Here is what I don't understand: actions like this takes more than one person. It takes hundreds of people, complicit in actions that are the opposite of what anyone would consider 'American'. It's plainly fucking unamerican. So who the hell are these people? Why are they getting away with it? Sure covert things have always been going on to protect the public...but this is so in-your-face against what we should stand for that I cannot fathom how it is allowed to continue. I am so very angry that things like this are happening. The worst part? we can't seem to do anything about it so we just end up whining on the internet.
I'm not so sure about that. Grand juries traditionally operated in secret, and subpoenaing information on someone without tipping them doesn't necessarily violate the constitution. Now if someone is charged with a criminal offense, they have a constitutional right to confront witnesses under the 6th amendment. but that's not the same as a requirement to be notified of being the subject of an investigation where no charges have been brought.
Note that the grand jury system itself is is explicitly provided for in the Constitution - one of the less well-known aspects of the 5th amendment, which requires that prosecutors make a case before a grand jury before attempting to bring suspects to trial in serious cases. I'm not an expert on the history of grand juries, but I believe this summary from US v. Johnson (319 U.S. 503 (1943)) suts things up well:
Were the ruling of the court below allowed to stand, the mere challenge, in effect, of the regularity of a grand jury's proceedings would cast upon the government the affirmative duty of proving such regularity. Nothing could be more destructive of the workings of our grand jury system or more hostile to its historic status. That institution, unlike the situation in many states, is part of the federal constitutional system. To allow the intrusion, implied by the lower court's attitude, into the indispensable secrecy of grand jury proceedings — as important for the protection of the innocent as for the pursuit of the guilty — would subvert the functions of federal grand juries by all sorts of devices which some states have seen fit to permit in their local procedure, such as ready resort to inspection of grand jury minutes. The district court was quite within its right in striking the preliminary motions which challenged the legality of the grand jury that returned the indictment. To construe these pleadings as the court below did would be to resuscitate seventeenth century notions of interpreting pleadings and to do so in an aggravated form by applying them to the administration of the criminal law in the twentieth century. Protections of substance which now safeguard the rights of the accused do not require the invention of such new refinements of criminal pleading.
The hiring filters for most of the security services seem to select for people who consider following orders to be the most American thing they could possibly do.
The FBI and CIA dont seem to weed out poor quality candidates maybe they are placing to much reliance on patriotic hooha and polygraphs and not doing proper vetting checks.
The uk found out the hard way that he seems a good sort of chap belongs to all the right sort of clubs isn't agood selection criteria for the SS and SIS the hard way with the Famous 5 (Philby Maclean Burgess Blunt and Caincross)
Ok sure, plenty of cogs in the wheel following orders. But what about the judges? What about the leaders? The people we elect into office? Where is the accountability?
> judges? What about the leaders? The people we elect into office?
Judges are appointed by the president, and confirmed by the senate[1] (I guess that means voted on by the senate after a high ranking civil servant decides they would make a good judge) so if this person disagrees with the policy of the senators, there's a good chance he's not going to get into power. The people who are in office are normally so caught up in this sort of thing that they would end their own careers by speaking out about it, or worse, be called traitors of their own country and hunted by the NSA/FBI (see Snowden). The problem is once you know about it, you're already in deep, and your head will roll if it rolls. For many people, that sacrifice is too much to make. If you have a family, you ruin their lives too remember. All your friends, parents, relatives lives will be turned upside down at the same time... Is that something you would risk and give up if you were in this position?
The standard argument I've heard against "accountability" is that "leaders" won't "lead" properly if they know they could be held accountable for the consequences after leaving "office". It's utter bullshit, and there is absolutely no way for any of us to change it, or do anything about it.
I'd call for us to 'scientificize' the shit out of politics, but it would do no good. We all know what an utter failure the social sciences are when it comes to the scientific method. Mainly due to unpredictable human nature and the vagueness of social and political policy.
That said, if the people hired already have a righteous belief in a cause they think they are serving then they are much more likely to go along with things that, from the outside, seem quite wrong.
I love these sorts of articles. They criticize Milgram for a lack of scientific integrity, but nobody seems to point out that prisons aren't a bastion of scientific integrity, either. If anything, Milgram's sloppiness made his study a better model of the institutions in question. He allowed his human biases to overcome his duty -- which, as his own results show, is exactly how these things happen.
Milgram's experiment wasn't about prisons (at least not directly), and it didn't really seek to model any particular situation. It just sought to examine people's response to authority, and the setting chosen was merely a convenient way to do that.
If you're referring to the Stanford Prison Experiment, there's no point making something a "better" model if you lose your controlled environment in the process. The fact that Zimbardo interfered might be an interesting observation, but since it's not a repeatable experiment, it becomes merely a well documented anecdote.
Also, this isn't what the articles were about. They're mostly just presenting alternative explanations for the results, and the experimental evidence which supports them.
You say it is unamerican, but as a european (a non person) if I hear about these things I can only assume it were ... the Americans, or possibly the Brits.
EDIT: This seems to be a language issue, I thought as in 'Ford cars' are American.
"It doesn't happen in America" and "it's un-American" are not the same statement. On the assumption you're being serious and not facetious, when an American uses the term "un-American," it's meant to mean that the action flies in the face of ideal American values (chiefly freedom).
It's obvious to all of us that these ideals don't reflect reality, but simply accepting that what the American government does is the ideal representation of values the American public actually holds isn't something most of us are willing to do.
As an American the phrase "chiefly freedom" sends shivers down my spine. I'm sure you don't mean it as such, but it sounds so narrow minded and "rah rah" patriotic. I wish America was "chiefly education and free thought".
Our country's founders went to war specifically for the ideals of freedom and fair treatment by a government that represented them, rather than merely ruled them. Free thought and speech are certainly central features of that -- but they felt many more things were essential to being Free.
"Freedom" sounds rah-rah patriotic because it is both TRULY patriotic, and also used as weasel-words by those who are wanting to do the things we would consider un-american ("preserve your freedom and safety by groping you at all airports and train stations...", "detain indefinitely foreigners For Your Freedoms", etc).
Consider re-reading America's Declaration of Independence, or reading it for the first time if you never have. It's remarkably easy to understand, and pretty clearly states some of the ideals that the original "Americans" felt were reason enough to go to war with England.
Indeed. All to often people mean freedom for me. Like, for example "I should be free to impose my religion on others if that's what my religion says I should do."
Theoritically, the principle of reciprocity should preclude this kind of thinking. In practice it tends not to.
Chiefly education and free thought have nothing to do with free speech and the other freedoms granted by the Constitution. What you are wishing American meant could be completely fulfilled by a ruthless dictatorship that put an emphasis on education.
If Twitter and Yahoo really wanted to disclose this information, there is nothing the government could do to stop them. Civil disobedience is one of the most important tools we have against Orwellian governments. And doing the right thing is infinitely more important than following authoritarian orders.
Selective prosecution is a key tool of an oppressive government, reposting one of my comments here, which was related to a politician seemingly getting a similar treatment:
The problem with your post is exactly why selective prosecution is the
very embodiment of an oppressive regime. After all they DID break the
law, and they SHOULD be punished right? Who could argue with that.
Meanwhile half of Washington is doing the same thing, with the full
knowledge of people like the NSA, and the facts are sure to come out if
they take a meaningful stand against their agenda.
The example of the soviet election is also an excellent one. They knew
every bit of information about every candidate, and merely had to expose
the ones that didn't toe the line properly as the criminals or terrible
people they were.
Just like every single other person ever, they did something illegal or
unsavory at some point in their life.
Make no aspersions, the kind of information the NSA holds is complete
and total political power.
You an absolutely be sure that at the bare minimum a large minority of CEOs of large company are in or have been in a similar situation. Laws on insider trading are very all encompassing and are broken on a regular basis by practices that are considered normal. It may have been fraud, and it may have been illegal, but that dosen't make it any less of a leveraging tool for people like the NSA.
That might be true, but law enforcement agencies are trained to reconstruct evidence via a process called "parallel construction" to avoid revealing their sources (NSA for example) so you might never know the whole thruth: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140203/11143926078/parall...
Your link isn't even an account of the trial or the details of the charges, it's just one guy disputing one version of the Nacchio story.
The "fraud" involved an overly optimistic assessment of Qwest's future. That might indeed legally be fraud but it's hardly blatant in the sense one might argue it's a fairly common occurrence and most instances of such behavior go to civil, not criminal court.
"In its case, the government stated that Nacchio continued to tell Wall Street that Qwest would be able to achieve aggressive revenue targets long after he knew that they could not be achieved. This helped it buy up regional phone rival US West, the government alleges."
I don't know if I would call it blatant guilt. The prosecution of insider trading in this case seemed to be very selective. How often do CEOs go to jail for that?
With enough budget and motivation, it'd be easy to paint even you -- regardless of who you are and what you have done -- as a villain, especially with the cooperation of the press.
- It's easy to believe a CEO is guilty of insider trading, because all CEOs are guilty of insider trading. (Few people take the next step to wonder why insider trading is a crime at all.)
- He's actually in prison, which makes him less sympathetic.
- He's a Bellhead, which makes him less sympathetic to me. (I've worked at multiple descendants of Ma Bell, so my prejudice was earned.)
- The biggest thing, I think, is most of us imagine that if we just behave in socially-accepted ways, that's enough to keep us out of trouble. It's uncomfortable to consider the possibility that isn't true.
Corporations generally don't do civil disobedience but individuals do. The chief reason is that corporations are responsible to their shareholders and disregarding the rule of law makes for a very easy shareholder suit if profit is impacted. That's one reason that B-Corps now exist in many jurisdictions. They allow for officers and directors to avoid liability for "doing the right thing."
> Corporations generally don't do civil disobedience but individuals do. The chief reason is that corporations are responsible to their shareholders and disregarding the rule of law makes for a very easy shareholder suit if profit is impacted.
And individuals run the risk of being arrested, imprisoned, tortured, and killed, depending on the issue and the area. If civil disobedience was risk-free, it wouldn't be necessary.
I think fighting through ACLU is more fruitful. What you are asking for could cause both companies to shutdown, effectively killing one of the few places (Twitter in this case) through which the same distress you are feeling against governments is voiced throughout the world.
I think if Twitter was forced to shut down, a PR shitstorm of amazing proportions would erupt. There is no way the government would win that battle. And that's part of the point of civil disobedience: publicity.
Twitter is a godsend for unbiased news. In many developing countries, Twitter is playing a very important role of spreading the revolution against incumbents. Granted that it's penetration is a tiny fraction of print & TV media but going forward, it'll be an essential fabric for survival of society.
What kind of "unbiased" news do you find on Twitter? Its role in revolutions around the world has been greatly overstated by Western journalists and techies.
I agree with you, but I don't know if you'll agree with me. In my experience, revolutions generally do not generate any sort of unbiased news. As a rule of thumb, it attracts extremist/opposition groups from both sides of the spectrum with their own agendas. Not to mention regular people themselves fall victim to bias.
How much can you really discern about the situation from a few tweets without context?
That's why I think regular investigative journalism should still be the norm.
India is witnessing an arguably revolutionary uprising against crony capitalism, their political nexus, unchecked flow of black money & corruption from top to bottom. The elections in the capital (Dec '13) were a strong indicator of what people want as opposed to what media portrays. Social media played a very important role in bringing a party from inception to near majority in almost a year. That was phenomenal. Now the same party is resource stretched to reach out the masses in the biggest election in the world (at country level). The media has blacked out most of the positive news (for obvious reasons). This is where twitter comes in. It's cementing day to day advancements of a revolution across the country. Unfortunately twitter is still limited to a very tiny fraction of the population.
Twitter has been systematically silencing voices on the right that apparently someone in their org disagrees with. Twitter is a political machine, and you'll see it used more and more in this way...
I'd argue "unfiltered" or "less filtered" rather than "unbiased". You're going to get multiple biases, including both the party line and the opposition (either or both of which may have its own distortions).
Sorting out the truth from this is itself a challenge. Economic historian Philip Mirowski has interesting comments on how neoliberals see deliberate distortions of the media as an arguably good thing (Mirowki, and I, disagree with this). Determining credibility (and advertising who is credible) remains a challenge, even with social / decentralized media.
The IRS could make the head honchos' lives miserable. This
seems to be all their Achilles heal? And when it comes to
their money--it all gets a bit fuzzy.
The question is, what law(s) are being used by the government to take these actions with Twitter/Yahoo? For instance, are these NSL letters?
If these are not actual laws, but rather gray-area interpretations of laws being used, then each company can decide whether to challenge them and have their days in court.
But, if the government is clearly operating within the law, then it is the law/lawmaking itself that should be challenged.
So, people still don't think they should prioritize getting their services from outside of EU, rather than US? It seems to me that despite all the laws and the Constitution, the government can still pretty much force any company do whatever it wants, "legally" or extra-legally (hello Amazon/Paypal/Visa/Mastercard!).
Post-Snowden, US companies don't deserve a second chance - at least not while the US government doesn't seem to have any remorse about mass surveillance and its abuse of power, and has no serious intention of reforming itself.
> So, people still don't think they should prioritize getting their services from outside of EU, rather than US? It seems to me that despite all the laws and the Constitution, the government can still pretty much force any company do whatever it wants ....
The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. I imagine that most other countries' governments would do at least what the U.S. Government does, if only they had the tools.
I find it peculiar that you still imply the US government's moral authority by using the phrase at least. What gives? What makes you think the other governments are intrinsically more evil?
Besides, your argument is rather off-topic. The other governments probably don't have the tools, so they can't be at least as evil, so the grass is greener on the other side of the fence.
EDIT: I'd prefer somebody to tell me why other governments are intrinsically more evil, instead of silently downvoting me.
> I find it peculiar that you still imply the US government's moral authority by using the phrase at least. What gives? What makes you think the other governments are intrinsically more evil?
I didn't say anything about morality, nor about evil. As Rayiner has correctly noted more than once, in international affairs the world is ultimately a Hobbesian state of nature. Morality plays a definite but limited role --- especially when different people adhere to drastically different views of what's "moral" or "evil"(cf., e.g., Crimea), in which case the stronger side will win.
The brute fact is that a government that daintily claims to be morally "above" gathering intelligence about potential threats is one that likely won't be in power for long. By and large, the people in charge of other governments tend to know this. Apropos of that, note that the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibits only unreasonable searches by the government.
----------------
> The other governments probably don't have the tools, so they can't be at least as evil, so the grass is greener on the other side of the fence.
Life isn't a snapshot, it's a movie. Other governments might not have particular tools now. If history is any guide, they will, soon enough (cf., e.g., the nuclear-weapons programs of various countries).
1)You stated that other country's governments would do at least as much surveillance. While not technically illegal, it certainly doesn't play out well for any system supposedly operating under the umbrella term "democracy". That's why I call it evil. That's something KGB/Stasi would do, and people don't exactly hold them to very high esteem?
2) I thought that everybody knows by now that the current surveillance apparatus is not for "potential security threats". If anybody who refuses to spy on their own people(e.g. telecoms) is considered a potential threat(whether it actually threatens national security or not), then, voila! We have arrived at a totalitarian government. The term threat has become very loose in its definition lately.
3)Correct, life isn't a snapshot. However, for the time being, the grass is greener on the other side of the fence. That's why companies need to be flexible and agile, and mitigate future threats on their livelihood e.g. switch to services in more friendly locales.
4) Still though. What makes you say that the governments of other countries would do at least what the US government is doing? That seems to imply some moral superiority that goes something like this - "we have this technology and we are spying on people, which is illegal, but other countries would do much worse things, given the opportunity". So it's corrupt, but somehow still above everyone else?
America is slowly turning into its own worst enemy. Is this what war on terror has lead to? "No one can terrorize our people, we terrorize our own people by slowly taking away all their rights and liberties" good job America.
There are legitimate reasons why the government needs to operate in secret for a short while — a sting on a suspected criminal, where they have strong evidence, but need to close the case without scaring the target into fleeing the country, for example. This usage should be firmly rooted in law and disclosed after a reasonable period of time, however.
Even those "needs" need to be balanced against having an open legal process. We have both NSLs and a "no fly list." For the purpose of keeping some very high-value suspect from fleeing, the no fly list should be sufficient. This looks like an exercise of power just to maintain and expand secrecy and the supremacy of "national security" over legal process.
I'm not trying to argue secrecy is right in this case — I don't know enough. I'm just saying that anyone (including the ACLU!) should recognize that limited & temporary secrecy is really important in combating crime or fighting wars. The question is just how we make sure it is limited, temporary, and really only applied to the right things — and not used as a way to cover up/hide information which should be public.
> * recognize that limited & temporary secrecy is really important in combating crime or fighting wars*
How important? Quantify that. Start at zero, and then justify all the really vital things. You may find there are actually zero existential threats if some super-Snowden revealed all secrets.
I was thinking this. But I can't tell that from the article if this isn't what's going on in these cases. Has the government permanently stopped Twitter from talking to the customers in question about something, or only temporarily?
However it's fairly obvious that the purposes which a gag order is commonly used, preventing jury tampering, media distortion, or other disruption to the operations of a fair court, do not seem to apply in the instances of the article.
I don't know what information they are trying to suppress but in my opinion gag orders are wrong and the US government should have to thoroughly justify any action that goes directly against the US constitution.
Say the plans for the US Navy's railgun, or advanced nuclear specifics, or advanced drone technology, or time-travel technology is leaked out, should the US government be able to do everything in it's power to wipe that information from the internet to ensure that it has the #1 military in the world?
I don't know the answer to that question. But I do know that if a terrorist group got that information and used it to cause massive amounts of destruction that people would have wished the US government did more to protect it's military secrets.
The Patriot Act really messed things up.
Does anyone have a solution? Does it involve getting more ethical people into congress?
I have a solution, and it's called Online Voting. We are probably one of the few online communities that can actually make it happen, yet it's never even mentioned. Start by testing it in select states, then if it's successful move towards implementing it nation-wide. I have proposed it before but people just tell me how it's impossible because of security. There HAS to be a valid solution, being able to validate your votes, having numerous checks in place, having open-source code, I don't know, but hopefully someday we can all work together to make it a reality.
We could even work to eliminate Congress eventually, have every single thing that normally goes before Congress voted by individuals. Yes, the president could overrule votes (such as building a spaceship for trillions of dollars), but near unlimited transparency just seems to be the obvious answer. There will be a ton of resistance, because those in power don't want to give up power. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think we should at least try it.
The problem is a cultural one, not a technical one.
What makes you think this community of people who work for the very companies that are being gagged, backdoored, surveilled and bribed are the ones who are going to fix it with a magic voting program? This community can't even come to a consensus to admit that Dropbox quite obviously has the hands of the Powers That Be rammed firmly into its asshole now (I apologize - maybe Condoleezza Rice had a revelation after advocating for the invasion of Iraq on false premises, and now deeply cares about the security of the world's porn backups).
Besides, I'd argue the system we have now is better, because it's hard to forge votes when you have hundreds of people across many municipalities counting votes and thinking for themselves. If you implement a national voting system in software, it would be much easier to corrupt by virtue of being centralized.
FTA, "To make matters worse, the government won't disclose its reasoning for requesting the gag, effectively shutting the public out of the courthouse without any explanation."
It's idealistic to think that no information should be able to be quashed by the government, but it's not idealistic to think that their motives for doing so should be made public.
I had the "motives made public" line in there but moved it to the top of my comment.
Suppressing leaks of top-secret military technology is acceptable, suppressing secrets that could harm the image of the US government or individuals because they did something bad is something that shouldn't be allowed.
People must be accountable for their actions, otherwise they are cowards.
I think a more subtle solution (a thus politically viable) would be to attach a filter to the front of the current political system. Right now, we get sports stadium style debates filled with sounds bites, pretense, and timely rhetoric, which encourage showmanship over substance. A cooler, internet based debate system could crowd source better policies and politicians. An interactive system for judging the debates and commenting could increase exposure and decrease apathy for the "voters".
It could be a platform where people "run" and "vote" on candidates. Debates could be structured in some sort of tournament system, where winners are determined by voters who are directed to them evenly. The debate topics could be decided on before hand by the voters, once again by voting their interests. At the end of it, there would be a few filtered candidates, who would have a series of well formed and observable views on each of the topics defined by the voters. The whole system would have no legitimate political tie in, but the win there could be used to prefilter their conventional run, and provide a history to go on.
There are some substantial details I overlooked there, a big one being how to make sure the votes are legitimate. But if enacted, I think it would take our political system a long way towards a true democracy.
We don't need to speculate, the ACLU article said the gag order was about preventing the companies from revealing the grand jury subpoenas to the people who's information was requested. It doesn't seem to have anything to do with suppressing secret information or the Patriot Act. And it seems like a reasonable step for some investigations, where tipping off the target of the investigation might end it before it could really begin.
This looks like another attempt by the ACLU to get the national security letter issue resolved (or undone). Its a worthwhile battle and I support them in it, but I'm not sure what this article brings to the conversation. It is yet another skirmish in the district courts.
I think it is pretty transparent right now that they don't think the american public that they serve worthy of having a say in the way that they are being served. Or knowing how.
Also voting them out is not an option right now because both parties are pretty fine with extending the security apparatus rights and abilities. And the system is made almost impossible for a non partisan candidates to enter the government.
Worse, we are conditioning people to believe they can get away with this kind of blatant abuse. The longer this goes on without somebody being forced to answer for their role in it, we will see more and more people coming to the conclusion that they ARE actually above the law. Nobody threw the people involved in ${OLDER_PROJECT} in jail - despite being obviously unconstitutional and/or illegal at a glance - so why would ${NEW_PROJECT} be any different?
This feedback loop, I fear, is at the root of a lot of these issues. We've seen a general emboldening in many areas. In some areas, nobody is even bothering to to pretend their abuses are legal and constitutional. Without the fear of getting "caught" in some way - which would break the conditioning feedback-loop - I expect these kinds of abuses to simply get bolder and more frequent.
There was a time thought things like the legal system could reintroduce that fear. As I've learned about just how bad things have gotten, I now strongly suspect it will take more. I never wish for violence. Unfortunately, I really don't see attitudes changing until at least some heads quite literally end up on a pike. Anything less will be interpreted as still "getting away with it".
Seriously, I don't want a damn civil war. I just think it seems foolish to expect things like "the law" to fix anything, when you see people publicly announcing their intention to ignoring the law, and barely even makes the news.
It is very very hard to sympathize with the companies involved. If they wanted to, they could implement secure communication where ephemeral keys or user-controlled keys are used, and open source clients would guard against the placement of "bugged" client software. Then they could hand over cyphertext on demand, and not take on the job of supposedly protecting people who in their estimation merit protection. Protect all the bits.
If I get a National Security Letter am I allowed to show it to my lawyer? If so, is there any limit to the number of people in my legal council? If NOT, what's stopping having everyone in the country as my legal council. Then, as I can only show the National Security Letter to my lawyers, I can then host the NSL on my website for everyone to see.
Ladar Levison claimed, "There's information that I can't even share with my lawyer, let alone with the American public."[0] I'm not familiar enough to say whether this level of gag is legally documented, or has been upheld, etc.
So the Government can't limit the amount of money corporations can spend on influencing political campaigns but, when it feels like it, it can silence them without even explaining why. Yeah that makes sense.
I'm reading through these comments and really laughing my ass off at the bold, crazy rhetoric being used here.
Orwellian governments! Everyone is just a complacent cog! America is it's own worst enemy! No more freedom!
I mean, I admit, this specific act seems pretty dumb on the government's part. I have no idea why the government would silence Twitter or Yahoo. And given that they didn't care enough to explain, seems like it was probably a legal bug. Maybe some 60 year-old anti-Internet Congress member that thought SOPA was genius got cranky one day and sent some phone calls. I don't know; doesn't seem like anyone that truly has power in government cares, or else they'd succeed in silencing. This doesn't seem like "an extraordinary effort by the government"; this is the same government that dropped two nukes in order to end a worldwide war, so if they really cared about what your favorite anti-government Reddit liberal had to say in in a 140-character long witticism, they'd be able to really shut it down.
But I have a feeling that these alarmist and dramatic comments regarding FASCIST AUTHORITARIAN GOVERNMENTS HOLDING THE TRUE ARTISTS DOWN! have much more to do with the general reddit.com/r/technology culture of shitting on everything the government has been doing since last June. And that culture is much more retarded and out-of-hand than anything PRISM could possibly be.
It seems like what the government is doing with user data since PRISM is very similar to what advertisers have been doing with user data since Fucking Forever, the government doing it for it's ideals regarding terrorism and advertisers doing it for the moolah. But the point is the same -- massive data collection and other forms statistical analysis that you dramatic fucks label "spying" in order to seem passionate and cool has been going on for a while. Just that the government is a much bigger and more complex system than your average advertiser, so you seem like a hip and happening individual by attacking it.
Most people really don't give a shit about massive data collection. I mean, sure, everyone's a Reddit slacktivist nowadays, throwing around words like "spying!" and "privacy!" but no one really cares, or else we'd all be using rsync + ftp and BitMessage and all that idealistic free software stuff that RMS peddles. People just want to seem special and cool and smart and advanced when they post about how EVIL the government is for spying on all of us. But no one honestly cares, or else no one would use Facebook and Google and Apple products.
And should you care?
Is it really that significant, your tiny, indistinguishable contribution to our advertising overlords that isn't even tied to your personal identity? Is it really that creepy or a violation of privacy? It's not like the government knows that specifically Omar Hegazy and E1ven, they don't care about everyone's specific identities (but that would be truly creepy). I mean, even if they have your specific data tied to your real name, it's not like the NSA has people actually listening and looking at your conversation and spying on who you are and what you do. That would be statistically impossible. There are 316 million American citizens, 204 million e-mails sent per minute, and 1.26 billion Facebook users, and only 75 thousand NSA employees.
Could they really be reading all your e-mails tied to you the person, are they even capable of that? They wouldn't be able to spy on each and every one of you even if they tried, and that wouldn't make sense, either. So I'm pretty sure the only thing that knows about you you is the program transferring stuff from Google's servers to NSA servers, and you can trust that one to not be sentient enough to care.
So. They're not spying on individual people, cause they physically can't - but that would really be creepy. They're checking on aggregate statistics. And when you're just another brick in the wall of statistical analysis, is it really all that creepy? Do they really know all that much specifically about you?
But why are they looking at aggregate statistics, you ask?
Good question. Don't laugh -- I think it's terrorism ? I mean sure, that seems like such a cop-out answer from our perspective. But how do we know that the only reason that terrorism isn't a threat anymore isn't because of the American government putting it's foot down? Couldn't it be that the government's seemingly creepy obsession with fighting against terrorism is the reason Al-Qaeda and such have failed so hard that we just laugh at the possibility of them being a threat? If terrorism isn't a threat anymore, couldn't it be that shows that the government's way is working? I mean, this bin Laden guy. His family was filthy fucking rich, man. They were connected to Saudi royalty. These Al-Qaeda guys had fucking planes, man. And they reaaaaalllllly didn't like us. So obviously, if we just did nothing about it, they probably would've struck again ...
But I don't know. I haven't done enough research on this topic myself. Maybe the government's obsession with terrorism is a bit too much and while we should be worrying about this issue in order to keep it from happening, maybe 20x the military budget of the next 10 countries on the list combined is a bit too far. Or maybe it's just the right amount. I don't know, I read programming books in my free time, not political discourse.
But it's just so obvious from their alarmist bullshit that these Reddit libertarians haven't done their research either. They just want to seem like they have.
Think of the government as being a member of Hacker News with nearly infinite downvote power. If it doesn't like what you've said it disappears what you've said...often without even so much as an explanation.
I don't understand the outrage here, aren't gag orders pretty much standard police tool? I mean, if you are taping the new Al Capone/Ben Laden/Ted Bundy, then surely you don't want Twitter to reveal it no?
It would make no sense to let the provider say "we're monitoring Al Capone", as this would alert Al Capone. But they're not even allowing the provider to say "certain users are subject to wiretapping at government order". On a huge service like Twitter this would not alert anyone in particular.
Even the above is not as much of a concern - but the same mechanism can silence the providere about more drastic intrusions which compromise the whole service - such as coercing private encryption keys. Lookup the whole Lavabit thing.
If he public knew the why, then they'd want to know more. So far the pattern of information control is to seal it at the most root position as possible.
