[HN Gopher] Today Is One of the Biggest Surveillance Votes. Will...
___________________________________________________________________
Today Is One of the Biggest Surveillance Votes. Will the FBI Stop
Spying?
Author : hungiri
Score : 309 points
Date : 2023-12-12 13:01 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (tuta.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (tuta.com)
| the-dude wrote:
| No.
| rmellow wrote:
| aka Betteridge's Law of Headlines.
| the-dude wrote:
| But we all know that. And it is so much more characters. HN
| was struggling already.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| Spying in the Land of the Free(r)?
| 0ckpuppet wrote:
| you mean spying on American citizens without a warrant?
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| And spying on citizens not suspected of a crime.
| solardev wrote:
| There's a potential subversive in each of us! Think of the
| kids! How will we stop school shootings if we don't spy on
| the terrorists before they spy on us? How will we know your
| shoe is unbombed? Freedom ain't free, you know.
| howmayiannoyyou wrote:
| That is NOT what 702 provides. 702 prohibits US citizens from
| being targeted (see:
| https://www.dni.gov/files/icotr/Section702-Basics-
| Infographi...)
| ibejoeb wrote:
| In practice, it provides for parallel construction in order
| to conduct domestic surveillance of US citizens by bringing a
| secret action against a foreign correspondent.
| kyboren wrote:
| If the HPSCI version passes, it will be legal (and
| presumably, automatic) to target any non-citizen or
| permanent resident traveling to the US and search "one end
| foreign" 702 data on them.
|
| Of course, if they're traveling to the US, it's much more
| likely that they're communicating with Americans (e.g.
| visiting friends). Which means that scrutiny of Americans'
| conversations, swept up en masse, will dramatically
| increase.
|
| If that passes, tell your friends not to visit America.
| Because if they do, then all your conversations with them
| are totally fair game for secret government review.
| coolhand2120 wrote:
| Bwahahhahahahahahhhahhahaahhaahahahhahahahhahahhahhaahhaahhah
| ahahahhhha
|
| No wait, you're serious?
|
| Did you not watch the senate testimony? They have illegally
| spied on millions upon millions of Americans. For things as
| petty as "I think this girl likes me" or "I'll show my father
| in law!". No punishments much less termination or what you or
| I would face: jail.
|
| So yeah, that link is a joke. There are no protections
| against corrupt law enforcement.
| alwaysrunning wrote:
| Of course it will pass. The government will never willingly give
| up power and will only seek ways to expand it.
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| American Exceptionalism means the power is derived from being
| able to make exceptions to the rules.
| bee_rider wrote:
| That's clever wording but I think it isn't right? I thought
| American Exceptionalism was the belief that the US _is_ an
| exception to the rules.
|
| Actually, the idea that _being_ an exception to the rules and
| _having the ability to make_ an exception to the rules are
| the same, or one implies the other, is pretty interesting and
| might be worth elaborating on.
| graphe wrote:
| The self checkout tsa is the opposite.
| madamelic wrote:
| Only because we have been boiled to be ok with it.
|
| It used to just be x-ray and a bag scan. Now it is a
| backscatter plus a pat-down if required plus a bag scan. If
| you get flagged on either, your hands get swabbed down as
| well. The tech and number of searches is only going to
| increase over time as more contracts get in on the TSA grift.
|
| I have zero doubts at some point they will also begin
| domestic device scans ("just plug the handy USB-C into your
| device and hang tight for a few while we ~~download all its
| contents~~ search for terrorism!) like they already
| apparently do for international flights under the guise of
| national security and making sure you aren't plotting
| something.
|
| The self-service TSA booths are to save money on their
| minimum wage security staff, not to relax security. It
| increases the amount of surveillance they can pack in by
| putting you individually through a chokepoint.
|
| Think of what you could do if you could lock people into a
| booth by themselves as they do tasks to be let out. I am
| being a bit hyperbolic but singling out a person in a
| potentially enclosed box opens the door massively to
| techniques such as strip searches (you don't even have to
| move rooms, how convenient, thanks TSA!) and illegal searches
| (ugh, really, just let us do it. It'll take 3 minutes and
| besides, no one will ever believe you that we asked because
| it's just us here), etc.
|
| Then you get into the fun tech that is opened up by having a
| person isolated such as bomb detection through analyzing
| residue in the air, far more cameras that can be analyzed by
| AI/ML ("your left eye twitched 27% more than average:
| TERRORIST") and analysts at scale, mandatory facial
| recognition and other biometrics collection (a big issue with
| facial rec is making sure no one interferes, it's very easy
| to detect a face when there is only one in the room and you
| can have the perfect solid color background)
| teeray wrote:
| > Think of what you could do if you could lock people into
| a booth by themselves as they do tasks to be let out.
|
| Hey kids, welcome to the TSA escape room! Can you solve our
| puzzles before you miss your flight?
| madamelic wrote:
| > x-ray
|
| I am aware I am mildly dumb. Metal detector! Hah!
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _government will never willingly give up power_
|
| Governments regularly do this. One of the greatest losses for
| privacy advocates over the last generation is this brand of
| nihilism making the issue electorally useless.
| dmix wrote:
| > Governments regularly do this
|
| s/regularly/rarely
|
| It's a generalization, there's always occasional exceptions
| to the rule.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _It 's a generalization, there's always occasional
| exception to the rule_
|
| The point is it's not a rule. It's a meme that results from
| misunderstanding the bureaucratic imperative and
| oversimplifying into a monolith the complexity of politics
| and power competition.
| cultureswitch wrote:
| One can explain the phenomenon and understand the history
| yet it's not wrong to say governments (or any other large
| org really) rarely give up power and only ever do so
| under coercion.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _it 's not wrong to say governments (or any other large
| org really) rarely give up power_
|
| It's incredibly wrong to say this. More modern states
| fail due to gridlock and fragility than violent coercion.
|
| Individual actors rarely give up power without coercion.
| That doesn't mean the system as a whole doesn't ebb and
| flow as interests diverge and align.
| jancsika wrote:
| Why are you LARPing based on first principles? Just give
| examples:
|
| * Trump's First Step Act. E.g., title III-- can no longer
| use restraints on prisoners during pregnancy-- and IV--
| reducing mandatory minimums for drug felony convictions
|
| * Trump's Affordable Clean Energy rule which removed caps
| on emissions
|
| * Clinton's repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act back in 1999
|
| * Carter's Airline Deregulation Act back in the late 70s
|
| * the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963
|
| If I searched my memory for five minutes a day I'd have a
| list of hundreds by the end of a week.
|
| I get that domain expertise doesn't magically apply
| outside a domain. But how is HN this special level of
| asinine when it comes to the simple history of
| legislation in the U.S.?
|
| Reading the thread with your interlocutor is like reading
| someone claim that C only has global scope. What could
| they possibly have read to convince them of such a thing?
| alwaysrunning wrote:
| The Patriot Act (2001), The Homeland Security Act (2002),
| The Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA)
| (2002), The National Defense Authorization Act, The
| Affordable Care Act (2010),The Cybersecurity Information
| Sharing Act (CISA) (2015), The Real ID Act (2005),The USA
| Freedom Act (2015), The Executive Order on Improving the
| Nation's Cybersecurity (2021), The Economic Stabilization
| Act (2008), The Executive Order on Improving Critical
| Infrastructure Cybersecurity (2013), The Foreign
| Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) (1978), The
| Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA)
| (1994), The Bank Secrecy Act (1970), The Sarbanes-Oxley
| Act (2002), The Emergency Economic Stabilization Act
| (2008), The Executive Order on Protecting Public Health
| and the Environment and Restoring Science to Tackle the
| Climate Crisis (2021), The Executive Order on Improving
| Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity (2013)
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| Nobody claimed governments never expand their powers. The
| contested statement was "government will never willingly
| give up power." Examples of governments curtailing their
| powers were provided. That they also increase their
| powers is unremarkable, uncontested and frankly obvious
| given you can't decrease something that was never
| increased.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)
| (1978),
|
| FISA is an example of what you are arguing against,
| unless you are arguing that is a net increase in power
| because the restrictions on government power came
| packaged with a government power to prosecute government
| agents who violated the new limits, which is kind of
| silly.
|
| (You may be confusing the 1978 act with the FISA
| Amendments Act of 2008, the War on Terror act
| undercutting the FISA limits, which is kind of like
| confusing the 18th and 21st Amendments.)
| dmix wrote:
| The amount of written law in the US gov has grown
| exponentially since the 1970s.
|
| https://www.everycrsreport.com/files/20190903_R43056_5083
| d3b...
|
| The only time it slowed has been during brief gov
| shutdowns. As this report explains this includes plenty
| of non rules and administrative stuff and does count
| repeals but anyone who has followed Congress knows that
| the bulk of those bills is new spending and new rules
| imposed on civilians/business. It's rarely ever reducing
| the scale of gov.
|
| And to repeat another post I made recently, the staffing
| and funding for US federal regulatory agencies has grown
| near exponentially since the 1970s (edit: or more
| accurately a consistent upward trendline)
|
| https://regulatorystudies.columbian.gwu.edu/sites/g/files
| /za...
| ethanbond wrote:
| Why should the government be shrinking when our
| population and the complexity of our society + economy is
| growing?
| ibejoeb wrote:
| I was expecting to find that federal employment has grown
| faster than the US population, but it looks like that's
| not the case. Since 2000, the federal workforce seems to
| have grown about 14%, while the overall population
| increased by about 20%.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| If you go back further it's even more stark - there are
| 5% fewer Federal employees than there were when Clinton
| took office, overall population is up 30% and real GDP is
| up like 120%:
|
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1cCLR
| jonhohle wrote:
| I wouldn't imagine a government needs to scale
| proportionally to the population much like a business
| shouldn't need to scale proportionally to its customer
| base. Most businesses should be able to handle twice as
| many customers with fewer than twice as many employees.
| _heimdall wrote:
| You may be assuming there isn't a connection there. Could
| it be that our society and economy are growing more
| complex _because_ the government continues to grow?
|
| More government agencies and employees create more rules.
| More rules almost certainly play into the growing
| complexity of both our society and economy.
|
| Population growth is nothing new, its only the last 60-80
| years that we've really cranked up the size of our
| government.
| ethanbond wrote:
| I am absolutely confident that our society and economy
| aren't growing more complex _exclusively_ due to
| government growth. The whole virtue of capitalism is that
| it finds increasingly niche ways and outright novel ways
| to change the world, that's by definition net new
| complexity. I'm comfortable attributing the vast majority
| of complexity growth to _that._
|
| Not only is the population growing exponentially but one
| would reasonably expect the complexity of the overall
| economy would go up exponentially even with linear
| additions to the population (each new person is N new
| possible economic relations).
| stronglikedan wrote:
| They should be minimal in their powers over the people
| and the bureaucratic waste they produce, but that doesn't
| mean they are shrinking. They can grow their
| administration workforce to accommodate the growing
| population and economy without adding new powers and
| while gaining efficiencies. Plus, the federal government
| should be _very_ minimal, while not infringing on state
| 's rights, which isn't the case any longer,
| unfortunately.
| ethanbond wrote:
| Sure, the disagreement stems from one's presumption of
| what "minimal" means.
| tastyfreeze wrote:
| Minimal is defined in the Constitution. It explicitly
| says we give the federal government limited powers and no
| more.
| ethanbond wrote:
| One of those powers is to rely on interpretations of the
| Constitution by SCOTUS and to pick SCOTUS's
| interpretation when it comes to conflict with an HN
| commentators' interpretation.
|
| So this is still just putting the cart before the horse.
| rtkwe wrote:
| It defines a proscribed set of powers but doesn't say the
| use of those must be minimized. On top of all of that all
| the powers currently used have either been ruled
| constitutional, are untested extensions of tested uses of
| powers, or haven't been challenged/are currently being
| challenged, we can all have our own opinions about what
| the Constitution does and doesn't allow but within the
| system defined the only opinion that directly matters is
| the Supreme Court's. Everyone else's only gets filtered
| through their selection and ... optional shall we say
| extra-constitutional means?
|
| Ultimately my stance is the founders weren't perfect,
| their creation isn't some mystical perfect system handed
| down from on high [0] so we shouldn't weld ourselves into
| some imaginary form of what precisely they would or
| wouldn't want. They're dead it's our country now we have
| to live with it in a world they couldn't even imagine.
| Even the groups that do try to lay claim to the founders
| original vision are cherry picking their favorite version
| of the founders and their ideas.
|
| [0] Remember their first try at it, the Articles of
| Confederation fell apart in 4 years and the Constitution
| was a broad overreach of the mandate that the convention
| was even convened for.
| tastyfreeze wrote:
| I agree that it is our country and we get to shape it as
| we wish. But we should build on what came before. The
| Constitution is pretty damn good but obviously not
| perfect. I believe that the identifying feature of the
| Constitution isn't so much the words on the page but the
| underlying message. The whole of the Constitution
| espouses an idea that we, as a people, and individuals
| will agree to live under laws of the defined government
| IF the government stays in the bounds defined in the
| Constitution. If the government breaks their end of the
| deal all bets are off. In that sense SCOTUS
| constitutionality rulings are meaningless. If ruled
| constitutionality is different than the people's
| understanding of the Constitution it creates a sense of
| tyranny. If there are too many rulings that people feel
| are unconstitutional they will not tolerate it. The
| Constitution says it is the right of the people to
| replace their government. It doesn't say it has to be
| peaceful.
|
| I would much rather see people participate in their own
| governance and take back control of the government
| peacefully before it is intolerable. However, history
| makes me fearful of a possible violent upheaval.
| rtkwe wrote:
| We are building on what came before, the decision for a
| more powerful federal government isn't particularly new.
| Pooling the resources of the many states has a lot of
| benefits (and the states traditionally opposed to that
| benefit the most from federal dollars).
|
| > If the government breaks their end of the deal all bets
| are off. etc etc
|
| Those are all explicitly extra constitutional and the
| ones I euphemistically referred to. The methods for
| changing the constitution systematically within it's own
| rules are through Convention or Amendment.
|
| > If ruled constitutionality is different than the
| people's understanding of the Constitution it creates a
| sense of tyranny
|
| I'd be more charitable to the devolution of powers if the
| expressed preferred outcomes of that devolution of power
| didn't so often tend towards the repression of various
| groups. There's the OG slavery, segregation, voting
| rights, and the modern day antitrans/gay panics and to
| gut things like the voting rights act to prop up
| gerrymandered governments... but now we're tending
| towards topics that wind up [dead] due to flame wars.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| I can't believe this argument is being made in good
| faith, but just in case: do you not realize that the
| number of laws need not scale with the size of the
| population? Especially when that growth is less than an
| order of magnitude?
| ethanbond wrote:
| I said size of _the government_ , not size of the code.
| Both were mentioned in GP's comment.
| ibejoeb wrote:
| It's a real shame. Legislating isn't a full-time job
| naturally, but we've made it so by turning it into one of
| the most lucrative careers. We judge congress perversely
| by output of new laws.
| kasey_junk wrote:
| Most legislative action happens at the state and local
| level where it's not particularly lucrative.
|
| If anything we should probably make it more lucrative so
| that the already well off aren't the only ones who can
| afford to do it.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Even federal legislative service isn't lucrative.
|
| Biden made the bulk of his wealth only after being vice
| president and writing books / speaking. And he was a
| senator for multiple decades!
|
| Being a federal senator is a middle class salary: https:/
| /www.townandcountrymag.com/society/politics/a31265187...
|
| Presidents make ~$400k.
|
| And before someone points out the "ancillary" financial
| benefits to being a legislator: (a) most of those are
| illegal if discovered & (b) typically the big money is
| made _after_ retiring or losing office, by leveraging
| connections.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| I absolutely agree that the U.S. government has gotten
| more powerful since WWII almost monotonously. The times
| of honest reduction were in the 1990s and, potentially,
| now.
|
| That said, I would be careful about conflating the volume
| of rules and staffing with power. The bureaucratic
| imperative will drive a bureaucracy to expand. But it
| also does that to others, the net effect being a lot of
| intragovernmental arguing that diminishes the state's
| actual power.
|
| That doesn't make the bureaucracy less annoying. Just
| less powerful. In fact, part of the present problem stems
| from it being easier for politicians to create blocking
| bureaucracies than to liquidate the ones they don't like.
| IG_Semmelweiss wrote:
| what are rules, but merely (legal) attempts to make the
| rule-maker more powerful ?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _what are rules, but merely (legal) attempts to make
| the rule-maker more powerful_
|
| You've got to be kidding me. Here's one: coordination.
| Everyone drive on the right. That wasn't done to make
| anyone more powerful; it was done to prevent stupid
| crashes.
|
| Here's another rule: don't fly you plane past its spec.
| That isn't to oppress the pilot. It's because the plane
| wasn't designed to be flown harder.
| u32480932048 wrote:
| Wait, I thought pithy statements containing some element
| of truth counted as theses? They were oversimplifications
| all along?
| laweijfmvo wrote:
| what are some recent examples of governments giving up power?
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Didn't you see the Portland Oregon thread earlier? Oregon
| has done a ton to legalize drugs, muzzle the police (can't
| pull people over for ghetto cars anymore as one small
| example), and generally reduce the amount of power that the
| government has over your day to day life. Ron wyden tries
| every day to reduce mass surveillance and similar risks for
| Oregonians
|
| You do get governments willing to give up power if you
| elect progressive democrats or libertarians. Republicans
| lie hardcore about wanting to do this though. Republicans
| used to be the party of federalism, now they're the party
| of "unitary executive theory"
|
| Anyone with the idea that governments never give up power
| is so pathetically unobservant that I honestly don't want
| them voting in our elections.
| tastyfreeze wrote:
| Interesting that you have a carve out for progressive
| democrats but all Republicans are bad. There are "unitary
| executive theory" camps in both parties. Seems to be a
| more dominant idea in the Democrat party than Republican
| from my view. Democrats vote as a block on almost every
| bill in congress. Democrats have also been behind most
| expansions to executive power in the last 100 years.
| yunwal wrote:
| They also carved out an exception for libertarians, which
| in the US are basically all republican.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _what are some recent examples of governments giving up
| power?_
|
| I'll pick a negative one: antitrust. Government retreated
| from its enforcement duty and powers for a few decades. In
| the vacuum, private interests asserted themselves.
| todd-davies wrote:
| Great example. Another one is state governments joining a
| union or federal system, such as US states joining the
| Union or European states joining the EU, and becoming
| bound by federal/EU law.
| logicchains wrote:
| >such as US states joining the Union
|
| This doesn't really count as freely joining, since half
| of them were forced to join by a bloody war.
| soco wrote:
| Let's not forget that other half joined freely a
| different union. So the argument doesn't change at all.
| KMag wrote:
| > This doesn't really count as freely joining, since half
| of them were forced to join by a bloody war.
|
| In the South, do they generally consider themselves as
| forced to re-join the Union, rather than having been
| forcefully prevented from leaving?
| madamelic wrote:
| > In the South, do they generally consider themselves as
| forced to re-join the Union, rather than having been
| forcefully prevented from leaving?
|
| I don't think it is revisionism and maybe I am wrong on
| this, but wasn't it the Confederacy who attacked the
| Union at Fort Sumter which kicked off the US Civil War?
|
| It's my understanding the Union was more or less
| ambivalent to the Confederacy and figured they'd let
| things lie then the Confederacy attacked.
|
| I don't know enough history to say whether the
| Confederacy was forced to re-join or whether the states
| asked to rejoin in light of their government collapsing
| (Davis fleeing Richmond, etc). My guess would be that it
| was more of a failed state situation where the US had
| dibs on propping it back up.
| Xeoncross wrote:
| That's an interesting way to look at it; governments
| merging into even larger entities is them giving up
| power?
|
| The "government" isn't a unified mind. It's a group of
| individuals looking to further their career and (rarely)
| pursue a cause they care about. If two governments merge
| their law-sets into one, they aren't losing anything -
| the people involved are simply being promoted and gaining
| a broader peer influence with more vertical growth
| opportunities.
| Am4TIfIsER0ppos wrote:
| What? Joining the EU absolutely increases government
| power. It lets the government do things by saying "europe
| makes us".
| soco wrote:
| Or lets the local government or whatever party say "ohhh
| how wouldn't we have increased your well-being if not for
| them darn Europeans so just elect us one more time then
| we'll show them for good". And this line works so well,
| regardless if the respective party did or tried anything
| on the European level or not. It's the cultivated
| helplessness in some circles, that EU was some remote and
| abstract place where "things" happen and no one, not even
| your own representatives there, can move an inch. Same
| whether you're German or Luxembourgeois, it's the ideal
| material for promoting your own party and keeping the
| voters dumbed down.
| WendyTheWillow wrote:
| https://legiscan.com/US/legislation?status=passed
|
| A few times this year in the US at the federal level, for
| starters.
|
| One could argue that every peaceful transition of power is
| the current government giving up power to the next
| government.
|
| Even Roe v. Wade was a "giving up" of power by the federal
| government to guarantee a right to abortion nationally.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| Does revoking a previous ruling really count as giving up
| power? The government had the power to say this is
| banned. They still have the power to say this isnt
| banned. It doesnt seem like any power has been lost. They
| just decided to use it in another way. They could change
| the decision tomorrow. That wouldnt be any more or less
| power. They are still using it to enforce their rulings.
| WendyTheWillow wrote:
| Yes, removing a limitation counts as giving up power.
| local_crmdgeon wrote:
| YIMBY reforms
|
| Weed legalization (NYS doesn't count)
|
| Gun laws
| vGPU wrote:
| Weed legalization is just trading of one authority for
| another. The government expects to be able to exercise
| their revenue collection authority over it in exchange
| for their authority to ban it.
| local_crmdgeon wrote:
| That's true in the no-homegrow states, but it's a
| significant new set of entitlements.
|
| Also, the gun stuff is a huge win for reduction in state
| power.
| dahart wrote:
| > what are some recent examples of governments giving up
| power?
|
| We have a whole category for it in the US and one of the
| two major parties devoted to it: Deregulation.
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| Boy, they got you good! There's no such thing as
| "deregulation." There's only _rearranging_ regulation to
| protect the incumbents against competitors which would
| try to arise in an actual capitalistic system.
| dahart wrote:
| It sounds like you're joking, but I can't tell. Of
| course, there is such a thing as deregulation, it has a
| definition and history that doesn't match your operative
| word choice of "rearranging".
|
| To your point, I have no doubt that _some_ deregulation
| has been spin for regulatory capture and /or anti-
| competitive behavior. Unfortunately, perhaps especially
| for the environment, that's not an accurate summary of
| all deregulation, nor of the US conservative party's
| official stance on regulation.
| 2devnull wrote:
| The border.
| aporetics wrote:
| Nihilism and expressions of futility are not the same thing,
| fyi. In this case, if the original poster were nihilistic,
| they would not care one way or another about privacy. It
| would be meaningless, like everything else.
|
| And the original poster remains correct about power. Power is
| never willingly given up by an institution (it can, however,
| be given up by individuals, when they decide that there is
| something more important than power). That is why we
| (assuming USA, here) have divided government, so power cannot
| ever be concentrated in any one branch. In this case, the
| hearing on 702 is being held by one branch, congress, to
| decide whether to limit or expand the power of another
| branch, the executive. It's an important distinction; without
| that separation there really would be no hope to restore
| basic privacy.
| flkenosad wrote:
| Not true at all. This isn't Game of Thrones.
| the_optimist wrote:
| Discard this attitude. It is defeatist resignation, and it is
| indistinguishable from the opposition.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| 3 month old account pushing unproductive defeatist nihilism.
| If you pay attention you'll see this in every thread about
| the US and users somehow think it's worth upvoting.
| dannyw wrote:
| Mass surveillance is antithetical to liberty, but direct,
| concrete harm is hard to identify.
|
| The surveillance complex has been pretty good at using secrecy,
| and perhaps even good internal controls, to limit everyday
| impact.
|
| How can we find real harms to win this fight? Or how can we get
| people to care?
| cultureswitch wrote:
| Acceleration brrr
| _heimdall wrote:
| The legal authority to surveil itself should be considered
| enough harm in my opinion. It fundamentally damages right to
| privacy, harm caused by the actual surveillance itself
| shouldn't be needed if the legal system is really designed to
| protect our rights.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> The legal authority to surveil itself should be considered
| enough harm in my opinion._
|
| While I'm sympathetic to this viewpoint, one should be clear
| about the tradeoff. One of the government's primary duties is
| to keep citizens secure, from crime, terrorism, etc. That is
| the argument that is used to justify the legal authority to
| surveil. It's not enough to just say "protect our rights"--
| the whole point is that there is a _tradeoff_ of rights.
| Protecting you against crime and terrorism is _also_
| protecting your rights--your right to life, liberty, and
| pursuit of happiness, if nothing else. So one can 't just say
| "no surveillance" and leave it at that; one has to make a
| case for why the existing tradeoff of rights is the wrong one
| and should be changed.
|
| Also on the subject of rights, the US Bill Rights recognizes
| the need for things like surveillance, searches, seizures,
| etc. That's why the Fourth Amendment doesn't say "no
| surveillance, period". It just requires that there is a
| warrant that specifies particular information. So if the
| proper tradeoff is what the Fourth Amendment describes,
| that's not "no surveillance". It's just stopping the abuses
| of the warrant process.
| _heimdall wrote:
| I'm not proposing that we should go full absolutist and
| also revoke the power for law enforcement to request court-
| approved warrants that clearly outline what they need to
| investigate and why.
|
| The laws up for discussion in this thread are largely there
| to give the FBI a backdoor to surveil the general public
| without requesting a warrant with clear details on what
| they're looking for and where they can look.
|
| Personally I have a much higher bar than most and think
| view the tradeoffs of privacy invasion rarely worth it,
| though I also don't expect our government to protect me in
| any meaningful way and would rather depend on my fellow
| citizens for that instead. There's a whole discussion there
| related to the surveillance and military state we live in
| today, but that probably veers way to far off topic.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> The laws up for discussion in this thread are largely
| there to give the FBI a backdoor to surveil the general
| public without requesting a warrant with clear details on
| what they 're looking for and where they can look._
|
| Yes, if we restrict discussion to warrantless
| surveillance then I think the restrictions ought to be
| much tighter.
|
| _> I also don 't expect our government to protect me in
| any meaningful way and would rather depend on my fellow
| citizens for that instead.
|
| In some respects this is already part of our legal
| framework: for example, there have been multiple court
| rulings at multiple levels that the police do not have a
| duty to protect individual citizens from crime.
|
| However, the public policies adopted by the government
| regarding crime can have a huge effect on overall crime
| rates, which in turn affects how much you _need* a means
| of protection other than the government's overall police
| powers. This is more a matter of state and local
| governments than federal, but even here federal policies
| have an effect.
|
| Also, I didn't limit government protection to police vs.
| ordinary crime. Government also has responsibility for
| national defense, border control, gathering intelligence
| abroad, preventing terrorism, etc.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| _How can we find real harms to win this fight? Or how can we
| get people to care?_
|
| Once issue is that people have to understand that even if you
| have nothing to hide, it doesn't matter. This level of
| surveillance is all about parallel construction. It's not meant
| to catch you in the act of doing something illegal, it's meant
| to give the government the tools they need to build (fabricate,
| even) a case against anyone they decide to target.
|
| Another issue is the media, and how they will pretty much
| always toe the government line when it comes to law
| enforcement. Edward Snowden and other whistleblowers are way
| too easily painted an enemy of the state.
|
| In general, people won't care until it affects them, and in all
| honesty, this likely won't.
| ghostpepper wrote:
| To play devil's advocate, if good internal controls are
| preventing abuse, why start with the foregone conclusion that
| there must exist "real harms" to find?
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Because the FBI has pinky promised to develop those and has
| consistently failed with violations continuing. There's also
| plenty of technical reasons why "good internal controls" are
| a myth. For example, the CIA and NSA could help out the FBI
| by secretly trawling through that database bypassing all
| "controls" using exploits / back doors and sending tips from
| "confidential sources" and parallel reconstruction being used
| to prosecute.
|
| Btw we also have similar problems with normal police officers
| misusing records to spy on spouses and whatnot and
| occasionally we find out about and the department promises
| stricter controls and reforms and round we go the merry go
| round.
| davotoula wrote:
| Spoiler: no.
| solardev wrote:
| "Today, corrupt politicians put on another dog and pony show
| while continuing business as usual. Is our democracy secretly a
| farce? Details at 11."
| Covzire wrote:
| It's "our" democracy, not our democracy it seems.
| vGPU wrote:
| The difference between a representative and a true democracy.
| xkekjrktllss wrote:
| A representative democracy would require at least some
| politicians representing working cutizens.
| howmayiannoyyou wrote:
| No. We cannot have our cake and eat it too.
|
| We cannot have unprotected, open borders for decades, and then
| expect to identify and track foreign internal threats AND not
| provide the USGOV the means to detect and surveil.
|
| We cannot assume that because we're an HN regular who thinks
| power corrupts (it certainly does) the cost of that corruption
| is greater than what we pay if/when a foreign adversary acts
| against the US.
|
| We simply cannot fulfill our obligations to our citizens or our
| allies if we cannot protect our home.
|
| We cannot have it all. Welcome to the ugly real world.
| kingkawn wrote:
| So lets give up the "destructive expansionist ambitions lead
| to global threats" part
| stronglikedan wrote:
| No. We can. Protect the citizens' rights. Detect and surveil
| non-citizens as a result of open borders all they want, but
| don't trample on the rights of the citizens in the name of
| safety.
| vGPU wrote:
| Ok, so let's deport everyone who came in through said
| unprotected open borders. That's literally why borders exist.
| To keep foreign threats... foreign.
| daveguy wrote:
| Weird how the most prominent example of terrorism on
| American soil from foreign agents was perpetrated with
| completely legal non-land-border penetration. Seems like we
| have locals lot more dangerous than anyone coming through
| the land border with Mexico to work or seek asylum in the
| US. Actual foreign terrorists just aren't as ignorant as
| you want them to be.
| seanw444 wrote:
| Okay so your solution is: open borders and heavier
| government surveillance to balance it? Fantastic.
| Levitz wrote:
| So what? Sorry but this is not even a bad argument, it's
| just not an argument at all. Most shootings are not in
| schools, so school shootings aren't a problem? Most drug
| addictions come from prescribed drugs, so heroin and
| fentanyl being sold on the street is fine?
| zdragnar wrote:
| In 2023, more than 160 people on the terror watch list
| have been caught illegally crossing US borders:
|
| https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-
| security/number-pe...
|
| Given that there are 600,000 who were observed entering
| but got away in 2023 alone, and more were likely crossing
| unobserved, there's very good odds that they are already
| here.
| electrondood wrote:
| Exactly, this "open borders" nonsense is a right-wing
| talking point, like "fiscal responsibility." It sounds
| great in TV interviews and speeches, but they
| mysteriously only trot out when there's a democrat in the
| Oval Office.
| ejb999 wrote:
| is that why the republican mayor of NYC is loudly
| sounding the alarm on this? my mistake, he is a democrat.
| electrondood wrote:
| Fun fact, "open borders" is a complete myth.
| ejb999 wrote:
| fun fact, no its not.
| SpaceL10n wrote:
| Fun fact, all those helicopters, horse patrols, infrared
| cameras, drones, aid groups, and vigilantes are fake
| news. Hacker news is better than this, everyone.
| tosstoyevsky wrote:
| Good point.
| gorwell wrote:
| Complete myth is a stretch isn't it? "closed border"
| doesn't pass the sniff test either.
| ink_13 wrote:
| Those are not the only choices. A border can be
| controlled.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| Well, our borders might be legally closed, but with 2.2
| million people illegally crossing them from the southern
| border per year, that is the entire population of Houston,
| maybe it's fair to say they're closed but effectively open.
| Coupled with the fact that if you're caught, you can just
| say you're claiming asylum and you get to stay.
| ink_13 wrote:
| They are not "legally closed", they are controlled. A
| closed border permits no crossings, which is clearly not
| the state of reality.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| The borders are legally closed everywhere except
| designated border crossings.
| solardev wrote:
| "Borders with a lot of CVEs?"
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Or, everyone could get off their asses and carry their weight
| as a citizen in a democracy.
|
| Nihilistic dismissal of the right to vote is lazy.
|
| Nobody said upholding your rights was going to be _easy_.
| Organization, affiliation, communication all take work.
|
| Get involved in primaries, for either party! Fewer voters and
| even more power there.
|
| Yard signs are cheap. Make your own. Make this an issue.
|
| Or, if you need to hear it in Tom Hanks' voice:
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-c_ctZ4lUCk
| PKop wrote:
| And belief that the masses organizing and voting can have
| power over Leviathan and its bureaucrats is delusional. They
| just keep pushing these policies and power grabs until they
| go through, and/or lie about the components of them. There's
| no practical check on deep state power such as this in
| today's so-called-democracy.
|
| You would need some counter-elite faction that already has
| foothold on power to oppose current power structure.
| Revolutions (and that's what is necessary to change current
| policies) never come from the bottom up.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| I don't think that American electoral systems allow proper
| accountability of political leaders. That isn't a criticism
| of democracy, it's a criticism of a two-party system with
| no ability for change from the outside.
| psychlops wrote:
| Decades of a democracy that worked has created generations of
| complacent people who do not participate, follow the rules,
| and expect things to continue to work out as they always
| have. I highly doubt anything except absence of democracy
| will change this perception.
| dancemethis wrote:
| US? Stop spying?
|
| That's a textbook case of "lol. lmao even", if I've ever seen
| one.
| trinsic2 wrote:
| Pay careful attention to who is not on that list that opposes
| section 702. Microsoft, Google and Apple. If they really cared
| about privacy on their platforms, they would have made that known
| at some point before this vote.
| x86x87 wrote:
| Microsoft, Google, Apple, etc are also putting up a spectacular
| dog and pony show in order to convince you they carr about
| privacy. They don't.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| this is tempting but, I think the answer is complicated. You
| happened to list them in the order of some spectrum !
| "surveillance capitalism" seeps out like sewage, but two of
| those companies are older than the Internet.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| Betteridge's law of headlines: _any headline that ends in a
| question mark can be answered by the word "no"._
| vlugorilla wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines#...
| numeromancer wrote:
| Worsidge's headline:
|
| "Can this headline be answered by the word 'no'?"
| norir wrote:
| Headline: Is Betteridge's law of headlines correct?
| vGPU wrote:
| Does the vote really matter? Will the FBI actually stop their
| unconstitutional actions?
|
| Hint:
|
| No.
| sargun wrote:
| I hope that the Government Surveillance Transparency act gets
| some legs. See: https://www.wyden.senate.gov/news/press-
| releases/wyden-daine...
|
| At least in turn, we could get a level of insight into how much
| these warrants are used, and keep those in power accountable.
| seanw444 wrote:
| The FBI director straight up admits that they violate the 4th
| amendment routinely, and then begs Congress to not ruin their
| precious workaround. And yet they will face no punishment
| whatsoever.
|
| Like another commenter said, many people were probably
| unconstitutionally charged via parallel construction thanks to
| this crap.
| raincom wrote:
| FBI director in his exchange with Senator Lee [1] claims this :
| the case law shows that 702 doesn't violate 4A. However, Sen
| Lee retorts back with 'FISA court doesn't even given standing
| to people who wants to litigate this'. So, Secret courts, lack
| of standing is what the relevant case law boils down to: if
| people are not permitted to litigate, no case law is
| established or challenged.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePBysxMUKoI
| seanw444 wrote:
| Probably some ridiculous claim that "at the time of the
| founding, they had no way of knowing how readily accessible
| data would be." Surely, finding 100x the information with
| 1/100th the effort compared to then must be 4A-compliant.
| ClarityJones wrote:
| The problem with parallel construction is that it implies the
| defendant is guilty. However, when individuals have secretly
| accessed the source of evidence, there is a potential that they
| planted / altered the evidence that they subsequently "find"
| through a parallel construction. The prosecution inevitably
| then suggests that the defendant had sole custody of the
| resources (which is no longer true) and that anything found
| there must be theirs.
| phpisthebest wrote:
| What ever protections the constitution may have provided in the
| past have been eroded away to nothing starting with the Massive
| Expansion of the federal government powers from the Wickard
| case, everything is down hill from that time period.
|
| We no longer have a Government subservient to the people, we
| have a people subservient to an unelected bureaucracy.
|
| Free Speech is the next target and it is well on it way to
| erroding that last freedom using code words of "mis
| Information", "Hate Speech", "Authoritative sources" and the
| like
| TriangleEdge wrote:
| As an engineer, what I want to see is metrics.
|
| Bar charts for events the surveillance program helped with:
|
| y = count of terrorist plots stopped, x = time bucket
|
| y = cost of surveillance programs, x = time bucket
|
| y = count of petty crimes caught, x = time bucket
|
| y = count of total analyst caught abusing power, x = time bucket
|
| y = count of total Americans profiles, x = time bucket
|
| y = count of total world wide profiles, x = time bucket
|
| y = count of illegal immigration caught, x = time bucket
| geodel wrote:
| I am pretty sure if one wants metrics one will get _metrics_.
| Law enforcement, like corporate management nowadays, is big on
| metrics.
|
| After all, the big enshittification of internet which is
| popular topic here is based on metrics of ad networks
| effectiveness.
| Minor49er wrote:
| What's to stop them from just making up numbers?
| tenacious_tuna wrote:
| this was a plot point of The Wire, where the mayor ran on a
| campaign of reducing murders. The murder rate dropped--but a
| zillion other stats came up, because the officers were
| fudging the classifications of the crimes to try and achieve
| the metric goal.
|
| Fictional, but it makes a poignant point about needing to
| deeply understand how metrics are collected and recorded to
| be confident in the conclusions drawn from them.
| phpisthebest wrote:
| Like Idiotacracy, I believe the Wire is more Truth than
| fiction
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| They already do. Entrapment then reclaim they prevented a
| threat _they came up with_. Claim on a daily basis that
| they've prevented "hundreds" of 9 /11 equivalents and no one
| presses for proof. Or when a new reporter that doesn't know
| the rules _does_ ask for proof, they get "classified for
| national security reasons."
|
| So, no. Please don't give me BS charts and graphs to make it
| easier for fed-apologists to point and play security theater.
| geodel wrote:
| Absolutely.
|
| Their metrics generating and promoting departments will
| have field day with this. Endless reports, case studies
| etc, a whole industry will pop up gorging on tax payer
| dollars for this "metrics" task.
| raincom wrote:
| Because of metrics, easy tasks in scrum/agile are transformed
| into monstrous little tasks, spanning five months. Same thing
| with law enforcement: they find some mentally deranged person
| in KS, lays a trap to ensnare him in terrorism charges. Yes,
| 'our dragnet' captured this many number of terrorists (that is,
| y).
| psunavy03 wrote:
| This is not how Scrum, Agile, or metrics work. Incompetent
| management doesn't need to be generalized into some sort of
| indictment of things beyond incompetent management.
| raincom wrote:
| That's how every response to this sort of criticism: when
| people criticize capitalism, response is "that's not a true
| capitalism". When people criticize policies of communist
| regimes, defenders of communism say that these regimes are
| not instances of real communism. When majority instances
| are not supposedly true instances of whatever-is-in-
| dispute, then one should stop coming up with it-is-not-
| true-X.
| efsavage wrote:
| While I'm always in favor of accountability and transparency,
| measuring success by counting things that _didn 't_ happen is
| very difficult even under the most benign circumstances. Mix in
| politics and careers and it's almost certainly guaranteed to
| misrepresent the goals and work being done.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| The FBI has become little more than the enforcement arm of the
| organized white-collar crime system run out of Wall Street
| offices with the active support of the White House and the
| Congress.
|
| This is why, despite the FBI's sweeping surveillance powers, no
| coordinated prosecution targeting the subprime mortgage
| fraudsters who brought down the economy in 2008-2009 was
| conducted - instead, they were all bailed out with taxpayer
| dollars in a coordinated Republican-Democrat left-right
| operation. In contrast, little Iceland put 39 of its top bankers
| in jail for their role in that event.
|
| It's true that an entity like the FBI is needed to police white-
| collar crime, because otherwise corporate conflicts over market
| share etc. would soon escalate into violent conflict (e.g.
| Mexican drug cartels, Prohibition-era alcohol distribution gangs,
| etc.), but they've become an organization that does more to
| protect the extremely wealthy white-collar criminals from
| prosecution than to gather evidence that would put them in jail.
| The fact that top-tier FBI officials so often 'retire' to
| lucrative private positions in Wall Street firms should serve as
| solid evidence that the organization is corrupt.
|
| As far as why they want to retain warrantless surveillance powers
| that don't require them to go before a judge and leave any kind
| of evidenciary record in support of that surveillance, well,
| would STASI have wanted to do that in East Germany, either?
| zirgs wrote:
| Meanwhile it is completely legal for the US alphabet boys to spy
| on foreigners. They don't need any warrants or anything like
| that.
|
| If you're living in the West then you're in American jurisdiction
| for all intents and purposes - if they are interested in you -
| they will get you. And you have no rights or protections
| whatsoever. Your own government won't protect you.
|
| My country has extradited our own citizens to the USA before and
| will do that again.
|
| It really sucks that there's no second democratic pole. The only
| alternative to this is to live in an authoritarian country like
| Russia or China where you have even fewer rights and freedoms.
| Coder1996 wrote:
| Paranoid government will do what paranoid government does. They
| jump on any improbable event to justify the paranoia.
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