Reacting to the Snowden leaks about PRISM, the United States Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, on June 7, 2013 confirmed in a statement that for nearly six years the government of the United States had been using Facebook to collect information.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_%28surveillance_program%2...
Who are all these astroturf accounts commenting in here right now?
Incidentally, this reminds me -- later Summer this year, I had the chance to meet a lot Linux kernel developers. At some point a handful were speaking casually about Facebook -- and guess what, each and every one of them were 20 times more paranoid about Facebook and its intent than I am (and I'm pretty skeptical of everything FB does). I'm honestly very confused. I don't want to make the jump and say "astroturfing" -- but I don't know, maybe we have some Facebook developers here who probably work on some engineering tasks and never are exposed to the questionable side of things and genuinely think FB is up to only good. In real world, every true hacker that I personally know greatly distrusts Facebook and all that Facebook touches.
edit: ok, I think I may have said that a little too soon. Posts doubting Poitras are now more toward the bottom than the top, and my two posts are no longer negatively scored.
""Here we report results from a randomized controlled trial of political mobilization messages delivered to 61 million Facebook users during the 2010 US congressional elections. The results show that the messages directly influenced self-expression, information seeking, and real world voting behavior of millions of people. Furthermore the messages not only influenced the users who received them but also the users' friends, and friends of friends." - Robert M. Bond, Christopher J. Fariss, Jason J. Jones, Adam D. I. Kramer, Cameron Marlow, Jaime E. Settle & James H. Fowler
I disagree, and I don't think I've forgotten my brain somewhere. Why I disagree? Because facebook, for all intents and purposes, is an intelligence agency. Doesn't mean that they welcome other agencies having a look at their data, but it certainly is more than a side effect.
The real value for intelligence is as a social science project. For example you became aware (through other channels) that unrelated individuals X, Y, and Z have taken up terrorism; if they were on Facebook then it's worthwhile to search through their profile history over the previous few years to see if there's some common behavioral pattern that's strongly correlated with people who actually take up arms instead of just posting support for their political cause of choice.
Is it? Facebook has even built in "crime scanning" technology into their Facebook messenger, to report people to police.
http://www.cnet.com/news/facebook-scans-chats-and-posts-for-...
When Kobeissi tried to build OTR over Facebook messenger, they announced Facebook messenger's API will shut down (a little suspicious, I think).
http://www.net-security.org/secworld.php?id=16857
> Intelligence agencies still have to comply with the law.
Do they really? At best the intelligence agencies have shown they will comply with their interpretation of the law, which in most cases defies even common sense, such as 3-hop mass surveillance being "relevant" to an investigation, or defining mass collection as "not surveillance".
> Trust them for a chance.
Ha ha. No comment. Just laughter.
Trust the NSA not to hack Facebook? No thanks, I won't do that. Facebook has amassed a single-source treasure trove of intelligence data, it's not up to them who gets to look at it. It's up the the biggest players in the hacking space, which seems to be the NSA.
> Trust them for a chance.
Oh, you mean trust the guy who said "Dumb fucks, they trust me!". No thanks.
What news have you been reading?
The "... it's a gift ..." turn of phrase doesn't imply that Facebook (or any specific entity) is doing a conscious act of gift-giving. The outcome can be seen as a "gift" for the desirability of the item and the serendipitous way it is dropped on the receiver's lap.
More than ever Facebook is trying to protect its data from three letter agencies. [...] Trust them for a chance.
They're leverage their power over users to collect data. It is generally to be expected, and is now explicitly known, that collecting data like that is an attractive target for the government to leverage their power over businesses (both Facebook and the communication infrastructure between users and Facebook) to get at the data.
We can bitch and moan about the existence and capabilities of those powers, but at some point facebook is choosing to consolidate data in a world where those powers exist. It's a tightrope balance for Facebook to minimize the collection possible through technical and legal means, and maintaining their business model hoovering up data. And that's fine, that's their business, whatever. It's just not trustworthy.
edit: And no one even claimed that they do in the interview. This is a stupid thread.
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"L.P.: Sure, don't you think? It totally does. Facebook is a gift to intelligence agencies. People volunteer all their social information."
...is the entirety of the discussion of facebook.
The constitution is the law. But people talk about laws violating the constitution as if they are legitimate.
If they are, then the constitution is a contradiction. National Security Letters, the TSA, even the existence of the FBI is in violation of the constitution.
But once something's been around for a couple decades, people assume it's legal. It becomes the background, and anything they do then becomes "the law".
Yeah, a law was passed creating the TSA, but that law did not repeal the fourth amendment, thus the TSA is still illegal, under both the fourth amendment and USC 18-242 which makes it a federal crime to violate a citizens constitutional rights.