Posts by tom dial

Re: Funded by Google's oppostition

The point is that the opposition are attempting to get the government to set rules to provide them benefits that they have otherwise been unable to obtain because they are not, in fact, competitive in their own right.

Re: "Agency spokespeople said Snowden filed no such objections"

So is Edward Snowden's career any less "over" for going illegal than it would have been for actually pushing within the organization? To be sure, the whistle blower protections, not entirely effective for civil service employees, are less so for contractors. However, it is not clear that Mr. Snowden could not have accomplished as much, or nearly so, by objecting within until NSA advised Booz-Allen that they no longer required his services and then contacting a sympathetic Senator. There has been, after all, very little change in NSA activities, and there is little prospect of significant change in the foreseeable future; and as far as I can tell, the same is true more or less in the other Five Eyes countries. The biggest change seems to be greater use of decent encryption, which everyone should have done years ago anyhow.

Re: Who needs a new 'law' when it's already written into the US CONSTITUTION?!

The present state of Fourth Amendment law still appears, on balance, to support, or at least consistent with collection of call record metadata without a warrant. Recent court decisions have answered the question differently, and the Supreme Court presumably will resolve the still-open question in due course. In any case, at the time the domestic call metadata program was developed, and extending through most of 2013, both it and the law under which it was authorized appear to have been within the limits of Constitutional behavior, opinions to the contrary notwithstanding.

Re: In defense of data slurping

"a sysadmin can't f*ck up your life by sending the men in black after you"

Probably not the men in black, but the NSA (or GCHQ ...) probably cannot do that either. On the other hand, I very strongly suspect that ordinary (service provider) sysadmins have sent police after viewers of child pornography, and think I have read of a case but am too lazy to support it. I know for a fact that some employers systematically review logs and act on at-work offenses against both work rules and laws.

Re: In defense of data slurping

We were talking here about Patriot Act section 215 metadata, provided by carriers from billing records, logs, and similar sources. Scanning content during transmission would be a different program, XKeyStore, which is foreign intelligence data collection authorized under Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act section 702.

Re: In defense of data slurping

Concern about possibilities for misuse of collected metadata has a rational and historical basis in the US and perhaps more so in some other countries. Unfortunately, sloppy use of the English language (and doubtless others) in reporting on the "Snowden revelations" combined with widespread underlying distrust of government activities has whipped up a certain part of the population into a moral panic not greatly different from the satanic ritual abuse panic of 25 or 30 years ago.

At the root is a widespread sense that the Government is not to be trusted, that its operators view themselves as better than the rest of us and therefore entitled to make the rules and to to establish and operate the agencies and programs that govern us for our own good irrespective of our wishes. They supply confirmation in the form of comments like Jonathan Gruber's recently outed description of the tactics used to obtain passage of the Affordable Care Act and their rationale, as well as the presumed Presidential action to revise enforcement of US immigration laws, details of which are to be announced this evening. To worsen things, such actions tend to be supported enthusiastically by their supporters without much consideration of the possibility that another President and Congress might act quite differently, although surely "for our own good".

Conflation of "logging" with "spying" and portrayal of the government's capability to track pretty much anyone as a fact that the government tracks pretty much everyone feeds the diffuse general anxiety about whether the government officials consider themselves our masters or our agents. Selective reporting that tended to omit context, conflate foreign and domestic data collection, overlook NSA's internal controls, and deprecate the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court except where it found fault with NSA activities have further contributed to a widespread sense that the government is to be distrusted and feared, and the program needs to be stopped, this despite the fact that it has not been shown to be instrumental in any oppression.

The truth is that if you are a target of government interest, there is not a lot you can do about it and they very likely will get you if they want. They can collect your metadata, as well as that of your contacts and their contacts from providers without a warrant and without notification. They can conduct physical surveillance without much justification, and a police officer behind your car will query a variety of databases for your license plate if he has the time. They can conduct heavily armed raids based on sometimes flimsy justification: Randy Weaver, David Koresh and the Branch Davidians, and the YFZ Ranch come readily to mind as probable government overreach. The government's prosecutors can use old or badly written laws to lay on outrageously excessive charges - Aaron Swartz and the Ohio Amish beard cutters, as well as a number of whistle blowers, are recent examples. And the governments' police can seize your property if they think it was used for or resulted from illegal activity. And not a bit of this is even remotely dependent on "mass surveillance", electronic or otherwise.

Jason Bloomberg is quite correct. The US communication metadata is potentially useful after the fact in finding those responsible for criminal (including terrorist) acts. The notion that it can be used prospectively to detect and thwart terrorism and other crimes probably is as much a pipe dream now as when Admiral Poindexter prototyped and advocated the canceled "Total Information Awareness" program. That is indicated by the scarcity of evidence offered by the NSA (and, as far as I know, the other Five Eyes SIGINT agencies), and the data would be similarly (un)useful for identifying anti-government domestic activity.

Re: information collected on innocent Americans did little

The most compelling argument against the NSA's bulk metadata collection probably is that for the few hundred times a year it is searched the operation is not cost effective relative to the alternative of executing a series of search warrants against the various communication carriers. If done piecemeal, though, current legal precedent is fairly clear that a warrant is unnecessary.

Re: Facebook and Tor

I take it the point is that law enforcement officials sometimes show an appalling lack of judgment. That certainly is true, although it appears all three instances cited were based on a complete message, so the question of being taken out of a recognizable context does not arise and all three warrant at least a cursory inquiry that should have convinced the authorities that nothing really was amiss. Certainly none should have gone so far as Paul Chambers' prosecution, which certainly represents overreach, but prosecutors (Angela Corey, Steven Dettlebach, Carmen Ortiz, to name a few) sometimes do that for reasons that are not clear.

Re: No-one actually believes that they can't crack this stuff right?

AES, used by both Android and Apple, was developed in Europe and subjected to a good deal of study both before submission to NIST as a candidate standard and after, and by both government and private sector cryptanalysts. There is no reason I have seen to think it has been broken by NSA or anyone else. Whether the Android or Apple implementation and key security are adequate is uncertain - both are likely to be somewhat vulnerable to key recovery as well as file access by anyone (law enforcement or not) who gains physical control of a powered on phone with the encrypted file system mounted.

Re: well said Evil Auditor

There are xxx problems with hypothetical arguments such as Mr. Katz gives. The first, of course, is that they are hypothetical. The main one, when used to argue against surveillance, is that demands for surveillance are not the cause of creeping legal oppression, but the result. The new, more detailed laws require ever greater oversight, some in the form of general surveillance, and a good deal in the form of required self-reporting, things like income tax forms to be matched with income reports from employers, banks, or securities issuers. Another US example is the requirement on banks to report cash deposits above $10,000 which, to the authorities, suggest drug money laundering. Based on the same law, repeated deposits a bit under $10,000 are considered to be "structuring" of deposits, and therefore also suspect of money laundering and subject to seizure, with the owner required to prove the source legal.

The fussing over surveillance, while somewhat entertaining, distracts attention from the real problem of too many laws that seem to necessitate it. The often repeated Franklin quote is not relevant to the case. It is oppressive laws against which we require eternal vigilance, and which represent the real choice between liberty and safety. Remove or modify them and reduce the justification for surveillance.

Re: well said Evil Auditor

One more upvote for omitting the Franklin quote.

Re: Limted intelligence failure

If someone were actually to put up a search engine that gave better results than Google, it would gain users at Google's expense. Google might try, and might succeed, in buying it, but could not reduce their end price to users to undercut it.

On the other hand, a quick examination of google.co.uk, google.de, and google.es suggests that Mr. Costejo Gonzalez has been remarkably unsuccessful if his intent was that his earlier tax troubles have been "forgotten" by anyone - the results seem about on a par with those from google.com, and somewhat better than those from DuckDuckGo.

Re: So...FBI wants extra powers then

The FBI boss said nothing to indicate a wish "to read any and all correspondence on your device at any time".

He expressed a wish to be able to do that with a search warrant, issued by a court based on a showing of probable cause to think the phone contains usable evidence of a crime.

As stated, providing a back door is madness and was rejected in principle over twenty years ago.

And, unfortunately for the FBI and others, government resistant encryption has been widely available for use by those with moderate technical knowledge and expertise for over two decades (email and computer files), built in and easy to activate for three years or so on Android devices, and is available as a default for Apple portable devices beginning with iOS8.

Re: Is this

The last I heard, all first class snail mail was photographed to obtain the metadata.

I am skeptical, though, about the implied proposition that X-ray would produce a useful image of a letter's contents.

Re: Founding fathers?

On average, the founding fathers opposed slavery, but to get agreement on the Constitution pinched their noses and signed off on the 3/5 rule and prohibition until 1808 of laws forbidding slave importation. You may think that cowardly or immoral, but it is not clear that slavery in the middle part of North America would have ended as early as 1865 if there had been two nations instead of one.

The same founding fathers, by the way, also insisted on the Bill of Rights as a deferred condition.

Re: "was seriously hampering the efforts of cops"

Encryption capability superior to Apple's pre iOS8 has been baked into Android releases for about the last three years. Default activation has not, but we may reasonably think that anyone who thought they had a need activated it, yet life has gone on. Law enforcement officials seem to think all criminals are so stupid that they need Apple and Google to protect them.

doesn't a legitimate government have a mandate to at least try to decide on what content is available in its country ?

To a first approximation in the US: No.

Copyright and copyright enforcement, although seriously damaged or broken, would be an exception; like it or not, they were established by processes generally considered legitimate and the way to change them, if we wish, is to use those same processes.

Porn might be an exception, but courts have not, in the end, treated its suppression with favor except in the matter of child porn.

Some statements published via the Internet may be legally actionable in civil courts and subject to takedown orders, although the effectiveness of such orders might be quite limited.

In other countries, the government's authority - legitimate power - to limit content availability may be much greater. The government of the People's Republic of China certainly is legitimate (on the mainland), yet it exercises great control over content availability without calling its legitimacy into question.

Re: Hmmmm

I tire of reading things like "We get controlled via the media tied to corporate interests ..." with scarcely a hint of exactly how, other than our presumed laziness, this is done in the US (and other Five Eyes countries, and NATO, and quite a few others).

Those who make such claims should occasionally explain just how this is equivalent to expropriating, jailing, or killing the opposition, as done in some countries that all of us could name.