> While we were able to use his evidence to make some change, both EFF and Mark were ultimately let down by Congress and the Courts, which have refused to take the steps necessary to end the mass spying even after Edward Snowden provided even more evidence of it in 2013.
Do you have to be a cynic to pretty much have expected this?
It's also hard to make the case that it isn't, ultimately, what the people want, by "the standard you walk past is the standard you accept" principle.
It's been nearly twenty years. If Americans were deeply, deeply bothered by the government spying on them, they'd have burned down this government by now. At most charitable, this speaks to a deep ignorance or apathy in the American electorate and American citizenship. Or a general anxiety about what "the other people" are doing that exceeds their anxiety about what the government can do with panopticon surveillance.
I think, in general, hackers vastly overestimate the average human concern or sensitivity to this kind of thing.
The one that hasn't formed yet because the electorate has failed to recognize that parties only exist because they can consolidate mass political power. This is part of the "apathy" category. People don't care enough to meet up on this issue. They don't even care enough to be members of the existing parties or do more than show up to elections (and then, only between half and three-quarters for President, less for Congress, and hovering around 10-20% for primaries).
People care, but not enough to overcome institutional inertia.
> The one that hasn't formed yet because the electorate has failed to recognize that parties only exist because they can consolidate mass political power.
This is not the reason. The reason is the how the system was designed:
The Tea Party Republicans are a counter-example (or more accurately, a counterinsurgency). While there are still only two parties, one of them has become something that would be nearly unrecognizable to its members from the '70s.
It is possible to organize within the party to bend it. But in general, one side of the aisle tends to seem to have difficulty with finding enough common ground to actually work as a bloc, while the other side has managed, impressively, to unify Christian fundamentalists and ultra-rich billionaires.
> If Americans were deeply, deeply bothered by the government spying on them, they'd have burned down this government by now.
Right now stuff is happening that does deeply bothers Americans, and what do they do? They walk around with signs, they file legal papers, and maybe some other forms of peaceful, albeit useless, protest... a lot of other countries truly would be burning down the government right now if something like Elon happened there, but so far America has just been saying they don't want it, in as many ways as possible, but while still continuing to fully let it happen.
In the US it's looking like the main aggressors are Trump supporters and most of everyone else is not actually out for blood, just Peacefully Unhappy.
Elon is 100% out for blood, he's practically a modern-day Nazi.
On many social media platforms you can see a lot of people from the UK, EU, etc. being totally bewildered that all the US is doing right now is useless peaceful protests.
Maybe eventually something will happen that changes things, or maybe eventually things will reach a tipping point, but right now at least they are still stuck in some peaceful protest limbo.
How close are we to “bypassing” a lot of this spying when some of the most popular communications platforms (e.g. WhatsApp) are end to end encrypted? Will the tech eventually solve the problem in a convenient way, at least for those who care?
They have a nicely implemented E2E protocol. This is operationally convenient: Meta can accurately say that they don't store WhatsApp messages, so fewer access requests go to them. And I'm sure it's nice for engineer morale, too.
However, the app makes it semi-mandatory to turn on backups. If you say no, it keeps nagging you. If you always say no, you are in the 0.1% and everyone you talk to has backups enabled, so all of your conversations are helpfully backed up anyway, just not for you :)
These backups go to Google Drive or iCloud. You can draw your own conclusions about who has access and who handles the LE/IC requests.
No, you're not a cynic. The EFF takes exquisite pains to hide from you the fact that these programs spied on foreigners, which is the job of the NSA. Thus, they are necessary and proper, and perfectly legal.
The EFF is a propaganda platform. You shouldn't take its claims at face value.
Don't give us this "perfectly legal" crap. To remind you: the NSA killed off ThinThread (that explicitly took care to avoid wiretapping US citizens' data) in favour of Trailblazer, which grabs ALL data, ALL the time, including ALL US citizens' data.
Their explicit intent was to break the law. They broke the law. Then Congress retroactively let them get away with it. They're still breaking the law today.
> The "change in priority" consisted of the decision made by the director of NSA General Michael V. Hayden to go with a concept called Trailblazer, despite the fact that ThinThread was a working prototype that claimed to protect the privacy of U.S. citizens. ThinThread was dismissed and replaced by the Trailblazer Project, which lacked the privacy protections
Let’s not confuse the fact that they are only legally allowed to spy on foreigners, with what they actually do.
I have no idea how you effectively filter mass wiretaps in fibre raw data and exclude americans. It’s impossible to not catch some/lots of domestic data as well..
So what you're saying is that the NSA wiretapping is OK because they're not doing it to you? That's really dumb.
Currently, the US is in a number of intelligence sharing arrangements in which countries ask other countries to spy on their own citizens for them. e.g. if the NSA can't spy on someone because they know they're American, they ask GCHQ to do it for them. And vice versa. This is why human rights need to be as universal as possible, because otherwise you just ask your buddy to do what you can't legally do yourself.
"We only spy on foreigners" is a water sandwich.
Furthermore, it is NSA policy to treat all encrypted traffic as foreign, and to archive it forever until it can be decrypted and searched to determine if it was legal to decrypt and search it. In other words, "we only spy on foreigners" is a guilty until proven innocent policy.
"Necessary and proper" is decided by a security apparatus with a conflict of interest. Nobody voted for this, the executive branch just decided to do it. As for legality, well, I'll give you that Congress retroactively made the spying legal. On the other hand, the US Constitution has a pretty clear restriction on the use of state power in order to search and seize. Being a foreigner is not in and of itself necessary suspicion to justify searching through all their shit, because being from another country is not a crime.
> While we were able to use his evidence to make some change, both EFF and Mark were ultimately let down by Congress and the Courts, which have refused to take the steps necessary to end the mass spying even after Edward Snowden provided even more evidence of it in 2013.
Do you have to be a cynic to pretty much have expected this?