask.
But would any sane government push things that far? Locking up the editor of a newspaper for not handing over the name of a journalist?
(I'm about to web-search, but have any American journalists been jailed for not giving up the names of their sources?)
The question that keeps coming up is whether being a journalist means you get special privileges. It's hilarious that David Gregory suggests Glen Greenwald be charged with a crime, seeing as Gregory, it will be further recalled, illustrated an anti-gun law by violating it on the air.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3Hb6c2tWl0
So if you go along with the idea that a journalist gets special privileges, what defines a journalist? Is Ariana Huffington one? Howard Stern? How about Rush Limbaugh? How about a famous blogger? How about a not-so-famous blogger? An anchor for Fox News?
Hmm. For many, these are uncomfortable questions. After all, what happens when journalists fail to do their job, because they either can't get the info or won't report on it? Julian Assange is proof of that issue. Is he a journalist?
Once upon a time you just needed to be bureaucrat. Today the thing to be is a bureaucrat with a badge. Bruce Schneier calls this phenomenon "privilege escalation". He cites the example of transit cops whose main ambition was to drop the "transit" part of their job description.
It becomes a matter of "who you are" instead of equal application of the law to everybody.
Frankly I despise the idea that journalists should have a different set of rules from the rest of us. Equally-applied laws make should be beyond question ... I can't believe people are even arguing whether laws should be applied to everyone equally.
The companies behind an Investigative Journalist are ultimately responsible for the content they agree to publish through their respective channels. In the case of classified information, Greenwald received the information and ultimately it was vetted by others in his department what could and could not be published.
I hope they do arrest him. If that doesn't start some sort of rebellion then nothing will.
We already allowed Obama's administration to create laws that stop whistleblower's from coming out of the shadows. Now the law is 'murky' on the people that would report it in the first place?
What the hell happened to the country we (as in US Citizens) love? I didn't pledge allegiance to this? If anything this sounds like a government that is threatening our freedoms more than any domestic or international terrorists ever could!
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 142 ms ] threadI agree that the focus should be on the NSA, but hopefully all of the stories about the subject matter keep the topic in the public's thoughts. Possibly enough for some people to do more research and change their minds (from "All the way NSA!" to "Hmmm. Maybe they went too far").
Still, you have to agree that the MSM way too often derails the conversation towards personalism and unrelated issues and away from actual policy topics, usually following this or that agenda, just because novels sell better than political essays. This should be taught in journalism school, nowadays, but it's clearly not the case.
"Nowadays, all you do is hear the media's description of what the candidate is saying, and one of the strange things about it is that politics is now presented in terms of politicians and not politics. I don't think the media is interested in politics, they're interested in politicians, which is a wholly different subject... who's doing this, about their private life, about their background, about what they must be thinking, might be thinking when they said something, why did they say it; but what they say is very, very hard to hear. And I think this is, in a sense, indeed quite deliberately, destroying the genuine democratic base on which people are elected."
So I should let creationists speak on stage on the same level as everyone else?
There was an editorial by (I think) the EIC of Nature. In it he talks about how giving people the floor for discussion in some way validates their positions, no matter how absurd, so the best solution is simply not to give them the floor.
If someone knows what article I'm talking about , please link it, it was extremely interesting read.
This is the same line of reasoning that leads to fringe opinions being overrepresented in the name of "equal time". Journalism is about presenting facts in order of apparent importance, the channel editor picks the cutoff point, and the audience (vaguely) picks the seeds for the next iteration.
Lately there has been relatively less talk about what the security apparatus has done, and more about the people involved in the revealing of it. History won't care where Snowden is today, or whether Greenwald is successfully tarred and feathered. The only thing on the page is going to be that the third use of the Internet (after media delivery and catalog shopping) was spying on the entire world in a way that only a decade ago was inconceivable.
Not at all. Journalism is about presenting the truth. You're talking about journamalism.
On the same token, not reporting facts like, "some people are Holocaust-deniers," just because their views might be wrong seems to fit with the 'fact suppression' definition of 'journamalism.'
At best, it's extra noise in the signal. At worse, it's a annoying way of "reporting" by appealing to the emotions and fears of the lowest common denominator. It's no more journalism than tabloid trash in my opinion. Actually, I'd say it's worse as the unwashed masses latch on to arguments like this and may ignore more important topics either because their minds are full of crud, or because their emotional response has already been tweaked- i,e,. "I can't trust this guy, he's a muslim spy!"
Fair and balanced does not mean you have to mix facts and conjecture; that's what editorials are for. The problem is that journalism today blurs the lines between the two.
Halfway between the truth and a lie is still a lie.
Whether or not there are multiple legitimate sides to a debate that are best left to the discretion of the reader is something that depends on the facts of each particular story and is not something that can be assumed as some sort of metaphysical principle of journalism.
Did I say somewhere here that all articles on the Holocaust require an equal amount of time presenting the views of Holocaust-deniers? If not, then why assume that I'm making some sort of absolute statement?
I'd say a better candidate for Golden Rule of the Internet is the tendency of people to collapse meaningful distinctions, and think that policing those distinctions is pedantry relating to far-off hypotheticals, but not to instances of their own behavior.
My view, the journalists are in a self-centered way raising the question of whether Greenwald should be charged with a crime because they see their faces in the mirror of his face.
The boundaries the national security state is setting on journalism are still very fluid. The Obama administration, unfortunately, has changed the status quo of what kinds of leaks and sources will be prosecuted. It is having a chilling effect on insider journalism. Naturally all the insiders are curious about who will be called an outsider and what the fate of the outsider will be.
Whatever you make of the rest of his testimony (and whether he lied about investigating Rosen), it would be harder for him to go after journalists after saying that to Congress.
[1] http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2013/05/31/justice-dept...
Edit: Just wanted to add in a thought. The only thing keeping a lawless government from pulling stunts like this is the fear of citizen revolt, and even then they generally proceed if the projected revolution strength is sufficiently weak.
Except that's not what they're doing. People actually care about nuance, and things aren't black and white.
I understand the notion of having principle, but it's been several weeks now and we need to stop having arguments in absolutes and start actually talking about what actually happens, what is actually useful and what should be changed.
William Binney, a well-known NSA whistlebower, has stated that there are 10-20 such installations around the United States [2]
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
[2] http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/al...
Edit: FWIW I'm not the one downvoting you. I hardly ever do so, and when I do it's certainly not just out of disagreement
Moreover, such a large scale program really wouldn't centralize data in giant data center in Utah. When you're dealing with this much data, you need to process locally because the costs of transmitting data volumes that large is prohibitive.
This is pure conjecture on my part, but I would presume that the government doesn't have to rely on civilian infrastructure to transmit data.
So, are those cables marked on maps or with signs (like legit cables are)? Or can any idiot with a backhoe cripple this secret network at any time? It seems that a secret network would have much much lower operational reliability because of how many idiots we let drive backhoes in this country.
Seriously, have you not heard of dark fiber? It's quite common for a network owner not to "light" many of the fibers in a particular run. Sometimes, this is because the capacity is not needed, but it's also common that the network owner's customers prefer to run their own multiplexers. Those customers could include the NSA or whatever agency in the government. Many such agencies certainly have built multiple classified networks this way.
Your average backhoe operator doesn't know what's in the pipe any more than the Dig-Rite spraypaint guy or even AT&T technicians do. The sign just says, "Buried Cable: Call Before Digging". Of course sometimes cables get cut anyway. That's why excavators get bonded. That's also why networks that aren't designed by "idiots" are redundant.
And yes, I know about dark fiber. Dark fiber networks don't have traffic but they're still on maps and have warning signs around them. There's a difference between burying fiber without using it and keeping the existence of fiber totally secret.
I guess I don't see how we could have a parallel internet whose existence was unclassified that no one noticed until now.
The point is that the USA government leases a great deal of network capacity, both directly and indirectly through "cover" entities. Much of that is probably used to build any number of networks that carry "classified" data, including SIPRNet, NSANet, JWICS, and others so "dark" that we don't technically know they exist. Nobody would bother to deny the existence of these, nor the obvious fact that the actual fiber belongs to the same firms that own all other long-distance fiber: ATT, L3, XO, VZN, etc.
I suppose it's possible that some agencies operate the sort of "secret network" you were challenging, but since it costs at least ten times normal prices for spooks to do anything, they probably try to keep that self-built stuff to a minimum.
EDIT: Just so we're clear, the security of a network does not depend on no one knowing it exists or where it is. The NSA knows encryption: no one is going to "tap" their fiber and find out their deep dark secrets. A well-informed goat enthusiast with a backhoe could conduct a denial-of-service attack, but that doesn't scale and as I said these networks have redundancy built in.
The PRISM slide that mentiones splitting probably references the other program(s) that collect raw data.
Occam's Razor, people.
"The NSA spent more than 15 years working to develop the technology to tap these cable strands. The Navy has almost finished outfitting the nuclear-powered submarine USS Jimmy Carter with state-of-the-art technology for undersea fiber-optic taps, according to people knowledgeable about it."[0, Wall Street Journal, July 17, 2003]
[0]: http://cryptome.org/nsa-seatap.htm
[1] Bamford, Binney and the ACLU at Defcon 2012 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqIz-RNUL1g
It is interesting you note this. This seems to lend credence to the 'Brave New World' theory over the '1984' theory of how the American people feel about the government.
Note that present polling indicates Americans, while holding a positive opinion of Snowden, still feel he should be prosecuted.
Ultimately, the country does belong to you more for understanding the problems of eroding privacy rights more than someone who doesn't. One could argue that rioting would change the conversation in a productive way, but I expect it would further the cause of authoritarians if a group of people behind a minority viewpoint tried to advance their cause through the violence of rioting.
I firmly believe that democracy can only function with transparency and a free press, but those are means to democracy, not a goal in themselves. It makes no sense to wish for riots, which are intrinsically anti-democratic when not expressing the will of the majority, for the sake of making a country safer for democracy.
Much as when our country was torturing people, the problem is less that of a disobedient set of elected officials, and more that of some really bad ideas that are held by a large portion of the population. Unfortunately, right now the problem is not politicians who can be easily demonized, but a population that for now is largely ignorant about the power of data.
But I am saying that the normal democratic methods seem to fail us here -- this is a real "don't blame me, I voted for kodos" situation. If Obama, who was the most strident advocate against this stuff out of both parties in the 2008 primaries (except for maybe Kucinich), doesn't follow through on this stuff, what are the democratic options?
America wouldn't have lasted very long if a minority group set the cities on fire each and every single time an unpopular decision was made public.
P.S. the democratic options involve letting your representatives and elected officials know that you are pissed, whether that's through letters, complaining to the media, peaceful protests, or all of the above.
Sometimes the people don't naturally do what jbooth personally feels is right for the entire nation. Welcome to Democracy.
I've knocked on probably 1,000 doors and made probably 5,000 phone calls for democrats over the last 10 years. I'm not some slacktivist, and I'm not saying that the whole world needs to agree with me, although the accusation of arrogance is well taken.
We've seen no evidence that Obama changed anything about NSA wiretapping and a fair amount of circumstantial evidence that he probably didn't (how those drone strikes coming, and the medicinal marijuana crackdown)?
When someone runs and is elected by a majority as being "the opposite of Bush", it'd be nice if he actually did something different.
The FISA was changed to require warrants in 2008 (though Obama was a Senator then, not sure what part he played in that as I don't remember the discussion from the time it occurred). The "watch list" the NSA was using was gigantic when Obama took office and was shrunk down to focus on those who might actually impact national security.
> how those drone strikes coming
Better than what we used to do, invade entire countries and drop 1000kg JDAMs everywhere, which involved far more "collateral damage".
That is, of course, unless you're saying that we should simply wait until a group blows up something in America and then go destroy whatever state the operational cell was working out of. I personally prefer disrupting the cell and leaving the state intact (as do the states that we surreptitiously work with...) as it involves less human sacrifice on both sides, but that might just be me.
> the medicinal marijuana crackdown
Yeah, I got nothing. The sooner we move away from giving a shit about marijuana the better, as far as I'm concerned.
> When someone runs and is elected by a majority as being "the opposite of Bush"
They were both "opposite of Bush" so I hope you had more in mind than that when you voted. As it stands though, if you think Obama is just like Bush then you might want to re-evaluate history, as time has a habit of helping us forget the bad and remember the good. There was a reason that as far back as 2004 that Bush was already well down the road toward becoming the most unpopular President in decades, and that's because there was much worse things going on than drones...
No, it wasn't. FISA always required warrants for certain surveillance, and the 2008 FISA Amendment Act increased the time period for warrantless surveillance, and added new exceptions to the warrant requirements, and it explicitly blocked investigations of illegal wiretapping that had occurred before the Act.
And then go read the damn law for myself. (Perhaps it's a good thing I mentioned Obama wasn't President at that time. :O)
The electorate is uninformed and easily manipulated. Bias in the news media is generally to support the status quo and not rock the boat. Lively debate occurs mostly for easily understood and emotional issues. Covering complex issues with complex answers is not a winning strategy for aggressive ad revenue goals.
With an uninformed and easily manipulated electorate, elections are largely influenced by money. Corporations and wealthy people contribute the most money to election campaigns, and therefore have a significant amount of influence over policy decisions and positions. Gerrymandering is also a huge problem and further reduces the amount of debate and competition during elections.
Lawrence Lessig (through rootstrikers.org) is a pioneer in raising awareness on how damaging the above situation is to a healthy functioning democracy. Awareness is the best thing we can do to improve the situation. If you're interested, check out this TED Talk that Lessig did: http://www.ted.com/talks/lawrence_lessig_we_the_people_and_t...
If the latter, the process is slower and more complicated. A starting point would be writing and paying visits to decision makers. My impression has been that the lack of communication from U.S. citizens to D.C. has left decision makers with the impression that this is, at most, a foreign relations problem.
Not all elites are in D.C., mind you. Speak with influential and high profile individuals you know. Encourage them to bring this up in the media or at the next conference they are at.
Sound difficult? Convincing people to change the status quo should be. Rioting to short-circuit this process is the equivalent of dialectical violence. Less charitably, it is the making of noise and commotion in the hope that someone else will pick up the baton and do the leg-work for you.
There's a difference believing that this type of surveillance is good and believing that Snowden should be prosecuted for leaking in the way that he did.
A more pointed example might be: indiscriminate surveillance can be used by corrupt officials for political persecution of their domestic political enemies. Look no further than the recent IRS scandal to see the willingness and ability of people in positions of power using the levers of power against political opponents, even when the stakes are low or petty. The NSA database of information represents an unbelievable trove of opportunity for the very real prospect of the arbitrary abuse of political power, both by people within the U.S. government and by anyone who manages to illicitly gain access to that information (e.g. foreign hackers—and there's some evidence that Chinese hacking attempts on Google were aimed at the interface Google set up to provide information to the government).
1.) There is a legitimate need for classified information within a government;
2.) The purpose of classified information is not to cover up illegal activities by the government.
So when it comes to revealing classified information, if it is done to expose a crime, I think the US public generally supports that. But in this case, near as I can tell, no crime was exposed. Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't PRISM conducted within the bounds of the law?
So now there's the question of whether or not PRISM should have been legal, and whether or not exposing classified information to put a spotlight on that discussion is legit. And I don't know how I feel about that let alone what the public at large thinks about it.
Remember, even the Stasi was legal. But no, these programs violate the 4th amendment.
I fully expect this program to be upheld by the courts if it ever gets that far, but that's because I think the courts are largely corrupt, not because I think it's actually being done in a legal and constitutional manner.
The government has been tracking postal letters and packages for decades. They don't open your letters (that we know of), but they certainly look at the to and from addresses and keep track of who is sending what.
Do you think this is a violation of your fourth amendment rights? Do you have a reasonable expectation to privacy for something you write on the outside of an envelope and drop in a public receptacle?
The government is essentially claiming that they're doing the same thing with phone and email records. They're keeping track of who is communicating with who, but not monitoring the contents of the communication for US citizens.
(And yeah, whether they are actually monitoring the contents of the communications is now up for debate, but the government's position is still that they don't monitor contents).
For one, if you write an encrypted letter, the government (at least not to my knowledge) doesn't claim the right to keep it indefinitely just in case you're using it to communicate with your terrorist buddies.
You can send letters without return addresses.
You don't have to use the recipient's real name when sending a letter.
Writing something on the outside of the letter makes it publicly visible, and thus carries no expectation of privacy. Writing an email to your friend is the electronic equivalent of a private one on one conversation, and thus carries an expectation of privacy. If you had wanted the government to know about it, you would have CC'd the NSA.
I can see why the government would take this position, as it portrays them in a more favorable light, but it's misdirection more than explanation.
It's hard enough to figure out the truth of an issue as it is, without switching the issue in the middle of the discussion.
I mean, that's what we would say when the RIAA comes at us saying that IP address umpty-squat was used to download a movie, right? "Must have been my neighbor on my Wifi". "My friend was browsing my laptop".
But either way, that's why the NSA must get a separate subpoena to get the subscriber information for a given phone number, if they don't already have it from earlier. And only after that can they get a warrant to allow for grabbing the data itself.
Secondly, given that it is quite common for DHCP to give a single computer different addresses and nothing like that happens to phone numbers (which are intended to be persistent and not transient identifiers), I don't think your analogy works.
Tim B Lee is HN's Rush Limbaugh, getting people into a lather about things that might happen (in the sense that they wouldn't violate any laws of physics) and getting them to freak out about that.
If Americans had looked at the programs that preceded PRISM and the motivation behind them and instead asked "is this ethical?" we wouldn't now be asking "is this legal?". All sorts of crimes (in the ethical sense) have been legal throughout American history, and it's a sad waste of one's rights under a democratic republic to skip the ethical question and jump straight to the legal question.
So, now, a whistle-blower needs to have strong anonymity and privacy to pass information on, and the newspaper needs to be strong enough to protect its journalists. And when this might mean that the editor goes to jail (contempt laws?) that's a lot to ask.
But would any sane government push things that far? Locking up the editor of a newspaper for not handing over the name of a journalist?
(I'm about to web-search, but have any American journalists been jailed for not giving up the names of their sources?)
With the War on Terror coming home, should Americans expect special treatment?
So if you go along with the idea that a journalist gets special privileges, what defines a journalist? Is Ariana Huffington one? Howard Stern? How about Rush Limbaugh? How about a famous blogger? How about a not-so-famous blogger? An anchor for Fox News?
Hmm. For many, these are uncomfortable questions. After all, what happens when journalists fail to do their job, because they either can't get the info or won't report on it? Julian Assange is proof of that issue. Is he a journalist?
Once upon a time you just needed to be bureaucrat. Today the thing to be is a bureaucrat with a badge. Bruce Schneier calls this phenomenon "privilege escalation". He cites the example of transit cops whose main ambition was to drop the "transit" part of their job description.
Fascinating commentary here: http://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2013/06/24/do-you-know-w...
It becomes a matter of "who you are" instead of equal application of the law to everybody.
Frankly I despise the idea that journalists should have a different set of rules from the rest of us. Equally-applied laws make should be beyond question ... I can't believe people are even arguing whether laws should be applied to everyone equally.
Especially defenders of the 1st amendment.
We already allowed Obama's administration to create laws that stop whistleblower's from coming out of the shadows. Now the law is 'murky' on the people that would report it in the first place?
What the hell happened to the country we (as in US Citizens) love? I didn't pledge allegiance to this? If anything this sounds like a government that is threatening our freedoms more than any domestic or international terrorists ever could!