Let's be clear about what the "FREEDOM Act" does. It does not make NSA Bulk Collection of phone data illegal. What it does is rearrange the laws and request process and more carefully enumerate and define procedures by which the NSA may acquire and query phone records that are stored in bulk.
It also focuses primarily on phone records and one phone record program. There are dozens of phone record programs and hundreds of different types of signals that are collected that are not subjects of the "FREEDOM Act".
Now (like it presumably was before) the NSA will not have full takes of all American phone records. They will force companies to keep these records for them though, and they will continue to have the ability to query them.
It doesn't matter if nobody is watching 99.5% of CCTV footage. If CCTVs watch every square inch of a city and record it for later possible inspection, that's surveillance. It does not matter if human analysts do not inspect 99.5% of the bulk data. It is still surveillance.
It was also surveillance when the KGB forced private citizens to keep tabs on one another. It does not matter whether it is Google, Yahoo, Apple, Microsoft, Dropbox, Facebook, and Comcast doing the surveillance on compulsion of the Fed. All of our data and communications are being stored and processed.
It's quite sad that even a relatively smart and educated community like HN fell for the "oh, they're putting restrictions on surveillance" thin veneer of bullshit when it's pretty damn obvious as soon as you look at the details that this act is doing exactly the opposite of what it claims to do.
If we here are not smart enough to see through this bullshit, then the vast majority of the US certainly will also fall for this.
I've found that a very easy way to quickly determine whether an act of congress harms our rights is in the name itself. They almost always use doublespeak. In other words, an act called the FREEDOM Act is more likely to harm freedom than help it.
I think the Internet needs more communication services that operate on the client-side and communicate in a decentralized manner.
Only truly distributed, client-side services can resist the kinds of mass metadata collection that governments force service operators to engage in.
I personally have long since lost faith in the political systems of the world to safeguard the interests of their people. It's about time we took the matters into our own hands and start coming up with technological solutions.
I guess you have an ideological bent that considers it a shuffling of deck chairs. At the end of the day, I would rather have private companies holding the records than government for reasons that should be obvious.
But isn't this just like forcing these businesses to be a free-of-charge private cloud storage for the government? Oh, silly me, of course there's gonna be payola bigtime for providing a service like this.
If the government can query the whole trove whenever she deems there is a need, what difference does it make where the hard drives live?
Just more lacklustre theatre where nothing really changes and the partners/cronies get some extra loot.
> I would rather have private companies holding the records than government for reasons that should be obvious
They are certainly not obvious to me. With government, there is a democratic oversight, you can (at least in theory) vote to have these records destroyed or stop collecting them and so on.
However, when private company does it, what kind of control do you have over them? Especially if they are 3rd party.
Yeah I don't see why it's better to have private companies hold the data either. Private companies have a different set of incentives, such as mining that data for advertising...
In the theory from which that line originates, it is definitional rather than descriptive: under that theory, whatever has a monopoly on legitimate use of force in a territory is called the State, whether or not it is the thing that purports to be "the government" or not.
There's a bill of rights and a system of checks and balances that protects me from the government. None of those things exist with private companies, not even in theory.
Much of what the government did (and does do) is not techically legal - in that they can not force companies to disclose or backdoor access to information beyond what is listed in the Patriot Act, CALEA and associated constellations of law.
Various mechanisms are used to get partnerships with companies including financial threat (QWest), legal threat (Yahoo), infiltration (Facebook), and appeal (Microsoft, Google). If it is more difficult to get cooperation from a company if they believe that customers will hate, snark and boycott them, or if it will damage their image it will be more difficult for agencies to make deals with companies in extralegal ways.
Discouraging customers from criticizing companies for voluntarily making deals doesn't seem fair to me. I think the OPs misgivings, however informed, are about voluntary rather than compulsed, action taken by Microsoft leadership.
I'm sorry you lost the text - it is so frustrating when that happens.
Getting the government to change itself is a game - and a more opaque one. Which representatives in upcoming elections are clear wins for the way that America is waging cyberwarfare, including its use of domestic surveillance? There are no such choices. The complexity of the issues and the pressing national security concerns (from an awakening Ottoman Empire, revisionist Russia and ambitious China, to the hollowing of an old American-centered European world).
The wise player, I think, doesn't only criticize Microsoft, AT&T, etc. The wise player criticizes all of the players complicit in the game: voluntary actors (like Microsoft), the Administration, shadow government, global incentives, allied interests alike.
(The government itself would say: don't hate us, the player! Hate the world game where we are compelled to reach for these powers or lose control of [y]our global dominance.)
Hating the game means hating it all - not choosing an exclusive player. So I think it makes sense to hate on Microsoft while hating on policy and surveillance law.
Actually, I do feel like tech hasn't doesn't what it could to provide for greater transparency/accountability regarding our elected officials.
Going off on a slight tangent here, but a thought I've had is that politicians aren't just evil/vote along party lines just because. They do it to stay in power. Maybe if there was an app/platform/something that citizens could to go to "pre-vote" on issues or crowdfund issues, maybe people's actual needs would be addressed?
Ideally, a rep would say: here's the app you guys use. I'll vote on everything exactly how my constituents tell me to vote. And, in doing so, just be a direct proxy for the voting public.
Can you clarify what changes you would expect Felten to bring into the government? I'm a little frustrated by the lack of specifics in both the article, the Wiki page, and these comments. What about his technology background and history make him a particularly viable candidate - and what changes will we expect him to bring to bear from his background?
He's pro-technology, pro-privacy, anti-DRM, anti-DMCA, etc. I'm hoping that he will use this role to make the government a little less technophobic, a little less inclined to use laws to prop up companies that can't cope with new technologies, and a little less inclined towards mass spying and data collection.
On the other hand, I have no idea how much influence this role actually has; we'll see how it goes over the next few years.
DRM is a technology that restricts the invention of future technologies. DRM enumerates what you can do with data, which by design restricts future possibilities as well as present ones. One of the key features of non-DRMed data is that it can be used in novel ways that its original authors never thought of.
On balance, I feel comfortable classifying DRM systems as "anti-technology": they prevent the further advancement of technology past the vision of what the authors of the DRM system could think of and deigned to allow. More importantly, laws and policies that enforce DRM are anti-technology.
But in any case, a clarification then: against DRM enforced by law, such as via the DMCA, or enshrined into "standards" that are then used by governmental entities. DRM enforced solely by technology, without the backing of laws like the DMCA, is not necessarily a governmental issue, though it's still something to fight against.
Or take Sunstein's appointment after his work on systems of domestic 'guidance' of public discussion through 'nudging' and 'choice architecture' through the study of behavioral economics.
It's less of a crowning as it is bringing in those who can transform, with leadership, the mechanisms and operating procedures of a department.
The US Chief Technology Officer was set up in the E-Government Act of 2002, which states the role's responsibilities as:
* To provide effective leadership of Federal Government efforts to develop and promote electronic Government services and processes by establishing an Administrator of a new Office of Electronic Government within the Office of Management and Budget.
* To promote use of the Internet and other information technologies to provide increased opportunities for citizen participation in Government.
* To promote inter-agency collaboration in providing electronic Government services, where this collaboration would improve the service to citizens by integrating related functions, and in the use of internal electronic
* Government processes, where this collaboration would improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the processes.
* To improve the ability of the Government to achieve agency missions and program performance goals.
To promote the use of the Internet and emerging technologies within and across Government agencies to provide citizen-centric Government information and services.
* To reduce costs and burdens for businesses and other Government entities.
* To promote better informed decision making by policy makers.
* To promote access to high quality Government information and services across multiple channels.
To make the Federal Government more transparent and accountable.
* To transform agency operations by utilizing, where appropriate, best practices from public and private sector organizations.
* To provide enhanced access to Government information and services in a manner consistent with laws regarding protection of personal privacy, national security, records retention, access for persons with disabilities, and other relevant law
Too bad the wiki doesn't give any information about what power he actually has. Does he control any budget? Get to make appointments of his own? fire people?
Something I've been thinking about for a long time - I'll add this here because you and others at HN are more likely to be able to act on it than I am.
It seems to me that hiring teams of programmers that are known to work well together and have proven track records is a smart idea. The reason is that hiring individual programmers, who may or may not get along with one another, and whose individual hire decisions may or may not cover the breadth needed or may result in redundancies - is an inefficient and strange practice.
What if you needed an IT department and could hire groups of programmers who have, collectively, proven track records of managing IT well? Need a website done? Yeah, you could hire a designer, a backend server woman, a database guy, a CMS guru - and hope they all get along well and work together.
Or we could imagine hiring a team of people who manage themselves to get the result you're asking for.
The problem is when there are confluences of conditions that systemically prevent someone (or their 'class') from having the mobility to exit their condition, even when they have enough merit to otherwise warrant it.
Take for example indentured servitude, or third world sweat shops. Sure, working for $0.28 a day in a (dangerous, unsanitary) factory is better than subsistence farming. But if this opportunity is enough to feed a family but not enough to lift the family from a condition whereby it can exit from needing to work in the factory, how is this so very different from perpetuated servitude?
Take serfs. While serfs were 'bound to the land', the condition of the serf was voluntary and mutually beneficial: Wikipedia reads "Serfs who occupied a plot of land were required to work for the Lord of the Manor who owned that land, and in return were entitled to protection, justice and the right to exploit certain fields within the manor to maintain their own subsistence."
Certainly it was a better deal for the serf to labor underneath a lord than live in the wild - especially since all fertile lands had already been captured by lords. And indeed, you see the language and argumentation during the time period repeat a variant of your argument: both the serf and the lord benefit from the situation and therefore it is good. Similarly, whites made similar arguments about black slavery throughout the history of American slave trade.
But a situation where both parties have no benefit by changing their 'local' stratety by small amounts represents a local Nash-like equilibria at the best - and not anything one could argue is a 'global' optimum. And in fact, if one truly buys that markets are meritocratic, one should be willing to subsidize the equality of opportunity so that as many people start off on an even footing as possible.
In sum this is to say that, like Braess's Paradox, locally rational decisions lead to local but not global maxima - whose gaps can be seen to be gigantic from history. When we discuss opportunities for labor, wealth and quality of life, this becomes an ethics question.
It is not so clear, at least to me, that the principle of trade (especially given its other major problems not covered here) should be prioritized over ethical considerations. Quandaries like this do lead us to ask what sorts of wages and opportunities are 'fair'.
The idea of mobility is a warping of the term 'fair'. It assumes the existence of a system in which people are poor and rich, it's a priori unfair, regardless of whether movements are possible.
I am (was...) working class. I had the 'merit' to rise.
Do you understand what that means?
It means that completely randomly I was blessed with a talent. I also put a bit of work in (the willpower to do so is arguably a talent in itself).
So I win (in a limited sense. I'm not really well off, just relatively). And my schoolfriends do not.
How is that 'fair'? How does that concept of merit make any sense at all? It may result in more efficient allocation of resources, but only within the current system that ensures most people have restricted autonomy. In a reasonable world the difference between a lower and higher paying job would be toys, not serfdom vs. fu money.
The issue is not individual decisions of how to allocate capital, about wages being 'low' or 'high'.
The issue is wealth and ownership and the huge differentials. Especially on basic necessities. Ownership is useful and probably something we desire, but the ability for groups to monopolise/oligopolise the necessities of life (e.g. land) and then use force to defend them against people who need them is broken.
Worker lives in a flat, landlord owns the flat, the landlord owns a fraction of the workers' labour. Why should they need supernormal amounts of merit in order to escape that situation? Why should they need to be above average in order to live the life they already do but with the exploitation removed? It makes no sense.
I come from a similar situation and these sorts of discussions always frustrate me. Hearing well-off middle class people, typically White, debate lower class struggles. I lived through this. All of my friends had the same opportunities. I’m not exceptionally talented, but I got out and they stayed in the ghetto. I graduated high school, they dropped out. They bought Nikes and Nintendos, I went to the public library.
Ultimately, from what I experienced growing up, the poor keep each other down. So while they chose friends, I chose solitude. Because “fitting in” meant remaining poor, choosing crime and materialism over education and grades.
I think what frustrates me is the idea of there even being a 'condition'.
It sort of makes sense globally. But in Western countries we can house everyone by just shuffling wealth about a bit, literally just writing words on paper. But we don't. To the rich money is a video game, to the poor it is a ball and chain...
The other way to understand the present is to be read up on current events.
The current DoD involvement in Silicon Valley is not a callback to the ARPANET so explicitly - the analogies are rough. But it's true that now, like then, the DoD sees the US in extreme danger of collapsing as a superpower like its old soviet rivals due to the huge changes and the challenges of the 21st century.
Today it is China, the Eastern tip of Eurasia and the Asia-Pacific arena that concerns the United States. Having been overtaken as the largest economy by China, and having grown only 0.2% this quarter compared to China's 7+%, and facing existential threats by China's ambitions to build the Chinese Dream of a New Silk Road and to become a great nation, the US is doing everything it can muster to arrange economic and security conditions in the world to maintain its order and its position at the top.
The Defense Department investment in cyber and the partnership with Silicon Valley is just one of many of these investments.
Just some realism? What harm is done by asking people to accurately describe the program?
If OP had bothered to understand the actual nature of the rendition programs and understand why the legal distinction matters, they would have an answer to their question about no one being in jail. That is, under current US law, it is not illegal for the CIA to kidnap people in other countries.
So the interesting discussion, the one about whether the US should be engaging in these activities (it should not), ends up getting overshadowed by the stupid sideshow about accuracy. But pushing back on the inaccuracy is necessary, imagine if we had to respectfully discuss the coming Martian invasion every time someone managed to stick that into the top comment in a thread.
This appeals to me, but I think at this point we are preaching to ourselves.
Re: realism. Some outrage is a nice way to temper realism with civility. If we temper it instead with only a pragmatic calculus or some Randian or Social Darwinism there's a chance we can delude ourselves into a fascism, jingoism or militarism. I prefer to play tit-for-tat - lead with the pillow, reply to sticks with hammers. But if in pursuit of the pragmatic we abandon the ideals, we're going to optimize the 'wrong' objective. In other words - the outrage is a way to call for the US to recognize inalienable rights (which mean that no nationality, nor any government, gives them to you), to pursue fair trails, and to be accountable for mistakes, and to perform justice through a court system where it can be seen for the good thing it is. It is not outrage for outrage's sake.
I think it is a fine thing to be outraged about the US kidnapping people, it is pretty outrageous. I've used "kidnap" repeatedly to hint at that, rather than sticking to "extraordinary rendition".
I think it is really stupid to be outraged that the CIA is kidnapping people off of the street in the US, because they are not doing that.
I feel like I am repeating myself, but from what I can tell from your reply here, you don't seem to see what I am getting at.
The CIA definitely has taken people from the US - even innocent ones - not necessarily 'from the streets'. It has also targeted and killed US citizens without trials.
I think it is being informed by these facts along with similar feelings towards the CIA's 'kidnapping' and 'manslaughtering' of innocent non-citizens, that is repugnant to those with the palate for more civil tone and direction of real defense and intelligence objectives.
The thresholds needed to achieve Quantum Error Correction are extremely close to being achieved nowadays (props in particular to Martini's group - and Google for hiring him). It appears that D-Wave is doing something Quantum - though nobody knows what. Furthermore, DARPA and the Obama administration's initiatives to get Probabilistic Programming adopted by the industry will create both software that can run natively on Quantum Computers and programmers that are able to think in the terms necessary for writing Quantum Software. Lockheed Martin funded research has discovered software algorithms for Quantum Computers that could (not without technical challenges) solve systems of equations that create stealth profiles for fighter jets that are an order of magnitude more effective.
The thresholds needed to achieve Quantum Error Correction are extremely close to being achieved nowadays
Yes, they are quite close to surface code thresholds. However, being close to the thresholds means that you need to be on the pessimistic side of how many physical qubits you need per logical qubit. As I mentioned in my other comment, even Martinis (whose group is, as you say, very good) is still several orders of magnitude short in terms of the number of physical qubits needed to implement one logical qubit, let alone the hundreds to thousands of logical qubits necessary to do interesting computations.
Packing more qubits in seems to me like it's going to be a very challenging problem. Looking at Martinis's recent Nature paper, 9 qubits are taking up something like 2 x 4 mm. Making these smaller would be nontrivial for many reasons: they each have their own microwave coupling line (which requires a certain amount of length); the coherence properties of superconducting qubits seem to care about how much surface you have relative to bulk metal, which is a loser for shrinking the devices; presumably jamming them together presents crosstalk issues; etc. Realistically, you also need to add a bunch of other types of electronics down there to handle multiplexing a la D-Wave. I don't know that these obstacles are insuperable, but I'm definitely a little skeptical that this road leads to useful technology.
It also focuses primarily on phone records and one phone record program. There are dozens of phone record programs and hundreds of different types of signals that are collected that are not subjects of the "FREEDOM Act".
Now (like it presumably was before) the NSA will not have full takes of all American phone records. They will force companies to keep these records for them though, and they will continue to have the ability to query them.
It doesn't matter if nobody is watching 99.5% of CCTV footage. If CCTVs watch every square inch of a city and record it for later possible inspection, that's surveillance. It does not matter if human analysts do not inspect 99.5% of the bulk data. It is still surveillance.
It was also surveillance when the KGB forced private citizens to keep tabs on one another. It does not matter whether it is Google, Yahoo, Apple, Microsoft, Dropbox, Facebook, and Comcast doing the surveillance on compulsion of the Fed. All of our data and communications are being stored and processed.
It is still, categorically, surveillance.