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

Time for a Rigorous National Debate About Surveillance

wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 93 posts

Re: Time for a Rigorous National Debate About Surveillance

#71

Post by TeMPOraL »

digler999 wrote: post #54
chrissnell wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. I'm saying that it's one of many factors, some typically benign (like "gun owner"), and some not benign ("has a brother fighting for IS in Syria"). To do a better job at intelligence, our government needs to look at these holistically. My argument also extends to things like the TSA. We all like to complain about having to wait in line for security at the airport. Why can't they do better threat assessmen…

> chrissnell, an officer in the Army Reserve, thats a red flag. you've got specialized training in weapons and tactics. maybe they should "keep an eye on you" ?

That depends entirely on their estimate of whether "specialized training in weapons and tactics" is a signal for or against being a potential person of interest.

This is a domain of probability, there are rigorous ways to deal with that. Bringing up "nothing to hide" isn't a rational response. Whether or not something constitutes a good signal does not depend on rhetorics! Math doesn't care about what some celebrity said at some point.

Re: Time for a Rigorous National Debate About Surveillance

#72

Post by wakkaflokka »

quizotic wrote: post #41

This motivated me to sign up for ProtonMail. Now I want to send Mike Pompeo a congratulatory email! He seems like a decent guy. Does anyone know where to send an encrypted email to the incoming cia director?

I love the idea of ProtonMail (and other encrypted email services). I keep getting the hankering to switch to one. But then I realize how convenient and integrated Gmail is. It's really weighing my privacy vs. convenience, but I am getting close to the point where I'm ready to move it all over.

Re: Time for a Rigorous National Debate About Surveillance

#73

Post by TeMPOraL »

chrissnell wrote: post #7

I'm going to go out on a limb here. I think he's right. It's a red flag, not the only red flag. Like, if you use strong encryption, have associated with known drug traffickers, and served time in prison on a felony charge, someone might want to keep an eye on you. It's one of many factors that may or may not be worth considering. The use of strong encryption alone should not be considered bad.

Indeed. People are forgetting we have a whole piece of math - called probability theory - for dealing exactly with that stuff. It can tell you whether or not doing X is an evidence for you being Y (or evidence against it).

The important thing is - probability theory doesn't depend on rhetorics. Someone speaking the "nothing to hide" argument, or someone else finding arguments against it convincing, doesn't suddenly invalidate Bayes' theorem! Trying to argue from principle is a mistake because reality doesn't listen to principles. The only relevant question is whether encryption/Tor/whatever is or is not currently an evidence for/against being an evildoer, and how strong that evidence is.

Those considerations do include things like loss of utility because of false positives / false negatives, too. So for instance, it may be so that evildoers are more likely to use encryption than general population, but there's so much normal people using encryption that you can't get evidence for being evil out of just noticing that a person uses encryption (the same considerations explain why so much of what TSA is doing is security theater).

Re: Time for a Rigorous National Debate About Surveillance

#74

Post by TeMPOraL »

ergothus wrote: post #67
jrs235 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same can be argued pertaining to guns. Guns have saved many lives. Guns and encryption are amoral. How and what they are used for determines if they are "good" or "bad". EDIT: Encryption may have been used by bad people to secretly carry out bad things with the end result of people dying (because the "good people" couldn't decrypt their communications). We all want only the "good" people to have guns and encrypti…

I don't want "only the 'good' people to have guns and encryption". I feel they are different: Guns are used for two reasons: target practice (sport), and shooting to kill (hunt/attack/defend). Encryption is used to keep communications secret. We can have lengthy debates on the various uses of guns, but staying on topic, I find nothing wrong with people keeping communication secret. Sure, it'd be EASIER if the bad guy…

The only problem with those arguments is because people use them as rhetorics instead of looking at them in a mathematical way.

Guns can be used to do bad things, like threatening and killing people[0]. They can be used for good things like providing pleasure to people who use them for sports or target practice. The question you want to ask is pretty much utilitarian - how much good vs bad comes from having guns widely available? If there isn't that much good, and by banning guns you can reduce the bad significantly, then it's worth to ban guns. If banning guns doesn't actually remove that much bad, but removes the good, it's not worth banning it. The question is really about estimating the difference between good and bad in those two situations.

So in case of guns, the estimates are not too clear. In case of encryption, it seems that having it available provides high amount of good (e-commerce, banking, privacy) and some amounts of bad (criminals harder to spy on by law enforcement). Banning encryption pretty much kills the entire good side, while does very little to the bad side (encryption algorithms are already open source anyway, so at best it'll affect the opportunistic simple criminals). Thus - by the same principle as with guns - it seems clear[1] that banning encryption will make the lives of good people worse.

--

[0] - let's ignore the issue of legitimate use of violence/threat of violence by governments for now to simplify the point.

[1] - if you agree with my estimates; however I believe arguing estimates by models and hard data is easier and more robust of a task than arguing positions based on rhetorics.

Re: Time for a Rigorous National Debate About Surveillance

#75

Post by marcosdumay »

ergothus wrote: post #67
jrs235 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same can be argued pertaining to guns. Guns have saved many lives. Guns and encryption are amoral. How and what they are used for determines if they are "good" or "bad". EDIT: Encryption may have been used by bad people to secretly carry out bad things with the end result of people dying (because the "good people" couldn't decrypt their communications). We all want only the "good" people to have guns and encrypti…

I don't want "only the 'good' people to have guns and encryption". I feel they are different: Guns are used for two reasons: target practice (sport), and shooting to kill (hunt/attack/defend). Encryption is used to keep communications secret. We can have lengthy debates on the various uses of guns, but staying on topic, I find nothing wrong with people keeping communication secret. Sure, it'd be EASIER if the bad guy…

That does make the optimum amount of regulation on encryption way lower than the optimum amount of regulation on guns. Ideally, for encryption it's no regulation at all.

I do agree. But keep in mind that the people comparing those two are just saying that if you defend no regulations for gun, you must also defend no regulation for encryption.

Re: Time for a Rigorous National Debate About Surveillance

#76

Post by shuntress »

brian-armstrong wrote: post #56
renlo wrote: post #27

>> "America is in a long war against a resilient enemy capable of striking the homeland, but U.S. intelligence capabilities are falling short of meeting the threat." >> "Reasonable warrantless searches are compatible with the Fourth Amendment. So are searches of data shared with third parties, such as social-media posts—a highly valuable surveillance window, since people undergoing radicalization are prone to showcas…

Depends on the medium, I think. If you post it just to your friends in a protected way with a reasonable expectation of privacy, then it feels wrong for the government to do dragnet surveillance on that. On the other hand, if you start tweeting about your plans to commit an act of terror, how is that any different than going to the city center and shouting it?

So what you are saying is, we need microphones on every street corner running natural language processing and speech recognition software to identify and record any threats someone may make?

Re: Time for a Rigorous National Debate About Surveillance

#77

Post by _qbxp »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #73
chrissnell wrote: post #7

I'm going to go out on a limb here. I think he's right. It's a red flag, not the only red flag. Like, if you use strong encryption, have associated with known drug traffickers, and served time in prison on a felony charge, someone might want to keep an eye on you. It's one of many factors that may or may not be worth considering. The use of strong encryption alone should not be considered bad.

Indeed. People are forgetting we have a whole piece of math - called probability theory - for dealing exactly with that stuff. It can tell you whether or not doing X is an evidence for you being Y (or evidence against it). The important thing is - probability theory doesn't depend on rhetorics. Someone speaking the "nothing to hide" argument, or someone else finding arguments against it convincing, doesn't suddenly i…

I agree with you in general. My issue with this line of thinking for policy decisions, is that I personally believe relying solely on objective probability theory to associate people with _______, without looking at the larger picture, and then building policies from that, could exacerbate the reason the association is being payed attention to in the first place.

Let's say theoretically, that people who wear red shirts are objectively more likely to commit a crime. Policies are made such that people with red shirts are targeted for extra policing. People with red shirts who are not criminals feel discriminated and overly watched, and because of that, generate a resentment against society and (I admit this is a jump), ultimately end up with a higher disposition towards committing crimes. And then it just goes on ad infinitum.

So in some situations, I would argue that society benefits from ignoring these objective probabilities entirely, if there's evidence that taking action based on them could cause downstream negative consequences.

Re: Time for a Rigorous National Debate About Surveillance

#78

Post by brian-armstrong »

shuntress wrote: post #76
brian-armstrong wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on the medium, I think. If you post it just to your friends in a protected way with a reasonable expectation of privacy, then it feels wrong for the government to do dragnet surveillance on that. On the other hand, if you start tweeting about your plans to commit an act of terror, how is that any different than going to the city center and shouting it?

So what you are saying is, we need microphones on every street corner running natural language processing and speech recognition software to identify and record any threats someone may make?

No, but I'm talking about a situation where you'd be surrounded by people. And what is Twitter if not a giant megaphone?

Re: Time for a Rigorous National Debate About Surveillance

#79

Post by shuntress »

brian-armstrong wrote: post #78
shuntress wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what you are saying is, we need microphones on every street corner running natural language processing and speech recognition software to identify and record any threats someone may make?

No, but I'm talking about a situation where you'd be surrounded by people. And what is Twitter if not a giant megaphone?

And this discussion is about setting up systems to automatically monitor/record everything spoken through that megaphone.

It's much more than the people around you taking it upon themselves to report your threats.

Re: Time for a Rigorous National Debate About Surveillance

#80

Post by jwtadvice »

The argument at the top of this article DEEPLY confuses the issue of mass surveillance, which I think is a very bad way to start an article titled “Time for a Rigorous National Debate about Surveillance”.

The article begins by invoking the spectral boogyman of terrorism, and doubles down on the concept that the United States can somehow be at war with a tactic.

The article refuses to admit that mass surveillance, as disclosed by the Snowden Documents, revealed that the capabilities of ubiquitous espionage were not developed and are not primarily used for a ‘war on a tactic’.

What the disclosures and investigative journalism clarified is that mass surveillance is about power and control writ large, with surveillance capabilities having been build long before terrorism became relevant and used at that time for the same power and control purposes that it is used today.

Specifically, the disclosures revealed that the intelligence is used to understand populations and how information moves through them - this helps with propaganda operations in various settings. They also revealed that the espionage was used to aide US diplomats by giving them negotiating leverage in international meetings, and was used to support domestic industries by stealing relevant market information from overseas competitors.

This slight of hand - equivocating public safety with national security - is a common tactic. There is a very specific definition of national security, defined by National Security Presidential Directive-1 (http://fas.org/irp/offdocs/nspd/nspd-1.htm): "National security includes the defense of the United States of America, protection of our constitutional system of government, and the advancement of United States interests around the globe. National security also depends on America's opportunity to prosper in the world economy.”

As the homeland is the safest place on Earth, the typical invocation of "national security" refers to the other components: a prospering economy, overseas access and interests, and protection of the current global political system for which America sits on top.

Mass Surveillance helps America to maintain it’s edge as a leading world power.

It is not about boogymen and terrorism, or about defeating certain kinds of tactics.

The article is completely ingenuous.

Post reply on HN