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End the N.S.A. Dragnet, Now

nytimes.com

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Re: End the N.S.A. Dragnet, Now

#71

Post by opinali »

rayiner wrote: post #54
dalek_cannes wrote: post #32

Surveillance. It always starts with a desire to be safe. And that comes from fear. It seems Americans today are afraid of more things than ever: pedophiles, guns, terrorists, lawsuits. Some news reports are ridiculous by foreign standards: teachers not being allowed to shake hands with students out of fear of sexual harassment allegations, boys suspended from school for drawing guns, bystanders not administering firs…

The Ben Franklin quote is apropos here: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither." While it's wildly misquoted on the interblags, you can't read out the word "essential." The point of the quote isn't that no trade-offs between freedom and safety are appropriate, but rather that we shouldn't trade away those freedoms that are "essential." It is debatable whethe…

Internet privacy becomes essential in the moment that people put their entire lives on the Internet. All mail is email, all financial transactions are electronic, medical records are in computers, credit scores are in data centers--- you name anything important to your privacy/freedom, and it's in the cloud these days. No tradeoff is possible anymore.

Re: End the N.S.A. Dragnet, Now

#72

Post by samolang »

rayiner wrote: post #65
samolang wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Indeed, the focus is clearly on personal things (house, person), not things possessed by third parties. You need to understand the context. People did not store information about their private communications with third parties in 1776. Can you call AT&T and ask for someone else's records and get them? Why not? Things you wish to stay private do stay private unless a warrant is issued citing probable cause to violat…

> People did not store information about their private communications with third parties in 1776. People stored all sorts of private information with third parties in 1776. They had accountants and bookkeepers and suppliers and vendors, etc. > Can you call AT&T and ask for someone else's records and get them? Can you call up Ernst and Young and ask for someone else's accounting records? No, but the government can. Th…

The contents of my emails are exposed to "god know how many engineers and system administrators." I still think I have a "reasonable expectation of privacy" with regards to the contents of my emails. If you hire a cleaning lady and she has access to private letters in your home, does that mean you forfeit your reasonable expectation that those letters are private?

Re: End the N.S.A. Dragnet, Now

#73

Post by twoodfin »

danenania wrote: post #16
twoodfin wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you justify your claim that a bulk collection of phone records "clearly" violates the Constitution? I don't think the jurisprudence is so obviously on your side there.

I think common fucking sense is pretty well on his side.

That's not an argument. rayiner has this exactly right: it is not a slam dunk violation of the Constitution as currently understood by the folks who make it their living to understand such things, and spodek was wrong to characterize it as such.

Outrage doesn't make you right; at this point it's just making hn boring.

Re: End the N.S.A. Dragnet, Now

#74

Post by walshemj »

adventured wrote: post #15
AsymetricCom wrote: post #5

The thing about the NSA dragnet is that if the NSA wasn't doing it, then corporations would (are) doing it. You can't stop technology from moving forward. Someone is going to be sniffing your packets now until the end of time.

Not very worried about Google arresting me at some point in the future with their jackboot thugs for something I did or said in the past (when X wasn't illegal). This applies to Facebook, Twitter, AT&T, Verizon, Samsung, Snapchat, and so on. When these guys start trying to acquire their own domestic armies, then I'll get really concerned. There seems to be a common gloss-over regarding the fact that it's the United S…

If they dont like your business model or want to compete with you they can damage or destroy your ability to make a living

Re: End the N.S.A. Dragnet, Now

#75

Post by javert »

onli wrote: post #25
spodek wrote: post #2

Senators have to go to the press to try to stop the government from doing what clearly breaks the law -- the Constitution, no less -- using up billions of taxpayer funds and undermines American business for no clear benefit. Conventional wisdom says the Cold War was between the doctrines of Capitalism and Communism and that the doctrine of Capitalism won. It doesn't look like that view was right. The doctrine of the…

No. Capitalism clearly won. But Capitalism is not Freedom, not democracy and is not the rule of the law. Capitalism is a way to conduct business by letting people posess the means of production, and the capital to produce as well. It was not only rhetoric that in the fight between USA and UDSSR, there was a fight between freedom and authority. But mainly, it was a fight between different ways to regulate the means of…

Nope. Capitalism == free markets == non-coersion. We have a highly mixed economy now, not capitalism.

If you consider large government bureaus (public, or "private" via regulation, like, say, Verizon) to define "capitalism" just because there are large amounts of money involved ("capital"), you are defining the term by non-essentials. There were also large amounts of money in the USSR.

Capitalism lost because of European intellectual influences in America; the existing defense of the ideas of the founding fathers was insufficient to stem the tide.

Re: End the N.S.A. Dragnet, Now

#76

Post by sailfast »

nateabele wrote: post #38

> "Our first priority is to keep Americans safe [...] And herein lies the problem. Their job is not to keep us safe, it's to keep us free . (I'm aware others in the thread have pointed this out, but less directly).

I also came here to post this. Our priorities of late have been flipped. While providing for the common defense is one of many responsibilities, our primary responsibility and the oath taken by those in government is to the Constitution.

Re: End the N.S.A. Dragnet, Now

#77

Post by rayiner »

danielweber wrote: post #69
rayiner wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Postal mail is historically treated as a special case because it's a government agency. Cars on the street are still your property, even when you're not in it, just as your house is still your property even when you're on vacation. Wiretaps and documents hosted on the "cloud" are somewhere in-between. The first time the Supreme Court considered the Constitutionality of warrantless wire taps, it found that they were n…

Historically, are safety deposit boxes considered your property?

Generally, safety deposit boxes are considered your property. However, renters in general have a property right in the space they rent, derived from landlord-tenant law. But that property right involves reciprocal rights, liabilities, and obligations. If a bank negligently causes loss of the contents of your safe deposit box, they can be held liable for that loss. When analogizing from safe deposit boxes to the cloud, as many have tried to do (including in legal cases), that whole element of reciprocal obligations is missing.

Do you have a property right in your Google Drive? Do you pay rent? Can you sue Google if they negligently lose the contents? Does Google have any obligations to give you say 30 days notice before they shut down your account? These reciprocal obligations are the difference between renting a garage to store your papers (which would fall within the 4th amendment), and simply leaving your papers in a friends' garage (which wouldn't).

Re: End the N.S.A. Dragnet, Now

#78

Post by aaronem »

monsterix wrote: post #3

And what about the remaining 7 billion law-abiding souls on the planet? I resonate with the intent of this article but how come protecting only an Americans' privacy be of concern to this voice on NYT? I believe this approach is not only insular (apart from being stupid) but also destined to fail. If I were to run dragnet, I'd accept protecting the interest and privacy of all Americans back home, but strike a deal wi…

The government of the United States is responsible, however imperfectly, to the people of the United States, not to those of the planet entire.

Re: End the N.S.A. Dragnet, Now

#79

Post by rayiner »

samolang wrote: post #72
rayiner wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People did not store information about their private communications with third parties in 1776. People stored all sorts of private information with third parties in 1776. They had accountants and bookkeepers and suppliers and vendors, etc. > Can you call AT&T and ask for someone else's records and get them? Can you call up Ernst and Young and ask for someone else's accounting records? No, but the government can. Th…

The contents of my emails are exposed to "god know how many engineers and system administrators." I still think I have a "reasonable expectation of privacy" with regards to the contents of my emails. If you hire a cleaning lady and she has access to private letters in your home, does that mean you forfeit your reasonable expectation that those letters are private?

People of course can disagree about what is "reasonable." I personally don't consider my e-mail private, not when a Google engineer has been caught stalking people through their GChats (http://gawker.com/5637234/gcreep-google-engineer-stalked-tee...), and not when the whole business model is built on reading through those e-mails to serve advertisements. I consider that quite different than my cleaning lady incidentally having access to documents in my desk drawer.

Re: End the N.S.A. Dragnet, Now

#80

Post by arethuza »

netman21 wrote: post #35
dalek_cannes wrote: post #32

Surveillance. It always starts with a desire to be safe. And that comes from fear. It seems Americans today are afraid of more things than ever: pedophiles, guns, terrorists, lawsuits. Some news reports are ridiculous by foreign standards: teachers not being allowed to shake hands with students out of fear of sexual harassment allegations, boys suspended from school for drawing guns, bystanders not administering firs…

Wow, well said. And extra points for quoting our national anthem at us!

Don't a lot of national anthems and/or identities claim bravery and freedom?
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