Category: Quotations

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Quotations

Opportunity and Future

There’s so much hue and cry about the diminishing opportunities for those who were previously part of the middle class – as if a problem only matters when it happens to folks who had better things in mind. But for some people this has always been their mode of living, their understanding of the world. When we hold out the promise of a better life as the result of higher education, not everyone can believe in that promise. When pundits bemoan the “high expectations” of an entire generation, they’re forgetting that not everyone had the expectation of magical prosperity either from education or anything else. If we took loans, it wasn’t because we truly believed we could repay them; it was because we saw no other option, because we were told our chances of survival were even lower without the coveted Bachelor’s degree. It was because not having a degree was presented a threat to our future employability, and the fear of debt was overshadowed by the fear of other forms of uncertainty. That doesn’t feel like a “choice” – it feels like coercion, and it’s something we need to start thinking about when we engage in debates about policy and accessibility.

* Melonie Fullick, “Poor Choices”
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Quotations

2013.11.11

Generally it takes an incident to focus attention on the issue of informational privacy – and such incidents tend to focus on one type of record system at a time. This human interest element helps to define the policy problem, galvanize media and public attention, and give members of Congress concrete examples of privacy invasion to justify their votes. There is always vocal and well-financed opposition to privacy protections, generally from business and government bureaucrats who do not want to restrict access to information. Their opposition is usually quite successful in weakening the proposed privacy protections and in further narrowing the scope of such protections. And after passage opponents are likely the challenge legislation in the courts, often on the basis of First Amendment grounds that any information, including that about individuals, should flow freely and without government restrictions.

Priscilla M. Regan (2008), “The United States,” in Global Privacy Protection: The First Generation, James B. Rule and Graham Greenlead (eds.).
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Quotations

2013.11.4

The NSA allegedly collected the phone records of 320 million people in order to identify roughly 300 people who might be a risk. It’s just bad public policy.

Eric Schmitt, in “Google’s Eric Schmidt calls NSA surveillance ‘outrageous’”
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Links Quotations

Andrew Coyne: Conservatives’ effort to hide from public only gains them more enemies

“…the Conservative tragedy grinds on. When your only principle is paranoia — when your central organizing proposition is that “everyone is out to get us” — when every criticism is merely confirmation of the essential rightness of that proposition, and every deviation is evidence of disloyalty, then you are less a party than a cult.”

Strong words, this time from Andrew Coyne.
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Quotations

2013.10.8

It is hardly surprising that supporters of bulk collection fervently believe it is critical to national security. No psychologically well-balanced person could permit herself to support a program that compromises the privacy of tens of millions of Americans, costs billions of dollars, and imposes direct and articulable harm to cyber security by undermining the security of commercial products and public standards without holding such a belief truly and honestly.

But the honest faith of insiders that their bureaucratic mission is true and critical is no substitute for credible evidence. A dozen years of experience has produced many public overstatements and much hype from insiders, but nothing to support the proposition that the program works at all, much less that its marginal contribution is significant enough to justify its enormous costs in money, freedom, and destabilization of internet security. No rational cost-benefit analysis could justify such a leap of faith.

Source: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/08/nsa-bulk-metadata-surveillance-intelligence
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Links Quotations Writing

2013.8.23

Neither the GCSB nor a spokesperson for the Embassy of New Zealand in the United States immediately responded to Ars’ request for comment. In June 2013, New Zealand Prime Minister John Key evaded answering whether the GCSB uses or has access to the NSA’s PRISM system.

“I can’t tell you how the United States gather all of their information, what techniques they use, I just simply don’t know,” Key told TV3’s Firstline. “But if the question is do we use the United States or one of our other partners to circumvent New Zealand law then the answer is categorically no. We do exchange—and it’s well known—information with our partners. We do do that. How they gather that information and whether they use techniques or systems like PRISM, I can’t comment on that.”

Cyrus Farivar, “New Zealand appears to have used NSA spy network to target Kim Dotcom”

What’s often missing from reporting about whether intelligence agencies are asking five eyes partners to monitor the agencies’ own citizens is this: rarely would a formal request for such monitoring services be required.

You see, folks in the intelligence and security agencies train with one another. They go to international courses together, just like any other group of professionals. And, as anyone who attends professional events knows, informal networks of information sharing arise. In the context of NSA/CSEC/ASIO/GCHQ/etc this can take the form of one government official complaining about the inability to conduct domestic surveillance on X group(s) that are regarded as a problem and then – independent of a ‘formal’ request! – other partners just might collect information on X given that a problem for the complaining agency just might turn into a problem for all the five eyes partners.

As an example: when a CSEC or NSA official complains that domestic extremists could be plotting a terror attack, but that neither CSEC or NSA can legally conduct the surveillance, a partner might be motivated to conduct the surveillance because, you know, terrorism. And, to turn the intelligence into something that’s actionable the foreign service could turn the collected information to CSEC/NSA/agency that is domestically located.

The great thing about this approach is no formal request needs to have been made. Is this as efficient as “Hey, can you guys spy on X so we don’t break our national laws?” No. But it does have the effect of generating favours and goodwill between the very professionals who are often in close contact with one another. And it also lets information be shared without the clear violation of domestic laws that forbid most intelligence services from spying on their own citizens.

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Quotations

2013.8.20

In the UK, the public, press, and politicians vigorously debated the Communications Data Bill, a law that would require ISPs and telecommunications providers to keep metadata records for 12 months (as of this writing, the bill has been withdrawn). The US had no discussion of such a bill; something more draconian simply happened through a secret interpretation of the law.

Susan Landau, “Making Sense from Snowden”
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Quotations

2013.8.19

In 2012, the Migration Policy Institute reported that immigration and border enforcement spending totaled almost $18 billion. That is 24 percent more than the $14.4 billion combined budgets in the last fiscal year of the F.B.I., the Secret Service, the Drug Enforcement Agency, the Marshals Service and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Add the billions anticipated in the Senate bill, and you have what the trade publication Homeland Security Today calls a “treasure trove” for contractors in the border security industry.

Projected as an approximately $19 billion industry in 2013, defense contractors seem, in the words of one representative from a small surveillance technology company hoping to jump into the border security market, to be “bringing the battlefield to the border.“

Todd Miller, “War on the Border”
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Quotations

2013.8.16

I suppose everything Alexander said was technically true, since the “congressional review” was different from the “NSA audit”, but it’s still gross deception. He acts with the ethics of the head of a police state. We should either upgrade him to the title he deserves, “Chief of the Secret Police”, or ask for his resignation.

Robert Graham, Errata Security
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Aside Quotations

2013.8.10

All four of Obama’s proposed reforms are useful. The second is adding an adversary to proceedings of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court, which has the power to approve secret warrants. Another is to assemble a committee that would issue a report about the balance between liberty and security. And then there’s a call to increase transparency. Some of this area’s elements are cosmetic—a new Web site for the N.S.A., for example, for which one hopes there is a better graphic designer than whoever puts together the agency’s classified PowerPoint presentations—and others are important but fragmentary. Obama said he’d make public the “legal rationale for the government’s collection activities under Section 215.” That is good, but legal rationales, for this and all other collection activities, are not things that should ever be fully classified in the first place. How an agency proceeds in a given case is one thing, but what it and we understand our rights to be should never be secret.

Source: http://m.newyorker.com/online/blogs/closeread/2013/08/nsa-dirty-dishes-obama-press-conference.html

You’ll forgive me if thinking that releasing details of how laws are secretly interpreted constitutes ‘transparency’ to any reasonable degree. Though I’m well aware that a vast portion of American jurisprudence is effectively withheld from the public (you have to pay for access to PACER to see how legislation has actually been interpreted by courts, thus excluding individuals from understanding their laws and court processes) it is inexcusable that POTUS thinks that making their rationales public is sufficient. What is legal is not necessarily right nor constitutional, and dragnet surveillance of the world’s communications is an inexcusable affront to basic human freedoms and liberties in today’s digital era.