Forget PRISM, the recent NSA leaks are plain: Digital privacy doesn’t exist | Hacker News Reader

Forget PRISM, the recent NSA leaks are plain: Digital privacy doesn’t exist

thenextweb.com

88 pointsgreyman15 comments

Well, at least people are belatedly realizing this, even if the government had to be the boogeyman that hackers/Facebook/Google/malicious ISPs/Mallory were not.

I was thinking about this same thing today.

I think the reason the government "won out" over all the other abuses is that they are able to collect data willy-nilly from all the other corporations. So whatever problems you might have with FB privacy, it's nothing with the abuses involved with taking the problems of 50 providers and adding them all together. Then storing the data forever.

The government also "wins out" because it reserves the sole power to take your life, liberty, and possessions from you.

The government is supposed to protect you from others trying to take these things and stop you from taking these things from others. It needs certain limited powers to do that. But without severe checks, those powers are certain to be abused.

Combine that power with total information, and it's almost certain to result in abuses and authoritarianism. While it's a thought many might not have at the tip of their tongues, I think most people realize that, due to the nature of power, it's extremely risky for the agent with all the power to also have all the information.

The government has always been able to do that though, albeit with a warrant.

Of course, a warrant is exactly what was needed for companies to hand over information even on non-U.S. citizens into NSA's Prism system in the first place.

Whatever else you might say about recorded phone calls and emails, Prism itself was shown to require the company to buy off on the logic used in the NSA NSL in order to obtain data, so Prism was hardly the problem people made it out to be.

In fact, a little itty bitty tweak here and there and Prism would apply directly to the FBI, who could then use it for normal warrant compliance for U.S. citizens. All the data just sitting there in their pretty little cloud silos, and pretty little hosted email solutions begging you to use IMAP, just waiting for the government to get a warrant (or not, unless ECPA gets revised). It would all be completely legal, and that problem has been around in some form for decades now.

Collecting information prior to the delivery of a warrant is unreasonably invasive. If you extend the reasoning then they could post a video camera in your home, filming everything you do, and then get a warrant to obtain the material at any point in the future. Our digital homes should have the same safeguards in place that our physical homes have: nobody has access before a warrant, and with a warrant they can only find out what's there now, not what's been there in the past.

Are you referring to Prism or the "beam splitting"?

Prism sends over data that was already generated; it's not the government's fault that the company bothered to generate it but if they get a warrant why should they pretend like it didn't exist? I'm not sure how you would even begin to investigate things like 9/11 if you weren't allowed to collect evidence from actions that occurred before the crime came to the attention of the government.

If you're talking about beam-splitting then, well, I see your argument. But that's not what I was talking about in my parent comment.

I never been to the US, but I would say it is a matter of which type of agency we are talking about.

I pretty much doubt secret services in most countries would need any kind of warrant to do whatever they want.

It's a bit ironic that the same technological "inevitabilities" that make piracy possible and DRM hard are the ones which make spying possible and privacy hard. Personally, I don't think either are inevitable (regulation is the answer to both), but if you think one is inevitable, you should think that the other is, too.

Just curious, are you implying that piracy is a flaw in the system that we must try and get rid of? And also implying that regulation might solve it?

While the first is a matter of opinion, I must disagree with the latter. Laws have tried and failed to curb piracy for as long as piracy has been possible. Unless that's not what you meant?

As the article made clear, the regulation already exists in the form of the Forth Amendment. Speaking of tradeoffs between privacy and security seems odd without reference to our prior adoption of the Bill of Rights and without a call for its repeal.

Regulation isn't just law. It's also law enforcement.

Regulation is a law written by people you don't get a chance to elect.

It didn't exist in the first place, but people pretend that it exists, as long as different parts of our lives are stored in different companies (facebook for fun, gmail for work, phone companies for personal etc). We considered that in the name of competition this data would not end in a single silo in the end. Little did we know

Real privacy doesn't exist. It's also a legal fiction. People assumed the legal fiction of online privacy existed because they fear that big baby government will fuck over innocents or people that are not a real threat to society. Their fears came true.

It is funny to see how the internet "folks" concentrate on the internet/virtual data being collected and analysed. What about all the real world interactions driving? walking? shopping? talking in public places? The (inter)banking traffic?

Scanning the license plates of ALL cars moving through New York? Reconstructing their paths? Why not, right? That's probably even less raw data that the facebook chit-chat.

I believe (no way to "know") that those infrastructures are in place and working 24/7.

Misused? Seldom. A huge problem as any large data/info store. For sure.

The "balance" between utility and the price tho pay for it for us all ... in the end that is politics. About to change?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com