it's hitting the fan

[zyxt9]

Red, you don't think this has been overblown? You knew this was going on all this time, no?

People are acting like their privacy has been stripped away when in reality they post far more about themselves on Facebook or other online sites, or send info to numerous people via email that only requires the recipient to post those things on Facebook, or Forward to their contacts. They are throwing up all of this stuff into the ePublic yet are upset that the government has computers searching for keywords.

Here's an analogy as to how ridiculous this whole thing has become. When walking down the street you are in Public Domain, which is what allows the paparazzi to get so many photos of celebrities for free. Suppose you happen to be walking behind the celebrity and now your image appears in print, right? Typically not. Why? Because the editors have photoshopped you out because your image isn't of importance. Likewise, the government is focused on terrorists, not people who are just going about their daily life. Maybe you briefly fall under their scope, but because you are of no value, you get filtered out.

Now you might think you are not in the Public Domain when making phone calls or sending emails; however, you did not pay for and setup a truly Private and Secure connection before corresponding. You may have assumed you were, but that was naive when you know the NSA has been doing this type of thing since the day the agency was created.

Isn't it better that the government have the ability to analyze the data and filter out the inconsequentials than to not have it? This is NOT a free-for-all surveillance, it is a structured query that must meet specific criteria prior to being granted access by the courts. Come to think of it, this whole thing probably gained traction after the Boston bombing. Didn't authorities go back and review these records to search for possible additional terrorists? Isn't it a good thing that they had that ability? Was anyone unjustly or illegally mistreated from that?

As for Ben Franklin's quote, do you think for a second that he didn't intercept messages or do whatever it took in order to gain the trust of the French, or even the upperhand in negotiations with others? He obtained any and all bits of information he possibly could from any and all possible resources to gain even the slightest of advantages, at every opportunity. His skill at doing so was a major factor in his being chosen to go to France and convince the monarchy to aid the Revolutionaries.

 

[zyxt9]

just a little food for thought: should read up on COINTELPRO... right-wing police state enthusiasts might not see the problem with it, but that is the problem.

or read about Jean Seberg ("Seberg is also one of the best-known targets of the FBI COINTELPRO project. Her victimization was rendered as a well-documented retaliation for her support of civil rights and activist groups in the 1960s.") At which point do they stop serving to protect Americans and actually start harming them outright?!

or this quote from Senator Frank Church (of the Church Committee), 1975:

?Th[e National Security Agency's] capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn?t matter. There would be no place to hide. [If a dictator ever took over, the N.S.A.] could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back.?
​

link:

As James Bamford wrote about Church?s reaction to his own findings about the NSA?s capabilities, ?he came away stunned.? At the time, Church also said: ?I don?t want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.?
​

It might help your cause if you could list the eggregious ways in which such surveillance has been misused since this quote was made in 1975. How many people were or are in prison or illegally mistreated in any way since that time?

 

[Michchamp]

It might help your cause if you could list the eggregious ways in which such surveillance has been misused since this quote was made in 1975. How many people were or are in prison or illegally mistreated in any way since that time?

for the record, the surveillance itself is overbroad and unconstitutional.

 

[redandguilty]

I wish we had an explicit right to privacy in the Bill of Rights. It would be tough to write one that struck the right balance, but I wish we had it.

 

[Michchamp]

its hard to point to specific examples of abuse here (beyond the abuse already demonstrated by seizing everyone's metadata regardless of whether they are a suspect or not.) because by their very nature they are clandestine and top secret. we've also seen a few of those absurd catch-22's where courts have ruled defendants cant challenge the spying because they dont have evidence of it and they cant get evidence of it because its top secret...or similar circular reasoning.

add to the fact that obama and the head of the nsa have both repeatedly lied about the existence of these programs, then changed their tune when they were revealed.

this mater clearly demands a full investigation and hearing.

 

[byco42]

A free society does not capriciously monitor the correspondence of its citizens willfully. Court or no court sanction. In fact the courts are complicit here. It should be asking: "should you be doing this in any event?" That it "has gone on for years" is not justification, but only evidence that these abuses are now standard practice.

Those who support this are latter-day McCarthyists. I correspond with people outside the U.S. every day, which means my correspondence falls into the scope of surveillance.

That this whole enterprise was secret until last week is significant.

 

[byco42]

I wish we had an explicit right to privacy in the Bill of Rights. It would be tough to write one that struck the right balance, but I wish we had it.

The 4th amendment is sufficient to me, but it's no longer relevant anyway.

 

[redandguilty]

Red, you don't think this has been overblown? You knew this was going on all this time, no?

No. I think it is consistently underblown. The surveillance power of the government is too great and the surveillance power of private companies is out of hand too. It all needs to be turned on its head. We should have no trouble knowing what our food is made up of and what chemicals are being pumped underground and they should, by default, have to delete their records of what we do after a certain period of time.

People are acting like their privacy has been stripped away when in reality they post far more about themselves on Facebook or other online sites, or send info to numerous people via email that only requires the recipient to post those things on Facebook, or Forward to their contacts. They are throwing up all of this stuff into the ePublic yet are upset that the government has computers searching for keywords.

That's fine and it's not hypocrisy. When you give up your privacy, there are neat things you can do, but giving up privacy should be something you opt in to, and people should have more control over what they are opting into. It shouldn't be an all-or-nothing choice where you have to be a digital hermit to stay off their records. By default there should be no tracking. Then you should have separate options for who you want to share with. I'd never opt for unnamed 3rd parties if I had the choice, but there are many things I couldn't do if I wanted to try to avoid that kind of sharing.

Here's an analogy as to how ridiculous this whole thing has become. When walking down the street you are in Public Domain, which is what allows the paparazzi to get so many photos of celebrities for free. Suppose you happen to be walking behind the celebrity and now your image appears in print, right? Typically not. Why? Because the editors have photoshopped you out because your image isn't of importance. Likewise, the government is focused on terrorists, not people who are just going about their daily life. Maybe you briefly fall under their scope, but because you are of no value, you get filtered out.

This analogy is very limited. Why should we assume we will eternally have benevolent editors photoshopping us out? The scale of the industry of big data suggests that our "photo" in this analogy has more importance that your analogy accounts for. Do you really trust, with the revolving doors between big business and the government, that we can assume all this power is only used for terrorist hunting? The scope of this is too great for oversight.

Now you might think you are not in the Public Domain when making phone calls or sending emails; however, you did not pay for and setup a truly Private and Secure connection before corresponding. You may have assumed you were, but that was naive when you know the NSA has been doing this type of thing since the day the agency was created.

I hate this argument. A hypothetical but extremely impractical option is not appropriate for an issue like privacy. Do you know what it would take to make your communications secure? You shouldn't have to be a hermit or especially skilled in the use of technology to have privacy. It's not a matter of being naive, you'd have to treat privacy like it's your job in order to have any. That's not right.

Isn't it better that the government have the ability to analyze the data and filter out the inconsequentials than to not have it? This is NOT a free-for-all surveillance, it is a structured query that must meet specific criteria prior to being granted access by the courts. Come to think of it, this whole thing probably gained traction after the Boston bombing. Didn't authorities go back and review these records to search for possible additional terrorists? Isn't it a good thing that they had that ability? Was anyone unjustly or illegally mistreated from that?

No. It's really not. We give the people at top certain powers to make our lives better. There's good and there's bad associated with that. Power at the top means we can act more quickly as a nation, it means more efficiency, but it also amplifies the magnitude of mistakes and can lead to corruption and it pushes us further into having 2 very different classes of people. So we have to evaluate the trade-off: How much power are we giving them and how much good could it do? This is a lot of power, and while it feels cold to say it, terrorism isn't a big of a problem to justify that much power, and having all this power doesn't make us secure for terrorism anyway. It might even inspire more terrorism. If privacy-for-anti-terrorism was a fair trade, then there's no question, the government should be in charge of our diets. Our poor diets easily do 1000x the damage terrorists do, so we should be willing to surrender 1000x the rights to let them try to fix the issue, right?

As for Ben Franklin's quote, do you think for a second that he didn't intercept messages or do whatever it took in order to gain the trust of the French, or even the upperhand in negotiations with others? He obtained any and all bits of information he possibly could from any and all possible resources to gain even the slightest of advantages, at every opportunity. His skill at doing so was a major factor in his being chosen to go to France and convince the monarchy to aid the Revolutionaries.

That was the 1st panel of the comic. The rest of it raised the issue of proportion; the idea that while the quote was expressed in absolute terms, this isn't a black and white issue. So passing a black and white judgement on Franklin misses the point.

 

[redandguilty]

The 4th amendment is sufficient to me, but it's no longer relevant anyway.

I don't think it gets the job done anymore. It should apply to private companies that improperly share your information.

 

[Michchamp]

I don't think it gets the job done anymore. It should apply to private companies that improperly share your information.

it should be. courts can apply the same principles to guide warrants related to electronic information.

zyxt is stupid because he's saying that because I surrender privacy in some instances - such as posting on facebook, or walking down the street - I should have no expectation of privacy anywhere else. this is absurd.

the rights to privacy, while not explicitly stated, are strongly implied. the government needs a warrant to enter your premises, read your private communications, or seize your personal property. If a private citizen does the same thing, you have had a right to sue for trespass at common law for hundreds of years, a right that was more recently (like the last 100 years) broadened to include rights to privacy.

prior to 2001, the government was forced to do any of this stuff in the shadows; after that, the Bush Administration really strong-armed the judiciary and the legislature to ram this stuff through after 9/11.

 

[redandguilty]

the rights to privacy, while not explicitly stated, are strongly implied.

I don't like it. I want it stated, not implied.

 

[Michchamp]

I don't like it. I want it stated, not implied.

ok, I'll email my lawyer buddies and we'll get right to work amending the constitution then.

 

[redandguilty]

They've probably fixed everything under Obama, right?



http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=5987804

Exclusive: Inside Account of U.S. Eavesdropping on Americans
U.S. Officers' "Phone Sex" Intercepted; Senate Demanding Answers

By BRIAN ROSS, VIC WALTER, and ANNA SCHECTER
Oct. 9, 2008?

 

[redandguilty]

ok, I'll email my lawyer buddies and we'll get right to work amending the constitution then.

Sounds good. You might need a lobbyist. I'm sure it won't be a problem. Just make sure you write it so everyone's happy with the implications for Roe v Wade.

 

[Michchamp]

other examples of abuse (this is not a complete list):

-the Petraeus scandal - note from the record, the whole thing was uncovered because a woman who happened to be friends w/an FBI agent complained to him about some harassment she was getting from some other woman. the agent then - without so much as a warrant, let alone suspicion of an actual crime - was able to get access to, and read all the parties' emails. (!!!!!!)

- slate article on why you should be concerned.

- WaPo article on what parts of the laws (the business records act exception to the Patriot Act) should be revised to curtail such abuse.

 

[redandguilty]

Here's an interesting skim/read on the subject

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1g9gz0/i_am_james_bamford_one_of_the_journalists/

It sounds like they do have rooms at phone centers screening calls for key words, but he just says "a secret room" at AT&T, that doesn't sound like enough to screen a big percentage of the calls.

 

[zyxt9]

so from now on when scandals break and private emails and texts are published, that will result in a privacy lawsuit vs publishers? good luck with that!

privacy is a falicy that does noy exhist. lawyers even find ways around NDAs these days.

don't get me wrong, it is a great concept, just a broken ideal and to have thought otherwise means you were duped. not criticizing, that happens every day. people are comstantly duped by politicians, advertisers, employers, friends, family, and others.

true privacy can only exist within one's brain. once shared with anyone it is no longer private, regardless of oaths, laws, or agreements. sure you could sue if the info gets out, but the genie never goes back into the bottle. and putting any amount of trust in someone else just opens the door for that trust to be broken.

 

[zyxt9]

so from now on when scandals break and private emails and texts are published, that will result in a privacy lawsuit vs publishers? good luck with that!

privacy is a falicy that does noy exhist. lawyers even find ways around NDAs these days.

don't get me wrong, it is a great concept, just a broken ideal and to have thought otherwise means you were duped. not criticizing, that happens every day. people are comstantly duped by politicians, advertisers, employers, friends, family, and others.

true privacy can only exist within one's brain. once shared with anyone it is no longer private, regardless of oaths, laws, or agreements. sure you could sue if the info gets out, but the genie never goes back into the bottle. and putting any amount of trust in someone else just opens the door for that trust to be broken.

 

[redandguilty]

so from now on when scandals break and private emails and texts are published, that will result in a privacy lawsuit vs publishers? good luck with that!

privacy is a falicy that does noy exhist. lawyers even find ways around NDAs these days.

don't get me wrong, it is a great concept, just a broken ideal and to have thought otherwise means you were duped. not criticizing, that happens every day. people are comstantly duped by politicians, advertisers, employers, friends, family, and others.

true privacy can only exist within one's brain. once shared with anyone it is no longer private, regardless of oaths, laws, or agreements. sure you could sue if the info gets out, but the genie never goes back into the bottle. and putting any amount of trust in someone else just opens the door for that trust to be broken.

Crime is a reality of life too. We should still make our best effort strike the right balance of regulation.

There does exist some degree of privacy. Different people have different degrees of ability to learn things about you and different barriers to that information. These issues of practicality matter. I don't know who you are or what your phone number is and if there's a way for me to figure that out without your permission, the practical barrier between me and that info is higher than my desire for that info. I would like that bar to be higher for more things between my habits and the businesses that want to sell me things. I would like it to be higher for potentially well connected people that might want to interact with or squash my extremely small business. It's not black and white, genie in or out of the bottle. Our laws and the degree to which we enforce them matter.

 

[Michchamp]

I am not convinced that because there are breaches of privacy that occur (from data theft to the outright massive surveillance revealed by these disclosures and prior ones), privacy itself is a fallacy and it's not worth fighting for legal and technological protections to it.

zyxt's rambling, incoherent, mistake-ridden rant has failed to persuade me. surprise.