Double Secret Surveillance

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/16/us/double-secret-surveillance.html

by sethbannon • 13 years ago

160 64 13 years ago

Articles like this lead me to think that really ridding ourselves of surveillance is not unlike getting the sugar back out of a cup of coffee.

tokenadult• 13 years ago

Controlling pervasive surveillance may end up a lot like controlling nuclear weapons--we can't uninvent the technology, and no one country has a monopoly on the technology, so the whole international community has to be united in the cause of preventing the most dreaded outcomes. Any break in solidarity may lead to proliferation of spying of a kind we never imagined.

amirmc• 13 years ago

Interesting thought. However, the dreaded outcome is at the bottom of a slippery slope rather than in a giant ball of flame. Mutually Assured Destruction doesn't quite apply.

pcrh4• 13 years ago

It may not be impossible to "uninvent" the technology of pervasive surveillance, but it is possible to forbid governments from doing it. The government is, although it seems naive to say this these days, there for the people, not for itself. If the people do not want to be constantly monitored, they shouldn't be. Commercial organizations can also be restricted in what information they can legally gather, should we choose to make that the case.

cdvonstinkpot2• 13 years ago

I get a paywall.

bediger40002• 13 years ago

Look it up in google by title ("Double Secret Surveillance") then follow the nytimes.com link.

For some reason, NY Times doesn't paywall requests coming in from Google.

Wait - did I just violate the DMCA's anti-circumvention provision?

cdvonstinkpot2• 13 years ago

That worked in Chrome, thanks.

foobarqux• 13 years ago

If you want your articles to be listed in Google News you have to provide free access to something like 5 articles a day for similar reasons to why cloaking is prohibited.

crgt• 13 years ago

Delete your cookies?

jimmahoney• 13 years ago

Open in Chrome's "Incognito" or Firefox's "Private" mode, i.e. without cookies to identify you to the Times.

bediger40002• 13 years ago

It just goes to show that evidence gathered through this sort of system is just used to prosecute, and never to refute chages.

Dragent surveillance is only good for guilt by association. It's un-American, in that a defendant can't face accusers (it's SEKRIT!), and in that there's no previous suspicion.

Fruit of an evil tree, in deed.

cobrausn• 13 years ago

As an aside, I think this is the first time in a while I read 'un-American' and didn't roll my eyes, even though I don't actually know if being able to face your accuser in court is actually an American original idea.

bcRIPster• 13 years ago

As I understand it, the concept is derived from the Magna Carta in that the spirit of facing ones accuser is in line with the concept of being told what you are being charged with in a complaint.

s_q_b3• 13 years ago

It actually goes all the way back to common law and the trial of Sir Walter Raleigh, and was later enshrined in the Sixth Amendment.

During the trial of Sir Raleigh, the prosecution moved affidavits for its witnesses into evidence, without giving the accused the right to cross-examine those that had made the affidavits.

Raleigh, conducting his own defense, objected on the grounds of hearsay. He was overruled, since the prosecution anticipating this attack brought the prosecution under Norman civil law, which allows for hearsay.

It was a large scandal at the time, an emblem of the state exerting arbitrary power. It marked legal thinking for generations, eventually leading to the American Sixth Amendment.

andrewflnr2• 13 years ago

It doesn't have to be originally American for Americans to embrace it. I daresay it's an idea that has passed through the head of anyone at a trial where they don't have that right.

analyst74• 13 years ago

Ease and scale of surveillance was more a result of technical improvement, and if history has shown us anything, technical advancement can only be delayed, not stopped.

Now take a step back, the problem with mass surveillance is that it gives disproportionate power to those who have access to it over those who don't.

So instead of banning surveillance, which would be futile, it'll be much more practical to call for transparency, so the power generated by surveillance data is not concentrated to the select few.

DanielBMarkham2• 13 years ago

I agree. I think there's no putting the genie back in the bottle, and pretending that we can somehow control this is a fool's game that only fools would believe.

The only way forward is for everybody to be guaranteed the same access. What's good for the goose is good for the gander. Create a level playing field, and watch innovation take off as people try to gather their lives back together.

cinquemb• 13 years ago

It's interesting that more people are starting to speak up about it. Funny enough, I shared my thoughts on this a month ago:

"When we allow for organizations such as the NSA to monopolize these tools for their own ends, we take the power away from ourselves to shape our own identities and for what purposes such information is used. We must realize that if we have already let things get to this point, that there will be no going back. That is why it is important for us to shift the focus on how data is collected on us as a whole, in favor for public uses."[0]

[0] http://blog.pictobar.com/post/52533760444/the-nsa-is-closed-...

jiggy2011• 13 years ago

What does it mean that everyone has the same level of access? Would you just publish a big public database of all of the data collected via PRISM so everyone can just read everyone elses email?

hobs• 13 years ago

The only way this would work is when all the powerful people realize this is a terrible idea for their lives to be shared and put a stop to it. Knowing this much about people's lives is literally a danger to many of them, especially in the hands of everyone.

The ability to pretext and get more information about people would go from a somewhat guarded skill to something any child could do, and problems like domestic abuse victims being tracked down via those types of things now becomes a trick anyone can pull.

We need to put the genie back in the bottle, now.

Zigurd• 13 years ago

"The only way forward is for everybody to be guaranteed the same access."

Except that's not true. Before it was the NSA it was criminals and Chinese government-backed hackers stealing our documents. Suppose we implemented a transparent society in some utopia. What about the non-utopian foreigners and criminals?

Another way forward is secure communications and storage. That would place natural limits on surveillance. If you are suspected of a very serious crime, the FBI would have to plant a bug to intercept your communications.

nitrogen2• 13 years ago

Advocates of a totally transparent society seem to be forgetting that there are significant reasons for privacy other than embarrassing personal details -- espionage, extortion, kidnapping, burglary, identity theft, blackmail, and more all become vastly simpler to execute and harder to prosecute when everyone knows everything about everyone, except the aforementioned criminals who know how not to leave a trail.

egocodedinsol• 13 years ago

fwiw, it has worked reasonably well for nuclear weapons, both in the sense that only nation-states have access (hopefully) and that only a select few nations have access.

mpyne• 13 years ago

I agree, but it's also essentially impossible to use nuclear weapons in a way which isn't transparent, which is not the case with PRISM.

I do not agree with giving everyone access to surveillance tools for use, but I think improved transparency into those programs is something that can be done and should be done.

pcrh4• 13 years ago

Restricting technology has worked in many areas in addition to nuclear technology, e.g. eugenics, abortion (in some places), access to firearms (in some places), wiretapping (previously), degraded GPS, etc.

There is also no reason why commercial organizations should not be constrained in what information they are allowed to collect.

There is no reason, technological or otherwise, why governments should not be restricted in what information they can collect on citizens without just cause.

mayanksinghal• 13 years ago

I would argue that it has not worked reasonably well. The part that worked well, is that only nation states have access to the technology. The part that hasn't worked well is that only a few nations, most of them being allies to each other, have access to them. And the countries have gone to great lengths to keep their own enormous stockpile of weapons while aggressively forcing other nations to not work on militarized nuclear technology (and at times civil tech) on the argument that once they have it, they will be able to bully their neighbours.

And of course my stance is quite biased, because I am an citizen of one of the very few countries that has not signed NPT and agrees with the stand my government has made.

s_q_b3• 13 years ago

That's strikes me as impractical. Just because the police can enter my house for certain reasons doesn't mean everyone should have that right. Similarly, there are legitimate reasons for the government to conduct surveillance. That does not mean everyone should have the same access to that information.

This route would sound the death knell for privacy far more quickly and surely than current surveillance programs ever could.

alan_cx2• 13 years ago

Er, no.

I don't want to be spied on, no matter how "open" the process is. My problem isn't the openness, its the spying in the first place. I don't care if its a select few, or the whole worlds population, I don't want to be spied on. I have done nothing wrong. I am not a suspect. I don't expect to be treated like one as some sort of evil default, thank you very much.

Get your suspect first, then do the spying. Not violate the population's privacy to find a suspect. Do that and people who say the West has become some sort of Nazi/Communist terror state will begin to sound less mental.

Sorry, but bending over and taking it rectally is no solution what so ever. It is a weak, lazy, cowardly, surrender.

leot2• 13 years ago

We know that people behave better when they're accountable for what they do and say, and worse when they're not.

The internet permits much more anonymity and privacy than people had previously: we no longer need to mail physical letters, post physical signs, or tell people things in person in order to communicate some piece of information. Humans have more privacy, not less, because they don't need to physically go to adult cinemas, video stores, or peep shows; and the walls of a house are much thicker than those of a shack, a straw hut, or a teepee.

What has changed over the last few hundred years has not been a decrease in our abilities to be anonymous or private, since in the past it was harder to be discreet. The change has rather been that instead of a town or a village knowing through the grapevine what's going on, it is a central authority who is collecting all the information, with all the attendant power that having such information affords.

The problem is thus not a lack of privacy and anonymity -- we have more of it than we ever did. What we suffer from is massive disparities in who knows what about whom (as compared with most of human history). This is the problem which is rectified by greater transparency.

wslh• 13 years ago

I would say sarcastically that if NSA is spying without much efforts, just pushing a button and analyzing the data with well known algorithms then US can reduce their deficit by a big amount firing all those "analysts".

They can even anonymize the information and crowdsource the analysis like Kaggle.

quantumpotato_2• 13 years ago

Do you wait for someone to perform a public illegal act before they become a "suspect"? Rely on tips from informants?

The scale & invisibleness of PRISM is part of what makes it so repugnant to us. If the NSA had 1000 guys in "NSA" t-shirts walking the streets in every major city, it would be irritating but almost laughable.

hemancuso• 13 years ago

Lock picking and door smashing have undoubtably advanced since the fourth amendment was adopted. Your argument essentially suggests that technology renders the fourth meaningless to the extent that we should constant to always be searched as long as we know about it. Doesn't seem like a good argument.

AnthonyMouse• 13 years ago

So instead of banning surveillance, which would be futile, it'll be much more practical to call for transparency, so the power generated by surveillance data is not concentrated to the select few.

Transparency is necessary but not sufficient.

Being able to see the government taking bad risks doesn't cut it if we can't actually stop them. And the problem is that it's not just the government and it's not just our government. You can't just come up with some restrictions on the FBI or the NSA (good luck with that anyway, and good luck enforcing it) while you ignore what China or large corporations might be doing.

Part of the answer to surveillance technology has to be anti-surveillance technology.

And I think one of the big things we need to push for is: We need more bandwidth. We need a national push for gigabit fiber to the home.

Copious transmission capacity attacks vulnerability to surveillance in two ways:

The first is that it reduces the practicality of storing all the data, by increasing the volume of data by an order of magnitude or more. We can price the spies out of the market.

The second is that it facilitates anti-surveillance technology. Tor is slow because it's bandwidth starved. Most people have piss-poor uplinks which are a factor of ten or more slower than their downlinks, which becomes the bottleneck if those users were to operate a relay. We need to solve the bandwidth shortage to make widespread use of that sort of technology practical.

andrewflnr2• 13 years ago

Yes. Don't give up, math is on our side. AFAICT, this is still true if quantum computing takes off. If surveillance is a technological problem, let's solve it. I think it's just a matter of time. People already want more bandwidth for more mundane reasons, and there's enough people who want user-friendly crypto that someone is going to get it right eventually.

another• 13 years ago

Even if you disagree with him (and to some extent I do), Brin was quite prescient on this topic. _The Transparent Society_ [1] anticipated most of this debate, 15 years ago, and it is well worth [re-]reading.

[1] http://www.davidbrin.com/transparentsociety.html

vacuo• 13 years ago

You read my mind. As soon as I read this article I thought of David Brin. For a shorter introduction to his work, check out the five-page essay [1] he wrote a few years before publishing his full book.

[1] Speaking of small cameras: The Transparent Society. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/fftransparent.html

grey-area• 13 years ago

Ease and scale of surveillance was more a result of technical improvement, and if history has shown us anything, technical advancement can only be delayed, not stopped.

Just because technical advancement cannot be stopped, that doesn't mean that all technical capabilities should be available freely to everyone, without legal limit. Many things are technically possible but still illegal, for good reason.

flumbaps2• 13 years ago

I would argue that although the advance of technology makes mass scale surveillance easier, it also makes it harder to hide. Secrets are harder to keep now, and that cuts in both directions. I think banning mass surveillance wouldn't necessarily be futile. With vigilance and enough political will, such a ban could be enforced and maintained.

Also, there are also other technologies that can affect whether or not mass surveillance is practical. Cryptographic tools like Tor and Bitmessage, represent another technological advance that can only be delayed.

marvin• 13 years ago

We have the technological capability of blowing up cities with nuclear weapons as well. We have decided to create laws and follow moral judgement in order not to do it. We can do the same thing with surveilance.

DanielBMarkham2• 13 years ago

This analysis is great as far as it goes, but the problem is even deeper than that. The government very well may be sitting on exculpatory information in its archives that it does not see fit to release because of "National Security" issues.

So it's not just that the government promised not to use this information as part of the people's case without recourse and then did anyway, it's that the government is selectively using this information in ways that are actively detrimental to ongoing criminal cases being fought by defense attorneys.

You can't just pick and choose, whether you're the one prosecuting or you're the one providing information for the defense. Once we allow the government to pick and choose which information gets released in which trials, the entire judicial system becomes more of a farce than it already is.

We have seriously damaged the structure of the country.

tantalor• 13 years ago

Source? Generally exculpatory evidence must be shared. Why is this evidence any different?

mtgx• 13 years ago

"In a prosecution in Federal District Court in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., against two brothers accused of plotting to bomb targets in New York, the government has said it plans to use information gathered under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, or FISA, which authorized individual warrants. But prosecutors have refused to say whether the government obtained those individual warrants based on information derived from the 2008 law, which allows programmatic surveillance."

This exactly what I feared, and I thought would happen. They're using the information gathered from the mass spying as "evidence" for probable cause to get individual warrants. This is the worst case scenario becoming real. They're doing fishing expeditions with the mass spying apparatus and then "legally" obtain the warrants to prosecute people.

Double Secret Surveillance

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