One problem with the discussion that is occurring online is that _we_ all have Internet access. 80%+ of Indians don't. Ask them whether imperfect Internet access is better than none. The answers you get will likely be quite different...
While this is undoubtedly harming some existing intelligence gathering operations, it's probably more useful in providing other information such as how does ISIS's network react when attacked by another network actor. Think of Anonymous as the hounds chasing ISIS for the the intel community. Watching ISIS's online behaviour under attack is probably very useful.
Knowing how many people in the USA are surveilled is not the same as knowing how many Americans are surveilled. Two very different numbers. What's more, without breaking privacy by looking at the content, the NSA cannot be absolutely sure. Statistically confident but not without the element of uncertainty.
Congress should ask better questions. They are mostly lawyers after all.
Maybe the online poker industry should take a cue from WoW where player conventions are huge. Online players get to meet face-to-face. They could set up regional, national and international events to attract players for special prizes and recognition. The conventions could have workshops by leading players etc.
As a professional historian who has worked in the National Archives in College Park, MD and at four different presidential libraries, which incidentally are also managed by NARA, I need to interject that this is an immense costly but valuable project.
Remember "the warehouse" from the Indiana Jones movies? NARA is a little like that in terms of size but are better organized. Aisle upon aisle, shelf upon shelf, row upon row, room upon room, floor upon floor, building upon building of neatly indexed banker's boxes with labelled folders of documents. The labels may have been checked by the archivists at NARA, but they may also simply be the labels affixed to the records by the source federal agency. The individual documents in folders are almost never labelled. In the course of my work, I gathered 30k digital pictures of documents over the course of two months. The acquisition process sounds deceptively easy. Look in the index, find key words and request boxes from the archivist. Then you look through folders to locate individual documents. In point of fact, I probably visually scanned 3M pages to see if they were "interesting" and photo worthy for future research, usually taking only a few seconds per page to make a snap judgement. My decisions on which boxes of documents to request were far more time consuming. What is the right keyword for talking about computers in government in 1970? If you said "information automation" then you would be right. A few presidential (Ford especially) libraries have updated electronic files for indexing which is a huge advantage.
On my trips to the archives, it was interesting to see both professionals and amateurs using a range of technologies. I saw really old school researchers using 3x5 note cards and taking notes on legal pads. They sometimes supplemented their work by photocopying really important documents at $.75/copy. Some researchers avoided this cost by using flat bed scanners which they carried in with them. Still other researchers brought in high end digital cameras and tripods. I used a digital camera freehanded. All of these people still need to find a way to actually get to physical proximity with the records. Digitalization would open up a new era in research.
On the metadata issue, most of these records already have copious amounts of metadata recorded in well-established fields that are used by NARA.
On the OCR issue, some documents have hand-written notes on them which would not be machine readable and sometimes are not human readable. It is likely that the documents will have to be digitally scanned and flagged if handwriting is detected.
Making these records available to the general public would be a huge advantage to anyone interested in government and US history. Come to think of it, in terms of size and complexity, it would be a worthy challenge for Google. U.S. government documents run back to the founding of the country and the number of documents only increases over time.
Speaking of choices in games, every now and then I wish that games would have a "reality" setting. In FPS games, this might manifest as "Oh look. I shot a police officer and now every police officer within a couple of miles is gunning for me." Maybe the other guy is a good shot too...oh, head shot? So sorry.
Maybe every 20th game should automatically start in reality mode.
This is not a diatribe against violence, simply the occasional reminder that virtual violence and lethality are very different than their real analogs.
On the contrary, I doubt the government is doing anything illegal. They are using techno-legal arbitrage.
Current laws do not protect metadata. The government likely analyzes metadata to find possible terrorist suspects by looking for patterns. It presents those analyses to the FISA court as evidence to look at the content of suspect individuals and FISA grants a warrant. All of this is strictly legal or at least extralegal.
The problem is that telecommunications companies are likely complicit. Private telecommunications law does address such things. That was why they fought so long and hard for immunity. While the government couldn't be held liable, the telcos could.
John Laprise Ph.D. Visiting Assistant Professor Northwestern University in Qatar
The really big deal in the document is the redaction. In the earlier version, item C allowing minimal physical intrusion was redacted. In the version I FOIAed it was declassified.
What's the big deal? In 1974, electronic surveillance wasn't covered by the law. The law didn't even envision such a thing. Breaking and entering, however the law was well prepared to deal with.
Ford authorized the DoJ to conduct break-ins without a warrant. I know really ironic coming on the heels of Nixon, but I have to reiterate; Ford was a really stout defender of privacy rights based on all the research I've done.
John Laprise Ph.D. Visiting Assistant Professor Northwestern University in Qatar
All true...though Ford was really concerned about the Soviet threat. He genuinely believed that this was the only way to deal with the threat of soviet eavesdropping on US microwave telecommunications. Ford was actually a champion of personal privacy. It's just that competing with the personal privacy that we think of everyday , there is a second kind of privacy which the government is concerned with. Their focus is protecting citizens from foreign surveillance threats and as these and other documents show, the responsibility of government to protect citizens' privacy from external threats trumps citizens' right to avoid surveillance from their government.
This duality is clear in the documentary record but does not show up in public. It's only a debate held in the White House. Perhaps it should be entertained elsewhere as well...
With respect to electronic surveillance, legality wasn't at issue. In 1974, the law did not recognize the existence of electronic surveillance. It did however regulate lawful and unlawful physical entry.
The originally redacted text was "That the minimum physical intrusion necessary to obtain the information sought will be used."
This clearly contradicted constitutional protections for unlawful search and seizure. Until the advent of FISA, all of the other aspects of the memo were legal or perhaps better defined as extra-legal. Ford delegated extraconstitutional power to the AG in 1974. So the Ford memo is revealing the legal and legally questionable methods it is employing, taking care to conceal the most questionable.
From current available information, the government since 9/11 is probably taking a similar approach. At present, the law does not recognize the capture or use of metadata and the courts have ruled that information on the outside of physical mail i.e. addresses are not protected. From conversations I have had, since 9/11 I suspect that the following is taking place:
Using the purported, NSA capture technology identified in Telco central offices, the government is collecting information about internet traffic patterns (metadata) and content but is not reading the content.
Using networking theory, they identify patterns of usage that are statistically similar to the patterns of usage of known terrorists.
The government then approaches the FISA court with this evidence seeking to obtain a warrant for the content, which they have previously captured but not read.
FISA court grants the government a warrant and it then legally reads the previously captured content.
The government's use of intelligence methods regularly outpaces the law's ability to catch up and recognize the existence and power of new technologies. This memo is evidence of that.I think that in all likelihood what the government is doing with the telephone companies is legal for the government to do because the law doesn't address their activities just as it didn't address electronic surveillance in 1974. The telephone companies desperate plea for immunity speaks to the fact that telecom law _does_ address this and that they would have been legally liable for providing customer information.
Techno-legal arbitrage.
John Laprise Ph.D. Visiting Assistant Professor Northwestern University in Qatar
It sucks but is understandable. If I were in your shoes, I would go to my boss and ask them how they would like me to procede. I would explain that while I understood and sympathized with their security concerns, I would also like to finish the projects and work that I had previously been assigned. If the company would like me to cease work on those projects, that would be fine; but I would like to know what they would like me to do in the next 3-4 weeks.
I think that the value of an liberal arts CS degree is equal to that of other programs for the most part. The huge caveat is whether you are interested in immediately pursuing graduate school. In that case, going to a larger school may provide you with better resources i.e. research opportunities. In the grad school derby, the prestige and strength of your undergrad program is an important factor. This is not a high hurdle, however. You can overcome this by being aggressive about seeking out different kinds of enrichment like internships and workshops with big IT companies. If you are interested in pursuing grad school later, aliberal arts CS degree will be less important than the work that you do in the private sector.
If you are choosing to go out into the private sector, your undergrad school will not matter 99% of the time. In our information economy, companies want to hire college graduates...they, for the most part don't even care about GPA.
Neither the national labs nor the NSA have the authority or mandate to conduct military operations. The national labs are put in the service of research questions from other organizations within the government and the NSA is primarily a SIGINT collection organization with some analysis responsibilities centered the interpretation network of networks and their characteristics. They were doing network analysis long before MySpace.
Dear Major General Lord,
I'm an academic who has been theorizing and writing about military doctrine in in cyberspace. One problem that I have encountered is in theorizing about what conflict in cyberspace looks like, though Libicki does a fine job. How does your command develop war fighting doctrine in the absence of actual conflict for cyberspace?
Slashdot Mirror
So what?
A large group of youngish, diverse, highly educated, intelligent technologists were dismayed at Trump's election.
I fail to see anything surprising.
I'd be equally unsurprised by the (likely) positive mood at a morning sales meeting at a southern Indiana John Deere dealership.
I'll believe it when I see it.
One problem with the discussion that is occurring online is that _we_ all have Internet access. 80%+ of Indians don't. Ask them whether imperfect Internet access is better than none. The answers you get will likely be quite different...
While this is undoubtedly harming some existing intelligence gathering operations, it's probably more useful in providing other information such as how does ISIS's network react when attacked by another network actor. Think of Anonymous as the hounds chasing ISIS for the the intel community. Watching ISIS's online behaviour under attack is probably very useful.
Knowing how many people in the USA are surveilled is not the same as knowing how many Americans are surveilled. Two very different numbers. What's more, without breaking privacy by looking at the content, the NSA cannot be absolutely sure. Statistically confident but not without the element of uncertainty.
Congress should ask better questions. They are mostly lawyers after all.
Maybe the online poker industry should take a cue from WoW where player conventions are huge. Online players get to meet face-to-face. They could set up regional, national and international events to attract players for special prizes and recognition. The conventions could have workshops by leading players etc.
As a professional historian who has worked in the National Archives in College Park, MD and at four different presidential libraries, which incidentally are also managed by NARA, I need to interject that this is an immense costly but valuable project.
Remember "the warehouse" from the Indiana Jones movies? NARA is a little like that in terms of size but are better organized. Aisle upon aisle, shelf upon shelf, row upon row, room upon room, floor upon floor, building upon building of neatly indexed banker's boxes with labelled folders of documents. The labels may have been checked by the archivists at NARA, but they may also simply be the labels affixed to the records by the source federal agency. The individual documents in folders are almost never labelled. In the course of my work, I gathered 30k digital pictures of documents over the course of two months. The acquisition process sounds deceptively easy. Look in the index, find key words and request boxes from the archivist. Then you look through folders to locate individual documents. In point of fact, I probably visually scanned 3M pages to see if they were "interesting" and photo worthy for future research, usually taking only a few seconds per page to make a snap judgement. My decisions on which boxes of documents to request were far more time consuming. What is the right keyword for talking about computers in government in 1970? If you said "information automation" then you would be right. A few presidential (Ford especially) libraries have updated electronic files for indexing which is a huge advantage.
On my trips to the archives, it was interesting to see both professionals and amateurs using a range of technologies. I saw really old school researchers using 3x5 note cards and taking notes on legal pads. They sometimes supplemented their work by photocopying really important documents at $.75/copy. Some researchers avoided this cost by using flat bed scanners which they carried in with them. Still other researchers brought in high end digital cameras and tripods. I used a digital camera freehanded. All of these people still need to find a way to actually get to physical proximity with the records. Digitalization would open up a new era in research.
On the metadata issue, most of these records already have copious amounts of metadata recorded in well-established fields that are used by NARA.
On the OCR issue, some documents have hand-written notes on them which would not be machine readable and sometimes are not human readable. It is likely that the documents will have to be digitally scanned and flagged if handwriting is detected.
Making these records available to the general public would be a huge advantage to anyone interested in government and US history. Come to think of it, in terms of size and complexity, it would be a worthy challenge for Google. U.S. government documents run back to the founding of the country and the number of documents only increases over time.
Speaking of choices in games, every now and then I wish that games would have a "reality" setting. In FPS games, this might manifest as "Oh look. I shot a police officer and now every police officer within a couple of miles is gunning for me." Maybe the other guy is a good shot too...oh, head shot? So sorry.
Maybe every 20th game should automatically start in reality mode.
This is not a diatribe against violence, simply the occasional reminder that virtual violence and lethality are very different than their real analogs.
On the contrary, I doubt the government is doing anything illegal. They are using techno-legal arbitrage.
Current laws do not protect metadata. The government likely analyzes metadata to find possible terrorist suspects by looking for patterns. It presents those analyses to the FISA court as evidence to look at the content of suspect individuals and FISA grants a warrant. All of this is strictly legal or at least extralegal.
The problem is that telecommunications companies are likely complicit. Private telecommunications law does address such things. That was why they fought so long and hard for immunity. While the government couldn't be held liable, the telcos could.
John Laprise Ph.D.
Visiting Assistant Professor
Northwestern University in Qatar
The really big deal in the document is the redaction. In the earlier version, item C allowing minimal physical intrusion was redacted. In the version I FOIAed it was declassified.
What's the big deal? In 1974, electronic surveillance wasn't covered by the law. The law didn't even envision such a thing. Breaking and entering, however the law was well prepared to deal with.
Ford authorized the DoJ to conduct break-ins without a warrant. I know really ironic coming on the heels of Nixon, but I have to reiterate; Ford was a really stout defender of privacy rights based on all the research I've done.
John Laprise Ph.D.
Visiting Assistant Professor
Northwestern University in Qatar
All true...though Ford was really concerned about the Soviet threat. He genuinely believed that this was the only way to deal with the threat of soviet eavesdropping on US microwave telecommunications. Ford was actually a champion of personal privacy. It's just that competing with the personal privacy that we think of everyday , there is a second kind of privacy which the government is concerned with. Their focus is protecting citizens from foreign surveillance threats and as these and other documents show, the responsibility of government to protect citizens' privacy from external threats trumps citizens' right to avoid surveillance from their government.
This duality is clear in the documentary record but does not show up in public. It's only a debate held in the White House. Perhaps it should be entertained elsewhere as well...
With respect to electronic surveillance, legality wasn't at issue. In 1974, the law did not recognize the existence of electronic surveillance. It did however regulate lawful and unlawful physical entry.
The originally redacted text was "That the minimum physical intrusion necessary to obtain the information sought will be used."
This clearly contradicted constitutional protections for unlawful search and seizure. Until the advent of FISA, all of the other aspects of the memo were legal or perhaps better defined as extra-legal. Ford delegated extraconstitutional power to the AG in 1974. So the Ford memo is revealing the legal and legally questionable methods it is employing, taking care to conceal the most questionable.
From current available information, the government since 9/11 is probably taking a similar approach. At present, the law does not recognize the capture or use of metadata and the courts have ruled that information on the outside of physical mail i.e. addresses are not protected. From conversations I have had, since 9/11 I suspect that the following is taking place:
Using the purported, NSA capture technology identified in Telco central offices, the government is collecting information about internet traffic patterns (metadata) and content but is not reading the content.
Using networking theory, they identify patterns of usage that are statistically similar to the patterns of usage of known terrorists.
The government then approaches the FISA court with this evidence seeking to obtain a warrant for the content, which they have previously captured but not read.
FISA court grants the government a warrant and it then legally reads the previously captured content.
The government's use of intelligence methods regularly outpaces the law's ability to catch up and recognize the existence and power of new technologies. This memo is evidence of that.I think that in all likelihood what the government is doing with the telephone companies is legal for the government to do because the law doesn't address their activities just as it didn't address electronic surveillance in 1974. The telephone companies desperate plea for immunity speaks to the fact that telecom law _does_ address this and that they would have been legally liable for providing customer information.
Techno-legal arbitrage.
John Laprise Ph.D.
Visiting Assistant Professor
Northwestern University in Qatar
It sucks but is understandable. If I were in your shoes, I would go to my boss and ask them how they would like me to procede. I would explain that while I understood and sympathized with their security concerns, I would also like to finish the projects and work that I had previously been assigned. If the company would like me to cease work on those projects, that would be fine; but I would like to know what they would like me to do in the next 3-4 weeks.
I think that the value of an liberal arts CS degree is equal to that of other programs for the most part. The huge caveat is whether you are interested in immediately pursuing graduate school. In that case, going to a larger school may provide you with better resources i.e. research opportunities. In the grad school derby, the prestige and strength of your undergrad program is an important factor. This is not a high hurdle, however. You can overcome this by being aggressive about seeking out different kinds of enrichment like internships and workshops with big IT companies. If you are interested in pursuing grad school later, aliberal arts CS degree will be less important than the work that you do in the private sector. If you are choosing to go out into the private sector, your undergrad school will not matter 99% of the time. In our information economy, companies want to hire college graduates...they, for the most part don't even care about GPA.
Yes, when I was referring to military doctrine, I wasn't talking exclusively about training, but to strategy, tactics, and equipment concerns as well.
Neither the national labs nor the NSA have the authority or mandate to conduct military operations. The national labs are put in the service of research questions from other organizations within the government and the NSA is primarily a SIGINT collection organization with some analysis responsibilities centered the interpretation network of networks and their characteristics. They were doing network analysis long before MySpace.
Dear Major General Lord, I'm an academic who has been theorizing and writing about military doctrine in in cyberspace. One problem that I have encountered is in theorizing about what conflict in cyberspace looks like, though Libicki does a fine job. How does your command develop war fighting doctrine in the absence of actual conflict for cyberspace?