This reminds me of a friend's response to the idea that the TouchID in the new iphone could be a way for the NSA to get your fingerprints: "Just imagine the shitstorm if they put a camera in there. Or a microphone."
There's no good way yet to uniquely identify a person based on a (dodgy) picture of them or sample of their voice. Whereas fingerprints are used for this daily* and a quickly searchable database of these (or just their "hashes") would be incredibly useful to _somebody_.
*I'm not raising the issue of whether they _should_ be or not here, just that they are.
There's no good way yet to uniquely identify a person based on a (dodgy) picture of them or sample of their voice
Surely this is sarcastic. We can easily identify with great certainty from a relevant set... as Facebook does, for instance. You have a relevant set if you are many governments (the local government, and in many cases Israel via AMDOCS and its intelligence allies - primarily the US, but in some cases possibly their intelligence allies) or a motivated attacker (eg. with an insider, or hiring an insider via a private investigation firm), because you have the device call/messaging/physical location records from which to cross-match. Even if it's a land-line. You also have easy access to additional voice data (voicemail recording, 'this call may be recorded' records at large companies such as banks or wings of government, etc.). Public data sets on non-secret government telephone interception frequency even in 'free-ish' countries like Australia suggest extremely broad cultures around acceptable collection. (For .au I read a raw statistics report I can't seem to relocate recently, but http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/be-careful-... is a good overview.)
>Are you actually asking if accidentally killing innocent people is better than routinely and intentionally killing innocent people, like this:
An innocent person dead is an innocent person dead. Regardless of whether it's an accident or intentional its still wrong. 'Accidentally killing' hundreds of thousands of innocent people in the name of 'all that is good and great' is disgusting.
The US government's assertion that it has the right to do this.
What are you referring to, exactly? I thought the scandal was the dubious distinctions being made to specifically avoid "monitoring an entire population", and the lack of oversight to prove it.
"[Update - 9/23/2013] – Today we filed a legal brief asking the court to confirm that we have the right to report the number of national security requests we receive, if any."
I'm getting tired of the knee-jerk tendency for a small group of people to flag these extremely critical revelations.
The "knee-jerk" comes from the tendency of people to submit lots and lots of less important stories on the same handful of topics, rather than a few good ones. Remember when the front page was nothing but Erlang? Or nothing but Steve Jobs eulogies? For people that come for quality rather than quantity, it harms the signal to noise ratio. Submitting even more just exacerbates the problem, without creating better discussions (more threads != better threads) in exchange.
As tomjen3 suggests: find or create your own subreddit. Subreddits themselves exist because this same problem afflicted Reddit.
Edit: I'm sorry if I offended somebody. I'm simply trying to propose a solution for people that feel they aren't seeing the stories they want to see on HN.
You may also want to reconsider your statement, substituting "intelligence agents" for redditors. If they collate photos or other information is it harmless?
>Repeating misinformation is acting on it, and harms attempts to get at the truth.
Well sure it is when you deliberately spread disinformation, as opposed to being mistaken.
>You may also want to reconsider your statement, substituting "intelligence agents" for redditors. If they collate photos or other information is it harmless?
Nope, I don't see much reason to think that the average law enforcement agent is much better or worse than the average redditor. The incentives for the law enforcement agency are often worse from the perspective of potential for abuse.
Well sure it is when you deliberately spread disinformation, as opposed to being mistaken.
There is no difference. Sunil Trapathi was mis-identified because somebody said they heard his name on the police scanner, and then Reddit (and Twitter) repeated it as if it were true (see "social proof"), with no confirmation at all. They weren't just mistaken: they didn't even bother to verify it.
I don't see much reason to think that the average law enforcement agent is much better or worse than the average redditor.
Aside from the fact that they actually located the right people whereas reddit identified several wrong people? You don't think that training in proper investigative and analysis techniques plays a role in that? How bizarre.
I think the point is that not everything people say is supported by the available documents, not that the documents aren't real. Moreover, not everything reported by the press is backed up by a document that we can go and read. Even your quote sites "someone familiar with the request", not a document leaked by Snowden.
That is to say: there are some things that we know and are verified (e.g. that there is a program, called PRISM, etc.) but other things where there's a lot of speculation, but less or no verification (e.g. that the iPhone is backdoored.)
Some of us like to distinguish between these things. Some of us don't. It doesn't help to call people names over it, though.
He's talking about this submission, not this site. There are dozens and dozens of other submissions where NSA discussion is more on-topic, and anybody here is free to submit their own article on the topic for discussion. That way, people that want to discuss the NSA at that moment can do so, and people that want to talk about something else can do so, too.
To put it another way: the problem is not the topic. It's the tactic of derailing every other topic that people want to talk about just because you think something else is too important to be ignored. That tactic, as well-intended as it might be, has a history of driving good users away from once-good fora precisely because it's so annoying to not be able to talk about anything else.
How is it not on-topic to discuss NSA surveillance in a discussion about one of the world's most popular internet-connected devices collecting biometric data under the control of a large American corporation?
It is becoming crystal clear that people really do not understand how important this issue is, the degree to which it permeates this industry and how farked we are if we cannot begin to understand the foundational position we require in order to change it.
Thank you for your succinct statement, I have very little faith we will get through this any time soon given the reaction I see on HN, Reddit and other sites where the most seemingly qualified among us to do anything cannot even comprehend how pernicious this problem is.
