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The US’s Stance on Surveillance Needs a Hard Reset

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Re: The US’s Stance on Surveillance Needs a Hard Reset

#121

Post by rayiner »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #64
rayiner wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, the framers meant to protect the information, not the paper stock. But they gave a right against a particular way of accessing that information. They prohibited warrentless searching or seizing-- i.e. infringing your property rights in--the paper, not a blanket right against the government collecting that information by any means. If the framers had intended to protect the information regardless of source , whe…

Is it maybe an analogy problem? At the time of the framing, your accountant had your information, but he was also authorized to know it. Nobody at Google is authorized to read my email or even I expect look at who I'm corresponding with. It's all done by machine. And the whole concept of "property" as inside a machine is unusual. Is an email on a server like a letter on an accountant's desk, or is it like a letter on…

> Nobody at Google is authorized to read my email or even I expect look at who I'm corresponding with. It's all done by machine.

The "machine" versus "Google employee" distinction isn't a compelling one. The computer is programmed by a human agent of Google to scan your email, collect information, and use that information for Google's purposes. Also, wouldn't your reasoning allow the government to avoid any allegations of 4th amendment violations by pointing to the NSA computer that does the actual scanning?

> And the whole concept of "property" as inside a machine is unusual. Is an email on a server like a letter on an accountant's desk, or is it like a letter on my desk in my apartment which I lease from someone else?

It's not unusual. Property is defined by the bundle of rights you have with respect to something, whether that something is tangible or intangible.[1] A lease is a property right that limits what the lessor can do. Your landlord cannot, except under certain exceptions, enter your apartment and look through your desk (or send a robot to do the same). Your landlord has no interest in the things inside your apartment, which remain solely your property. None of that is true for many types of digital information held by third parties. Google explicitly retains the right to scan your emails and use the collected information for commercial purposes. At some point, Google retained quite extensive rights over what you put on Google Docs (although they've narrowed that in a TOS change). Facebook retains quite extensive rights over what you post.

The 1878 case of Ex Parte Jackson addresses the Post Office issue. It distinguishes between sealed letters (protected by the 4th amendment), and things like postcards that are open to inspection, even if they are not routinely inspected (not protected). Arguably, most clear-text online traffic falls in the latter bucket.

All of that being said, my point is that you certainly could conjure up a right to digital privacy from the "penumbras" of the 4th amendment. But the opposite view--that no such right exists--is pretty logical too. Certainly, I think logical enough that you can't say that the text of the 4th amendment compels you to find that such a right exists.

[1] This should not be a foreign concept to programmers. It's very much like a capability: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-capability_model.

Re: The US’s Stance on Surveillance Needs a Hard Reset

#122

Post by JoeAltmaier »

rayiner wrote: post #121
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it maybe an analogy problem? At the time of the framing, your accountant had your information, but he was also authorized to know it. Nobody at Google is authorized to read my email or even I expect look at who I'm corresponding with. It's all done by machine. And the whole concept of "property" as inside a machine is unusual. Is an email on a server like a letter on an accountant's desk, or is it like a letter on…

> Nobody at Google is authorized to read my email or even I expect look at who I'm corresponding with. It's all done by machine. The "machine" versus "Google employee" distinction isn't a compelling one. The computer is programmed by a human agent of Google to scan your email, collect information, and use that information for Google's purposes. Also, wouldn't your reasoning allow the government to avoid any allegatio…

The right to freedom from search is not about envelopes. Arguments about cleartext online email cannot stem from paper equivalents - it must be about intent, how it affects our lives, not some rule-lawyering view.

Further, when govt attempts to prevent citizens from putting email into secure envelopes then its clear what's going on. Its goes from "I can easily read your email; thus its not protected" to "You must submit all you email for inspection!" That's clearly the sort of thing the 4th amendment is intended to protect from.

Re: The US’s Stance on Surveillance Needs a Hard Reset

#123

Post by eropple »

RugnirViking wrote: post #120
eropple wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meanwhile, the elected President and his party are demanding the names of people involved in climatology and are passing acts to let them reduce individual named government employees' salaries to $1 per year. Avoiding that "corruption" really did a whole lot of good with the actual, literal wannabe serial-assaulting autocrat who is in office, you're so very right.

Can you provide reputable sources for those claims?

Energy Dept. rejects Trump’s request to name climate-change workers, who remain worried:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2016/12/13/...

House Republicans revive obscure rule that allows them to slash the pay of individual federal workers to $1:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-politics/house...

Both have been extensively reported and are well-understood. In the interest of fairness that Trump and his cronies do not deserve, they claimed significantly after-the-fact that the former request for the names climate workers was "not authorized." This is a lie, and a bad one, and the truly damning thing is that they think--perhaps even correctly--that the lie will be taken by their listeners. "Alternative facts" (hat-tip to Trump's mouthpiece Conway for that gem) are the measure of the autocrat: make the people doubt everything to exhaust them, to instill the notion that there is no truth, and to prevent them from focusing on what you are actually doing. It provides cover when suspicions are actually aroused by something you are doing to fade away, and then it is as if it never was.

Re: The US’s Stance on Surveillance Needs a Hard Reset

#124

Post by wildmusings »

wybiral wrote: post #22
mozumder wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get that but a lot of people are questioning any surveillance.

That's fair. But regarding this statement: > Until you are your own king, you will always have to live under the permission of government. My complaint is that a government should exist to facilitate the well being of its people. They should have to operate under the permission of us, not the other way around.

The US government does operate under the permission of the people. There have been candidates who are strongly opposed to the NSA's surveillance programs. They didn't win.

The election of Donald Trump should shatter any illusions that the political establishment has a stranglehold on power.

Re: The US’s Stance on Surveillance Needs a Hard Reset

#125

Post by slarrick »

hedora wrote: post #114
slarrick wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not well versed on the details of U.S. government surveillance, but is it not the case that collection of phone logs, for instance, does not entail the government directly infringing on or even caring about 99.999999% of the public's private activity? My understanding is that these types of surveillance programs technically exist so that logs can be pulled up retroactively or algorithmically in rare but important…

That argument has been made by repressive regimes to justify all sorts of witch hunts: "Our records say you were friends with John; you should have known he would be branded a subversive traitor. Why didn't you turn him in first?" Stats make this even worse: "Sorry. The computer said we have to lock you up for your own good." Also, the framers of the US constitution had a deep mistrust of government (they just overth…

Thank you for your reply. Your argument makes sense to me, however I am still having some difficulty understanding how ultimately surveillance is anything but negligible in aiding law enforcement to oppress U.S. citizens - compared to the government's already existing enormously superior weaponry. IF the government were out to get me, I can't imagine how I could stop them, even if they had only basic information about me. UNLESS I am a criminal mastermind, in which case it seems like the government would NEED information about me to stop me, which would probably be a good thing? I dunno... do you at least see where I'm coming from? I haven't formed a concrete opinion about it all, and I am a student of cyber-security. Presently considering all points of view.

EDIT: I guess your point is that the surveillance information can be used to /justify/ an attack on a citizen, so that the public accepts it. But somehow I imagine the government could already easily falsify records to do exactly that without deep troves of info?

Re: The US’s Stance on Surveillance Needs a Hard Reset

#126

Post by erikpukinskis »

I think "presumption of privacy" is going away. The next generation will see bubbles of privacy as something you can create, by force, not something guaranteed by societal norms.

Frankly, I am a little surprised when I see other technologists advocating for governmental/corporate/societal reform of privacy-respecting practices. It seems like a losing battle to me. We are headed toward a time when you can buy a $100 vial of drone dust at Best Buy, dump it into the air, and 30 minutes later have a live 3D video feed in every window within a 5 mile radius. Maybe it will take 100 years, but every year between now and then will be a shade closer to that reality.

Even if we could get strongly worded laws from Congress, I just don't see that stopping bad actors, inside government or out. It feels a little bit like bow-and-arrow culture trying to legislate that government agents shouldn't be allowed to use these new "gun" things. You can to legislate, but bigger forces are afoot. The physics of information is changing very fast.

Re: The US’s Stance on Surveillance Needs a Hard Reset

#127

Post by anigbrowl »

ebcode wrote: post #105
anigbrowl wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What else can people do absent somethin glike a constitutional privacy amendment? Americans have just never cared much for privacy in the aggregate; the news is (and has long been) dominated by stories that appeal to the most prurient of interests, and furthermore Americans generally don't care what other people think of them that much (or so it seems to this European). True, many of them may not appreciate the degre…

>>a constitutional privacy amendment That would be the 4th Amendment[1]. I really don't think that Americans have never cared about privacy; I think if that were true, we would have a different 4th Amendment. Instead, I think that the various amendments and overall content of the Constitution serve to limit the power of government, and in that regard, it behooves the individuals within the government to disregard as…

It's crap and clearly doesn't work very well for the use cases under discussion here. As evidence: the existence of credit scores.

Re: The US’s Stance on Surveillance Needs a Hard Reset

#128

Post by AnthonyMouse »

rayiner wrote: post #121
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it maybe an analogy problem? At the time of the framing, your accountant had your information, but he was also authorized to know it. Nobody at Google is authorized to read my email or even I expect look at who I'm corresponding with. It's all done by machine. And the whole concept of "property" as inside a machine is unusual. Is an email on a server like a letter on an accountant's desk, or is it like a letter on…

> Nobody at Google is authorized to read my email or even I expect look at who I'm corresponding with. It's all done by machine. The "machine" versus "Google employee" distinction isn't a compelling one. The computer is programmed by a human agent of Google to scan your email, collect information, and use that information for Google's purposes. Also, wouldn't your reasoning allow the government to avoid any allegatio…

> Also, wouldn't your reasoning allow the government to avoid any allegations of 4th amendment violations by pointing to the NSA computer that does the actual scanning?

That's assuming the scanning never results in any information being conveyed to a person or recorded anywhere someone might eventually read it. That wouldn't provide much use to the government.

> None of that is true for many types of digital information held by third parties.

That depends on the third party. Not all email providers do that. And if scanning your email to target advertising was the determinant of whether the government could read it without a warrant, email providers would stop doing that or people would stop using them.

And then wouldn't it change based on whether the scanning is done client side or server side?

> Arguably, most clear-text online traffic falls in the latter bucket.

That puts a different spin on the whole encryption debate. If not encrypting traffic allows the government to read it without a warrant, a government encryption ban takes on a whole new meaning.

And the traffic increasingly is encrypted. Hosts are increasingly using TLS for HTTP and SMTP.

Re: The US’s Stance on Surveillance Needs a Hard Reset

#129

Post by RA_Fisher »

saalweachter wrote: post #50
RA_Fisher wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Net neutrality by encryption seems like a much better idea than government imposed NN. It's optional and not one size fits all. Let's encrypt all the things!

I take it you've never had WiFi drop your connection when you start using a VPN?

Yep, and then I switched to OpenVPN! :)

Re: The US’s Stance on Surveillance Needs a Hard Reset

#130

Post by hedora »

slarrick wrote: post #125
hedora wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That argument has been made by repressive regimes to justify all sorts of witch hunts: "Our records say you were friends with John; you should have known he would be branded a subversive traitor. Why didn't you turn him in first?" Stats make this even worse: "Sorry. The computer said we have to lock you up for your own good." Also, the framers of the US constitution had a deep mistrust of government (they just overth…

Thank you for your reply. Your argument makes sense to me, however I am still having some difficulty understanding how ultimately surveillance is anything but negligible in aiding law enforcement to oppress U.S. citizens - compared to the government's already existing enormously superior weaponry. IF the government were out to get me, I can't imagine how I could stop them, even if they had only basic information abou…

The ideas I presented are from a long time ago. Arguably, modern military technology made grass roots revolutions impossible in first world countries (or will soon, given drones, etc).

Dragnet surveillance creates capabilities like "shoot the 1% of people in this city most likely to oppose me." A more effective / socially acceptable version is already being implemented in China. They have a number that measures how good of a citizen you are. As I understand it, it can be used to vet people for all sorts of things (employment, credit, housing, law enforcement targeting, etc).

So, now, if you say something wrong in private, you might end up begging for food on the side of the road.

Of course, the input to the score is secret; presumably it can be adjusted up or down by (abusive?) people in authority.

Even if I am wrong about the details of the Chinese system (maybe it has great checks and balances for all I know), it is easy to see how government agents could abuse such a system.

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