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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
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!
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
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.
Because informed voters are extremely dangerous, keeping people uninformed is a top priority for any pseudo-democratic government.
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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.
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.
I know it's just an analogy, but here's where your analogy is so fundamentally different that it is completely inapplicable: In the case of the corporation, the corporation is backing up data they own on systems they own. The NSA, on the other hand, is not just backing up data on its own systems. If you visit the NSA's website, and they log that activity, sure, that meets your analogy. But we're talking about the NSA collecting and storing data from systems that do not belong to them. Add to that the fact that they're a government entity and that whole pesky constitution document....
It's catch 22
No, it's not. They didn't simply lie about their activities. They lied about breaking the law and violating the constitution. You're focused entirely on the fact that they lied, not the fact that they broke the law. A more appropriate analogy would be if you lied about committing a murder, then were later found out to be the murderer. Which is the sentencing judge going to focus more on, the fact that you lied, or that fact that you committed a murder?
How can the NSA expect the uninformed voter to make an informed decision if it keeps the voter in the dark?
Now you're getting 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".
The real question is why didn't they just admit to it from the start?
Because it's a flagrant violation of the 4th amendment.
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