New Bill Would Stop NSA’s Mass Collection of U.S. Phone Data

https://www.thedailybeast.com/wyden-paul-amash-lofgren-bill-would-stop-nsa-mass-collection-of-us-phone-data

by JumpCrisscross • 7 years ago

207 53 7 years ago

thedailybeast.com

hanniabu3• 7 years ago

They'll tell you it's ended, but it'll never really end.

JumpCrisscross3• 7 years ago

They'll tell you it's ended, but it'll never really end

The number one hurdle to changing these laws is apathy. A narrow majority of Americans oppose mass surveillance [1], but the intensity of their support is weak. Meanwhile--anecdotally--those who intensely care about the issue are largely apathetic. As a result the other side, which is equally opinionated but less apathetic, wins.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/05/29/what-americ...

hanniabu3• 7 years ago

It's not that those that care are lazy, it's more of a "what can really be done" attitude. As you've shown, most are opposed to this yet it exists. This is because we're past the era where, by large, the representatives actually represent. These have become seats to either fight for your own personal beliefs, increase your income and the income of those around you, or both.

I mean really, what are you supposed to do? Call your representative? Most don't care and the person you talk to is usually just a proxy who's job is to answer, nod their head, and make you feel like you're being heard.

Maybe protest? Good luck, you'll be demonized by the media calling you a bunch of homeless people because the only ones that have the time to protest are largely those who don't have jobs. There's also laws made that keep you from protesting in various areas so you can't even inconvenience the decision makers into noticing you. When they've had enough you either just saw it's a public health hazard to have people protesting because they're sleeping there and use that as an excuse to break it up by force, or you can just pay an actor to pretend to be part of the crowd to act violently towards the police and use that as an excuse to break up the protests.

Bottom lines is that I believe we've reached a tipping point where the people have lost control of the country.

upofadown• 7 years ago

That isn't the point of having laws to cover this stuff. It is to make it so the intercepted information can not be freely used and/or shared. The laws also enable whistle blowers.

dsfyu404ed• 7 years ago

In theory. In practice if they want to get you they'll use parallel construction.

naveen99• 7 years ago

Lying can never be a stable policy. Secret surveillance is lying. It is unstable and can’t last because it leads to undefined behavior.

aubricus• 7 years ago

There should be a convention for alerting users that content is paywalled :(

technofiend• 7 years ago

My personal opinion is we first need to release the NSA from impossible demands for perfect information. It seems like each time there's a terrorist incident people ask how it could be prevented and why didn't we know? The answer is if course you simply can't know everything, particularly what's going on in people's minds.

Since the impetus is always on NSA to gather intelligence and prevent the next disaster all they can say is "We need more data". No, they don't. No amount of data will prevent every criminal act. Instead we need to revisit the trade offs made between freedom, privacy and bringing criminals to justice.

DoreenMichele• 7 years ago

We don't live in a Minority Report world. We can't put people in jail for what we think they are about to do. They actually have to commit a crime to be charged.

If you do prevent everything, people claim you did nothing. Your organization gets its funding cut because it isn't needed.

(America has had to ramp up it's military repeatedly for new wars. We routinely shrink our armed forces during peace time, feeling it isn't needed. I strongly suspect this shrinkage has helped make us a target at times. Then we ramp back up.)

Though I'm not sure I agree with your conclusion.

wallace_f• 7 years ago

I worry that these problems are too hard. Most human groups become corrupted, or at best, complacent. Without competing forces, this goes unchecked.

Hopefully some people conquer the multi-planetary challenge before we completely conquer ourselves.

chiefalchemist5• 7 years ago

I'm not being snarky but when did we say we expect perfection? And we want it at all cost (i.e., we'll give up liberty and freedom)? Yes, that's been the general narrative but where did it come from? Where there protests? Was there a vote? Are we getting what we want, or wanting what we get?

andrewflnr• 7 years ago

They don't say it outright, but basically everyone grieving after an attack wants the government to have been perfect enough to prevent the attack.

bilbo0s• 7 years ago

There's always been kind of a vote.

Just a for instance, but I think the patriot act passed the senate 99 to 1.

And we got rid of that one guy who voted against, and we replaced him with a more "law and order" type guy.

So you gotta figure almost every American has at least had opportunities to vote for their senators. (We can agree that not everyone did, but the opportunities were there.) And those votes resulted in a senate where something like the patriot act could pass without more than a single vote against it.

vaguesortof• 7 years ago

I'm no expert but pretty much everyone was for the Patriot act. It was voted on like 2 weeks after 9/11. Crucially, it was also supposed to retire. And now we have the freedom act, essentially the same thing...(I'm like 80% on it being called freedom act)

craftinator2• 7 years ago

The US Intelligence Community as a whole is under constant demand for perfection. Not every individual unit (I've worked with several, and it varies), but institutionally the executive branch and military leadership applies the pressure of perfection at the top, and that pressure trickles down, skewing data, analysis, and policy making (and policy execution!).

I personally blame Hoover for the state of things, but as a whole, our government is used to control, and complete control relies on complete information. If something is missed because it fell between the cracks in the IC's sampling rate, the executives publicly blame the IC for not informing them, which ends with demands for a higher sampling rate. Look deeply into the causes of our most recent invasion of Iraq, and you'll see this pattern pretty clearly.

schoen• 7 years ago

Do you think that spy agencies' powers and budgets are a direct response to public opinion or public demand? I find that intuition kind of strange because NSA, for example, was created by a classified executive order and operated for two decades or so before its existence was publicly acknowledged by the government at all.

mLuby• 7 years ago

The problem is that politicians are acutely damaged when there are successful attacks, and are not affected when surveillance is overly broad, so of course they favor less privacy.

To correct this, politicians must be at least as susceptible to surveillance as the general public, if not more so.

One way to do this is to make all collected information public after 25 years. Long enough to avoid compromising ongoing investigations, but short enough that politicians will be thinking of themselves.

craftinator2• 7 years ago

I really like the start of your comment. I see that if something bad happens, the politicians shift blame to the Intel community for missing it. Then they put pressure for more complete information from them. Then later, when there's civil outcry over a surveillance state, the politicians shift blame onto the Intel community for being too invasive. Politicians man.

anonymous_ch• 7 years ago

The NSA prevents thousands of potential terrorist attacks each year...we just don't hear about it because it's classified information. Of course one or two will always slip through the cracks. No process is perfect.

Zhenya• 7 years ago

Do you have data to back this up?

nilskidoo• 7 years ago

Never believe marketing.

tremon2• 7 years ago

And here is the problem with the unaccountability of the NSA: if not even the broad outline of its operational statistics is available for public scrutiny, and we can't trust the politicians who do have that data available (assuming it is), how can we have a meaningful public debate about this?

Gpetrium• 7 years ago

There are implicit agreements that society has to itself and the entities that coalesce in it. A major event tends to have a disproportionate impact on the population's perception of its institutions. It is in human nature to search for something to blame, it helps people rationalize the issues at hand. I don't think people realize how many incidents are resolved before it even reaches the TV and that is a good thing.

Even if society was willing to exchange more privacy for a higher number of unpredictable 'negative' incidents, the question changes from what, to how many. For example, how many incidents of X magnitude would be required for people to change their minds? What if you only need 1 incident of Y magnitude to change the shape of your society in a negative way, potentially rocking its very core? Would you take the risk for your individual's privacy? You have to remember that an event can be come in different ways such as a terror attack, a semi-natural disaster, a cyber attack, an espionage that rocks the foundation of a key industry in your country, etc.

I think some of the questions society should be asking are: What is an acceptable degree of personal privacy that we should strive for? What are the blockers to ensure the material is not used for nefarious reasons? Are the right institutions in place and are they solid enough? How can society engage more and have a better understanding of the issues at hand?

m463• 7 years ago

I think EVERYONE doing data collection, the NSA and all the surveillance capitalists are hoarders.

I think it's a rookie mistake for newly minted officers in the armed forces to delay decisions because they want perfect information.

In the same way, commercial entities collecting information don't NEED it, but they're collecting it and swapping it and screwing up society by doing it.

I think scaling back all this nonsense will make us all happier and healther.

sctb• 7 years ago

We've updated the link from the paywalled https://www.wsj.com/articles/lawmakers-call-for-termination-....

tomc1985• 7 years ago

Hey everyone, let's watch this bill die in congress!

freen• 7 years ago

I would not be surprised if some particularly damaging scandals for one or more of the sponsoring congress members suddenly came to light.

ourmandave• 7 years ago

Wow, two Rs and two Ds sponsoring this Bill. Does that mean it has a snowball's chance in hell and this isn't just more Political Theater?

eternalny1• 7 years ago

U.S. phone data?

They are essentially siphoning up the entire internet, what is the point of this stunt?

m0zg2• 7 years ago

Would be good to also take care of illegal spying on presidential campaigns while they're at it. And of rubberstamping FISA warrants based on fake, uncorroborated "dossiers".

dragonwriter• 7 years ago

Would be good to also take care of illegal spying on presidential campaigns while they're at it.

Even if that was a real problem, it's obviously impossible for a law to “take care of it”, only to outlaw it, which, as we’re discussing “illegal spying”, it already has, by definition.

m0zg2• 7 years ago

Sure, but it seems like it'd be valuable to make the FISA court less rubber stamp happy, no? Gosh, maybe even require corroborated evidence before requests are granted.

bashwizard• 7 years ago

Press X to doubt.

bbulkow• 7 years ago

It does amaze me that we are ok with foreign intelligence having the data, just not domestic intelligence. The theory being that the fbi and nsa have more power to effect our lives than the kgb, I suppose, but... Really? It is ok for the KGB to have the data and use it for whatever they would like?

New Bill Would Stop NSA’s Mass Collection of U.S. Phone Data

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