David Miranda, schedule 7 and the danger that all reporters now face | Hacker News Reader

David Miranda, schedule 7 and the danger that all reporters now face

theguardian.com

681 pointsr0h1n152 comments

Jaw: on floor.

The mood toughened just over a month ago, when I received a phone call from the centre of government telling me: "You've had your fun. Now we want the stuff back." There followed further meetings with shadowy Whitehall figures. The demand was the same: hand the Snowden material back or destroy it. I explained that we could not research and report on this subject if we complied with this request. The man from Whitehall looked mystified. "You've had your debate. There's no need to write any more."

"You've had your fun. [...]"

That line is particularly infuriating.

in some way it is the key to understanding the situation - the government people live in another world, and things look differently from their perspective. Like it is not a useful reporting and public debate about government's abuse of power, it is a fun some pests have at the government expense. It is a reality distortion field of Power.

Thank you. This is an important point, and one that I haven't seen nearly enough of on HN lately. It is very difficult to overstate the extent to which "government people" live in a bubble. In many ways, they are working from an entirely different set of first principles than those used by most of the HN-reading world. As such, it is difficult for "us" to understand why "they" do what they do, and very easy for us to come up with our own (usually incorrect, or at the very least, incomplete) explanations for their behavior.

Of course, the converse is generally true: the laughably incorrect explanations that "government people" always seem to come up with for "our" behavior often are the result of them interpreting events, statements, etc. through their lens- a lens informed by a completely different set of optical principles than the ones that we are used to using (to abuse the figure of speech a little bit).

In other words, when you read or hear about a "government person" doing or saying something head-deskingly stupid, the odds are very good that the statement or action made perfect sense in the context of that government person's world. It's not that they're (necessarily) stupid, or even ignorant- just that they're not living in our world, and so have dramatically different motivations, constraints, first principles, etc. etc. Their actions may be perfectly follow an internal logic- but it's not our logic, and so we have a hard time making sense of it.

And all of this goes double or triple when we're talking about military or IC people. The classified nature of their work, with its attendant organizational, cultural, technical, political, and psychological distortions, makes their "bubble" look more like a bathysphere.

I remember having a conversation in a pub with a junior Whitehall civil servant a number of years ago. Only half jokingly, he quipped that "of course the civil service runs the country", noting the relative powerlessness of parliament.

Interestingly enough, the more senior (and experienced) civil servants that I have had the opportunity to talk to have been very careful to emphasise that the department answers to the minister.

Of course, the relationship between the civil service, ministers and the media is an unnatural, strained and stressful one -- I do not envy any of these parties, although I think that the media has the most (effective) power out of these three, given the proportion of central government activity (60-70%?) that is driven by whatever happened to be in the headlines that week.

Well to a large extent the civil service is meant to "run the country". The political leadership is meant to set the rules and directions, but they don't do the day to day grunt-work, and the civil service provides the continuity between governments and a lot of what they do indeed does span different governments without much interference from the political leadership.

So his "joke" might have been a sinister indication that they are sidestepping political control, or just pointing out the realities of who does the actual work.

I suspect that he was just pointing out the realities of who does the actual work, but making a joke from the double meaning of the phrase "run the country".

This is useful for trying to understand other people. You should always try to figure out how/why a person came to their particular worldview.

But in a government "of the people, by the people, for the people", it is The People who have final say.

(edit: yes, I am aware that this particular incident happened in England, not the U.S....)

They wield and apply real force [in the wide sense - from crude violence to making citizens pay taxes, etc..] to the real people outside. The only known practical approach here the human race has so far come up with is to have their application of force be a subject to the strictest formal control possible. Unfortunately, we see erosion of such control, and unfortunately there is no reversal of the trend on the horizon...

Watching "Battlestar Galactica", 3rd season beginning. Cylons trying to live peacefully with humans they occupied on New Caprica. "Either we increase control or we lose control" ...

Is the golden wall.[1]

It isn't power, it is the illusion of power and the attempt to keep it up that corrupts.

Is all the lies you have to tell people about the things you claim to control and all the fakes you have to pull all the fucking time, just to make people think that you genuinely have some clue about what is going on so that you can retain authority.

But you never do.

No one can.

For all the technology in the world, nobody can do more than the amount of time they have and their ability to comprehend, and after a while the amount of information becomes a hindrance and you wish you could plug the flow, and you would in a moment, apart from the fact that if people thought you were not watching it for even a second, forever trapped in watching it with far too much to understand, that you wouldn't know what was going on and you can never let that happen.

[1] I nicked this phrase from Harry Mulisch, from his book "The Discovery of Heaven". Is a good book.

Mmm. Or rather, it's all fun to them being as they make the rules and can never ultimately lose the game. They seem to forget that for the rest of us it's not quite so discretionary.

It will indeed, sadly turn out to be the truth unless the reporting on Snowden's material turns to change current policy - something that is not at all certain.

Unless I'm misinterpreting this, those are paraphrases and not quotes. There's no feasible reason to believe a government official is overtly villainous or foolish enough to say something like "You've had your fun."

Remember that the people executing these commands (civil servants) are probably well aware of just how absurd and futile they are, and likely to make that clear with dark humour. On the destruction of the hard drives:

The man was unmoved. And so one of the more bizarre moments in the Guardian's long history occurred – with two GCHQ security experts overseeing the destruction of hard drives in the Guardian's basement just to make sure there was nothing in the mangled bits of metal which could possibly be of any interest to passing Chinese agents. "We can call off the black helicopters," joked one as we swept up the remains of a MacBook Pro.

This bleak humour is typical of British public servants, and not at all unlikely, e.g. on leaving office after 10 years, a treasury secretary for the Labour government left a note for his successor:

'I'm afraid to tell you there's no money left.'

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2010/may/17/liam-byrne-n...

These off-hand comments don't materially change the story any in my view - the important points are that the government insisted on shutting down reporting as much as possible, and destroying any materials in the newspaper's possession.

They visited a newspaper office to destroy evidence - that's the important point here.

It does sound exactly like the type of goading comment a government official would make to a journalist off the record.

All of this controversy aside, do you have any real reference point for what a conversation between a government official and a journalist sounds like, let alone a goading one at that?

Yes; take what happens at the local politics level, and amplify it up several orders of magnitude.

What a reporter puts in quotation marks is being represented as a direct quote. What's written out in the context of a sentence is a paraphrase or summary.

I received a phone call from the centre of government telling me: "You've had your fun. Now we want the stuff back."

Would be a direct quote.

The demand was the same: hand the Snowden material back or destroy it.

Would be a paraphrase.

Are you done spreading FUD yet?

I'm not quite sure the editor of one of the most important newspapers of record right now is into "paraphrasing"

There followed two meetings in which he demanded the return or destruction of all the material we were working on.

That is, by definition, paraphrasing the meeting. I'm not accusing Rusbridger of mischaracterizing the interaction, I'm clarifying that this is probably isn't a direct quote. Note that this is an op/ed.

I'm pretty sure it is a direct quote. He didn't say, 'he said something to the effect of' or something else. He just quoted the official directly, and in the same vein as what the previous commenter pointed out, you wouldn't expect the editor of one of most important newspapers in the world to not know how to use quotes.

That is, by definition, describing the meeting. Paraphrasing is when you say in other words, generally shorter ones, what somebody else said.

What's your evidence that it's not a direct quote? Aside, of course, from your personal disbelief that a government official would say something ridiculous.

Double quotes imply a direct quote, not paraphrasing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark.

Not sure about villanous, but I have yet to see an action for which government employee would be not foolish enough to do it. There was time, long ago, where I would say "this is too foolish, no government employee would ever do such thing" - and I was proven wrong so many times that I gave up and never would say such thing again. For example: can you imagine senior government employee would be so foolish as to blatantly lie to Congress while testifying, and knowing there are many people that know it is a lie? Yet it happened in the last year not once, but multiple time with multiple people. And, surprisingly enough, nothing happened. So maybe it's not them that they are foolish - maybe it's us that are foolish enough to tolerate them.

While twirling his nefarious mustache, no doubt.

EDIT: If you must downvote me, go ahead, but I'm not making a statement here. I'm joking. I think HN could use it these days.

I can well imagine that the quote is accurate, although it would have been said with a certain sense of dark humour and sympathy, not at all as unkindly and aggressive as it appears in print. As such, it fits in very well with the culture of the armed forces - particularly that of a senior NCO who has gone on to work for the Security Services. (And who is used to being given bonkers orders by his C.O.)

Is it just me it does anyone else feel like this is one of the most important articles posted in... decades?

The guardian is obviously put at grave risk for revealing that UK spooks have gone so far as to oversee destruction of inconvienient materials in the London office, threatening legal action if this material is not dropped.

I applaud the guardian for their bravery and excellence in reporting.

I grok a different subtext:

It's a journalist's job to know where the skeletons are buried, and where the escorts keep their address books. Journalists also have ready access to dictionaries, with which to clarify the meanings of words. Such words include "mutually", "assured" and "destruction".

Sadly the way US and UK are mishandling the whole thing can lead to a lot stuff leaked that could possibly cause real harm.

There is something truly entertaining about the insistence they smash the hard drives.

The number of computer-illiterate C-level assholes I have met all insist on applying analog world logic to their digital decision making. When you try to properly correct them for wasting their time or embarrassing themselves to end up on sites like HN, they lose it. I find it funny how badly such people in positions of government corporate power need to prove to themselves they have any recourse in contexts or fields where they are too stupid to find a proper solution to their own dilemma.

This is not entertaining (or, reading into subtext, absurd) at all. It is widely accepted that complete physical destruction of hard drives is required to avoid future forensic recovery, which is what Rusbridger is referring to when he mentions "passing Chinese agents."

He already made it clear that the data is replicated broadly, and so it is absurd, because physically destroying laptops only increases the desire to increase the integrity of the data. Increasing integrity against this sort of attack naturally compromises security, which means "passing Chinese agents" are more likely to have access to the data now.

If GCHQ wishes to have my laptop harddrive destroyed to destroy data (I don't know - maybe they don't like 8-bit chiptunes or something), all they'd achieve would be that I'd have to restore from my RAID mirror on my home server, the rsync'd third drive on my home server, or from my remote backup outside the UK.

Complete physical destruction of any one copy just indicates they're either clueless or assumes their adversary is entirely clueless.

Furthermore, my first reaction to a risk of harddrive destroying GCHQ goons would be to sign up to a few more online backup services, and hide another NAS somewhere under my floorboards and maybe get my mom outside the UK to host an external drive for me to mirror to.

In the Guardians case, the have multiple reporters on this case, have Greenwald in Brazil, as well as have provided data to Poitras in Berlin and to Washington Post, and doubtlessly they have other reporters outside the UK. In other words: Plenty of places to leave copies.

The question is whether it is about destruction of data or whether it is about intimidation and strong-arming.

If it is intimidation and strong-arming, it is also exceptionally ineffective.

The reaction at the Guardian presumably was something along the lines of total confusion. They'd made it clear they had copies. They'd made it clear the story could and would be reported from anywhere. And the only response these GCHQ goons could come up with was to smash a Macbook?

Unless someone at The Guardian are particularly sensitive Apple fans that might see their Macbook as an extension of themselves, it seems like a rather feeble attempt at intimidation.

That's what makes this so ridiculous. It's like some comedy sketch where some big burly sketchy guy comes over and "threatens" to push your pencils off your desk and drop your papers on the floor. I get images of Dupond and Dupont (Thomson and Thompson) from Tintin - a pair of bumbling buffoons.

It makes me kinda wish I had something to leak - if this is the UK government response, leaking would be fun for the whole family.

> They'd made it clear the story could and would be reported from anywhere. And the only response these GCHQ goons could come up with was to smash a Macbook?

When "the family" sends around Big Tony with a baseball bat to express their displeasure at an overheard disparaging remark from the restaurant owner regarding their operations on the sidewalk outside that his cctv recently picked up, do you think he's going to have the intelligence necessary to understand when he smashes the surveillance system that doesn't imply the evidence is actually gone?

The only difference in this scenario is that because it's a government actor people credit them with a surfeit of sense and a deficit of malice so try to make them understand the futility of their actions, whereas everyone already accepts such actions are useless vis a vis big tony and the family.

Consider this a frame correction; The state is actually much more foolish, malicious and incompetent than you think.

Almost certainly the latter. Which reminds me to think about ways to ensure the persistence of sensitive data that is important to the general public. Either way, I'm pretty sure there's a backup somewhere.

I think he should with a completely serious face comply, deliver the disk to them and then smash it with a sledgehammer right in front of their eyes.

Now of course he should have copies spread in multiple locations. But, hey, they just asked for the information to be returned and destroyed, just comply, very easy.

Sometimes it is worth taking pleasure laughing at the stupidity of those in power. That has to be exposed alongside malice and corruption.

Reminds me of the many times I emailed spreadsheet files to marketing, saying, "I need that back when you're done"

Generally they got it, but it took some of them a while.

Reminds me of the bad old days of locking VCS.

That's exactly what he did.

On that note, I think the rise of Bitcoin will be particularly interesting (assuming it keeps rising). Already it has been introduced before Congress, as a money laundering mechanism, no less. With nothing to smash, I wonder how they might deal with such a technology.

The thing I like about bitcoin is that it's just the first of many. It's not perfect, but the fact that there's a decentralized cryptocurrency with major traction out there makes me giddy for what the future holds. We're living in a cyberpunk world.

Easy, they'll order people to smash the Google instead of just hard drives. Problem solved.

Dang and blast it, foiled again by these fiendishly clever government chaps! Oh well lads better just get back to the slave mill the jig is up.

You could smash the drives that store individual's private keys, but beyond that - that's one of the benefits of a truly decentralized system.

Rusbridger responding to an AMA question on reddit a week or two ago: "Various difficulties have been put in our way (sorry to be vague, but this is an ongoing story). We’re working round them. And, yes, more to come....."

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1jf6uc/i_am_alan_rusbr...

I am not entirely certain about the history of how this happened, but in the US "the press" has taken on an unintended meaning - to refer to the fourth estate. So somehow we have created a privileged class of citizens who enjoy special constitutional protections. Originally, and rightfully, "the press" refers to the the machine used to print broadsheets (not the people who do the printing) - and so freedom of the press would probably be best interpreted as "freedom of anyone to use technology to disseminate information", which is one step beyond "freedom of speech".

That's an interesting view. Not to challenge you, but for my own edification, do you have sources for that?

Here are some references to get you started:

http://www.volokh.com/2012/01/02/the-original-and-traditiona...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._Federal_Elec... (Relevant part: The majority opinion viewed "freedom of the press" as an activity, applicable to all citizens or groups of citizens seeking to publish views).

However, before you even delve into the references, note that the First Amendment reads:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

IMHO, the expression freedom of speech, or of the press conveys the idea of freedom of the spoken word and freedom of the written word. Of course, I am not a lawyer, not an american, and also not a native english speaker, so my impressions on language have to be taken with a grain of salt.

A worthwhile read on the British history of this subject is "Power without Responsibility: Press, Broadcasting and the Internet in Britain"

My biggest take from this is that your notion that "freedom of anyone to use technology to disseminate information" as upheld by the printing establishment is significantly undermined by the business of printing itself - whereby the cost of disseminating information has increased consistently to make a truly "free" press completely prohibitive to the average person. The book goes into great detail about how this happened and the nature of how the internet effects this pattern. I would highly recommend this to anyone reading this thread.

Noted pamphletist Hilaire Belloc complained about exactly that in the early 20th century.

yeah but the average person doesn't need to disseminate information to maintain a free society. It's totally fine to have a community of news mavens that supplies most of the information. What is not okay is a process of accreditation, either state-run (or less worrisome) an independent process - that affords special roadblocks to get protected status.

Common Sense[1] might disagree with you on that one.

If we are talking about truly "disseminating information" I think we need to consider any form of broadcast or public proclamation and so as we approach the 50th anniversary of a certain speech[2] I would say the dissemination of information by an average person is absolutely fundamental to the checks and balances required to construct and maintain a free society. But therein lies the rub - just swamp the channels with noise and you raise the bar for actually transmitting a meaningful signal. This is what I was alluding to in my other comment about the way the internet has effected this age old pattern.

It's not clear what your second point is saying - it's okay to have only experts informing the public, but they cannot be afforded "special... protected status"? Like parliamentary privilege? "The fourth estate"? Freedom of speech? The right to protect their sources? I'm genuinely curious about what you mean, sorry if I've misunderstood completely.

[1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Sense_%28pamphlet%29] [2: MLK - August 28th 1963]

I'm taking a literal view of the word average. Anyone motivated to write a pamphlet is by definition no longer the average person, unless almost everyone else is doing so - i don't think we need 50% of the population writing pamphlets to maintain a free society.

As to your understanding of my second point: Exactly. I am saying it's okay for only experts to be informing the public, as long as there is no barrier to anyone becoming an expert. The only way to ensure there is no barrier to anyone becoming an expert is to have no special protected status. The only way to have no special protected status is for the protected status to be extended to everyone.

In summary: Everyone should have the protection of the freedom of the press, therefore, anyone can become an expert with all the attendant protections (without having to be special), but it's okay if not everyone is an expert, as long as anyone COULD be an expert.

"Bluntly, we did not have to do our reporting from London. Already most of the NSA stories were being reported and edited out of New York. And had it occurred to him that Greenwald lived in Brazil?"

So there is the answer for how the UK/US division was picked for the NSA stories.

This is an absolutely incredible article. Incredible because I both am shocked (yes, that's the right word this time) about the contents and incredible because I'd rather not have to believe it.

Apparently the government of the UK now equates journalism with terrorism and will use laws instigated to squash terrorism to squash the free press or at a minimum attempt to intimidate it and to disrupt communications between members of the press. On top of all that they have spooks that seem incapable of understanding the first thing about digital communications visit a newspaper to oversee the physical destruction of a computer holding data of an investigation in progress.

Incredible... what's next?

I just read about the harassment Laura Poitras has to go through each time she travels. And all that for just doing your job? It is becoming really hard to distinguish the good guys from the bad guys.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLJUocaDYw0 It's getting easier to distinguish.

"they didn't get to design our uniforms"

The Guardian shifted from a .co.uk to a .com very recently (~10-14 days ago), now showing content with a /uk subdomain. I wonder how much of that decision was based around the pressure they've been put under by the UK government. I imagine it's been a considered change for a while, but if you're starting to get concerned about journalistic freedom in the UK moving your reporting outside of it gives you a little wiggle room. Not sure how well it'll play long term, so we'll see.

It's sickening seeing how far the UK government is going to persecute journalists for exposing the surveillance state that's been created over the last decade. Pulling journalists partners in for questioning as a terrorist, forcing destruction of uncomfortable evidence? All in the name of protecting us from another round of terrorism, when really there's been significantly fewer terrorist incidents in the last 10 years than in the 10 before.

Edit: a quick traceroute shows that The Guardian seems to have it's servers for the .com outside the UK, and guardian.co.uk is/was located in London.

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on an encrypted, backed-up, redundantly distributed hard drive — forever.

With the NSA debate, I keep wondering if there is something people in positions in the government and security agencies know that makes them keep doing what they're doing.

I mean some of these people are really smart and understand how this spying can be abused. There must be something they know that makes them build or support these programs.

I had a similar thought, in 2003, when the US invaded Iraq. At the time, I was a bit of a UN nerd, and I had been following the weapons inspector reports and the Security Council debates. I was angry at how belligerent the Bush administration was getting, given that the publicly available evidence did not corroborate their claims that we might wake up to a "mushroom cloud". Iraq was maybe dragging its feet, but the weapons inspectors all agreed that inspections were working and should continue.

When the the US invaded Iraq, I started to doubt my own firmly held beliefs. Did they possess some classified evidence that I did not? Going to war without the authorization of the Security Council was such a grave breach of precedent and international law that I didn't believe the Bush administration would take such a drastic action if they didn't fully expect to find WMDs.

It turns out they didn't secretly have reliable information the rest of us didn't. They were blinded by conviction and ideology.

I'm sure these people in government and at the intelligence agencies truly believe these programs are vital to protect the US from terrorism. They know spying can be abused, but in their minds any abuse is unintentional and minor relative to the purported benefits of spying on terrorists.

> It turns out they didn't secretly have reliable information

And more to the point, they knew exactly what their information was worth. A document known as the "Downing Street Memo" is pretty blunt on that: "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." (From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downing_Street_memo , http://downingstreetmemo.com/memos.html)

We're not talking about any random document either. It was, in effect, the executive summary of the pre-Iraq war situation, given to the prime minister of UK by his private secretary.

> It turns out they didn't secretly have reliable information the rest of us didn't. They were blinded by conviction and ideology.

They really, really wanted to invade Iraq. It never made any sense from the rhetoric alone. Yes there were true believers, yes there were the propagandized officials and newsmen and opinion makers, a mad fervence of sorts. It never made any sense, and yet it was sure to happen, and what for? Why spite ourselves so?

I don't know why, but I do know at the core whatever the reason it was coolly rational, strategic, and not good.

>I mean some of these people are really smart and understand how this spying can be abused. There must be something they know that makes them build or support these programs.

just look at the recent 100 years of human history - good and smart people can perpetrate awful things if they suitably organized and informed. "Just doing my job", "just carrying out the orders", etc... In 21st century in the world's most progressive country, government employees and contractors were torturing other people just because some government lawyer wrote a memo saying it is a good thing.

They build it because they can and they are told to. First, they are payed well to STFU, ethics vs. money. Second, if they do speak up they'll just be replaced. Third, if they are replaced, they are legally bound that they cannot speak about it.

So why bother fighting against the current? Someone somewhere must've determined it's legal... right?

Snowden is pretty chilling. Doing the right thing and bring up a major issue will cost you everything other than your life. I'd like to think I'd do the same but I just don't know.

That is why I have a great deal of respect for Mr. Snowden. He did something that was very difficult to do all the while KNOWING the consequences of it and far deeper and better then any of us do now.

> I mean some of these people are really smart and understand how this spying can be abused. There must be something they know that makes them build or support these programs.

Governments and security agencies want the Social Graph -- in detail, and, if possible, in real-time. This has become one of their top strategic priorities.

There is no legitimate "use" of these programs that would stand in contrast to what you call their "abuse".

I respectfully disagree. Most of the people doing this do it not to be evil, but because they genuinely believe that their mandate to "protect the country" from ${bad_things} (terrorists, porn, etc) is _more_important_ and valuable than the rights or freedoms which they tread on. That is the core of the debate: finding out when/whether it is OK to do that.

This. We won't get anywhere if we imagine that these programs are instigated by moustache-twirling villains bent on harvesting our personal data. In all likelihood, everyone involved believes that they are acting for the best. The real threat is a slow shift in the expectations of privacy.

Sure, it's the belief that the rulers can create a rational society through technical means, and it's been the dominant idea of the past century. And time after time, their pet theories of the day are undermined by the unintended consequences of meeting reality.

Well, I think part of it can be a question of whether you think that the government is evil or stupid. A simple way of thinking about it is asking whether the government uses information to make decisions or just to justify them.

Goverment == Evil ------------------

Before PRISM:

Bob: "Hey, Bill, I'm feeling bored tonight. Want to go hit Paul Graham with a crowbar until he confesses to terrorism?"

Bill: "Sounds fun, Bob, but we don't have anything on him. Let's just sit on our butts and collect a paycheck for doing nothing."

After PRISM:

Bob: "Hey, Bill, I'm feeling bored tonight. Want to go hit Paul Graham with a crowbar?"

Bill: "Sounds fun, Bob. Hey, it looks like he ate at a restaurant whose owner gave to an animal rights group whose mailing list sent an update message to a teenager who might be connected to ALF. I'll go get the crowbar."

Goverment == Stupid -------------------

Before PRISM:

Bob: "Hey, Bill, I'm feeling bored tonight. Want to go hit Paul Graham with a crowbar until she confesses to terrorism?"

Bill: "Good thinking, Bob. Paul Graham is a woman programmer."

Bob: "And all women programmers are terrorists."

Bill: "So Paul Graham is a terrorist. I'll go get the crowbar"

After PRISM:

Bob: "Hey, Bill, I'm feeling bored tonight. Want to go hit Paul Graham with a crowbar until she confesses to terrorism?"

Bill: "Good thinking, Bob. Except PRISM is saying that female programmers have a 95% chance of not being terrorists. Also, there's a 65% chance that Paul Graham is male. Paul Graham might not actually be a terrorist"

Bob: "No shit? Well, that would have been embarrassing. Let's just sit on our butts and collect a paycheck for doing nothing."

-------------------

Clearly this is all a terrible caricature and the government contains a mix of stupid and evil. However, if you believe that the government is mostly stupid, then programs like this will increase the government's intelligence and decrease atrocities. On the other hand, if the government is more evil than stupid, keeping information out of the government's hands is the best course of action. Well, the best course of action in either case is to just take away Bill's crowbar, but that discussion sidesteps the entire privacy debate.

No it's more like:

[Secret impersonal machine-learning algorithm follows links on social networks, private phone calls, and financial transactions and decides you should be put on the "threat" list and you (and potentially your friends) are continually surveilled and treated with extreme negative prejudice in every interaction with public servants. You attempt to complain and learn of the evidence against you, but you are stonewalled by official denials and national security.]

> that makes them keep doing what they're doing.

For many of them, the paycheck is probably motivation enough. IT subcontracting from governments and security agencies can be quite lucrative.

I think the need for an enemy can't be understated for some people and some organisations. One of the upper comments here states:

> It is very difficult to overstate the extent to which "government people" live in a bubble.

I completely agree and I would add that a large part of that bubble - particularly for many military/intelligence folk - is the 'them and us' or perhaps more accurately 'them vs us' paradigm. People in these professions tend to see the world in a very black and white view. In my country at least, some of our intelligence agencies have a long history of being staffed by people with a fairly fundamental religious background. So when this kind of black and white, "them vs us", religious or quasi-religious (and quite likely racist) view is applied to national security, matters of immigration and so on, the result is pretty predictable IMO. Many of these people truly live in a different world than I do, one that harks back all the way to attitudes that were forged during the events of WWII and before.

Not to say that everyone involved on a government's side is blinded by dogma, but I believe enough of them are (in certain spheres) to keep the culture alive.

This has occured to me too. Is there some extra dimension to all this that we cannot see? However I dont think its necessary to explain events.

"If we have to. That's what makes us special. No more red tape. No more getting the bad guys caught in our sights then watching them escape while we wait for someone in Washington to issue the order. Oh, come on. You've seen the raw intel, Pam. You know how real the danger is. We need these programs now."

I don't know either, but I do wonder if it could be to do with this: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/07/money-nsa-vote/

They know the taste of power.

The justifications have been flogged to death in the open literature for decades: control of special nuclear materials, attacks on vulnerable infrastructure, espionage, sabotage, etc.

There is a bizarre jump in this story. How did they go from phone calls and meetings to incinerating MacBooks?

(Obviously, as a journalist, you need to start recording these conversations and publishing names. There can be no privacy for government employees.)

The modern equivalent of burning books?

Fahrenheit 4566: The temperature at which your MacBook Pro's aluminum casing boils.

where they burn macbooks, they will ultimately burn people also

In the comments Rudsbridger, in all sincerity, is asking why a newspaper should have fought a government request to destroy source material.

I mean this is the strongest position the Guardian could have challenged the government from: No risk to the story, public visibility, government has nothing to directly gain from having the material destroyed. What is being fought over is purely principle and a demonstration of obedience: Gov asks and Guardian rolls over.

I presume we can expect the Guardian to routinely delete source material upon gov request if it hasn't been doing so already?

Or is it just complying because of the stupidity of the request? Because nothing was actually lost and nothing was deleted as such. A copy got wrecked, so what?

Both parties knew there were copies elsewhere. The act was a demonstration of compliance which has reinforced a relationship of subservience to the government.

I think I would have complied just because I'd want to see just how far down the rabbit hole they'd go.

It'd be like getting front row seats to Terry Gilliams Brazil - The Musical (I'd set my normal hate of musicals aside if that ever became reality).

Not wanting to sound too cynical, but choosing to let them break out the sledgehammers does seem to have made a pretty good story in itself, doesn't it?

What infuriates me is that not enough people care for them to demand change.

It goes on the news one day then the next it's gone. Information-overload. That's their card and they'll keep playing it.

What infuriates me is that not enough people care for them to demand change.

This is a common theme on Hacker News, and an understandable one: You see a situation that seems unjust, and you want other people to be upset about it. But they're not, because people don't work that way.

People will become upset when they have social proof that they ought to be upset. This takes a long time, which means that politics, metaphorically speaking, has massive momentum and takes a long to change direction.

At this stage, watch the decision makers, the influencers, and the people who pride themselves on being "middle of the road" above all else. When they start to flip, it means a larger political shift has started. And sure enough, obsessively middle-of-the-road writers like Andrew Sullivan are starting to doubt the government's arguments.

If the government keeps raiding newspapers, detaining spouses, and otherwise getting caught, public opinion will continue to shift. But it will do so slowly.

> This takes a long time, which means that politics, metaphorically speaking, has massive momentum and takes a long to change direction.

I've said for a very long time that Newton's First Law (conservation of momentum, or inertia) applies for all masses. Including masses of people.

Hell, I've even joked that it may actually apply better to masses of people.

The silly thing is, I had arrived at that conclusion before I had ever read Asimov's Foundation.

It goes on the news one day then the next it's gone.

It's not gone. There's a continuing battle over the effects of these revelations, and quite a pitched one.

The media has been "captured" with all the other "estates". Many people outside of the tech elite are aware of what's going on. What do you want the public to do? Protest? Riot? Revolt? Vote? Those aren't good choices considering what control the US and the UK government have over every aspect of life. The best thing to do right now is observe and remember. Don't let this depress you, worse things have and will happen in history.

Vote.

In aggregate, it has infinite power over an incumbent politician's future office. It's hard to know what you're getting when you vote for someone new, but it's easy to vote for or against an incumbent based upon past performance.

Voting will gain you nothing in the US, even if you manage to unseat an incumbent. The big companies running the country via lobbyists will just turn their huge pocketbooks towards the new guy, and the status quo will continue.

Congressmen generally aren't even afraid of losing their jobs anymore. They'll just stick around in Washington and become conference speakers or lobbyists. There's a rule saying you can't lobby for two years after you lose your seat, but that doesn't stop them.

To understand how politics works at the national level in this country, This Town is required reading.

http://www.amazon.com/This-Town-Parties-Funeral-Plus-America...

This works only if the electorate allows their votes to be bought.

We can vote for whomever we choose. The notion that a third party vote is 'wasted' is false. Even in a two-party system, it's an irrefutable signal to the dominant parties that available votes are being left on the table.

There are lots of unpleasant realities about our present system, but that can't stop us from voting for the reality we'd like to see. If we do, it will happen.

TL;DR : "Because if they didn't vote for a lizard," said Ford, "the wrong lizard might get in. Got any gin?"

>This works only if the electorate allows their votes to be bought.

The electorate doesn't receive anything for their votes. What they receive is entertainment in exchange for their attention. Their attention is then sold to the highest bidder, i.e. the politicians with the most money.

>The notion that a third party vote is 'wasted' is false. Even in a two-party system, it's an irrefutable signal to the dominant parties that available votes are being left on the table.

You have two problems here. The first problem is that the votes aren't actually on the table. If you vote for the Green party, the Democrats can't move to the left and end up with a net increase in votes because if they move to the left they may pick up a four Green voters and lose six centrist voters. What putting a viable Green candidate on the ballot does is require the Democrat to move toward the right because they'll have to capture more of the middle in order to defeat the Republican. It also allows the Republican candidate to move even further to the right at a given level of risk of losing to the Democrat. (And obviously vice versa if the viable third party candidate is an arch conservative.)

The second problem is that the third party candidates know this, so anyone you would actually want in office and who has any realistic chance of being elected just runs on the major party ticket of the party most aligned with their views. So you don't actually have any good third party candidates to vote for, because anyone who satisfies the criteria of being plausibly electable is just going to run on a major party ticket. Feel free to trot out a few count-on-one-hand counterexamples, but your average House race doesn't exactly have a plethora of desirable third party alternatives.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: If you want to vote where it counts, vote (or run) in the primaries for the major parties.

> This works only if the electorate allows their votes to be bought.

You don't have to buy votes. Just the politicians.

In 2008, we elected someone who promised to restore civil liberties. By 2009, the EFF was saying he was worse than Bush regarding some of these and the pattern has continued.

Voting is only effective when it is the final action which follows all others and makes them real to the elected officials.

> Vote.

This is our first problem. Too many people still fall for "voting", as if it accomplishes anything at all.

> It's hard to know what you're getting when you vote for someone new, but it's easy to vote for or against an incumbent based upon past performance.

If you don't know what you are getting, how can you possibly make a choice when voting that will elect someone that does represent you?

Really? Vote for who? It's a choice of corporate backed candidate A vs corporate backed candidate B. Vote out the incumbent and expect change? That's what we have now, change.

The British Public are the (ideological) descendents of people who had the "Magna Carta Libertatum" as a cornerstone of their civil society. Now from everything that comes out it looks like Britain is closest to becoming the Orwellian nightmare - constant surveillance of citizenry, arbitrary detentions, suppression of the press and an uncaring bureaucracy.

British folk ..."Remember remember the fifth of November". Speak out against this at every forum possible and kick out these enemies of freedom ASAP.

The developmental history of what might be called loosely the British Establishment is indeed interesting.

If you're interested in a previous example of the relationship between MI5, the Home Office and the 'Press', you could look at the publication of the biography 'Spycatcher', by ex MI5 officer Peter Wright.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spycatcher

    Also remember the 16th of October,
    Though failed the gunpowder plot,
    The lowly, humble, and hardly remembered
    Tax receipts burned down their lot!

(Referring to the Burning of Parliament when efforts to incinerate wooden tax receipts burned down both houses of parliament.)

And install a theocracy?

I'm sure the main point of grabbing Miranda (ironic name) was to get at whatever files he was carrying, but...

Any thoughts that someone might use this as a way to "expose" Greenwald as being gay? Sorry, but there are a tremendous number of people for whom that will change their mind about the whole thing

What's up with HN and these shitty titles lately? This says literally nothing. It isn't rhetorical or helpful at all. Tell me about the article.

The original title was: "You've had your debate. There's no need to write anymore." (theguardian.com)

The new title is: David Miranda, schedule 7 and the danger that all reporters now face (theguardian.com)

I prefer the first one.

Once again the posters title was overruled despite the fact that it was on top of page 1, the posters title was a quote taken directly from the article, and the post was generating good discussion.

None of those things matter at all. The second title is objectively more descriptive and that's what titles should be.

> The second title is objectively more descriptive

Is it? Probably most people who haven't yet read the story don't know who David Mirdanda is, since the story they haven't read yet is the thing they would most likely know him for. "Schedule 7" is meaningless without context. "The danger that all reporters now face" is meaningless without context -- they could just as well be talking about libel laws or piracy or some news about the Apple antitrust case.

The new title is objectively less descriptive because it gives the reader no clue as to what the article is actually about before reading it. The original title tells you exactly what the article is about. "You've had your debate. There's no need to write anymore." That's what the article is about.

No, second person "you" is less telling than third person "David Miranda." "Your debate" is not descriptive in the least. I chose the word "objectively" deliberately.

The first title doesn't correctly translate what the article is about. The quote might well be taken from a ranty essay, and without context hints at empty sensationalism.

This doesn't make the second title ‘objectively’ more descriptive, though. A person who happens to miss Miranda's name in news and isn't familiar with Schedule 7 term, such as myself, wouldn't find it descriptive at all.

Still, second title looks subjectively better to me. I'd say ‘all reporters’ is bad phrasing for HN (the article doesn't imply that every reporter, regardless of their country or what they write about, now faces danger), and HDD destruction may deserve mentioning (it seems central to the story), but overall this headline does better job at translating the spirit of the article and sets correct expectations for the reader.

Only truth. Only fact. No art. No feeling. Sad world.

Why are you coming to a news website for intentionally unhelpful "artistic" headlines? I think you might have made a wrong turn.

Who put you in charge and gave you the idea that HN was a news website?

The site is 99% opinion, 1% external links. It is in no way a news site, in the way that phrase is normally understood.

> HN

Do you know what this stands for?

Is it an alligator running away from a ladder and a sideways Z?

If you tilt your head 90 degrees it actually says V IZ going from top to bottom. I have no idea what this means though. I also thought maybe it was something like "better than snakes and ladders", but that would be more like "> NH". Still confused.

OP here. The job of a headline or title isn't to "objectively" encapsulate the essence of an entire story, not in the least because that is an impossible task most of the times.

Instead, it is to interest readers enough to start reading the story. Of course I'm not arguing in favour of blatantly link-bait titles, but I don't think that was the case with the original title proposed.

The rate at which mods are editing story titles, we might as well delete the title field from the submissions page. Just pick up the title from the source URL.

pg and the mods are extremely stubborn about the original title rule. For the minority that sensationalize headlines, they're throwing away modified titles that are actually useful out of the context of the original site.

Even if they only edited abusive titles, it would still solve this problem. As it stands, the way to edit a title is to blogspam an article and choose your own title.

Our governments have lost a great deal of good faith as a result of the manner in which they've handled this. They're applying tactics from the 1950's in the modern age, and it's just blowing up in their faces and they're not coming out looking so well. I just wish there was more introspection and less of whatever you want to call this madness.

A good measure of how free a country is: are its own journalists safe putting their feet there.

Many of these comments are touchingly naive. Governments have always maintained absolute control over what they will permit to be said within thir own borders about matters affecting state security, whether this is about home or abroad.

Nothing has changed, just because you have a web browser hasn't given you any more 'freedom'. In the UK we still have D-notices (now DA-notices) and the media still has to abide by their guidelines or discover the consequences.

It is sad though that the "land of the free" needs an English newspaper to tell them what is going on. Your state control of the media must be even stronger than ours.

Compliance with D-notices are voluntary. They are notices that indicate concern and puts the press on notice that some of what they report may lead to lawsuits if they go ahead. They're intimidation of sorts, but they don't in themselves stop publication or make publication illegal.

You'll notice that a lot of US media has to a decent extent chosen to ignore the latest DA-Notice relating to PRISM.

I don't see what everyone is so shocked by. Sensitive government information is in the wild. The government is using laws in place to try to limit the exposure of said sensitive data. Personally I don't think that journalists are the ones who should have final say over what information should and should not be exposed.

Regardless of which side of the argument you fall on, I don't see what is so revolting about this whole development. Journalist is thought to have very sensitive information about leading world powers. Leading world powers want information on who has the data, where it's been released, and want to limit further exposure. You want to be a journalist involved in releasing government top secret information? This is what you have to be ready to deal with. As a journalist, you're not above the law either.

To be clear, I'm not saying the government is always right either, I'm saying that the government is just doing what it's job is: keep top secret information from reaching sensitive hands.

And therein lies the real problem. Very few (possibly none) people think "I will subvert and subjugate the entire populace in evil oppressive ways for my own power". Rather they think "I truly believe my job is important and this is what's best".

The SWAT teams that destroy a peaceful organic farm in Texas are just doing their job to collect evidence according to a warrant. There may be a little petty "fucking hippies attitude" in there, but they aren't thinking "lets scare everyone from ever trying to have a nice big garden again". The police commander/cheif/whatever isn't thinking "lets make sure to cause as much damage as possible", they are thinking "lets do this safely and decisively, criminals need to be shown there is no point in crime". The prosecutor and judge aren't thinking "hey oppressing is fun!" they are thinking "we need to live under the rule of law, lets make sure that happens", and that is just their job. Hell even the people who vote for laws and representatives are thinking "this really is the best way to keep crime down and keep people from trashing the nice places we're trying to make here.

The intelligence apparatus is the same. Sure they are just doing their job to get material labeled as sensitive back under control. They really think it's dangerous for it to be out there. The people who label it such are truly under the impression that it is dangerous to the country they protect for it to be widely known. The people who build the gathering apparatus truly believe it won't be abused.

The abusers themselves aren't looking at it and saying "oh subjugate subjugate subjugate!" They are saying "I know my motives are pure - a little abuse of means is less important than the noble end.". The bad ones are not saying "fuck the people, they are an impediment". They are saying "I can get my own position bettered by ignoring one little rule". They say " My primary goal is personal gain, this twisty interpretation gives me that, and besides - it's legal in that light, so why is it bad?"

It's a death by a thousand cuts - the slow erosion of OK action by a large number of distributed players playing for their own gain. The agency of a group (a conspiracy) is not needed - and in fact would be better - it's easier to target and stop. The people who aren't abusers can't imagine the little abuses that would arise - they say "but it won't be used that way, it's absurd!"

Think of it like engineering a system: the security people fight their own engineering teams as much as they fight the "bad guys". They hear regularly "why would anyone think to do that?" "how could someone know that to abuse it?" "I can't imagine anyone going to such trouble for my little bit" and on and on. It's difficult to make people who aren't used to thinking and seeing it realize that such things happen all the time. Human systems and rules aren't any different.

This is what we need to focus on - closing the holes, fighting the little abuses, and generally making things overall better, rather than looking for the big conspiracies that may not even exist (because they don't actually need to).

"One U.S. security official told Reuters that one of the main purposes of the British government's detention and questioning of Miranda" [note: using a clear abuse of a terrorism law] "was to send a message to recipients of Snowden's materials, including the Guardian, that the British government was serious about trying to shut down the leaks."

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/britain-forced-guardian-destroy-cop...

It should be obvious to all of us how futile it is to destroy those hard drives if the goal is merely to limit exposure. We may reasonably assume this is just as obvious to people making decisions in those intelligence agencies, which ought to give you a big clue about the real intent of actions like these.

Wow....I can't quite understand the actions of governments these days.

Did they really think that they could literally destroy the hard drives of the journalists working on these NSA scandals and that story wouldn't become a major story?

As in....really now. Any amount of legitimacy that the Snowden leaks didn't have before, just got significantly bolstered with this type of action.

How is this government still in power?

Because when they failed to be not elected (the vast majority of those who voted voted for some other guy, but somehow these guys got to be in charge - first past the post, joy), they thought "stability" was the most important thing, and passed a law that said that there wouldn't be another election for at least 5 years.

>That work is immensely complicated by the certainty that it would be highly unadvisable for Greenwald (or any other journalist) to regard any electronic means of communication as safe.

Can anyone comment on how accurate that statement is? I would imagine that two people (Greenwald and Poitras) who frequently meet face-to-face could set up a secure way of transferring data.

I wouldn't imagine that. All we really know about the NSA's cryptographic powers are that they have a shit-ton of money and a lot of very smart people. And even if your cryptography is actually as secure as you think, the power that can be brought to bear here is immense.

Could they, from a distance, read the EM emissions of your computer? Could they compromise some physical object on which you set your computer and read the EM emissions from there? Can you afford to have somebody watching your computer every second of the day? Is there some possible attack that you haven't thought of but they, having devoted lifetimes of thought to the problem, have?

Of course, they could also be bumbling idiots, so there may be no need to worry. Certainly, this sort of ham-fisted pressure suggests that there are, at least, idiots involved. But if you have gotten to the sort of prominence where somebody might be willing to burn a billion dollars to cause you trouble, it's really hard to say what's safe and what isn't.

No need: Using a Mac? Compromised, the NSA has root access via the Patriot act. Ditto windows. And that's before you get to the idea of remote updates to the microcode supported by modern PCs (and not even running Linux keeps you safe from that, unless you recompile your kernel to turn it off).

Lets also not forget that even the strongest crypto is vulnerable to cartel attacks and the rubber hose technique.

Use a one-time pad, run Linux, don't connect to the net a machine with access to the keys or the plaintext. Encrypt your message, copy the file to a formatted flash drive, and send it to your communication partner however you like. Hell, stick it on pastebin, it won't matter.

I'm confused at the perspective being espoused here - "encryption is pointless because the NSA can break anything, and failing that they can always beat you up". Encryption is not pointless, they probably can't even break standard open source crypto, they definitely can't break one-time pads which are trivially easy to make nowadays, and they can always beat you up anyway so you might as well encrypt.

There's no plausible way any of that is less safe than running the gauntlet of border security with the data in your pocket.

I think you've exaggerated the perspective being espoused, so your reply is equally exaggerated.

Encryption only solves the problem of a suspicious link with perfectly trustworthy endpoints and a perfectly trustworthy side channel (for keys). Nobody is saying, "don't encrypt." But people are saying, "don't assume encryption is perfectly safe."

Also, the plausible way that physical carriage is safer is that you know when interception happens. If you encrypt everything and then use your husband's pocket as a transport medium rather than a wire, that's better data security because interception is harder, and can't be done in secret.

If you can exchange a one time pad out of band via a secure channel (say, face-to-face) then you have absolutely unbreakable encryption, no matter how good the attackers are. This doesn't stop side-channel attacks, but it invalidates and questions about the strength of the encryption algorithm.

One can only hope that Greenwald et al have been clued into this.

>I would imagine that two people (Greenwald and Poitras) who frequently meet face-to-face could set up a secure way of transferring data.

Two people that the gov't didn't know it needed to care about might be able to accomplish that feat. But Greenwald and Poitras against determined governments with vast resources? Imagine the motivation among the NSA operations and cryptanalyst folks at this moment. This has got to be one of the most exciting times ever to be an NSA spook (assuming of course you agree with the mission, and don't care too much about people's rights). I think in the current environment even guys like Zimmerman and Applebaum might find it challenging to operate under Greenwald's and Poitras' conditions.

The natural response in this case is to communicate anything that is ok to have intercepted directly. E.g.copies of the documents that come from the NSA. Article drafts that'll get published soon anyway.

That leave you with the much simpler task of securing communication of any details that needs to be kept safe, such as any knowledge of other sources, or details that might jeopardise their ability to publish, or the safety of other people. Hopefully that dataset is much smaller to the extent that someone acting as a courier can bring sufficient information "in his head" that remaining details can be rendered "harmless" by leaving out the information passed directly.

It's interesting that Greenwald has admitted Miranda carried documents, as that makes very little sense - presumably they understood the potential of confiscation, and any documents would not be much more secure than if transferred directly.

However Miranda might have carried with him knowledge of information otherwise left out, such as, say, pass phrases or a way to derive additional pass phrases that would allow any intercepted data to be protected better - any data on his devices ought to be inconsequential (at least that's what I'd hope, especially given Snowden mentioning that he started trusted Poitras when he realised she was more paranoid about him than he was about her).

One such method would be for Miranda and/or other associates to take more than one trip. If intercepted you need to try again. If not, one or more of the files transferred might be a set of one time pads and all you need to do to massive increase security is to use said one time pads.

I wouldn't trust anything that important across a wire, and neither should you.

I think it's quite important to share the names of the men from Whitehall to the world. I mean we all know names of only the people defending public interest so far: aka Greenwald, Snowden, Miranda and a few others.

We should be told about everyone from the other side too.

Like we learned about Keith Alexander of NSA, you know. It is of utmost importance to make names of public servants well - truly public - because they're the ones using tax-payers money and should have been defending public interest instead.

Agree. But, FWIW, Alan Rusbridger, the author of the article, explains in the comments that in this case, this would not be legal, as the conversations he is quoting from took place after he had agreed to keep names off the record.

It's not a matter of legality, it's a matter of keeping your word. He says as much in a comment.

http://discussion.theguardian.com/comment-permalink/26170409

Agreed.

Perhaps another good journalist could score a one-up on this one? That aside, it doesn't seem coherent that the owner of the laptop containing the sensitive materials would voluntarily agree to conceal the names of the agents, and at the same time let their machine/drives be destroyed by the same sleuths (crooks?).

Seems fishy, but then what is not given the circumstances.

"Off the record" is not an actual legal thing.

Off the record is privilege given from the journalist to the person speaking.

Since journalists have showed willingness to go to jail but to protect their sources they take things such as these very seriously.

When the bastards make the rules at whim, there is nothing to be gained from playing by those same rules.

A journalist who violates conditions of 'off-the-record' is not going to be a journalist for much longer, because nobody will tell him anything. The 'bastards' who made the rules, in this case, are the journalists themselves.

I'd guess that the gain for Mr. Rusbridger is that he retains his privilege to be able to quote from similarly absurd conversations with government officials in the future.

That rule is actually made by journalists, not governments.

Wow, a Guardian article that had something positive to say about the U.S. My jaw has also hit the floor!

FWIW, I also agree that shredding hard disks is far overstepping the bounds of what is proper.

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