Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What Snowden really revealed

aljazeera.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 58 posts

Re: What Snowden really revealed

#21

Post by horseapples »

gaius wrote: post #13
pgeorgi wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Order some armed body to take over all NSA sites and burn things to the ground. Reason being in the set of (libel|slander|extortion|treason).

That is precisely what the Founding Fathers intended to happen in this situation. Calling the militia!

This is exactly why that amendment exists. Instead, the vast majority of the individuals with the guns are far more upset that about protecting bigotry than protecting their rights. And the liberals on the side of rights, are generally less inclined to actually use guns.

Re: What Snowden really revealed

#22

Post by AnthonyMouse »

gaius wrote: post #13
pgeorgi wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Order some armed body to take over all NSA sites and burn things to the ground. Reason being in the set of (libel|slander|extortion|treason).

That is precisely what the Founding Fathers intended to happen in this situation. Calling the militia!

Ironically, if citizens actually did that then the government officials would classify it as terrorism and use it as an excuse to crack down and demand new powers.

And politicians need to learn not to be so pusillanimous. What do you think would happen if a politician came to the media and revealed that some spook had tried to blackmail him for proposing an anti-surveillance bill? It would cause the bill to pass and the politician to be reelected. It would be like surviving an assassination attempt -- and if you could prove it you would become practically beyond reproach, because anything anyone ever said bad about you again could be attributed to the blackmailers.

Re: What Snowden really revealed

#23

Post by DanielBMarkham »

Hey I'm as big of a hair-on-fire guy as the next guy, but this is getting too much.

A bit of context. Please.

The U.S. has always overreacted to existential threats. In fact, that's the way the system is designed. If it has to fail, it fails towards a dictatorial president and overbearing laws -- which are removed by a frequently-elected and truly representative Congress as soon as the threat is gone. We've been going along like this for 240 years or so. There is nothing new about the abuse of power or removal of freedoms (unfortunately).

So what's changed? First, internet companies are tracking every freaking thing you do online. They figured out that the average Joe will give up his privacy for free email, and they're having a field day with it.

Governments trump companies, and since the data is already collected, every government on the planet is wanting a piece of that action.

Second, there is no ever-changing Congress looking to score points with the folks back home. Instead, there's a static political system that fears looking bad -- and it's grown a perpetual fear machine built up around terror that can make it look really bad.

Folks do this issue a great disservice when they focus only on the U.S., or only on the NSA. Look guys, if the U.S. and the NSA disappeared tomorrow, you'd have the same problems you have now -- you just wouldn't know so much about them. This has nothing specifically to do with them. (I'm not making excuses, only pleading for context).

The tech community brought this on themselves. We are the people to blame. The trade-off of tracking data for free stuff was too good to be true. In fact, instead of the tracking data being almost worthless to the average citizen, as it turns out this data is much too valuable to give up under any circumstances, at least in the aggregate. Until that leaky bucket is fixed somehow, nothing changes.

Re: What Snowden really revealed

#24

Post by joseflavio »

"all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed" -- Preamble of the declaration of independence

It is going to be very difficult to motivate people to change something... until a big part of population is starving I believe...

Re: What Snowden really revealed

#25

Post by deelowe »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #23

Hey I'm as big of a hair-on-fire guy as the next guy, but this is getting too much. A bit of context. Please. The U.S. has always overreacted to existential threats. In fact, that's the way the system is designed. If it has to fail, it fails towards a dictatorial president and overbearing laws -- which are removed by a frequently-elected and truly representative Congress as soon as the threat is gone. We've been goin…

There's a big difference between my agreement with a private company which allows me to use their webmail service in exchange for scraping my data for ad use and agents of the state watching everything I do with the expectation that this data will be used to harass, fine, detain, prosecute, or execute me or my family. The distinction here is that state entities are granted authority to do things no corporation can.

TL;DR - Google doesn't use this data to kill people or rig elections.

Re: What Snowden really revealed

#26

Post by DanielBMarkham »

deelowe wrote: post #25
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #23

Hey I'm as big of a hair-on-fire guy as the next guy, but this is getting too much. A bit of context. Please. The U.S. has always overreacted to existential threats. In fact, that's the way the system is designed. If it has to fail, it fails towards a dictatorial president and overbearing laws -- which are removed by a frequently-elected and truly representative Congress as soon as the threat is gone. We've been goin…

There's a big difference between my agreement with a private company which allows me to use their webmail service in exchange for scraping my data for ad use and agents of the state watching everything I do with the expectation that this data will be used to harass, fine, detain, prosecute, or execute me or my family. The distinction here is that state entities are granted authority to do things no corporation can. T…

No, but once the instrumentation is in place to collect it, by Google or anybody else, it's fair game for various governments to use it to do just that.

What would the alternative be? To have Google et al be above the law?

You can't have it both ways. If you give up your data, you give up your data. You can't just give it up for special purposes. You don't get to choose. (And neither does Google or whoever is on the other end of the transaction)

You could even take all government influence out of it and still have problems. Companies could just buy up each other, pay for illegal data transfers, and so on. That's kinda the point here. A tiny little piece of data like my email to Aunt Claire this morning is almost completely worthless. Almost. But zillions of pieces, accumulating day-by-day? The value, in both monetary and intelligence terms, just keeps going up. Every day the economics of getting that data, by hook or crook, changes in favor of it being lost. And once it's lost, in most cases it's lost forever. There's no "going back" to having the data private again. That's an unsustainable system.

Re: What Snowden really revealed

#27

Post by DennisP »

horseapples wrote: post #21
gaius wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is precisely what the Founding Fathers intended to happen in this situation. Calling the militia!

This is exactly why that amendment exists. Instead, the vast majority of the individuals with the guns are far more upset that about protecting bigotry than protecting their rights. And the liberals on the side of rights, are generally less inclined to actually use guns.

I know a lot of those individuals with guns, and would say that's more a media caricature than reality.

Re: What Snowden really revealed

#28

Post by DennisP »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #26
deelowe wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a big difference between my agreement with a private company which allows me to use their webmail service in exchange for scraping my data for ad use and agents of the state watching everything I do with the expectation that this data will be used to harass, fine, detain, prosecute, or execute me or my family. The distinction here is that state entities are granted authority to do things no corporation can. T…

No, but once the instrumentation is in place to collect it, by Google or anybody else, it's fair game for various governments to use it to do just that. What would the alternative be? To have Google et al be above the law? You can't have it both ways. If you give up your data, you give up your data. You can't just give it up for special purposes. You don't get to choose. (And neither does Google or whoever is on the…

The spying goes far beyond webmail. Most people haven't agreed to have their phone calls tapped, or backdoors put into networking hardware and encryption standards.

Re: What Snowden really revealed

#29

Post by InclinedPlane »

horseapples wrote: post #21
gaius wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is precisely what the Founding Fathers intended to happen in this situation. Calling the militia!

This is exactly why that amendment exists. Instead, the vast majority of the individuals with the guns are far more upset that about protecting bigotry than protecting their rights. And the liberals on the side of rights, are generally less inclined to actually use guns.

It boggles my mind how quickly people who know absolutely nothing about guns and have almost no knowledge of the lives of gun owners are nevertheless so extremely willing to put forward ideas about such based on nothing but prejudice and ignorance.

Re: What Snowden really revealed

#30

Post by axus »

Derbasti wrote: post #7

At this point, it may well be impossible to shut down the NSA. I imagine every opposing politician gets visited by some agent at some point, showing him records of his own wrongdoings. Imagine every politician ever be forced to choose between the end of his career and opposing the NSA. How can we get out of this mess?

Actually I think that would get them shut down pretty quickly, right now. Politicians would be scared of the NSA. But if the NSA could pass the information to a different law enforcement, who then build a parallel case, they could knock out their opponents without making themself a target.
Post reply on HN