Pentagon surveilling Americans without a warrant, Senator Wyden reveals

https://www.vice.com/en/article/88ng8x/pentagon-americans-surveillance-without-warrant-internet-browsing

by jbegley • 5 years ago

699 228 5 years ago

Unsurprising, but still disappointing. Actually I'm glad someone is trying to hold them accountable. It seems silly tho that we need to pass a law to uphold what's already written into the constitution. It highlights that the constitution only has teeth in some legal contexts, primarily where a court case is being heard on a citizen being prosecuted. Conditionality seems to not have any bearing on preventing agencies from violating the constitution or stopping them when they're found out, nor punishing those responsible for the violation.

clairity4• 5 years ago

i'd go one step further and prohibit our government from surveilling any non-governmental foreigner without an auditable warrant, and strictly prohibit corporations with heavy sanctions from sharing any non-governmental surveillance with the government whatsoever (on top of existing privacy laws of course). the government should be in service, not in command, of the people.

c3534l• 5 years ago

The government only has the powers granted to it by the constitution. If the power for the executive to unilaterally conduct searches was not given to it, then it doesn't have it. Just because it doesn't say the government can't surveil foreigners doesn't mean they can - it has to specifically say the government is granted the right to surveil foreigners. And there's really very little reason to think that a power never granted to the government in the first place in the case of Americans was actually, somehow in secret, granted in the cases of non-Americans.

coliveira• 5 years ago

The US government has a history of requesting extraordinary powers for extraordinary situations and never give them back. All the modern surveillance apparatus had its beginning during WW2. When the war was over, instead of pacifying the world, they immediately switched to create a cold war against a former ally to justify an even more expensive surveillance apparatus. With the end of former Soviet Union, instead of dismantling the surveillance industry, they started to create new enemies around the world, so people would be coerced to keep them employed against the interests of the population.

tsimionescu4• 5 years ago

The text of the US constitution explicitly talks about the rights of people, not citizens - so I would argue that the constitution itself has always prohibited this.

However, there is a long history of interpreting 'people' to mean specific groups - from only white people to only citizens.

xinniethepooh2• 5 years ago

'Any non-governmental foreigner' includes the vast number of non-official-cover spies sent by other nations. The government is to serve the people, but it must balance the fact that other world powers and enemy nations are seeking to undermine the nation.

billytetrud8• 5 years ago

I agree. I think the constitutional limitations placed on our government should limit it universally, not just within the borders of the country.

babesh2• 5 years ago

Surveillance is a form of power. Power does not give up power.

Law is enforced via power. When it meets a greater power then the law is contravened.

Look at the US and how it broke international law to force a plane down that it thought had Snowden.

edoceo• 5 years ago

Huh, TIL..

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evo_Morales_grounding_incide...

maybelsyrup6• 5 years ago

1000x this. It's so unusual to talk plainly about power, but that's really what it's all about.

splithalf2• 5 years ago

Would you prefer no laws?

Seems we benefit from them no?

markus_zhang• 5 years ago

The real problem is that ordinary people do not have power and (secretly) they do not want power.

slibhb4• 5 years ago

Law is primarily about voluntary submission, not power. A law that is followed only as long as it is enforced is not much of a law and is unlikely to last.

In terms of your broader point, something about restricting the authority of a law-giving entity via the law seems paradoxical. An example of this paradox is the fact that it's difficult to have standing to sue the government over an illegal spying program that is classified.

The best we seem to be able to do is the future-government holding the past-government accountable.

ultrastable2• 5 years ago

as a great man said, "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun"

coolspot• 5 years ago

Obama won’t scramble jets for Snowden: https://youtu.be/-_mqzSbAPXM

cma• 5 years ago

Power does not give up power.

This isn't true, look at for example the nineteenth amendment (men giving up power).

mywittyname• 5 years ago

It seems silly tho that we need to pass a law to uphold what's already written into the constitution.

The constitution only grants or limits power of various branches of government, it doesn't prescribe punishments for breaking the rules. That's a job of Congress (or courts, for civil cases).

0xbadcafebee• 5 years ago

Even if the Constitution did prescribe punishments (what's a law without enforcement? wishful thinking.), everyone seems to think that just because there's some lines in the constitution that the matter is settled. We've been debating the constitution since it was written. We need laws to be tested in order to find out if they can or should be changed, or if we need to do something else.

billytetrud8• 5 years ago

Yes, but it could have defined punishments for violating it. IMO it should have.

WalterBright• 5 years ago

The Constitution is just a piece of paper. It is powerless if people ignore it.

It's the same with presidents, kings, and dictators. If people just stopped doing what they said, they become nothing.

There's an incident in Soviet history where Stalin was sure they were coming to arrest and execute him. He was shaking and completely powerless. But they were just coming to affirm his power.

The Arab Spring came about because people stopped following orders.

When Nixon was on his way out, the military decided to not follow his orders (so I've read).

The US will end when people just decide Constitution Shmonstitution.

Gun control is neither here nor there for me personally, but what greatly concerns me is if the Bill of Rights is ignored wrt the 2nd Amendment, then what about the rest of the Bill of Rights? Is that next?

rootusrootus• 5 years ago

It is powerless if people ignore it.

Indeed we just had a bit of a lesson in the recent past which showed exactly how dependent our country is (and probably most other countries as well) on shared values and tradition. The Constitution isn't all-powerful as a piece of paper, its real power is as an idea.

tick_tock_tick2• 5 years ago

The 2nd Amendment is always a great point in these kind of debates if any other right had half as many restrictions on it people would be on the streets. Requiring an ID to vote is viewed as completely unacceptable by many but the very same people think it's perfectly reasonable to require it for other rights.

brobdingnagians• 5 years ago

This reminds me of the tension between the Confucians and the Legalists in ancient Chinese Philosophy; as well as Étienne de La Boétie with his [1] Discourse on Voluntary Servitude.

The Legalists believed that if you had good laws then the rest would take care of itself. They "advocated government by a system of laws that rigidly prescribed punishments and rewards for specific behaviours. They stressed the direction of all human activity toward the goal of increasing the power of the ruler and the state."[2]

But the Confucians, particularly Mencius, pointed out that good men would create the good laws; while bad men would corrupt good laws. The laws were important for the ordering of society but insufficient. i.e. : "The sage-kings of antiquity are a model, but one cannot simply adopt their customs and institutions and expect to govern effectively (4A1). Instead, one must emulate the sage-kings both in terms of outer structures (good laws, wise policies, correct rituals) and in terms of inner motivations (placing ren and yi first). Like Confucius, Mencius places an enormous amount of confidence in the capacity of the ordinary person to respond to an extraordinary ruler, so as to put the world in order." [3]

To borrow from the Confucians; the Constitution is a product of good men and good laws to help protect goodness and order in society, but without good men to continue to have a living embodiment of the principles, it is still just a law that can be corrupted or ignored.

A beautiful quote from Etienne that you reminded me of is this, where he advocates to simply stop supporting tyrants: "Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break in pieces."

Tyrants only have power because people choose to follow.

[1] https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Discourse_on_Voluntary_Servit...

[2] https://www.britannica.com/topic/Legalism#:~:text=The%20Lega....

[3] https://iep.utm.edu/mencius/

billytetrud8• 5 years ago

The problem with the constitution is that it provides few good legal mechanisms to enforce the provisions of the constitution. It doesn't incentivize government officers and representatives to follow the constitution. If there were clear consequences for doing things or supporting things that violate the constitution, and if there were clear procedures for indictment with a broad ability for those procedures to be started, we would be in a far beter position to protect the constitution. As it stands, lawmakers can just create unconstitutional laws that are in place for years or even decades until someone brings it all the way to the supreme court. And once they do, the lawmakers that created those laws aren't held responsible at all - no consequences for them. That must change if we want to protect the constitution.

phkahler• 5 years ago

> It seems silly tho that we need to pass a law to uphold what's already written into the constitution.

The argument is probably pretty simple. These companies will sell your data to anyone for the right price, why would a government agency be any different. It's probably not a search or seizure, just a purchase between parties that don't even include any specific member of the public.

First congress needs to make all this data selling and trading illegal, then we'll see how the government goes about obtaining it and weather that's legal or not. But too many lobbyists represent companies that make a ton of money on it, and of course these agencies would prefer to just purchase the data "legally", so I'm not terribly optimistic.

baybal22• 5 years ago

In other news:

- More than 120 retired generals and admirals wrote to Biden appearing to back a false election conspiracy and questioning his mental health - https://www.businessinsider.com/former-generals-admirals-let...

- An open letter by former officers calling the president a “Marxist” dictator is a greater threat to U.S. democracy than the ouster of Liz Cheney. - https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/05/12/joe-biden-military-revo...

- Over 120 retired generals and admirals signed on to a letter falsely claiming the 2020 election was stolen in a move other veterans say erodes democratic norms. - https://sofrep.com/news/retired-officers-question-2020-elect...

30 Brigadiers, 16 Lietenant Generals, 42 Major Generals.

In any other normal country, at this stage people will call a military putsch brewing an inevitability.

xvector• 5 years ago

There are over a million service members in our armed forces. A couple of retired, senile crazies does not indicate a “military putsch brewing.”

fredgrott• 5 years ago

it is often stated that locks are not for honest people, but to keep dishonest people out.

can be applied to US constitution as additional laws needed not for those who WANT to uphold the US constitution but those who want to violate it.

Most of you probably already saw a Michigan-congress rep submit a bill to violate the US constitution by trying to force twitter posters to register with Michigan to post facts because he wanted to prevent others from outing him in the form of fact checking.

vernie• 5 years ago

Isn't it the other way around?

danans• 5 years ago

it is often stated that locks are not for honest people, but to keep dishonest people out.

The saying goes the other way: "Locks are for honest people", implying that criminals aren't deterred by locks, and will just break a window if they want to get in.

seaourfreed2• 5 years ago

Congress is corrupt (via lobbyist money) which causes this problem.

The DoD tracks large scale threats to our nation. When the economy is rigged, then the establishment worries about the citizen base turning on the establishment.

Congress corruption (via lobbyiests) happens by:

a) Wall Street rigged economy HF front-running trades,

b) Wall Street is rigged

c) 2008 Mortgage crisis theft

d) Pharma is rigged

e) Medical costs are out of control. Every price fixes are killed by lobbyists): Hillary, Obama cost controls, etc.

parineum• 5 years ago

What lobby is lobbying for warrantless surveillance?

Black101• 5 years ago

It seems silly tho that we need to pass a law to uphold what's already written into the constitution.

What makes you think that they will respect new laws?

billytetrud8• 5 years ago

Great question. Unless there are consequences, some will simply ignore it and do what they want.

1cvmask• 5 years ago

The Supreme Court and constitution have always been irrelevant. Ask any former black slave or many laws etc that were trampled on by Presidents:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worcester_v._Georgia

The constitution and Supreme Court do not consider Blacks humans or citizens:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dred_Scott_v._Sandford

billytetrud8• 5 years ago

I very much disagree. Yes the constitution has been violated many times. But without the constitution, its tenants would be violated constantly everywhere in the country. Nothing is perfect, and the outcomes brought the constitution being imperfect is no indictment of the document.

java-man• 5 years ago

"not wittingly"

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEh-l_G1Gcs

2OEH8eoCRo04• 5 years ago

Can't watch because I am at work but the NSA conducts foreign surveillance. If a foreign target talks to a US citizen that's "unwittingly" surveiling a US citizen.

Do you believe that it's alright for the NSA to conduct surveillance on foreign threats?

etrabroline• 5 years ago

Under the 4th amendment NSA is forbidden from collecting the communications of US citizens without a warrant. Do you disagree or think the constitution should be amended to authorize that?

Mediterraneo10• 5 years ago

Do you believe that it's alright for the NSA to conduct surveillance on foreign threats?

It is one thing for the NSA to conduct surveillance on foreign threats, but I have always been uncomfortable with the suggestion that the NSA is perfectly entitled to vacuum up the communications of ordinary, perfectly harmless foreign individuals because "the protections of the American Constitution don’t apply to foreigners". The American Constitution is largely a product of 18th-century natural-law arguments, and so you would think that case can be made that all human beings are endowed by their Creator with a right to privacy regardless of their citizenship.

MikeUt• 5 years ago

But the NSA did collect data on hundreds of millions of US citizens, knew about it, and lied about it to congress and the US people. That is the exact opposite of "unwittingly". That is the action of a domestic threat that has escaped democratic and even government control.

"Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?" He responded, "No, sir." Wyden asked "It does not?" and Clapper said, "Not wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertently, perhaps, collect, but not wittingly."
The order, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian, requires Verizon on an "ongoing, daily basis" to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone-reco...

maybelsyrup6• 5 years ago

Do you believe that it's alright for the NSA to conduct surveillance on foreign threats?

I like this question, but I think there's a better one: "do you believe it's alright for the NSA to exist?"

totalZero2• 5 years ago

A conversation that includes a single US person should be privileged more than a conversation between non-US persons.

auiya2• 5 years ago

Do you believe that it's alright for the NSA to conduct surveillance on foreign threats?

Whether anyone believes it's okay to do or not is irrelevant, the NSA is charged to conduct foreign intelligence surveillance by US law, and does so accordingly.

Nasrudith4• 5 years ago

Calling it unwitting is as lame an excuse as "I was suveiling the middle school locker room walls to prevent graffiti with hidden cameras when I recorded twenty-five terabytes of undressing minors. Therefore no crime was committed by shipping it over interstate lines to third parties for back up."

They knew exactly what they were doing every step of the way.

ErikVandeWater• 5 years ago

Are you saying that the NSA has a different definition of wittingly than the standard definition of wittingly?

If you have a bug placed on someone's purse and they talk to others, you are wittingly surveilling them. Unwittingly would imply it was not foreseen that others would be spied on (e.g. placing a wiretap on the wrong phone number).

throwkeep• 5 years ago

Body language experts must have had a field day with that.

ssklash2• 5 years ago

I knew before even reading that the senator would be Ron Wyden. He's a treasure and the most tech-literate politician I know of. Oregon is lucky to have him, and we could use a lot more like him.

nickysielicki• 5 years ago

Respectfully, the most tech-literate politician is without a doubt Thomas Massie, who went to MIT for both his undergrad in electrical engineering and his masters in mechanical engineering, who formed a decently successful startup working on novel computer input mechanisms.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Massie#Early_life,_educ...

ssklash2• 5 years ago

Fair enough. I think it would be more accurate to say that Wyden is the most vocal and effective when it comes to tech-related issues.

verall• 5 years ago

And yet he is publicly against Net Neutrality and doesn't believe in climate change. Tribal affiliation takes priority over technical ability I guess.

dzonga• 5 years ago

reminds me of the politicians in my native country. very well educated either lawyers, engineers or doctors. but idiots and corrupt.

I would rather have a non degreed non corrupt politician.

tclancy4• 5 years ago

Actions speak louder than CVs. That reads like an argument from authority.

totalZero2• 5 years ago

Thomas Massie is an example of what I like to call the "tetazoo paradox": As a person gets more adept regarding technology, their capacity to communicate with laypeople about technology diminishes. The best advocates for tech literacy are not the most tech-literate, but rather the ones in the middle ground who are smart enough to understand the technology and patient enough to communicate about it with laypeople who are a few eureka moments behind.

We occasionally find wonderful people like Richard Feynman who can sidestep this inverse relationship, but not frequently.

kelnos2• 5 years ago

And yet, he's a climate-change denier who wants the EPA disbanded, seemed to downplay the seriousness of COVID-19, and voted against human-rights bills relating to Hong Kong and China.

I guess "tech-literate" isn't really worth that much as a label.

jasonwatkinspdx• 5 years ago

He's one of the very few politicians I support with little to no reservations about him getting stuff really wrong. We are indeed extremely proud to have him.

I know enough people wired into local politics that if he had some huge hidden dark side, it'd be out there. He really is pretty much what he puts out there.

UncleOxidant• 5 years ago

As an Oregonian I also strongly suspected that it was Ron Wyden prior to opening the article. Oregon is fortunate to have two good Senators (Wyden and Merkley).

2OEH8eoCRo04• 5 years ago

This is about the DoD purchasing data from 3rd parties.

swiley• 5 years ago

I wonder if this is why the anti trust action against Apple/Google/Qualcomm has taken so long.

Nasrudith4• 5 years ago

Antitrust suits are slow and hard even when they are legitimate and not publicity stunts or attempts to punish enemies.

freshair• 5 years ago

Until high ranking government officials start getting very length prison sentences for this sort of shit, I doubt it will ever get better.

giantg22• 5 years ago

Why would they get a prison sentence for legally buying information that the private sector can also buy?

topkai22• 5 years ago

Also with the legal precedent from the Supreme Court that telecom metadata IS not protected by the 4th amendment? It is NOT clear from the article that what is doing is legally unconstitutional, as much as I might personally disagree with the Judicial branch's current view.

Nasrudith4• 5 years ago

You can hire a PI legally. A police chief hiring a PI to bypass warrant restrictions would rightfully be in deep shit for it.

kwere• 5 years ago

they will get senteces due data collected so to not get caugth they will ride privacy bandwagon

sprkwd• 5 years ago

This is my surprised face.

HDMI_Cable• 5 years ago

The Third Party Doctrine is one of the things that is so obviously out of date, and needs to be changed. When so much of our lives (to the point where it is our lives) are online, why is there no expectation of privacy?

--- [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine

Nasrudith4• 5 years ago

Because they wanted to take as much as they could without any pesky constitutional rights getting in the way.

webXL• 5 years ago

Apple sells privacy, so there's a market for it and it's expanding into the public conscience. Apple isn't a bank though, and they aren't beholden to the same paternalistic/sinister interests. So what's really needed is reducing the size and scope of what paternalistic/sinister interests manage. Design principles such as separation of concerns come to mind.

anonymousisme• 5 years ago

What about the practice of letting our five eyes partners collect on Americans, and then obtaining the laundered intel products?

maybelsyrup6• 5 years ago

The thing I still can't fathom, all these years after Bush II and then Snowden, is just how little human beings really care about mass surveillance. Yeah, the Snowden leaks made a splash, but the media cycle turned over a couple weeks later and everyone moved onto other things.

It's like, if you're of a certain age, you had to read 1984 or whatever in school. You'd think "well, no one would stand for that sort of thing in real life!" Okay, so we don't live in that society, exactly, but time after time, we're shown the breadth of government surveillance and the reaction from the broader public isn't to call for anyone's head on a pike -- it's not even to vote anyone out!

Outside of little communities like this one, people don't give much of a fuck. I guess that was Orwell's real point.

derg• 5 years ago

Honestly it could also be it's just hard to fathom the breadth and scale. Easier to imagine someone opening your mail or tapping your phone or otherwise physically interacting with things you own over the government intercepting a request to post a picture to facebook, for instance.

I think a fair number of people intuitively understand just how massive the internet is and it's hard to conceptualize someone or something sifting through the sand to find your few little grains.

thanatos519• 5 years ago

Maybe 'Amusing Ourselves to Death' by Neil Postman will help you fathom it; here's the forward:

https://www.tau.ac.il/education/muse/maslool/boidem/170forew...

tsimionescu4• 5 years ago

I think most people would oppose it if the media were really presenting it as an issue to keep in mind. However, most of the people in the media are very much supporters of such powers, as they are deep believers in the rightness of US institutions and their 'fundamentally benign' nature. If you look at the media, most are still in support of every single war America has ever been in, with the only opposition being on matters of strategy (e.g. "The US should have retreated from Vietnam earlier", not "there was no defensible reason for the war in Vietnam, it was just a blatant display of imperialism"). And I'm not talking about Fox (who pride themselves on such views), but even the most liberal papers or news channels.

Of course, they are very much opposed to such measures in other countries, especially their enemies.

maybelsyrup6• 5 years ago

I think this is on point, and way underappreciated by the non-hard-right in the US. People who vote Democrat tend to think of "their" media institutions as objective or sincere, and they're quick to forgive the litany of examples of heinous shit the NYT or WP or CNN has pulled over the years - salivating and fully turgid support for endless wars being just the most obvious example.

lettergram• 5 years ago

The people who started these programs are now contributors to CNN and MSNBC after trump fired them....

treis2• 5 years ago

Bush II and then Snowden, is just how little human beings really care about mass surveillance.

I'm struggling to think of a single negative thing that I can directly associate with mass surveillance in the US. Certainly nothing bad has happened to me personally or anyone that I know because of it. So no one cares because it doesn't impact anyone's lives.

pope_meat3• 5 years ago

Here's one negative thing you can now associate with mass surveillance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction

Thorrez• 5 years ago

At least a dozen U.S. National Security Agency employees have been caught using secret government surveillance tools to spy on the emails or phone calls of their current or former spouses and lovers in the past decade, according to the intelligence agency’s internal watchdog.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-surveillance-watchdog...

sneak5• 5 years ago

I think most people don't care much about privacy for themselves ("I have nothing to hide") and are happy to let military intelligence daddy read their emails, as long as it doesn't affect their life.

They remain ignorant of the fact that this means that people who actually do need privacy for purposes of organization against the harmful elements of the status quo (civil rights leaders, labor leaders, political party upstarts, et c) will be kneecapped by this for the remainder of the time the USA exists.

It's a lack of imagination, really. The Long Now.

nobody99994• 5 years ago

I think most people don't care much about privacy for themselves ("I have nothing to hide") and are happy to let military intelligence daddy read their emails, as long as it doesn't affect their life.

I'd point out that the DoD is purchasing this data from private entities, not collecting it themselves.

As such, I'd say that it's less about government surveillance specifically, and more about surveillance in general.

Corporate surveillance is nothing new (Equifax/Experian/etc. have been doing that for at least half a century) and those folks collect, store and correlate enormously more data than does the US government.

There is a massive effort by corporations to hide this sort of data collection, which has been mostly successful.

Complaining about the government dipping into all that tasty, tasty data is like blaming the child who was sickened by stealing a cookie from a batch that was poisoned, then making sure that the rest of the batch is fed to the intended target.

That most folks are just complaining about big, bad government (which isn't wrong, but just a tiny portion of the larger issue), rather than the folks who are collecting, correlating and using such data to their own advantage (of which selling it to governments is just chump change) seems rather silly and short-sighted.

ultrastable2• 5 years ago

I think this might be overly pessimistic. imo more people care about their privacy but feel powerless to affect change than don't really care about it at all

kingTug• 5 years ago

Not caring about privacy because you have nothing to hide is like not caring about free speech because you have nothing to say.

godelski2• 5 years ago

While I agree that the major reasons for being anti-surveillance is because of the long game, can we not also complain about our tax dollars being wasted in the short term?

austincheney• 5 years ago

That is why I find most interesting about social media generally. Many people seem to care about government mass data collection all the while voluntarily and intentionally providing to private companies from which the government purchases it. Having your cake and eating it too.

cronix• 5 years ago

I think part of the reason, maybe by design, is it took 7 years to be ruled illegal. I'm actually surprised it didn't take longer. A lot happens in 7 years.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/03/edward-snowd...

2OEH8eoCRo04• 5 years ago

There's a chance that it's actually not that huge of a deal? We like to be dramatic here like the sky is falling.

nxc18• 5 years ago

I’m of the age where I had a Kinect in my bedroom when I read 1984, and it was interesting to reflect on how basically everything was already happening IRL and it wasn’t that big a deal.

Do you remember when people freaked because the new Kinect would be on _all the time_ and (gasp) _always listening_? Obviously no parallels to future technologies.

Alexa, play Despacito.

aidenn02• 5 years ago

Something I've noticed is that some people have a very emotional tie to privacy while most people don't. When my oldest daughter learned about Alexa (I think she was 13ish at the time), her response was "So it's always listening, and connected to Amazon? Who would ever want that?" While most of the rest of my family ranged from ambivalent to uncaring about the privacy issue.

decasteve2• 5 years ago

Brave New World becomes ever more prescient. Fahrenheit 451, too:

We're Mildreds too busy being consumed by the stories of our parlour walls (social media?). Or Fabers too cowardly to really speak up and stand up to it when we had the chance. Or Montags working in the system that slowly eats away at us until we wake up one day to what has been lost.

I think the "average" person is fine because they never have the pressing need to exercise a freedom, and when one comes to the occasion and finds that the freedom is gone, it might be too late to regain.

nr2x• 5 years ago

Here's a good behavioral experiment that shows surveillance can reduce people's comfort speaking online. Likewise, if people are afraid to speak up, you aren't hearing it.

http://scratchbook.ch/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Journalism-...

godelski2• 5 years ago

I think what confuses me most is that one side of the political isle says their major concern is big government and them taking away rights. Yet these people are the hardest to convince to use services like Signal, VPNs, or even basic privacy things like ad blockers (or pick your poison of basic privacy tools). Like if you don't want them to take your guns you should also be concerned about them spying on you. It has utterly surprised me how little they are. If we're going with the super inaccurate political compass I'd say it tends to be lower center and lower left that tend to care more about surveillance. I'm not sure why it isn't everyone that is afraid of the government. I just don't get it. Maybe someone can actually explain it to me, because my friends and family just say "what can I do" and "well I have nothing to hide."

SuoDuanDao• 5 years ago

I've a theory that it might break down along 'faith in process' vs 'faith in community' - the types to hold on to their guns seem to generally imagine using them alongside a few people they trust very deeply on a personal level, while the types to care about privacy seem to imagine more that well-intentioned individuals can steer things into a better direction without ever building the sort of interpersonal trust a militia movement would require.

The vaccine question breaks down similarly, we either trust our inner circle and our own health, or our own judgement and that of the people who designed vaccines/protocols, but rarely both - it's like we orient to only a small or a large community.

matheusmoreira• 5 years ago

Yeah, this is fucked up. How can people not care about this stuff?

It's not like this is a fringe subject, we have mainstream media exposing people to these ideas. There are so many movies and series where global surveillance is part of the plot. Every 21st century police procedural episode begins with the authorities briefing themselves on the situation and they always have access to ridiculous amounts of information. I can't possibly be the only one who gets uncomfortable watching these scenes.

jeffwass• 5 years ago

I reread 1984 several months back, my first time reading it since 8th grade, I believe.

It was scary as all hell, given the Trump presidency. But it's not just the surveillance that is frightening. Eg, the rewriting of history, and the Two Minutes Hate which seem characteristic of the Trump rallies

syshum• 5 years ago

People will always perfer the guided cage of illusory safety constructed by government over the messy unpredictable chaos of freedom....

how little human beings really care about mass surveillance is just one in the long line of truths that prove that most of the population prefer perceived safety over liberty

cloudfifty• 5 years ago

Maybe, but you are not selling freedom. Your previous comments here make that abundantly clear. People are smarter than you seem to think. They know that for the vast majority, Propertarianism in practice means subservience to the propertied. That's not a rejection of freedom, but rather a defense of what's still left of it.

boomboomsubban5• 5 years ago

I don't like how this article buries the important parts of this story. There is good reason to think that this surveillance by public info is legal currently, there was a court ruling stating that's the case.

A law is necessary to codify that this practice is a violation Fourth Amendment, and Wyden is currently one of a handful of senators trying to get it passed.

The story eventually mentions this, but the beginning focus on confidentiality makes it seem like they're hiding evidence of their crime.

kemitchell• 5 years ago

I'm not familiar with any such ruling. Which do you have in mind?

boomboomsubban5• 5 years ago

Sorry, I'm basing this off other articles on this subject I've read recently but my 30 second search didn't locate them. The DoD has some reason to believe their interpretation is correct though, a law clarifying it's not would still be a good idea.

raincom• 5 years ago

It is called "third-party doctrine". It is a loophole for "fourth amendment".

GartzenDeHaes• 5 years ago

A warrant is not required for the government to purchase commercial data products and there are plenty of legitimate uses for this kind of data. Security analytics would seem to be an obvious use case for netflow data, for example. Commercial datasets are also used for address correction and standardization and most government agencies routinely do.

jtdev2• 5 years ago

This sounds like the definition of flimflam with a splash of gaslighting...

flimflam: deceptive nonsense

tclancy4• 5 years ago

there are plenty of legitimate uses for this kind of data

Who defines "legitimate" and why should that be an argument for doing something that seems blatantly unconstitutional?

sjaak• 5 years ago

Land of the free, home of the surveilled.

forgithubs2• 5 years ago

I don't support that kind of surveillance.

That said, are they really in illegality ? Can I buy this type of localization data as a private individual ?

If so, then they don't need a warrant, am I right ?

tclancy4• 5 years ago

There are plenty of things a private citizen can do that a government entity cannot.

forgithubs2• 5 years ago

Do you have an example ?

croes2• 5 years ago

That's why all this data collection in the web is a bad idea. Not only by FAANG but any developer who helps in creating this data.

jtdev2• 5 years ago

I think U.S. based developers need to create something akin to the CCC in Germany to combat the clear abuse of privacy that many developers are now engaging in on a daily basis.

https://www.ccc.de/en/club

I know... the CCC has been the target of infiltration and compromise in various ways throughout history, but that's a reality of standing up to abusive power.

croes2• 5 years ago

I would have thought something like that already existed in the USA. So there is one point where Germany has a head start in IT.

SquibblesRedux• 5 years ago

Regarding the DoD purchasing data from data brokers, I would much rather first focus on laws or regulations that set legal standards for the collection, sale, and other distribution of personal information. For example, make the sale of personal information to a government agency an act that requires posting notice on a public register. Also, a hefty tax on the sale of personal information would be nice to see.

I would focus on the collection and sale of personal information first because it is often done without the informed consent of the person to whom the information is associated.

grayfaced• 5 years ago

If these data brokers are already selling this data, I'm not going to get upset at the govt for buying it.

I want restrictions on EVERYONE buying my data. Not just one entity.

nobody99994• 5 years ago

I want restrictions on EVERYONE buying my data. Not just one entity.

That's a start, but I'd prefer restrictions on EVERYONE collecting my data too.

bsd44• 5 years ago

This is brand new information.

sneak5• 5 years ago

"We can't tell you if we are violating your constitutional rights or not, because that's classified on the basis of national security."

When the preservation of the formerly supreme law of the land is made subordinate to the interests of the ruling military, I think it is safe to say the american experiment is over.

I have long maintained that the US is basically a military dictatorship. There are many examples, like the CIA hacking congressional computers to cover up the fact that the CIA lied under oath to congress. Snowden telling us that all of the large US internet and web service providers have to spy on everyone, citizens and not, without a warrant. And now this.

The US is not a free country today, if indeed it ever was.

rpdillon• 5 years ago

I fear that arguments like this lead to people devaluing what freedoms they have, since hey, we're already in a military dictatorship, so there's nothing left to lose.

I understand why you're saying this, but I think it's profoundly dismissive of those who have fought for what we have.

auiya2• 5 years ago

So Wyden's issue is the DoD is buying access to these data sets from private industry? I'm not sure there has been a court ruling declaring this practice to be illegal, and it might very well be legal depending on the dataset's coverage and what it's intended use would be. The DoD's OGC are not stupid when it comes to these sorts of matters, and surely they've had to weigh in on this collection point already. I guess this is why Wyden is trying to pass legislation for this practice to be illegal unless explicitly directed by court order to do so? I'm betting the DoD has already anticipated this and filters out the domestic traffic they don't care about prior to ingest - I think they have to do so by law anyway. So Congress can pass a law saying a court order is needed first to buy these communications datasets, but the FISC will continue to be a rubber stamp for the IC, and not at all the friction barrier the legislators are hoping for. This strikes me as posturing and nothing more.

spydum• 5 years ago

Agree, buying sampled Netflow data would technically hit this bar. Hard to know if it is troublesome without knowing the purpose. Are we using this for analyzing citizens traffic and correlating with other identifiers... Or are we analyzing traffic patterns to critical infrastructure and/or foreign nations?

epberry• 5 years ago

We should all be grateful that Senator Wyden has been a champion for these issues. I like to watch him in hearings and it's clear he's one of the most well prepared questioners on issues of privacy and liberty. To the staff of his office, if you're seeing this comment section - thank you!

jnwatson• 5 years ago

The US Intelligence Agencies have been using this trick for a long time. They ask the Brits for intel on US persons and they trade for intel on Brits.

The only difference is they go through a commercial entity now. If it is legal to trade with the Brits, it is legal to go through a private entity. Data is big business.

kingkawn• 5 years ago

if its possible, theyll do it

1MachineElf2• 5 years ago

Some of the answers the DoD provided were given in a form that means Wyden's office cannot legally publish specifics on the surveillance; one answer in particular was classified. In the letter Wyden is pushing the DoD to release the information to the public. A Wyden aide told Motherboard that the Senator is unable to make the information public at this time...

It seems strange and troubling to me that a senator would be restricted from making public any government information.

samuelizdat• 5 years ago

Jeremy Bentham and his consequences have been a disaster for the human race.

anm89• 5 years ago

I would be more surprised at this point to find out that the American three letter agencies bothered to get a warrant for anything. My base case is that they are constantly warrantlessly surveilling everyone.

Juntu• 5 years ago

Data transx :::3(( pentagon secret Alice

Pentagon surveilling Americans without a warrant, Senator Wyden reveals

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