Comment by fauigerzigerk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fauigerzigerk | Hacker News Reader

"Or to put it another way, who the hell needs “direct access” or “back doors” when companies are building “secure portals” for them instead?"

The extent of his confusion is breathtaking. Apparently very few people get what this is all about. The real question is this:

Does the government (a) mine content and/or metadata in these service providers' databases for suspect activity, or (b) can it only access specific accounts after naming the account holder?

What happened at Verizon is (a). Page and Zuckerberg say it's not what happens at Google and Facebook.

What Page and Zuckerberg meant when they were talking about "scale" is that the government cannot mine their databases for suspects. Not directly, not indirectly, not through a secure portal or in any other way.

The government can and does make requests (lots of them) to have specific accounts opened, and what Google/Facebook apparently do is to make that process technically more efficient via a secure portal.

I agree, this is the question. And the answer is "both". From the NY Times article:

> FISA orders can range from inquiries about specific people to a broad sweep for intelligence, like logs of certain search terms, lawyers who work with the orders said. There were 1,856 such requests last year, an increase of 6 percent from the year before.

Imagine a 2x2 matrix of intelligence requests, with one side being "narrow" vs "broad" and the other being "short" vs "long" duration. Verizon was long and broad, the worst kind.

The tech companies are trying to imply that they were short and narrow, at least most of the time, and the journalists are trying to imply that they were long and broad, but never come out and say it because they have no evidence. If we had better transparency about FISA, we could answer this question ourselves. Just knowing how many requests were for individual user's data would be extremely helpful.

I think the "real question" is whether people are okay with the government being capable of retrieving personal information that they thought was private. Public outrage is justified even if the nuance is not understood.

Moreover if the government is doing dragnet surveillance on telephone records it is only a matter of time before they expand the program to tech providers even if it hasn't already.

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