Weekly Edition
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PRISM quotes of the week
2. If I add a phone to my account, will those calls also be monitored? Once again, the answer is good news. If you want to add a child or any other family member to your Verizon account, their phone calls—whom they called, when, and the duration of the call—will all be monitored by the United States government, at no additional cost.
Knowing how the government spies on us is important. Not only because so
much of it is illegal -- or, to be as charitable as possible, based on
novel interpretations of the law -- but because we have a right to
know. Democracy requires an informed citizenry in order to function
properly, and transparency
and accountability are essential parts of that. That means knowing what
our government is doing to us, in our name. That means knowing that the
government is operating within the constraints of the law. Otherwise, we're
living in a police state.
— Bruce
Schneier
We need whistle-blowers.
Only one explanation seems logical. The government is afraid of us -- you and me. They're terrified (no pun intended) that if we even knew the most approximate ranges of how many requests they're making, we would suspect significant abuse of their investigatory powers.
— Lauren Weinstein
In the absence of even this basic information, conspiracy theories have flourished, which incorrectly assume that the level of data being demanded from Web services is utterly unfettered and even higher than reality -- and the government's intransigence has diverted people's anger inappropriately to those Web services. A tidy state of affairs for the spooks and their political protectors.
Even assuming the U.S. government never abuses this data -- and there is no reason to assume that! -- why isn't the burgeoning trove more dangerous to keep than it is to foreswear? Can anyone persuasively argue that it's virtually impossible for a foreign power to ever gain access to it? Can anyone persuasively argue that if they did gain access to years of private phone records, email, private files, and other data on millions of Americans, it wouldn't be hugely damaging?
— Conor FriedersdorfThink of all the things the ruling class never thought we'd find out about the War on Terrorism that we now know. Why isn't the creation of this data trove just the latest shortsighted action by national security officials who constantly overestimate how much of what they do can be kept secret? Suggested rule of thumb: Don't create a dataset of choice that you can't bear to have breached. (Log in to post comments)
What we knew Posted Jun 13, 2013 8:09 UTC (Thu) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link] Wholesale monitoring of domestic and foreign communications, huge datacenters built to contain exabytes of data forever, secret orders issued by secret courts, recipients that cannot speak about any orders they receive, prosecution for any whistle-blowers about the many monitoring programs... Any extant ex-Stasi officials must be proud that the methods they pioneered live on.Frankly, what worries me most is that we knew all of the above before The Guardian's revelations, and most US citizens apparently did not care much. Suddenly we learn that the government is using (not even abusing) those powers conferred to them comprehensively, and everyone is shocked.
What we knew Posted Jun 13, 2013 13:32 UTC (Thu) by viro (subscriber, #7872) [Link]
The interesting part is that this database is any blackmailer's wet dream - to hell with the conversation contents, the knowledge that Mr. So-and-so had been making regular phone calls to Ms. Such-and-such can be extremely valuable. And then there's Rep. So-and-so making calls to escort service owner, etc.
Seeing that at least one employee of their contractor has clearly turned out to be unreliable from their POV, it's hard to assume that their process for granting clearance is good enough to prevent _that_ sort of leaks. Or that such leaks had not been happening all along, for that matter - people doing that would have every reason to keep it quiet, and the same goes both for their targets and for their superiors if/when they get caught by internal safety measures.
Granted, the halflife of that stuff is much shorter than that of nuclear stockpiles, but it'll remain very tasty for several decades and unlike the weapon-grade fissionables there's such thing as backups, just as dangerous as the original. Even if the program is stopped and the database is shredded, reliably locating and destroying said backups wouldn't be easy.
What we knew Posted Jun 13, 2013 13:52 UTC (Thu) by oever (subscriber, #987) [Link]
Blackmailing is peanuts compared to using it for "insider" trading.
What we knew Posted Jun 13, 2013 14:09 UTC (Thu) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link] There are many other immoral uses: industrial espionage, human rights abuse, drone targeting... The sad part is that it is not even clear that these uses are illegal since they happen mostly outside the US. Of course there is no way to challenge any obscure practices because they are outside public scrutiny.And the most worrying part is that a bubble of dark power is created since no senator is going to challenge the power of those that can destroy them without blinking. Again, all this was known (or could be imagined) since a few years ago at least.
PRISM quotes of the week Posted Jun 13, 2013 10:44 UTC (Thu) by ortalo (subscriber, #4654) [Link]
Direct criticism of the US government in this affair is a good thing. However, it seems to me that criticism of a government *only* is not especially fair.
Why not also associate to it in our criticism the private companies that gather and centralize all such personal data under their umbrella and further on develop more and more closed technologies to facilitate that gathering and control? BTW, maybe the criticism is now so much concentrated on governemental power because extending it to all culprits may, in the end, imply ourselves (the citizens) to think again about our own implicit agreement on such things... Technology is so convenient when it's given free of charge, without effort; why bother questioning its morality or security for real...
Of course, especially in a democracy, those who solicitate the votes and a public charge, have not excuse for not living up to the highest standards of moral implied by their (delegated) power; so these governements are certainly first culprit of not obtaining the needed results in the area of digitial privacy protection. However, let's not take such events as an occasion to forget the general lack of attention of a large number of people (parliaments, shareholders, travelers, software developers, big data advocates, consultants of many sorts, webmail users, mobile phone users, web customers, public service users, etc.)...
PRISM quotes of the week Posted Jun 13, 2013 11:03 UTC (Thu) by sorpigal (subscriber, #36106) [Link]
Ultimately all responsibility is in the hands of the citizenry. It's hard to credibly make outraged comments about the government recording your conversations *and then log in to Facebook and chat with someone*. I'll believe that public outcry will cause politicians to end government domestic spying of this sort if and when citizens stop voluntarily spying on their friends.
In other words, never.
Or, perhaps I'm wrong; perhaps these revelations will lead people to object to monitoring from all sources.
PRISM quotes of the week Posted Jun 13, 2013 11:16 UTC (Thu) by freemars (subscriber, #4235) [Link] I've been thinking/wondering about the use of Linux in NSA facilities including the huge new Utah data center. We have no way of knowing, of course, but I expect it's used a lot. People who contribute to the kernel and all the userland software under GPL are (or should be) well aware their code will sometimes be used for ends they disagree with. But the good things the code can be used for outweighs that, so people continue to add to Linux. (It's too bad the NSA doesn't take the same view about our ability to have a private phone call.)
PRISM quotes of the week Posted Jun 13, 2013 11:54 UTC (Thu) by patrick_g (subscriber, #44470) [Link]
> People who contribute to the kernel and all the userland software under GPL are (or should be) well aware their code will sometimes be used for ends they disagree with.
Mandatory quote of "sharks with lasers on their heads" => http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Linus_Torvalds#2006
PRISM quotes of the week Posted Jun 13, 2013 16:07 UTC (Thu) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] People who contribute to the kernel and all the userland software under GPL are (or should be) well aware their code will sometimes be used for ends they disagree with. But the good things the code can be used for outweighs that, so people continue to add to Linux. There is also the fact that adding field-of-use restrictions (as in »not to be used for kitten mulching«) to software will make that software »non-free« under most definitions of free or open-source software – so free-software authors avoid field-of-use restrictions.
PRISM quotes of the week Posted Jun 13, 2013 13:37 UTC (Thu) by smitty_one_each (subscriber, #28989) [Link]
Lauren: "Only one explanation seems logical."
Another plausible explanation is due to Gustav LeBon's book, "The Crowd".
PRISM quotes of the week Posted Jun 17, 2013 10:19 UTC (Mon) by jospoortvliet (subscriber, #33164) [Link]
Well, they are not wrong. Question then is still: why do they do it? Protect us against ourselves or control and exploit? Note that the intentions, god or noble, don't justify or vilify the actions themselves...
PRISM quotes of the week Posted Jun 17, 2013 10:48 UTC (Mon) by smitty_one_each (subscriber, #28989) [Link]
People are born and die as individuals. Losing sight of that is the first step on the road to woe.
PRISM quotes of the week Posted Jun 17, 2013 11:01 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
You weren't a twin, right?
(I was born as one of two individuals who were conceived as one. Others are born of two individuals and conceived as two.)
PRISM quotes of the week Posted Jun 22, 2013 12:39 UTC (Sat) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183) [Link]
I think it's naivety. This is, they honestly believe that such a database will only ever be used for good.
Reminds me of a presentation I got from a company. We were asked to think about how you would design a system that billed people in cars by tracking how much they travelled on which kind of road, by putting a GPS in each car.
When suggested that the data could be abused, the response was shocked: but we have laws for that... and I was being needlessly paranoid.
It's not just government, really.
PRISM quotes of the week Posted Jun 17, 2013 19:47 UTC (Mon) by Rudd-O (subscriber, #61155) [Link]
"We are sorry that, we have conspired to spy on everyone, lying to everyone about what we did, and also deal in child porn [http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-20011494-38.html]. We will now summarily destroy all stolen data and disband this criminal organization that we have created and funded with the money we stole from you under false pretenses and lies."
Said no one in government EVER.
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