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Edward Snowden: Permanent Record

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Re: Edward Snowden: Permanent Record

#381

Post by ordinaryperson »

Unpopular opinion destined to attract downvotes but: IMHO the NSA spying program was outrageous...for the colossal waste of money and time it was.

First, if you're really worried about privacy, why is it not a DEFCON 1 outrage that state DMVs are selling your info to private investigators? [1] Or if you're really worried about your personal liberty, isn't your local police force a greater threat then NSA eavesdroppers?

Back in 2013 the NSA claimed it was spying on 29 petabytes of internet data (out of 1826) a day [2], or 1.6%. That's both a trivial amount of overall traffic and an insanely large dataset at the same time (since it accumulates every day).

Isn't a big chunk of that traffic encrypted? Even if it's not, how do you find terrorists in that data? Do they self-identify? Even if they use a trivial substitution cipher ('cupcakes' instead of 'bombs') it would evade these billion-dollar supercomputers.

To me the NSA's spying program was security theater akin to airport security: expensive machines that don't even catch terrorists. They fail their own internal tests 95% of the time! [3]. I personally would like to know what algorithms the NSA was using to successfully identify terrorist data in exobytes of (possibly encrypted) datasets. Sounds like billions spent on airport scanners to me.

Finally, on a political level, Snowden seems like a massive hypocrite to me for hiding in China, which harvests the organs of political prisoners [4] and Russia, which routinely assassinates political opponents and journalists [5]. But he's mad that what, the US was reading his Gmail?

I realize he's super popular among the HN crowd and the libertarians for whom all gov't surveillance is evil but I, for one, am not a Snowden admirer. Downvote away.

[1] https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/43kxzq/dmvs-selling-data-...

[2] https://www.zdnet.com/article/nsa-hunger-demands-29-petabyte...

[3] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/investigation-breaches-...

[4] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/china-forcefully-harvests...

[5] https://www.thedailybeast.com/russia-shows-us-what-happens-t...

Re: Edward Snowden: Permanent Record

#382

Post by CamperBob2 »

loup-vaillant wrote: post #371
halr9000 wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your life or death scenario is an edge case with its own special complexities which should not be lumped in with discussions of the vastly voluntary choices we can make. Healthcare is heavily regulated as we all know. This raises the barrier to entry to new competitors, and leads to a less dynamic market where the status quo can last a long long time. So you end up with only 1 or a very small number of medical device…

Okay, let's try a concrete example: Gmail. Let us agree that the point of Gmail is to read people's email so it can send targeted adds. That automating the process (since human employees don't directly read that email) makes the thing more efficient, and thus worse , as well as easier to misuse. Let us agree that I can indeed avoid having a Gmail account. Can I realistically avoid sending email to a Gmail user? Nope.…

That automating the process (since human employees don't directly read that email) makes the thing more efficient, and thus worse, as well as easier to misuse.

While I agree with your larger point, I don't agree with this subjective value judgement and am not sure why it's necessary to lump it in with the rest of your (valid) points. Why do I want to see ads for things I'm not interested in? How is that in any way "better?"

What I definitely don't want is unauthorized humans reading my email. (Even so, I have to assume that is exactly what will happen whenever I type or dictate anything into a computer. I've operated on that basis since before GMail, Google, or even the civilian Internet existed.)

Re: Edward Snowden: Permanent Record

#383

Post by bori5 »

yuduhhrhr wrote: post #379
tomatocracy wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd disagree that nothing has changed. Consciousness of the fact that mass surveillance is happening is much more widespread, and gets brought up in passing from time to time. People have changed their behaviour somewhat - eg many now try to use encrypted communications quite consciously and even Signal has become quite popular for example. It's influence thinking over e.g. use of facial recognition cameras in public…

It's amazing how people still believe government laws will protect them from spy agencies. The CIA spied on the Senate and nothing happened. Naive in the extreme. So naive its hard to believe the opinion is genuine and not Astro turf.

If voting made a difference, they would have outlawed it years ago.

Re: Edward Snowden: Permanent Record

#384

Post by autoexec »

einpoklum wrote: post #377

A bit ironic that it's suggested to us to buy the book through Amazon, a cloud services provider for the CIA (and otherwise shady mega-corporation) See: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/07/the-d...

Amazon controls so much of the internet that it's increasingly hard for anyone to avoid them. The deal they struck is far more involved than your typical company using AWS, but I wouldn't look to Amazon's customers to make any assumptions about Amazon's motivations beyond their lust for more money.

The reality is that this book doesn't pose any meaningful threat to the US government's mass surveillance programs and having impotent critiques of the US Government openly available as opposed to outright banned gives us a false sense of security in our freedoms.

Re: Edward Snowden: Permanent Record

#385

Post by literallycancer »

navigatesol wrote: post #57
typenil wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other countries that tax worldwide income: Libya, North Korea, Eritrea and the Philippines. Great company to be in. You could call it ridiculous because it’s so unusual. But the reason most countries don’t do it is that taxes are a supposed to be a deal - the government forces you to hand over money and pays for services you use in return. Expats - they aren’t using those services. And your point about tax evader…

> taxing global income only hurts law abiding expats If you want to maintain your citizenship and have a safe-haven to run to if SHTF, then you should contribute to the tax system. I truly don't understand why this is controversial. An American passport is powerful. Edit: I suppose I shouldn't be shocked that the tax avoiding leeches in Silicon Valley don't feel obligated to contribute to the societies from which the…

Safe haven with 5.3 homicide rate?

If you wanted an actual safe haven, you'd chose something like Andorra, Vatican, San Marino, Liechtenstein or Monaco. Those have a homicide rate of 0. Japan with 126 million people has 0.2, UAE 0.5 and South Korea 0.6.

Re: Edward Snowden: Permanent Record

#386

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

grecy wrote: post #75
Noxmiles wrote: post #9

Does anyone know how much money he gets from every book / ebook? I think buying it is, at least for some people, very much a support Snowden thought.

I'm self published on Amazon and can speak to that, but I see that this is actually published by a publisher (Metropolitan Books) In that case, from what I have learned from speaking to a few NYT Best selling authors, he's getting peanuts per sale, though it's very likely he got an advance in the range of $50k. He won't actually get a cent from sales until his share goes above whatever his advance was.

> an advance in the range of $50k

That... would not be very much for a book that can be expected to generate hundreds of thousands of sales.

Re: Edward Snowden: Permanent Record

#387

Post by wwweston »

ekianjo wrote: post #353
dredmorbius wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you can decide not to buy corporate products That's a fallacy by both choice and externality. There are cases in which there is no choice but to use specific corporate products, or in which choices are made without an individual's consent or involvement. Karen Sandler, co-host (with former FSF directory Bradley Kuhn) of the "Free as in Freedom" podcast has an implanted, closed-source proprietary medical device. She c…

You cannot escape it completely but you can certainly reduce your exposure. I don't think the parent was talking in binary terms.

This is essentially true of government surveillance as well. Not really a surprise, since most modern state surveillance issues are essentially about ways in which private and public/state power cooperate.

The overarching point is that it's naive to consider issues of privacy particularly distinct in the public or private sphere. Neither market nor political power are trivial to escape (and they have other things in common). Individual opt-outs will only get you so far from either a Google scale or state scale operation.

Re: Edward Snowden: Permanent Record

#388

Post by LMYahooTFY »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #358
dredmorbius wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you can decide not to buy corporate products That's a fallacy by both choice and externality. There are cases in which there is no choice but to use specific corporate products, or in which choices are made without an individual's consent or involvement. Karen Sandler, co-host (with former FSF directory Bradley Kuhn) of the "Free as in Freedom" podcast has an implanted, closed-source proprietary medical device. She c…

There are cases in which there is no choice but to use specific corporate products "No choice" in the sense that you lose business, lose touch with your high school classmates, or are forced to go out and pick up your own food from the restaurant down the street? Or "no choice" in the sense that people show up at your door with guns? What a privilege it is to be able to casually use the same language to describe such…

So the argument is not invalid, but you take issue with it because you can imagine someone in a worse situation somewhere in the world? I fail to see the point of your comment, this is not a UN hearing regarding some oppressive regime.

If you require home internet access to do your 30k salary job, you move into an apartment, and they tell you you have one option for internet access, you have literally been restricted to a single corporate product and subject to surveillance.

Re: Edward Snowden: Permanent Record

#389

Post by jrochkind1 »

dredmorbius wrote: post #323
microcolonel wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe the long term solution is to put together an open source library database package that serves the needs of 90% of libraries without modification, and make it convenient to make high quality data available.

Worldcat / OCLC is pretty close to this. It's not fully open source, but it's widely used and pretty open. (The fact that the API isn't publicly accessible without registration and payment is a major annoyance.)

Yeah, at one point OCLC was actually being kind of litigious with trying to make sure their db was _not_ open. I think they got over that, at about when they realized nobody actually really wanted it so much anymore. But it's debatable whether it's "pretty open" at present.

LibraryThing was sort of another attempt, that sort of still exists.

It's just a really hard thing to do, that takes a lot of resources to do well, and nobody's managed to figure out a funding model.

I don't think "Just create an open access database anyone can edit, like wikipedia but data, and books" will work (and actually, [that's](https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_Books) been tried too), but you can try to start another project if you want.

There are a handful of projects with various business models and degrees of openness of data that have tried or are still trying to do this. For whatever reasons (and we can debate em), they haven't really taken off or been succesful. shrug.

Re: Edward Snowden: Permanent Record

#390

Post by ryanisnan »

tracker1 wrote: post #357
duxup wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you talked about the massive surveillance from governments people tossed you aside as a paranoid lunatic. I wonder how much that was any given person, or just that the availability of such surveillance has increased dramatically.

My thinking before Snowden was the sheer resources it would take to actually record, catalog and index all that information, let alone into something useful. I thought some people were just a bit too paranoid. Then I learned they did have/spend/use the resources needed for this. It just feels crazy, but true. Since then, combined with the ability to use AI patterns against video streams and even deep fake capability.…

My trust in most things is pretty much broken at this point.

Are you me?

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