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

The real story in the NSA scandal is the collapse of journalism

zdnet.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 49 posts

Re: The real story in the NSA scandal is the collapse of journalism

#31

Post by cpleppert »

The media needs to get more credible technology consultants they can turn to. The days when a brief but imprecise description was acceptable are over.

In this case 'direct collection' i.e. a backdoor didn't make sense for a lot of reasons and didn't square with the program was described in other sources that came out after the slides were released.

But the real problem is secrecy. This is a complicated program with many actors and the media can't be expected not to report information clearly contained in leaked NSA slides even if they can't get the context 100% right.

Re: The real story in the NSA scandal is the collapse of journalism

#32

Post by jlgreco »

kllrnohj wrote: post #23
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #10

I don't know about the collapse of journalism. What it seems to me is the collapse of credibility. Here we have major publications publishing something and then major corporations denying it. Then the publications step back from it, but not entirely. At the same time, this is an issue about which the parties involved may be under a legal obligation to lie . If there is a room at Facebook that does the same thing as t…

Being under a gag order is VERY different from being under a "legal obligation to lie". There is no such thing as a legal obligation to lie. You can be under a legal obligation to not disclose it, or to not talk about it, yes, but to lie about it? No, absolutely not. Maybe these companies have VOLUNTARILY lied, that's possible, but that's also rather unlikely as that would suggest they are friendly with the NSA for s…

> There is no such thing as a legal obligation to lie. You can be under a legal obligation to not disclose it, or to not talk about it, yes, but to lie about it? No, absolutely not.

That is the logic behind the idea of a warrant canary, but my understanding is that they have never actually been tested.

The frequency with which rsync.net representatives bring up their warrant canary in community conversations (such as those on HN) suggests to me that their canary is still legitimately alive (one would expect them to be less proud of it, where it coerced), but do we really know that is the case? The very nature of these things prevents us from saying things like that with certainty.

For a time, until USA PATRIOT Act was amended, these letters were allowed to forbid you from consulting a lawyer about the letter. So if the letter included demands that it was not allowed to include (perhaps: "Lie."), how would you even know that those demands were not allowed? For that matter, if you received a letter today that said this amendment to the Act was not relevant in this particular circumstance and you were not allowed to consult a lawyer, what would you do? Call their bluff?

Re: The real story in the NSA scandal is the collapse of journalism

#33

Post by AnthonyMouse »

varjag wrote: post #30
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There is no such thing as a legal obligation to lie. So what are you supposed to do if you're not allowed to disclose something and someone directly asks you about it? An obvious evasion is clearly going to be a de facto admission, and you're not allowed to admit it, so you either have to lie or mislead. I'm not sure the distinction between a lie and a misleading statement is particularly meaningful in this context.

You can say you are not in a legal position to comment on the issue: for a company with scores of lawyers, it's easy enough to hint that you are bound by gag order. None of the big tech companies have an incentive to cover up: for them wiretapping both an extra cost and a continuous PR nightmare.

>You can say you are not in a legal position to comment on the issue: for a company with scores of lawyers, it's easy enough to hint that you are bound by gag order.

But hinting that you're bound by a gag order shouldn't be permitted by the gag order since that would compromise its effectiveness -- certainly a risk averse corporation could imagine a prosecutor arguing as much.

>None of the big tech companies have an incentive to cover up: for them wiretapping both an extra cost and a continuous PR nightmare.

As I understand it the government compensates them for the inconvenience.

Re: The real story in the NSA scandal is the collapse of journalism

#34

Post by AnthonyMouse »

res0nat0r wrote: post #26
mtgx wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It says right there in the slides PRISM has direct access to their servers. How the media and the public interpret that, that's different. Maybe if the government was more transparent, this wouldn't happen.

Or maybe the slides are inaccurate?

Maybe. Hey, why don't we ask someone with first hand knowledge?

...

Re: The real story in the NSA scandal is the collapse of journalism

#35

Post by jlgreco »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #33
varjag wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can say you are not in a legal position to comment on the issue: for a company with scores of lawyers, it's easy enough to hint that you are bound by gag order. None of the big tech companies have an incentive to cover up: for them wiretapping both an extra cost and a continuous PR nightmare.

>You can say you are not in a legal position to comment on the issue: for a company with scores of lawyers, it's easy enough to hint that you are bound by gag order. But hinting that you're bound by a gag order shouldn't be permitted by the gag order since that would compromise its effectiveness -- certainly a risk averse corporation could imagine a prosecutor arguing as much. >None of the big tech companies have an…

> As I understand it the government compensates them for the inconvenience.

I wonder how that works. If stories about pervasive US surveillance of a burgeoning tech startup cause their european market to be DOA, how could that startup be correctly compensated?

Re: The real story in the NSA scandal is the collapse of journalism

#36

Post by res0nat0r »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #34
res0nat0r wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or maybe the slides are inaccurate?

Maybe. Hey, why don't we ask someone with first hand knowledge? ...

We can't ask the person who supplied said info since they are anonymous, but you can ask Zuck or Larry since they've personally said the allegations are totally false, so there is that.

Re: The real story in the NSA scandal is the collapse of journalism

#37

Post by room271 »

The collapse of journalism? Isn't this week's news some of the best journalism of recent times?!

There are plenty examples of poor journalism, but I personally feel more encouraged that there is decent investigative and brave journalism going on after this week.

Re: The real story in the NSA scandal is the collapse of journalism

#38

Post by AJ007 »

eupharis wrote: post #25
brown9-2 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They had the knowledge but they could not publicly disclose a classified program. That's what "unable" means here.

Ah yes, I should've included the next sentence: > Wyden repeatedly asked the NSA to estimate the number of Americans whose communications had been incidentally collected, and the agency’s director, Lt. Gen. Keith B. Alexander, insisted there was no way to find out. Eventually Inspector General I. Charles McCullough III wrote Wyden a letter stating that it would violate the privacy of Americans in NSA data banks to tr…

In the recent Senate Intelligence hearing Senator Wyden asked General James Clapper "Does the NSA collect any data at all on millions or hundred of millions of Americans?" Response: "No sir, it does not .. not wittingly, there are cases where they could inadvertently, perhaps, collect, but not wittingly."

If ones assumes that William Binney both knows what he is talking about and is telling the truth, then the NSA has been collecting data on Americans since before September 11th.

If the rest of what William Binney says is also correct, then the NSA initially was keeping the data on Americans anonymized, for viewing only after a court order -- but then after September 11th disabled data anonymization for some order of time.

If the data has been anonymized once again, this may present legal problems in how officials can guarantee this because it would reveal past illegal activity which those same officials may have been involved in.

Re: The real story in the NSA scandal is the collapse of journalism

#39

Post by acqq »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #10

I don't know about the collapse of journalism. What it seems to me is the collapse of credibility. Here we have major publications publishing something and then major corporations denying it. Then the publications step back from it, but not entirely. At the same time, this is an issue about which the parties involved may be under a legal obligation to lie . If there is a room at Facebook that does the same thing as t…

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/08/nsa-prism-server...

The slide with the explicit formulation in published today:

"Collection directly from the servers of these U.S. Service Providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Paltalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple."

This supports the claims of Glenn Greenwald's article and is exactly what companies claimed not existing.

Re: The real story in the NSA scandal is the collapse of journalism

#40

Post by eightyone »

kllrnohj wrote: post #23
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #10

I don't know about the collapse of journalism. What it seems to me is the collapse of credibility. Here we have major publications publishing something and then major corporations denying it. Then the publications step back from it, but not entirely. At the same time, this is an issue about which the parties involved may be under a legal obligation to lie . If there is a room at Facebook that does the same thing as t…

Being under a gag order is VERY different from being under a "legal obligation to lie". There is no such thing as a legal obligation to lie. You can be under a legal obligation to not disclose it, or to not talk about it, yes, but to lie about it? No, absolutely not. Maybe these companies have VOLUNTARILY lied, that's possible, but that's also rather unlikely as that would suggest they are friendly with the NSA for s…

Imagine if the CEOs came out with something vague aluding that PRISM is exactly what we think it is. This would hurt profits and would most likely upset stock holders. I'm really not sure if this would intertwine with any sort of profit maximization laws or what have you, though.
Post reply on HN