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Pykrete NOT THE BEES from Viridian Forest Since: Sep, 2009
NOT THE BEES
#251: Jun 13th 2013 at 12:42:44 PM

And I'm trying to get across that that's a terrible argument because it's slippery slope logic that can be applied to literally every single power granted to the government.

And this is why I keep saying people need to closely read the Slippery Slope Fallacy before they start shouting it on internet forums.

Slippery slope arguments assert that further legislative steps that might happen in the future will be bad — and this behavior happens all the time in reality. Indeed, legal precedent is built upon this. It's only a fallacy if you assert that this will happen 100% of the time as the only possible conclusion.

In this case, a tool that already exists has "an endless number of bad uses and no substantial benefit for the public" as well as no meaningful oversight and being run by an agency infamous for constantly overstepping its bounds. It's not even a slippery slope anymore because we're not afraid of going down the slope — we're already there and we want back up.

edited 13th Jun '13 12:47:14 PM by Pykrete

NativeJovian Jupiterian Local from Orlando, FL Since: Mar, 2014 Relationship Status: Maxing my social links
Jupiterian Local
#252: Jun 13th 2013 at 1:00:01 PM

In this case, a tool that already exists has "an endless number of bad uses and no substantial benefit for the public" as well as no meaningful oversight
No one has yet been able to tell me any of these bad uses, or back up the claim that Prism has no benefit to national security, or explain why oversight by both FISC and Congress doesn't count as meaningful.

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.
Greenmantle V from Greater Wessex, Britannia Since: Feb, 2010 Relationship Status: Hiding
V
#253: Jun 13th 2013 at 1:00:17 PM

[up][up] Well at least you didn't have a Government that wanted to introduce Identity Cards to supposedly counteract terrorism — something that pissed off the Left and the Right.

edited 13th Jun '13 1:00:34 PM by Greenmantle

Keep Rolling On
NativeJovian Jupiterian Local from Orlando, FL Since: Mar, 2014 Relationship Status: Maxing my social links
Jupiterian Local
#254: Jun 13th 2013 at 1:03:12 PM

What's so heinous about government-issued identity cards? Every state in the US issues drivers licenses that are de facto ID cards (many also issue actual explicit ID cards for people who can't or don't drive but still want a government-issued photo ID), and on the federal level we have social security numbers.

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.
Fighteer Lost in Space from The Time Vortex (Time Abyss) Relationship Status: TV Tropes ruined my love life
Lost in Space
#255: Jun 13th 2013 at 1:08:18 PM

Indeed. A national ID system is something that we sorely need. It's certainly the only way we're going to be able to effectively combat identity theft, among other nasty things, and if the people out to stop illegal immigration really mean it, they'd recognize the value there too.

It just can't be half-assed.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Greenmantle V from Greater Wessex, Britannia Since: Feb, 2010 Relationship Status: Hiding
V
#256: Jun 13th 2013 at 1:10:37 PM

Every state in the US issues drivers licenses that are de facto ID cards (many also issue actual explicit ID cards for people who can't or don't drive but still want a government-issued photo ID), and on the federal level we have social security numbers.

We've got both of them. Photocard Driving Licences and NI Numbers. But this ID Card was much more. The last time Britain had ID Cards was World War II.

From the article on The Other Wiki:

The introduction of the scheme was much debated, and various degrees of concern about the scheme were expressed by human rights lawyers, activists, security professionals and IT experts, as well as politicians. Many of the concerns focused on the databases underlying the identity cards rather than the cards themselves. The Act specified fifty categories of information that the National Identity Register could hold on each citizen, including up to 10 fingerprints, digitised facial scan and iris scan, current and past UK and overseas places of residence of all residents of the UK throughout their lives and indexes to other Government databases (including National Insurance Number) – which would allow them to be connected. The legislation on this resident register also said that any further information could be added.

edited 13th Jun '13 1:12:42 PM by Greenmantle

Keep Rolling On
RadicalTaoist scratching at .8, just hopin' from the #GUniverse Since: Jan, 2001
scratching at .8, just hopin'
#257: Jun 13th 2013 at 2:56:42 PM

I had an alien ID card while I was in South Korea, and all the Korean citizens I saw didn't seem to be chafing under the tyranny of having their own federal ID cards either. I can't imagine how tough it was to have one card you needed to go to the hospital for your state-provided healthcare, apply for any sort of government paperwork, or verify your identity for stuff like missing bank cards. It must have been awful for them.

Share it so that people can get into this conversation, 'cause we're not the only ones who think like this.
Achaemenid HGW XX/7 from Ruschestraße 103, Haus 1 Since: Dec, 2011 Relationship Status: Giving love a bad name
HGW XX/7
#258: Jun 13th 2013 at 3:14:17 PM

[up]

IIRC it was less that people had to carry ID cards and more that the UK ID Card scheme involved a lot of snooping on the government's part and overly broad powers, not to mention concerns about Police racism.

But yeah, the bill as it stood was basically carte blanche for the government to collect tons of info it did not already have. That was the crucial issue.

edited 13th Jun '13 3:14:50 PM by Achaemenid

Schild und Schwert der Partei
breadloaf Since: Oct, 2010
#259: Jun 13th 2013 at 3:47:09 PM

I'm pretty sure it was about collecting non-relevant data about the ID cards as everyone else has already stated. They took a simple idea that was meant to benefit people and turned it into a power tool.

For PRISM, 20 million is so small I'm quite sure it's completely ineffective at what it's stated intention is anyway (collect all data) because server costs alone would be more on the order of $100 to $200 million a year (as a rough estimate). Plus competent engineers working on such a program cost $150k/year (Snowden had a $120k base salary not including perks) a piece in salary alone, not including hardware, so that budget number seems to indicate lack of confidence on the part of the government that PRISM was even effective :P

And why should anyone try to prove "anything bad" happened? It's a program that mass-collects data of everyone in total secrecy. Before Snowden, you couldn't even prove it friggin existed, now you want to prove the effects of the program? What do you want? Bodies to pile up? It's too late by then.

Two things:

There is no security through obscurity.

A government has no right to secrecy, only people do.

@ Fighteer

We're only talking about PRISM. We can't scrap PRISM? I don't think the US government is broken enough that it can't scrap even one on the fringe program.

edited 13th Jun '13 4:01:55 PM by breadloaf

Ominae Since: Jul, 2010
#260: Jun 13th 2013 at 4:03:16 PM

Let's see if Snowden will receive asylum. Heard Russia gave him an offer, but nothing yet.

breadloaf Since: Oct, 2010
#261: Jun 13th 2013 at 4:09:28 PM

I'm not sure if China would give an official offer of asylum. They might just be "really bad" at finding him.

Are you sure that Russia gave asylum? Do you have a link?

Ominae Since: Jul, 2010
#262: Jun 13th 2013 at 4:19:56 PM

The Guardian says Russia is considering it if requested. There's no formal one yet.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/06/11/if-asked-moscow-says-it-would-consider-granting-edward-snowden-asylum/

Other places include Ecuador, India and the Philippines. I doubt the latter since we're nice to the Americans.

RavenWilder Since: Apr, 2009
#263: Jun 13th 2013 at 4:34:06 PM

And why should anyone try to prove "anything bad" happened? It's a program that mass-collects data of everyone in total secrecy. Before Snowden, you couldn't even prove it friggin existed, now you want to prove the effects of the program? What do you want? Bodies to pile up? It's too late by then.

Again, we already trust the government to hold onto a lot of dangerous stuff. They've got stores of explosives, toxic chemicals, radioactive substances, and germ cultures that no one outside the government is allowed to get near or learn the exact location of. I'm not saying you're wrong, but if your concern is that the government will abuse its secret resources, then you've got a lot more to worry about than just data collection.

Barkey Since: Feb, 2010 Relationship Status: [TOP SECRET]
#264: Jun 13th 2013 at 4:59:28 PM

While we know the government has access to those materials, where they keep them is officially secret, so we civilians can't go and check what the government's doing with them.

That's actually not particularly secret.

Dugway Proving Ground is one rather expansive site.

This satellite of Aberdeen Proving Ground is a location where they destroy chemical agents.

Detrick is where we test the nastiest things we can find.

Test range for nuclear delivery systems.

DOE manages most of our nuclear ''research'' programs.

Disposes of depleted uranium rounds, home of the FEV Virus in the Fallout video games IIRC.

Chemical disposal depot, including VX weaponry.

Chemical weapons destruction and storage facility.

Pine Bluff Arsenal is for the production and storage of smoke, riot agents, and white phosphorous. It also used to perform chemical weapons disposal.

As for our Nuclear arsenal, the US Air Force has custody of most of it in bases like Minot, Barksdale, FE Warren, Kirtland, Whiteman, Offut, Malmstrom, Mountain Home, and a few other bases. The US Navy also has a smaller nuclear arsenal for its submarines, but I don't know where they are off the top of my head, though you could find out easily enough.

All the above is open source, and easy enough to figure out if you go looking for it. tongue

Now of course you can't just walk on and go "Hey, can I check out what your VX disposal operations look like?" But it's pretty obvious why you can't do stuff like that and why these bases are closed to personnel who don't need to be there.

NativeJovian Jupiterian Local from Orlando, FL Since: Mar, 2014 Relationship Status: Maxing my social links
Jupiterian Local
#265: Jun 13th 2013 at 8:18:53 PM

For PRISM, 20 million is so small I'm quite sure it's completely ineffective at what it's stated intention is anyway
Not really. This is a pretty good article about the technical aspects of what the NSA is doing. tldr version; no, they can't monitor everything, but they don't have to in order to be effective.

And why should anyone try to prove "anything bad" happened?
Because people are claiming that Prism does or will inevitably lead to bad things. If you want to make the claim, you need to back it up.

It's a program that mass-collects data of everyone in total secrecy.
As I've pointed out before, it was by no means operating in "total secrecy" if all three branches of government were aware of its existence, had approved it, and were involved in continuing oversight of it.

There is no security through obscurity.
Not true. Relying on security through obscurity alone is a terrible idea, but as an additional layer of security, it works fine. No one can try to break in to your stuff if they don't know it exists, after all. I'm not sure what that has to do with Prism, exactly, though.

A government has no right to secrecy, only people do.
A government has the right to privacy (or rather, secrecy) when public knowledge of the thing in question would cause more harm than good. The normal extreme example is that we don't want everyone and their dog to know nuclear launch codes. If you can accept that keeping that secret is acceptable, then it's not hard to dial that back to keeping things with less obviously-devastating consequences — like intelligence operations, where making their existence public knowledge compromises their effectiveness, so it's reasonable to keep them secret.

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.
Pykrete NOT THE BEES from Viridian Forest Since: Sep, 2009
NOT THE BEES
#266: Jun 13th 2013 at 9:01:21 PM

Because people are claiming that Prism does or will inevitably lead to bad things. If you want to make the claim, you need to back it up.

When dealing with an agency known for overstepping its bounds on a regular basis being handed an unprecedentedly invasive tool on the grounds of fighting a threat that ranks lower than wild bees, one can be forgiven for putting the burden of proof on the other side. Under such extreme outlier circumstances and risk, to do otherwise would be, frankly, pants-on-head idiotically naive.

edited 13th Jun '13 9:03:33 PM by Pykrete

Fighteer Lost in Space from The Time Vortex (Time Abyss) Relationship Status: TV Tropes ruined my love life
Lost in Space
#267: Jun 13th 2013 at 9:17:00 PM

When has the NSA done anything that caused demonstrable harm to any citizen?

edited 13th Jun '13 9:17:13 PM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Pykrete NOT THE BEES from Viridian Forest Since: Sep, 2009
NOT THE BEES
#268: Jun 13th 2013 at 10:22:36 PM

Wiretapping is itself demonstrable harm. There's a reason we prosecute it when anyone else does it. People expect privacy — whether it's TSA body scanners or NSA saving a copy of every personal phone call and email they ever make. Furthermore, they tend to cause vulnerabilities by trying to stick backdoors into things — see Clipper.

Beyond that, you're obviously looking for concrete physical harm, which is a loaded question because the NSA is exclusively intel — the suits that go out and abduct people based on that intel are CIA or FBI. So when this or this or this happens, the NSA's contribution leading up to it often gets left out because they weren't the ones who personally yoinked the dude and shipped him off to get tortured in Africa.

edited 13th Jun '13 10:37:35 PM by Pykrete

Meklar from Milky Way Since: Dec, 2012 Relationship Status: RelationshipOutOfBoundsException: 1
#269: Jun 14th 2013 at 1:44:15 AM

There's no evidence that it's ever been misused
Newsflash: Secret things are secret!

and officials familiar with the program have said that it has had concrete results in helping to prevent terrorist attacks.
At what expense?

It's already been pointed out how ridiculous the quantity of resources spent on 'stopping terrorism' is. Most likely, even if it isn't being abused, PRISM is still a colossal waste of public funds and public privacy, and the responsible thing would be to shut it down. On the other hand, if it happens to be one of the few anti-terrorism projects that actually is cost-effective (and again, the lack of transparency means the public has no way of determining this), then the responsible thing to do would be to shut down the other projects that weren't, thereby showing the public that their money is being spent on actually serving their interests.

As it is, the absurd amount of money being thrown around is a giant red flag that 'anti-terrorism' efforts are rife with ulterior motives, and the public has very little idea where this latest invasion of their privacy fits into the whole mess. Other than that, you know, its non-discriminating nature lends itself to the 'ulterior motives' side more than the 'actually stopping terrorism' side. Which may or may not mean anything. But probably does.

The fact that you're choosing to ignore or dismiss the safeguards built into the system is not the same thing as us not being shown the safeguards built into the system.
The thing is, each new action they're allowed to take without a warrant makes the wall of safeguards that much thinner. There was a time when the american public felt it reasonable to assume that a warrant would be required to tap into their private data. Now you merely feel it reasonable to assume that a warrant is required to open up said data and examine it with human eyes. Right...so where do we go from here?

Because people are claiming that Prism does or will inevitably lead to bad things.
I, at least, am not claiming that. I am claiming that it presents a relatively large risk for what is almost certainly a relatively small reward.

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Greenmantle V from Greater Wessex, Britannia Since: Feb, 2010 Relationship Status: Hiding
RadicalTaoist scratching at .8, just hopin' from the #GUniverse Since: Jan, 2001
scratching at .8, just hopin'
#271: Jun 14th 2013 at 6:02:53 AM

The British Government continues to set brave new standards for disagreeing with the American Government.

Share it so that people can get into this conversation, 'cause we're not the only ones who think like this.
Fighteer Lost in Space from The Time Vortex (Time Abyss) Relationship Status: TV Tropes ruined my love life
Lost in Space
#272: Jun 14th 2013 at 6:46:00 AM

@Pykrete: Frankly, wiretapping being harmful is somewhat tautological. There is no loss to anyone except for an abstract concept called privacy, and it's really hard to prove damages if nothing was done with the information. It's illegal because it's illegal, because we say it should be illegal. That's well and good, and if Joe Schmoe is tapping my phone, I certainly want him caught and punished — as much for the invasion of privacy as for whatever he might do with the information.

But the NSA's mandate is to gather intelligence, and that means wiretapping and such. That's its job, defined in law. It is specifically authorized to do it by Congress. It is legal by definition. Getting outraged when, all of a sudden, it's revealed to have been doing what it's legally authorized to do doesn't help anything.

edited 14th Jun '13 6:52:30 AM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Ramidel Since: Jan, 2001
#273: Jun 14th 2013 at 6:54:24 AM

@Fighteer: That sounds almost Nixon-esque, in a way. "If the President does it, that means it's not illegal." However, even if Congress has authorized warrantless wiretaps, they're still illegal if they violate the Constitution.

I agree, it's the NSA's job to collect intelligence. Thus, we as citizens need to force Congress to tighten the standards under which the NSA is permitted to operate, to be in compliance with our right to be secure against intelligence gathering without a warrant. Failing that, it's up to the courts to find the enabling legislation to be in violation of our citizens' constitutional rights.

edited 14th Jun '13 6:56:30 AM by Ramidel

Fighteer Lost in Space from The Time Vortex (Time Abyss) Relationship Status: TV Tropes ruined my love life
Lost in Space
#274: Jun 14th 2013 at 6:58:01 AM

I agree with that, Ramidel. It is up to the courts to determine if these programs are constitutional, and it's up to the public to vote for lawmakers who represent their interests. PRISM, however, met with the approval of all three branches of government. It is, by definition, legal.

I'm not saying that you can't get upset about it, but this aura of shock and outrage is almost comical for its hypocrisy, given that we voted for the people who enacted the policies that we now decry.

edited 14th Jun '13 7:01:00 AM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Greenmantle V from Greater Wessex, Britannia Since: Feb, 2010 Relationship Status: Hiding
V
#275: Jun 14th 2013 at 7:10:48 AM

I agree, it's the NSA's job to collect intelligence. Thus, we as citizens need to force Congress to tighten the standards under which the NSA is permitted to operate, to be in compliance with our right to be secure against intelligence gathering without a warrant. Failing that, it's up to the courts to find the enabling legislation to be in violation of our citizens' constitutional rights.

Then would it be ok if PRISM was just used against foreigners?

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