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U.S. surveillance laws have proven ineffective at countering terrorism

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Re: U.S. surveillance laws have proven ineffective at countering terrorism

#21

Post by anarchodev »

livueta wrote: post #19

> The Privacy Issue is brought to you by the team behind IVPN. Get to know IVPN’s mission and download the app to browse privately and securely. Ugh. It's a fine article, but I worry the VPN industry's constant mis-selling of services under the banner of privacy will eventually taint the message.

What is the mis-selling exactly? Doesn't seem to me that they're saying using their VPN will make you impenetrable to dedicated actors with nation-state resources. VPNs do help maintain one small level of privacy (namely from your ISP), and if you're using one it's a good bet you'll be interested in other privacy concerns too.

There are a lot of VPNs with really bogus claims on their websites but I didn't notice anything appalling about this.

Re: U.S. surveillance laws have proven ineffective at countering terrorism

#22

Post by Razengan »

president wrote: post #14

I'm not sure what the alternative is. Without some form of surveillance, you're never going to catch terrorists or other bad actors. You do, however, need to make sure there are strong checks and balances in place to ensure that people don't use it for nefarious purposes or for personal gain.

Really? It doesn't even occur to you to address the issues that create "terrorists?"

Re: U.S. surveillance laws have proven ineffective at countering terrorism

#23

Post by npo9 »

president wrote: post #14

I'm not sure what the alternative is. Without some form of surveillance, you're never going to catch terrorists or other bad actors. You do, however, need to make sure there are strong checks and balances in place to ensure that people don't use it for nefarious purposes or for personal gain.

> Without some form of surveillance, you're never going to catch terrorists or other bad actors.

The article: Surveillance fails to catch terrorist.

Your argument: Without surveillance we cannot catch terrorist.

My question: How are we catching them now? How did we catch bad actors and saboteurs before surveillance?

Re: U.S. surveillance laws have proven ineffective at countering terrorism

#24

Post by DanielBMarkham »

president wrote: post #14

I'm not sure what the alternative is. Without some form of surveillance, you're never going to catch terrorists or other bad actors. You do, however, need to make sure there are strong checks and balances in place to ensure that people don't use it for nefarious purposes or for personal gain.

The structure of your statement has problems not related to the topic at all. When you take something away that never (or rarely) happens, how do you establish causality?

Suppose I told you that taking bazookas away from people that live in the city prevents bear attacks? You might say that there aren't bear attacks in the city anyway, which would be true, but you couldn't prove it one way or another. Who knows, maybe there would have been one bear attack if people ran around with bazookas shooting up the nearby forest.

Now add in the complexity that terrorism is more like a rate than a yes/no question. What if I told you that taking away bazookas in the city reduced the crime rate? Well, the crime rate in many cities has decreased, but how are those two related? Once again, we're left with a statement that might sound good to some and bad to others -- and no way to reasonably discuss it.

The only thing we can say with certainty is that no matter what we do, terrorism will continue exist. We can never eliminate it no matter how hard we try. So unless we want each new terrorist act to wreak havoc with massive changes on our societies, we're really talking about trade-offs here. How much stuff do you want to give away for a 50% reduction in terrorism? And once you come up with that answer, how would you know if your giving those things actually was the thing that reduced it?

It's one thing when a pubic discussion has reasonable people talking about the various sides. It's another thing entirely when we start injecting these semantic landmines into our conversations. I'm not saying you're wrong or right; I'm saying there is no way to know.

Re: U.S. surveillance laws have proven ineffective at countering terrorism

#25

Post by zzzcpan »

president wrote: post #14

I'm not sure what the alternative is. Without some form of surveillance, you're never going to catch terrorists or other bad actors. You do, however, need to make sure there are strong checks and balances in place to ensure that people don't use it for nefarious purposes or for personal gain.

You can't catch "terrorists" with surveillance and even generally bad actors, except for some naive desperate people doing stupid things. What you can do with surveillance is catch dissidents, create some chilling effect on dissent and overall use it as a tool to suppress dissent. It's basically a power supporting tool, nothing more.

Re: U.S. surveillance laws have proven ineffective at countering terrorism

#26

Post by Thriptic »

president wrote: post #14

I'm not sure what the alternative is. Without some form of surveillance, you're never going to catch terrorists or other bad actors. You do, however, need to make sure there are strong checks and balances in place to ensure that people don't use it for nefarious purposes or for personal gain.

Assuming that surveillance works (and I'm not really sure it works well) then the alternative is terrorism and crime. I agree we need some level of surveillance, but the question is at what point do the risks of the surveillance (suppression of democracy / dissent, self-censorship, loss of privacy / liberty, concentration of rich data for misuse by bad actors, etc) outweigh the risks of terrorism and crime? Just because we can bring terrorism and crime to zero with max surveillance, doesn't mean that it's in the best interest of society to enable such a system.

Personally, I'm willing to accept a level of risk from terrorism and crime if it means that I get to live my life the way I want to without being constantly monitored by government.

Regarding checks and balances, it's extremely hard to have robust authorization when the group calibrating and performing the authorizations is the same group or adjacent to the group who wants to look at the data. To do it well you need true, apolitical, independence between gatekeepers and users, and users can never be in possession of the actual data because access control can be easily bypassed if this is the case. We have never had that in this country, countermeasures against misuse always seem to be non-transparent and policy based rather than technical (ie secret courts and warrants that no one can actually audit), and data is repeatedly misused over and over with no consequences (eg parallel reconstruction, people spying on partners, people spying on celebs, etc).

Re: U.S. surveillance laws have proven ineffective at countering terrorism

#27

Post by mpiedrav »

Razengan wrote: post #22
president wrote: post #14

I'm not sure what the alternative is. Without some form of surveillance, you're never going to catch terrorists or other bad actors. You do, however, need to make sure there are strong checks and balances in place to ensure that people don't use it for nefarious purposes or for personal gain.

Really? It doesn't even occur to you to address the issues that create "terrorists?"

Reasons behind the kind of terrorism for which mass surveillance is enforced (e.g., Muslim fundamentalists against American interests) have deep historical roots, too messy to be addressed.

Britain and France had geopolitical and business interests in the Middle East since the 18-19th century. America since the 20th, when oil suddenly had all the spotlight.

Fundamentalists are convinced that "the West" is the Devil on Earth. No political force can pacify fundamentalists nor avoid future generations.

Re: U.S. surveillance laws have proven ineffective at countering terrorism

#29

Post by conception »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #24
president wrote: post #14

I'm not sure what the alternative is. Without some form of surveillance, you're never going to catch terrorists or other bad actors. You do, however, need to make sure there are strong checks and balances in place to ensure that people don't use it for nefarious purposes or for personal gain.

The structure of your statement has problems not related to the topic at all. When you take something away that never (or rarely) happens, how do you establish causality? Suppose I told you that taking bazookas away from people that live in the city prevents bear attacks? You might say that there aren't bear attacks in the city anyway, which would be true, but you couldn't prove it one way or another. Who knows, mayb…

I agree with your general thesis. The "And once you come up with that answer, how would you know if your giving those things actually was the thing that reduced it?" seems "simple" enough in that it would result in a number of arrests involving the methodology of surveillance in question. You couldn't say they wouldn't have been caught otherwise but you could at least say "X has produced Y for these cases." no?

Re: U.S. surveillance laws have proven ineffective at countering terrorism

#30

Post by mikeappell »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #24
president wrote: post #14

I'm not sure what the alternative is. Without some form of surveillance, you're never going to catch terrorists or other bad actors. You do, however, need to make sure there are strong checks and balances in place to ensure that people don't use it for nefarious purposes or for personal gain.

The structure of your statement has problems not related to the topic at all. When you take something away that never (or rarely) happens, how do you establish causality? Suppose I told you that taking bazookas away from people that live in the city prevents bear attacks? You might say that there aren't bear attacks in the city anyway, which would be true, but you couldn't prove it one way or another. Who knows, mayb…

So what you're saying is, they're "not even wrong."
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