The NSA Is Commandeering the Internet

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/08/the-nsa-is-commandeering-the-internet/278572/

by mxfh • 13 years ago

199 202 13 years ago

smutticus• 13 years ago

It makes me happy to see Schneier get more mainstream press these days. As someone who has followed his blog for years it's about freaking time he got more attention.

humanspecies2• 13 years ago

Even if the only purpose is to propagate absurdly naive and ineffective ideas?

What, google and apple "fighting" the US Government they've gladly been cooperating with since forever???

Why doesn't Schneier call them out for what these corporations really are, government snitches? What makes Schneier think any of these companies want to do what's "moral"??

This article is one of the most naive pieces I've ever read. It parts on the principle that these companies want to do what's moral, but the government is keeping them from doing it. That is absurd.

Google, Apple and friends have been willingly cooperating with the government in exchange for perks, for immunity against FTC probes and so on. They're NOT gonna "fight" because they have nothing to fight against.

lukifer4• 13 years ago

Moral hazard cuts both ways, including giving someone the benefit of the doubt. Opportunity for wrong-doing doesn't confer guilt, it just means we should take the possibility seriously.

Look at it this way: if every tech CEO is complicit without coercion (a strong possibility), the purpose of the article is to take away their shield, and convince the reader that those CEOs are morally culpable for not defending their customers. It's about calling the bluff by proxy.

diminoten51• 13 years ago

Commandeering implies control, and the NSA does not have control. No one has "control" over the Internet.

I also don't like this, "us vs. them" rhetoric that this story has turned some people towards, where the NSA are the unequivocal bad guys and we, the "little people", are the unequivocal good guys. That's a great way to get absolutely nothing done. The NSA is, despite everything we're being told by some people (Bruce), on our side. It's paranoid delusion to think the NSA is actively out to get us - at least ostensibly, the NSA is trying to help the citizens of the US.

What we should be doing is asking for changes and modifications to how things are done. There are some not-so-big tweaks to the currently running programs which can feasibly be made without compromising these program's efficacy while also providing more insight into what's going on. We can have our cake (terrorist monitoring) and eat it too (maintain individual privacy) - it's possible.

That's what we should be figuring out, not this chicken little/us vs. them bullshit.

pdonis5• 13 years ago

the NSA does not have control.

How do you know? The Internet backbone was developed using US government funding. How do you know that the US government did not put backdoors there? It did in the case of the long-distance telephone network.

We can have our cake (terrorist monitoring) and eat it too (maintain individual privacy)

I agree that this could be done in theory; I'm not sure it can be done in practice.

diminoten51• 13 years ago

I don't know in the epistemological sense, but there's just no reason to believe such a thing to be true.

Spearchucker• 13 years ago

Maybe the adversarial approach is needed to make the point. His post is a communication to an audience that, I suspect, will be more likely to respond if words are chosen with that audience in mind.

jacquesm5• 13 years ago

The NSA is, despite everything we're being told by some people (Bruce), on our side.

Define 'our side' please. I'm not convinced of that. And if you take the temporal element into account you might very well find that the NSA is even against 'your side' in the longer term. Information gathered indiscriminately has a tendency to concentrate on the bad parts. If I vacuum up all your communications over the last 20 years or so and pick out the bad bits while deleting the good bits you'll look like a pretty bad person no matter how saintly you are in real life.

A disputed quote (but generally attributed to Richelieu and quite applicable):

"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."

The potential of abuse of this data is simply too large, no matter what the potential benefits and whether or not the NSA is on 'our side'.

reader5000• 13 years ago

"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him...and then nobody will because everybody understands this basic principle."

diminoten51• 13 years ago

The potential of abuse for guns is pretty damn large, but some would argue that the US was founded on the idea of gun ownership.

There's a lot of speculation about what could happen, but if we look only at what has happened, people aren't being snatched up off the streets because of the NSA's monitoring programs.

The language of the above article seems too adversarial to be effective at getting anything done. If we continue to take this "death to the NSA" stance, we're not going to get anything that we want because, like it or not, the NSA, or someone else doing the same things, is going to have to exist on some level for the remainder of the US's existence as a representative democracy. We need to be talking scope and extent, not existence/abolishment, and this article is a little too polemic to be helpful.

TallGuyShort4• 13 years ago

> We can have our cake (terrorist monitoring) and eat it too (maintain individual privacy)

Until the definition of a "terrorist" grows to include people who engage in activities previously considered harmless and private.

diminoten51• 13 years ago

So we're ready to convict the government of thought-crimes?

Just because they can, doesn't mean they will. Gun owners could all go out and harm innocent people, but they generally don't, do they?

At least we don't convict them before they do.

apalmer15• 13 years ago

This is overly ideological. Agreed that the NSA probably doesn't control the Internet, however the argument that the government does or doesn't control the Internet cannot be assumed either way at this point. We do know the government has desired/requested control of the internet before, the kill switch initiative is well documented. Whether this has actually panned out for the Gov in any concrete way we do not know, and if it did pan out it would probably be classified.

As for 'the little people' being the good guys, that's kind of fundamentally what a democracy implies. Now whether the paranoid HN types really represents the people, or the soccer mom who would scream bloody murder if their family was injured because a terrorist plot went off that 'could' have been stopped with widespread snooping without warrants really represents the people is an entirely different question.

jivatmanx3• 13 years ago

Keith Alexander believes that terrorists live amongst us, trying to implement Sharia and create a Caliphate. To fight this, he needs to "Collect it all".

It's just as important to understand his motivation as it is to understand ours, and assess the reasonableness of each in comparison to the other, comparing our current situation to others in history that were similar, and the result they had.

saraid2162• 13 years ago

Alexander actually sounds like J. Edgar Hoover in that regard, which is pretty disturbing.

diminoten51• 13 years ago

Firstly, does he seriously believe that, or are you just demonizing him because it'll get you agreement? If he said something to that effect, that's concerning, but if he hasn't, can we stick to things which have actually happened?

And secondly, is not the motivation to stop terrorists in the US from harming US citizens a noble goal, in theory? Now granted, we shouldn't have to sacrifice our privacy to get that done, but it's not like Keith Alexander is trying to harm the US. He wants to help, and depending on who you ask, may be misguided, on the money, or completely wrong in how he plans to help.

It'd be more useful to correct than to abolish, because abolishment of the NSA and it's surveillance programs is never, ever going to happen, nor should it. ZERO surveillance (this might be arguable, I suppose) results in US citizens dead on US soil. Unacceptable.

knowaveragejoe2• 13 years ago

Source?

jcromartie• 13 years ago

He believes that Islamist terrorists are trying to institute Sharia law and establish a Caliphate in the Middle East, and that terrorists live among us, and he's absolutely correct.

You are wrong to suggest that he believes that there is an imminent threat to American government itself from Islamists living in the USA. Some people do believe this, but he is not one of them, based on his own words.

saraid2162• 13 years ago

That's a great way to get absolutely nothing done.

I agree. I've actually been having trouble deciding whether or not this us vs them mentality has been deliberately cultivated by people who don't want things to get better or not. It would not surprise me to be told that there's an NSA program intended to do that; after all, the FBI sent in undercover cops to suspected terrorist groups who ended up being overzealous, so it's not like such false flagging is unknown.

ledge3• 13 years ago

Well they certainly aren't on my side, and I don't want to be on their side. They aggregate and analyze data used to conduct drone strikes, spy on the world indiscriminately, and assist brutal agencies like the DEA in destroying the lives of millions of innocent Americans.

Is it a paranoid delusion if you're a drug dealer to think that the NSA is out to get you? Not anymore. What about a drug user? What about a file-sharer? A child porn viewer? You might not be any of these things, but a huge portion of the American citizenry is, and I'd argue they're not doing anything wrong. Sorry but I'm not going to just take it on faith that the NSA is on 'our side'.

diminoten51• 13 years ago

You'd argue that a child porn viewer isn't doing anything wrong?

Your opinion officially doesn't matter any more. Sorry, I have a 10 yr old sister and I simply can't abide folks who won't even do the research to understand what it means when they say things.

Sauer_Kraut8• 13 years ago

"No one has "control" over the Internet."

Aside from the people who control the hardware, and the NSA/others seem to have control over those people, getting them to install monitoring hardware.

"I also don't like this, "us vs. them" rhetoric"

I am able to be prosecuted for creating "hacking tools" while Endgame Systems has the NSA pay them a million+ a year to access data from those "hacking tools."

'There are even target packs for democratic countries in Europe and other U.S. allies. Maui (product names tend toward alluring warm-weather locales) is a package of 25 zero-day exploits that runs clients $2.5 million a year. The Cayman botnet-analytics package gets you access to a database of Internet addresses, organization names, and worm types for hundreds of millions of infected computers, and costs $1.5 million.[1]'

In this environment of immunity granted to profiteers while my friends and I are prosecuted, it is "us vs. them."

Stop attempting to blow out meaningless opinions like "The NSA is on our side" in response to articles showing the opposite.

[1] http://wiki.echelon2.org/wiki/Endgame_Systems

diminoten51• 13 years ago

wiki.echelon2.org, huh?

The US military uses weapons citizens are not allowed to own or create on a regular basis. Is Lockheed Martin or Boeing not on our side because they make fighter jets that only the US government can buy?

It's only "us vs. them" in your head. You're why we can't get jack shit done in congress - people like you get time of day from congressmen and women and then when someone like me wants to talk the same conversation (except, you know, rationally), I get lumped in with crazies like you.

ceol• 13 years ago

I really appreciate your reasonable argument, but if the past few weeks have been any indication, there isn't any room for that here. HN has gone from interesting tech discussions to extremist, us-vs-them political rhetoric, and anyone who takes a different stance is jumped on and downvoted — as you can tell from your post having more replies than the entire rest of the thread.

Of course, you won't see the story about a federal judge ruling NYPD's stop-and-frisk was illegal[0], despite it being a much graver offense to individual rights, because it doesn't affect rich, white techies. But an email service you never used shut down and cited "NSA did it!" as its reason? Put that shit all over the front page!

[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/13/nyregion/stop-and-frisk-pr...

pessimizer5• 13 years ago

I am black and not rich, and I think that NSA/Lavabit stories are more relevant to HN than stop-and-frisk stories, because they are about techies and technology. Call me crazy.

w_t_payne• 13 years ago

True.

The "Us-vs-Them" rhetoric directly feeds our pack-animal drive for tribalism, from which nothing good ever emerged.

However, it does make for some amusing rabble-rousing.

Now that the rabble has been roused, so to speak, we need to move the debate onto a more mature phase:

1. We need to work out how to live our lives in a state of total surveillance - when our lives are transparent not only to the NSA but also to innumerable other state & non-state security services.

2. We need to work out how to maintain the balance of power between the individual and the state.

3. We need to work out how to maintain business & personal relationships in an era of total transparency.

4. We need to work out how to maintain our freedom and independence of thought when the objects of our attention, our knowledge and our feelings can be observed and (potentially) controlled in detail.

e3pi• 13 years ago

1. ... > 4. We need to work out how to maintain our freedom and independence of thought when the objects of our attention, our knowledge and our feelings can be observed and (potentially) controlled in detail.

5. We need to become familiar with what are the functions of the new Fort Meade agencies, having to be recently created to supplement the NSA. The NARUS moniker goes "See Clearly, Act Quickly". NSA's `Unbounded Awareness' et al, gets repeated discussion day after day, this is brought about by Snowden's leaks. The `Intelligence Made Actionable' side of the scale has not even been `tin-foiled' yet.

It is believable McCain's poking Putin's eye is no idle threat, or even possibly Russia will be coerced into extraditing Snowden back to US by orchestrated `Action'. This new `Parallel Construction', Bruce's `NSA Creep' is all I've seen suggesting this `Act Quickly'. Who are these new unknown silent baddest alpha predators --without peer-- being fashioned to be released onto the unbounded wild, to take action, or manufacture outcomes whatever USG wants?

jmcmichael3• 13 years ago

There are many lines that one could draw to divide this whole mess into two sides. Who's the 'us' and who's the 'them'?

I can think of quite a few lines to divide up the power-centers and sociological groups, and the intelligence community/military-industrial complex is almost always on the wrong side.

How about Congress vs. the Executive? The people in congress, our elected representatives, have been asking serious questions about these programs behind closed doors, and they have been lied to. They have been lied to by the representatives of the intelligence community (IC) in open court. Representatives of the IC continue to lie and dissemble on national TV, getting softball questions from sycophantic 'journalists'.

How about the IC vs. the Internet community as represented by open standards bodies and the rest of the international internet? The IC has been involved in numerous plots to undermine the basic security of the Internet both by engineering military-class viruses and trojans (Stuxnet), and inserting their hardwired and software backdoors in critical infrastructure - all unilateral decisions done w/o consultation of any of the open governing bodies of the Internet.

I could go on. These are critically important actions and concepts being debated here. The IC has given absolutely no indication that they are willing to compromise or work with the rest of the world, and almost every positive step towards openness has required civil disobedience.

How is this not an 'us vs. them' battle on almost every front one could draw?

diminoten51• 13 years ago

Because every group you've named has the same overarching goal - to keep people free and safe.

Pretending like the intelligence community is some kind of evil monster is a great way to get ignored by the intelligence community, and for good reason.

alan_cx2• 13 years ago

Once you have information, you have control. We now have given them control, by behaving differently, because we now know they have our information.

Its the same thing with implied political blackmail. Politicians know the NSA has all their data, so best not annoy the NSA.

natrius3• 13 years ago

Congress and the NSA believe it is both constitutional and acceptable to collect and store any data they can get their hands on. They supposedly draw a fuzzy line to exclude most Americans when searching the stored data, but storing the communications of Americans is blatantly unconstitutional and dangerous for our democracy. It just takes one bad actor with access to that information to control elections and entire lives.

The idea that there are "not-so-big tweaks" that could be made to these programs is false if preserving privacy and democracy matters to you.

diminoten51• 13 years ago

storing the communications of Americans is blatantly unconstitutional and dangerous for our democracy

Is it?

The idea that there are "not-so-big tweaks" that could be made to these programs is false if preserving privacy and democracy matters to you.

So I'm either wrong or unamerican? Right.

marssaxman• 13 years ago

The NSA is, despite everything we're being told by some people (Bruce), on our side.

Like hell it is. The NSA is part of the US Government, which is on its own side, and is only on "our side" to the degree that it depends on us for tax revenue and political legitimacy.

jacquesm5• 13 years ago

And that's if you're from the USA. If you are not then the NSA isn't on your side, period.

diminoten51• 13 years ago

The US government is on the same side as the US citizenry. I realize how unpopular that statement is on this website, but it's demonstrably true in hundreds of thousands, millions, of examples.

dictum3• 13 years ago

us vs. them bullshit

Surely not an appropriate point to raise when defending an agency whose raison d'etre is to acquire and analyze all foreign communications. Its existence comes from a us vs. them mentality.

What's happening is that for the USG, "them" now includes not only foreigner suspects; it includes all foreigners and many Americans—probably all Americans.

I don't expect the intelligence agencies of a dictatorship to explain to me, as a non-citizen, how they're "on my side". I wish I could have better expectations for a non-dictatorship, the US: I wish, as foreigner, I wasn't assumed to be an enemy.

So no, the NSA is not on my side, and it's probably not on most Americans' side. Also, things change, and all they're collecting will be using against you when they decide to no longer be on your side.

diminoten51• 13 years ago

Okay so you're not in a dictatorship, and the NSA isn't "out to get" you.

If you're a US citizen, then the NSA is trying, at least, to prevent you from being harmed by foreign threats by gathering data on those threats and alerting other US government agencies. That's what they do. As long as the US exists, someone will have to do this.

If you're not a US citizen, then the NSA will take a look at you. Period. That's what they do, and your government will be taking a look at me in exactly the same way, for exactly the same reasons. Neither of our respective intel groups are assuming either of us are enemies, but that doesn't mean these intelligence groups aren't going to look at us. Being investigated does not mean you're an enemy. You're not a "them" just because someone looks at you, I don't know why people think this is how it is.

So no, if you're not a US citizen, the NSA is no more on your side than the British NHS will pay for my appendix removal.

apalmer15• 13 years ago

This line of argument is kinda weak. Personally I agree with the end goals, but the argument isn't compelling. Realistically these companies don't have much choice, and these businesses end users for the most part (the 99.99% that aren't technophiles) don't really care that the NSA is snooping.

I think we need to step back from hoping that business will protect the people. The people will protect the people, and if the people dont, a for profit entity wont (and shouldn't) step in as guardian.

Sauer_Kraut8• 13 years ago

"Realistically these companies don't have much choice"

Of course they do. They can comply or not. If they do not comply they may face court. Of course it is impossible to say how that court would go since none of them are making a choice to stop being co-conspirators.

wil421• 13 years ago

It should read The NSA "HAS" Commandeered the Internet.

As more and more information is gets thrown into the light, I find it disturbing that the NSA's capability has grown under the Obama Administration. I would think they would have less powers compared to Bush Admin post 9/11.

Wait till they attach listening instruments onto drones and send them to scan the sky's across America under a directive from the FISA court.

DanielBMarkham• 13 years ago

I have to wonder what it's like for Zuckerberg, or Brin, or any of the other big internet moguls today.

Here they are creating internet experiences made as addictive as possible, meanwhile gathering every damned little piece of miniscule information possible about each of their users: where they are, who their friends are, what they like, what they hate, their favorite colors, their favorite brands, and so on.

Hell, people are happy giving away this stuff! And all of if can be plugged directly into a big honking machine to sell stuff!

Then the government comes along and wants in on the action too. They start vacuuming up data gigabytes at a time.

It must seem like the only people not getting in on this action is the common folks, the patsies.

I have no idea and could care less what their official statements are. It's obvious they have no problem with gathering the information as long as they were the ones doing it. But in private, what kind of opinion must they have about all of this?

apalmer15• 13 years ago

Their opinion probably is along the lines of 'Show me the money'.

Really wondering what 'zuckerberg' or 'brin' feel like is kind of besides the point.

shmerl2• 13 years ago

They are losing users now. People are more interested in privacy issues than before, and Google and FB were always weak on privacy by design. There isn't much they can do. It's their inherent deficiency.

S_A_P• 13 years ago

While I understand that Lavabit and others have taken a stand, Im not sure that I would call going out of business fighting. I see this as an NSA victory. If they could shut down all of these niche secure email businesses, what option will people have but to use less private alternatives?

I would argue that a shut down is exactly what the NSA wanted from lavabit.

Of course the flip side is that you don't want to be complicit in aiding the NSA, so the stance is honorable. I do think that it would take a company with the utility Google drawing the line for any traction to occur with the average person. Google would either have to: - suspend operations like the SOPA blackout - put up a fight very publicly to the point where there is so much transparency the NSA has no either back down or to penalize them in a way that would piss people off.

Otherwise, this is and will always be a fringe topic.

rhizome5• 13 years ago

A fundamental principle of Judo is, "don't be there when someone wants to hit you."

ge0rg• 13 years ago

If they could shut down all of these niche secure email businesses, what option will people have but to use less private alternatives?

I think Ladar Levison answered that question, implicitly, in his shutdown announcement: "I would _strongly_ recommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States."

It is high time to provide secure services hosted in countries without secret surveillance courts, or maybe even in countries where law enforcement has bigger problems to fight than "Internet crime".

drivingmenuts4• 13 years ago

Great if you live outside the US, but if you're inside the US, would not the very act of connecting to a foreign secure service automatically make you suspect?

There is a much deeper issue here: as Americans, we need to decide how much protection we actually want. One group says everyone is responsible for their own protection, another says everyone needs protecting from everyone else, yet another group says we'll protect you if you don't look to closely behind the curtain, and so on e pluribus ad-infinitum ...

Nobody has a good solution, yet. Personally, I don't mind the NSA spying on foreigners (that's their job) and if you're not from the US, I feel like you should have known that was a possibility.

What I'd settle for at the moment is more independent oversight by people not intimately connected to the defense industry and less secret courts and judgements that make us look and sound like cartoon banana republic.

anologwintermut• 13 years ago

What country? Most of Europe has worse laws than the US for surveillance of their own subjects (though their secret interpretations of their worse laws as far as we know are better than the US interpretations). What they don't have, because no one does, is restrictions on spying on people outside of their country. We are just as much fair game for the BND(German), DSGE(French),FAPSI/GRU (Russia) as their subjects are to us.

Absent massive efficiency advances in multi party computation and fully homomorphic encryption, most of the cloud is antithetical to privacy, no mater where it's hosted.

rst• 13 years ago

Which countries would these be, and how could you be sure? Remember that exceptions to normal judicial procedures might take some form other than a secret court, and can be a whole lot less overt. (And that the governments may be motivated to lie about what they're doing, and whether they exist.)

mark_l_watson• 13 years ago

There are many hosting companies in Iceland - I have been doing some research to see what the options are. Vote with our wallets...

tlb• 13 years ago

Lavabit probably believes, correctly, that no company can provide secure-against-government email as a service. The only way for two people to communicate securely is with in-person key exchange and dedicated devices running open-source right down to the hardware. By continuing to exist, they create a false illusion of security which is worse than no security at all.

deegles• 13 years ago

It was a win-win situation. Shut down the service, or get a backdoor into the emails of people who are explicitly trying to keep their communication private.

Had lavabit capitulated, we wouldn't know about it.

swombat• 13 years ago

If Google, Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo and Facebook simultaneously came out and published all statistics that the government is not allowing them to publish, and declared that they will continue to publish those as they come in and be entirely transparent about the tracking that the NSA asked of them, would their CEOs all go to jail, doing enormous damage to the stock market?

I don't think so. I think the NSA would fold if those five cards were played simultaneously.

lukejduncan• 13 years ago

Too big to fail civil disobedience

Sauer_Kraut8• 13 years ago

Too big to be considered anything but fellow conspirators.

northwest2• 13 years ago

That's probably the best idea right now - uniting.

Will they? They're of course competitors, they could be played off against each other by the government. Anyways, such talks would have to remain ultra-secret.

apalmer15• 13 years ago

Well I hope this is not the case. I am against the NSA monitoring program. I think powerful commercial interests colluding to purposefully break the rule of law is a huge negative.

Lets disconnect this behavior from the specific instance's moral outrage:

If Exxon, BP, Chevron, Shell simultaneously came out and ignored all EPA restrictions would their CEOs all go to jail, doing enormous damage to the stock market?

This sound like a good thing to anyone?

northwest2• 13 years ago

I think powerful commercial interests colluding to purposefully break the rule of law is a huge negative.

It happens all the time, though, if you look at the financial, banking, insurance and oil industry - even without the slightest (moral) excuse. And nobody goes to jail, just some ridiculous fines to pay.

This time, there is a very serious moral imperative.

alan_cx2• 13 years ago

Are you seriously comparing protecting the environment to embarrassing a government in to open disclosure?

Really?

Two completely different things.

dwiel• 13 years ago

The point of civil disobedience is that those doing don't believe that the official methods for determine what a good thing is are working. Comparing this suggested action to oil companies and the EPA is like comparing Ghandi to the KKK.

pessimizer5• 13 years ago

If you're strictly judging by lawfulness, its a problem - but if you judge it by the public being exposed to harmful externalities during the normal operations of any of these businesses, and that preventing that is a positive, then this might be a solution.

The negative externalities are pollution and secret monitoring of customers. Polluting more doesn't reduce or eliminate either of those for the public, while informing the public of how it is being monitored does.

That being said, it would be a protest, and all useful protests against government are unlawful.

flexie• 13 years ago

It's powerful commercial interests colluding to defend the constitution of the US and protect the human rights of US as well as non-US citizens.

joyeuse6701• 13 years ago

Haha, its an absolutist vs. utilitarian moral argument. It is clear that from the absolutist perspective as you've stated, the outcome has potential for abuse. I assume that the precedence set bothers you, corporations were not intended to be a check against the gov't per se. The state of affairs is probably indicative of a larger issue which the failure of our checks and balances in our government.

Utilitarian morality could be that the net effect of the free market demands for an unwatched internet is the correct moral course of action. But as you may have unwittingly hinted at, it is entirely dependent on how the position of the companies and choice of action relate to the benefit of the society. In this case with the NSA the answer is yes, in your example, no, but that should prove that the idea of corporate collusion and interference with gov't isn't intrinsically morally wrong. Just depends on what the companies stand for.

dmix2• 13 years ago

Depends on which law is being broken. In addition to whether the law is moral, there's also the business implications.

Markets serve customers first. If the companies colluded to act morally in their customers interest and against repressive governments, then I don't see it being a comparable issue. They would be rewarded longer term with customer loyalty.

If oil companies collude to ignore safety regulations, that would harm customers, then it's something that would result in a different market response and much greater legal implications from citizen lawsuits, not only from the government.

RyanMcGreal• 13 years ago

Looks like you're reasoning at level four:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Kohlberg's_stages_of_m...

danenania• 13 years ago

Yep, the NSA is on very thin ice right now and they know it. It's the perfect time to stand up to them. Large tech companies can do more than just release statistics. They can take principled stands against these disgusting programs in their entirety.

Executives who are still playing along at this point are just cowards.

ihsw2• 13 years ago

The stock market is a fickle thing. Despite the government-collusion revelations, top tech companies' shares haven't moved an inch in response. It stands to reason that share prices would decrease in the event of a revolt against the US Government, one could even take it a step further and argue that -- through a variety of strategically-placed and secretive investments -- the USG holds stocks in these companies.

Through such an arrangement the USG would be able to exert considerable control. One can enter serious conspiracy territory and speculate that the entire recession recently was orchestrated by the USG to launder billions of dollars to gain influence in a variety of companies and property across the world.

pyrocat• 13 years ago

Or people would go "well, that sucks, not much I can do about it" and business continues as normal. But that's the cynic in me in talking.

greatzebu• 13 years ago

If you're relying on giant corporations to engage in coordinated civil disobedience on your behalf, you're in a pretty bad place.

marshray• 13 years ago

would their CEOs all go to jail,

Why wouldn't they?

doing enormous damage to the stock market?

If they willfully broke the law to act against the interests of their stockholders, that's another thing to keep them in jail for.

Playing chicken with an out-of-control government is a very dangerous game for anybody.

humanspecies2• 13 years ago

What makes you think any of those companies want that?

They're happy where they are. Profits are good. This article is one of the most naive pieces I've ever read.

What do Google, apple, etc want now? For this subject to go away and so that their big mass of users forget about it, that is what they want.

rhizome5• 13 years ago

Classic Prisoner's Dilemma.

Shivetya• 13 years ago

I found this story on Atlantic which sums it up in words simple enough for about anyone to understand.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/08/photocop...

shmerl2• 13 years ago

They're too large; they're public. They have to do what's economically rational, not what's moral.

This is weird. Why should size dictate whether one should act morally or not. It's a very slippery logic.

PavlovsCat• 13 years ago

Boo to whoever flagged this story to death.

The NSA Is Commandeering the Internet

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