81–90 of 181 posts
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>Because anyone trying to keep anything private or secure must be hiding something bad... No, that's not the reasoning. People that do bad things try to hide them. Therefore, a good first filter to catch bad people is to target those who hide things. They can narrow the search field afterwards.
This is true, but saying "treat all people trying to hide things as potential terrorists" is a very wide net to cast (to the point of useless).
Warning: The first sentence goes "If you read Boing Boing, the NSA considers you a target for deep surveillance". So, if you find this interesting, maybe you shouldn't read it.
I don't agree at all with these practices.
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> I can't believe the NSA is trying to rationalize it as being a good thing Is it really a surprise people in power wish to remain in power?
I wonder if the sentiment here is that the NSA used to be known for being a highly intelligent group of people trying to solve hard problems but now they seem like a bunch of D-level bureaucrats snooping through everything hoping they'll get lucky.
Of course this happens, and it's an obvious technique. I'm sure that not having a facebook account adds to your score, using AdBlock adds to your score, mentioning the NSA online adds to your score, refusing cookies adds to your score, using Linux adds to your score, etc. That's how a police state works. (XKeyScore += 5) My mother was involved in civil rights, so she has a file. It's fine that I have a file too. Hope…
Amplify this by 100, and welcome to Minority Report, where you get a arrested for having a "very high score". This is where the "mass surveillance" and "let's monitor everyone just in case they might do something bad" thinking inevitably ends up.
Considering this is PRECISELY how spam filtering works, it doesn't seem entirely irrational.
Much like spam filtering, it would all come down to dialing in your filters and picking a good threshold.
Hell, if the system was good enough, it could actually improve freedoms. We currently arrest many innocent people as part of the legal process (who are later exonerated). What if our "arrest filter" outperformed the current system, in terms of percentage of innocent people arrested? It doesn't have to be perfect to be better.
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It's a conservative meme that raw milk producers are being unfairly persecuted, in those circles it's supposed to be a paradigm case of the overly intrusive nanny state. In reality, there is hard epidemiological data showing that selling raw milk (edit: e.g. through the normal store channels) can lead to serious harm including deaths. So FDA bans it for interstate sales, but it's up to the state to decide how to regu…
It's probably misplaced to focus only on NSA in this respect, but if we talk about government electronic surveillance capabilities generally, they've been expanding through many agencies and parts of government. ACLU's recent focus on local police use of IMSI catchers is just one example; they started out as super-secret high-tech spy stuff and now local cops think they're super-awesome and are afraid they may to hav…
Seems more like it was the DOJ that was placing strings on access to the devices.
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>Not doing something can't make you more suspicious. That's just stupid.
No. That's common sense. If you don't do something on the internet, there is no data. No data = nothing suspicious.
It's quiet. TOO quiet.
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> You won't get to hear about how the trial turns out from your grave. Well, in contrast to you, I plan to enjoy my life instead of wasting it by worrying about some possible bad actor spying on me, which is what I'm must read is how you spend your life. Sure, fight the NSA by engaging a little bit politically, and buying the right things. But apart from that, don't worry so much, man.
I'm not worried (edit: about anything immediate), I'm not failing to partake in anything that I ever would, and I don't live any differently than I ever have. You're projecting something onto me, and that's not a great way to have a productive discussion.
> You won't get to hear about how the trial turns out from your grave
that's equally projecting something onto me, so... that's not a great way to have a productive discussion neither.
Because anyone trying to keep anything private or secure must be hiding something bad... That's just wonderful. After 10 years of pervasive surveillance and not being able to catch a single terrorist I can't believe the NSA is trying to rationalize it as being a good thing. It's too bad the bill to defund the NSA didn't pass: http://defundthensa.com/
Because anyone trying to keep anything private or secure must be hiding something bad... Well that idea isn't exactly new, unfortunately, remember Eric Scmidt.. "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."
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If we are to accept that some who seek privacy and security are good and innocent, we also need to accept that some who seek those same things can also be bad.
You can literally replace "seek privacy and security" with almost anything in that statement. I mean, out of all the people that prefer Coke over Pepsi, there are definitely some bad guys. While your statement is true, it doesn't really give any justification on targeted spying. That is, unless of course, we consider the desire to hide things to be a signal of being a bad actor. Thinking along those lines is a very s…
Pardon the bluntless, but it seems like an a priori conclusion that only people taking pains to hide their data/communications should be targeted. That is not because the vast majority of those people are innocent (they are) but because that is the only group that contains a subset that poses a real & present threat.
So, that ignores your slippery slope argument about personal liberties, which are totally valid. How do you balance national security and personal liberty in this case? That's the million dollar question.
Please let me know if you question my reasoning. I'm purely looking at it as a 2x2 matrix of (highly encrypts personal data, does not ...) x (seeks to harm people/nation interests, does not ...)
So only the people hiding their tracks that seek to harm are the ones to worry about. Those that don't hide their tracks are a lot less likely to be operationally successful.
However, I assume that the 99.95% of people that highly encrypt personal do not seek to harm anyone, and are collateral damage here.
Constitutional tradeoffs happen all over. Fire in a crowded theater, felons rights to vote, personal rights to own certain weapons, etc. This is another one that needs to be decided very carefully. But I think both sides have very valid concerns.
Because anyone trying to keep anything private or secure must be hiding something bad... That's just wonderful. After 10 years of pervasive surveillance and not being able to catch a single terrorist I can't believe the NSA is trying to rationalize it as being a good thing. It's too bad the bill to defund the NSA didn't pass: http://defundthensa.com/
Because anyone trying to keep anything private or secure must be hiding something bad... Well that idea isn't exactly new, unfortunately, remember Eric Scmidt.. "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."
Whereas he bought himself a specially isolated penthouse in order to live his open marriage in perfect privacy.