It's been interesting to me to watch everyone get a crash course in the NSA. See the outrage that someone is listening to your phone calls. See the outrage that someone is reading your emails. The horror, the horror. Are you fucking kidding me. Google reads your email. That's how they serve up ads. Oh, right - that isn't a human reading it. But it could be. Same with the NSA. Facebook reads your posts. That's how they serve up ads. Oh, right - that isn't a human being it. But it could be. Same with the NSA. There's this notion that sending communication across electronic media does not get intercepted by anyone and everyone... or that, if they do, there's some sort of due process. Except we watch Our Heroes do it to The Evil Brown Terrorists all day long, right? Truth, justice and McDonald's? the FISA court turned down seven warrants in 20 years. "So why doesn't the NSA have to abide by it?" Why do you care? If they rubber-stamp everything anyway, what difference does it make? The thing that blows my mind is that anyone paying the slightest bit of attention can determine precisely how much surveillance electronic communication is under (hint: total and absolute). The same people who are going "herp derp my liberties" are the ones that are in the absolute best position to know exactly the people who should know this stuff inherently. Why the hell are tech journalists wrist-to-forehead astounded by this shit? Your government spies on you. Has had since Yeardley Smith. Has never stopped. WILL NEVER STOP. And your blow for freedom is you're going to stop publishing a newsletter? Grow the fuck up.
Hear hear! In fact, I'd like to take it a step further. Let's get out of our own electrical closets and assume The Man is always listening. Assume your freedom means everyone is listening because you're broadcasting. There is a huge lesson from the history of the gay community in the US. Back during World War II and for decades after, sailors in the Pacific would get dishonorably discharged for being found as homosexuals. They'd be dropped off in San Francisco for discharge. This fact would be stamped on their papers: no escape. Every potential employer knows, your family knows... so there is no point in going home. Suddenly you're stuck in a major city with all the other dishonorably discharged and smokin' hot dudes. Might as well start a bar! The point is that they couldn't choose to come out of the closet: they were thrown out. Thus when the crackdowns and the homophobic violence got bad enough, the gay community unified. Everyone in America, possibly the world, has been thrown out of the electrical closet. Our online words are public. Suck it up, know it all the time. White male privilege can't save you this time.
I get the point, but it's not so much my privacy I am worried about. I'm most worried about the oppression and coercion that comes with a surveillance state. When these abilities trickle down to the local level, corruption has a powerful weapon. If they want to hurt me, they hurt my daughter. Or, they threaten to hurt the daughter of another guy they choose to hurt me. We managed to keep physical mail from dragnet surveillance. We could do the same for email.
Right. "We must do something..." I get you. I even agree. Where we part ways is "...starting with empty gestures." I get tired of it. It's tedious. Changing everyone's facebook photo to a green screen didn't save a single job in Hollywood, so let's stop pretending that e-advocacy matters.
I understand the point, however, IMO there have been significant revelations since Snowden. If I tried to start a conversation under the assumption that the NSA has full access to all my emails prior to Snowden, most people would have called me crazy. Heck, even after Snowden, when I suggested it, not everyone thought that our emails were being read. Prior to Snowden, everyone in the NSA and the US government would have denied it. For the general public, we've gone from something that could be believably denied to cold fact in the last three months. That's not to say that techies shouldn't have been paranoid enough to use lavabit or something like it, but I think it matters to Jones that even options like that are becoming unsustainable. But, that aside, I think stopping Groklaw was about as strong a statement that she was in a position to make. A lot of people will miss that newsletter. There is a tangible change brought to their lives due to a surveillance state. It's kinda like the SOPA blackout. Consciousness raising and all that.
Most people don't know what the NSA does, despite the dust-up over warrantless wiretapping from 2005. It's a willful ignorance. Outside of Sneakers and Good Will Hunting, there is a whilsting in the dark about what, exactly, the NSA does. You excuse that from the general public. This is a newsletter about tech law. "Options like that" AREN'T "becoming unsustainable," THEY WERE NEVER EFFECTIVE. That's the truly stupid thing - we're not talking about a bunch of hackers on Tor using 256-bit encryption, we're talking about gmailers. "Consciousness raising?" Seems to me the argument put forth is "hey guise they're reading our email." The brave thing to do is soldier on and keep doing what you're doing despite the fact that suddenly you feel like your underwear is being pawed through. 'cuz that's just it - IT WAS NEVER REALLY YOUR UNDERWEAR DRAWER TO BEGIN WITH and if the revelation that your private thoughts on public wire weren't all that private is enough to send you into a tailspin, what use are you anyway? I smell Yellow Ribbon Syndrome - the idea that a meaningless gesture in the face of a large problem is actually accomplishing something, despite the fact that the gesture is only visible to you.If I tried to start a conversation under the assumption that the NSA has full access to all my emails prior to Snowden, most people would have called me crazy.
I smell Yellow Ribbon Syndrome - the idea that a meaningless gesture in the face of a large problem is actually accomplishing something, despite the fact that the gesture is only visible to you.
I'm conflicted. I think it will probably take plenty of both going on if we are to ever get any real push back. If Yahoo or Google pulled a Groklaw, then there would be a reaction. But there's no way that public companies are going to give a damn unless it affects their bottom line. The only scenario I see there is if enough start moving to an off-shore option that makes it tough on the NSA (not that Deutsche Telekom is that option), but there maybe be money in it for someone in a country that will take a stand on their behalf, maybe Norway, for instance.
..except that Qwest told the NSA to pound sand and all they got was frozen out of GSA contracts. It's not going to happen until there is a legitimate, violent reaction at home. So anything short of demanding the NSA be disbanded is pretty much pointless. "Fans of sausage and politics should not watch either being made." The United States is the world's puppetmaster and a large percentage of Americans have foolishly presumed there were no strings holding them up.
Blood in the streets has more of a likelihood of doing something than Google giving up marketshare to Bing. The CIA did not pull out of Lebanon until William Francis Buckley was kidnapped - not even the Beirut bombings did the trick. There has to be a real human cost for things to change, and even then, it's a reorganization so they can say "The National Security Agency has stopped spying on the American people" while congress authorizes a trillion dollars for the formation of the National Security Association under seal. We were back in Beirut within 9 months. Go take a peak at Total Information Awareness. see if the Powerpoint doesn't have the same designer as PRISM. It certainly has the same mission, and we violently fuckin' killed TIA in 2003. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
Separate thought from my other comment ... isn't the NSA/thought police/whatever winning if their actions cause us to gradually lose things like Groklaw and Lavabit and presumably more to come? I don't think discontinuing is the right move in a situation like this.
No. Ever seen The Wire? So the whole goal is to get a wiretap on a phone so that you can listen in on what's being said. If the bad guys know you're listening, they ditch the phone. They go for a burner. They change up their methods. And you no longer have anything to listen to. Were the NSA to chase everybody off methods they can tap, the NSA would have nothing to listen to. The goal is not to silence discussion, the goal is to eavesdrop. If everyone shuts up they have failed, not succeeded.Separate thought from my other comment ... isn't the NSA/thought police/whatever winning if their actions cause us to gradually lose things like Groklaw and Lavabit and presumably more to come?
I see what you mean. I meant that rather than shutting down they should protest actively, not that rather than shutting down they should just persist blindly. That said, I was being facetious; I think this ongoing mess with the NSA is hilarious. I don't understand why people didn't think the National Security Agency was spying on us. EDIT: oh and there's the obvious point that if we shut up we're also hurting ourselves.
in a word, yes. they are winning. but this particular incident isn't really a loss on our part, it's a tactical retreat.
losing groklaw is a terrific blow to the public discourse, but maintaining groklaw in light of the now-apparent insecurities would have been worse.
there is no sense in continuing to use the clearnet for this purpose.
to continue doing so means allowing participants to be exposed to retribution from the state. it's like the discussion among activists about the use of facebook. sure, facebook has fantastic publicity and organizing potential, but when every action you take is preemptively thwarted by the police, that benefit is all for nothing.
so they retreat from facebook.
but they don't stop altogether, they just move offline or switch to safer networks. groklaw's work can still continue, just not in the same way nor in the same place.
its closing is both a strong request for something safer to fill the vaccuum, and a wake-up call to those who are still complacent:
look out, they have us running scared, we need to regroup, and you should help because this affects you too.
In a word, no. There's this notion that the NSA is spying on Americans because they're an evil organization hell-bent on crushing civil liberties. This flies directly in the face of the nature of the NSA - they have no "Ops" wing. They have no troops. They have no physical presence, in fact, outside of listening posts and analysis stations. They have more in common with the NRO than the CIA, in that they are essentially a deep hole full of technology that occasionally spins a secret or two out to their masters in order to justify their funding. I'm not at all pleased with total global surveillance by the NSA, but I've been aware of it for more than ten years (as would anyone be who was paying attention). Because of this, I know that they're snoopers who do nothing but filter through the floodwaters of discourse in order to find nuggets of gold that they can exchange for provisions at the trading post. I know that all of their work has been about making it easier and more effective for computers to deal with the information explosion brought on by the Internet and cellular communication. And I know that the biggest issues with the NSA snooping on everyone is that nature abhors a vacuum and that information has to go somewhere. The biggest objection to the NSA and CIA by foreign governments is that much of their labor is about industrial espionage - providing trade secrets for American companies in order to advance American economic hegemony. That's all WTO shit, though, and Americans could give a shit about us doing a little pre-game spying ahead of a G8 summit. Get the DEA and IRS involved, though? NOW we've got a scandal. And lo and behold - grumblings. If you've got a problem with the NSA, you need to address the root of the issue, not the method. Foreign governments crank on the NSA because they spy on industry. Americans just feel "violated." Well, why is that? Is it because there's a possibility your conversations with your dealer are being transcribed and passed along to the DEA? Then do something about drug policy. Is it because you didn't declare your online poker winnings? Then hire a better accountant. the NSA will ALWAYS SPY ON YOU. ALWAYS. But it's 100,000 people attempting to make sense of every internet post, every phone call, every email, every tweet, every text, every internet packet everywhere in the world always. And while the staff has gone up by a third since 2001, the volume of data they deal with goes up by a factor of ten every year. Quoth Bradley Manning:
Lavabit was already lost, by shutting down it was lost the best way it could be. Groklaw, eh. It would be admirable to shoulder whatever risks they face, assuming everyone involved was aware, but I don't think anyone can be blamed for not being willing to.
From the NSA's statements, they look at people who have communicated with people with people they are investigating, or people who communicated with people who communicated with people they or investigating, or ... up to some number of hops away, with the nominal constraint that the person they're investigating be outside of the US. Many people communicate with Pamela Jones. If someone she exchanges emails with attracts the attention of the NSA, she exposes everyone she communicates with to the attention of the NSA.
That is exactly what happened. I wasn't there when it happened, so I wasn't hurt in any way physically. And I didn't then own much of any worth, so only a few things were taken. But everything had been pawed through and thrown about. I can't tell how deeply disturbing it is to know that someone, some stranger, has gone through and touched all your underwear, looked at all your photographs of your family, and taken some small piece of jewelry that's been in your family for generations. If it's ever happened to you, you know I couldn't live there any more, not one night more. It turned out, by the way, according to my neighbors, that it was almost certainly the janitor's son, which stunned me at the time but didn't seem to surprise any of my more-seasoned neighbors. The police just told me not to expect to get anything back. I felt assaulted. The underwear was perfectly normal underwear. Nothing kinky or shameful, but it was the idea of them being touched by someone I didn't know or want touching them. I threw them away, unused ever again. You know, this is off-topic but I've always wondered about this mindset. I've never been burglarized in any meaningful way (although this just made me think of a time that I learned a very distinct lesson about human nature at a very young age) but I don't think I would react as the author did. Anyone on hubski ever been burglarized? Might make this a separate topic. EDIT: interesting answers.Years ago, when I was first on my own, I arrived in New York City, and being naive about the ways of evil doers in big cities, I rented a cheap apartment on the top floor of a six-floor walkup, in the back of the building. That of course, as all seasoned New Yorkers could have told me, meant that a burglar could climb the fire escape or get to the roof by going to the top floor via the stairs inside and then through the door to the roof and climb down to the open window of my apartment.
Two times. Once by people who had help from someone at a realty company. Here's a tip for free: if you get robbed and there's no sign of forced entry, break a window or something. If you tell cops there is no sign of forced entry, they can't do anything as they have no reason to believe that you were really robbed. Also, buy renter's insurance. And back up your computer shit on external hd's and keep them separate from your computer. I lost years of writing and photos that way.
Yep, twice: First was when I was young, maybe 7, and had slept through burglars go past me asleep on a living room couch while on a family holiday. Never really got told much more than that, so it never really bothered me per se. Second was soon after moving out of home for the first time, maybe 8 years ago: ground floor apartment, got a phone call from my sis (who I was living with) with her first words "did you push the couch up against the front door?". Met by my "the fuck?", she twigged and realised we'd been broken in. I raced home, and it looked like a bomb had gone off: place had been smash-and-grabbed, personal items strewn all over the place. Yep, it sucked big time, but at least I learnt a few lessons out of it: Always try to not end up with a ground floor apartment. Change your bedding to at least help you sleep better in your room. Immediately throw your toothbrush away after being burgled.
I've been armed robbed with a handgun, not burglary but not completely dissimilar. It didn't screw with my mind or make me lose faith in humanity. I testified against the guy and I have to say being cross examined by his attorney really pissed me off. He didn't get caught in relation to his crimes against me. He had stolen some jewelry and got caught when his fence got pinched. I heard that he got tens of thousands of dollars in jewlry which the fence paid about five hundred dollars for. I guess you could make the case that a burglary is more violating than armed robbery, someone going through your personal stuff but personally I'd take burglary over getting a gun pointed at me by a crazy meth head anyday.