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Forced Exposure

groklaw.net

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Re: Forced Exposure

#371

Post by dragontamer »

md224 wrote: post #359
dragontamer wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because there is an inherent mismatch in privacy concerns and law enforcement / defense concerns. Office of Censorship was created to counter the German / Japanese threat of spies during World War 2. It was seen as a necessary measure to help unite the country. The successful use of the Atomic Bomb is credited to the Office of Censorship, who helped keep the project secret. Quite possibly... the Atomic Bomb's details…

> Every few decades, peacetime makes us forget that the world is willing to attack us. Eventually, we as the citizenry work to dismantle the annoying and invasive defensive measures we give to law enforcement. (see Clinton Era in the 90s, where he reduced the size of Intelligence Agencies by half) > Then, an attack happens. The US returns to "war mode", and everyone is willing to trade privacy for security... at leas…

> I hope your observation that "peacetime makes us forget that the world is willing to attack us" is not implying this is a bad thing; on the contrary, it seems like the closest we'll get to rationality.

Not necessarily. It comes with good and bad.

People have already forgotten that it is the NSA's job to investigate the Nasdaq and Google Hacks of last year. Chinese hackers were spying on Americans... hacking into gmail accounts and so forth.

And yet you read through this thread, with Groklaw closing down and everything. You have to remember: you may feel that the NSA has violated your privacy, but they are also the organization responsible for protecting it from other nations.

But peacetime makes us quick to forget these events. The Google-hack event was only 2 years ago, the Nasdaq hack is currently ongoing, the RSA hack was in 2011. Someone hacked Verisign in 2012. All are being treated as international hacking events.

The balance of "privacy" and "security" is more complicated than "destroy that program" or "remove funding" from a certain agency. Overreactions happen both in peacetime and wartime. Now, more than ever, as other countries spy on Americans, is the time for agencies like the NSA to step up and help defend.

You see how easy it is to turn an argument into anything? There are no easy solutions in politics. A lot is going on in this country, and its far more complicated than "totalitarianism" vs "privacy concerns".

Re: Forced Exposure

#372

Post by dragontamer »

crusso wrote: post #368
dragontamer wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. I'll go back to the Constitution. * Blacks can't vote. * Women can't vote. * Corporations were straight up illegal unless CONGRESS approved of them first! Oh my, yes, I'd much rather live in 1790s America than today. Get your history straight boy.

You were saying that ours is a government that gives up its powers for the privacy (sake) of its citizenry. I pointed out that the statement is incorrect over the long view. Then you call me "boy". Is that supposed to be racist or just demeaning? And you throw out some red herrings about voting rights.

Do you think citizens have more, or less rights today than in 1789? When the Bill of Rights was first drafted?

I believe we have more rights today, as a historical fact. We can easily create Corporations. Almost anyone can vote, Black, white, or women. The original 13 colonies drafted their soldiers into militia, while today the Draft has been completely eradicated. (ditto for the Civil War). Before 1960, freedom of press is compromised if there was a "reasonable tendency" to endanger society. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_tendency)

Are you seriously telling me, that we were "more free" in 1790s than today? If we were still operating in 1900s era law, we wouldn't even be allowed to talk about strikes, due to the "bad tendency" measure. (A man was in-fact arrested and put into jail for inciting a strike in the 1910s)

And yes, I'll call you "boy" until you understand simple US History. "Boys" believe in the ideal past, a past that _never existed_. Boys are unable to see how much this country has grown, and how much better it is today than before.

Re: Forced Exposure

#373

Post by nullc »

jcromartie wrote: post #221
pron wrote: post #39

I have said this on HN several times, and I will say this again. Dragnet surveillance of private digital correspondence by the US and other governments is wrong, and a gross, unjustified, overreaction to the real threat of terrorism. And yet, when taken as part of the whole picture that is the internet, government surveillance is little more than a drop in the ocean. While governments may collect a possibly significa…

People must understand that every interaction with an Internet service means voluntarily sending your data to them. These companies don't just "vacuum it up", the data is simply sent directly to them. Maybe you don't see it that way, but that is why the perception needs to change. When you use Gmail you are sending your mail to Google , first, and then it is relayed to the recipients. When you search for driving dire…

> People your you you you your you you you they You them you they

People who do not understand technology to the depth and detail that you do are not halfwits or children. They know what they intend to accomplish and giving up their most personal information for perpetual archival is seldom a property they are asking for. If the technological tools they possess do not faithfully obey their intentions with a minimum of unintended side effects then the problem is with the technology or the services not the user.

Technology is neat and important, but it exists to serve the user. Faithfulness to the users needs and intentions are the only criteria by which we can judge technology.

Re: Forced Exposure

#374

Post by robg »

dragonwriter wrote: post #329
robg wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The efforts aren't illegal, in the Constitutional sense (U.S.), so long as the searches are deemed reasonable. Two branches of government (Executive and Judicial) have generally been in agreement that searches for the purposes of National Security ( very broadly defined) are reasonable. And Congress has not passed laws to the contrary. In fact, Congress has been exceedingly pliant on these issues. They've been passin…

> And Congress has not passed laws to the contrary. Congress did, in fact, pass the original Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 "to the contrary", expressly prohibiting (and criminalizing) many of the types of searches (both physical and electronic) for the stated purposes of "National Security" that had been done prior to the Act. Of course, the executive was successful in getting Congress to remove many…

Sorry, by "Congress" I wasn't referring to the version in place 35 years ago in the post-Watergate Era.

As you note, the Congress of today has rolled back FISA and added new, more pliant laws (e.g., Patriot Act).

We are in a different era where all three branches are gladly pushing the reasonable clause far beyond the intended use. That's the result and it is Constitutional because all three branches say so.

Re: Forced Exposure

#375

Post by FedRegister »

vtail wrote: post #249
FedRegister wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not in the same way that you can use email though. It is unsafe to use GnuPG on a computer you do not own or trust like a computer at a public library or an Internet cafe. It is, however, possible to register an email address on such a computer and send unencrypted email on that same computer with some precautions and still be fairly sure that the contents will not be connected to you.

What stops you from encrypting the body of the message on you own computer and use USB stick to just copy over an encrypted file?

Not wanting to be in possession of key material which could tie the original message back to you would be a good example. PGP messages are not deniable.

I was thinking more of a situation where a worker trying to expose abuses has knowledge of how to use a computer but does not have a computer at home that they can trust. Either it's shared, is running an operating system that cannot be trusted (due to malware or other reason), is under active surveillance (not necessarily by a state-level actor), otherwise untrustworthy, or the leaker simply does not own one.

In that case there is no safe way to generate and store a PGP key, and possession of the associated key is a great way to break anonymity.

Re: Forced Exposure

#377

Post by nkurz »

jacquesm wrote: post #96
nkurz wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but is it a good impulse? http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.html

In this case, yes. PJ being a woman is very well known and it irks me when people automatically assume that anybody that runs a thing as successful as groklaw has to be a guy without checking. If you don't know use a gender neutral word or check, it's simple. It's not purity in language, it is paying basic respect to a person who is named several times in full in this thread.

I think you're brilliant, but I don't know if you are right here. PJ is a private person, kept her name out of the blog for a long while, and I've never seen her make an issue of her sex. This error is made frequently in the Groklaw comments, and I haven't seen her correcting them. While disputable, it's not clear to me that it's more respectful to correct an irrelevant factual error than to follow the authors lead.

The "basic respect" part is tricky. While getting this correct may imply more respect, it also reinforces the idea that the difference is relevant. For example, if she was identified as "Miss Jones" and you happened to know that she was married, does it merit a correction to point out that she is actually "Mrs. Jones" to show proper respect to her status as a married woman?

Hofstadter skewers this in one of this examples: "Ble conveniently sidesteps the fact that there is a tradition in our society of calling unemployed blacks 'Niss' and employed blacks 'Nrs.' Most blacks --- in fact, the vast majority ---prefer it that way. They want the world to know what their employment status is, and for good reason. Unemployed blacks want prospective employers to know they are available, without having to ask embarrassing questions. Likewise, employed blacks are proud of having found a job, and wish to let the world know they are employed."

I don't have an answer, but thought you might enjoy thinking about the issue in the context of Hofstadter's article.

Re: Forced Exposure

#379

Post by grey-area »

logn wrote: post #370
grey-area wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since you genuinely don't seem to understand, here's the deal: that story was about someone's personal experience of sexual harassment, and you posted a flippant analogy comparing it to invasion of online privacy. NSA surveillance is a big deal, but nothing to do with sexual harassment.

Thanks, I appreciate your feedback and the other commenter's. It didn't occur to me it would be interpreted as flippant or off-topic. Anyhow, IMO it was a serious and equivalent analogy, as I think pj's story shows. Anyhow, I was just curious, I don't actually care about downvotes.

I think the problem is that it is no way equivalent, and sexual assault is psychologically far more damaging. I don't think you can compare the complex damage to body and self-worth triggered by that meaningfully to the limited intrusion most of us feel at having machines storing and cataloguing our every move. With respect, I don't think pg's story shows the two are similar at all - she's taken a decision to withdraw from being a conduit for leaks (probably because she doesn't want her life destroyed by a NSL), but has not had sexual contact forced on her. It's just a completely different thing.

The biggest dangers I see with the surveillance state are more in the future, when complex filters are run on our data in decades to come, and segregate us into cohorts of users which can then be targeted and related at will. When that capability catches up with the data storage capability and starts to churn through decades of data, we truly will be in a dystopia far beyond our imagining today.

Re: Forced Exposure

#380

Post by dragontamer »

samstave wrote: post #365
dragontamer wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Governments are composed of people. The people who ran the government in the 1940s no longer did by 1960s... and the people who ran the government in the 1960s no longer do today. Your example is fallacious to begin with, because you assume a single entity is responsible for PRISM, Office of Censorship, and COINTELPRO. No, they are different: different governments of different eras... facing different problems even.…

> Governments are composed of people. The people who ran the government in the 1940s no longer did by 1960s... and the people who ran the government in the 1960s no longer do today. No, governments are composed of institutionalized sets of behaviours and response guidlines; colloquially known as "Laws" - the architecture of governance. The "people" in these organizations are agents of these systems. They behave exact…

Sure, if you wanna be a defeatist. But IMO, that viewpoint is lazy, and unacceptable to the hacker.

Governments change, be it to external factors (9/11 -> passage of Patriot Act -> PRISM), or internal factors (Erm... the Civil Rights Movement)

We, the Millennials, have a good shot at becoming the next greatest generation. We grew up during the rise of the internet. We witnessed 9/11. We fought in two oversea wars, we've returned to the greatest economic recession since the great depression. We've elected the first African American President. We've defeated SOPA. We've created Reddit. We've created Google. We've created Wikipedia.

The air of political change is growing... not shrinking. Don't you see? Millenials are beginning to take over the country. Its our time to shine!

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