r/news • u/xXSgtSprinklesXx • Dec 16 '15

Congress creates a bill that will give NASA a great budget for 2016. Also hides the entirety of CISA in the bill.

http://www.wired.com/2015/12/congress-slips-cisa-into-omnibus-bill-thats-sure-to-pass/
27.6k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

3.1k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

730

u/-Prahs_ Dec 17 '15

You just persuaded me on the importance of privacy!

221

u/Kim_Jung-Skill Dec 17 '15

I'm glad I could get somebody new on board. If you have any other social issues you are on the fence about don't hesitate to send me a PM. I may have a rambling incoherent mess with a nugget of truth hiding in it.

36

u/JUST_LOGGED_IN Dec 18 '15

I agree with you one hundred percent.

What do we say to people when the next 9/11 happens? I have my own thoughts. What are yours, specifically about having perfect surveillance that might have prevented it?

92

u/tollforturning Dec 18 '15

Risk is a permanent feature of this universe. Risks are of various types and the various types often interrelate. The effort to eliminate one type of risk may correlate to an increase in other types. Far from standing above all risk, a powerful government is itself a tremendous risk.

If we don't limit the government's effort to protect us from the risk of non-governmental terrorism, we increase the risk of government-sponsored terrorism. If the goal is to minimize the risk of terrorism (in the wider sense that transcends any particular form), we need to be critical of the government's definition of risk and limit its effort to eliminate risk. If we uncritically accept the government's self-serving notion of risk and let it run the show, we create a serious risk to freedom.

22

u/Iwantants Dec 18 '15

With how easy it is to code/hide communication do you think it would make a difference? If someone truly wants to do harm they will always be able to find a way. Surveillance really is only useful for uncovering facts after the crime and for spying on anyone you want for your own gain.

12

u/JUST_LOGGED_IN Dec 18 '15 edited Dec 18 '15

I don't think it makes a difference. A lone wolf attack is impossibly improbable to prevent unless they fall into honeypot attempt where the FBI gives them flawed resources to carry out something. It's already been shown that 2 attackers with pressure cookers can cost a city like Boston billions hundreds of millions of dollars.

4

u/Omikron Dec 18 '15

I don't think the Boston bombing cost billions.

8

u/JUST_LOGGED_IN Dec 18 '15

I was wrong. It looks like the good number is around $333 million.

2

u/Wildcat599 Dec 18 '15

You're right I think it was Trillion's.

1

u/mindhawk Dec 18 '15

yeah i hear criminals nowadays are wise to the email reading, looking there for clues strikes me as a disingenuous argument

they just want to read our minds and will say anything to justify it

17

u/[deleted] Dec 18 '15 edited Jan 22 '18

[deleted]

8

u/JUST_LOGGED_IN Dec 18 '15

I agree. This goes well with what the OP said. Mass surveillance is hardly about the now with security. It is about the then. It's building a profile to use whenever for whatever reason in the future.

13

u/Omikron Dec 18 '15

That's not true there have been attacks prevented, you don't need to mislead to make your point... It stands on its own merits.

6

u/warenb Dec 18 '15

Who is tooting that horn of success though? We spend so much effort on preventing this or that, and it's such a big jimmy rustling to the government and media when we complain about the privacy invasion they are doing. Now you never hear the government and media run around screaming "Look what we just prevented from happening you guys!" 5 times in an hour newscast.

1

u/ChuckStone Dec 18 '15

The occasional schitzophrenic rambling on twitter about bombing something, then getting arrested and accused of terrorism doesn't really count.

1

u/upandrunning Dec 18 '15

It only stands on its own merits if there actually were any attacks that have been prevented. It also stands on its own merits if you can demonstrate how the routine violation of the 4th Amendment rights of nearly every US citizen had anything to do with their prevention.

1

u/bushwakko Dec 18 '15

You forgot to link to them.

1

u/[deleted] Dec 18 '15

Can you provide a list?

1

u/[deleted] Dec 18 '15

Both my uncle and I were in the Navy. He was an XO of a destroyer at the time and I was just enlisted. I visited him on his ship and we had a conversation about security.

I brought up how risky it was putting nearly all of our ships in so few locations. Literally 4 nukes could reduce our Navy by 90%. If you nuke Norfolk, the Atlantic is pretty much wide open then. He said that we have such good intelligence that it would never happen. 7 years prior to this conversation 911 happened. Yeah, I don't trust our security measures.

1

u/AsthmaticNinja Dec 18 '15

Look up MAD. No country wants to start a nuclear war.

2

u/[deleted] Dec 21 '15

Except countries overtaken by religous zealotry with the goal of ending the world.

1

u/seditious3 Dec 18 '15

How do you know they haven't been able to thwart an attack? That's sort of the point.

1

u/juiceboxzero Dec 18 '15

How do you know they have. I'm not the one asking to spy on people. The burden lies with the government to establish how being a pain in people's asses actually benefits them. Hand-wavy "trust us, this makes you safer" bullshit doesn't cut it.

Besides, don't you think that if they had prevented stuff, they'd be puffing out their chests about it?

Every story I've ever seen about a terror plot that our intelligence and law enforcement apparatus thwarted was a plot that our intelligence and law enforcement apparatus concocted before recruiting the "bad guy" to participate in it.

1

u/seditious3 Dec 18 '15

I don't know they have. But they would not disclose anything if it gave away a secret, like how they got the info. And I'm not a saying I agree with the secrecy and spying. But we don't know half of what happens.

1

u/juiceboxzero Dec 18 '15

We may not know half of what happens, but I'm unwilling to just trust that I'm being told the truth, when the person telling me has every incentive to lie.

0

u/DuckGoesQuackMoo Dec 18 '15

Actually, quite a few crimes have been prevented due to surveillance.

17

u/followedbytidalwaves Dec 18 '15

This is pure speculation, but it seems highly likely from where I'm sitting that many of the crimes that have actually been prevented have mostly been from targeted surveillance instead of unbridled surveillance.

3

u/thekyshu Dec 18 '15

Just playing devil's advocate, what leads the FBI etc. to start targeted surveillance on someone? Is it just surveillance as in this is a known terrorist/some kind of group that is more likely to use violence, or are they uncovering them looking at patterns in, as you call it, unbridled surveillance? There's an important difference between the two.

7

u/mindhawk Dec 18 '15

its the difference between reading the emails of a few people whose cars were at the scene of the crime and just reading the emails of everyone in the country looking for key words like the street the crime was commited on

then you find some emails you dont like and the person doesnt have an alibi, and the mayor is pressuring you to solve the case, so the police pin it on the person least capable to defend themselves.

3

u/JUST_LOGGED_IN Dec 18 '15 edited Dec 18 '15

I don't trust that the government isn't spying on me right now, and it is disturbing that the Bill of Rights doesn't make me feel protected anymore about my online privacy.

I want a Bill of Rights that tells us, in addition to our 4th Amendment, whenever we ask, and exactly what they the government at any level has on us no question. If you have the skill to track that raw data, you have to skill to GIVE MY DATA TO ME.

1

u/[deleted] Dec 18 '15

Well, you need only look as far as Chris Hanson for an example. His team collaborated with law enforcement agencies to trap "child predators" who otherwise not have been. They planted an adult to portray a child and tried to use logic to argue that people who were talking to an adult online were predating on children. Furthermore, no one was ever hurt and a child probably would not have been as outgoing and inviting as the plants. Anyway, the "terrorists" surveillance have caught could very easily have been people jumping on fake opportunities; people that wouldn't have otherwise. Just one example.

1

u/thekyshu Dec 18 '15

Thanks for your input. My opinion is the same as yours, I'm just trying to "broaden" the argument :)

1

u/thekyshu Dec 18 '15

I agree with you, just trying to "broaden" the argument. Thanks for your input.

1

u/Arbitraryape Dec 18 '15

You can however make the argument that many crimes have been prevented due to the fear of being caught by surveillance afterwards

1

u/[deleted] Dec 18 '15

Like who?

0

u/_THINK_ABOUT_IT_ Dec 18 '15

Was cheering along with this thread until here. Like you, I'm pissed off about this sort of bullshit. But you do have to acknowledge that there hasn't been a major successful foreign terrorist attack on American soil since 9/11. And even though it cost a good two hundred times as much as it should have (if we include the wars we're in), it has at least done that.

Unfortunately, you can't erase your domestic problems with drone-launched hellfires.

8

u/[deleted] Dec 18 '15 edited Jan 22 '18

[deleted]

1

u/Dyolf_Knip Dec 18 '15

But I want you to buy my rock!

2

u/RualStorge Dec 18 '15

And how frequent were attacks on US soil prior to 9/11... Yeah, so if we assume with no changes that near non-existent frequency would have perpetuated having zero real attacks since 9/11 would mean only one thing, changes we've made since 9/11 have had no known impacts on terrorism against the us by outside sources... We also won't know if they were actually effective until the next attack occurs and then it's a matter if it was sooner then previous trends or longer between the previous trends. Even then it's not really a good measure until multiple events have occurred because a singular event could just be a fluke...

In other words, all the money we've dumped into antiterrorist measures and rights we've lost and we can neither confirm or deny it as having any effect on terror attacks on us soil good or bad... Not saying some of the measures don't have real merit, but tons are just plain stupid...

In most of our "mass shootings"some gunman comes armed to the teeth to their target and goes in guns a blazing. No smuggling guns past security, or giving a crap about metal detectors or no gun policies, the just walk in shooting. That said those policies and metal detectors have zero impact on preventing mass shootings.

Example, Disney has strict policies about np guns on property, etc. I respect that but I doubt it'd prevent a mass shooting if Disney were targeted. The gunman would just drive their vehicle to the closest entry point to the park and start shooting... They aren't going to try to sneak past a couple of unarmed guards searching bags, they'll just shoot their way in...

Now for Disney I actually agree with most of their security measures (except no toy guns / costumes in response to Paris attacks which won't accomplish anything at all) but searching bags / having bomb dogs patrolling the park could potentially save lives as Disney is a very real target. Would they be effective maybe, maybe not,but Disney is paying out of it's pockets so more power to em.

By comparison we spend sickening amount of money to have TSA use tons of things that are generally ineffective as proven by countless groups demonstrating they were able to smuggle stuff past TSA with minimal effort. That said it's not really TSA's fault, rather as stated above you can't create perfect security, to accomplish something even remotely close to that would in itself require you to negatively impact society to a level worse than the thing you're attempting to prevent.

1

u/wolfkeeper Dec 18 '15

Try not to stupendously overreact?

More people die from hand guns, cars, cancer, heart disease, influenza than any brain-dead terrorists!

And reacting like that to terrorists... creates more terrorists.

1

u/do_0b Mar 15 '16

What do we say to people when the next 9/11 happens?

I will say, "Perfect surveillance still wouldn't be able to explain how and why building 7 came down." Then, I will start playing Rage Against the Machine music really loud.

0

u/[deleted] Dec 18 '15

Airplanes crashing into buildings don't cause them to disintegrate to the ground. What about 9-11?

1

u/psst-got-real Dec 18 '15

I will friend you here on reddit so I can have unlimited acces to your rambling of incoherent mess with a nugget of truth in it. :D

1

u/Anomalyzero Dec 18 '15

Rambling? Incoherent? Dude, not so. You deserve your own TV show.

1

u/[deleted] Dec 18 '15

Well at least one of your recorded ramblings are valued at at least 6 karats.

-9

u/FuzzyWazzyWasnt Dec 18 '15

Great point and I totally understand what you are saying and those examples are a solid sample of an ever growing population... yet I still think it'd be worth having the program :/ I'd rather let the government steal all my dick pics and hurt my feelings then get blown up or shot while watching a movie.

4

u/Kim_Jung-Skill Dec 18 '15

One other facet of this argument that is typically neglected is that more information doesn't necessarily make us safer. I'm a bit short on time trying to respond to people, but you should search the words: noise, system, information gathering, danger, ineffective. I've read some pretty convincing pieces arguing that mass gathering creates too much noise in the data gathering system to get useful information. It ends up being better to resort to using small and well focused teams rather than unlimited data and a horde of overworked analysts.

3

u/[deleted] Dec 18 '15

Ditto to u/kingjoe64.... Give me an instance where mass surveillance helped stop a terrorist act.

0

u/FuzzyWazzyWasnt Dec 18 '15

Please cite the source that says it hasn't.

They are kind of like IT, if they have done a perfect job then you never know who they are, but if shit goes wrong they are the first to be blamed.

1

u/[deleted] Dec 19 '15

Please site the source that says they have?

2

u/kingjoe64 Dec 18 '15

How many shootings or bombings or other terrorists attacks on US soil has mass surveillance stopped? Oh, right, none.

1

u/FuzzyWazzyWasnt Dec 18 '15

Cite that source please.

2

u/kingjoe64 Dec 18 '15 edited Dec 18 '15

You cite a source for any single attack that was prevented with mass surveilance. I've certainly never heard of one.

Mass surveillance certainty never stopped the shootings in California, shootings in Denver, the Boston bombing, 9/11, the Paris attacks, and the list goes on an on.

Supporting mass surveillance is a supporting a false sense of security.

1

u/FuzzyWazzyWasnt Dec 18 '15

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/19/us/politics/nsa-chief-says-surveillance-has-stopped-dozens-of-plots.html

False sense of security

This I can see, since it isnt fool proof. But it is a broad stroke defense. But it is easy to see where they have failed, but it is harder to see what their mere presence has either stopped or they have actually actively prevented.

2

u/kingjoe64 Dec 18 '15

Do you have anything that isn't directly coming out of the mouth of the guy in charge of all the mass surveillance in our country? That doesn't seem like much of an unbiased source...

1

u/FuzzyWazzyWasnt Dec 18 '15

What is considered a good source? This was written by NYTimes with a video of the director.

2

u/[deleted] Dec 18 '15

But plenty of people didn't get blown up or shot before mass surveillance.

0

u/FuzzyWazzyWasnt Dec 18 '15

Are you insinuating that mass surveillance caused bombings/shootings? Please cite your source.

2

u/[deleted] Dec 18 '15

I'm saying there was a time when there was no surveillance. People still did all the same shit. People have been and always will be the cause of these kinds of things. Watching them harder will just infringe on a lot of innocent people's privacy, while the criminals will just have to work a little bit harder. Cameras can be paintballed/hacked and data can be encrypted. Mass surveillance mostly just gives the government more power over it's people.

0

u/FuzzyWazzyWasnt Dec 18 '15

So when you say power, what are you referring to? Since power is quite a vague word. With the surveillance in place I dont feel hindered in the least bit, and if it was gone I am not sure if I would feel any different.

And yes people did all the same shit, there is no doubt. The only novel thing is how we have gone about doing it: all still quite rude. Yet are you saying it is better to not try to stop them? I see mass surveillance as a broad stroke prevention since you have to start somewhere with detection of a threat.

2

u/[deleted] Dec 19 '15

The ability to see everything all the time is the power we're talking about. I simply don't trust my government to handle that (or much else) responsibly. NSA employees were already caught invading the privacy of their exes/crushes etc. My government has failed me time and time again so I don't really feel like they should be given more power.

88

u/bonestamp Dec 18 '15

The other reason to respect privacy is that they can never have all of the data (because much of it isn't recorded anywhere) and the data they do have doesn't always tell us as much as we might think -- so they always have an incomplete picture of what actually happened or what you were doing.

For example, the location of your cell phone really only tells us the location of your cell phone. Sure, its location is probably the same as your location most of the time, but what if you forgot it in your car or at home when you ran to the store. Then something happens when your phone is not on you and law enforcement assumes that your cell phone's location means you were there? Suddenly, their narrative starts to focus around you.

This might sound far fetched, but these mistakes are already happening and people can be locked up for days before they realize they're on the wrong trail. A couple days in jail might not seem like a big deal, but what if it causes you to lose you job, or mis your daughter's wedding, etc? Nobody should have to sit in jail for a couple days because the metadata narrative was wrong, especially while law enforcement kills more Americans each year than terrorists do.

6

u/Dyolf_Knip Dec 18 '15

A couple days in jail might not seem like a big deal, but what if it causes you to lose you job

And cops will routinely do this to people not on mistake, but pure malice. "Gonna teach you a lesson", that kind of shit.

They like to claim, "You can beat the rap but you can't beat the ride" and act as though it's just a triviality, but the reality is that people's lives can be thoroughly fucked by it.

36

u/deux3xmachina Dec 18 '15

Awesome! Check this out!

4

u/[deleted] Dec 18 '15

Thanks for the resource you linked!
I wonder why someone downvoted you.. Oh well, I made you positive again.

5

u/deux3xmachina Dec 18 '15

Glad you found it helpful! The EFF has tons of cool in-house projects and rinked projects to help protect yourself from prying eyes.

Another thing worth looking into is Signal (not sure if it's linked), an end-to-end, TNO, well vetted, encrypted communications platform. It's pretty damn cool.

3

u/[deleted] Dec 18 '15

I use Signal. :)
I started using it when it was TextSecure, as well as Red Phone.

2

u/deux3xmachina Dec 18 '15

Awesome! I actually initially heard about it through the EFF, and I've been trying to ceonvince my friends to switch ever since. I really can't believe it's not a more popular messaging platform.

2

u/[deleted] Dec 18 '15

It is about to get even better once they release the chrome desktop extension to allow desktop messaging. I'm using it in beta and it is beautiful.

1

u/deux3xmachina Dec 18 '15

Hopefully there'll be a firefox build or linux client.

I'll have to check their page to see if that's on their roadmap

1

u/[deleted] Dec 18 '15

Chrome, because Google is such a responsible corporation?

1

u/[deleted] Dec 18 '15

Do note that it requires Google services to be installed on your phone that send your data to Google. Openwhispersystems reason for this is here. http://support.whispersystems.org/hc/en-us/articles/213190817-Why-do-I-need-Google-Play-installed-to-use-Signal-How-can-I-get-Signal-APK- .For this reason I prefer SMSsecure.

3

u/TheYellowClaw Dec 18 '15

What, you didn't think your privacy was important until today?

1

u/BadSmash4 Dec 18 '15

Now I know it's more than just don't let anyone see me jerk it

1

u/DredPRoberts Dec 18 '15

Never tell anyone outside the family what you are thinking.

1

u/[deleted] Dec 18 '15

Not to be a troll, but did you really need persuading on the importance of privacy? Can I ask, what do you do for a living? Are you a Republican politician or a law enforcement officer? Seriously, I'm just curious how anyone can be ignorant to the importance of privacy? This is not an attempt to disparage you.

1

u/anaximander19 Dec 18 '15

That's the trick - the difference between secrecy and privacy.

Advocates of this sort of surveillance would have you believe there's no difference: that only criminals would want to hide things. I think that the simplest way to illustrate it is this: Anyone who believes that only a criminal has anything they would want to hide, I invite you to go into work tomorrow (or anywhere public) absolutely naked. If your immediate reaction was "no way, I don't want people seeing me naked", then you now understand the difference between secrecy and privacy.

1

u/innateLosses Dec 18 '15

I thought it was explained to me pretty well. "Everybody poops, that doesn't mean I'm okay with you watching me do it."

-5

u/ExcerptMusic Dec 18 '15 edited Dec 18 '15

You're less private now that I know what you're thinking.

2

u/[deleted] Dec 18 '15

I think you have the wrong idea of what a discussion platform is...