Amerika, I disappointedFollow

So not only is he is a wanton criminal with no respect for government property, but also a liar? That is clearly a public enemy and must be caught for such slanderous lies he spreads about our beloved regi... government.

And we did not have a conversation, I assume ( because I had the presence of mind not spend time on actually reading the posts you consider the part of the conversation ) you were just parroting various talking heads who happily decided to decree that metadata is not data and thus ripe for harvest.

I was promised more shower rapes once DADT was gone.

That's kind of a bizarre assertion. There's very little data; what was he basing that on?

That's kind of a bizarre assertion. There's very little data; what was he basing that on?

It's a pretty common 'men's right' assertion. It's derived from the fact that it's mostly men who are *involved* in rapes, as victims or assailants. So, men rape men, men rape women, women rape men, but apparently women rarely rape women, so men are more likely to 'experience' rape. Isn't language wonderful?

They were asking for it.

Um... No. I said that's exactly how they would do it. What I said they would not do is "hack" into sites like google and facebook and every ISP on the planet and siphon people's data that way. Because that would be an insanely stupid way of doing things (and almost certainly be detected). You're the one who argued that they'd just break through people's firewalls and copy all their data constantly (technically, they'd install taps on the routing equipment installed inside their networks IIRC). I'm the one who said that they would simply install network taps into backbone routers over time as the infrastructure was built, and divert that data to their own networks running parallel to those already existing (with large data storage sites distributed across the net to prevent obvious traffic pattern issues). Easy to do, nearly impossible to detect.

The problem with tapping the data inside those site's firewalls is that you have to get the data out across the networks those sites control. That kind of data flow is trivially detected and can't be hidden. If you want to do bulk grabs of massive amounts of data, you really want to do it at the backbone layer where the various customers of the network wont see it.

But great job completely getting my position backwards there Smash.

/shrug



What he did certainly qualifies as treason.




We, meaning "all of us collectively in this thread". And if by "parroting various talking heads", you mean "the judge who wrote the decision linked earlier in the thread, and all the court decisions he was referencing when he wrote it", then yeah. The courts have consistently ruled that metadata is not protected by the 4th or 5th amendments. That's not me making stuff up. That's the decision of a long run of court cases on the subject. You can sit at your desk typing on the interwebs about how shocking this is to you, but that's you being ignorant of current law and judicial standing on the issue.

Edited, May 8th 2015 4:17pm by gbaji

Except the government didn't lie about "spying on us". As I said earlier, anyone who read and understood the 2006 law knew that it authorized exactly the sort of metadata collection and analysis that Snowden "revealed". We had long arguments about it on this very forum. And back then, I never said "OMG! They're not collecting metadata." I said "They're only collecting metadata (on US persons), and that's not a violation of privacy".

Snowden didn't reveal a lie. He told the public what was already known but lied about it and made it out like the program wasn't just collecting metadata, but was examining content. The statement about being able to "wiretap anyone" by using this data is a blatant lie. Period. If you pay close attention to the article (like what's inside quotation marks and what is not), and you look at the actual data from the documents and contrast it to the out of quotation mark statements in the article, you'll notice a pattern. The article references "content" several times, but nothing in the documents uses that term, or shows content (as we presumably all mean it) being made available. What the guardian calls "content" is actually email headers. Which, as I pointed out earlier, is not protected content since it only contains from/to information and routing information. It's the equivalent of looking at the outside of an envelope, which does not require a warrant.

So yeah. I'm not going to trust the guy who got a job with access to secret information, promised not to reveal that secret information, but then revealed it anyway, and basically covered for it by misrepresenting the information itself so as to make it look whistle blower quality. It was not. I have seen absolutely nothing about this NSA program that wasn't what we expected it would be doing as a result of the law that was passed and which we had long conversations about. If this sort of data collection was so secret and unknown to the public, how is it that we were discussing it on this forum years before Snowden ever came on the scene?

All he did was toss data out there that would match an already existing false narrative. Nothing more.



Which officials are you talking about? The Republican chairman of the house intelligence committee (Mike Rodgers) who called his action treason? Or the Democrat Chairwoman of the Senate intelligence committee (Dianne Feinstein), who also called his action treason? Or maybe you mean the panel that Obama formed to investigate the program, which also concluded that what Snowden did qualified as treason?

You're free to argue that Snowden's actions were justified (I disagree, but you can certainly make the argument), but those actions were absolutely treason. He stole classified US documents and handed them to a foreign government.



Yes. I already talked about this. The court ruling linked earlier rules that the current law should not have been interpreted as an authorization for that broad a system of data collection. But it did not rule in favor of an injunction against further collection nor did it rule that the collection, if it were directly authorized by congress (with say an amendment to the existing law), would violate the constitution.

I'm not sure who you think "all establishment" is in this context. Yeah. Right at the moment when a bunch of people who have been told the program does something it doesn't are all up in arms about it (witness the number of people in this thread repeating the assertions about content despite already being told directly several times that this isn't what's being collected, and multiply it by the number of people who don't even have that much information about it), politicians will tend to shy away (they are subject to public opinion after all), but I guarantee you that they'll just wait for the furor to die down a bit and resume things. They'll toss in some extra oversight or something to make it look better. We'll get assurances from folks that they're not being spied on. And it'll go right back into operation (actually, has never stopped).



Because I don't labor under the false belief that public data I generate is private and protected by the 4th amendment. I have a firm grasp of the actual point at which my actions transition from public to private and I believe that the goal of privacy is much better served by properly knowing where that line is and defending it strongly, rather than weakening the entire issue with a series of "boy who cried wolf" scenarios. All you accomplish is to convince the public that there is no privacy by doing what you are doing. Because you'll keep losing court cases, and the government will keep collecting data, and if people actually do believe that's what "privacy" is, then they'll conclude that they don't have it anymore, and then they'll stop protecting actual privacy.


I care deeply about property and privacy rights. Which is why it's important to properly define them and not try to defend things that don't fall into those headings falsely. I want us to defend actual privacy rights, instead of arguing about nonsense like this in the name of defending privacy. All you're doing is weakening the defense of real privacy by doing that.

Edited, May 8th 2015 5:02pm by gbaji

Ok. I don't disagree. ****, I am actually mostly in agreement. I do find it mildly amusing that you think NSA part is negligible given it was the NSA that gave our police stingray as a tool, but other than that.. it is like I am on the other side of the looking glass.

I am not sure why/how you think all of those cannot be handled at the same time? How is fake cell phone tower easier to explain than wholesale interwebz backup in terms of popular messaging?

The dead don't know they're dead.

I don't think the NSA gave police such devices, but that the same security device companies provide them to both (and the FBI, and probably several other investigative organizations). The technology would exist whether the NSA existed or not. Heck. I've seen enough base station designs to know exactly how it's done, and it's really not rocket science. But yes, that's one of the areas one might question in terms of being tracked via a device that you can't really turn off (a cell phone) without seriously degrading the purpose of the device itself. And it's a real issue in terms of privacy. As more of our day to day activities involve technological devices that communicate via some sort of network, the more data we give off about ourselves just by walking down the street.

Such devices still don't listen in on content (so not a "wiretap"), but being able to get dumps from cell towers (or set up fake ones as in the case with Stingray), you can still determine everyone who was in an area at any given time. The degree to which that represents a true invasion of privacy is still subject to debate. Heck. I'm not even sure where I fall on that particular issue. I'm just saying that it *is* an issue to be discussed and debated.



Because one is being used by law enforcement and the other is not. When you read up on police using these sorts of techniques, it's always in terms of hours of data and a handful of sources (like cell towers). This is (currently) a resource issue. Police forces simply don't have the data storage capacity to collect and retain every bit of metadata from every source within their jurisdictions. So they rely on subpoenas to cell tower companies after the fact to get data as needed. So each grab of data is in response to a criminal justice investigation and not just collecting it ahead of time and holding it for later examination if it's needed (which is where most of the privacy concerns come in with metadata).

The NSA, on the other hand, does have the resources to collect vast amounts of data and store it for later use. Enough that they can use this nationwide to look for patterns that may indicate national security threats. But, the NSA isn't a law enforcement agency. They can't use that data to prosecute someone for a crime. As long as that remains the case, I'm far less concerned about such data collection by the NSA than other forms of data collection by agencies that may use it against me in some punitive way.

As I mentioned earlier, I'm less more concerned with the collection of data itself (although that is still a concern) as I am with government regulations that effectively require the creation of said data in the first place. An example would be if government decided that in order to be a licensed car insurance carrier, you must require that all customers with cars equipped with a OBDII scanner that records details about your driving. Currently, some insurance companies offer "safe driving discounts" if you plug those devices in. But there are secondary uses for the data, right? And what if the government starts mandating such things? In the same vein, there's already a movement to require "safety devices" to be installed in cars, which effectively turn your car into a mobile cellular device that communicates with other devices around you (other cars, or devices placed on the side of the road). The idea being that you could make your car smarter by allowing it to communicate with other cars around it and help avoid collisions (or even allow for automatic control). Similarly, devices on the side of the road could send signals to oncoming cars alerting them to hazards ahead or whatever. Of course, the same devices could also collect data on any vehicle traveling along the road. And they're talking about a whole bunch of data, including things like airbag sensor data (which say, could be used to tell a listening device if you have a passenger in your car, and possibly even the weight of said passenger).

Medical data is even more problematic. It's kinda funny to me that every time there's some kind of wearable tech device (smart watches are the current "thing"), the immediate go-to purpose is always health monitoring. For joggers, of course. Right. Of course, no one uses these devices for that purpose (well, almost no one), but that's what is always on the marketing brochures. It's like someone out there really really really wants people to wear networked devices that continually monitor our health. I can't imagine why that would be? And absolutely falls far more into the "private stuff no one should have access to" area, but if the cost of getting a wearable device is that it also collects health information and sends it off somewhere, how do you avoid that? And with the government getting more into the health market, how to we prevent it from arguing that since it's paying for our health care, it has the right to monitor our health. You know, to detect conditions that could be treated cheaply early rather than waiting for them to become more expensive (preventative medicine, right?). The same authority that just passed a law mandating that everyone buy health insurance could also mandate that we all wear health monitoring devices. Slippery slope? Not really.

There's a ton of "scary stuff" that can easily be justified as "safety and security". And I'm far more concerned about it than the NSA. Do I know what form these things will take exactly? Nope. But it's not hard to see a pattern. Certainly, there are some aspects of technology that simply as a matter of convenience make it harder to keep (semi) private activities private (ish). And businesses absolutely are willing to give us discounts for signing up for rewards cards, or for plugging a monitor into our car, or using a credit card to buy things rather than cash, or connecting our store account with our social media accounts. But those businesses can't actually compel us to do so. We can still choose to keep our activities as private as possible if we want. But as time goes by, this becomes more difficult. And I've seen a pattern of government regulation that does seem almost aimed at making it, if not impossible, increasingly difficult to minimize one's digital footprint.

And that's far more of a concern to me. Now, you're correct that we can choose to fight both, but as I mentioned earlier, when we expand the scope of what we fight, we weaken the fight itself. We're spreading the same resources over more things. Also, as I kinda touched on earlier, the NSA isn't forcing us to use those services that generate the metadata that they are tapping into. The privacy question here is whether the problem is the reading of data we put out that is technically "in the public space", or actions that force us to put data into that public space in the first place. Put in more analog terms, it's the difference between fighting against someone listening to you while you're eating food in public, and fighting against something that forces you to eat all your meals in public. It's not the fact that my public activities can be monitored, but that more of my activities are "public" that is the problem. So I'd rather focus on that side of the equation, if that makes any sense.


Might be a totally lost cause, but that's how I view the issue anyway.

Edited, May 11th 2015 5:05pm by gbaji