The US intelligence community has a long history of going right to the communication source and obtaining raw data from public companies. In the 1920's Herbert Yardley's "American Black Chamber" worked with Western Union and other cable companies who turned over interesting cablegrams and radiograms.
In 1940 [before the US entered the second world war], the military assigned Lt Earl F. Cook to read and copy cable messages that passed through RCA's office with the consent of RCA's president, David Sarnoff.
After the war, there was of course project Shamrock.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_O._Yardley#The_American...
The big question is how this will affect the intelligence community long-term, who are becoming simultaneously more important, and simultaneously more threatened by technology and the openness of the internet.
Will they be forced to become more transparent or succeed in their fight to keep growing in power/secrecy?
Having an extremely large and powerful government, now even more obsessed with aggressive enforcement of law, is almost always going to be continually at odds with the peoples trends towards social liberalism.
The internet seems to have accelerated liberalization and terrorism seems to have accelerated state totalitarianism. So it seem's we're witnessing an acceleration in the battle between the two (especially if you live in the HN bubble).
The counter argument of course could be, and often is, dismissed by those who see the state as a representation of the people and total secrecy in the intelligence community as necessary for a healthy country/national security.
Two hundred years ago, intercepting signals was extremely difficult. They were sent by courier in envelopes. Couriers are crafty and the backwoods perimeter long.
150 years ago, they could be sent by wire and this meant both an explosion of signals, but also a corresponding ease of identifying the route by which they would be passed.
In the early 20th century, radio increased the volume of signals, but again interception became easier to the point that there were many so many locations from which an antenna could be used that the development of encryption and decryption methods became the most important task in signals intelligence.
Today, anything could be important. And the NSA, being charged with national security assumes that you and I may very well be up to no good. There job is to be paranoid, and they are good at it.
Building a massive security apparatus, so far as I am aware, has never led to a more liberal political regime. While anecdote is not evidence, I don't see how one can make a strong case that the current state of affairs is the result of increasing liberalization.
The worst part is that the argument brought against transparency actually makes sense on the surface level, but as usual completely ignores the factor of bad actors within the system, which need to be kept in check as much as any hypothetical group of terrorists.
1. The government lied and pretends not to engage in domestic espionage.
2. To support that lie, the government didn't do much bad stuff with the results of its domestic spying.
3. Thus, the domestic spying wasn't a big deal.
I think we're past that point now.
That's just what we've heard about.
As for the rest -- it's hard to prove what secret sources the government used to motivate which actions. But as one example:
Being on the No-Fly List is pretty bad, and a lot of people are on it.
If the U.S. decided to take down every one of those companies or indite their CEOs/Boards the would have an uproar from the populous that would likely be comparable to the 60's (or worse).
Essentially, the populous would be more loyal to a company who's honest than a government which is dishonest.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/11/nsa-americans-p...
While they may not share information with say - China - they will share it with one of the other eyes, who could also lend a helping hand in domestic spying.
Plausible deniability and so forth.
1. Most people probably are not huge fans of this, but don't consider it a big enough deal to go to jail over it. I'm in that category (double disclaimer: not speaking in any official capacity for my company).
2. Even if someone DID think it a big enough deal, it's not easy to be a martyr. If it were, then presumably you would have already found yourself a job at one of these companies then spilled the beans. Considering you're commenting on HN, not languishing in prison, I can only guess that you find the prospect of such martyrdom much less appealing than your comment seems to indicate.
Oddly enough, this time it's the tech companies arguing the opposite (that disclosing specific metadata only is OK and not hazardous).
Weird world we live in, sometimes...
Tech lacks representation though, particularly compared with how much lobbying much less affluent industries manage to do.
You can't fight things like that in court, it's as hopeless as Khodorkovsky's attempts to defend himself. Only things that work for businesses is moving out, for people - using strong encryption on personal level.
I don't say that legal way should not be taken, it is still good but just to show how far the government is willing to go to defend it's violations of human rights - which should make things clear to those who are still in doubt.
Sure, individual employees might leak the information, but they would being taking a great personal risk by doing so. Ed Snowden was not the only person who was aware of these programs and had a problem with them; yet he was the only one ready to give up his livelihood to leak the information.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwest#Refusal_of_NSA_surveillan...
If these companies were serious about protecting their customers, they'd band together and block government mandated mass surveillance entirely, from A to Z. Given their size of the market, the government can't and wouldn't shut them down.
