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The NSA Is Commandeering the Internet

theatlantic.com

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Re: The NSA Is Commandeering the Internet

#121

Post by diminoten »

eliasmacpherson wrote: post #43
diminoten wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know it for the same reason I know unicorns and leprechauns don't exist - there is no credible evidence supporting it. Ignore and refuse to participate in wild speculation until evidence appears. That's how we have to operate, lest we succumb to every conspiratorial fantasy the Internet can come up with.

It's hardly wild speculation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction Use of NSA info in the manner described above is scope creep because they aren't terrorists, or foreign.

What's wrong with this?

Re: The NSA Is Commandeering the Internet

#122

Post by w0rd-driven »

jacquesm wrote: post #84
diminoten wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd argue that a child porn viewer isn't doing anything wrong? Your opinion officially doesn't matter any more. Sorry, I have a 10 yr old sister and I simply can't abide folks who won't even do the research to understand what it means when they say things.

I have a 3 year old and a 1 year old and I can't abide by folks who are so bad at statistics that they'd happily ruin the world for fear of some statistical implausibility to become true in their lives. I understand that you're taking this position with the best of intentions but 'child porn is bad' does not equate with 'a surveilance state is good because it gets rid of child porn or its viewers'. Fear is such a bad…

I've always had this weird observation. What makes child porn different than a parent having photos of their naked child? Porn isn't just sex acts.

There are clear distinctions, yes, but this line can get extremely blurry real quick. I often wonder at what point a police state would get the wrong idea and arrest a parent for their own perfectly innocuous photos.

It just always fascinates me when morality can be subjective like this and completely up to individual interpretation.

Re: The NSA Is Commandeering the Internet

#123

Post by dragonwriter »

diminoten wrote: post #109
dictum wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I'm aware, the country of which I am a citizen does not take an adversarial approach to other countries. If I learned that it's spying on people of other countries, I'd be just as concerned as I am about the NSA/the USG. None of that changes the fact that the NSA and the USG have a us vs. them mentality and it's only natural that Americans look at their government with a corresponding us vs. them view. I ca…

The US has organizations which look inward for terrorists - the FBI, DEA, ATF, TSA, local law enforcement, etc. We have our own country fairly well covered, with well-establish legal precedent and rules of engagement. The NSA is an intelligence gathering organization for the parts of the world we don't have covered, and its goal is to collect global intelligence. It doesn't treat anyone adversarially, as it has no "t…

> it has no "troops" with which to engage foreigners.

Well, if you ignore that thing where the NSA is an part of the Department of Defense, and that its director is also the commander of a sub-unified command of the US military, sure.

Re: The NSA Is Commandeering the Internet

#124

Post by e3pi »

w_t_payne wrote: post #42
diminoten wrote: post #3

Commandeering implies control, and the NSA does not have control. No one has "control" over the Internet. I also don't like this, "us vs. them" rhetoric that this story has turned some people towards, where the NSA are the unequivocal bad guys and we, the "little people", are the unequivocal good guys. That's a great way to get absolutely nothing done. The NSA is, despite everything we're being told by some people (B…

True. The "Us-vs-Them" rhetoric directly feeds our pack-animal drive for tribalism, from which nothing good ever emerged. However, it does make for some amusing rabble-rousing. Now that the rabble has been roused, so to speak, we need to move the debate onto a more mature phase: 1. We need to work out how to live our lives in a state of total surveillance - when our lives are transparent not only to the NSA but also…

>1. ... > 4. We need to work out how to maintain our freedom and independence of thought when the objects of our attention, our knowledge and our feelings can be observed and (potentially) controlled in detail.

5. We need to become familiar with what are the functions of the new Fort Meade agencies, having to be recently created to supplement the NSA. The NARUS moniker goes "See Clearly, Act Quickly". NSA's `Unbounded Awareness' et al, gets repeated discussion day after day, this is brought about by Snowden's leaks. The `Intelligence Made Actionable' side of the scale has not even been `tin-foiled' yet.

It is believable McCain's poking Putin's eye is no idle threat, or even possibly Russia will be coerced into extraditing Snowden back to US by orchestrated `Action'. This new `Parallel Construction', Bruce's `NSA Creep' is all I've seen suggesting this `Act Quickly'. Who are these new unknown silent baddest alpha predators --without peer-- being fashioned to be released onto the unbounded wild, to take action, or manufacture outcomes whatever USG wants?

Re: The NSA Is Commandeering the Internet

#125

Post by marshray »

swombat wrote: post #25

If Google, Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo and Facebook simultaneously came out and published all statistics that the government is not allowing them to publish, and declared that they will continue to publish those as they come in and be entirely transparent about the tracking that the NSA asked of them, would their CEOs all go to jail, doing enormous damage to the stock market? I don't think so. I think the NSA would fold…

> would their CEOs all go to jail,

Why wouldn't they?

> doing enormous damage to the stock market?

If they willfully broke the law to act against the interests of their stockholders, that's another thing to keep them in jail for.

Playing chicken with an out-of-control government is a very dangerous game for anybody.

Re: The NSA Is Commandeering the Internet

#126

Post by diminoten »

pdonis wrote: post #77
diminoten wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know in the epistemological sense, but there's just no reason to believe such a thing to be true.

there's just no reason to believe such a thing to be true No reason to believe what to be true? The US government's placing of backdoors in the long-distance telephone network is historical fact. That historical fact is a reason to believe that what the US government has done once, it could do again. It may not be a reason you want to accept, but it's still a reason.

The NSA can't stop you from visiting Hacker News. That's what control means, the ability to alter your behavior or the course of events. The NSA does not have the ability to do this.

So no, this is not historical fact.

Re: The NSA Is Commandeering the Internet

#127

Post by diminoten »

natrius wrote: post #62
diminoten wrote: post #3

Commandeering implies control, and the NSA does not have control. No one has "control" over the Internet. I also don't like this, "us vs. them" rhetoric that this story has turned some people towards, where the NSA are the unequivocal bad guys and we, the "little people", are the unequivocal good guys. That's a great way to get absolutely nothing done. The NSA is, despite everything we're being told by some people (B…

Congress and the NSA believe it is both constitutional and acceptable to collect and store any data they can get their hands on. They supposedly draw a fuzzy line to exclude most Americans when searching the stored data, but storing the communications of Americans is blatantly unconstitutional and dangerous for our democracy. It just takes one bad actor with access to that information to control elections and entire…

> storing the communications of Americans is blatantly unconstitutional and dangerous for our democracy

Is it?

> The idea that there are "not-so-big tweaks" that could be made to these programs is false if preserving privacy and democracy matters to you.

So I'm either wrong or unamerican? Right.

Re: The NSA Is Commandeering the Internet

#128

Post by [deleted] »

ihsw wrote: post #65
danenania wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, the NSA is on very thin ice right now and they know it. It's the perfect time to stand up to them. Large tech companies can do more than just release statistics. They can take principled stands against these disgusting programs in their entirety. Executives who are still playing along at this point are just cowards.

The stock market is a fickle thing. Despite the government-collusion revelations, top tech companies' shares haven't moved an inch in response. It stands to reason that share prices would decrease in the event of a revolt against the US Government, one could even take it a step further and argue that -- through a variety of strategically-placed and secretive investments -- the USG holds stocks in these companies. Thr…

[deleted]

Re: The NSA Is Commandeering the Internet

#129

Post by humanspecies »

swombat wrote: post #25

If Google, Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo and Facebook simultaneously came out and published all statistics that the government is not allowing them to publish, and declared that they will continue to publish those as they come in and be entirely transparent about the tracking that the NSA asked of them, would their CEOs all go to jail, doing enormous damage to the stock market? I don't think so. I think the NSA would fold…

What makes you think any of those companies want that?

They're happy where they are. Profits are good. This article is one of the most naive pieces I've ever read.

What do Google, apple, etc want now? For this subject to go away and so that their big mass of users forget about it, that is what they want.

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