Did you read the article all the way through? At the end it mentions that only 6% of all Americans think this is perfectly fine.
"A survey ... found that 56% believe that broad-based government tracking of telephone records is acceptable ... More Democrats than Republicans found it acceptable, a reversal of findings in a similar poll taken when George W. Bush was president ..."
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732490400457853...
> Democrats are more likely to approve of the surveillance programs (49-40 percent), which Republicans (32-63 percent) and independents (34-56 percent) largely disapprove.
http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/305181-gall...
Did you really not recognize the contradiction even as you typed this sentence?
This is so narrow minded in my opinion. Snowden has done something good to the world, because US administration is secrectly messing with everybody around the globe.
Stop considering it happened only within US borders or as an internal matter. US and US media still are using a group (country) scale reduction to draw some bad opinion on Snowden, divide and gain some people to this spying dementia.
If you look on an international scale, the trivial question would be : hero or villain, and the answer is quite obvious.
AAaaaand somebody is knocking on my door...
I keep thinking about how in some Asian and Middle Eastern countries, the same things have been going on (if not more overt), and I wonder if their citizens have as much apathy as ours?
For example in medieval Iceland, one of the major protections against unreasonable search and seizure was a combination of limiting the number of people who could be involved in searching for a stolen item for example, and also mandating all the places where the MUST search. So you could only have so many bondir searching for a stolen item and they couldn't selectively search farms. Instead they were required to search all farms between two suspects. this made very indiscriminent searching impractical.
Personally, I find it hard to love my country (not even sure what that really means to me) or any country I've been in for an extended period of time. Maybe it is because I keep abstracting country back to ever changing lines on the ever changing maps drawn throughout history. Though, I'm not saying that there are some places that I wouldn't rather live over others.
>The question, as always, is how individuals and groups of people navigate the government and vice versa. The specific limits vary from one place to another but the attitudes seem remarkably stable over time too.
Maybe that's why it is easy for some individuals/organizations to play chess games between nation states for whatever (usually business) reasons? At least that's what is going on in my head now about the larger geopolitical landscape in relation to some national and some international issues…
Real opinion pieces that actually ask the hard questions like "should the government know less than Google" are all but ignored, in favor of 6 year old backdoor "zero-days", frontpage'd on HN, for applications that have been out of favor for even longer, or politically motivated 'stub' court cases that aren't expected to go anywhere. It has all the indications of a coordinated media event, not a real political scandal. Nobody really cares what's going on, we just care that there is popular support going forward. Popular support for what exactly? for general NSA outrage?
To list a few reasons people are outraged: -Surveillance has been revealed that seems to far exceed what is authorized by the Patriot Act -The executive branch refuses to release the legal rationale on which it justifies the surveillance -Senior officials have lied to Congress about the scope of surveillance -Congress has not properly been briefed on these programs -There programs were kept secret unnecessarily -These programs are extremely dangerous to a free society -It appears this is a serious overreach in executive power, indicating a breakdown in the checks and balances of a functioning representative government
> A majority of the insinuations of the original "leak" have since been retracted
I don't know of any insinuations that have been retracted. The NSA slides say one thing, and the companies say another. There is still much to resolve.
> and those actually following the details of the story have no belief that there is anything illegal going on.
This is completely false. There seems to be a claimed legal basis for what's going on (which happens to be an extreme interpretation of the Patriot Act that even its author states goes beyond what it was written to authorize). But it hasn't been ruled on by a court because the executive branch claims it is too secret for judicial review. When that obstruction is removed, it's likely to be found unconstitutional.
Sure, people you interview might not be able to clearly express the reasons they're outraged. But there are at least three tiers of reasons to be concerned. Please consider reflecting on the fact that a claim of legality is not a claim that something is not terribly wrong and dangerous for society.
"Updated June 10 to include a quote from a follow-up article in the Post directly contradicting its initial claims and another observation after the release of the leaker's identity."
It seems the claims of the Guardian have not been edited, proven incorrect, or retracted. I haven't re-read their entire article, but it appears to be the same one that was initially published.
It appears that the exposé you linked eventually concludes: "According to a more precise description contained in a classified NSA inspector general’s report, also obtained by The Post, PRISM allows “collection managers [to send] content tasking instructions directly to equipment installed at company-controlled locations,” rather than directly to company servers." Looking at this from a process perspective and not a technical one, it appears there is little functional difference between this and "direct access" to servers. And it perfectly explains why the NSA presentation cut to the point: you get data from the company's systems without the company being involved.
It's up to the companies and the NSA to clarify things, but it appears the NSA slides are likely correct in terms of process, if not in technical terms.
Ultimately, I think you are talking past the person you are replying to. You are arguing that the program as reported by The Guardian (essentially unfettered access to personal data stored with tech companies) is horrible. He is arguing that the program is not what it is being made out to be, and the differences between what it is now popularly believed to be and what it is are tremendous. That is a more fundamental argument that would make the other argument moot if it is true.
The questions about Prism just add more to potentially be worried about.
I don't think this is true at all. Glenn Greenwald is sticking to his guns, alluding to further revelations, and there has been no evidence contrary to his claims other than press releases by the companies in question.
I'm not sure where this "nothing to see here" idea on HN came from, but it's false and dishonest.
Maybe most people on HN don't consider that a hard question? At the very least, I consider it an ill-stated question. I think something a little more transparent would be better: at what point must a company forfeit all knowledge to the government?
And when you put it that way, it really doesn't seem like a hard question to answer. At least, not for me.
At what point do you think a company should be required to forfeit all knowledge to the government?
It's an interesting framing but I don't think a correct one.
To the question itself, in some areas the government should absolutely know less than other groups/individuals. My wife should know a lot more about me than the government does, and she does very little data mining.
To the framing, though, just as there's a tremendous difference between "follow that car" and "follow every car" (http://www.schneier.com/essay-109.html), there's a tremendous difference between "knowing what Google knows" and "knowing what Google knows plus what Facebook knows plus what Apple knows plus what Twitter knows plus what Verizon knows plus ...".
I said I had and she told me that she agrees with the government surveillance and told me Snowden was a traitor to the American people.
I said, "You support PRISM?!"
She said, "What's PRISM?"
People have no idea. All they know is Snowden, Snowden, Snowden...
PRISM can't be dismantled, for the same reason no one on the planet has figured out how to dismantle nuclear arsenals. The other guy is doing it too.
In our case, PRISM can be dismantled without the other guy (i.e the population) retaliating in any way or any enemy country gaining any advantage out of that.
The latter is a matter of definition IMHO. But I applaud you for speaking out. It seems like the groupthink reigns on this one, and nobody seems to realize that they may have had a damn good reason for doing what they did. For example, if monitoring the Internet can avoid actual ground conflicts by early intervention, saving lives on both sides of the conflict -- is that really a bad thing?
I'm not an American. Which means that I am glad that there's finally some media outrage concerning privacy in general, because it was already public knowledge for months (with no leaks necessary) that the EU agreed the NSA could tap any EU-citizen's data in the US (or under the jurisdiction of).
For some reason this went by without barely a squeak[0].
In fact, a great many transgressions on our privacy (concerning both US and the EU and probably the World) went by without a squeak.
There is enough to be outraged about, even without knowing what this leak exactly entails. The important point is, it has the public's attention. And if the overwhelming majority of people are not okay with unlimited surveillance, isn't that a good thing? As you say, popular support going forward? It's about time, didn't you think?
[0] In the news media. Some organisations definitely took notice and adjusted their dependence on US data storage accordingly.
I already donate to Bits of Freedom and the Dutch Pirate Party (actually I need to double check the latter) since quite a while, but I'm not sure how that directly helps an EU directive being written right now.
Any ideas? EU stuff is notoriously "far away" and hard to reach or affect (which is the one thing I really dislike about the EU, they silently passed some ridiculous things that would never fly in NL).
Just want to point out that this kind of thing being technically legal might be the scariest fact of all.
IANAL but it seems clear that cell site data could be included (since it's held to be transactional data), but it would be limited to the towers connected to when making and ending calls, not a complete timeline. [2]
1. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone-record...
Are there any articles that have stuck out to you that you'd care to share?
Thousands of years ago, you lived in your village with your sheep in pigs, and the local warlord would be responsible for watching the edge of the woods and defending you against invading Barbarian hordes. In return, you paid the warlord taxes.
If you believe you can protect yourself adequately from the global threats of nuclear war, extremism and terrorism, Chinese hackers and the rest, then anarchy is a form of government that might suit you well! And best yet, no taxes!
That said it was great to hear the congress and the heads of the departments agreeing that the entire process deserves review. There was zero animosity, etc at the finance committee meeting today. Very cool to see when the government is working, a dialog is happening, etc.
But this guy is the ultimate sophomore, and if you ask me he was turned by China or just by some dreams of entering into some 31337 hax0r club illuminati.
All for leaking a powerpoint detailing what was codified in law over the past decade.
Hong Kong is actually the perfect place because he is able to play three distinct groups off eachother. The immediately obvious parties are the US and China who both are likely to look at this in terms of what he knows, but then there is also the large-scale concern in Hong Kong over encroachment by the Chinese government so he is able to play Hong Kong off China as well. It is one thing to play two groups off eachother but three gives him a significant chance.
Moreover an extradition request would be a total game changer. Right now it is a game of chicken. Extradition procedings woudl turn it into a game of national security assets and intra-Chinese politics.
The fear of him already being turned by the Chinese is another thing he is able to play off of.
