C|Net Reporter Declan McCullagh Talks About Privacy (Video)

Declan Mccullagh, C|net's Chief political correspondent, has covered politics since the late 1990s for a variety of publications. He is a strong libertarian, privacy advocate, and long time Slashdot reader who is not happy about how the NSA and other government bodies are sticking their noses into our personal business. He and I originally talked about doing an interview based on a story he wrote for C|net on July 12 titled How the U.S. forces Net firms to cooperate on surveillance. Scheduling problems put the interview off for a bit, but here we are. Note that Declan has written millions of pixels worth of material about privacy, NSA spying, and related matters. With new revelations about unsavory government activities coming to light seemingly every day the interview delay is no big deal. And this question still remains: Can we repeal the Patriot Act? New Jersey Congressman Rush Holt wants to. What about your representatives? Are they willing to join Rep. Holt? Do you think they might if a bunch of people -- perhaps starting with you -- asked them to?

Comments

funnyhowitworks

[Korruptionen]

Any attempts to repeal the Patriot Act will be caught by the government with snooping and snubbed.

Re:funnyhowitworks

[BenSchuarmer]

Repealing the Patriot Act would be unPatriotic! How could anybody be against Patriotism?!?!

Re:funnyhowitworks

[davester666]

The Patriot Act has made no real difference w.r.t. what the NSA does. If anything, it just made them do some paperwork filing documents with the FISA court.

There have been repeated disclosures of blatant violations of the law by the NSA since WWII, with no penalties or sanctions applied to the people running those programs. There is nobody with the power to hold their feet to the fire that is also willing to do so. So why would they stop?

Millions of pixels

[Richy_T]

Yeah, but he used a big font.

Re:Millions of pixels

[superpie]

How many libraries of congress is that?

Repeal the patriot act??

[fustakrakich]

Not until you vote the D/R party out. However if it was to lose 20 or 30 percentage points, that might scare them into rethinking their platform, but right now there is no incentive to do so. It's easy for guys like these to stand up and make noise knowing full well nothing will come of it, but it will look great to the rubes back home who otherwise might start thinking of voting for someone else.

Re:Repeal the patriot act??

[MetalliQaZ]

You forget that the PATRIOT Act has lots of support with common Americans. Most of them are scared and ignorant, and they want government protection.

Re:Repeal the patriot act??

[dkleinsc]

Well, Congress as a whole can't lose 20 or 30 percentage points: Its current approval rating is at somewhere around 10%. According to the available polling data, Americans think this is the worst Congress in at least 40 years.

Another interesting trend from Gallup on this: If you ask Americans whether their Congressman is doing a good job, 46% say yes (also lowest number since the 1970's). If you ask Americans who know the name of the Congressman if that Congressman is doing a good job, 62% say yes. Let's just say there's a civics education problem in America.

Re:Repeal the patriot act??

[denis-The-menace]

Too bad they need protection from the governemnt itself than from the terists.

Meanwhile in a three letter department:
Guy#1: When is that false flag operation going to start? We need to justify the need for the PATRIOT Act.
Guy#2: Soon!

Re:Repeal the patriot act??

[fustakrakich]

Gallop and other media polls are bullshit. Election results give congress and the executive a greater than 95% approval rating. Those are the only polls people should pay attention to. Media polls are designed to vent anger while accomplishing nothing else. During election season that same media is busy pimping the crooks that everybody 'hates', while telling us that resistance, by voting for someone else, is a futile waste or your vote.

Not goint to solve the problem

[Sparticus789]

The Patriot Act authorizes the US government to obtain secret warrants to investigate suspected terrorists. But what they are actually doing, is obtaining warrants for the entire US population. Repealing the Patriot Act will not stop this, because the Patriot Act is not their legal authority to seize these records. The US Government has NO authority to seize these records.

The author of the Patriot Act agrees

Re:Not goint to solve the problem

[pixelpusher220]

The Patriot Act is their excuse for doing though, so yes, repealing the Patriot Act removes their justification as a valid point of argument.

It is a valid question though, how do you prove a secret program actually stops?

Re:Not goint to solve the problem

[dave562]

...how do you prove a secret program actually stops?

You withdraw the funding for it in the appropriations bills.

Re:Not goint to solve the problem

[SirGarlon]

It is a valid question though, how do you prove a secret program actually stops?

Sufficiently extreme measures could do that. For example, I believe the President has the authority to declassify entire programs with the stroke of a pen. Likewise, the President could order a criminal investigation of the program's managers. I'm not saying this will happen. I'm saying that if some hypothetical President wanted to clean house, he/she could come down on the NSA like a ton of bricks.

Unfortunately, the last two Presidents have felt the benefits of this secret program outweigh the violence it does to the fundamental principles of the Republic. How they came to that conclusion is a secret.

Re:Not goint to solve the problem

[Sparticus789]

I can say that XYZ is an excuse for doing something, but that doesn't mean that XYZ is actually a legally justified reason.

For instance, I can sit around and claim that the 2nd Amendment gives me the right to "bear arms" and go to Alaska and shoot every Polar Bear that I can find. Then bring those Polar Bear arms back to my house and mount them on the wall. Just because I claim the 2nd Amendment gives me the right to have those "bear arms" does not mean that the 2nd Amendment actually gives me the right to shoot Polar Bears.

Re:Not goint to solve the problem

[stewsters]

"How they came to that conclusion is a secret."

It does seem to run contrary to how they behaved before they had much power.

The NSA has every conversation they have made since ~2000 recorded and analyzed. You can see from this article that the NSA has been interested in controlling politics with blackmail for some time.

Re:Not goint to solve the problem

[pixelpusher220]

When XYZ *is* a legally passed law, then yes it is a legally justified reason.

Doesn't mean it's right or even constitutional, but it IS legal. Until ruled unconstitutional :)

Re:Note that Declan has written millions of pixels

[Samantha Wright]

Note that a 1920x1080 monitor has 2073600 pixels, so at a legible font size it's perhaps not a very noteworthy achievement to begin with.

It Shouldn't Be Necessary

[Jane Q. Public]

Technically speaking, unconstitutional "laws" do not need to be repealed, because they were never properly laws in the first place.

And yes, that means those who enforced them should go to jail.

Re:It Shouldn't Be Necessary

[Jane Q. Public]

The Supreme Court, on its own, cannot just say, "Law X is unconstitutional".

There is a lot more to it than just that. However, I don't have time to get into a long discussion of the issue right now.

I will just say that despite what you may have been taught in school, our system was not designed to have the Supreme Court be the be-all and end-all arbiter of everything. States have a say in the matter too.

Re:C|Net

[TWiTfan]

Is that the same CNET that has recently become notorious for installing a bunch of adware with the software downloaded from their Download.com site? Yeah, I want a privacy lecture from some guy working for a company that keeps trying to install about a dozen adbars and popups to my browser every time I try to download anything from them.

See 18 USC 242.

[Jane Q. Public]

This is a Federal law that makes it a felony to deprive you of your rights "under color of law". And it applies specifically to government officials. Up to, and including, the President.

Also, I should point out that because of the way it is worded, if you read it quickly, you might get the impression that it applies only to racial prejudice and other such errors. Not so. It has been tested in courts and it applies to ANY of your Constitutional rights.

Not a nerd?

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

>> written millions of pixels worth of material

If we're using true-color pixels (24-bits), that's at least an embarrassingly bad 48M bits of information.

Quick, someone tell this guy about compression, or at least 7-bit ASCII character sets please!

Re:C|Net

[TWiTfan]

Here's a link in case anyone has no idea what I'm talking about.

wait a minute

[slashmydots]

"He is a strong libertarian, privacy advocate"
Then why did he give his name for the interview?

A simpler, cheaper alternative

[MikeRT]

1. Repeal the USA PATRIOT Act and Homeland Security Act
2. Triple the budget of the reestablished US Border Patrol and direct it to hire at least 40k new agents for the southern border and at least 10k new agents for the northern border.
3. Double the size of the US Coast Guard.
4. Spend the remainder of Homeland Security's former annual budget on hardening the electrical grid against an EMP attack.
5. Suspend all travel visas from countries that have a serious problem with their citizens being recruited by radical Islamic countries.

See? No war, no torture, no idenfinite detention, no one's junk getting man-handled at the airport. Homeland security is 95% "keep the borders secure, keep the known problem populations away from our territory."

Of course, it'll never happen because even if the MIC and DHS could be overpowered politically, you'd have half the country saying "no sir, I'd rather maintain the status quo than be perceived to be discriminating against people from different countries."

Re:A simpler, cheaper alternative

[emho24]

All five of your comments would be decried as "racist!". It doesn't even matter anymore if that is a logical retort, it is the default accusation.

It hinges on the car.

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of the people you're ever likely to meet are in totally favor of Big Brother shit. They are cowards, afraid of their own shadow, terrified by every rustling leaf. Big Brother will protect them, and keep them safe from the Bad people and the Different.

The ONLY thing that will change their mind is if Big Brother tries to fuck with their cars. It's the one nerve they have left.

Ask them about speed cameras, or red light cameras, or any of that stuff: It'll have them foaming at the mouth in no time, shrieking about "revenue gathering" and other shit.

Tell them Big Brother plans to track their vehicle usage and they'll merely gripe. But tell them Big Brother will use the data to send automated speeding tickets and there'll be blood in the streets.

Government = Corporations

[Princeofcups]

"He is a strong libertarian, privacy advocate, and long time Slashdot reader who is not happy about how the NSA and other government bodies are sticking their noses into our personal business. "

That's hilarious. Does he completely ignore that the US government is completely controlled by corporations, i.e. the richest of the rich? You know, the exact people that the Libertarians worship and wish to emulate? PRISM was not designed to keep the government in power. It was designed to keep the rich people rich, and the poor people poor. You know, the logical consequences of unrestricted corporate freedom. And if that's not the Libertarian ideal, then what is?

Re:Government = Corporations

[Anonymous Coward]

And if that's not the Libertarian ideal, then what is?

We Libertarians are a diverse bunch, and not all of us are in favor of allowing corporations free reign to abuse the public.

What Libertarians have most in common is that we want individuals to be left alone as much as practicable.

But when it comes to large groups of people (i.e corporations), Libertarians don't always think alike.

But there's a bunch of us Libertarians who understand that Capitalism is sometimes the enemy the free market.

This -- in fact -- is the big Libertarian dilemma: The "free market" is a wonderful but incredibly fragile thing. Protecting it makes the world a better place, but the only way to protect it is to restrict corporations and lawmakers from abusing it. Where do you draw the line on restrictions that "protect the free market" versus restrictions that "impede company's freedoms"? It's a tough call, and Libertarians have been arguing amongst themselves for decades about it.

So, no, not all Libertarians rejoice when corporate/government abuses take away our freedoms. Some of us champion the individual more so than the rich. Some of us value the Free Market more than we do Unrestrained Capitalism, and some of us keenly understand how the term "Free Market Capitalism" can be a bitter oxymoron.

Despite what you might think, the Libertarian view is not a simplistic view. It's complex and richly nuanced, because each individual Libertarian comes to different conclusions about what restrictions are warranted to protect liberty. Your characterization of Libertarianism is laughably cartoonish. It's time for you to learn more about Libertarianism.

Re:Government = Corporations

[TheSeatOfMyPants]

I wonder if it would've been mentioned if he was from another party, or if the assumption is that Slashdotters (or geeks) virtually all view libertarianism in a positive light.

It was designed to keep the rich people rich, and the poor people poor. You know, the logical consequences of unrestricted corporate freedom. And if that's not the Libertarian ideal, then what is?

From what I've seen, most geek libertarians figure either that they're only non-rich because the big bad government is in the way (while everyone else is non-rich due to their own faults/choices) -- or, alternately, that everyone hard-working and smart would quickly become affluent without a government to 'interfere.'

Re:Dystopia

[babblefrog]

Read Stross's Glasshouse for a particularly nasty version.

Re:C|Net

[datavirtue]

You mean like Source Forge? Just happened to me today while downloading Filezilla.