Google Engineer Wins NSA Award, Then Says NSA Should Be Abolished 297
First time accepted submitter MetalliQaZ writes "Last week, Dr. Joseph Bonneau learned that he had won the NSA's first annual "Science of Security (SoS) Competition." The competition, which aims to honor the best 'scientific papers about national security' as a way to strengthen NSA collaboration with researchers in academia, honored Bonneau for his paper on the nature of passwords. And how did Bonneau respond to being honored by the NSA? By expressing, in an honest and bittersweet blog post, his revulsion at what the NSA has become: 'Simply put, I don't think a free society is compatible with an organisation like the NSA in its current form.'"
Public resignation? (Score:3, Insightful)
Google is a huge part of the surveillance machine. If you oppose surveillance, aren't you morally bound to stop enriching a big part of the problem? Is this what you signed up for? To help them build the apparatus of tyranny?
Maybe a mass wave of resignations among the 9 would effect positive change? Maybe we are all responsible to do our part to stop this monstrosity?
I am afraid to post this comment. I am sure that I will get categorized as a dissident for it. I would say a lot more, but my freedom of speech is chilled.
Re:Public resignation? (Score:5, Interesting)
More accurately, the internet is part of the surveillance machine. Google is picked on regularly as they're the biggest collector of information, but they also have pretty much the best record for privacy.
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Just because it is not apparent who you are shilling for does not mean you are not shilling.
Re:Public resignation? (Score:5, Insightful)
I am afraid to post this comment. I am sure that I will get categorized as a dissident for it.
You are the heart of the problem. The brave aren't easily terrorized. The government has acted criminally, and I voice my dissent publicly.
Not that it will do any good.
Re:Public resignation? (Score:5, Insightful)
I applaud you for your comment and your bravery, but I must correct you on one thing:
The brave aren't easily terrorized.
Yes, they are. Here is a quote of quote from the Dictator's Handbook [dictatorshandbook.net]:
Some men and women have great courage ... But the tyrant has ways of countering even this. Among those who do not fear death, some fear torture, disgrace, or humiliation. And even those who do not fear these things for themselves may fear them for their fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, wives, and children. The tyrant uses all these tools.
Even ignoring any threats by the government, I am always worried about the health and well being of my wife, my brother, his wife, their unborn child, my young goddaughter, my aging parents, my ill in-laws, etc. Being brave can mean watching your family get hurt. Being brave can mean your family hating you even if you are doing the right thing. Perhaps it's a medical thing like in my case. (Let's just say my mother in-law and I have disagreements about what is best for her.) Perhaps they hooked on drugs. Perhaps they have a gambling problem. Speaking in terms of a repressive government: having your whole family turn against you because you stand up for what is right is a very difficult thing to do. In fact, the water gets really muddy... is it better to stand up for your fellow countrymen or to keep your loved ones "safe" and alive? Sometimes, you can pick only one. A choice you make might remove their freedoms or their lives.
Unfortunately, I don't find the picture isn't quite black and white as a lot of others do.
Politicians .... (Score:5, Interesting)
From the Winner of the prize:
"And like many American citizens I’m ashamed we’ve let our politicians sneak the country down this path."
From some of the politicians:
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) : "It’s called protecting America," Feinstein said at a Capitol Hill news conference.
"Protecting America!" - that's right up there with "Think of the Children!"
"Right now I think everyone should just calm down and understand this isn't anything that's brand new," Reid said.
Al Gore
In digital era, privacy must be a priority. Is it just me, or is secret blanket surveillance obscenely outrageous?
Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) said in a statement:
"This type of secret bulk data collection is an outrageous breach of Americans’ privacy."
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said he was "glad" the NSA was collecting phone records.
"I don’t mind Verizon turning over records to the government if the government is going to make sure that they try to match up a known terrorist phone with somebody in the United States," Graham said in an interview on "Fox and Friends."
The "Catbert" quote....
Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) also claimed that reports of the NSA collecting phone records was "nothing particularly new."
"Every member of the United States Senate has been advised of this," Chambliss said. "And to my knowledge we have not had any citizen who has registered a complaint relative to the gathering of this information."
Bold mine. I think Saxby doesn't understand "secret surveillance" means.
Senator Ted Cruz
Disturbing pattern emerging. Govt wants your DNA, prayer content & now...phone records?
And lastly, Mike Lee:
Mike Lee
#NSA surveillance of #Verizon cell phone records illustrates why I voted against Patriot Act
I think everyone who said he was "UnAmerican" or UnPatriotic" should apologize.
Re:Politicians .... (Score:5, Informative)
But although President Obama agreed with Wyden that FISA Court opinions needed to be made public in 2009, not one single opinion has been published since then, and the surveillance state has only grown larger.
Bonneau's paper (Score:5, Informative)
The paper in question is available here [jbonneau.com] in case anybody is interested why the NSA granted him the award.
Re:Bonneau's paper (Score:4, Interesting)
Very good work of destroying the whole point of privacy. And who the fuck allowed him access to 70 million passwords? Google? Shame on google then.
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As someone I assume is in the tech industry, you should know that some people in companies have access to the passwords the company stores, right?
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Access to the information should be very strictly controlled and logged. Let alone bringing out 70 million people's passwords and use it for a paper.
My friend is administrator of a national health care database. He has never (been allowed to?) run a query to see his own records. He was forced to fill a form and formally request a copy.
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At some point in a company there is someone who you must trust with the access to the data, or you dont keep the data.
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First line of the Abstract:
We report on the largest corpus of user-chosen passwords ever studied, consisting of anonymized password histograms representing almost 70 million Yahoo! users, [...]
Re:Bonneau's paper (Score:4, Insightful)
Very good work of destroying the whole point of privacy. And who the fuck allowed him access to 70 million passwords? Yahoo? Shame on Yahoo then.
Fixed that for you.
Though, also, I disagree with your first sentence. The better we understand the use of passwords by larger numbers of real people, the better we can design systems that exploit the strengths of passwords which avoiding their weaknesses -- or perhaps it will motivate us to choose other approaches if it demonstrates that passwords simply do not provide sufficient security.
This is valuable information for people who want to build secure, privacy-preserving systems, which is the complete antithesis of "destroying the whole point of privacy."
Maybe relative to pure cringing... (Score:2)
That post struck me as pretty abjectly apologetic for the NSA. Sure "I don’t think a free society is compatible with an organisation like the NSA in its current form."; but then, same paragraph no less, a bunch of fuzz about how visiting the NSA was pretty neat, and the engineers there seemed like a smart, likeable bunch, who asked good questions, and the problem is clearly with Politicians, not with the NSA (lets just not talk about the...somewhat creative...approach to informing anyone outside the N
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Is everybody scared of the NSA ? (Score:4, Insightful)
Interestingly, out of the first 13 posts on this topic, only 2 have been by named individuals, the rest by anonymous cowards.
Is everyone so scared of getting on the NSA's "of interest" list, no one want's to be identified? Maybe our new tyrannical overlords have won already.
Re:Is everybody scared of the NSA ? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Why can't the motive simply be "What I post on Slashdot is nobody's business"?
If it's nobody's business, why post it?
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Personally, I don't post here with an account anymore because slashdot is circling the drain lately and it depresses me. But I can understand that thinking, which is why I've started signing important posts. I'm not afraid of my government. They should be afraid of *me*.
- - Anthony (0x076F9E89)
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Interestingly, out of the first 13 posts on this topic, only 2 have been by named individuals, the rest by anonymous cowards.
This may be caused by fear of the NSA as you speculate, but I have noticed a lot more comments by ACs in recent months. I was recently threatened on Slashdot for supporting someone who's opinion isn't popular. I didn't know the guy and could care less who he is. I only cared about the comment he made at that particular point in time. An AC threatened to bomb my karma into oblivion. Perhaps AC is the only way to post anything of quality of late if you're hated by the Slashdot community and don't have en
Profiling fail (Score:5, Funny)
If the NSA cannot even accurately profile somebody they are about to give an award to and predict his response, what good are they? It seems all this massive surveillance is not only hugely immoral and dangerous, it also seems to be completely broken with regard to its stated mission. WTF are they collecting this data for?
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If the NSA cannot even accurately profile somebody they are about to give an award to and predict his response, what good are they?
Really? That is such bullshit. He wasn't being profiled in the first place, accurately or not. He was receiving an award for the work he did
Your argument assumes the NSA's goal is fascism, which if it were, we would have a lot more evidence of actual fascism - rather than just the potential for fascism.
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Actually, having thought about this again, I think they profiled him accurately, but the information failed to be communicated within the organization because of a dysfunctional organizational (and secrecy) structure. As to fascism, is there any other possible form of government that does require this level of surveillance and is not at the very least closely related to fascism? Historically, there has not been one and it seems highly doubtful the US is in the process of inventing something new in that rega
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Indeed. Maybe one problem is that the US population does not know a lot about what the Nazis actually did. Getting these things told by a grant-parent and by historical documents that mention places you actually know and might have been to makes things a lot more vivid and clear. And one thing is abundantly clear: The only form of government that has need of blanket surveillance is a totalitarian one that is afraid of its population. Hence when such surveillance is getting established, as it is currently in
Re:Profiling fail (Score:4, Interesting)
In summary, it said NSA good, politicians in Washington bad. The same politicians who are now getting people riled up, all because they want to take the NSA down a notch or two.
Snowden's "leaks" and the controversy in their wake, are part of a carefully thought-out campaign to take power away from the NSA.
ITM!
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It's to have the information ready at hand when they start to profile him.
Which, of course, is just as evil, but, as you point out, less effective.
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His statement isn't a troll, though it is pithy. Remember also when S&P downgraded the US' credit rating. This administration loudly and proudly announced an IRS investigation into them.
Displease the political masters, and they sic the 60,000+ laws on you. Certainly they must be violating something -- historically that's the purpose of myriad laws, so you can't move without violating something, which gives them an excuse to hall you in when you get uppity.
Seriously, this is how corrupt nations operat
Detriment to science (Score:3)
I was wondering about the relationship between NSA and academia, only the other way around. It's probable that they've got their eye on relevant courses (math, cs) and must by now employ a significant number of top-shelf scientists -- whose insights are not likely shared academically, certainly not in a timely fashion.
This seems to me quite detrimental to scientific progress in these areas.
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At certain times a society has to reevaluate (Score:2)
Its priorities. The US has reached such an ethical crossroads: either strong state security or extensive individual liberty. Can't have both.
Remember Wall Street (Score:5, Insightful)
The NSA is just like a too big to fail bank. They believe they no longer need to hide their evil nature and criminal activity. They are, regrettably, correct in their belief.
The Wall Street banks, private sector entities with (in theory) strict oversight, gambled away other people's money, and then the victims were forced to hand over taxes to replace the money the banks lost. Expect the "punishment" that the NSA receives now that their bubble (secrecy) has collapsed to be equally punitive.
The people have spoken multiple times (Score:2)
And they have decided to discard the 'free' society for the 'security' of the NSA. This will not effect next year's election, or those in 2016. A republican or a democrat will occupy the white house and the vast majority of seats in congress... and life will muddle on.
Damn (Score:2)
Both the NSA and Google have unexamined ironies (Score:3)
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html [pdfernhout.net]
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Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing.
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http://www.pdfernhout.net/a-rant-on-financial-obesity-and-Project-Virgle.html [pdfernhout.net] :-). And that jest came almost half a *century* after the "Triple Revolution" letter of 1964 about the growing disconnect between effort and productivity (or work and financial fitness): :-) As with my mother, no doubt Googlers have lived through periods of scarcity of money relative to their needs to survive or be independent scholars or effective agents of change. Is it any wonder they probably think being financially obese is a *good* thing, not an indication of either personal or societal pathology? :-( ... :-(
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Look at Project Virgle and "An Open Source Planet":
http://www.google.com/virgle/opensource.html [google.com]
Even just in jest some of the most financially obese people on the planet (who have built their company with thousands of servers all running GNU/Linux free software) apparently could not see any other possibility but seriously becoming even more financially obese off the free work of others on another planet (as well as saddling others with financial obesity too
http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm [educationa...ocracy.org]
Even not having completed their PhDs, the top Google-ites may well take many more *decades* to shake off that ideological discipline. I know it took me decades (and I am still only part way there.
So what is Google Headquarters in Mountain View, California but a little temporary space habitat bubble of happiness for regular employees, but floating on a sea of relative misery for everyone else planetwide who supports it? Can't we as a society or Google/Virgle as an aspiration do better that that? And even within that bubble are emerging issues. How long can a company expect to run on twenty-somethings without kids?
Google-ites and other financially obese people IMHO need to take a good look at the junk food capitalist propaganda they are eating and serving up to others, as in saying (even in jest):
http://www.google.com/virgle/opensource.html [google.com]
"we should profit from others' use of our innovations, and we should buy or lease others' intellectual property whenever it advances our own goals" -- even while running one of the biggest post-scarcity enterprises on Earth based on free-as-in-freedom software.
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See also, for the future both of them together may create, the upcoming movie "Elysium":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elysium_(film) [wikipedia.org]
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In the year 2154, the very wealthy live on Elysium, a Stanford torus[8][9] high-tech space station governed by President Patel (Faran Tahir), in a utopian setting which includes access to private medical machines that offer instant cures, while everyone else lives below on the overpopulated, ruined, "Third World slum"[7] Ear
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Overridden by the NSA being the bad guys on Stargate.
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no that was the nid a fictional department made for civilian over site of military secrets
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I say that Bayer should select their advertising agencies and brokers little more carefully.
Re:Don't forget (Score:5, Funny)
The engineers are mere henchmen for the Brin. All hail the Brin and his manly spy glasses!
Re:Don't forget (Score:4, Funny)
> All hail the Brin and his manly spy glasses!
Ah, but they are countered by the (other) Brin and his kiln-baked doppelgangers!
Re:Don't forget (Score:5, Insightful)
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No it's not. Any time you see a page with a Facebook or Google logo on it ANYWHERE, that page is a part of the respective corporation's data collection machine.
Virtually all websites on the internet today have some form of "social" badge on them to make them easy for users to share, be it facebook, google, pinterest, or reddit. Every one of those badges is pulled directly from those corporate servers and effectively pings the servers with your IP address, browser agent, operating system, and a few other met
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How does facebook know who I am? From my IP address? Only my ISP can connect my name to an IP address. Are you suggesting that Google routinely contacts someone like Comcast or Verizon and just asks to connect the two because, you know, they are curious?
If the FBI wants to connect my identity to an IP address they can call my ISP, but I haven't seen any evidence that ISPs are routinely giving out that information to people without law enforcement credentials.
Re: Don't forget (Score:5, Informative)
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Very interesting. I've always believed Facebook was evil and I've never had an account with them. I also don't have any friends who actively use the site. From the article it seems that the way they get information on people without Facebook accounts is by using information their friends post about them. So it does seem avoidable. So if you value your privacy:
1) Don't use Facebook.
2) Tell your friends that you would prefer if they didn't write about you on Facebook. If someone does then stop being friends w
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If someone does then stop being friends with them.
How would you know if you are not on Facebook?
Disclosure: i do not use Facebook - so i can be your friend :)
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Unless you've taken some odd measures, you're very server-side trackable. Go here [eff.org] and see how unique you are even with no cookies of any kind on your client. As a general rule, any step you take to block cookies or client-side tracking makes you more unique to server-side tracking. IP address isn't the point at all here! I'm unique mostly because I have an unusual monitor resolution due to running in a VM, and ad blocking on IE.
Unless you're so privacy-obsessed that you actually turn javascript off ever
Re:Don't forget (Score:5, Informative)
1.Google first is not spying on you. Partly because you actually know what they are doing, and spying requires secrecy, and google will tell you what they are doing.
2. Google cannot ruin your life like the NSA can.
3. You have no idea who collects more data.
Re:Don't forget (Score:4, Insightful)
1. Google IS spying on you. Anytime you see a "share on G+" logo, an embedded youtube video, or that google analytics is being used in a page's HTML, you are being spied on by google, a fact that is not understood by most people and is difficult for even experienced users to grasp the full ramifications of.
2. Google hands it's collected data over to the NSA. This is no secret and is widely documented fact. By doing this google is directly causal to any actions the NSA take against you.
3. It's irrelevant who collects MORE data, what is relevant however is that all of these giants, facebook, google, microsoft, yahoo, reddit, etc... are required by US law to comply with court orders to hand over information to the NSA.
The NSA does not collect much data at all personally; you won't see "NSA+", "Share on NSA", or "Login with NSA Connect" on any webpages ever. What the NSA does is go to those private industries that are tracking virtually every single page you view including most porn, news, shoping, and entertainment sites and they show them fancy court orders for them to hand over data on you and anyone else involved in the investigation. The NSA admitted to using "3 hops" of separation in their data collection demands so to day they could demand the entire contents of Google's data collection on every man woman and child is not a stretch. They'd only need a few dozen "suspects" to do so.
Re:Don't forget (Score:5, Informative)
4. Google doesn't spend your tax dollars tracking you.
5. You can tell Google to buzz off if you want.
Re: Don't forget (Score:4, Informative)
Does google analytics need javascript to work? I never whitelist it in noscript.
Re: Don't forget (Score:5, Insightful)
Noscript. I would suggest you Google it but you might prefer to avoid them entirely. You could try bing, but that's likely a frying pan-fire situation.
if you're willing to trust Google to some degree, then DO Google it. They offer a few solutions themselves.
Now, try asking the NSA how to opt out of their tracking and see how far you get.
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How do you tell google analytics to buzz off if it's embedded into practically every website?
https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout
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I don't know about that but if you go into your account settings and edit the information they have on you and you can request a report on your google usage be delivered via Email to you.
Re: Don't forget (Score:2, Insightful)
You can opt out of Google, but you can't opt out of NSA
Re: Don't forget (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re: Don't forget (Score:2)
This is assuming they can't just get what they want by tapping your upstream provider of course.
Re:Don't forget (Score:5, Insightful)
The NSA and CIA are not allowed, by law, to spy on American citizens. I don't see why this is so difficult for people to get through their fucking heads.
Google sucking up as much customer information as they can may be sleezy (maybe) and can be questionable, depending on how they are using, selling, whatever that data . . . but it is a far fucking cry from the nature of the NSA/CIA doing it to our own citizens (except when Google and other companies then hand it over to the NSA/CIA, in which case it is just as fucking vile again).
Re:Don't forget (Score:4, Informative)
It's not difficult; The concern is that these government organizations are blantantly, deliberately, and willing violating said law(s), and going ahead with mass spying on the public.
At least Google tell you up front that they're going to collect data on you in some form or another.. At no point do they ever state otherwise.
With the CIA and NSA, all we have is some dodged questions and weak promises that they're actually holding up to the letter of the law. We have no way to properly audit them to ensure that they're actually in compliance, and their [theblaze.com] congressional [huffingtonpost.com] admissions [foxnews.com] are rather concerning that they in all likelihood aren't.
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They have actually been very ufront with what they are doing. They spy on anyone, as long as there's a 51 probablity that he/she is not an american. ( source [washingtonpost.com])
This is what the relevant part of the PRISM code actually looks like:
boolean OK_to_spy(individual *TARGET) {
if( US_POPULATION < 0.51 * DATABASE_SIZE)
return TRUE;
else
error("Database is too small.");
}
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The weasel way around it is to collect great big blocks of data that include some traffic that goes to people that are not American citizens, or say they are just investigating a citizen because they are a link to a non-citizen.
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Re:Don't forget (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Don't forget (Score:4, Insightful)
The world, regardless of your hippy views, is still divided up into nation-states. The duty of the US government is to protect and serve US Citizens, not the entire world. That mission includes spying on the citizens of other nation states from time to time, as do the governments of other nation-states spy on the US. If you're trying to claim that the US is the only nation that spies on its allies and others you're going to get laughed out of the courtroom, so your implied objection is DENIED.
Spying on EVERYONE, including US Citizens, is typical of a Government that is ill and out of control, and THAT is something that US citizens need to correct.
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There is no need to spy on close allies. That is a sign that the whole system is out of control and exists only for its own sake. Also, ultimately laws are supposed to derive from ethics. If it is wrong to spy on your own citizens it is also wrong to spy on anyone else who is not currently or very soon to be an enemy.
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The US is one of unfortunately all too many nations that spy to support their own corporations getting business secrets. There's a big difference between checking up on what ballistic missile submarine a government is deploying where, and what new flavor some consumer product will be released in six months from now. The US government pays, with your tax dollars and mine, to give "American" companies (which are often international), data on what their competitiors are doing , supposedly because that keeps jo
Re:Don't forget (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not happy about Google either but Google has neither the power nor the inclination to throw me in prison because I wrote that I'd like to kill person X in an email that was never intended for any eyes but the recipient. Or put me on a no fly list when I criticise the TSA and say I want to go on a killing rampage and take out a bunch of them.
We are used to having genuine 100% freedom of speech with no exceptions when communicating privately with a friend. Due to PRISM and probably other NSA programs this is no longer the case. You have to assume that everything you write could be read by an NSA agent.
Privacy from a repressive government is completely different from privacy from a private company that merely wants to make as much money as possible. On the one hand you get targeted ads. On the other you might spend years in prison getting raped by your cellmate and then dying from HIV. That's why we should be more concerned about the NSA than Google. Google doesn't even have a reason to personally read our emails. The NSA does.
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So to you being served target ads which you won't even see if you use noscript and an ad blocker is just as bad as being thrown in jail and/or put on a terrorist watch list for something you wrote to a friend in an email or instant message or text message?
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Re:Shortsighted techie ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Shortsighted techie ... (Score:4, Insightful)
I call NSA slashtroturfing (Score:5, Informative)
As per the congressional investigations into what we knew before Pearl Harbor -- and as per records in any public library before the 2001 reclassification act, AND testified to by the fact that some of the volumes and some of the pages are new, AND also to be confirmed by librarians that the substitutions did occur, followed by a failed lawsuit...
the US government, including the president, KNEW when, what, and where on Pearl Harbor ahead of time, but the president of the United States wanted to pressure Americans into accepting the war.
I call BS on your post, and further I call NSA slashtroturfing.
As of this point, NSA reclassification is being used against US citizens, for the benefit of the NSA.
You're "short-sighted" - how/why? (Score:2, Informative)
"Absolute Power Corrupting Absolutely" in the long-haul. There is a reason that old adage exists you know... it usually comes true, and history's FULL of examples of it & if you keep reading? You'll see WHERE I got that idea, and from whom (an expert in the field, without a doubt).
I.E.-> You put that much power in anyone's hands, sooner or later, it goes to their heads, & they abuse it (not sure I'd be "above it" either myself - 1 'bad day' & poof - you've got Caligula!).
I figure it this way:
Re:Shortsighted techie ... (Score:5, Insightful)
On the contrary. We all have responsibility for national security. And what is being done today by our government in the name of national security threatens national security.
Re:Shortsighted techie ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Shortsighted techie ... (Score:5, Insightful)
And herein lies the problem: who gets to define who the "undesirables" are? How do we know they're undesirable? There's a large segment of the American population who think gays are undesirable. There's an even larger segment who think Muslims are undesirable. There are an amazing number of people on /. who object to pinko, gun-stealing liberals.
In my opinion, NSA apologists are undesirable, and should be the people we tap 24/7; it's usually ultra [wikipedia.org] right-wing [wikipedia.org] types [wikipedia.org] who perform modern domestic-bred terrorism.
j/k. Even conservatives deserve privacy.
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And, once again, we have yet another example of why the warrantless surveillance is a bad idea. There was an agent (DuÅan Popov) working for the British MI6 who was trying to tell the US military about Pearl Harbor for months before the attack, but the US military didn't want to listen. In othe
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...which in turn allowed Pear Harbour to happen.
Utter bullshit. It's well understood in the intelligence community and among historians that elements in DC (including Roosevelt) knew all about the impending attack and allowed it to occur for political reasons.
You really ought to refrain from commenting on subjects you clearly know nothing about.
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MOST people would understand the phrase "in it's current form" to mean he understands the need for some sort of sigint.
Re:Communication is sometimes the only trace (Score:5, Insightful)
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It's okay as long as we catch the bogeymen.
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Safe communication means safe means for propaganda, avenues for radicalisation and recruitment, and for coordination and planning. And that's plenty harmful.
Unsafe communication means no safe means for recruitment, coordination and planning. And that means that people take their business elsewhere than the U.S.A.
If you really want to know how important secure communication is considered, ask the military, the diplomatic service, and most companies.
Not to mention the U.S. constitution.
I'm all for good old detective work, given a suspect. But the trick is to get a suspect in the first place. Monitoring communication helps enormously in becoming aware of suspects.
In particular since every citizen is suspect. Some need less, some need more coaxing in order to stop behaving like prospective terrorists and to start loving the government. If the government is supposed to micromanage its citizens' loyalty, it needs proper access to their communication.
Re:Communication is sometimes the only trace (Score:5, Insightful)
It is certainly true that monitoring everyone 24/7 as in 1984 increases security. It is also true that it leads to a lot of very unhappy people who are forced to live in an Orwellian dystopia. Human beings simply are not meant to live like that. So your cure is far, far worse than the actual diseasae.
If the price for freedom from being watched all the time by hostile government agents on fishing expeditions to find illegal or suspicious (to them) behavior is losing 3000 lives every 10-20 years then it's a price that I and probably most freedom loving people are willing to pay.
Nuking every country other than the US would also make us very safe. A bit lonely but a lot safer from the occassional terrorist. The fewer people on the planet the fewer terrorists. Unfortunately for you safe at any price people there are ethical considerations.
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I see plenty of reasons. Whatever information corporations collect is typically given to the government without much of a fight.
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Re:too much (underlying) left-wing bias for my tas (Score:4, Insightful)
This times eleventy billion. If congress, etc., didn't want the NSA they could change it. Besides, the ability to view private communication has been a core capability and even the purpose of national spy organizations forever.
The larger question is what government is allowed to do with it. Honestly it would be disappointing, even outrageous if the NSA didn't have the technical ability to collect this kind of data. Being on the cutting edges of information gathering and technology were crucial in the allies winning WW2, for instance. Certainly russia and china are champing at the bit to do it. This is the major reason why they keep pushing to "decentralize the internet" and wrest control from the US for their own purposes.
The hijacking of government for political purposes (e.g., the IRS scandal) is far more worrying simply because it's a clear indicator that those in power have no qualms about abusing it. Hence ultimately you could blame not congress but rather the electorate.
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Re:too much (underlying) left-wing bias for my tas (Score:4, Informative)
IRS scandal? Did you even read how that ended up?
http://www.wnd.com/2013/07/there-was-never-any-irs-scandal-after-all/
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Honestly it would be disappointing, even outrageous if the NSA didn't have the technical ability to collect this kind of data.
It really wouldn't; from my perspective, they're just a waste of tax dollars.
Hence ultimately you could blame not congress but rather the electorate.
Blame both.
Re: It's only evil unless Google does it (Score:2)
Or do hundreds of other life ruining things.