Expectation of privacy was nice while it lastedFollow

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Gbaji wrote:

Seriously? That's incredibly naive of you.

Yes, seriously. Society tends to think smarter with technology, not dumber.

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Gbaji wrote:

Except that the logic follows the technical. If it costs me 100 man hours to hack into one person's computer and read his electronic diary, it's not efficient to use wide scale hacking of private computers as a means to find potential criminals.

If it costs me .000001 man hours to hack into one person's computer and read his electronic diary, it's very very efficient to use wide scale hacking of private computers as a means to find potential criminals.

We can also create a machine that can counts millions of pennies at a time. You're not getting the logic point.

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Gbaji wrote:

People will abuse any power you give them. My argument is to be cautious about what power we grant the government over our private information. I'm not sure why this is even remotely controversial. I'm not even proposing any specific legal change or activity. Just saying "let's make sure that people remember that privacy is important, because if they stop thinking it's important to them, then they wont resist if/when some government agency decides to try some sort of mass hacking scheme". I'm not saying what *will* happen, but what *might* happen. Why is that such a problem?

The controversy isn't the concept of being cautious of providing private information to the government. The controversy is your third grade logical jump of doing automatic mass hacking of random people. That is both logically and technically stupid.

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Gbaji wrote:

Please tell me you're kidding. I could actually write down all the ways you are wrong here, but it would take more time than I'm willing to spend writing, or that anyone else is willing to spend reading. Um... But for starters, let's just say that the very idea of typing "the command" is where you start off being wrong. You're still assuming a person sitting at a keyboard click clacking away. That's not remotely what I'm talking about here.

I've probably forgotten more about IP packets, TCP stacks, and physical device buffer structures than you will ever know in your lifetime.

You act as if robots fall out of the sky and create their own scripts. SOMEONE is writing the script. If you don't want to write the command, please describe the command that you are referring to. Tell me what you would be looking for. Don't give me the "I don't have time to write" BS, given the amount of text you write on a daily basis.

Holy shit are you dense?

He said you can search for specific Americans private info out of the massive pool of collected data.

The parameters are a joke because anyone with access to system can search for anything. Also when you have conditions like "at least 51 percent confidence in a target's 'foreignness." There is an awful lot of wiggle room for abuse.

Wtf? No one is saying people have no purpose when they search stuff. The problem is that they can look for anything, You can search through and look at private emails of people who are not under any suspicion and that you do not have a warrant for, and search for incriminating evidence for any crime, or non-crime but frowned upon activity.

That's the problem.

No one is saying you go straight from massive data seizure to prosecuting everyone implicated inside it without any targeted analysis.

What you do is create an internal database with the random files. You can then search this internal database freely without having to justify your perusal of information. This has a large abuse potential. To actually build a case against people and get 'results', you would still need some kind of method to your trawl, yes, but there is nothing infeasible about creating the database in the first place - and the creation of an internal database of non-analysed data creates a state of affairs very different to unanalysed data out in its natural habitat, the real world.

There is a lot of 'automated' big data stuff you can do, as well, but there's no need to get into that.

Already created ... over a decade ago.

Well, not "random" so much as "completely mirroring all data moving through specific points and dumping all the data into storage".

My money is something more like "list of people who might be interested in buying new consumer electronics," because there's gotta be a wealth of information there, but that's just me.

Dude. 1975 called and wants its telecommunications technology back.

Seriously? You obviously have absolutely no clue how advanced data searches have become. How do you think google works?



Since this is the second time you mentioned it in this thread, do I really have to repeat the same response? Fine: There's a difference between public and private spaces. Those other searches were occurring in public spaces. Totally different thing.

All the more reason to collaborate, you're not directly competing with each other and one man's trash is another man's treasure.

Obviously can't speak for him, but I think the point is even if it's trivial to do there's still no point in doing it. Starting from a targeted point (say visits to a terrorist website) will always be more likely to yield "good" terrorist candidates than a broad and blind search/hack/whatever. Given they have limited resources to follow up on leads there's no point to generating more candidates for closer monitoring as there's never going to be the resources to do anything useful with that information.

The only way you'd ever start with a blind search through a database is if you had absolutely no idea where to start looking, in which case you probably have bigger problems than the ethical concerns that come from mass surveillance.

Edited, Jul 19th 2016 2:31pm by someproteinguy

That assumes they're looking for terrorists. As I (and at least one other person) have already mentioned, once you have the database, you can just as easily search for "people associated with a political organization I dislike who have a higher than 51% chance of being involved in a marital affair, or who's children might be substance abusers, or who may have visited a **** site, or who's travel patterns indicate a chance of being a closeted homosexual, etc, etc, etc". Then passing that information to a "dirty tricks squad" to try to dig up something for political use to damage said opposing political organization. Or use it directly via some sort of blackmail or extortion.

In a climate where things like a prominent pastor being caught buying drugs or the magazine subscription of a female VP candidate is used as political fodder, surely you can see how this might be abused? Any information about someone, even if just implied via data patterns, can be used as a starting point for digging into them to find something to make hay about.

And again, my main concern is that truly "private" information remain protected from such things. There's already a risk of the sort of abuse I mention above, but since that is (at least in theory) limited to just public information collected about someone, it's less likely to yield fruit. If you have access to private information stored on people's computers, then the potential for there being valuable/harmful data in there grows significantly, which increases the odds that it will be used in the manner I mention above (bang for the buck on the search time in this case).



It's not having no idea where to start looking that is a concern. It's looking for things that we probably don't think our intelligence services should be looking at/for that is. I'm generally of the mindset that at some point we do have to trust our intelligence services to do their jobs properly and not go outside the boundaries required for those jobs. However, that doesn't mean that I think we should just abandon the concept of privacy and trust blindly that no one will ever abuse that power. I happen to think that putting that dividing line for data collection (absent warrant) at the whole "public vs private" point is a good way to go. It gives our intelligence forces sufficient information to do their jobs, while still protecting our rights.

The video below demonstrates choosing to randomly grab millions and millions of files over specifically targeting people that you have leads on.