So that's it - the net legislative effect of all the "bombshell" disclosures that Ed Snowden made has been what - Nothing, NADA, Zilch.
Proving once again that going thru "Official" Channels was never an option. That in the toxic hyper-partisan environment of Washington the Powerful will find a way to kill any meaningful reform of even the worst abuses.
The solution to this has to be first and foremost Technological.
First, a single political defeat is not the end-all-be-all here. Politics may move slowly, but it does move (e.g. the political status of a black lesbian is undoubtedly better today than it was 50 years ago).
Second, technology and political are not an either/or proposition (or even a primary/secondary proposition). IMHO, it's something like: Privacy = Technology * Politics. Simply stressing one will give you (relative) diminishing returns if you don't push the other as well.
Good encryption can make it difficult for the NSA to conduct widespread online surveillance, but given (a) the difficulty of getting crypto right, (b) the sheer number of organizations with the ability to (intentionally or unintentionally) compromise security for a large number of users, and (c) the relatively low impact privacy and security have on purchasing decisions for many (if not most) people, it's something like the size of the NSA's budget (a political question) that will ultimately determine whether mass surveillance is prohibitively expensive or merely inconvenient.
I just wanted to chime in and say that I had always avoided infosec as "too hard" (I'm primarily a UI guy), but the Snowden leaks have made me a lot more conscious of my digital footprint and security in general. I even spent several months on khan academy learning the requisite maths to understand the stanford crypto 101 class on coursera (awesome course by the way!). Of course I'm far from journeyman status but I believe there are many more like me whose awareness of the issue was significantly raised by the leaks. Even if no political changes come about as a result, that's a huge aggregate effect that will only increase over the next years/decades.
I think it's a bit odd so many hackers view technology as even a possibility to their saving grace in this struggle. Were hackers the ones largely supporting actionable development efforts of Tor? Do they continue to? How many people do you know that use Tor for casual internet browsing vs spending more time on Facebook?
Take a look at your paycheck, expenses, taxes, and then contributions to technological solutions by-the-people, for-the-people. How many of you work at $job doing data-analysis for marketing schemes verses something useful to society. After all of that, then do some rough statistics on programmers that contribute to meaningful projects regarding cryptography (properly implemented, not talking about crap like 'secret') and freenet-type ideas. How many of us are going to quit our jobs to focus on this problem, how many of us could if we wanted to. Stop kidding yourselves, we're all literally paying for the work of evil-doers to subvert long extinguished ideas of privacy. Either adapt to survive or resist in a meaningful way, stop diluting yourselves with ideas of grandeur.
Tech people are nothing more than glorified marketers by-and-large. We handed the reigns of technology to those with capital, and the results are sickening. RMS was and will always be correct. The rest of you live in a vacuum fortified by paychecks and social support.
The captue of silicon valley by madison avenue never ceases to Amaze me. That's the difference between now. Amazingly, it has nothing to do with the NSA. But the privacy landgrab really stated with all of the VC backed companies desperately trying to become profitable in a stock bubble.
> The rest of you live in a vacuum fortified by paychecks and social support.
It's all of us really. The enormous amount of money pumped into tech by the surveillance state reaches nearly every software company (and beyond). Your examples for worthwhile projects are Tor, freenet, and crypto. The surveillance state finds those projects useful too.
This problem is larger than what you're considering and blaming particular industries and spaces understates the amount of cash pumped into the world by governments.
And just because corn farmers have a subsidized crop that drives the processed food industry which give us cancer/diabetes doesn't mean those farmers shouldn't follow best practices unless we want another dust bowl. Likewise, I think it's great that UI programmers are more aware of security.
Also, we're not literally paying for the surveillance state. They're essentially stealing from the people by arbitrarily printing money which devalues our own. If taxes were raised commensurate with spending and debt, we'd certainly be making some more prudent decisions about how best to spend tax dollars.
I assure you I have no delusions of grandeur. I believe that you are underestimating the halo effect of the negative attention that sovereign and corporate spying have received in the last few years. And I don't pay taxes to the US government.
I was careful not to specify US taxes. The US may have started the awareness of this issue, but they're far from the only government involved. I've underestimated very little so far, retrospective to my predictions. However I've argued with plenty that have overestimated as history now proves.
Again, my point was looking at the overall useful contributions the average hacker can make while focusing on the struggle of maintaining 98F, verses the hiring, monetizing and actionable efforts coming from the adversary. Making progress in this day and age largely depends on accurately understanding the actual adversary. If you think that's limited to the 'US Government'... well then...
I think we all agree that progress on the technological front is important, but I disagree that you can ignore the political and cultural fronts.
Even if you have perfect encryption, if the government can demand anyone to decrypt anything at anytime (else go to jail) without due process or transparency, that's going to undermine the effectiveness of technological tools. Even modest legal protections for privacy will greatly increase the value of technological tools.
Along the same lines, what's the point of all our great tools if no one uses them? Some privacy tech is more successful than others, but why is most email sent as plain text? Technology has been around forever.
A lot can be said for increasing ease of use and so on, but until encrypted email is easier to use than unencrypted email (seems unlikely), what motivation do users have to switch if they don't value privacy? To get users to make the switch, they need to understand the value of privacy. This is a social problem, not a technological problem.
saying that it is "Technological" is merely dodging what you are actually doing is a technology based form of rebellion. It is the statement that the government is not correct, and that the people can organize and do better.
It's okay. Now we all have a reason to recommend others against using American products. If the Washington leaders "don't want to" make a reform, let's force them to do it.
The vast majority of people don't care, though. We saw this in the latest election. Surveillance wasn't a central issue for most candidates, and the electorate was OK with that.
No, the entire West is not working together on intel. Most Western countries are not part of the 5-eyes agreement. Of course most states secretly have no qualms about violating the privacy of their citizens, but this should in no way distract us from the fact that UKUS capabilities far exceed those of anyone else.
Five Eyes is not the only agreement, and the UKUS capabilities are not far in excess of the others. Nearly all European nations did/do have agreements with the NSA and other intelligence organizations to share data on both their own citizens and foreigners. For example, the NSA categorized Germany's BND as a Tier 2 partner.
UKUSA capabilities ARE far in excess of others. They are the only global adversary that happens to control DNS and the whole certificate stuff. Furthermore, all popular consumer operating systems (Windows, Mac OS X, Android and iOS) are created by American companies who can receive secret orders with gag clauses at any time to introduce custom functionality or vulnerabilities which are only meant for UKUSA use. Additionally, apps are increasingly installed from app stores, which are once again subject to American law. This means that any undesirable app created outside the UKUSA jurisdiction (e.g. Telegram or Threema) could be tampered with at the source. No other nations have ANY of these capabilities.
They are not the only ones that can control certificates and DNS. I am not sure why you thought this was the case given it is widely documented (and occurs with some regularity) that we hear about some other country doing one or the other.
One might make the argument that most consumer hardware is not produced in the US. But it suffices to say that if Microsoft or Apple choose to obey a secret order rather than exiting a market of 300 million people, they will do so for other countries.
App Stores are subject to more than American law. For example, there isn't just a single Apple App Store. It's split up.
It is true that the NSA has uniquely easy access to say, Google and Facebook servers and so things are a little easier than just tapping all the fiber. That's precisely so many countries are gung-ho about creating their own, in-state services...so they're the ones with uniquely easy access.
But that's not "far in excess" of others, it just makes the job easier.
As for certificates, it is becoming increasingly obvious that the NSA controls several root certificates and can exert legal pressure if not outright control of many others. They can use this power to perform SSL Man-in-the-Middle attacks. See http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/37216/how-likely..., https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/09/new_nsa_leak_... or https://digitalelf.net/2013/09/how-the-nsa-is-breaking-ssl/. I don't see how it can be remotely controversial that the US and its allies possess deeply asymmetric power. They have legal power over all popular desktop OSes, all popular mobile OSes, all major cloud providers (Amazon, Azure and Google) and most major social networks. To pretend that other countries have anything approaching this capability is patently ludicrous.
Turns out the US has announced earlier this year that they intend to relinquish control of the DNS root zone file. However, this is a privilege that they used to steadfastly hold on to, so its hardly surprising that some people (including me) thought this was still the case.
Honestly, I'll start by saying I am a democrat so before the full flak of the HN community peppers me.
Rule contraction at times of relative piece and expansion at times of duress are never effective. Expanding surveillance after 9/11 with sweeping judicial reforms and due process, and vice versa (in today's case) contracting or attempting to contract is also not a good idea. Yes there are many problems, but think of it from a impact and policy perspective. What happens after if there is a terrorist event? Then do we expand again because perhaps someone yells out "not enough oversight or data?". Although many here are PRO reform, the pattern contraction/expansion is not the way to go about national security policy.
I'm not peppering you because your political leanings, but because I have no idea what you're trying to say. It sounds like you're saying that there is never a good time to change our current state of mass surveillance.
What pattern of expansion and contraction are you talking about? I know the expansion part, but I certainly don't know what the last contraction was.
What due process are you talking about? These policies were effected unilaterally, in secret.
What is a good way "to go about national security policy" if not by working within the legislative framework? Are you saying that there is no legislative solution?
What if there is a terrorist event now? How much more data can we collect?
My position is that it is never too early to examine the effects--the consequences--of any legislation. This particular incident has lingered secretly for well over a decade, and that is oppressive. Regardless of wordsmithing and mental gymnastics, these programs are clearly out of line with the spirit of American civil liberties and need to be checked.
For what it's worth I am Republican (or a Republican Affiliated Libertarian might be a more apt description) I am active in the local GOP and sit on the county party executive committee.
The serpentine flow of the amount of power given to the executive branch or government in general is nothing new. There was an overstep with the patriot act, and according to Rep. Sensenbrenner (the author of patriot act) the executive branch under Bush and Obama exceeded the authority of the patriot act.
I think ultimately these types of powers need a congressional kill switch. Much like under the war powers act. The Congress through a concurrent resolution can remove the executive's authority under these acts.
A little bit familiarity with the US ways of congress tells me that this comment is most probably right about this and that the voters need to be categorized qualitatively ("Why did you vote against?) rather than quantitatively ("Did you vote against?): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8627770
This was only about mass surveillance conducted over phones.
If this "analog tip of the iceberg" already fails, how can they ever be stopped politically regarding mass surveillance conducted by simply tapping all Internet traffic (as was shown they do)?
> All R's voted wrong except Cruz, Lee, Heller, Paul, and Murkowski.
The roll-call vote I'm looking at [1] only has Cruz, Lee, Heller, and Murkowski voting to move the bill to a vote on passage; Paul supported the filibuster.
Do you bother reading previous answers before you comment ? He is opposing it because it renews the Patriot Act, which is a higher order Evil compared to the NSA-related measures.
> “In the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Americans were eager to catch and punish the terrorists who attacked us. I, like most Americans, demanded justice. But one common misconception is that the Patriot Act applies only to foreigners—when in reality, the Patriot Act was instituted precisely to widen the surveillance laws to include U.S. citizens,” Sen. Paul said, “As Benjamin Franklin put it, ‘those who trade their liberty for security may wind up with neither.’ Today’s vote to oppose further consideration of the Patriot Act extension proves that we are one step closer to restoring civil liberties in America.”
Please don't make political arguments into personal quarrels on HN, even when someone doesn't bother reading. Political arguments are abrasive to begin with. Let's not add gratuitous abrasiveness.
This comment would be quite a good one without the first sentence.
Is it really gratuitous? Don't we want to show that some behaviors (like not reading the content) aren't welcome? Spelling that out rather than the mystery of a downvote is useful.
> Please don't make political arguments into personal quarrels on HN
I am not making any kind of political statement nor a personal quarrel, I am simply pointing out that he got the answer previously but jumped on the comment trigger before reading anything linked. Is saying "Do you bother reading" considered offensive now?
> Some of its opponents, like Senator Saxby Chambliss, Republican of Georgia, believe it went too far in curbing the N.S.A. Others, like Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, thought it did not go far enough.
This bill was completely watered down and subverted from the original, to the point where even many of its initial champions turned against it. Voting it down was the right choice. The worst thing would have been to have passed it and pretended that "reform" had been made.
Google, MSFT, Apple, the EFF all supported this bill. Obviously there are further improvements that could be made, but instead of starting from a better platform, we're at ground zero with an incoming congress that has no interest in curbing the 'military' power of the US.
The EFF's case for supporting the bill that was just killed is very clear about this:
While you are correct that there's no such thing as perfection, this bill is so far from the changes that are needed that its arguably not worth passing. When you pass a watered-down bill, that buys a decade or more for the opposing side. When it gets voted through, all of a sudden they imagine themselves as champions of compromise and at the same time delude themselves into thinking that they gave their opposition a gift. If an inadequate bill passes, that's likely all we are going to get for the next 10-20 years.
Obama can update the EO's for the NSA without congress[+].
[+] EFF: "Future reform must include significant changes to ... Executive Order 12333, and to the broken classification system that the executive branch counts on to hide unconstitutional surveillance from the public."
He just doesn't want to stick his neck out.
So this bill was a distant 3rd choice for the country.
1) pass a good law
2) administrate the NSA into compliance
3) pass muddled legislation in a lame duck session
Maybe. But by passing anything that politicians (and virtually no one else) currently cry 'terrorism' over, we'll get a chance to see that the sky did not fall after all, and an incrementally better bill could be plausibly considered with incrementally more reasonable debate.
Neither Rand Paul nor Ted Cruz were going to break with the party on the eve of the GOP's assumption of the senate majority, knowing that in a year or so they're going to be on a stage debating other Republicans in front of the GOP base.
In fact: the more "grassroots-friendly" this bill had been, the less tenable a yea vote would have been, particularly for Paul.
Because, like Paul, he has the luxury to. If he ever held the tie-breaking vote he sure as hell would vote lockstep with the GOP. These people are "show libertarians," at best.
Nope. Paul refused to support the bill because of the provisions for the continuance of the Patriot Act into 2017. He's been quite consistent on this, and it really doesn't have anything to do with Senate majorities. I applaud his stand.
The new R's are going to do what they're told, just like Paul and Cruz did what they were told in this vote, as well: as stars of the Republican party, they were allowed to vote for cloture and deflect attacks on them in a year when the race for President heats up. And, they were allowed to do this because the leadership knew they already had the votes to block the bill.
I'm not sure why you think I'm suggesting they are? My only point is that, had the blocking of the bill depended on Paul and Cruz voting against cloture, they would have voted against cloture. Since it didn't, they were allowed to vote for cloture, and appear to be friendly to privacy/whatever, since both of them think they might be President someday.
It's why a lot of votes in both houses can seem close, or bipartisan, but in fact they are not - just Congressmen who are owed a favor being allowed to vote in such a way that won't piss off their constituents or hurt their chances of being elected to a higher office someday, or land them a sweet consulting gig after they leave office, or whatever. If the leadership knows they have votes to spare anyway. This is a pretty common and well-known practice I thought, so I don't really understand the downvotes.
I mean, if both Cruz and Paul had voted for cloture and the Senate had moved on cloture with e.g. 61 votes or something (i.e. both their votes actually mattered and were against the party interests), then their votes would be big news and evidence of an actual schism. As it stands, how they voted doesn't mean shit, other than that they are reasonably famous politicians.
I doubt most votes are motivated by what's "right" and "wrong" (since we're apparently pretending those are objective for the moment). I suspect most are motivated by the party lines, for members of both parties.
If what the purest form of this bill was trying to do is important to you and you're from the US, keep working for it. I suggest the following:
1) Show up at the primaries.
2) Reform your local laws to allow you to vote in the primaries for both parties.
3) Don't shut up. Keep talking.
4) Keep in mind, at all times, that the fight isn't over once the NSA is squelched. AT&T et. al. still get to keep this information forever.
5) Think about parallels. Encryption isn't good enough, as the same kind of meta-data is generated when you visit an encrypted site. It's not any one activity it's the pattern of all activity that's important and no one is making anyone give up that data, either.
Does anyone have a history of the "60 votes needed" to pass a bill in the Senate?
I could have sworn that within my lifetime, the press talked about "50 votes needed" to pass a bill. Then at some point in the Bush years, threat of filibuster was regularly invoked, making 60 votes the requirement in practice.
Now no one even mentions a filibuster. As a non-American, it's rather strange.
In the mid years of Bush, the D Senate filibustered more than usual in regards to nominations of non-Supreme Court judges.
In 2006, when Democrats took the Senate, the Republicans started filibustering up a storm. But no one in the press noticed because Bush would have veto'd anyway, so the balance of power didn't shift.
As soon as Obama was elected, the Republican Senate had an internal meeting where they agreed to filibuster everything all the time -- legislation, judges, executive appointments, everything. Even legislation they supported, just to throw a wrench into the plans. It was a momentous change. The press failed to point it out or make an issue out of it. And here we are.
Thanks, that's the summary I was looking for. I remember that shift happened, and thinking "that's odd". Then I checked out of politics for a few years, and noticed the current language, which doesn't even reference filibusters.
I am now curious to see if things will shift back once there's a Republican president. The Republicans seem far better at press management than the Democrats.
I'd call it politics of self-interest rather than politics of national interest. These actions were perfectly logical and reasonable, if your goal is to improve the position of your party potentially at the expense of the nation.
Well the point was that in a different political system such actions would not improve the position of your party. The idea that is does seemed odd to me and the only possible explanation I could come up with was that apparently enough people seem to dislike the Democrats so much that they would support such non constructive behaviour.
It's more that people just don't pay attention to the details and put far too much emphasis on the power of the President. President makes promises, fails to fulfill many of them, then the President and his party takes a hit. It doesn't matter that the reason they were blocked is because of action by the competing party.
I wonder what the odds are that the Republicans will end the filibuster once they take back the Senate. Seems like the smart play would be to only do that if you have a veto-proof majority or a Republican President, but who knows.
Not immediately. It's more useful as a "capitulate or else" weapon, at least for now. And immediately changing it upon winning has some petty, triumphalist optics to it. McConnell is a very shrewd politician.
FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt), part apathetic electorate that chooses to not vote (period) because 'it doesn't matter', part uninformed electorate that votes based on a letter next to the name rather than positions (if the candidate even bothered to establish any positions / if the voter bothered to even look up the candidate's views) and a media that is so bent on presenting 'both sides' that they fail to call out the mountain of bullshit that we often hear (climate change isn't real, etc.).
I feel like this is the worst excuse, there are usually many things to vote on other than a US rep, or Senator. For example, here in Arizona the exit polls showed that people felt education was the most important issue. In turn, we elected a governor that loathes the idea of public schools / supports vouchers; and a school superintendent that loathes common core (because, state rights) and __did not__ run a campaign (other than repeating 'nobama' & 'states rights'). The needs and results couldn't be further apart.
James Fallows, the last of the old guard at The Atlantic, has this as part of his beat: he calls it "false equivalence watch". A lot of the coverage of this fiasco succumbs to it, for instance blaming the failure of the bill to clear the Senate on lack of grassroots support, as if that was going to get it votes from senators elected by rural conservatives.
On the other hand: over the next couple years, the same force is going to work in the other direction as the Democrats assume the minority. Were it not for the filibuster, Social Security might be a block grant to NY financial firms by now.
>On the other hand: over the next couple years, the same force is going to work in the other direction as the Democrats assume the minority.
Maybe. The republicans seem far better at parliamentary procedure and press management. Once there's a Republican president, I can imagine there will be loud outcries against "Democratic obstructionism" if the democrats attempt to block votes with a filibuster.
As Hario's comment above pointed out, the reverse happened in 2006 then 2008. I could see them successfully switching the narrative back.
These past several years I've been very surprised that the Democrats simply acquiesced to 60, and didn't even try to make Republicans actually filibuster bills by talking.
As this article points out, actual filibustering is a gruelling process. The speaker can't leave the podium:
I looked up any more recent filibusters. I came across Rand Paul's filibuster from 2013. He lasted 13 hours, and failed to block the appointment of John Brennan.
It seems odd to me that rural conservatives support surveillance, given that for many of them, the justification for strong gun rights is to preserve the ability to rebel against the government.
I have never understood how "we filibuster!" is acceptable. If you want to stop a bill, get somebody out there in sneakers reading out of a fucking phone book, but going "tee-hee, we say no, go fetch a supermajority" is asinine. I don't get why the body has chosen rules that make filibusters require no effort.
The threat of filibuster is implicit in the "60 votes needed" language. At 60 votes, the majority side can invoke 'cloture' which moves the bill to an actual vote, after which you only need 50 votes to pass. Prior to 60 votes, the minority side can pretty much endlessly delay the actual vote on the bill through filibusters and other parliamentary tactics.
Your understanding is correct. The workings of the US government would make the Byzantines scratch their heads. Hopefully though, it doesn't take one-thousand years for this shit-show to get rubbed out and replaced with something better.
I don't. But, I drew a comparison between the Byzantine Empire, which IIRC correctly lasted about 1000 years after the fall of the West, so I thought I'd follow it through to the end.
At least your media even talks about this, I'm in a 5 Eyes Alliance country and none of them have written anything except excuses why we should be under 24/7 surveillance. Our senate can't even block bills.
Not to sound more cynical than the situation warrants, but in this case I'm not particularly surprised or disappointed. Congress is clueless and more concerned with partisan politics and re-election fundraising.
We should be (and many are) working to secure ourselves so that Congress and the legal system must work to catch up to the possibilities of citizens to protect themselves on their own terms: good end-to-end encryption, true anonymity when it's needed, and as much open and auditable code as we can get.
They're not going to give security and privacy to us — they wouldn't even if they could. So we make it ourselves, slowly, surely, and publicly, and maybe in a few years they'll be the ones that are outraged.
You will, however, be bound by current 'lawful intercept and storage' laws. If you provide a remote computing service (email, hosting, cloud storage, fitness tracking, etc) you will be bound by 18 U.S.C. § 2703(f) [1]. If you provide telecommunications you will be bound by CALEA [2]. You will be bound by the Stored Communications Act and by the Patriot Act, and you will be bound to provide access to the core of your service and/or your private keys if you are given an NSL.
Essentially - you can not provide secure communication as a service.
If you try to provide it as a product it's more blurry. With precedents like Blackberry, RSA and Skype you need to make sure you're operationally able to deal with extreme levels of leverage and influence.
I have no pity for the Republicans and every one that voted against it needs to be reminded of it every day from now until election.
I'm also not such a noob at politics that I think this is the entire story. Democrats knew this wouldn't pass. This was their last couple of months of control. So it's a poke in the eye to Republicans on the way out.
The really interesting counter-factual here is what would have happened if a large block of Republicans switched up. My bet is that you'd see quite a few defections in the Democratic camp.
If I'm a politician, I can either support something, oppose something, look like I'm supporting something when I really don't, or look like I'm opposing something when I really support it. The key issue isn't my stance, it's how I can position myself against the other politicians.
I'd love to see movement on this. Not for a second did I think this vote was anything but political posturing. But still -- any vote is a good one. Just wish it would have actually meant something instead of more fodder for all the partisans to throw dung at each other. It also looks like the beginning of "See! If we were just back in power, this time we'd really fix all those problems we approved of and encouraged the last time we were there!"
I wonder if this will have any traction among the base, which was the entire point. Sadly, I think it will.
"Earlier this evening, Sen. Rand Paul voted against further consideration of the USA Freedom Act as it currently extends key provisions of the Patriot Act until 2017. Sen. Paul led the charge against the Patriot Act extension"
"“This is the worst possible time to be tying our hands behind our backs,” Mr. McConnell said before the vote, expressing the concerns of those who argued that the program was a vital tool in the fight against terrorism."
When would be a good time? Seriously, I hate these arguments, because there is no reasoning with them. Sure, these various programs may have helped stop terrorism, or at least have the potential to.
However, so would killing anyone (citizen or not) who has any potential threat. I would argue the later is even more effective, and uses the same chain of reasoning.
Why then, can we not move past that and try to stand a bit more on law (being the constitution in this case), if not reason. Clearly, these programs are disliked by a large number (if not the majority) of the constituents these senators represent. Then, why are they not voting on their behalf?
Notice that the article only inferred that McConnell was referring to terrorism specifically. Perhaps they anticipate domestic unrest (due to, among other things, egregious NSA spying, ironically), and don't want to tie their hands behind their backs in the fight against that. In which case, a good time to do it, is whenever they decide to stop the spying and the impoverishment to destitution of literally everyone save for the rounding error of a demographic that constitutes the ruling and elite classes, et cetera. So, never.
Not to sound more cynical than the situation warrants, but in this case I'm not particularly surprised or disappointed. Congress is clueless and more concerned with partisan politics and re-election fundraising.
We should be (and many are) working to secure ourselves so that Congress and the legal system must work to catch up to the possibilities of citizens to protect themselves on their own terms: good end-to-end encryption, true anonymity when it's needed, and as much open and auditable code as we can get.
They're not going to give security and privacy to us — they wouldn't even if they could. So we make it ourselves, slowly, surely, and publicly, and maybe in a few years they'll be the ones that are outraged.
(pasted from the other thread where I wrote this before I saw this one)
It may well still be able to be dismantled by executive order. Just 1) the next President could put it together again, and 2) Obama doesn't have much interest in dismantling it in the first place.
In 2008 he campaigned against dragnet (or at least warrantless) surveillance. Obama's wikipedia entry says he taught constitutional law for twelve years or so.
Why is Obama not interested in dismantling dragnet surveillance? He also worked as a civil rights lawyer.
Obama has the education and experience to know that surveillance has lots of bad effects, and that some secret special reading of a law doesn't make it legal or ethical or constitutional. Why didn't Obama dismantle the universal-as-possible surveillance?
This is a really fair question. I think it is simply he doesn't want to look weak. The political problem with him fixing the EOs is he has to sign them. This is just a publicity stunt to blame someone else for not doing something he lacks the courage to do himself. Its truly mind-bending. A good leader would dix the stuff he can fix by himself and then work with other people to fix what needs to be fixed by consensus. POTUS is not that guy, tho.
Fundamentally, the whole NSA operates under an EO. The directive of the NSA is basically an EO. So, Every thing they do can be curtailed by POTUS.
The NSA only needs legislation to expand for the most part beyond existing laws. But here we are talking about limiting. That is simple fiat, not an issue for congress. (The nsa reports to the dod, headed by a civvy, who reports to potus.)
> With the bill’s defeat, the Senate faces a hard deadline for new legislation since the legal basis for the phone records program, a provision of the Patriot Act, expires in June. After that, when the 90-day orders to phone companies requiring them to turn over their customers’ records expire, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court would be unable to issue a new round of orders.
Given the "rifts between the [GOP's] interventionist and more libertarian-leaning wings," what are the probable endgames? Specifically, what are the odds of–and promoting factors for–an obstructionist minority flipping over the table in June?
Assuming no new R's vote right, that gets us to a vote of 50 / 50, with Biden getting the deciding vote. However, in the modern filibustering Senate, 41 Senators can kill any bill.
So in theory, if everyone who voted for the bill hangs tight, they could destroy any new legislation, including PATRIOT ACT reauthorization.
However, I'd be quite surprised if neither of these things happen:
1. McConnell decides the filibuster no longer works for him, so he kills it.
2. Obama puts remarkable pressure on fellow D's and they buckle.
But theoretically, we have all the votes we need. And if 1 new R senator joins the anti-NSA caucus (and all the D Senators hang tight, and all the D senators are good on the issue), they wouldn't even be a minority -- they'd have 51 votes.
I'm away from my lists, but some of the new R Senators will vote anti-NSA with Paul / Cruz. I would imagine the Patriot Act reauthorization might be problematic.
This article characterizes the new R senators as belonging more to the establishment wing of the party, in part because the party was fairly successful in getting its preferred candidates through the primaries, avoiding some of the surprises that characterized 2010/2012: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/16/us/new-senators-tilt-gop-b...
Some do have more track record in that regard than others though, so it might be that they won't all side with the national-security conservatives.
4 were swept into the House in the wave that brought the R majority and their voting record isn't exactly all happy happy with the establishment. Joni Ernst is not establishment. I am not sure about the other 2.
There were a lot a jockeying and some losses from the outsiders, but remember that Cantor got beat in the primary.
Both Cruz and Lee are assumed to be in contention for 2016. Neither can reasonably expect the nomination, but both could, with a decent showing in the early primaries, end up with the VP nod. They are very unlikely to buck the party at such a sensitive time (the optics of doing so right before McConnell takes over as majority leader are bad).
Note: I deleted my original post because I mistakenly said Paul had voted for the bill. Paul voted with the establishment republicans (McConnell, etc) against (i.e. to keep the NSA as-is)
Edit: Also, Cruz bucks the Republican leadership all the time. That's his thing and they hate him for it. He was the main force behind the government shutdown.
I think the key part here is that they're strongly associated with the Tea Party enough that they're not worried about a challenge from the right in the next election cycle. I doubt we'll see very many others feel comfortable straying out of the fold unless it's something which is really important to voters back home.
Only 3 provisions of the roughly 100 from the Patriot Act would be renewed with this bill[1], but that amendment was added on by one of the original authors of the Patriot Act, Jim Sensenbrenner (R)Wisconsin.[2]
It was a "manager's amendment" from the House Judiciary Committee, meaning that it was a majority consensus of whole committee.
Here are the 23 Republican members on the committee:
Bob Goodlatte, Virginia, Chairman
Jim Sensenbrenner, Wisconsin
Howard Coble, North Carolina
Lamar S. Smith, Texas
Steve Chabot, Ohio
Spencer Bachus of Alabama
Darrell Issa, California
Randy Forbes, Virginia
Steve King, Iowa
Trent Franks, Arizona
Louie Gohmert, Texas
Jim Jordan, Ohio
Ted Poe, Texas
Jason Chaffetz, Utah
Tom Marino, Pennsylvania
Trey Gowdy, South Carolina
Mark Amodei, Nevada
Raúl Labrador, Idaho
Blake Farenthold, Texas
George Holding, North Carolina
Doug Collins, Georgia
Ron DeSantis, Florida
Jason T. Smith, Missouri
I can very much understand people for the 2nd amendment and people for government surveillance but for the love of me I cannot understand people for both things, they seem direct contradictions of what your idea of government involvement in citizen's life should be.
I think they just reflect what the people want. In other words, a majority of American population does not want overhaul of NSA program. Right or wrong we will see in the future.
The parties have successfully rigged the system such that they only need to cater to lobbyists, and the extremist wings of their respective parties, to maintain power.
It really wouldn't matter what the majority of Americans believed, notwithstanding that a majority of Americans probably would view the NSA programs as, at worst, a necessary evil. You also have to take into account the politics approaching the upcoming presidential election.
Matt Taibbi is a good writer to read in regards to how Washington really works. I can't remember which of his books had the best example, but the system is broke.
Being spied on by your own country is worse than being spied on by other countries. Your own country doesn't have another country between you and it to protect you. Also, other countries will look at the USA and say 'we can do it because they do it', and that just leads to more problems. Eventually you have to say no to spying. It's morally and ethically unacceptable, and we should not tolerate anybody doing it.
When a country wants to spy on it's own citizen, they apparently think that it's acceptable to ask for that data from another country as opposed to being illegal when getting the data directly. USA <-> Germany being an example
The democrats want the government to control everything. Do you think we will have less data collection when we have universal health care? How about making the Internet a "utility"? You don't think when this happen there won't be a direct pipe to our data??
I can't believe anything I read on the Internet anymore. I would be interested to see why they voted against it.
I'm shocked that a group that claims they are open and accepting, yet when the word republican is used, the tactics and tone change to that of the people you are against (personal attacks, slander, bigotry, and bias). It's because most of it is bullshit. There is only acceptance when someone aligns with your personal beliefs.
I can see how evil dictators can come into power. The average person can so easily be swayed by emotion.
Encryption doesn't quite solve everything here - the NSA can still demand the encryption keys, or demand direct modifications to the service like logging being installed.
To solve this from a purely technical standpoint we'd need to design services where the service provider is a completely untrusted party - never allowed to see or manipulate user data on the backend, and all processing that requires decrypted user data would need to be moved to the client. We would also need a way to verify client code to ensure that malicious changes haven't been introduced. And finally, we would need a way to anonymize all requests to the backend.
An architecture like this is pretty hard to implement, so it would be nice if we could just get the NSA to stop.
The NSA will not stop because DC wants to spy on governors, lawyers, judges, companies, etc. NSA has been illegally spying domestically since its inception, which was itself an undemocratic exec order. Only Supreme Court will restrain, and doesn't protect against Chinese and Russian hackers. So encryption throughout consumer tech stack and net protocols is the only answer.
Proving once again that going thru "Official" Channels was never an option. That in the toxic hyper-partisan environment of Washington the Powerful will find a way to kill any meaningful reform of even the worst abuses.
The solution to this has to be first and foremost Technological.