Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Re: Obama on Fetishizing Our Phones

jonathanmh.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 337 posts

Re: Re: Obama on Fetishizing Our Phones

#81

Post by JoshTriplett »

ross-life wrote: post #73
mozumder wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ultimate oversight is the voter. And the voters have decided that the courts should be trusted.

But the voters are being purposefully misinformed by that very same government. It's literally circular reasoning. Your argument would hold more weight if the people voting were actually well informed and educated about what the implications of their votes would be. If the government came out and said "everything you do, say, click and load will be saved for latter analysis" do you think they would vote the same way?

The argument would also carry more weight if the voters actually had a chance to vote on this issue orthogonally to everything else, rather than picking a candidate and hoping.

(Not that I'd accept building a backdoor just because 50%+1 people wanted access to my users' data, either, but at least then the argument made in the post you replied to would have any meaning at all.)

Re: Re: Obama on Fetishizing Our Phones

#84

Post by schoen »

ross-life wrote: post #48
mozumder wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, good luck building your own army. My army can beat your army. As a citizen, you are expected to trust the FISA court.

> As a citizen, you are expected to trust the FISA court. This opinion is just nuts. Trust a court that you were told for years didn't even exist? A secret court? How about no. Secret courts lead to abuses: https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/jo-shaw/secret-cour...

The existence of the FISA Court has never been a secret. It was created by FISA in 1978 and is right there in the text of the statute. Even the members of the FISA Court are publicly disclosed (they're all existing Federal judges who are appointed to temporary terms).

What is secret about the FISA Court is its decisions, not its existence (and that should change slightly as a result of the USA Freedom Act's requirement to release "significant" opinions).

Re: Re: Obama on Fetishizing Our Phones

#85

Post by enraged_camel »

api wrote: post #64
tomlongson wrote: post #42

A key promise of Obama's campaign for the presidency was to run the “most transparent” government- however the only person to really deliver on that promise was a whistleblower. Secret courts, secret domestic spying, and now calls for weakening of the digital equivalent of the safe shows that he either was not honest about transparency, or has radically changed his opinion since becoming POTUS. Maybe it's that he dec…

Policy wise Obama is close to a Rockefeller Republican. What people say during elections is entirely disposable.

I'm giving Bernie Sanders one last chance. But if he is elected and also reneges on his promises, I will probably stop caring about politics permanently.

edit: Whoops! Shouldn't have revealed I'm a Bernie supporter. Forgot that HN is a libertarian paradise!

Re: Re: Obama on Fetishizing Our Phones

#86

Post by jordanb »

tomlongson wrote: post #42

A key promise of Obama's campaign for the presidency was to run the “most transparent” government- however the only person to really deliver on that promise was a whistleblower. Secret courts, secret domestic spying, and now calls for weakening of the digital equivalent of the safe shows that he either was not honest about transparency, or has radically changed his opinion since becoming POTUS. Maybe it's that he dec…

I think Washington has changed Obama more than Obama changed Washington. He's spent seven years in the craziest bubble in America surrounded by people being paid millions to distort his worldview one way or another.

A while back he advised some kids in College to never type anything into a computer if they want it to remain private. For him, it probably seems completely reasonable. I doubt he's touched a keyboard since he became president. His daughters are the only teenagers in America who've never been near Snapchat (the Secret Service will keep it that way). And he's literally surrounded by security officers and spooks everywhere he goes. They manage every interaction he has so you can imagine their worldview is going to affect him.

I'm not trying to make excuses for him. He's so completely off the deep end nowadays (between this and TPP) that it's heartbreaking as a long time supporter. I hope he leaves the presidency, leaves Washington and spends a few years thinking about what went wrong before writing his memoirs. It would be an amazing insight into the corrosive influence of Washington on a person's integrity.

Re: Re: Obama on Fetishizing Our Phones

#87

Post by mozumder »

ross-life wrote: post #73
mozumder wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ultimate oversight is the voter. And the voters have decided that the courts should be trusted.

But the voters are being purposefully misinformed by that very same government. It's literally circular reasoning. Your argument would hold more weight if the people voting were actually well informed and educated about what the implications of their votes would be. If the government came out and said "everything you do, say, click and load will be saved for latter analysis" do you think they would vote the same way?

What exactly are they being "purposefully misinformed" about?

Re: Re: Obama on Fetishizing Our Phones

#88

Post by thom »

We're going to fight hard so our grandchildren have really secure email in a world where everything they do and every word they say is uploaded to the internet, transcribed and annotated in realtime by swarms of drones controlled by other kids that, only 50 years earlier, would have been at home doxxing people on Twitter.

Privacy will die, not because it's undesirable or a bad idea, it'll die like copyright and DRM - because it's technically and economically easy to defeat, and people will be motivated to do so. What's more, those people will be hard to catch - after all, the drones will be communicating over very strongly encrypted channels.

[Please refute - I genuinely have nightmares about this future]

Re: Re: Obama on Fetishizing Our Phones

#89

Post by x5n1 »

Obama, the technology, sir, is absolutist. You can have it one way, with privacy, or another, complete lack of it. That's how things are, and you are, with all due respect, stupid for arguing otherwise.

Re: Re: Obama on Fetishizing Our Phones

#90

Post by deathanatos »

afarrell wrote: post #30
rdlecler1 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The U.S. government has already shown that it is willing to abuse the law and create loopholes. Maybe the FBI will need a court order, but once the back door exists, what's to stop the NSA, or North Korea, from using it and finding ways to exploit that vulnerability. Freedom has a cost and we need to accept that. There are no free lunches here.

But without a valid court order, the evidence collected by the NSA cannot be used against a defendant in a trial. If a defendant feels a court order was improperly issued, he can appeal his conviction on those procedural grounds. If the data is not used in a criminal case, then there is no mechanism for 4th amendment protection and the spied-upon has no recourse.

Except that this isn't correct in the face of parallel construction. You can't fight the evidence at trial if it either isn't presented, or its origins are misrepresented by the prosecution, which is what parallel construction leads to. (You use the stuff from the NSA to find other stuff, and build a plausible story about how you found the other stuff. The illegal search is never presented in court, so you can't fight it; the other stuff is, but is should be fruit of the poisonous tree, if the full truth were told.)
Post reply on HN