So, the rest of the world is "shocked, shocked I tell you" that the US is monitoring the internet? Does anyone really believe there aren't similar entities in other countries doing the same?
I bet all the world's governments can be divided into just two groups: those that are monitoring the internet, and those that are trying to.
There aren't many other world governments that yield the same kind of international power on the Internet. You might have a point about governments in general, but I think the situation actually gets better if no single government can wiretap on such a large scale.
That being said, the tone of your comment makes me think you are not interested in an argument, but rather just want to deflect attention away from what the USG is doing. Because everybody is doing it, right?
Here's my interpretation of GP: since every governmental org wants to snoop, it is not enough to "break away" from the US* because it doesn't solve the underlying problem: insecure internet. Let's find solutions that presuppose the government is trying to snoop.
*Unless you don't mind being snooped on by your own government.
> That being said, the tone of your comment makes me think you are not interested in an argument, but rather just want to deflect attention away from what the USG is doing. Because everybody is doing it, right?
Quite the opposite. In no way am I trying to excuse what the US is doing or say that it is "right" in any way, shape, or form. I think what the US government is doing in terms of internet surveillance is unequivocally wrong.
The issue is: viewing it as a US-only problem will lead to everyone being vulnerable to similar surveillance from other parts of the world. Countries which are currently grandstanding about the US's actions are almost certainly motivated in part by wanting to deflect attention from the fact that they are either already using similar systems, or scrambling to build them.
Freedom from internet surveillance should be viewed as a human right that applies no matter where one lives. Framing it as "the US vs. everyone else" leaves everyone wide open. Before the Snowden leaks came out, there was widespread skepticism about the reach of the US's internet surveillance. Now that that skepticism has been (hopefully permanently) dissolved, I find it strange that there is any skepticism left in regards to other governments.
If people want to leave "America's Internet," the logical next question is: where would they go? So whether other national governments are doing the same thing is directly relevant. If they are, then nothing will be gained by leaving one surveillor for another.
The big difference between the US and other countries is the way it projects itself. There is a history of subjecting foreigners to the vagaries of American justice (extraordinary rendition, Kim Dotcom). America presumes to extend its sovereignty across the entire globe in the interest of self defense. This makes people worried. If China was extraditing Americans to Beijing and making them stand trial with evidence based on intercepts the US Government would go ballistic.
As you say, it's likely that most governments monitor domestic internet communication to some degree. It's very unlikely that any government but that of the US is trying to monitor international internet communication in its totality.
So the two groups you are looking for are: those that monitor the internet domestically, and those that monitor the internet internationally. The US (with assistance from a few allies) is the only country to fall into the second group.
I would assume any country with a big enough economy/budget is monitoring international internet communication in its totality. Or at least attempting it. Of course there's really only a hand full of nations that could likely pull it off.. This list is obviously purely speculation but in the game are probably: China, Russia, Germany, UK, maybe India.
The point is that the American government have no right to monitor my communications with a website outside the US, given I live in the UK (we'll ignore that I work for an American company for a bit).
If the UK government decides they need to monitor my communications, fair enough. I am, afterall, subject to UK law.
Is there any check/balance on the definition of "criminal threat"? Because that's a pretty loose definition a priori.
"We believe a terrorist exists in GB. That constitutes a criminal threat. To catch him or her, we need to run big data analysis on all communications."
Does anyone really believe there aren't similar entities in other countries doing the same?
This argument is often used, and it's a bad one because it ignores that there are different levels of surveillance. No one is saying that other countries don't respond to illegal stuff going on on the Internet. But not every country in the world has opted for the all-out, monitor-every-law-abiding-citizen thing that NSA is doing.
Save for the UK, I can't think of a single Western European country that goes to the extreme lengths of surveillance that the US does.
> Save for the UK, I can't think of a single Western European country that goes to the extreme lengths of surveillance that the US does.
People were equally skeptical about the extent of the US's surveillance until the Snowden revelations. It always seems far-fetched ... right up until the moment it doesn't.
The big difference is that in the years before the Snowden revelations there were a lot of signs of things going on (e.g. when Washington Post revealed that 800,000 people worked in US intelligence and had a high security clearance [1] ). Signs as big as that have not been present for the EU, even when you count in Echelon.
> "Does anyone really believe there aren't similar entities in other countries doing the same?"
Do you believe anyone except maybe the Chinese government has a system like FOXACID for deploying exploits? Do you believe that there are more than a handful of governments spending what it takes to develop their own zero-day exploits? Do you believe any other government than the US has built out the backhaul needed for global dragnet surveillance?
The US spends more than the rest of the world combined on weapons and intelligence.
Some guy in the Latvian secret police might wish they had an NSA, but all they've got is a potato.
> I bet all the world's governments can be divided into just two groups: those that are monitoring the internet, and those that are trying to.
Which is even more reason for people to use strong encryption. And for states to, if they think their traffic might be read by someone with conflicting interests to theirs.
If my government is spying on me, at least i can try to change this, by voting, by pushing popular laws to my country congress.. If its overseas.. how can i change that?
Are the democracy of US listening what its own people has to say?
as somebody looking from the outside, it looks the answer is that is not.. perhaps the government are too busy listening to the elite class, that have their own agenda, and as long they are taking some profit out of it, its fine.. (but as a plus, and to our shame, in what country that is NOT the reality)
If its my government at least i can try to make them be reasonable in some way.. as im a citizen;
But how can we do that if we are not the citizen of the country who is abusing and breaking what we think is our civil rights? Can we citizens of all others countries spied by NSA knock on the doors of the white house?
So the "Your country are doing the same" line of thinking so popular here doesnt stick.. Sorry Pal
That might be how it's being played - the NSA surveillance is a useful story to push individual countries agendas, but what they're really after is complete control of domestic communications. It's not countries "breaking free from the US", rather the beginning of the balkanization of the internet.
Back to the good old days when all communications where under the countrys PTT and in third world country's was a nice source of foreign cash to be spirited away to a Swiss banck account.
Thats why Postmaster general was such a plum Job in that sort of country.
The article could be less fluffy. I believe the most concrete piece is:
Another portion of their [Directors of all major Internet organizations present at the Uruguay meeting] released statement asked to accelerate “the globalization of ICANN and IANA functions, towards an environment in which all stakeholders, including all governments, participate on an equal footing.”
Sounds more like "wrestling the centralized control from" rather than "breaking up".
3. encourage end-to-end encryption. If all the US sees is encrypted traffic, it makes it a lot harder for the NSA to extract useful information from it.
Yes, I was going to mention that but first you need #2 done since, as we have seen with Lavabit, End to End encryption is no good if one end can be forced to surrender their keys.
That applies much less to non-US entities communicating to other non-US entities who happen to have significant bandwidth between them running through the United States.
> since, as we have seen with Lavabit, End to End encryption is no good if one end can be forced to surrender their keys.
I'm not sure I made myself clear: my position is that the encryption needs to be done on each end-user's PC, not on some centralised service such as Lavabit.
While the USA could extract the secrets from one person, if that person is living in the USA, it is harder fro them to do so to people outside the USA. Although they could burgle people's houses and extract information that way, it doesn't scale and they certainly couldn't do it to all the people in a country.
Ah right, I do not consider that a feasible thing right now.
How would facebook (or the non US equivalent) work if data was encrypted on everyone's PC. There is no PKI that would support that at the moment (Although a social network that also acts as a PKI is an interesting idea.)
China has done this with their Great Firewall and web firms such as Baidu (search engine), QQ (like Facebook), Weibo (like Twitter), etc. I believe EU and Russia also have the capability to do the same if they want to. For the rest of the world, they can license a copy from one of the three and host their own server farms.
This is not a bright future to have though: the Internet would become an actual inter-net among a few huge LANs.
China is way ahead of the game... that's for sure. There's no arguing that.
But the rest of the world is pretty dependent on the US when it comes to the internet. This include the EU and Russia. And this is not something that is trivial to change.
I am not saying that it WON'T change... I'm saying that for the rest of the world to create a China-like internet for their citizens may be desirable, but it won't be easy.
I mean... if I was Brazilian, I would much rather the Brazilian Government watched my internet usage than to have the American Government do so. Because the American Government can put you on a No-Fly list and you have no recourse. (ie - no rights in US Courts). Consequently, you have no easy way off of that list.
So I understand the desire... I just think it will be more difficult than flipping a switch.
But - the American government probably isn't going to care if you say terrible things about your own, or if you're looking at porn, or cheating on taxes or denying the holocaust, or about any number of things that could get you into trouble on your home turf.
I'm not saying America in this case isn't a threat, it is abstractly, but it can also be the lesser evil.
Instead of using services under authority of US sovereignty. We can all use services under authority of our own governments. True freedom will be reached then.
I get what you're saying. I do notice that myself is getting more cynical nowadays. On the positive side though you can push changes to your own government, while there is nothing you can do to the USA.
I think there are a number of self-serving incentives for countries to pursue a "national firewall" model. Many of the same governments which (justifiably though maybe also cynically) decry the scope of US surveillance would probably welcome a closed network which makes it easier to perform their own domestic surveillance while appearing to liberate their people from the bogeyman of American tyranny. Content filtering (censorship) and national version of "American" sites like Facebook and Google (of course, all of which would filter money and data back to the motherland) are win-wins for the state as well.
Governments on the 'same footing' vs. human beings on the 'same footing?' I respect people everywhere sure; but dictator x is not deserving of disproportionate influence.
Outside the US the internet is under the worst sort of attack. Filtering, censorship, and worse. Even in the most free countries in Europe or Asia the idea of an unrestricted, unfiltered, uncensored is under forceful attack. In countries like China, India, Turkey, or Russia the internet is already censored or filtered. In other places like the UK, France, and Australia plans for filtering and censorship are gaining steam.
Meanwhile, the idea that other countries are not pervasively snooping on all manner of internet communications is simply a fiction. Indeed, many such programs outside the US have been well known since before revelations of NSA internet surveillance came to light.
I'm not sure which is more deserving of ire. The assholes in the US government who abused and overstepped their authority and in the process validated every single fear (rational or not) about the US being so central to the internet. Or, the fools who are running away from one threat, US surveillance, right into the arms of a vastly more serious threat, local government censorship.
The idea of a free and open internet still existing a decade from now seems to be slipping out of our hands by the moment.
>> "Or, the fools who are running away from one threat, US surveillance, right into the arms of a vastly more serious threat, local government censorship."
How do you judge which is more serious? For example you mentioned the UK. The only censorship/filtering here is for two things: piracy and porn. ISP's have to block The Pirate Bay (easy to get around through a proxy) and when you sign up for internet some ISP's ask "do you want us to run our filtering software to protect your children from porn?". You say "no" and they don't filter. Those things don't bother me at all. US surveillance does.
Those things don't bother me at all. US surveillance does.
The UK has surpassed the US in surveillance - the Tempora program attempts to capture all traffic in the UK and store it as long as possible.
The only censorship/filtering here is for two things: piracy and porn.
That's not quite true - along with self-censorship, there are huge areas (for example surveillance) which cannot be discussed in an open way in the UK because of government pressure (D-Notices, threats of legal action etc).
That's not quite true - along with self-censorship, there are huge areas (for example surveillance) which cannot be discussed in an open way in the UK because of government pressure (D-Notices, threats of legal action etc).
Sorry are you suggesting that we in the UK can't have an open discussion on surveillance?
Right. They're only filtering for porn and piracy, no big deal of course. But then again, the NSA is only looking for terrorists, right? If you're not a terrorist, then that's no big deal either.
Right?
Do you understand the problem or do I need to explain more clearly?
I too live in the UK, and it seems to me you are forgetting two things. Number one is the UK governments complicity in spying on UK citizens; and number two is that once the systems are in place to filter porn (and lets not forget how badly they will probably perform), who knows what else they will start censoring.
I definitely have a problem with UK spying - and I didn't forget about it. I was responding to the parents idea that local government censorship is much more serious than the extreme surveillance we've recently been made aware of. I'm more worried about the surveillance than the censorship. Obviously with the censorship we have the problem you've mentioned ("who knows what else they will start censoring") but I think that's something citizens actually have a chance fighting against. The internet isn't the only way of distributing information. If the government wants to censor something it's going to be very, very hard. As we've seen with the surveillance there is little we can do - the governments aren't listening to their citizens and doing something as extreme as stopping using the internet isn't enough to stop yourself being surveilled.
No surveillance agency in the world has the resources or the technical know-how or easy access to a selection of the world's finest companies offering Internet-enabled services and operating systems and standardization committees for encryption algorithms. The US government also has the longest arm in terms of demands it can make to other governments. And us foreigners have no chance of fighting the NSA, because we aren't US citizens, remember? (surprise, us foreigners have feelings too)
And "filtering, censorship and worse" happens in spite of US governance. So we have to worry about the US government, in addition to local threats. Because 1 + 1 = 2.
And don't get me wrong, we never trusted the US government, but we trusted US companies to do the right thing, given your strong and stable Constitution. But apparently your government found ways to coerce your companies into doing whatever they want and make you shut up about it. And that's why it's not the US government's governance I'd worry about, but rather I'd worry about the bottom line of your companies that have brought so much innovation and that are going to get punished in the international marketplace while not being guilty.
The US really needs to do something to repair their image and fast. And statements such as yours really do seem disingenuous or ignorant about what this whole thing means for us and does nothing to repair the loss of trust.
I am reminded of the ITU meeting a few months ago, where they wanted to make content filtering by nations easier to do, and the adoption of a "sender pays" billing scheme. As well as remove ICANN from under the US aegis.
As bad as the NSA vacuum is, it's a problem that can be solved under the current system.
I wonder if history will look back at this as the decade the USA lost "governance" of the "free" world / leadership among nations. US Dollars losing defacto currency of the world status. Internet balkinization in response to spying. China and India overtaking US as places to make money selling consumerism. Leading up to now; no more unifying USSR threat -> NATO's lack of relevance, growth of EU, USA near unilateral military actions and wars.
The world is rapidly realizing not only do they not need the USA anymore, they are better off without it.
That is a lovely fantasy but the world is run by grownups. Intelligence like defense has been outsourced to the US and Europe shows no signs of resuming their own defense. I think you will be in for few disappointing decades, probably longer.
Methinks Europe is realizing that a) most of that defense and intelligence is aimed at enemies created by the US in the first place, and b) outsourcing defense to a nation that massively violates the civil rights of European citizens is about as appropriate as outsourcing protection to the mafia.
Yeah, violating the civil rights of Europeans should be done by European governments only - they all have similar spying programs in place, and have had them for a while now.
They are probably pretty concerned about the appearance of being concerned, however.
> Intelligence like defense has been outsourced to the US and Europe shows no signs of resuming their own defense.
Disclaimer: Brazilian here.
This is where you don't get it: there is a growing gap on what "defence" means to the US and the rest of the world. And this is precisely where the problems arise. Gradually the US will have to spend more and more to protect national interests that no one else cares about. Eventually the costs will outweigh the gains. This is part of the story of the British Empire fall.
G.W. Bush also thought that "America can go alone". Then he discovered that military power is too expensive to be the only way to implement hegemony. You also need the "soft power", the ability to persuade people without using guns. This is precisely where US power is eroding.
If we didn't protect the border between North and South Korea with several tens of thousands of troops each year for the past 6 decades; there are many popular brands of electronics and cars that would probably not exist today.
Talking specifically about troops, I don't buy it - we have more troops than needed as a 'tripwire' to warn of an attack, but nowhere near enough to repel a full-on North Korean assault.
When we start embedding sensors and microchips in our bodies, it'll suck when we ctrl-alt-delete on the running processes in our bodies, and see Google Play Services in the task manager. Try to kill it and it pops back in your sleep. I just hope the current passive evil ever-present corporate interests aren't forced upon us at the biological level. I don't want my body violated by the NSA.
'Murica has some good points but it's a pretty destructive and unsustainable culture. I'm also worried about the fact that they have no qualms about blowing up people with drones or sending people to shady prisons without trial. You might say that China and Russia are worse, but they have nowhere near the power and technical possibilities open to Murcans.
You confuse decisions by government with those of the American people.
I can assure you, as an American, I have qualms about blowing up people with anything, including drones... and I hold due process to be one of the most fundamental human rights.
I wonder what impact this will have on cloud service providers.. I guess an opportunity for cloud vendors to develop "national cloud" - a public cloud inaccessible outside a particular country/region/state etc.
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[ 5.8 ms ] story [ 148 ms ] threadI bet all the world's governments can be divided into just two groups: those that are monitoring the internet, and those that are trying to.
That being said, the tone of your comment makes me think you are not interested in an argument, but rather just want to deflect attention away from what the USG is doing. Because everybody is doing it, right?
> Does anyone really believe there aren't similar entities in other countries doing the same?
*Unless you don't mind being snooped on by your own government.
Quite the opposite. In no way am I trying to excuse what the US is doing or say that it is "right" in any way, shape, or form. I think what the US government is doing in terms of internet surveillance is unequivocally wrong.
The issue is: viewing it as a US-only problem will lead to everyone being vulnerable to similar surveillance from other parts of the world. Countries which are currently grandstanding about the US's actions are almost certainly motivated in part by wanting to deflect attention from the fact that they are either already using similar systems, or scrambling to build them.
Freedom from internet surveillance should be viewed as a human right that applies no matter where one lives. Framing it as "the US vs. everyone else" leaves everyone wide open. Before the Snowden leaks came out, there was widespread skepticism about the reach of the US's internet surveillance. Now that that skepticism has been (hopefully permanently) dissolved, I find it strange that there is any skepticism left in regards to other governments.
So the two groups you are looking for are: those that monitor the internet domestically, and those that monitor the internet internationally. The US (with assistance from a few allies) is the only country to fall into the second group.
If the UK government decides they need to monitor my communications, fair enough. I am, afterall, subject to UK law.
"We believe a terrorist exists in GB. That constitutes a criminal threat. To catch him or her, we need to run big data analysis on all communications."
This argument is often used, and it's a bad one because it ignores that there are different levels of surveillance. No one is saying that other countries don't respond to illegal stuff going on on the Internet. But not every country in the world has opted for the all-out, monitor-every-law-abiding-citizen thing that NSA is doing.
Save for the UK, I can't think of a single Western European country that goes to the extreme lengths of surveillance that the US does.
People were equally skeptical about the extent of the US's surveillance until the Snowden revelations. It always seems far-fetched ... right up until the moment it doesn't.
1) http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/articl...
Do you believe anyone except maybe the Chinese government has a system like FOXACID for deploying exploits? Do you believe that there are more than a handful of governments spending what it takes to develop their own zero-day exploits? Do you believe any other government than the US has built out the backhaul needed for global dragnet surveillance?
The US spends more than the rest of the world combined on weapons and intelligence.
Some guy in the Latvian secret police might wish they had an NSA, but all they've got is a potato.
Which is even more reason for people to use strong encryption. And for states to, if they think their traffic might be read by someone with conflicting interests to theirs.
Are the democracy of US listening what its own people has to say? as somebody looking from the outside, it looks the answer is that is not.. perhaps the government are too busy listening to the elite class, that have their own agenda, and as long they are taking some profit out of it, its fine.. (but as a plus, and to our shame, in what country that is NOT the reality)
If its my government at least i can try to make them be reasonable in some way.. as im a citizen;
But how can we do that if we are not the citizen of the country who is abusing and breaking what we think is our civil rights? Can we citizens of all others countries spied by NSA knock on the doors of the white house?
So the "Your country are doing the same" line of thinking so popular here doesnt stick.. Sorry Pal
People from all over the world have been contributing to the development of the internet, web, computers et cetera. Yet, it is America's Internet.
Thats why Postmaster general was such a plum Job in that sort of country.
Another portion of their [Directors of all major Internet organizations present at the Uruguay meeting] released statement asked to accelerate “the globalization of ICANN and IANA functions, towards an environment in which all stakeholders, including all governments, participate on an equal footing.”
Sounds more like "wrestling the centralized control from" rather than "breaking up".
1. Start laying (more) cables between countries that do not pass through US territory. [1]
2. Encourage home-grown innovation and services so that people are not all using services under authority of US sovereignty.
[1] And try and stop the US from tapping them...
Good luck...
I'm not sure I made myself clear: my position is that the encryption needs to be done on each end-user's PC, not on some centralised service such as Lavabit.
While the USA could extract the secrets from one person, if that person is living in the USA, it is harder fro them to do so to people outside the USA. Although they could burgle people's houses and extract information that way, it doesn't scale and they certainly couldn't do it to all the people in a country.
How would facebook (or the non US equivalent) work if data was encrypted on everyone's PC. There is no PKI that would support that at the moment (Although a social network that also acts as a PKI is an interesting idea.)
Lavabit was the middleman in the communication, not the end; or was it?
Also territories that have data sharing deals and probably most allies.
China has done this with their Great Firewall and web firms such as Baidu (search engine), QQ (like Facebook), Weibo (like Twitter), etc. I believe EU and Russia also have the capability to do the same if they want to. For the rest of the world, they can license a copy from one of the three and host their own server farms.
This is not a bright future to have though: the Internet would become an actual inter-net among a few huge LANs.
But the rest of the world is pretty dependent on the US when it comes to the internet. This include the EU and Russia. And this is not something that is trivial to change.
I am not saying that it WON'T change... I'm saying that for the rest of the world to create a China-like internet for their citizens may be desirable, but it won't be easy.
I mean... if I was Brazilian, I would much rather the Brazilian Government watched my internet usage than to have the American Government do so. Because the American Government can put you on a No-Fly list and you have no recourse. (ie - no rights in US Courts). Consequently, you have no easy way off of that list.
So I understand the desire... I just think it will be more difficult than flipping a switch.
The American government could put you on a No-Fly list, but your own government could put you in a cage.
So can the American Government.
The difference is...
if your own Government puts you in a cage...
you actually have rights.
I'm not saying America in this case isn't a threat, it is abstractly, but it can also be the lesser evil.
/sarcasm
No, he wasn't. ICANN appoints its own President/CEO. There is no US confirmation of that position. None.
Everyone. Everywhere.
Unconscionable asses.
Outside the US the internet is under the worst sort of attack. Filtering, censorship, and worse. Even in the most free countries in Europe or Asia the idea of an unrestricted, unfiltered, uncensored is under forceful attack. In countries like China, India, Turkey, or Russia the internet is already censored or filtered. In other places like the UK, France, and Australia plans for filtering and censorship are gaining steam.
Meanwhile, the idea that other countries are not pervasively snooping on all manner of internet communications is simply a fiction. Indeed, many such programs outside the US have been well known since before revelations of NSA internet surveillance came to light.
I'm not sure which is more deserving of ire. The assholes in the US government who abused and overstepped their authority and in the process validated every single fear (rational or not) about the US being so central to the internet. Or, the fools who are running away from one threat, US surveillance, right into the arms of a vastly more serious threat, local government censorship.
The idea of a free and open internet still existing a decade from now seems to be slipping out of our hands by the moment.
How do you judge which is more serious? For example you mentioned the UK. The only censorship/filtering here is for two things: piracy and porn. ISP's have to block The Pirate Bay (easy to get around through a proxy) and when you sign up for internet some ISP's ask "do you want us to run our filtering software to protect your children from porn?". You say "no" and they don't filter. Those things don't bother me at all. US surveillance does.
The UK has surpassed the US in surveillance - the Tempora program attempts to capture all traffic in the UK and store it as long as possible.
The only censorship/filtering here is for two things: piracy and porn.
That's not quite true - along with self-censorship, there are huge areas (for example surveillance) which cannot be discussed in an open way in the UK because of government pressure (D-Notices, threats of legal action etc).
Sorry are you suggesting that we in the UK can't have an open discussion on surveillance?
Right?
Do you understand the problem or do I need to explain more clearly?
[edit: grey-area has said it better than me]
And "filtering, censorship and worse" happens in spite of US governance. So we have to worry about the US government, in addition to local threats. Because 1 + 1 = 2.
And don't get me wrong, we never trusted the US government, but we trusted US companies to do the right thing, given your strong and stable Constitution. But apparently your government found ways to coerce your companies into doing whatever they want and make you shut up about it. And that's why it's not the US government's governance I'd worry about, but rather I'd worry about the bottom line of your companies that have brought so much innovation and that are going to get punished in the international marketplace while not being guilty.
The US really needs to do something to repair their image and fast. And statements such as yours really do seem disingenuous or ignorant about what this whole thing means for us and does nothing to repair the loss of trust.
As bad as the NSA vacuum is, it's a problem that can be solved under the current system.
The world is rapidly realizing not only do they not need the USA anymore, they are better off without it.
They are probably pretty concerned about the appearance of being concerned, however.
Disclaimer: Brazilian here.
This is where you don't get it: there is a growing gap on what "defence" means to the US and the rest of the world. And this is precisely where the problems arise. Gradually the US will have to spend more and more to protect national interests that no one else cares about. Eventually the costs will outweigh the gains. This is part of the story of the British Empire fall.
G.W. Bush also thought that "America can go alone". Then he discovered that military power is too expensive to be the only way to implement hegemony. You also need the "soft power", the ability to persuade people without using guns. This is precisely where US power is eroding.
I can assure you, as an American, I have qualms about blowing up people with anything, including drones... and I hold due process to be one of the most fundamental human rights.