…you use software to make it harder to spy on you:
(emphasis added)
Is this a sign of overreach even worse than we’ve learned in l’année Snowden, or is the government simply that incompetent at distinguishing between genuine threats and background noise?
Tor users constitute a threat to the NSA’s panopticon.
Dunno, this seems pretty reasonable from a logical standpoint.
Extremist user:
if (iAmAnExtremist) {
governmentWantsToFindMe(true);
hideFromGovernment()
}
function hideFromGovernment() {
...
useTor(true);
...
}
Government:
if (userUsesTor(user)) {
isAnExtremist(user, true);
}
It’s not a foregone conclusion that all torists are extremists, but your odds of bumping into one are presumably a lot higher than by looking at the general customer of adultdiapers.com.
“The thing is, you don’t have many suspects who are innocent of a crime. That’s contradictory. If a person is innocent of a crime, then he is not a suspect.”
Edwin Meese - Attorney General of the United States (1985–1988)
It’s much worse. Linux Journal, a perfectly mainstream on-line magazine for Linux users, is also on the list. Not just specific LJ articles about stuff like Tor, but the whole website, even though 95% of its content has nothing to do with crypto or anonymity or whatever. So if you have ever visited the Linux Journal site, congratulations: you are now on the NSA’s Special Attention list.
I guess the idea is to simply redefine “suspicious behavior” to the point where even if you’re a toddler who only ever visits www.disney.com, they’ll still find a reason to put you on the special watch list together with the rest of the population.
Again, while I appreciate your sentiment, if I was the ATF and I wanted to prevent people from building bombs, I would put everyone who ever bought fertilizer or had access to a cow onto a level 1 watch list.
Realistically, we’re all on a “watch list”. Police cars that pass yours on the freeway aren’t ignoring you. They aren’t checking your license plate against a list of cars to target for watching, the police just watch everyone. By simple virtue of having accepted to follow the rules of this nation, you’re on the great big watch list in the sky.
The problem comes that logistically, the government can’t watch everyone close enough to spot threats. They can’t even watch 1 in 1000 people very effectively. But if they can flag 1 in 1000 people as a potential threat because of A and another 1 in 1000 as a potential threat because of B, then suddenly you’ve got the real watch list which contains 1 in 1,000,000 people, and that’s a list they can actually do something about.
The people who have been flagged for one thing aren’t “on a watch list” any more than the rest of us, but in the popular parlance that list of flagged people is called a watch list. But realistically, there’s probably a level 0 list (the entire population), level 1 (flagged), level 2 (needs investigation), and level 3 (under surveillance).
If the police give me a second glance because of the model of car I drive or whatever, that won’t bother me too much. (Although some people would call it ‘profiling’ and argue that it goes too far already.)
But in this case we’re talking about permanently storing not just the metadata but the content of people’s e-mails, just because they visited a certain perfectly legal website. That’s more like if the police decided that because they judge you to be part of a high-risk group because of the way you look or talk or dress, they can search your house without a warrant.
(By the way, note that I am not a citizen of “this nation” by which you presumably mean the US. So in my case the NSA does not even need to pretend that they care about my privacy rights, as they would if I were a US citizen. But note that the ‘fingerprinting rule’ which targets Linux Journal visitors, does not make an exception for Americans, although some other rules do.)
I believe that the government’s argument (at the moment) would be that the emails are in the public, since they’re passing over the internet, just as your car is in the public the instant you take it out of your garage. I’ll grant that, that’s stupid, given as there’s a strict no-looking policy with physical mail.
But in terms of using tiny, low-weight metrics to build up watch lists, I don’t know that the government has any other methods by which to prevent crimes before they happen.
An interesting angle I missed the first time around is that this revelation appears to be coming from a new source (i.e. not the Snowden leaks):
If there is indeed a second source, I hope (s)he has the sense to remain anonymous, thus preventing another round of ad hominem nonsense and keeping the focus on the issues.
Yes, interesting new development. Also this story, although its main message (the NSA targets everybody, not just crime and terrorism suspects) won’t surprise many people anymore at this point…
Actually, wasn’t their claim that they are free to look at the metadata whenever they want, because you don’t have a privacy interest in that, but they grudgingly acknowledged that they need a rubberstamp from their secret court before they can look at the content? I thought that was the case, so maybe they got the secret court to agree that anybody who is interested in Linux is automatically a suspect.
Or maybe they still haven’t let go of the claim that they are free to collect and store as much data as they want on as many innocent civilians as they want (American and otherwise) because it doesn’t count as “collecting” that data until a human analyst wants to look at a particular person’s data. (I wonder if a private person could get away with that excuse. Yes, I snuck a hidden camera into my neighbour’s bathroom, but you can’t prove that I ever looked at any of the recordings!)
Yeah well, recognizing that people have a right to privacy, does indeed impose some limitations on what the government can do to people who have not yet been accused of any specific crime. In fact, that’s kind of the point…
(I realize we’re mostly on the same side here, actually. Don’t mind me while I vent…)
You’re definitely right when it comes to phone calls. Their argument is that storing information in an inaccessible location doesn’t count as surveillance, if no one can perform any lookups against you without a warrant.
But I don’t believe that’s the case with email. For anything sent internationally, they can just grab it based on its not being domestic, legally. With anything purely domestic, I don’t believe that the government has yet admitted to doing it, let alone provided a legal rationale.
The right to privacy isn’t an explicit right, it’s more something that was pushed onto the 4th Amendment. But definitely, that right doesn’t extend into the public. The inside of your home, your car, and (now) your cellphone are considered to be private locations that are protected. But things you do publicly, that any person in the street (or on the web) could see, is not protected.
If a policeman finds a crack pipe in the middle of the street, with a perfect thumb print on it, he can take that in to be processed, without needing a warrant.
If the officer is in the bookstore and sees you reading the Anarchist’s Cookbook, he can tell the other officers in town to keep an eye on you and see if they see you doing anything else worrying, like casing the local abortion clinic.
Such things don’t give the police any power to arrest nor harrass you, but if they are able to spot enough details about you to add up to a worrying image - sufficient to sell a judge - they can plausibly get a warrant to go in and suss out the situation. So far as I understand it, this is how our legal system does and is intended to work.
When I visit a website, other visitors to the same website do not see me unless I choose to “speak up” by e.g. posting on a message board. The website admin will know I was there, but ordinary members of the public do not. So it’s quite different from being in a public street or a library.
Likewise, an ordinary member of the public could not get a list of all the e-mails I’ve sent recently, or all the Google searches I’ve done recently, without needing some serious hacking skills and probably breaking a few laws. Even unencrypted Internet communications have a greater expectation of privacy than the things I do in a public street.
There is no “might”. You either ARE or ARE NOT.
If you have to use special software specifically to hide your communications from the government, then it strongly implies that your communications include material that you wouldn’t want the government to see.
I see no problem with treating use of this software as evidence of illegal activity.
No, the problem is (1) that the government wants to and (2) that the government’s concept of “threat” is not always one I agree with. To the government, someone who won’t keep quiet about a spree killing by their employees is a threat to their interests in the Middle East, but to a decent human being that does not justify persecuting whistleblowers as Obama does.
And an ordinary member of the public couldn’t figure out every stop you made on your daily commute, or everywhere you used your debit card last weekend, without needing some serious hacking skills and probably breaking a few laws.
This is not a compelling argument that the police should not be allowed to collate that information from traffic cameras and your bank records.
And of course you see this as a one way street, don’t you, Smapti? When the government goes to extreme lengths to hide its actions from oversight, that’s not evidence that they’re working against our best interests?
Any decent government exists to be a slave. It is not a person, and should not be afforded the right to privacy afforded to a person. It is granted extraordinary powers only to make it a better slave, not to advance the goals of a few corrupt employees.
I am utterly confused here. OP’s argument hinges on the statement that the NSA regards TOR users as extremists. Is that the author’s assessment of the situation, or is that a statement the NSA made itself? Also, OP presents a false dichotomy: We are asked to choose between overreach or incompetence. I don’t understand why those are the only two possibilities.
Has anyone asked why the NSA was monitoring TOR or what they were looking for? If our enemies use TOR, and they would be idiots not to, then the NSA has a very valid reason to examine it. Germany is a foreign state and is therefore explicitly permitted as a target for intelligence collection. There is no “overreach” of anything because collecting foreign intelligence is why these organizations exist. The NSA has every right to collect any damn thing it wants on any non-US citizen, so long as the President authorizes that collection operation. Further, if anyone believes Germany (and France, and others) are NOT themselves spying on the US, they are naive. Given that Europe is a playground for foreign espionage and Islamic terrorist organizations (Germany included), it seems to me that targeting a foreign TOR node is a pretty obvious and reasonable course of action.
And to clarify: When I say the President is the only one who decides what is right, I mean that he is the one who issues or amends the Executive Order that directs intelligence collection operations pursuant to US law. German citizens don’t have the right to freedom from US surveillance, just as US citizens do not have the right to be free of German surveillance, because neither countries laws make it subordinate to the other.
The Government has no right to privacy. Classified information is not “privacy,” it is security. We as voters and taxpayers have invested billions of dollars in intelligence collection resources because we realize those resources are important to our safety and security, and help our leaders make informed decisions (at least, they should). When a collection platform is compromised, the enemy can avoid it and YOU, taxpayer Joe, have squandered your own investment… not to mention placing people’s lives at risk.
I hate to be the one to point this out, but we live in a Representative government. We give our representatives the ability to make decisions that we believe will be in our best interest, and we hope that the democratic process allows us to pick the person who represents our interests the best. A part of this trust is that we hope our representatives will make wise decisions for us even when security dictates that we cannot and should not know the exact details of us. This is part of the unfortunate part and parcel of living with a representative government, but our system certainly represents our interests better than most of the autocrats and dictatorships in the world have done for their people.