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

theprivacyissue.com

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

#41

Post by falcolas »

anarchodev wrote: post #21
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 anyt…

Between TLS and DNS over HTTPS, the number of things an ISP can reliably discern from your traffic is becoming vanishingly small. Once the TLS SNI plaintext hole is closed, it becomes smaller still.

One can argue that IPs and ports matter, but if all the IPs you visit are in AWS (and their ilk) over 443 (including real time communication protocols), it becomes meaningless.

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

#42

Post by mhb »

conception wrote: post #29
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No. Because 1) X itself may enable Y which might not otherwise have occurred and 2) since resources are finite doing X to yield Y means that you couldn't do Z instead which you might value more than whatever utility you got from Y.

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

#44

Post by blurps »

Great informative article, but at times the posing is naive or supporting a certain narrative.

For instance: The government goes after Islamic terrorists and Mexican illegal immigrants. So what to complain about? Mix cause and effect to pose the illegal immigrants as targeting based on race. Or pose the extremist religious as vulnerable Muslims, targeted on religion. Remove their status as far away from the cold-hard reality, so you can claim racism and prejudice and use that to cripple surveillance. But the suspect is a "citizen"! All weasel words to stay away from the real dirt. Let's go after the atheists for counter terrorism, so we don't discriminate in the eyes of the ACLU...

Then the "ineffective against terrorism"-claim. This can't be supported, because no clear numbers/cases are known. Then conflate laws against terrorism with actual actions against terrorism: Sure, no law directly contributed against countering terrorists, but the surveillance certainly did. Thanks NSA for passing along information to my country many times, so we could capture really dangerous people before they could strike.

Anti-terrorism is also a red herring for surveillance efficiency. Surveillance predominantly used for other national security purposes, such as counter intelligence, foreign intelligence, border safety, crime fighting, and even economic espionage.

Sure, posing any immigrant as a bad hombre, potential MS-13 gang member, selling your children fentanyl-laced drugs, is ridiculous. But the other side of that same coin is posing bad people as vulnerable undocumented citizens who are being targeted on race. It does not do justice to the situation on the ground.

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

#45

Post by ftvy »

dheera wrote: post #32

Most terrorists in the US happen to be white (and really just because it's the majority race), but the media and government fail to use the term "terrorist" if they are white. That in turn results in them being busy racially profiling against colored people and foreign nationals and overlooking a lot of culprits. Also, nobody is born a terrorist. They're overly fixated on catching terrorists instead of preventing ter…

Most terrorists in the world happen to be brown (and really just because it's the majority race).

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

#46

Post by remarkEon »

anarchodev wrote: post #21
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 anyt…

I don’t have the time right now to do this, but someone with it (and probably more technical experience than me in that field) should write up a no BS guise to what these popular VPN services really are offering. It’s been hard, over the last couple months especially it seems, to wade through all the new products these companies are constantly dropping in this space.

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

#47

Post by dheera »

ftvy wrote: post #45
dheera wrote: post #32

Most terrorists in the US happen to be white (and really just because it's the majority race), but the media and government fail to use the term "terrorist" if they are white. That in turn results in them being busy racially profiling against colored people and foreign nationals and overlooking a lot of culprits. Also, nobody is born a terrorist. They're overly fixated on catching terrorists instead of preventing ter…

Most terrorists in the world happen to be brown (and really just because it's the majority race).

That's probably true. However the US government should really be putting more effort into protecting its own residents at home, in terms of the most likely actual threats. Calling all forms of terror "terror", regardless of the color of the culprit, is probably a good first step.

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

#48

Post by jagged-chisel »

datashow wrote: post #7

> "U.S. surveillance laws failed to counter terrorism" > "The patchwork of U.S. surveillance laws has proven ineffective at countering terrorism" Where is the proof? I can not find it in the article.

They haven't provide proof that it is effective.

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

#49

Post by [deleted] »

falcolas wrote: post #41
anarchodev wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 anyt…

Between TLS and DNS over HTTPS, the number of things an ISP can reliably discern from your traffic is becoming vanishingly small. Once the TLS SNI plaintext hole is closed, it becomes smaller still. One can argue that IPs and ports matter, but if all the IPs you visit are in AWS (and their ilk) over 443 (including real time communication protocols), it becomes meaningless.

[deleted]

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

#50

Post by humblebee »

remarkEon wrote: post #46
anarchodev wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 anyt…

I don’t have the time right now to do this, but someone with it (and probably more technical experience than me in that field) should write up a no BS guise to what these popular VPN services really are offering. It’s been hard, over the last couple months especially it seems, to wade through all the new products these companies are constantly dropping in this space.

My naive understanding of these common service VPNs is they provide privacy (when properly configured) from a physical network. Otherwise they aren't much different than an IPS. Once on the other end, everyone still know who you are. They don't provide privacy on the internet.
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