Cap'n Refsmmat

We allow free expression and a free press because of the benefits they bring a free society, despite knowing that occasionally they will be used to do things we personally do not like. That is a necessary part of the tradeoff: allow free speech and association and you'll end up with the Westboro Baptist Church, spouting homophobic bigotry in front of funerals. We don't rewrite the laws to ban the free expression we don't like, because that defeats the whole purpose. Instead, court supervision exists to allow us to limit freedoms while maintaining appropriate controls on police power. But Section 7 allows the police to detain travelers without any warrant, probable cause, or judicial oversight -- they can simply say "I don't like you" and invent an excuse.

If nobody could ever break the law, social change would never happen. Interracial relationships would never have happened, because they broke the law, and nobody would ever have thought to allow them, because nobody would ever try. Same-sex marriage would never have happened, since nobody would ever have tried a same-sex marriage to find out if it's worth it. A bit of freedom is necessary for society to advance. We should all have something to hide. Then, of course, there's the ability of the police to find a crime when you may not have done anything morally objectionable. Perhaps you've used an unlicensed rabbit in a magic act. Or the police can invent a crime -- after all, the surveillance programs are top secret, so you're not allowed to use them to defend yourself in court. You can be placed on a no-fly list for a made-up reason and you have essentially no recourse. You can be assassinated by a drone strike without the government being forced to present its evidence, if there is any.

Here's an interesting development: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/07/15/196755/lebanese-officials-say-cia-warned.html Of course, the intelligence collected in this case may not have come from the NSA's domestic surveillance programs, but through targeted overseas surveillance. But it does make one wonder about the uses to which PRISM and domestic phone records are being put.

As an off-topic aside: could we all please pick topic titles that are descriptive? "They do?" gives me absolutely no idea what question you're asking or whether I know how to answer it. You could attract more attention to your threads with good titles.

Probably those posts have been deleted as spam before you can see them.

The software's built-in filter is supposed to use this automatically, along with Project Honeypot data. It's not working very well right now, but I'm away on a trip until tomorrow night and won't be able to find out why.

It will be visible to anyone unless you were only to mention it in a private message to another member.

This is why I don't like this conception of privacy. The danger comes in aggregation, reuse and mission creep. Start indexing Instagram pictures with facial recognition and no single picture will we an invasion of privacy -- but in aggregate you can learn more about people than a strip search would provide. See also http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=990030

Allow me to change the subject from this tedious bickering. Some interesting things we learned today: The NSA claims that cell phone location data is not part of the collected metadata. I had earlier talked about the dangers of keeping that data, so if the NSA is honest this is reassuring. Glenn Greenwald has written about the "oversight" provided by the FISA court: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jun/19/fisa-court-oversight-process-secrecy This is worrisome.

He claims that Of course, that's exactly what he would say if he were a spy. But I don't think it's very productive speculating.

Edward Snowden is holding a Q&A on the Guardian's website. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/17/edward-snowden-nsa-files-whistleblower A couple of interesting answers relevant to this thread: Q: Is encrypting my email any good at defeating the NSA survelielance? Id my data protected by standard encryption? A: Encryption works. Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on. Unfortunately, endpoint security is so terrifically weak that NSA can frequently find ways around it. Q: Some skepticism exists about certain of your claims, including this: "I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone, from you, or your accountant, to a federal judge, to even the President if I had a personal email." Do you stand by that, and if so, could you elaborate? A: Yes, I stand by it. US Persons do enjoy limited policy protections (and again, it's important to understand that policy protection is no protection - policy is a one-way ratchet that only loosens) and one very weak technical protection - a near-the-front-end filter at our ingestion points. The filter is constantly out of date, is set at what is euphemistically referred to as the "widest allowable aperture," and can be stripped out at any time. Even with the filter, US comms get ingested, and even more so as soon as they leave the border. Your protected communications shouldn't stop being protected communications just because of the IP they're tagged with. More fundamentally, the "US Persons" protection in general is a distraction from the power and danger of this system. Suspicionless surveillance does not become okay simply because it's only victimizing 95% of the world instead of 100%. Our founders did not write that "We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all US Persons are created equal." Q: Can analysts listen to content of domestic calls without a warrant? A: NSA likes to use "domestic" as a weasel word here for a number of reasons. The reality is that due to the FISA Amendments Act and its section 702 authorities, Americans’ communications are collected and viewed on a daily basis on the certification of an analyst rather than a warrant. They excuse this as "incidental" collection, but at the end of the day, someone at NSA still has the content of your communications. Even in the event of "warranted" intercept, it's important to understand the intelligence community doesn't always deal with what you would consider a "real" warrant like a Police department would have to, the "warrant" is more of a templated form they fill out and send to a reliable judge with a rubber stamp. Q: When you say "someone at NSA still has the content of your communications" - what do you mean? Do you mean they have a record of it, or the actual content? A: Both. If I target for example an email address, for example under FAA 702, and that email address sent something to you, Joe America, the analyst gets it. All of it. IPs, raw data, content, headers, attachments, everything. And it gets saved for a very long time - and can be extended further with waivers rather than warrants.

The NSA cannot perform voice analysis if the phone companies do not have to turn over the content of calls. If you're alleging that the NSA performs data collection outside that contained in the court order, that's a separate surveillance program outside the scope of this thread. Here, the question is if the metadata in the court order is private.

Glenn Greenwald of the Guardian, who wrote the initial stories after being approached by Snowden, promises that more NSA stories will appear "very shortly". In the past he's told Clapper to "save some melodrama and rhetoric for coming stories," suggesting that he'd reveal serious abuses by the US government. We shall see if he lives up to his hype.

I would say that because metadata is private, while such databases can exist they should be carefully overseen. I don't count "trust us, there's oversight, but it's top secret" as oversight. I don't see how secret oversight of a secret program offers any guarantee that abuse will be detected or punished. If you want to sic the NSA bloodhounds on you, just end every post with a selection of interesting key words. You know, like Adriatic Croatian bullion Bin Laden weapons of mass destruction infowar UNSCOM Centro embassy red noise pre-emptive 9/11 morse Steve Case beanpole cypherpunk. (M-x spook)

Possibly, although there may presumably be means to automatically mark airline tickets as requiring extra security checks based on the credit card or phone number associated with their purchase. (Perhaps there's a known terrorist who uses a certain card or phone but switches aliases frequently.)

My view is that privacy is about power, so abuses of power are inextricably linked to invasions of privacy. If you're thinking of privacy in the "nothing to hide" sense then yes, metadata doesn't threaten me unless the government links it to my name (unless I am unusually worried by a government agent knowing only that someone, somewhere bought a PleasureMaster 4000). But in many cases the government would never have cause to look up my name without seeing the metadata first.

Credit cards are not telephony, but they are metadata collected by the NSA: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324299104578529112289298922.html I don't believe the harassment of Applebaum and others is a result of the no-fly list; they're only detained when entering the country from overseas, as fourth amendment search and seizure rights are waived at border inspections, and hence the government can confiscate and inspect their laptops and phones. This is AFAIK legal, or at least not sufficiently illegal to cause a lawsuit yet.

An interesting perspective from Moxie Marlinspike: We Should All Have Something To Hide In short, he suggests that if law enforcement were 100% effective through pervasive surveillance, social change would be impossible. Civil rights leaders would have been jailed and nobody would ever argue for same-sex relationships, because nobody would ever have had one. Homosexuals would have been jailed immediately. A democracy is supposed to grant us the freedom to experiment with new ideas. Additionally, the sheer number of laws on the books means that surveillance will likely reveal evidence of crimes committed by everyone, at which point law enforcement becomes arbitrary.

I can imagine several scenarios where the government can (ab)use its power against you based on metadata alone: I am your abusive boyfriend and I already know your phone number. Fortunately, my job at the NSA lets me know whenever you contact anyone else. One of your friends is, unknown to you, part of some dissident or terrorist group. Your cell phone records reveal you spend a great deal of time with them. You are put under surveillance or arrested as you leave their house after a Tupperware party. Metadata indicates you are part of a group the government doesn't like, and your credit records indicate you have bought round-trip tickets to the UK and back. They are marked for special security screening when you return, much like Jacob Applebaum has repeatedly experienced. Phone records indicate where you live, so an agent sits on the other side of the street with a telescope and night-vision goggles and takes pictures of you coming out of the shower. This may not be a 4th Amendment search requiring a warrant. Credit card records indicate you recently visited a sex shop and bought the PleasureMaster 4000. A snickering agent calls all of your business contacts to let them know, anonymously.

It's a pretty quiet chatroom. chris logan, if you're getting a blank page, something is wrong; what browser are you using?

In some cases the metadata is inseparable from the identity. Since the details are secret we don't know if cellular metadata includes location data, but if it does, the location data is enough to uniquely identify each person. You still don't get a name, but you know where they live, where they work, who they associate with, what events they attend, and so on. (Verizon already shares this data with other companies in some sort of anonymous aggregated form; I don't know if the aggregation is enough to render people indistinguishable.) A disgruntled NSA employee could look up his ex-girlfriend's data just by knowing her home and work addresses. I do agree that use restrictions are as important as collection restrictions. Perhaps it's reasonable to allow the government to collect these phone records in case they are needed, but to require probable cause when searching and processing the data. Of course, oversight in a top-secret program seems purely symbolic if the disgruntled employee's searches are secret by default. He could skip the warrant and nobody may be able to tell, or nobody could bother punishing him. I agree; the government can't be trusted on this issue yet. I believe the government doesn't have to know anything for the alert system; they just tell the cell providers to broadcast messages in a certain geographic area. But I see your point; there are some cases where it is necessary for the information to be used. But we should be very clear about what those cases are and restrict all other uses. They aren't, but they are examples of abuses which came from illicit surveillance. You seem to be focusing on the issue of metadata in group surveillance -- collecting metadata from thousands of people simultaneously, without caring who they are. In that case I'll agree that the proportionality principle doesn't work. Collecting metadata about groups en masse is a different use case. One solution I've seen proposed is to require group surveillance programs to have a legislated design. Allow only programs with a targeted purpose and mechanisms which are minimally invasive but achieve that purpose, and specifically legislate the allowed uses of the data. This prevents the sort of mission creep that ends up with metadata being used to send traffic tickets to speeders based off of their cell phone's GPS records. Of course, in that case the NSA programs would have to be public. So this has the side effect of making top-secret minimally-overseen surveillance programs difficult to implement. I'm not sure I mind.

Yes. My view of privacy (based on Daniel Solove's) is that we should not see it as hiding embarrassing or revealing information. Privacy isn't something you need only when you have something to hide. Keeping your affairs private is a way to maintain your own freedom of action. The more information other people have about you, the more they can use this information to influence your decisions and behavior. A simple example would be a used car salesman. Obviously, the more you know about the condition of the car, the price the salesman paid for it, and his business practices, the better you can negotiate down the price. The less you know, the more he can bluster about having a wife and four kids to feed and how terrible business is these days. A metadata example might be how Target knows if you're pregnant. Target records metadata about all your purchases and transactions and purchases metadata from other providers, using this to deduce from your purchase history whether you're pregnant. From there they can send targeted advertisements and coupons to influence you into shopping at Target for all of your baby needs. Metadata, then, can't be dismissed as less revealing than, say, the contents of your telephone conversations or emails. There is a surprisingly great deal that can be learned from metadata. This information can be used against you just like your sexts can. We should enforce restrictions on the government use of metadata for surveillance purposes because it grants the government a great deal of power. There are potential abuses -- like the FBI's treatment of Martin Luther King, Jr., who they tried to convince to commit suicide through blackmail, or the offenses committed by the White House Plumbers -- and legitimate uses, like detecting and prosecuting crimes through surveillance of metadata. This would be an enormously powerful policing tool, akin to a general warrant, and would require enormous due process restrictions to prevent officers from just finding dirt on people they don't like. Metadata has also been used by oppressive regimes to frighten dissidents into silence. If you're discovered to be corresponding with a known dissident, it doesn't matter what you said in those conversations -- the government can come and threaten to detain you as a material witness or hint that further contact will have repercussions. ("That's a nice family you have here; be a shame if anything were to happen to it...") Of course, the companies collecting the data also have this power. Consider Western Union's attempts to influence the 1876 election, or imagine the prospect of Google using its knowledge about your email and search history to hint to your spouse that you may be cheating. (Of course, Google has access to more than just metadata, but it wouldn't need the contents of your mail to notice a suspicious trend. "Dear Mrs. Swansont, Your spouse has sent 343 messages to a Ms Rubidium in the past month, sometimes scheduling appointments on Google Calendar with her in empty fields...") I've read suggestions to implement a proportionality principle in the 4th amendment: restrictions on surveillance and data collection should be proportionate to how much they can reveal about the subject. Metadata would rank highly.

We subscribe to an automated service which tracks known spammers and allows them to be blocked before registering. Anyone who makes it through and gets manually banned by us is also automatically reported to the service, which should slow them down on other sites.

Oh, I was wondering if you already had it in compatibility mode; I don't know if it will help. Worth a shot though.

That's interesting, because your browser claims that it is IE 7. You may want to check if you have it in compatibility mode, where it renders pages like it's IE 7.