Once again the lack of media coverage on this is appalling.
Rand Paul has introduced an amendment that goes up for vote tomorrow that would disallow this surveillance on American citizens, which of course is not expected to pass.
McConnell is drafting language to prevent this from being used on “federal election candidates” which of course is expected to pass.
>An individual running for a seat in the House or Senate or for the office of U.S. President becomes a candidate when he or she raises or spends more than $5,000 in contributions or expenditures.
One generally needs a certain number of petition signatures to appear on a ballot, but apparently not needed just to legally be a candidate.
So we start a party where we all sign to get each other on the ballot and donate to a pool that allocates $5k to each of us? Can this $5k just be moved around per candidate which counts as spending?
This would become a problem if someone just joined the party with the intent of cashing out the 5k$ and leaving. Maybe you could fix this somehow with smart contracts? idk
I gave you an upvote in the previous comment because I knew what you were talking about mainly due to Slackware's reference to Church of SubGenious. I don't think many know what that is though.
I would like to add, just think of the chaos at the primaries if the act of declaring candidacy one also declares they are running for the R|D nomination. The voting machines can barely deal with 20 presidential candidates. Imagine what would happen if you had to thousands of people running for a congressional seat!
The way this works is that no one is excluded. They collect everything blindly, then sort through for what they want. That was the issue when they falsely claimed US citizens were excluded. That’s the issue when they say the same about election candidates or sitting senators or whoever.
“(G) if the target of the electronic surveillance is an elected Federal official or a candidate in a Federal election, that the Attorney General has approved in writing of the investigation;“
No perfect solution, for sure, but you have some reasonably options to mitigate risk. If you can, use one outside the US i.e. with no financial presence of any kind there.
Admittedly that's a high bar, the next best choice is one that claims to keep no logs and has successfully defended such a claim to law enforcement. Not a long list here, but there are some.
Just use ~3 VPNs in a nested chain. So an adversary would need data from all three. Better yet, have the middle one be in a jurisdiction that doesn't cooperate with your adversary's.
Are VPNs legal in China? It would be hilarious to set up a chain of VPN connections that are each in a jurisdiction that will not cooperate with one another.
E.g. one connection each in China, Russia and USA, and three more in the opposite direction of geopolitical allegiance if you’re super paranoid.
I'm not at all familiar with Chinese VPN services. But it's my impression that the Chinese authorities mostly care about domestic VPN use. Citizens are limited to approved VPNs, which are obviously backdoored.
More generally, as long as you're not interacting with domestic Chinese people, authorities don't care much about what you're doing. That's what I've seen providers claim in darknet forums. And that was my experience when I leased VPS in Hong Kong. Once I made it clear that I wouldn't be interacting with domestic Chinese people, all was cool.
I have used one Russian VPN service, Insorg. They're one of the oldest. I've read about others, but don't recall names. And it's my impression that Russian authorities also mostly care about interactions with citizens.
So anyway, I typically start with a mainstream VPN service. Then I chain one or two notoriously hard to coerce ones. And for Mirimir, IVPN is the final one. Because I've written stuff for them, basically, so using IVPN earlier in chains would be stupid.
Although Tor is better, because the connection reroutes dynamically. And worse, because anyone can volunteer to be an entrypoint or endpoint - this matters because a very well-resourced adversary could conceivably control both your entrypoint and your endpoint, and use a timing correlation attack to de-anonymize you. But I don't know that nested VPNs are immune to that either, given the level of invasive surveillance 5-eyes has over the entire internet.
I only use Tor via nested VPN chains. The VPNs mainly provide backup anonymity, in case Tor circuits are compromised. And they also anonymize me vs Tor use, which may avoid attention.
When I don't care so much about anonymity, I just use nested VPN chains. Throughput is 5-10 times that for Tor, latency is lower, and I'm not limited to TCP.
And do you just need to spend ten minutes making a static webpage saying that you're running for federal office as a write-in candidate, or do you actually need the signatures to get on the ballot?
yeah the NSA will put a note in your file saying DO NOT SPY THIS PERSON and if someone sees that note and spies anyways, you can engage in a long and ultimately fruitless battle against the US DoJ.
To your point, I just visited the NYTimes.com, and no mention of this very important story on the front page. Clicked on "Politics" and "U.S.", and I still cannot find a single mention of this story. A complete failure.
Once again the lack of media coverage on this is appalling.
I often encourage (and practice myself) looking for a tip email address to your favorite outlets and sending them...well a tip when there’s a story going on they haven’t yet reported, but one feels especially is need of wider dissemination.
As it is right now, it would allow access to the internet search and browser history of anyone in the world, without probable cause or a warrant.
But to be clear, this is just a reduction in friction of the previous process which was to just call a judge of a secret FISA court which no one is really allowed to know the details of.
So this is likely just a move to reduce some red tape, and increase data ingress.
> the previous process which was to just call a judge of a secret FISA court which no one is really allowed to know the details of.
This is simplifying the process to imply it’s nothing more than just a phone call away. I do not think any court works like that. They still have to argue their case before a judge of the court which also allows third parties to submit material in the case.
Simply saying “no one” is suppose to know about these courts is portraying this process as something unconstitutional and nothing more than a secret society of government friends. If by no one you actually mean the public, then you have a point. There’s national security concerns around these type of things that you’re ignorantly ignoring.
You act as if this court has no existed for over 40 years and under multiple administrations from both side of the aisles.
The Lee-Leahy amendment passed the Senate. Not sure how someone can say there is no counter-balancing entity with regard to FISA courts.
From Senator Mike Lee's webpage[0]:
The Lee-Leahy amendment will strengthen third-party oversight of the FISA process. Specifically, it requires FISA court judges to appoint an amicus curae (a neutral third-party observer) in any case involving a “sensitive investigative matter” so long as the FISA court does not determine it to be inappropriate.
The amendment will also empower the amicus to raise any issue with the court at any time and give both the amicus and the FISA court access to all documents and information related to the surveillance application.
It is just a phone call away. Sometimes not even a phone call. In some cases the AG can authorize surveillance and merely notify a judge and file the warrant application later (within 10 days IIRC).
Even calling it a rubber stamp is an exceedingly generous definition of probable cause.
It's a pandemic, and as far as i remember they didn't finalise a rule to allow senators to vote remotely[1]. I don't know if this is why Bernie missed it, but 3 other senators besides him missed it too.
What media do you think should cover this? FOX News? CNN? MSNBC? Do you think Rachel Maddow should report on this? Who is going to report on this kind of stuff?
Yes, yes, yes, yes, everybody. Right now on the NYT side there's a story about renewable resources being used more than coal. Great news, but is it more important than the government snarfing your browser history? A California congressional election? We have college students considering gap years, LA Times has a spurious Wuhan-interest story and a whole 1/3 sidebar dedicated to the death count.
There are plenty of stories being written, but not about this. Pretty much at all. That is the problem, and I don't know how assigning blame certain outlets would change that. We don't know if pitches are getting rejected, or the money is in other topics, or anything, but the simple fact is that it's not happening and it's something that affects everybody in the US (and beyond, I'm sure).
Looks like you're getting the usual HN anti-intellectual downvotes and my upvote wasn't enough to drag you out of the gray.
I don't get the hostility towards requiring a warrant to spy on election candidates. Even if the goal is similar protections for everybody, it's obvious that measures designed to prevent parties from abusing the surveillance apparatus for political ends is a good thing. It's difficult to imagine a better tool for ensuring one side gets muck raked harder than the other.
Aside from the blatantly obvious issue of equal protection of the law, if the people who would have to pass a broader law are already protected by one that is narrowly focused on them, they're less incentivized to pass the broader law. Letting the narrow law pass creates a barrier to passing the broader law.
It goes even further than that. If the politicians are protected by their own special law they are much more likely to write laws that violate the privacy and rights of everyone else because they do not feel threatened by it.
For one, we have a POTUS that may have benefited knowingly or unknowingly by means of a foreign intelligence influence campaign. This gives those entities a free pass to influence campaigns or to hide other types of spying relating to an incumbent who is running for re-election. Seems like a bad time to make such a change in the law.
There’s also the whole equal protection under law issue — a core tenant of American law is that everyone is nominally the same. Declaring a vague category of citizen out of bounds of the law is absurd.
> Declaring a vague category of citizen out of bounds of the law is absurd.
Yet it’s hardly new for congress to exempt themselves from the laws they pass. Political campaigns are exempt from robocalls for instance. It’s an unfortunate reality.
You could literally say the same thing about the Steele Dossier sponsored by the Clinton Campaign, Steele was identified as connected to a foreign government influence campaign as well. A candidate literally cooperated with a foreign actor with undisclosed Russian ties to generate evidence against their opponent which they knew would be disseminated by the American IC. Not having these protections just incentivizes whoever currently controls the apparatus to strategically investigate their party's opposition.
Steele is very publically a former MI6 agent, and while the British are our allies, that counts in and of itself.
However, it's also fact that Steele himself was well known to Russian intelligence, and while it's clear he was no friend to them he was a known enemy - They were specifically trying to feed him disinformation[1][2]
Did he bite bad bait? That's the question that doubters bring up. The "pee tape" thing is so bizarre I think it's likely true, but on the other hand I think that at this point Trump could just own it.
It isn't about POTUS, it's about the notion that preventing US counter intelligence from doing their jobs with respect to illegal influence on political campaigns. If what you say is true, and the Clinton campaign was seeking foreign assistance, shouldn't we know about and prevent that?
It violates the core principle of equal justice. What if we only required search or arrest warrants for those with more than $10M in assets? Your comment would still apply, and would be more obviously unjust.
Whether it harmonizes perfectly with the spirit of equal justice or not is irrelevant to whether or not it still represents an improvement over the status quo. Your hypothetical is similarly asanine and works mainly as a straw man because, as far as the integrity of the democratic process, there's a clear difference between shielding individuals competing in a public election and random rich people on the street. You're literally arguing against something that would improve the integrity of the system.
If you have a broken system, and you allow people in power to fix it in targeted ways that only affect them, then it will never get fixed for ordinary people.
Your point might hold true if the people being exempted from surveillance weren't also the people deciding who can be exempted from surveillance. But since they are, it is counterproductive to the privacy cause to allow Congress to give itself these kinds of special rules.
Force everyone in society to play by the same rules, and everyone in society will get the benefits. Allow Congress to get into the habit of exempting themselves from social systems or problems, and those problems will continue to exist.
In other words, when setting up incentives you have to think pragmatically about the entire system in the long term; you can't always just focus on short-term goals to the exclusion of everything else. Local optimums[0] aren't just a problem in AI, they're also a problem in real life. Because of the long term consequences, we're not interested in forming privacy castes in scenarios where doing so will make it harder for us to improve the system in the future.
As a Bernie supporter, I'm disappointed by his lack of a YES vote. We at least deserve a statement. I'm going to suggest a potential explanation, but I'm still disappointed by the lack of vote and/or statement.
Based on how Patty Murray (D) has said she would have voted YES but wasn't able to get to DC in time, it's clear it was never going to pass to begin with. This happens often – someone like Mitch McConnell might whip the votes, realize they're ahead, and allow a few Republicans that are at-risk to vote YES to provide cover for them in the future. Remember, even if you count the two Independents as Democrats, there's still 6 more Republicans. We've seen this with Susan Collins a lot; if Republicans don't need her vote she'll vote against them. But when they need it, she votes with the party like clockwork.
So, now we get to be mad at Sanders and Murray (the Democrats who weren't in DC), and nobody blames the 37 Republicans who actually killed it. Remember that McConnell decides what is voted on, and he always knows the votes. Maybe the one exception ever was McCain saving Obamacare.
I feel certain Sanders would have voted YES. He's historically been mostly pro-Snowden, anti-surveillance, and pro-whistleblowers (it's nuanced; for example he thinks Snowden should be prosecuted but also thinks what he did was right and that he should get a plea deal).
(Not the point, but it's insane Senators have to be physically present, especially given the situation. At least one Senator missed the vote due to quarantine. Why are we making a 78 year old man physically fly to DC to vote, and do so in a chamber full of at least one person who has had COVID-19 recently?)
Like I said, I'm still disappointed we haven't even gotten a statement from Sanders yet. But this whole thing has been on my mind a lot today.
>nobody blames the 37 Republicans who actually killed it
I think we _do_ blame the 37 Republicans, it's just that that's not a particularly new emotion to feel at this point. It's no secret that the GOP pulls this stuff (as, like you noted, with Collins).
Currently, though, Bernie (and Murray, who at least commented) have the image of not being present for what, even if only optically, feels like an incredibly important job. I've had to say this to a few people today: you can be equally annoyed with with the people who voted for it, the GOP who brought it, and those who weren't there to try and stop it to begin with.
Everyone on this forum knows what's at stake here, so it's frustrating to see the "one vote missing" here.
For additional context, Bernie hasn't voted in any of the 10 roll call votes so far in May.[1] He's not campaigning anymore. Hell, he was streaming on Twitch this evening.
As noted up thread, the GOP would've just moved the goalposts by turning one of their swing votes if there was any danger of him putting a vote in for this. But he was batting .000 on the month going into today, so it was an easy bet.
> As noted up thread, the GOP would've just moved the goalposts by turning one of their swing votes if there was any danger of him putting a vote in for this.
That's exactly why he should've showed up. The swing votes are swing votes because voting that way is unpopular in their district. It makes it hurt more to do the wrong thing. "Meh, it would've passed anyway" lets the people doing wrong get off too easy.
That’s a bit weird, he seems pretty pro privacy. I know he voted against the Real ID thing (including the version that was tacked on to a spending bill which was how it passed.)
> Based on how Patty Murray (D) has said she would have voted YES but wasn't able to get to DC in time, it's clear it was never going to pass to begin with. This happens often – someone like Mitch McConnell might whip the votes, realize they're ahead, and allow a few Republicans that are at-risk to vote YES to provide cover for them in the future.
So make them vote yes. If they think it is a weakness to vote yes, all the more reason to force them to do so.
I agree that this likely wouldn't have passed even with Bernie since McConnell can easily whip a vote to switch.
That being said, this puts Bernie's incompetence at politicking in the spotlight. Any half decent politician would've been able to deflect, Murray is a perfect example of how easy it is.
I think his "incompetence at politicking" is what draws a lot of people to him (since he comes off as much more genuine and real), however it's a "live by the sword, die by the sword" situation. There have been a frustrating number of times where I felt a simple tweet could have saved a lot of bad optics.
It is part of his appeal, and I like a lot of what Bernie has to say. But you can't win if you don't play the game and politics is definitely a game.
Hillary and Biden snaring the nomination ahead of Bernie show how thoroughly the establishment Democrats can school him on politics. His appeal to certain voters is great, but he still has to play the game to some degree.
It's not remotely a coincidence that all of those candidates dropped out and endorsed Biden near-simultaneously -- meanwhile the best Bernie could get was de Blasio and Williamson. Failing to even get Warren to endorse him isn't a failure of his ideology, it's a case of political incompetence.
I hope someone (Warren? others?) echoes a lot of what he has to say and then actually executes within the political system we have today to accomplish those things. Within my lifetime would be nice.
> Hillary and Biden snaring the nomination ahead of Bernie show how thoroughly the establishment Democrats can school him on politics. His appeal to certain voters is great, but he still has to play the game to some degree.
That is not hard when they benefit from a multiple year media blackout against Bernie. Playing the game sounds a lot like compromising on values; something which would have also led to voters losing interest. I would argue he did play the game, and that's why he lost. He did not try to draw enough distinctions between himself and Biden for fear of hurting the Democrats, and in the process missed many opportunities to call Biden out on his inconsistencies.
> Failing to even get Warren to endorse him isn't a failure of his ideology, it's a case of political incompetence.
Failing to get Warren to endorse him is not a case of political incompetence, but rather desire to gain more power by Warren. The political machine built by the establishment Democrats was always going to be put to work against a candidate like Bernie, or if you prefer, to "facilitate the gatekeepers."
> I hope someone (Warren? others?) echoes a lot of what he has to say and then actually executes within the political system we have today to accomplish those things.
Warren already executed exactly what she wanted to execute within the political system; to ensure the gatekeepers maintain order. She will be rewarded accordingly, probably with a cabinet position, if Biden somehow manages to win the Presidency.
If Bernie can't "compromise his values" enough to make political deals to get the nomination, then he would be completely ineffective as president -- where getting your policy enacted requires constant deal making with Congress.
Bernie not voting yes for this is the final nail in the coffin for my enthusiasm towards him. I'd still take him over others, but he's no longer the firebrand anti-authoritarian that I took him for initially.
Wyden is probably one of the few senators, who is consistent on this issue. Everyone else, at best, pays lip service or repeats talking points about terrorism and the need to protect America from the ever present danger.
Or does she represent companies like Google, Facebook, or Palantir who are more concerned with pro-privacy laws cutting into their revenue? The politics of tech industry workers are not identical to their management and the latter steer a LOT more money into politics.
It's complicated? 538[1] (yeah, I know) did a decent dive into this back in 2018: as her electorate has moved left, she's moved right. The theories for that are pretty simple.
- The Dem/GOP split swung from nearly even to 45-25 over her tenure, so there's no longer any credible Republican competition to force her back toward her original left-of-center leanings
- She can outraise even the most serious Democratic challenger by more than 10-to-1
- She appeals more to pro-business, homeowner, and technocrat Democrats and independents than any other group, who in turn power that fundraising and also are responsible for Democratic plurality in the voter base
So we wind up with this dichotomy of her winning every election and getting booed out of nearly every town hall. The question going forward is whether she can hang on to her seat as easily in a recession California as in a booming one, especially if her constituency shifts away from her under economic stress just as quickly as it shifted in her favor.
I'd be careful of trying to describe Feinsten in terms of left/right when both parties official platforms both include things that are both for and against government micromanagement of people.
She has been very, very consistently pro-authoritarian her entire career. The hate for her is truly bipartisan.
The reason she's still in office isn't because pro-business types like her and give her money. It's because she has so much influence over the democratic party in her state that she can make sure nobody worth voting for every gets enough funding to mount a successful primary against her.
Given the issues in terms of lives lost and economic damage due to the pandemic, the outcome of a terrorist attack doesn't really seem that bad. I would hope that the public would see through the farce of the security apparatus and let the patriot act expire and get rid of organizations like the TSA.
I think if we took a public vote on the Patriot Act today, it would be nullified by tomorrow. Unfortunately, that's not how we do things and congress has been renewing it for some time, even stealthily. (p.s. apologies for not being able to find a more credible news site for this story - believe it or not, it wasn't widely reported on late last year)
It's really hard for me to tell on these issues what is real. I feel like they just have a certain number of senators who are allowed to look moral, but the end result always needs to be that surveillance wins. My gut says that Wyden just happens to have drawn the long straw in a sick game to make the Seante look more moral than it is, but if he needed to vote for it to pass for some reason, he would. This loss is kinda like a carnie saying "oh close one, you almost got it" in a game he knows is fixed.
Maybe. That said, he was one of the few people, who actually made Clapper lie in front the of the entire world. Reportedly, this lie was a breaking point for Snowden who saw the exchange between Clapper and Wyden[0].
While I would be willing to accept your suggestion that is basically just Kabuki theatre, it seems even more cynical than I am willing to contemplate now.
I am saying this, because Wyden visibly pushed Clapper ( apparently knowing that he was lying ).
edit: Come to think of it, if Wyden was a genuine threat, I am sure security apparatus would have tried to take him down by now. But no dead hookers, no unsavory hobbies, no character assassination.. your suggestion makes more sense than I initially thought it had.
Ron Paul is also quite consistent. He's done a good job of keeping the Trump side of the Republican party happy with him through his words while still being the Republican senator who votes against Trump the most.
People in power should always have to justify their actions to us. Always. They should always be questioned. This (in theory) is how we ensure their power isn’t abused.
We should have privacy while they do not. A lack of privacy should be a cost to the power they’re entrusted with.
If it’s legal for them to sift through our lives while they refuse to be questioned, and they act insulted that we dare question their actions, we have gone off the rails.
It’s important to stress: They should happily answer with accurate and honest data when asked.
We have hit a wall where our leaders react with vitriol when asked what they’re doing; mcconnell’s pushing for an exemption for those in power, pushing for them to have privacy while actively voting laws into place which drastically reduce ours should concern every single one of us–at least as much as Snowden’s docs revealed to us.
Just a reminder that if you're upset about this, politics is an active process. I'm going to look up my senator's votes right now and send them an email if they were one of the nay votes.
Whelp... I'm 0/2 for my senators. Here is my letter BTW, feel free to copy it and use it to get in contact with your reps. Look up their votes here [1].
Dear Representative $NAY_VOTER,
I'm writing you to express my disappointment in your recent vote on May 13 to reject Wyden amendment no. 1583. This amendment would have required law enforcement agencies to obtain a warrant before accessing American's web browsing data. Despite bipartisan support, the amendment failed to garner the required 3/5 majority by only one vote.
The controversial language of section 215 of the Patriot Act provides the government with broad powers to collect information related to federal investigations. Unfortunately, that power extends to the warrant-less collection of American's private information. This even includes innocent and law-abiding citizens who's only relation to an investigation is that their records are considered "relevant" in some manner.
Privacy reform is important now more than ever with the increasing role of technology in our daily lives. Please give me your support in creating meaningful oversight for our country's surveillance programs.
Unless you're worth more than $500M, you're wasting your time. (And on this forum, hey, maybe you hit the startup vestment goldmine, and actually are!)
Years ago, when the Slashdot/Reddit crowd got up in arms about some other terrible law, I actually took the time to look up my Senators' numbers, and call their offices. The aides I talked to acted like I was an insurance telemarketer, and wouldn't/couldn't even tell me their positions on the bill. Needless to say, I became disillusioned with the process.
I've heard a lot of people say that "if enough people bug them," but it's simply not true. Unless you're a campaign donor, and writing checks large enough to stick out from the crowd, you literally don't exist in the US law-making process. I'm sorry, but you just don't.
Makes me pretty happy to see headlines with him and generally be quite proud of what I see. If only I could say the same thing about our congressman in OR2...
PopVox record for the bill which was to be amended[1]
Congress.gov article for the same bill[2]
I'm thoroughly confused about the current process. It looks like HR6172 is the House "version" of the extension on the "USA FREEDOM Act" thru 2023 and S3421[3] is the Senate attempt to do the same. I can't find any references on Congress.gov which references Ron Wyden's proposed amendment.
If the Senate has amended the House bill, it will have to go back to the House (or a conference committee) to hammer out a unified version, which then needs to be voted on again and passed by both sides. This isn't a done deal (yet).
Short term solution: Well VPNs for all, Ghostery [1] was running a deal on their paid version with a VPN built into their add-on [1].
Long term: The State is making their panopticon ambitions overt now in the public eye, thus spurring on the need to re-design the Internet entirely to avoid this.
Anyone know what Starlink is offering in terms of privacy? Details are sparse for the most part right now, but given their ties to DoD I'm not sure how this will play out. Sounds like a product release presentation is needed to clarify some things.
Edit: I plan on buying Ghostery Midnight but it's Windows/Mac only, so no Linux! I guess these Bitcoin accepting ones will have to do [2].
Most traffic is over HTTPS, so VPNs aren't as useful as they once were. The advice of "don't go to your bank's website on coffee shop wifi" is 10-15 years out-of-date. Yes, HTTPS has some holes, but HSTS and certificate pinning help.
If you're this level of worried, you should make sure you're either signed out go Google/Gmail or have your search history turned off. A VPN offers zero added protection. there. IIRC, Google claims your history is anonymized. Wouldn't hurt to use DDG if you're paranoid.
VPNs are hit-or-miss on how they handle DNS requests. Even using a VPN, you might leak that you're a Hacker News reader.
I guess a VPN that doesn't log might protect you against going to an IP known to host bad things.
A lot of traffic is over HTTPS, and that does help a lot. But a lot of that traffic isn't doing an adequate job of protecting the domain names, there are general attacks around page size that can be used to identify static resources, and people underestimate the vocal subgroups of developers that refuse to use HTTPS in the first place.
Encrypting DNS is a good reason to use a VPN. DNS over HTTPS theoretically solves those problems, but last time I checked unless you configure it right it would fall back to normal DNS whenever it couldn't find a domain, and that still doesn't solve the problem that SNI isn't universally adopted yet.
> If you're this level of worried, you should make sure you're either signed out go Google/Gmail or have your search history turned off.
Strongly agreed. For most people, using Firefox containers and/or uMatrix would result in a bigger privacy gain than a VPN. That's not to say a VPN wouldn't help on top of that, but if you're using a VPN and not using uMatrix to block cross-site cookies from sites like Google, your priorities are probably wrong.
Have you disabled Chrome sync for your browsing history? You should be worried about stuff like that long before you consider either subscribing to or running your own VPN.
You have to consider the threat through the whole request.
You start on your computer and jump to the VPN instead of the destination website. Is the VPN hosted in a different country that refuses to work the US? Do you trust them to not do anything else shady? Do you trust that the encryption you are using will not be broken before your death, because the NSA is logging traffic to other countries, especially ones that won't cooperate with the US.
Then you have to hop from the VPN to the destination website anyway, is that jump really more secure than the jump from your device directly to the destination? Is the destination site tracking you?
VPNs are for moving your traffic off the airport network or Starbucks wifi, not defeating a nation state.
But most ISPs will have DNS lookup records. Most users aren’t savvy enough to set their own DNS servers. I’m not sure on the current status of DNS over HTTPS, but I’d imagine .gov could just compel cloudflare or whoever to provide logs.
Do ISPs generally have DNS lookup past records? That seems like something that would be costly with little benefit. I run small ISP and only enable DNS logging when tracing some problem.
How could Google see the content of a browsing history?
They can see searching history, but generally not browsing history (unless someone uses something like synchronizing browser history through Google account).
Most users sync browsing history when using Chrome, but Google also both tracks the links you click on the search page, and tracks the pages you visit that load Ads (will show in myactivity.google.com).
This is dubious. While I agree VPNs oversell themselves, who do you trust more? Comcast or your VPN (Mullvad,PIA,whatever)? I think many of us have no trust for Comcast.
I use it for P2P and I work from home so I don’t want to be on any “naughty” P2P lists may employer might check on their VPN log (since they distribute media). That’s another use case of the VPN.
Starlink is a product of a U.S. company. That's great if you're in China and want to get around the Great Firewall, but it's no use if you're in the U.S. and want to evade the panopticon. Not that there are many countries whose Starlink alternatives (if they had them, which they don't) could be trusted by anyone in the U.S.
VPN + DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) is a very potent combo turning your internet connection into an opaque pipe, as far as your ISP is concerned. DoH hides your DNS requests from your ISP, and a VPN service (basically glorified proxies these days) hide the IPs of site you're visiting.
If you are concerned about this issue then I urge you to use that combo. The more people doing that and the more normal that kind of traffic becomes the less able law enforcement is to use it as probable cause or similar.
AFAIK Mullvad is a non-US VPN service that does not require personal info for sign up and accepts cryptocurrency payments. Though I haven't used them myself so I can't speak for service quality.
For DoH, I'm only aware of Google and Cloudflare offering that. However they are both US companies so if anyone has a non-US recommendation I would appreciate it. At least using them is one step removed from your ISP, making it a little harder to get your records.
Is there a senator who is filibustering this bill? It seems that there were 59 yes votes and four absences - how many nays are there, and who is obstructing this bill?
It’s a strange vote. I mean it’s completely bipartisan. And a couple on either side and an independent abstained. Guess there was some good horse trading.
I doubt this. It makes no sense to not vote for the amendment irrespective of your vote for the larger bill. In other words, Sanders could vote yes on the amendment and no on the bill.
It could make sense to vote against watering down the bill if you think the watered-down version is more likely to pass. This amendment could be the opposite of a poison pill (a "spoonful of sugar"?)
So, if the Bernie voted “yes” (which is consistent with his usual political alignment), then the amendemnt would have passed, right? If yes, then how do you derive “his vote wouldn’t have mattered” from this?
I do wonder why Bernie didn't vote (and why some people voted against this), but it's also possible that it wouldn't have mattered.
The real voting is often done at the party whip level. If McConnell knew Bernie was going to show up and vote, it's possible that another Republican would have voted nay.
My take is a little more nuanced. I believe this still needs to get approved back in the House. If this amendment had passed, the Patriot act renewal would have been more palatable when it gets there, and moderate democrats would have had a much harder time rejecting the bill there. I just can't imagine how the house could possibly pass the legislation that the Senate just approved.
In this context, it wasn't as critical of a vote. I wouldn't be surprised if Schumer allowed the vote to happen today while Sanders was absent to drum up some extra support for Biden.
Can you explain how this is consistent with his political alignment? Because Bernie Sanders (regardless of how you feel about him) has voted consistently against increasing the surveillance state. Hence why his vote wouldn't have mattered, because it would've been a NAY vote and NAY votes don't have any affirmative power.
The vote is on a plan to REQUIRE a warrant. If he'd voted, he would have voted YEA, to pass this bill requiring a warrant, because he does not want to increase the surveillance state (on that we agree!)
It's "yea" for requiring warrants, and "nay" for warrantless surveillance (which is somehow the law of the land now? When did I miss this??)
Actually, this is an amendment on a bill to reauthorize expired warrantless surveillance programs, so a yes vote is a vote to make warrants for certain searches a condition for reauthorize broad authority for warrantless dragnet surveillance.
I suspect Bernie's abstention is because he thinks reauthorization is equally unacceptable with or without the condition.
Procedurally, he could vote yes on the amendment and still vote on the bill, and there's an argument that not doing so is making the perfect the enemy of the good (or at least the barely decent the enemy of the mildly less oppressive of two oppressive options), but it's kind of hard for me to get mad at Sanders for not collaborating in putting lipstick on this particular totalitarian pig of law. One can maybe rationalize the USA Patriot Act in the context of it's time, it's much harder to rationalize the USA Freedom Act’s deliberate after-the-fact authorization of much of the illegal blanket surveillance that went beyond what the original Patriot Act authorized, and it's far harder to rationalize the current reauthorization of the combination, with or without minor tweaks.
See my other response. This makes a lot more sense when you consider this to be a reaction to a separate amendment to the Patriot Act which is meant to explicitly authorize warrentless surveillance of a user's internet history.
I think you're misreading what happened here. The vote that failed would have required a warrant for something that does not require one today. It would have added a hurdle to law enforcement's access to user browsing histories.
Assuming Bernie would have voted YEA on this, we're all wondering why he didn't vote at all.
Of course he would have voted in favor, why do you assume he would side with the corrupt elite against the general public when his entire platform is the opposite.
Oh, I see my mistake now. I was getting this confused with the earlier story we had on the McConnell measure which is a separate amendment to allow for the warrentless searching of internet history explicitly. This seems to be another separate amendment in attempt to cut off the McConnell amendment.
The president must be at least planning on obstructing the bill, since the only reason they'd need 60 votes would be to overcome a veto.
If we treat the absences as very wimpy nay votes, and lump the 2 independents in with the party they caucus with (both Democrat), then the party breakdown looks like this:
Democrats: 35 yea, 12 nay, so ~75% in favor.
Republicans, 24 yea, 29 nay, so ~45% in favor.
The 59 yea votes consisted of 35 Democrats (King is independent but caucuses with the Democrats), and 24 Republicans. I'm much more interested in why it failed to pass, so I'll refrain from listing the yea votes for brevity.
The 4 absent senators were 2 Democrats (Sanders is independent but caucuses with the Democrats), and 2 Republicans:
Alexander (R-TN)
Murray (D-WA)
Sanders (I-VT)
Sasse (R-NE)
The 37 nay votes were from 10 Democrat and 27 Republican senators:
You're right, I was jumping to conclusions that it would be vetoed. In that case I have no idea who was filibustering it, assuming that's why they needed 60 votes. I would love to know.
No. First it has to be brought to the floor (not automatic) in each house with quorums present. It then takes 2/3s vote of members present in both houses.
The minimum to override in the Senate would be 2/3 * 51 = 34 votes.
51 is the minimum for a Senate quorum [1] (the VP isn't a member and wouldn't count) and you need 2/3s of members present after the Senate is quorate to vote for an override. The vote itself has to be quorate since it will require a roll call to establish the count. There are a lot of procedural rules+hurdles. You don't just need 2/3s of 100.
"But the amendment fell short by one vote of the required 60 votes to pass the chamber."
No, it needed 60 for cloture, to stop debate. Pass/fail requires a simple majority in a subsequent vote.
"Assuming none of the amendments pass, the final bill is likely to skip the House — which passed its version of the bill earlier this year — and await the president’s (sic) signature."
Uh, that's not how it works. A bill isn't enrolled (sent to the President) until the identical contents pass both houses. So, if the House has a distinct version with any difference whatsoever, it can't proceed.
These hits will keep coming. The only way is to fight it by joining the system and setting up a pro-privacy lobby group and fund it. I don’t know how long it can last though. I am pessimistic about this.
Lots of things change but the fact that rulers need to subdue the ruled has not changed.
What has changed is how either civilians or the military could withdraw their consent which gives a government legitimacy. Society thought it would be a good idea to log our thoughts and lives on computers and the internet,now rulers can monitor the ruled and adopt before they can organize any effort to withdraw their consent.
Suddenly all the weapons,money and elections are futile against rulers that monitor and manipulate thoughts and social relationships.
You can imagine why they feel like americans must be spied on. Their ability to maintain rule depends on it. Not all citizens are created equals in their minds. Deep divisions and addiction to power.
I wonder how broadly they define “internet browsing and search history”. I’m assuming email is somehow included. I wonder if mobile app data falls under the umbrella.
The two categories of information are largely referred to as “content” and “metadata”. The terms are not actually well defined under law when it comes to internet GETS and POSTS.
It’s supposed that knowing you went to “amazon.com” would be metadata. Knowing you went to “PornHub.com/v/id=Xyz” (or whatever URL would link to a specific video) would be considered content.
Today they are allowed to collect just “metadata” without a warrant. This amendment would have explicitly required a warrant for metadata.
McConnell is proposing another amendment which would clarify the distinction that content can not be obtained without a warrant, but basically maintains the status quo, while also exempting specific types of people or entities.
IANAL, but reading the McConnell amendment almost makes me think there’s a secret court interpretation of the existing law where they decided they could collect “content” as well without a warrant.
I imagine the intelligence community would try to interpret it as narrowly as possible, ie just the literal URLs you visited and terms you sent to Google.
The thing at question was an amendment to add additional proof for access to "internet browsing and search history" data, so if the "intelligence community" defines that term as narrowly as possible, (assuming the "USA FREEDOM Act", the bill which was to be amended, is renewed) then the potential future restriction is applied to fewer data points.
You must be kidding? the only time they are looking only at "meta" data is when they don't have the (mental/physical) capacity to analyze the rest... look at this for example: https://www.businessinsider.com/when-can-the-government-read... (they can read any emails that are older than 6 months without a warrant.... since 1986, if they are stored on a 3rd party server)
You misunderstand both what your parent's intention was and what is being interpreted in a narrow fashion.
The amendment would add a new burden for whitelisted data points. Your parent was saying that the "intelligence community" would likely play legal definition games to retain the most data points which don't have a new higher burden of proof.
It’s not your personal data. It’s Google’s log of requests made to and carried out by Google’s servers. It’s not covered by the literal text of the fourth amendment—which, as you correctly paraphrased, applies to one’s own person and property. The fourth amendment was also never understood at the time it was written to apply to third party business records, which is what your search history is. (While we didn’t have search engines in 1789, we had all sorts of commercial businesses, from banks to accountants to merchants, who kept sensitive customer records. Indeed, for at least 400 years, such records have been obtainable in civil suits with just a subpoena.)
I think it would be a good idea to require a warrant in such cases. But it’s not a 4th amendment issue.
I'd go so far as to argue that the 4th amendment ought to be amended to apply to such data. Such customer records may have been sensitive in the past, but they've become far more personal and all encompassing.
Yes it ought to. Unfortunately the current logic seems to be (approximately) that by voluntarily using a third party system the data is no longer your personal property.
The obvious issue with this is that (for example) it seems to treat a Google Docs spreadsheet differently than one stored locally. The way the law is currently worded simply isn't sufficient (IMO) now that the internet exists.
A Google doc is bits encoded onto Google’s property (its servers). A local Excel spreadsheet is bits encoded onto my property (my computer). The law treats them differently because they are totally different.
Yes, there is a bunch of fancy technology that makes it look and feel like the two things are the same. But why should a technological illusion trump physical reality? In reality, you can tell where the bits are and who owns the physical thing that the bits are on. The fourth amendment very neatly and cleanly delineates between the two scenarios based on who owns the relevant “papers and effects.”
Hey I completely agree that it's how the law is currently written.
Reflecting a bit more on my Google Docs example (which differs from the original browsing history topic) I believe it was faulty. It would be a bit odd to treat bits I own as not mine simply because they're stored on hardware owned by someone else. In fact on it's face it appears to go against existing precedent that the 4th amendment applies to a rented storage unit.
When it comes to sensitive data like browsing history though, regardless of legal ownership it certainly feels like a form of unreasonable search. I really can't blame the original authors for failing to anticipate the existence of the internet though.
This type of data collection falls under the 3rd party rulings, i.e. your data is not protected by the 4th Amendment once it is given to a 3rd party. Not saying this is a good thing, just that this is the state of 4th Amendment interpretation.
we did this to ourselves. we built these tools that are now at the disposal of people with malicious intentions. in another thread about surveillance of WFH employees everyone is aghast that managers would use such tools. again: we did this to ourselves.
you can shift the blame any number of times around the loop of responsibilities
it's not my fault it's my boss's fault -> it's not my fault it's the government's fault -> it's not my fault it's the constituency's fault -> it's not my fault it's the business's fault
and so on. someone has to admit fault and break the loop. for my part this year i left a dod funded project even though the money was easy.
Your argument essentially boils down to "I'm frustrated. We need to do something! The only reason nothing changes is because of our mindset! If only we all made the same decision I made, we wouldn't have this problem!"
But this kind of egalitarian desire, well intentioned as it is, should not be mistaken for an effective mechanism. It does not take very much comparison to see the night and day difference between a low level IC employee at the DoD or a subcontractor, and a high level military chief capable of making executive decisions for a $700B/year war machine. Nor does it take that much thinking to consider that for a lot of poor folks, the military is one of the few options remaining for them to be able to afford an education, a calling, a social circle, and a sense of structure and purpose in the modern world. If you want to more insightfully analyze what enables this Leviathan to perpetuate, perhaps you should take a look at the nonlinear systemic factors involved rather than reducing things to a naive linear sum of individual actions.
I don't think it's a reasonable comparison to make between WFH managers of consenting employment contracts and the national security apparatus which we didn't get to vote on or opt out of.
The rationale for the Manhattan Project (the impetus for your quote by Oppenheimer) was that the US government thought that if we got the atomic bomb before our national enemies, we would be more virtuous in its usage. That is always the blind faith that US government workers, military, and contractors use to justify working on military/surveillance technology. Until all of those government workers stop deluding themselves into the "exceptionalism" fallacy, the technology used against Americans will continue to outpace our ability to protect against it or perhaps to even know about it.
i'm constantly so frustrated by the lack of imagination of people on this forum.
employees of some company consented more or less just as much as we did - they consented by staying in the employ and we consented by voting/not voting/not emigrating. in fact we consented more because we at least had a say in representation. is that a silly argument? good i agree - those workers are just as aggrieved as we are in this case.
>more virtuous in its usage
we technologists are deluded in the exact same way. something along the lines of "our code doesn't hurt people who didn't deserve it/consent to it".
> i'm constantly so frustrated by the lack of imagination of people on this forum
It's not a lack of imagination. I simply don't agree with your framing of the options.
To quit a job is fairly low friction for most employees (except where there is a high friction complication like a pension or a medical pre-existing condition). It doesn't even require changing companies -- just finding a better boss which doesn't feel the need to surveil their employees is a lower friction way to accomplish the same ends.
To emigrate is fairly high friction -- it requires another country willing to accept the immigrant and usually requires physically moving and lots of time/money (I've heard the IRS demands 10 years of future income taxes for US citizens to give up American citizenship). I personally think the "love America or leave it" is an intellectually crippled argument -- America exports its bad drug / foreign policies around the world, so just leaving the country isn't enough to get away from the bad policies.
You are being disingenuous when you speak about voting because in practice we get a small sliver of a say in electing a representative from one of two parties (if that many) and no guarantee that the people we vote for will vote the way they promise (if they even give us a straightforward promise).
I don't disagree that "we" should take far more responsibility for the sad state of surveillance policy in the USA, but some of "we" are far more culpable in the current problems than others.
>To quit a job is fairly low friction for most employees
Do you live in alternate reality where jobs grow on trees? Especially right now? How could you possibly genuinely claim that there's no friction to quitting a job right now when we're almost at historically high unemployment? You can't quit your job in a frictionless fashion when there isn't another one waiting for you!
>To emigrate is fairly high friction -- it requires another country willing to accept the immigrant and usually requires physically moving and lots of time/money
That bears such a close resemblance to what it's like to look for a job for almost everyone except FAANG employees that I don't understand how you fail to acknowledge the analogy that I was drawing.
>You are being disingenuous when you speak about voting because in practice we get a small sliver of a say in electing a representative from one of two parties
You're doing exactly the thing I alluded to: passing the buck To whom? History I guess. That's not the entirety of the rights that are afforded to you as a citizen of this country. You can organize, advocate, run for office yourself, etc.
>but some of "we" are far more culpable in the current problems than others.
Who? Who are they? Is there some class of actors that I forgot?
Where did I say blame? I essentially said we should take responsibility for our part. So far I've seen many people say things like "it's not my problem I only do as I'm told" absolving themselves of the responsibility of doing anything to rectify the situation.
> I can understand why a system built on a pattern must try to destroy the free mind, for this is one thing which can by inspection destroy such a system. Surely I can understand this, and I hate it and I will fight against it to preserve the one thing that separates us from the uncreative beasts. If the glory can be killed, we are lost.
Awesome. Now, FISA warrants can continue to be used without oversight to spy on Americans!! Goooo team! And who wants to do this?? These guys! yaaaaay!
http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2020/roll099.xml
Committing the initial capital to form a FEC recognized national political party The Privacy Party to begin direct opposition to this and related activities.
If you are interested in collaborating or learning more:
This article does an incredibly bad job of explaining the current status of this law, and what is expected to happen next. Has the existing law expired? Is it being replaced with something equally bad? Is the replacement subject to further change? Am I just bad at reading?
Sure, until they get a government order compelling them to do so. Don't confuse something that is not done by choice with something that is not done because it is not possible.
normally narrowly rejects is a construction used to indicate something bad was going to be done, so narrowly rejecting it is still bad, which I mean I guess this was still bad but not because the rejection was narrow.
Please don't take HN threads further into political flamewar. It won't do any good and will just fill the thread up with off-topic angry repetitiveness.
Doesn't it have to go back to the House anyway? Am I missing something? I thought that bills needed to pass in both the House and Senate before they can be signed into law?
Now in the House they'll have an opportunity to reject the bill with McConnell's original amendment, which is obviously dispicable. This all seems like political theater, like Senator Schumer allowed a vote on this today knowing Sanders would be out. This way, the GOP looks slimy and the House has more reason to simply reject the bill as is and Bernie Sanders can be the scapegoat --> more support for Biden. If this amendment had passed, it'd have been harder for the House to reject the bill.
(Sanders was out today with Ilhan Omar advocating for international debt relief for indebted countries. )
The House has already passed the surveillance renewal bill, so unless the Senate passes the House bill with at least one amendment (so it's not technically the same bill), it doesn't have to go back to the House.
I've been reading that Mitch McConnell's changes, the ones that would expressly allow warrantless surveillance, are a "new amendment". Wouldn't that kind of reporting imply that this amendment hasn't yet been cleared in the house?
Democrats are federally elected officials and are of course gonna vote yes on his amendment. Just bec they wear a blue tie it doesn't suddenly make them less self serving.
How can they just replace something in the bill passed by the house without the house approving that change? Would that not constitute an amendment? My understanding of the bicameral legislature is that both bodies need to clear the exact language of potential legislation for it to become law. Any change made by either body constitutes an amendment and needs to be approved by the other before the president can sign the bill into law or veto it.
Rand Paul has introduced an amendment that goes up for vote tomorrow that would disallow this surveillance on American citizens, which of course is not expected to pass.
McConnell is drafting language to prevent this from being used on “federal election candidates” which of course is expected to pass.