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NSA tracking cellphone locations worldwide, Snowden documents show

washingtonpost.com

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Re: NSA tracking cellphone locations worldwide, Snowden documents show

#121

Post by ars_technician »

marvin wrote: post #65
angersock wrote: post #3

From the article: NSA Director Keith Alexander disclosed in Senate testimony in October that the NSA had run a pilot project in 2010 and 2011 to collect “samples” of U.S. cellphone location data. The data collected were never available for intelligence analysis purposes, and the project was discontinued because it had no “operational value,” he said. Alexander allowed that a broader collection of such data “may be so…

> And that, folks, is why we as engineers and hackers have a moral duty to be very selective in the types of work we take on and for whom. Computer yechnology work is still a wild west. Other fields which have similar ethical considerations - medicine, chemistry, engineering - have ethics courses which make it clear to the graduates that their professional decisions have consequences. There is no such standard for co…

>It still baffles me that people would voluntarily work at implementing something like PRISM

It's almost like not everyone in the world shares your political views on privacy rights...

Seriously, you are baffled by this? The majority of the population doesn't value privacy at all.

Re: NSA tracking cellphone locations worldwide, Snowden documents show

#122

Post by mixmastamyk »

Posts with NSA in the title are heavily penalized here. Keep that in mind when submitting an important story.

    2.  Have I been pwned? Check if your email has been...
        213 points by mountaineer 4 hours ago
        
    3.  NSA tracking cellphone locations worldwide, ...
        266 points by 001sky 2 hours ago

Re: NSA tracking cellphone locations worldwide, Snowden documents show

#123

Post by onosendai »

agwa wrote: post #91
marvin wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And that, folks, is why we as engineers and hackers have a moral duty to be very selective in the types of work we take on and for whom. Computer yechnology work is still a wild west. Other fields which have similar ethical considerations - medicine, chemistry, engineering - have ethics courses which make it clear to the graduates that their professional decisions have consequences. There is no such standard for co…

Yet there is no shortage of doctors willing to assist in torture of prisoners at Guantanamo, assist in executions of prisoners, or conduct non-consensual and medically unnecessary procedures (inserting catheters, rectal examinations, etc.) upon demand of the police. The problem isn't lack of ethics courses but a fundamental flaw in human nature, which is that people easily forget all their personal ethics when someon…

> people easily forget all their personal ethics when someone in authority (whether their boss or the police) tells them to do something.

I don't know whether you're aware of this or not, but you just described a famous experiment which essentially arrived at the same conclusion. It's worth a read for those not familiar with it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment

Re: NSA tracking cellphone locations worldwide, Snowden documents show

#124

Post by wcummings »

crystaln wrote: post #107

NSA responses generally imply that any sort of surveillance is ok, as long as it's of non-Americans. While it may largely be legally true, I think the presumption that that is a valid defense needs to be challenged more often. Phrases like "intended strictly to develop intelligence about foreign targets" seems to be regularly used by reporters in such a way as to imply that, if true, the surveillance would be a-ok. T…

The distinction between ordinary spycraft and mass surveillance of a foreign civilian populace at an unprecedented scale needs to be drawn

Re: NSA tracking cellphone locations worldwide, Snowden documents show

#125

Post by sukuriant »

sanskritabelt wrote: post #93
sukuriant wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Citation needed on the 20% of the population of the US that doesn't use the internet. Is there even 20% of the US population outside of 100 miles from the shore? Also, you can't use a cellphone without them knowing who you are with high certainty. It only takes 3 points of location data to identify a person the vast majority of the time[1]. Using a cell phone that you paid for with cash is insufficient. [1] http://ww…

Rough estimate from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territo... suggests that about 2/3 of americans live in a state bordering the ocean, so about 100 million americans further away from the shore. What that has to do with anything, god only knows, unless you meant something like '100 miles away from the border', and even then I'm at a loss. Go visit a flyover state sometime. Most of the country's…

I was going on the assumption that most people in population centers use or have used the internet; and that the number of people that were not in population centers was less than 20%; and I mental-gymnastics'd myself to thinking that those population centers tend to be on the shore, so I said it that way.

Not necessarily right, but that's how I go there.

Re: NSA tracking cellphone locations worldwide, Snowden documents show

#126

Post by adventured »

swalkergibson wrote: post #120
slg wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying that you actually support this level of spying when the person being spied on has a different political opinion than you?

I do not support this level of spying, period. However, the ignition of any real movement would certainly be helped by the personal embarrassment of anybody with a large enough mouthpiece. s/Glenn Beck/Rachel Maddow if you want, the point still stands. Somebody has to get really, really worked up over this. EDIT: As it so happens, Glenn Beck is actually not in favor of this type of surveillance. I would have never gu…

Isn't Glenn Beck a strong Constitutionalist? I was always under the impression that was his entire platform.

Re: NSA tracking cellphone locations worldwide, Snowden documents show

#127

Post by toyg »

runn1ng wrote: post #89
marvin wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And that, folks, is why we as engineers and hackers have a moral duty to be very selective in the types of work we take on and for whom. Computer yechnology work is still a wild west. Other fields which have similar ethical considerations - medicine, chemistry, engineering - have ethics courses which make it clear to the graduates that their professional decisions have consequences. There is no such standard for co…

It's way more ambiguous. PRISM people thought they were doing right. All NSA - based on all the official and unofficial responses - think they are doing right. That they help building a safer America. That they have to sacrifice privacy for safety. Etc, etc. I don't think NSA people are evil. They believe that the things they do are for good.

>They believe that the things they do are for good.

And so they walk a famously paved road.

Re: NSA tracking cellphone locations worldwide, Snowden documents show

#128

Post by toyg »

latj wrote: post #84
qq66 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prism may have been built by people holding their noses for the paycheck, but it could also have been built by people who genuinely believe that its social benefits outweigh its costs. Even if only 0.1% of software professionals believe this, it's enough to staff the project.

I agree. Just look at who Palantir hires. I imagine its a pretty small number of nose-holders and more often people who think they are doing good and people who think spying is a necessary evil so lets put fine grained controls on it.

I'm pretty sure there's also a good number of people who actually enjoy the craft. How many geeks do you know who wouldn't enjoy the power-trip? From LOVEINT to immature Googlers, there's an abundance of literature on the joys of doing evil.

Re: NSA tracking cellphone locations worldwide, Snowden documents show

#129

Post by MrZongle2 »

swalkergibson wrote: post #120
slg wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying that you actually support this level of spying when the person being spied on has a different political opinion than you?

I do not support this level of spying, period. However, the ignition of any real movement would certainly be helped by the personal embarrassment of anybody with a large enough mouthpiece. s/Glenn Beck/Rachel Maddow if you want, the point still stands. Somebody has to get really, really worked up over this. EDIT: As it so happens, Glenn Beck is actually not in favor of this type of surveillance. I would have never gu…

We're well beyond the Left-vs-Right model on this. Like armed drone usage, support or opposition doesn't run along party lines.

Re: NSA tracking cellphone locations worldwide, Snowden documents show

#130

Post by infectoid »

Amadou wrote: post #102
runn1ng wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's way more ambiguous. PRISM people thought they were doing right. All NSA - based on all the official and unofficial responses - think they are doing right. That they help building a safer America. That they have to sacrifice privacy for safety. Etc, etc. I don't think NSA people are evil. They believe that the things they do are for good.

I don't think NSA people are evil. They believe that the things they do are for good. Evil like in the movies doesn't exist. In the real-world evil is simply a lack of perspective (some would call it empathy instead). No one ever wakes up and decides they want to be a villain. They always have some sort of logic that rationalizes their actions as being reasonable if not outright good. The more they act on that lack o…

Indeed. But also imagine that as an engineer on any secret NSA project, being shown real information regarding atrocities that have never been publicised and knowing that you can help to make the world a better place. You would have the passion and motivations to do these things and have meaning in your life and work.

Evil in this case is an aggregation of actions by many parties, not individuals and is rarely committed by the tool makers. However, it's always justified by the perpetrators.

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