Is the FBI dumb, evil, or just incompetent?

http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/25/is-the-fbi-dumb-evil-or-just-incompetent/

by kevin_morrill • 13 years ago

88 103 13 years ago

techcrunch.com

ireadqrcodes• 13 years ago

i guess they don't care about anything else as long as they can do their job

reeses6• 13 years ago

We obviously need a test-driven government framework. :-)

nolite• 13 years ago

d) all of the above?

reeses6• 13 years ago

Do FBI contradict myself? Very well then FBI contradict myself, (FBI am large, FBI contain multitudes.)

HarryHirsch• 13 years ago

The last line is the most important: if there is a backdoor (that is the Lawful Interception interface) there is no guarantee that it won't be used by unauthorized third parties.

Anyone could have predicted that something like the Google hack was going to happen. I also seem to remember that there was a similar incident involving the cellphone network in Greece.

betterunix4• 13 years ago

I would say that the most important issue is that an already over-powered law enforcement agency is asking for even more power. The recent journalist surveillance scandal should give a clue about the dangers of law enforcement surveillance. This proposal by the FBI will make that sort of surveillance easier. They are trying to grab more power to gather evidence against people, and by extension more power to arrest people.

We already have the largest prison population in the world. There is no pressing need to expand it.

rpgmaker• 13 years ago

On top of this, the FBI doesn't have a "going dark" problem. For more on this please read Trevor Timm (an activist for the EFF and Executive Director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation) on the topic here: http://dprogram.net/2013/04/17/going-dark-whats-so-wrong-wit...

"Trevor Timm: Well, yeah. They’ve been complaining about this “Going Dark” problem for years now and we’ve never really seen any actual evidence that this actually exists. The FBI or the DOJ has to report the number of times they run into encryption when they ask for surveillance. Every year they have to report back how many times they ultimately couldn’t get the information they sought; the number is always 0—for the last 11 years."

He shared this on twitter a while ago: https://twitter.com/trevortimm/status/331985318620327936

LeoTolstoyJr• 13 years ago

Maybe I'm being naive, but what's preventing Google or Facebook from using their resources to launch a PR campaign against these requests from the FBI, or at the very least be a bit more outspoken about them?

TsiCClawOfLight• 13 years ago

the us government?

sp332• 13 years ago

Google already makes noise about it. They have a project to report on requests. https://www.google.com/transparencyreport/

dragontamer• 13 years ago

Because they are?

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57577958-38/google-fights-...

_pmf_• 13 years ago

> Maybe I'm being naive, but what's preventing Google or Facebook from using their resources to launch a PR campaign against these requests from the FBI

The fact that they do not give a shit about you and your data (and why should they?).

If you want your data to be encrypted, you have to do it at your end. PGP has shown exactly how much people really care about keeping their communication private if it requires even a minuscule amount of effort.

skylan_q2• 13 years ago

Google and Facebook are now basically corporate interests/extended arms of the USG.

AnthonyMouse3• 13 years ago

>Maybe I'm being naive, but what's preventing Google or Facebook from using their resources to launch a PR campaign against these requests from the FBI, or at the very least be a bit more outspoken about them?

In theory, nothing. In practice, creating tension with the FBI and DoJ who may then decide to investigate or prosecute them for entirely unrelated things that would otherwise not have been investigated or prosecuted, etc.

They have a choice between doing the Right Thing and doing the Easy Thing. We'll know what they choose soon enough.

will_brown• 13 years ago

Until recently the US Government was issuing tech companies National Security Letters (different from subpoenas, they do not require judicial approval) and the letters had built in gag orders. In other words if the recipient could not discuss what was being requested by the government, or even challenge the request in court without criminal penalties. Recently courts have reviewed this and given a partial lift on the built in gag orders. (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_security_letter)

zeroexzeroone4• 13 years ago

Google used to have a very subtle way of telling you that an NSL was issued against you by asking you to "re-accept" their ToS. This may or may not be true, though.

brown9-22• 13 years ago

How do you expect these companies to operate in the US while defying US laws?

Cieplak• 13 years ago

Are there any video chat clients with end-to-end encryption?

I was trying to do this by piping the output of my webcam to openssl and then to netcat, which sends the packets to a publicly addressable server (Amazon instance) that relays the encrypted packets to another computer behind a firewall, that decrypts the video stream and plays it in MPlayer. It works, but the latency is about 10 seconds. To reduce the latency, I could delta-encode the video stream, leverage the GPU somehow, but I'm not sure how to get the latency down to the 200ms required for seamless conversation. Also, it should be noted that there is little code behind this, mainly just unix utilities and pipes.

PS: Also I could remove the Amazon piece and forge a direct P2P connection using NAT hole punching if the routers on both ends permit, but this is not always reliable and isn't a huge source of latency.

stephen_g• 13 years ago

Apparently FaceTime [1] and iMessage are end-to-end encrypted with unique session keys. Whether Apple has access to those keys is not known though (the key exchange isn't documented as far as I can tell).

1. http://www.zdnet.com/blog/apple/facetime-calls-are-encrypted...

venomsnake3• 13 years ago

Any communication that you don't set the keys/are able to track them should be considered unencrypted in my opinion.

mtrimpe• 13 years ago

Assuming TLS is still unbroken, RTMPS (Flash RTMP over TLS tunnel) offers the most accessible form of end-to-end encryption.

To avoid intermediaries you'd have to run your own Flash server (e.g. Red5) though.

vy8vWJlco2• 13 years ago

"Are there any video chat clients with end-to-end encryption?"

Jitsi claims to. ( http://www.jitsi.org )

mtgx2• 13 years ago

WebRTC clients should be encrypted and secure, since it's P2P communication.

mikeash2• 13 years ago

How does it handle the key management necessary to prevent a man-in-the-middle attack?

moxie2• 13 years ago

I keep expecting to see more research into side channel attacks for encrypted video. A fair amount of work has been done for similar attacks on audio streams with VBR codecs. Secure encrypted voice requires using a codec in CBR mode, but that's not really possible for video. It's perhaps likely that video is too complex to leak anything usable through that type of side channel, but I haven't seen much discussion either way.

makomk• 13 years ago

I had end-to-end encrypted video chat bodged together using libvlc and SRTP streams at one point, but it was incredibly user-unfriendly and getting latency down below 1 second was easier said than done. VLC really wasn't designed for this kind of application.

Jun8• 13 years ago

You don't need such a long argument to prove FBI's stunning incompetence, an example like failing to prevent the Boston bombing where they couldn't find their assess with two hands would suffice.

skylan_q2• 13 years ago

They are dumb and evil. But in some ways they're also very bright. It's the most dangerous mix possible; To be effective at being incompetent.

nathan_long7• 13 years ago

>> failing to prevent the Boston bombing

OK, you're in charge of the FBI now. There are tens of thousands of public events today in tens of thousand of venues.

Protect them all. Go.

tomjen32• 13 years ago

No I am not. I can't protect them so I wouldn't try to become the leader of the FBI. I also can't do surgery but if I come in to have some work done on my hand and leave with a foot chopped of I am going to sue the doctor.

ianstallings• 13 years ago

I'd say they're a little of all of those things and more. They are, after all, human. They get paranoid and worry, they make mistakes, they grasp for power when they can. It never works out like they want though, because they are human.

kenjackson3• 13 years ago

I think people have the FBIs motivations misunderstood. And I don't mean in some evil conspiracy theory sort of way, but in one that is pretty consistent with their mission.

Their main mission nowadays is to stop terrorism, etc... I I think that when they look at this rationally they believe are better served by being able to access these conversations.

The article theorizes that people with data to hide will use encryption, or otherwise would be so stupid, that one can find them easily in any case. In the real world a lot of these cases are broken on a "lucky" break or two. Someone improperly or not using their encryption software once, for example.

I think it seems foolish to accuse them of being dumb, evil, or incompetent. Given the stakes they deal with, and the amount of data they have to sift through, I think its very reasonable that they try to reduce the amount of work they need to do to find credible leads. And I'm sure they try to institute methods to minimize abuse, but I'm sure they are also aware that some abuse will happen.

While some of this feels like it may cross the line, I think it's a line that a rationale organization, with their mission, should push against.

nathan_long7• 13 years ago

Yes. Most of us here are privacy advocates, and I think society needs our voice. However, we're only one side of the coin.

Imagine a world where every phone call, email, chat, forum post, etc is fully anonymous or indecipherable to law enforcement. And imagine your loved one has been abducted and law enforcement has no tools for finding those responsible.

There are many kinds of dystopias. Big Brother is one. Rule by competing gangs is another. We're shooting for some compromise where both individuals and society's rights are balanced.

It's hard.

betterunix4• 13 years ago

"Imagine a world where every phone call, email, chat, forum post, etc is fully anonymous or indecipherable to law enforcement. And imagine your loved one has been abducted and law enforcement has no tools for finding those responsible."

So somehow, these abductors managed to leave no physical evidence at all and no witnesses? What does communication privacy have to do with that?

There was once a time in this country when communications could be anonymous -- when law enforcement agencies did not have easy wiretapping access. We still managed to prosecute criminals then. Yes, sometimes criminals got away with their crimes, but that is what striking a balance is all about. The FBI is not trying to strike a balance with this proposal, they are trying to shift the balance in their favor.

TelmoMenezes• 13 years ago

Rule by competing gangs is not a dystopia, it's the natural state that we were born into as animals and that we'be been living under for most of our history. We live largely under rule by competing gangs to the present day and are used to that. We prefer that to Big Brother. That's why the Berlin wall was built to keep people _inside_ the GDR and not the other way around.

polarix• 13 years ago

Abduction should be solved by physical surveillance.

dm2• 13 years ago

I don't think many rational people would be against this type of surveillance. It's all about transparency and ensuring that those who use this great power are doing so for the right reasons.

Every time a wiretap is executed, there should be some sort of public notice. It should be automatic and only suppressed if the investigation is ongoing and only with a judges approval.

Would that make everyone happy? Obviously there are tons of edge-cases, but those would have to be ironed out as they are revealed, just like anything else.

We have major issues to overcome with keeping those in power honest and free of corruption, but like you said, it's hard.

mrtksn• 13 years ago

There was an article about the IRS targeting legal organizations that are not exactly beloved ones by the government.

Sure, FBI are not evil or anything but even one abuse is too much. Government agencies are build to act according to the status quo.

What if the government is not perfect and there are people trying to change something but the government in power is opposing it. Ending the slavery, ending the Vietnam war, gay rights or any movement with an opposition in Washington could have been destroyed with the power that FBI is seeking. The recent decriminalization of drugs in some states could have been prevented if FBI had this power of intercepting all communications. People must have means to challenge the government with non-violent actions. Just because FBI may catch some terrorists is not good enough reason to give them all the means to preserve the status quo. I am not even talking about individual abuses that may occur, compared to society engineering, they are not that important anyway.

wyck• 13 years ago

Being reasonable to try and reduce harm/work in this regard is not congruent with reality. What makes the FBI so different than the NSA? The latter already throwing billions down the hole in useless tech and encroaching on your freedom at the same time.

The article also does not mention something obvious, the FBI does not have earth-wide jurisdiction, moving to a "chat" or operating system hosted and built in another country is already available in many forms.

So they will encroach upon your freedom and throw your culture into the garbage to catch a bunch of dummies.

bazillion• 13 years ago

Working with the FBI folks at the TSC (Terrorist Screening Center), being dumb and incompetent doesn't even begin to describe what I saw. The FBI is the most backwards agency technologically -- the leadership is mostly composed of people who actively oppose innovation. At any other government agency, you can host user created applications that consolidate workflows and make peoples' lives much easier. Some even have teams that are dedicated to creating these one-off solutions that don't fit into a general commercial/OSS workflow program. The FBI, however, doesn't allow programming of any sort outside of the scope of their contracts, which mean that a regular analyst is storing data in an excel spreadsheet and trying to pass it around as a database.

I say actively oppose innovation, because I've seen people told to get in line and shut up when speaking out about how to make processes better. This attitude mostly comes from a culture of "special agents" who are their own cool kid club. Imagine a bunch of movie-stereotypical dumb jocks. Now imagine them in front of a computer. FBI.

The most egregious of technological sins I witnessed was when we told the FBI that if they appended a row id to the scattered data they were sending us, that it would literally save on the order of 10 million dollars a year in people not having to manually input things, but being able to parse the data out. Their engineers came back and told us that it was not technologically possible. I said that not knowing their systems, what languages they were using to program the database, or even the database structure itself, give me one hour in the code and I will make it happen. Let's just say that didn't go over well.

reeses6• 13 years ago

The thing I try to keep in mind is that 'the government' is the emergent behavior of millions of self-interested people of varying abilities, from people who just want a job for life to people who want to rule the world. There's a framework in place, and they all live within it. Some work to change the framework, but as with ant colonies, it's not as if all of the ants are designing and architecting the colony. Uncle Milton is a blind watchmaker.

That doesn't mean bad things won't happen, just that you have people "trying to do their jobs" who aren't thinking about fundamental liberties. Get a few million of these ants together and they end up in all aspects of your life, much like real ants. In most cases, the best you can hope for is benign mediocrity.

When counted as individuals, it's the infinitesimal minority that reach to greatness or descend to horror.

mikeash2• 13 years ago

What do you call it when you do a good job of achieving a poor goal? "Evil" might not be too far off, although the FBI doesn't have too much of a choice in this matter.

The resources spent on combating terrorism are vastly disproportionate to the threat presented. The FBI may see this as the best way to combat terrorism, but it's an unworthy goal, and it's bad for them to potentially cause so much damage in pursuit of it.

Maybe another alternative should be presented: "solving the wrong problem."

belorn• 13 years ago

> I think that when they look at this rationally they believe are better served by being able to access these conversations.

I don't doubt that FBI believe that total surveillance and complete control over every move that their citizen do is useful to data mine. However, the article question such logic because of the social impact that total surveillance has on society, criminals and innocents.

And this article is not alone on that aspect. The Swedish secret police had similar objections when the military suggested introducing such surveillance in Sweden. Their primary objection was that ubiquitous surveillance pushed criminals and innocents alike to darknets and encryption, which would then make their job harder (through, after they got a slice of the surveillance pie, they have now become very silent on the subject). I guess the police would have similar objection, however they are also getting a slice soon.

In the mean time, we can actually see in real-time the effects on society, like hot-lines being called less, people avoiding calling priest/lawyer and so on. Germany has some direct statistics since they introduced the surveillance several years before Sweden. I guess we will have to wait for hot-lines being added to tor hidden services before people feel comfortable again with talking with a stranger about suspected child abuses or domestic abuse. Criminals will as suggested move to more encrypted routes. Botnet distributors can get an increased slice in facilitating secure communication, and the military, secret police, and to a degree, the regular police can catch those too slow to follow the technology change.

Is this a dumb, evil, or just incompetent change to society?

joe_the_user• 13 years ago

So your choice is dumb, then? Meaning they understand only "their mission" and nothing else.

I mean, sure, an organization with Mission X can go about that mission in variety of ways. It's like the sci-fi movies about a God-like-AI "solving" society's problems. Stop crime in New York City? Easy, just encase every resident in three inches of plastic? Makes sense "from their point of view".

And the fact is that the deaths and mayhem from terrorism haven't exceed deaths and mayhem from many other sources. Thus preempting everything to fight terrorism is not actually logical for us as a society and has not, so far, been particularly positive in its effects.

kvb• 13 years ago

Are defense attorneys dumb for taking on the cases of guilty defendants? Having a specific mission is often helpful, and doesn't preclude having other systems to provide an appropriate balance.

swalkergibson• 13 years ago

Here is an interesting article discussing the relative probabilities of losing your life due to terrorism versus other ways.

http://reason.com/archives/2011/09/06/how-scared-of-terroris...

fixxer2• 13 years ago

I've read that quantum computing is picking up, so please correct me if I'm wrong... it IS still pretty hard to factor very large primes, right?

This push to "stop terror" via reading the general public's email/chats/etc. seems more like Big Bro and less like a viable method to stop the next 9-11. Sure, the bros from Boston weren't exactly sophisticated, but I find it hard to believe nobody in Al Qaeda knows how to use PGP.

Still, I'm voting for incompetent. If they want to know what kind of porno we all like, fine.

kenjackson3• 13 years ago

it IS still pretty hard to factor very large primes, right

Depends on what you mean by this... There are no practical systems which will do so. But the reason why quantum computing became interesting was because of Shor's work showing that they can factor large primes quickly (in theory).

nathan_long7• 13 years ago

>> There are no practical systems which will do so.

... that we know of. The intelligence community has secretly outpaced the rest of the world in computing, cryptography and cryptanalysis before.

gweinberg• 13 years ago

You mean numbers which are the product of two large primes.

arethuza• 13 years ago

"it IS still pretty hard to factor very large primes"

I think you mean that it is hard to factor the product of two primes, factoring primes is pretty easy regardless their size.

fixxer2• 13 years ago

Of course. I took it for granted that the audience here would know what I meant. My apologies.

charlesjshort• 13 years ago

What happens when the FBI becomes infected with people like Lerner who use their power to persecute political dissidents?

nathan_long7• 13 years ago

This is the real danger of letting government become too powerful: individuals within it can abuse that power.

If your political or religious views are or become unpopular, how much power to monitor, control and punish you do you want government organizations to have? How much oversight do you want for them?

bediger40002• 13 years ago

What do you mean "becomes"? J. Edgar Hoover actually did use his power to persecute political dissidents. I say this whole FBI backdoor/legal intercept thing reeks of trying to do that sort of thing again.

I mean, it's pretty easy to monitor Quaker anti-war activists: they do everything publically and invite participation politely. No agency needs wiretap access to monitor them. So, who are they going to monitor with this?

siculars3• 13 years ago

I say all of the above. There's basically one reason to work for law enforcement: Authority and its slutty sister, Power. People who are attracted to these things are susceptible to logic failures in pursuit of their interest in exerting Authority and Power.

nathan_long7• 13 years ago

>> There's basically one reason to work for law enforcement: Authority and its slutty sister, Power.

I'm against government surveillance, but your statement is way too broad.

Only one reason? Really? You don't think anybody goes into law enforcement to protect others, curb violence, and generally do good for the world?

I doubt you'd want your profession to be slandered so casually.

siculars3• 13 years ago

I said "basically one reason" because I thought it may engender pedantry. Ya, sure, people may get into law enforcement for ideologically pure reasons but I am of the opinion that with great power comes great responsibility and there are just not that many people who can resist the temptation of those two sisters. And as I said elsewhere, there are many ways to "generally do good for the world."

andrewljohnson• 13 years ago

Many people are drawn to law enforcement out of the desire to help others and do good for the world. Being an FBI agent is a very honorable and well-respected profession, especially outside of an internet forum.

Your comment pisses on every person who ever went to school to study criminal law, many of whom did so for noble or at least neutral reasons.

zeroexzeroone4• 13 years ago

I wholeheartedly agree - I was born on American soil and always felt that the FBI's profession was very admirable. I have had family members deal with the FBI and most of their field agents are second to none when it comes to being good at their jobs.

betterunix4• 13 years ago

"Being an FBI agent is a very honorable and well-respected profession"

Unless you are doing this:

http://blogs.citypages.com/blotter/2011/01/secret_government...

It is not as though this is some kind of new, unprecedented behavior either:

http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/03/31/mlk.fbi.conspiracy/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Edgar_Hoover

So let's say a young man is thinking about joining the FBI; he wants to do good for the world, maybe help catch a serial killer or take down a child abuse group. How does he know he will not be asked to conduct surveillance on an anti-war group? How does he know he will not be asked to dig up some dirt on a civil rights leader?

This "honorable profession" you are defending has always had a dark side.

kybernetyk• 13 years ago

>Many people are drawn to law enforcement out of the desire to help others and do good for the world.

Yeah right, and bittorrent is mainly used for distributing Debian ISOs.

siculars3• 13 years ago

There are many ways "to do good for the world." I am incredibly suspect of law enforcement, especially at a national level. Not to say that local law enforcement is any less corrupt but it's the nationals that can influence laws like "show me all your messages" happen.

I would absolutely hate the USA to go the way of Russia, USSR, China or many others. Unfortunately we are headed in that direction.

zeroexzeroone4• 13 years ago

So if people who are attracted to law enforcement are hungry for Authority and Power then everyone else is attracted to Anarchy?

reeses6• 13 years ago

Authority and power are not inherently evil, nor is the desire for authority or power.

Would you like the authority and power to prevent women from being raped? Would you like the power to vote to implement laws equalizing 'rights', such as same-sex marriages?

rubinelli2• 13 years ago

Power may be a necessary evil, but it's still evil. It robs you of empathy, because putting yourself in the shoes of every person affected by your decisions is just too emotionally taxing. And lack of empathy is the root of all evil.

riggins• 13 years ago

So the FBI would only be able to wiretap suspects who are either too dumb to use encryption — in which case they ought to be easy enough to catch without wiretaps

I think the author under-estimates the difficultly of catching criminals.

reeses6• 13 years ago

Agreed. The dumb ones will work out of 'the game' quickly enough and are quickly replaced.

The bigger problem is not 'catching' them, but prosecuting them effectively. This requires prioritization of limited resources based on severity of offense, availability of sufficient evidence, and difficulty of prosecution. The last is ugly because it's almost directly economic, in that the ability to afford legal counsel creates some level of inequality.

ancarda2• 13 years ago

Why would the FBI be interested in social networks? I don't think criminals and terrorists communicate using Facebook.

mtgx2• 13 years ago

Which makes you wonder why they are interested in it, anyway, doesn't it?

brown9-22• 13 years ago

Not true.

ancarda2• 13 years ago

Can you cite any sources? I just find it implausible that anything other than petty crime would be discussed over social networks.

nitrogen• 13 years ago

It's probably for the network itself, not just the communications.

bediger40002• 13 years ago

I vote a little dumb, a little evil (you know, the banality kind) and pretty incompetent.

Anecdotal, but the FBI's first web site was hosted by a NASA machine. I think the FBI was traditionally an IBM shop, and mainframes and the web didn't work well together at first.

In more verifiable evidence of incompetence, there's the Virtual Case File epic fail (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08... just one of many articles about it) followed by a minor debacle in Sentinel (http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2407922,00.asp)

lostlogin• 13 years ago

This has happened on a vastly smaller scale at a few places I have worked. Another flaw seems to be that none technical people ask for something to appear in the new system when they have no idea. The system is built, exactly as requested, and it sucks. Having a competent software engineer on staff who understands the field is vastly more handy than a fat wad of cash paid to outsource. I'm sure there is a good middle road, but companies I have worked for haven't found it.

venomsnake3• 13 years ago

Think like a sysadmin in a big corporation. Assume that there are devices (the BYOD trend) that you have no root to/ no way to monitor them. It will drive you crazy if you have a mild case of ODC(and in IT it comes with the profession) no matter what the real risk is. Now you are in FBI shoes.

With the devices so closely integrated into the cloud we are already close to the "day every iDevice was wiped irreversibly and huge part of the world stopped". Let's not make it closer.

paullth• 13 years ago

Cant the companies that would be affected just split off the operational side of the business to be outside of US jurisdiction, you know like some do to avoid paying tax (not to grossly over-simplify the issues...)? You know facebook could still exist as a US corporation encompassing the intellectual side of the company but create and icelandic company that actually deploys the servers and processes the data. Or something.

lawnchair_larry2• 13 years ago

I'm one of the hard-headed privacy freaks usually sharpening my pitchfork when there is an outrage against civil liberties. I'm that guy.

I once had a job that involved investigations of criminal activity (not law enforcement or government related, just a company protecting its own users and employees).

In this case, I had identified, with certainty, one individual that was engaging in significant fraud. He appeared to have several accounts, and it was appearing highly likely that he had a few accomplices.

During the investigation, I was fully willing to violate everyone's privacy to find everyone in the fraud network. This included data that was already submitted voluntarily, private communications, as well as embedding tracking objects and invisible flash objects to retrieve IP addresses of users surfing behind proxies (this used to be an effective way to unmask users). I didn't have a second thought about it. Why would I? I didn't care what the legitimate users were doing, wasn't going to stalk them, wasn't going to pay any attention to their personal affairs. But, to weed out this problem effectively, I needed to sweep everything. I'm trustworthy, just doing my job, and I certainly trust myself enough to disregard or ignore information that wasn't pertinent.

After being entrenched in the investigation, I had a fairly exhaustive list of the bad actors. Initially this was just basic hard data, (such as correlating IP addresses), but then there was kind of a "sixth sense" that I also started relying on, where I couldn't articulate the signal, but some behavioral cues just felt like they were related. You know, "gut instinct". So I ended up digging into those accounts, and confirmation bias took over. I did find many more bad actors, but I was thoroughly convinced that a few cases were also related, which ended up being suspended, and it turned out that they were actually unrelated and legitimate. That's when I started to reflect a bit.

I didn't go through with the most blatant of the proposed violations, although at the time I was willing to initially. I now realized how egregious that was, and noticed how easily I fell into that mindset. If asked, I think the words "If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear" could have naturally rolled off my tongue (though, this certainly would have alerted me to the errors of my thought process).

So I concluded a few things:

- Most of the time, these blatant, sweeping violations, are most likely not malicious and probably do have good intentions. I very much understand what frame of mind most of those people are in. It's not an opaque three letter agency, it's made up of regular individuals with tunnel vision on their legitimate objectives (stopping crime).

- When you look at criminals day in and day out, and are on a mission, everybody starts to look like a criminal.

- The "working backwards" approach - finding signatures of bad activity, and applying it to other data, then "confirming" the new matches, is a well-understood statistical fallacy, aptly named, the prosecutor's fallacy[1]. If you spot it in court, your defense attorney can try and point it out to the jury - and good luck explaining it to your "peers" who probably play the same lotto numbers because theirs is "due eventually". But let's face it - your life is already ruined by then. You're on all the watch lists, your vehicles are bugged, you've got huge legal bills and no job, and maybe if you're extremely unlucky, you're even in Guantanamo. Everything prior had little or no judicial oversight, no way to defend yourself, and is from a system that is invariably full of investigators who are not self-aware enough to always catch themselves doing this, especially when the cost of missing an actual threat is extremely high.

And for bonus points:

The interface that a coworker created to do some of the data mining (let's call it the "lawful intercept interface") had an SQL injection bug in the logic that parsed login history. It wouldn't have been difficult to discover and exploit without even knowing this interface existed, due to the error a user would see on login if they had certain bad characters in the affected field. I found it roughly a year later and reported it to the CTO in a message from his own account, after using the bug to take his auth cookie out of the DB (we were friends, so I knew he would be a good sport).

tl;dr It's mostly good intentioned individuals with tunnel vision, who are very misguided, and who don't understand the side effects and costs of what they propose.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosecutor%27s_fallacy

pekk• 13 years ago

Please tell which US citizens are in Guantanamo because they were "extremely unlucky". You make it sound as if the FBI is picking up Soccer Moms for no reason and mysteriously spiriting them away to Guantanamo.

lawnchair_larry2• 13 years ago

No, I don't make it sound like that at all. Hence, "extremely unlucky." And I didn't say US citizens went to Guantanamo.

If you aren't aware that there were many documented false positives who were sent to Guantanamo or other CIA detention facilities, you aren't paying attention, because there were some very high profile cases. Here is one example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khalid_El-Masri

Khalid El-Masri is a German citizen who was mistakenly abducted by the Macedonian Police, and handed-over to the U.S. CIA, whose officers interrogated, sodomized and tortured him. While in CIA hands, he was flown to Afghanistan, where he was held in a black site, interrogated, beaten, strip-searched and subjected to inhuman and degrading treatment, tantamount to torture. After El-Masri held hunger strikes, and was detained for four months in the "Salt Pit", the CIA finally admitted his arrest and torture were a mistake and released him.

In April 2004, CIA Director George Tenet was told by his staff that El-Masri was being wrongfully detained. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice learned of the German citizen's detention in early May and ordered his release. Shortly before el-Masri was released, in May 2004 the US ambassador to Germany informed the government for the first time of his detention.

* According to a December 4, 2005, article in the Washington Post, CIA agents discussed whether they should remove El-Masri from Macedonia in an extraordinary rendition. The decision to do so was made by the head of the al Qaeda division of the CIA's Counter-Terrorism Center, on the basis of "a hunch" that El-Masri was involved in terrorism; his name was similar to Khalid al-Masri, strongly suspected as a terrorist.*

I can't think of a worse way to completely ruin an innocent man's life. He was basically a "Soccer Dad".

vy8vWJlco2• 13 years ago

Most of these debates seem to start from the idea of a yes or no ballot to formalize a panopticon and I think that only makes it more likely that society will go there (I mean: please, somebody, think of the children).

IMHO, the idea that law enforcement should have either all or no access to online data is a false dichotomy.

Wiretapping capability is less relevant than ever IMHO, in a time with more privately-owned cameras and personal communication devices than ever; it is more likely than ever that criminals will leave physical evidence of physical crimes, and so there is less reason than ever to invade people's privacy or criminalize thoughts and suspicion/conspiracy/planning of physical crimes when the damage comes from the follow-through, not the imagination. Violent crime has been declining In Canada and the US for decades. This idea of urgency simply doesn't fit those facts.

The Internet is basically a bunch of random thoughts. In a sense, people are having public conversations, but in another people are simply thinking out loud; the more we hold to criminalizing thoughts, the more we create problems by that process and criminalize freedom of thought.

I'm for warrants, and against vigilante justice, but I also really think we need to dissect this idea that only law enforcement should have, or even already has, the tools to address all dangerous situations. IMHO, the less individuals rely on institutions the better, since it is well known that power corrupts. So far Canada and the US have had pretty good luck and the public has had some success holding institutions accountable for abuses of power, but I don't get the impression that influence is as strong as it needs to be, going forward (and I don't know how to fix it while continuing to empower institutions that quite predictably stray from their mandates rather than close shop). IMHO, Institutions pose an unnecessary risk as they continue to grow and claw for more power - in this case, pushing for more surveillance capabilities. I would rather be responsible for myself, without the help of institutions, wherever possible.

As we create new potentials, and empower people to help themselves, I think the role of institutions should decrease. Take the recent article on the French police offloading missing person searches on Facebook for example. ( http://www.itworld.com/networking/357720/french-police-end-m... ) As much as I don't like Facebook, I think that's the right tool for that job, and I would like to see more work to empower individuals in that sense. It's a wonderful thing to be not needed because you actually solved a problem. I, for one, would love to not need to rely on (and pay for) the police or government because I was safe and had a voice of my own.

X4• 13 years ago

I believe that the CIA is much much worse than the FBI.

Is the FBI dumb, evil, or just incompetent?

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