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NSA Surveillance May Have Dealt Major Blow To Global Internet Freedom Efforts
An anonymous reader writes "Simply put, the US government has failed in its role as the 'caretaker' of the internet. Although this was never an official designation, America controls much of the infrastructure, and many of the most popular services online are provided by a handful of American companies. The world is starting to sober up to the fact that much of what they've done online in the last decade is now cataloged in a top-secret facility somewhere in the United States. The goal has been to promote internet freedom around the world, but we may have also potentially created a blueprint for how authoritarian governments can store, track, and mine their citizens' digital lives."
Is it too late for the NSA to spin this as just a huge misunderstanding?
I mean PRISM was obviously intended to be a redundant backup of the entire Internet.
- Senator Barack Obama, 2007
We had absolute power (or close to it) and we know what that does. Here's a disturbing thought: What if the Internet is just unworkable? What if it's just too tempting for *any* caretaker to avoid using as a giant eavesdropping machine? What if people start opting out en masse?
Somewhere, a postal worker's ears just pricked up.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
You can erode freedoms gradually or even outright remove them overnight in the name of 'fighting terrorism'. People are driven paranoid by the media and the government. Terrorism, school shootings, global warming, the boogeyman, something is around the corner waiting to kill you and your children. Want to be safe from that? Then get ready to lose a lot of your rights and get ready to pay a lot more in taxes as well to finance the loss of your rights.
We all know that airport security and border security failed before 9/11. Letting multiple armed men most of whom had passport and visa violations into airplanes was a colossal intelligence failure. After the attacks security at our airports was supposedly beefed up and billions of dollars were invested in physical security. Did that prevent the shoe bomber or underwear bomber from getting bombs onto their airplanes? No. But it gave everyone the illusion of security and the government made a killing from forcing taxpayers to pay for all sorts of wasteful security theater.
The NSA is the cyber equivalent of the TSA. Instead of groping everyone and inspecting your person they inspect your internet usage and your phone records. They go after everything you do in your personal life that they can get a hold of and use. And did that prevent the Times Square bomber? Or the Ft. Hood shooter? Or the Boston Marathon bombers? No. But everyone felt secure on the days that there wasn't terrorism. And the government made a killing. And the government got to use the NSA (and IRS, FBI, etc.) to go after political enemies as well.
You question any of this? And you're siding with the terrorists. You blow the whistle on any of this? It's treason. Get ready to flee to a foreign country or risk being murdered, jailed, rendered, or worse.
We spy on our own people indiscriminately. Ruin the rights of the people with the destruction of privacy. Intercept and record and document everything. Yet the Boston Marathon bombers were looking at radical Islam videos for months. The older brother had been thrown out of a mosque for preaching violent Jihad. The brothers names had been tipped off at the CIA by both the Russian and Saudi governments that they were linked to Al Qaeda. The Ft. Hood shooter was viewing radical Islam videos online and even told his supervisors about his Jihadist sympathy. But the government somehow in their total surveillance missed all of those things.
The fact is that most people don't care or understand. George Carlin said "think of how dumb the average American is...and realize that half of the people are even dumber". The average American doesn't care about rights or privacy. They won't defend the Constitution or Bill of Rights. The American empire is crumbling from within. Demographics rapidly changing, politicians and leaders being openly hostile to the Bill of Rights, rapidly escalating bipartisanship in politics and society, increasing loss of rights resulting from alarmist paranoia.
At this point all we can do is try to stop the bleeding. But eventually the freedoms of America. Its lifeblood. Will be gone.
The NSA is a pack of dimwitted fuckers for pulling this, because the blow back when this was discovered (not if) would clearly far exceed any benefit they could possibly gain. Now, I think this might not be an entirely bad thing that they pulled this shit.
I suspect that as a result, the rest of the world is going to be deeply suspicious of the US in the future, and it is going to be much more difficult to maintain control of the Internet's key systems and keep them inside US borders as much as is possible. I also think this might kick off a new round of encryption and paranoia, which really is a good thing for consumers of tech resources in the long run. Bad for the spy types, because RSA1024 on everything will really put a damper on their ELINT gathering capabilities. They might have to go out and do some honest on the ground trade craft for a change.
Who ever is running the NSA should be sacked on the spot. Not for engaging in massive illegal wire tapping, but for being such a shallow idiot and not considering the fall out of being caught. You have to suppose that there are analysts writing papers about what will likely happen when they get caught, so the Director isn't paying attention to their own intel papers and projections. Fire him for being a fucking inept moron.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-501465_162-57440895-501465/new-york-lawmakers-propose-ban-on-anonymous-online-comments/
This will ensure only comments that support that the USA promotes internet freedom will stay up on some US forums.
i.e. a proper balance between security and privacy.
"A web site administrator upon request shall remove any comments posted on his or her web site by an anonymous poster unless such anonymous poster agrees to attach his or her name to the post and confirms that his or her IP address, legal name, and home address are accurate."
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
The US government IS an authoritarian government. Period.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
I don't think "we" consented to this. The NSA did it on it's own and then lied to congress about it. Is it even legal?
The whole sordid wiretapping & internet monitoring mess comes as no shock to some (those who care about the associated issues and have keep abreast of the situation), and as no big deal to the vast majority (those who don't). In a trans-national globalized world, the quintessential paradox of government v. freedom now knows no flag or borders.
As the sound-bite value of the initial shock fades and the lowing herd is calmed by condescending platitudes, we sink back into business as usual, as it has since the first paleolithic tribal chief.
A lot of us saw the dawn of the information age as the potential for a second Enlightenment, when a universally free flow of ideas and wisdom would lift mankind as a whole into an era of freedom and prosperity. Universal education and information was going to save humanity. Silly us. All we really did was give the despots more tools.
What comes next? We'll probably have to wait for http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izQB2-Kmiic
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
I've been posting for years every time discussions about ICANN, DNS and other US-centric Internet systems came up that the party line "but only US control guarantees that it remains free and open" is bullshit at best.
Frankly, putting everything under UN control is probably the best thing we could do. Not because the UN were any less power-hungry or insane than any individual government, but because they have more trouble ever agreeing on anything, and less resources to do crap in secret.
Cue the USA-USA-USA answers...
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
If you haven't connected the dots yet, it's simple.
They hoover down all the internet data, most of which crosses US Fibre and can be freely read. That's email, texts, VOIP, GPS, Maps, your photos, your videos. As US companies switched to https, that wasn't so useful. So they started an agenda of 'going dark', demanding CALEA II/UK 'Snoopers Charter' laws and using the secret courts to grant them direct access to Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple servers, 3 months at a time, using a power granted to the FBI, but used by the FBI on behalf of the NSA.
Sweden's FRA spying law, nobody could quite figure out why Sweden did that in 2008, but now we know the NSA started its program in 2007, a year before, its now clear:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FRA_law
All that data together with all government data on you, goes into a central database, where it can be data mined and searched at whim of the US military, without a warrant. There are no limits and no checks on the access to that database. Reporters, politicians, competing generals, all had leaks on them recently. In Europe politicians seem to face leaks regularly.
The excuse given is terrorism, and the military man testifies how he won't sacrifice "one American life". As if someone put him in charge and he can decide to throw away the constitutional balance and replace it with this "one American life" test. Obama has so far killed 4 Americans in drone strikes, 3 Americans were killed at Boston. 3 is less than 4, so much for terrorism as the excuse.
Lots of new databases are springing up and NSA is working hard with leaks and lobbying to get hold of them. e.g. Europe is to switch to its own banking system next year, SEPA, watch the PR and smear battle unfold, which will ultimately lead to the EU signing over our SEPA bank data to the NSA, 'for our safety'.
And the Canadian military leader has confirmed a Canadian surveillance program, nobodies quite sure whether their spying agency is loyal to their own country, or to the USA military.
There's dark days ahead.
Is it too late for the NSA to spin this as just a huge misunderstanding?
I mean PRISM was obviously intended to be a redundant backup of the entire Internet.
It is obvious, but it's also something most of us suspected they were doing all along. The real question is why didn't they just admit to it from the start? Why keep it a secret from us if it's to protect us?
If you work for a corporation and its telling you they never back anything up and anything you delete is deleted forever and then you find out that they lied and everything any employee every did was secretly backed up for all eternity, this would change how you view that corporation. This would also change how the customers view that corporation which lies to it's own employees about it's practices.
This is similar to what the NSA has done. It has got caught lying to the American people. It tells the American people it exits to spy on foreigners, but applie deception tactics to the American people as if the American people themselves are the foreigners.
It's catch 22. They could have a valid reason to have kept this stuff secret but it's up to the NSA to explain their reasoning. The NSA also has to find a way to communicate better with the American people in such a way that the American people cannot disclose those secrets to the enemy. This might mean greater portions of the American people should be given enough of a clearance to know why the NSA does what it does and to make informed decisions in the voting booth.
How can the NSA expect the uninformed voter to make an informed decision if it keeps the voter in the dark? How can the congress make informed decisions if they are kept in the dark as well? The NSA needs to shed light on this. While I don't necessarily think leaking is the best way to shed light and promote discussion, if the NSA wasn't willing to have this discussion without it having to be leaked to the whole world then that is a problem with the NSA because this is a discussion we need to have.
Countries such as Saudi Arabia and India have successfully demanded for access to blackberry mail.
Countries such as Syria and Turkey have demonstrated that they can cut off the internet from their country at will.
Iran is actively trying to promote their own intranet over the Internet at large.
The disclosure of the PRISM programme will only accelerate this trend and I forsee three major consequences arising from it :-
1) Now governments all over the world will demand that internet companies such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft etc disclose data that they want including the data of parties who are not their citizens. If the US will assert extra-territorial jurisdiction over the data of foreigners, so will they. And I don't see any excuse that these internet companies can use to refuse to disclose without being seen as hypocrites and as tools of the US government.
2) Governments all over the world, especially those who have not been historically friendly with the US will restrict or hinder the use of internet communication tools such as Facebook, Twitter, GMail and the like and accelerate the development of their own internal versions. To a certain extent this has already been taking place, for example VKontacte has largely supplanted Facebook in Russia, and in China Tencent, Sina, Baidu and its legions of smaller competitors rule.
3) PRISM will be a large or even fatal blow to internet freedom. Authoritarian governments will argue that they are justified in monitoring their citizens because the US does the same through PRISM.
Just because YOUR government is corrupt doesn't mean that all governments MUST be corrupt.
And what is your fix for this? Hand over to the corporations because power will be allotted by money? Did you know that most of your politicians are executives for these corporations? Therefore if they aren't employed in government, they're employed in those companies you're going to have collecting this.
Or is it OK if corruption is done for money by a private industry but not when it's done for money by a public one?
One area the US has dominated is all things internet. We don't focus on manufacturing things, so the internet is somewhat important to us. We provide a huge number of great services to the world. We might find that we have done billions in dollars in damage in the name of fighting terrorism. This is self inflicted. We may have already done more damage than any terrorist could ever dream of doing. Governments around the world may start to ban using internet companies based in the US or with US operations for their government workers. Public companies around the world have a duty to keep non-public data non-public. MS 360 is all about the cloud. This product might be DOA. Skype, Linked In, Facebook, etc. You don't want your banking data, business plans, unreleased financial data, etc. being accessed illegally. What is worse, is that this might have nothing to do with terrorism, and more to do with spying:
www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-14/u-s-agencies-said-to-swap-data-with-thousands-of-firms.html
What to do now? Invest as fast as you can in every little internet company outside the US that provides services that might compete against the US giants. Once they get a little momentum, they could take off and make huge profits.
It was for the US to lose. We chose this path. The traitors should be shot for treason (This is slashdot. Irony never seems to be understood. I'm not talking the guy in HK), but that will never happen.
Here is my perspective as I view it:
The NSA expects us all to basically support their agenda.
The NSA wont tell us any detail on what that agenda is.
The NSA monitors our every behavior, but uses deception and basically lies to us telling us they aren't.
The NSA lies to congress, refusing to admit it even after the leak.
So the problem here is the NSA believes it requires secrecy to a greater degree than the US public can understand. If this is a case where the US public is simply uninformed, then the NSA should give out security clearances to journalists and to more people within the American public so that it can inform them.
I understand the NSA does not want to tip off the foreign enemy. The problem with what they are doing is when they apply deception, and act as they are acting, the uninformed American citizen feels like the foreign enemy. I understand that leaking to the media isn't necessarily the best way to handle it because the element of surprise is important in warfare. Enemies foreign and domestic did not need to be tipped off along with the American people. But enough American people have a security clearance, these surprises are going to seem directed against the American people as a whole.
So the question is why do so few Americans have security clearances? Are we supposed to believe that all those American people without a security clearance are "enemies"? If they aren't then why can't they be given enough of a security clearance so that at least the basic agenda of the NSA is known. When journalists don't even known, and when congress doesn't even known, well then who does know? If only the cleared individuals know then why not expand it?
In 2011 4.2 million people had access to the governments classified information. 4.2 million people is not a lot of people out of 300-400 million Americans. As a result you have a lot of propaganda and misinformation confusing the uninformed American citizen into believing conspiracy theories while the 4.2 million who have access get to know the truth but can't say anything. Until more people know the truth, the only access American citizens get to the truth is through these leaks. The problem with these leaks is the enemy gains access at the same time.
Do you seriously believe European or Asian governments aren't doing the same thing? They are actually closely collaborating with the US and exchanging spy data with each other on each others' population. The only differences are that (1) the NSA is technically better at it, and (2) in the US, people are actually making a fuss about it, and maybe it will change. The NSA spying is unconstitutional and we need to do something about it. Fortunately, we do have the legal means at our disposal in the US.
This is obvious to a diligent engineer. One central lot of despots and bureaucrats to bribe and cajole instead of lots of little national ones.
We can combine the efficiency of the EU with the scale of the UN. Brilliant!
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
Fair enough.
My full name is DBASE III, and my home address is 127.0.0.0
Web and start educating yourself. Download Project Byzantium Linux hybrid iso's and create your own mesh networks. Learn new technologies and use encryption. It CAN be done if you want it bad enough. In fact join their group, help them test and harden the technologies. Assist in translation and help them create documentation and instruction material (videos). Don't just take it sitting down, fight back!
Because informed voters are extremely dangerous
Think again !!
Voters, whether they are of the "informed" group, or otherwise, most of them can not comprehend that much anyway
I was listening to BBC's world service just yesterday and they had a BRITISH PROFESSOR spinning his yarn for NSA
If a PROFESSOR can say things like that, you think Joe Six Pack can think otherwise ?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
I agree that other countries are doing the same thing. I don't think the main differences are the ones you listed, though.(1)NSA certainly have more resources than their counterparts in other countries, but I wouldn't automatically equal that to being "better at it". (2) People outside the US are making a fuss. The main difference from my POV is that most other democracies don't tout their spying as being "caretekers of the Internet" or "a bulwark against international terrorism". The spy and cheat and keep very quiet about it. When they get caught with their hands in someone else's cookie jar they do some low profile damage control and get back to business as usual.
If you actually thought that no one was looking into what you did then you deserved it. I've said it a hundred times and I'll say it again, privacy is dead! If you want privacy then give up the internet, give you your cell phone, give up you credit cards and basically fall off the grid. The NSA didn't deal the blow, the blow was dealt long before the big whistle was blown, it was every person who thought they have privacy on the internet. So how about now people listen and believe me when I say, YOU DON'T HAVE PRIVACY ON THE INTERNET!!! SO deal with it.
Because informed voters are extremely dangerous, keeping people uninformed is a top priority for any pseudo-democratic government.
Informed voters are NOT dangerous!
They only become dangerous when you allow them ballot options which would result in substantive change. As long as you provide them only Aristotelian A/B choices similar to "Heads, I win"/"Tails, you lose", then things keep moving in the direction that the people whose job it is to draft the choices want them to move.
This is one of the reasons that the California voter initiative process pissed them off, and it's the reason that recent initiative results have simply been ignored, and the powers behind big government has done what it wanted to do in the first place anyway, from funding projects that failed to pass public muster, to ignoring constitutional changes, to slipping in language to prop 13 at the last minute to have it also apply to commercial property, after public debate was complete.
The upshot, in particular of the prop 13 change, was that each property owned by a large company is actually owned by a newly incorporated holding company. Then, rather than selling the property, as is done with non-commercial property, and having its tax rate corrected at that point, they sell the holding company to another company. Since the property has not changed hands (it's still owned by the same holding company), the tax rate effectively never corrects on commercial property, and the burden, over time falls more and more upon non-commercial property owners, while the commercial property owners get a free ride.
So as long as the outcome of a vote won't rock the status quo boat, it really doesn't matter which option of those presented wins, nothing changes the progression vector.
It's kind of elegant engineering, if you think about it; it's on the order of the "Demopoll" concept in Frank Herbert's "The Whipping Star".
our "free" markets are a shining example to the rest of the world- at least the part that the mortgage banks didn't steal from just prior to the housing collapse, our "free and democratic" elections are a shining example- offices are sold to the highest bidder and then election boundaries are jiggered by the party in power, our system of taxation is fair to all, but especially fair to people and corporations with the resources to hide money offshore, the same people who were claiming Saddam Hussein had WMDs are at it again, trying to get us into a war in Syria, our government sends people off to war to fight for the oil companies - oops, I mean freedom- and when they come back injured can't be bothered to take care of them, and like the idiots we are, we keep volunteering for military service, our healthcare "system" is a joke, and now our "free and open" internet turns out to be a means of massive government surveillance- but it's OK- it's for our own good.
And dopes in the US wonder why the rest of the world doesn't just follow our examples...
Anyone remember Bush selling us torcher? I remember at least 2/3rds of the morons near where I live were convinced. Secret CIA prisons? Yeah, they're all for it. Guantanamo? They made sure to let their congressmen they want to keep our gulag open with the Red White and Blue over it. Remember how a majority of Democrats were against gay marriage 6 months before Obama went on a warpath for gay rights? I happen to be pretty happy about that one, but the insanely rapid shift in public opinion was due to PR. How about the case for a preemptive attack on Iraq? Even I was too dumb to see that mess coming.
I'm thrilled Google, Microsoft, and friends have asked for some sunlight on the way our fundamental right privacy to privacy has been run over rough-shod. At least if we stupid morons are told the whole story, I can blame ourselves for being morons rather than ignorant. I prefer to be a moron. Our tech giants at least have enough spine to ask for a tiny bit of sanity... except of course for Cisco, who is making a killing world wide on government spying and censorship.
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
1). Any *blueprint* was never any further away than
1) FOAF network analysis
2) a signal splitter
3) the power to force your nation's providers to cooperate
4) a data warehouse
5) analysts.
6)??????
7) profit !
I *really* don't think many nations needed the U.S. to tell them that.
So the *blueprint* point is totally false- the NSA did not provide a much needed but missing blueprint to anyone for any purpose
2) What nefarious thing has the NSA or US government ever done with this knowledge? Name one thing. As I see it, the US with all this data collection and the apparent restraint *to do nothing* with it, makes the US a provably good steward of the internet, almost better than we could have hoped for, given men and their nature.
I totally agree a despotic regime could emerge and would leverage this database in the process. I actually actively fear a Cheney or a Gonzales or a Rumsfeld or a Pipes or a Wolfowitz getting a hold of this kind of power.
That's why it's very important - VERY IMPORTANT- for the presumed demographic of slashdot to vote. b We're what keep the REAL fascists at bay.
I also think we need a provable, physical way (encryption / partial keys held by a number of judges? dunno..) to prevent the kind of leveraging of the chain of command that would permit neocons from gaining access to this database in the dark and use it against his political enemies
(I'll link to the specific thing the neocons did that has me so concerned at the bottom of this post)
Without the chain of command, we're fucked; it is a totally necessary part of any military.. But the chain of command + read/write access to this database means the power to potentially destroy who you want, in any way you want, for any reason you want and to distort reality itself to the intelligence community in any way you want. This represents a non-trivial, even existential and decidedly non-theoretical threat to our nation.
\http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_B
and for those familiar with it, go to Criticisms section .
Cheney literally re-assembled Team-B in the run up to the Iraq war. scroll to: " team b sweeps the series "
http://www.pitt.edu/~gordonm/JPubs/TeamBqjs.pdf
That's why we also need to go easy on Snowden and Manning. Here's my reasoning, it's pretty simple - they're young and idealistic and didn't mean to harm America - and that matters.
Not that many people can know or can get their minds around the full,ugly picture of all the trade-offs that reality forces on you. Those tradeoffs are analyzed, decided upon, get institutionalized, and finally become structural, procedural.
Later, some regular guy working in the system looks at the fleshy details of what those trade-offs entail, and it appears callous and horrifying. They're just going to react out of a surfeit of humanity.
Do we really want to punish those people to the hilt and over time , through word of mouth reputation, actually prevent people of good conscience from joining up ? Read Antigone- it's no way to run a nation.
Obama's Executive Order is a good start.
http://www.publicintegrity.org/2012/10/15/11473/obama-order-protects-intelligence-community-whistleblowers
Republican hate it but there has has has to be some place they can go "out" of a system they think is breaking the law and into the light, because that's the psychology that's motivating them to do this in the first place. "They're doing this in the dark. " No one knows what's going on" Holy shit!".
IMHO the military has to publicly differentiate between acts of espionage and acts like these and gauge its public and prosecutorial reaction accordingly. What is reality telling you? This is how people are now. This goes to the core of what this generation is. Even the military has to chan
If you don't vote you send the message "I don't give a fuck, do whatever you want.", which is almost as good as outright support to whoever gets elected.
You want to de-legitimize the established powers? Vote for an underdog. It doesn't even matter if they win - if we can get enough people voting for the underdog we send the message that we *do* care, and we are *not* happy with the way things are going. Right now somewhere upwards of 50% (80%?)of US citizens don't vote at all. Just think of what it would mean if all those people instead went to the trouble of going to the polling place and voted for whatever random 3rd-party candidate sounded interesting at the moment. Spread those votes across a half-dozen also-ran candidates and the election itself would be basically unchanged, but we'd be sending the message to those in power that we're not happy with how they're doing things, and perhaps just as importantly we'd be sending the message to the third parties that they *do* have a realistic chance of winning if they can just get behind a position that people actually care about.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.