If they get a person's password, the largest privacy violation is not to that person. It's to all that person's friends and family who shared private material.
We can discuss all we want whether it was wise for anyone to share, say, everyday normal photos of their children or themselves on Facebook.
If you think they shouldn't have shared normal, everyday, family photos on an online service, sure, fine, I don't know what to say. But let's say they did do so, which is pretty normal.
Are they entitled to some privacy from whatever pervs the DHS hires?
Remember "they" is the friends and family of the person visiting the US, not the person themselves.
Many of these friends and family will be US citizens, so arguments about differing rights for non-citizens, whether valid or invalid with respect to privacy rights, don't necessarily apply in those cases.
US citizens must thank the founding fathers for all the amendments else the feds would have treated all of us just like this.These wannabe immigrants have 0 rights or voting power so they are being treated like complete shit.
The way US government treats legal immigrants, they might as well ask them to bring a lube and drop pants and bend over at the immigration check. This comment might seem crass but it is nowhere close to the crassness with which US government has come to treat people who are going through all the ridiculous legal hoops and in process making criminals out of perfectly ordinary people.
This is like having a super complex CAPTCHA on your signup page for humans while letting bots pass through by some minor cookie manipulation.
I wonder if this includes google accounts (since you know, google plus).
I mean, the whole notion is horrific and abysmal, but in today's OAUTH world you're not just giving up the facebook goods, you're giving up co-logins to lots of other sites too. There's other technical issues too - I use 2FA everywhere. So, do I disable the 2FA or have to give that up too? In perpetuity? I mean, I don't trust law enforcement to not go around murdering people, why should they have access to passwords?
The very thought or suggestion that this could someday happen would make me cancel any and all trips to the US for the foreseeable future (if I weren't already a US citizen who lived here, that is, and as it is I'm seriously considering emigrating in response to this administration).
The brain drain effects will have to be enormous. There's already a company focused on helping startups use Vancouver to base their remote employees. [0]
On so many levels this is bad. I'd heard the notion floated under the Obama administration, but I trusted them to be adult and see all the possible ramifications. I do not trust the Trump administration to even be in the neighborhood of rational, let alone adult. I mean, they dumped the immigration executive order with no actual warning whatsoever (besides repeatedly saying he'd do just that, I suppose). So now we have no real choice but to take them at their word.
I am failing to see how providing your Facebook password provides any legitimate confirmation about you and your associations. You can easily create a fake Facebook profile with your picture, fake posts, fake friends, fake everything.
The internet is a cesspool of people who troll, create fake profiles, invoke reactions, behave completely different than they would on the streets, and intentionally hide their identity. Using it as a primary source of identity verification is a terrible idea.
Why not require proof of a financial statement? Bank account in your name, or a process to verify somebody via their bank account without requiring their bank account password.
It won't be primary. A surprising number of people post dumb things, or even talk about their plans to violate their visa conditions while in line for entry. This'll catch a lot of mundane violations, like folks planning on working or permanently residing in the country while claiming they're just visiting for a week. It's very intrusive and I'm against it, but it will be quite effective.
Most people aren't gonna create fake profiles. Or if they do, they'll be suspiciously empty. If someone is gonna go through that effort to get entry they probably can just refrain from posting their plans online in the first place.
> It's very intrusive and I'm against it, but it will be quite effective.
It will be effective initially, but people will catch wind of this and start to purge their Facebook profiles prior to entry. I'm certain that cheap online "Facebook cleaning" services will start to pop up very soon.
I've seen people talk about their plans to enter under false premises while in line at Houston (IAH). Talking about how they're gonna work as a nanny or whatever. CBP has folks walking around and sometimes they ask spot questions and suss these people out. I imagine the same will happen.
People who will go thru the hassle of dealing with a fake profile will just not post about their plans to enter "illegally" in the first place. People prone to writing dumb shit online are probably not going to wise up because of this.
> You can easily create a fake Facebook profile with your picture, fake posts, fake friends, fake everything.
Perjuring yourself to a border agent is inadvisable. The legal threat follows you whether or not you are granted or denied entry. At any time, it may be discovered and lead to very serious criminal and administrative consequences.
If you simply refuse to give over the password, they can refuse entry. But they can't necessarily treat you as an actual criminal.
It is never a good idea to lie to, mislead or interfere with law enforcement officers. If you are having trouble, get a lawyer as quickly as you can.
Speaking of which: I am not a lawyer and consequently this is not legal advice.
There is no legal obligation to be truthful in what one places on their Facebook profile, however, so it's not perjuring. You can out on whatever you like and it's up to the border agent to make of it whatever they will.
In criminal law, intention matters as much as actions.
I suspect the that deliberately creating a false profile would push you into perjury territory. And in any case, even if the rulings come down otherwise, you'll still get arrested and remanded for a long time while the lawyers sort it out.
Again, though: I am not a lawyer. Consult a lawyer.
Sure, you can provide a fake profile. And then they'll find out your real one (Facebook will certainly be compelled to help out) and you're now guilty of lying to the border officials, and probably banned for a long time, if not for life.
I wouldn't phrase it like that but, yes, there are ~200 countries in the world.
Things like this (and this[1]) just help destroy the idea that the US is a special haven of freedom that cause many people to want to visit in the first place.
At least in my opinion USA is one of the last countries on earth which is offering near 100% freedom of speech, largely free trade and individual freedom, right to own guns and many other things which you can not own without nonsensical bureaucracy, huge landmass, top notch education and a growing capitalistic society.
The way I see it countries like France, UK are pretty much going down the drain through which welfare states often go. In these countries government perhaps don't even need your password. They can do all sort of unauthorized searches any ways. Australian society remains hostile to non white people and China lacks individual and political freedom. Canada is close but it is far too cold for me. Japan is pretty much isolated because of the language and unique culture.
> Do we really need the USA anyway? What is honestly being lost if we're banned?
Good, don't come then. I've traveled the world a decent bit, and there is a reason why people from all over the world come to the US to start a business or try to make financial independence and a better life from their home country.
In many cases its because of ignorance -- America's cultural dominance simply makes it the default rich nation to try to enter. Many are shocked (in one case I vividly remember, to tears) to hear how much better life is for many in mainstream developed nations than it is in the US.
How would they discover you provided a fake profile in the first place? Sure they might be able to catch a percentage of people, but not nearly all of them.
A: Most people aren't gonna bother, or do this right. B: Most people will leave their original profile up, so quickly searching might find that person's photo with another account. C: There will probably be a lack of activity. "You signed up for Facebook 1 month ago?" "Why do you have no friends talking about this trip?" etc.
People that don't want to get caught entering under false pretenses can just delete social media or not post dumb stuff on it in the first place. This isn't gonna catch spies[1] and terrorists or whatever, it'll prevent visa overstays and stuff like that.
[1] Though I heard of one spy getting caught cause she tried to collect frequent flier miles on her main account while traveling under aliases. So, who knows what kinda things will happen every now and then. But that can't be the primary aim of the idea.
Depends on whether they decide they want a reason to get you out of the country later. How much do you speak against the regime? They won't be interested in most people but they will target their efforts.
Another example of an absurd question like that was one I was asked when I was applying for my visa; along the lines of "are you planning to commit espionage for another country against the United States". I assume they do it so they can pin you for perjury as well was whatever crime you committed should you turn out to be a spy. But it's just so absurd when asked deadpan like that.
The reason for those is to then quickly provide a way to invalidate their visa and have an administratively easy path to kick them out without having to go to court and such. Terrorist activities doesn't mean blowing things up, it could be open to all kinds of interpretation (donated money to some organization, protested and was arrested for rioting, went to a black-hat conference which had talks about subverting security systems of power plants etc, etc).
Any statue establishing those could also establish that those are proper cause for immediate deportation, no need for fancy forms and logic-gymnastics.
They're just getting you to incriminate yourself. The standard of proof for excluding someone for lying on the forms is quite different from convicting them of an actual terrorism-related crime.
They will make you sign a document that would be something like
"I confirm under penalty of perjury that this is the only social media account I have." Later when the government wants to target you specifically they will point out that you had also owned an Orkut account which you had failed to disclose. Bam! you have to leave the country.
You act like that's some kind of revelation. Countries such as France, Britain, Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands, Australia, India, Russia and China are already on par with or beyond the US when it comes to abusive domestic espionage.
This was one of my first thoughts too. I deleted my Facebook account years ago. I almost never use Twitter. Would a border person believe me? Would I seem sketchy? Should I create a new Facebook account and post something banal every few weeks just so I can travel with peace of mind? That does seem insane.
I can only assume this threat of asking visitors to grant government agencies complete and unfettered access to their online accounts was conceived by people who don't know how the internet works. There are just so many logistical problems with it at so many levels that it's hard to imagine it ever working in practice.
Alternatively, what if you do have such accounts and don't know the passwords? I keep all my passwords in a password manager, and if I'm crossing a border, I'm probably going to make sure I can't access it until after I'm across.
I'll guessing the right thing to do, if you know about this requirement, is to set up a Facebook account specifically for this purpose, then right before you cross a border, change its password to something easy to remember.
Considering how the NSA probably has access to this already, what does this mean? A few options off the top of my head. Not putting any probabilities on these, but it's interesting to think about. The options are neither exhaustive nor exclusive.
(a) NSA info is drying up due to resistance from companies
(b) NSA info can't be shared due to low-priority targets
(c) NSA info can be shared but there's something going on between NSA and DHS that makes this difficult
(d) NSA info can be shared, but only to people of a certain clearance, which makes this non-scalable for ports of entry
(e) NSA info can be shared but the goal of the policy isn't info, it's signaling
My hunch is that this is less about the technical ability to access data and more about adding another legally-defensible way to reject people they want to reject for other reasons.
The NSA is probably already cahooting with the CBP for selected cases.
I would say everything except option (a). additionally, it's possible that data streams are drying up into the NSA (i dont think they are), but the NSA already has enough to incriminate literally every human on earth for any petty thoughtcrime
most likely, I say, is that the data in NSA Utah is basically like a walled off test dev that only a few special people can query for currently important things. their main job is to determine how best to query it in the future
and then each agency maintains a prod database of its own data its collected to oppress everyone. very rarely would they ever get NSA data
Interesting. How many people, would you say, have a textual conversation over email or FB or a forum, etc, that had ended up in an NSA dragnet?
Then, of those conversations (presumably several billion), how many are stored with some identifiable metadata, like IP address, GPS tag, real name, photo?
Even if it is only a few million people, it's still way too much of an overreach, and still ridiculously cheap to store on tape and analyze on disk/ssd.
then you just pay someone who cant find any better work to type queries into a system.
How many times have you talked about potential crimes with your friends? how many times have they talked about using drugs, fake IDs, speeding, petty theft, etc
how many times has "child porn" inadvertantly made it into your browsers temporary files.
Almost everything is a crime, and the government's ability to cheaply prosecute is only growing
i hope everyone can look at this and see the conclusive proof:
many people in government from all sides abuse technology to control the lives of people in new, shocking, and totalitarian ways
to say "i'm not muslim, or Iranian, or Mexican, or a dissident", or etc, will soon no longer suffice.
Every conceivable activity and word you speak or think will eventually be evaluated if the technology is cheap enough and politicians are daring enough
The constitution doesn't even stop people from doing things like this anymore, so I don't know how to fix this
The Constitution is on it's way to becoming a dead letter. There's nothing wrong with rebooting the Republic, many countries go through such disruptions. I'm not saying just do it, but if the existing political consensus collapses we won't benefit from trying to back to how things used to be.
One of the very first changes of any new version of the Constitution arising from any major quarter would be the deletion of the First Amendment, with the Fourth following closely. I have no faith that a document reflecting contemporary American generational consensus, as Jefferson aspired to, would be better or more free.
Could =/= would. If you're arguing for the status quo because every alternative you can imagine is worse then you're essentially treating it as religious dogma.
Though I wish it were different, I can't help but feel that this truly is game over. The statists have won. The technology is too powerful, they're too easily able to afford it, and the public can't do much to stop it
It's sad to see such defeat. The tech is not too powerful, the public just has to care about privacy, that's all. We have the technology to prevent mass surveillance. We can stop it, as soon as we the people want to.
I wish this were true. When you use technology to prevent mass survaillance, they criminalize its usage.
Anyone can be thrown in jail at any time for relatively petty reasons, and you can be physically surveilled by detectives on mere suspicion. It isn't pretty, but it's the truth.
Sure most of us will be fine with basic precautions but 20 years from now is a different story? I prefer not to think about it
It is true; we have tunneling, VPNs, ssh, Tor, FreeNet, I2P. None of these things have been criminalized, so what are you thinking about when you say "its" usage has been criminalized? Do you have some examples of when privacy tech has been criminalized in the past? I might be naive, it probably has happened, but I don't personally know of any privacy or security software or hardware that is illegal to use in the US.
People being physically surveilled doesn't land in the same camp as mass digital surveillance. It requires a warrant, even if they can be obtained for petty reasons. The government doesn't have the bandwidth for physical surveillance of everyone. It just isn't the same thing.
20 years from now is a long way off, long enough for us to make it better. If you give up and don't think about it, people who care and work for what they want will probably get what they want. Money and government power certainly do want to watch what you're doing, if they can get away with it. But if the public, on the whole, really truly started to care about privacy, enough to vote on the issue and enough to make purchasing decisions based on privacy concerns, it would get better. The only reason it's bleak right now is the majority of the world is still giddy about joining Facebook, rather than concerned about the implications of digital public over-sharing. Give it time and get your friends & family to care, and it's more likely to improve than not. If we all look the other way, then we get what we get...
One of the simple ways to fix this is to by simply starving the beast. Constantly demanding lower taxes. In fact a constitutional amendment to limit US government's spending to may be 15% of GDP.
Once US government is faced with either wage a war in country X under the pretense of WMD or Zombie virus or spend on public education I think we will see some sanity. But the war mongering right and welfare mongering on left will not let that pass.
Those travelers would be violating their FaceBook ToS:
"You will not share your password (or in the case of developers, your secret key), let anyone else access your account, or do anything else that might jeopardize the security of your account." [1]
Perhaps this would give FaceBook the power to intervene and, well block their account or something.
IANAL, but even though this is true, Facebook could still ban accounts for complying.
They are a US company, and their TOS says they can ban an account for any reason or no reason at all. If they chose to ban anyone who shares passwords, even with the US government, even if they are Americans or not, they are within their rights as a US company to do so.
It's quite likely that any law promulgated to compel the production of passwords or any other authentication information would include language prohibiting a provider from terminating an account for complying with the law.
In addition to other points against this measure, there are massive privacy implications. Loads of people could be reusing passwords or may reuse keywords for multiple passwords. A collection of such data by an organization can and will be misused.
I hope that we can keep this issue "apartisan", because the importance absolutely transcends past or future political affiliation. What has become "reasonable" is slowly but surely come to mean "what we can get away with".
I heard you can have password hundreds of characters long for Facebook... it'd be nice to have some long random gibberish impossible to type or maybe the full text of the 4th amendment to remind these people that what they do is against the constitution.
PS. password managers mean you won't suffer the same inconvenience.
Most other countries have been thrilled to abuse their own people when it comes to espionage. So no, they'll jump right on board, gladly. Not primarily to punish the US, but because it's a perfect excuse to expand their existing spying programs.
Look, as much as we all get up in arms about this... total access to my email, calendar, and contacts were required to play Pokemon Go. I hate it, but until people starting taking privacy seriously, what is an appropriate response? The encroachments are everywhere and so prevalent (and people are so dulled) that nobody bats an eye when "the authority" (or just someone who seems mildly trustworthy) asks for things they shouldn't ask for.
If you offer to help a stranger fix something on their laptop, what percentage do you think would just tell you that their password is their kids' middle name -- and how many do you think would use the same password on their Gmail and bank accounts? The fact that so few people take privacy and security seriously is enraging; it's hard to go from enraged to outraged when most people don't even bother protecting themselves.
How far off do you think we are from that? It'll be here within 5 years. To get a visa, you have to have the visa pre-scan app that requires every account you own to share data with it. They'll run that through some magic black box and it'll show the TSA's glorified mall cops a green or red light when you walk up to the scanner.
Fucking terrifying, and 99.9% of the people won't bat an eye before logging in. Thought policing is "for national security." That same percentage of people would be ok with the government raping their own mother if it was for national security.
I'm not sure, but to be honest I'm somewhat surprised something like this isn't already in place. Is there a TSA PreCheck app already? I also wonder if it will be tied to getting a visa/entering the country/flying, or initially pitched as a way to gain access to the TSA PreCheck line or some similar promotion. Maybe that will be the pilot program
Yikes, was that on an iPhone? I'm not seeing permissions to read email or calendar content on the Android version. It does have permissions to read your contacts.
Every try and roll out 2FA for an office and get the majority of people -- C-level folks included -- griping and giving pushback that they hate it because now they have to do one more tinsy little thing to sign in? After a while it's just sort of like... "Well... you've been warned you should care more about security, you have been given every opportunity to learn about how technology works, and bottom line I don't really care about your privacy if you don't..."
I saw a video interview with the CEO of Hotspot shield vpn the other day, he had a quote ready that went something like 'The first 3 companies to hit 1 billion users did it by selling private information, the next 3 are going to make it by protecting private information.'
I wrote it off as a nice sound bite, but maybe he's right...
Hey I'm sure I'm not the only one to think of this, but to everyone trying to build the next social network, how about putting in a feature where a second password will open your scrubbed profile? You'd choose what goes in from your main account, and not have to build entirely fake accounts. There's a way to get some quick traction, should the Trump administration succeed at making a policy of asking for passwords!
Perhaps I'm not understanding something. Why wouldn't an information-hungry regime simply ask for both passwords given that this would be a known feature?
A state actor wouldn't even break a sweat getting around 2FA, individually or at scale, if the 2nd factor involves SMS (or the phone system in general) (which, for 99% percent of the 1% of people using it, it currently does):
That probably only works if you're entering a country that you're a citizen of, and not otherwise.
BTW, legally speaking by US law, it's a lot easier to force someone to give up their thumbprint than a password. So whatever you do, don't go through an American border with touch-id unlocking your phone.
Yeah the best approach, the one I use when crossing, is to encrypt everything, then send part of the password to someone else who won't give it to me until later. They can steal your hardware, I guess.
And then you'll just be denied entry for "not cooperating". There is no technical solution to this political problem. (It also happens to be an ineffective measure, as false identities are easily crafted on the internet.)
Here's the question I want answered. How does this type of thinking affect the future of Snapchat. The future of Signal is easy to predict. Back door. Snapchat? This type of thinking seems like an existential threat to Snapchat.
I don't fall for your both-sides-do-it framing. Fact is that the other side had power and didn't do it. Now we have insane cheetoh in office and we're getting insane cheetoh policy ideas. This is not a matter of equivalence.
Please don't post inflammatory political rhetoric to HN. It lowers signal, raises noise, and triggers flamewars. You probably have a good point in there, but the Molotov cocktail is not an acceptable delivery mechanism.
4 years ago the 9th Circuit Appeals Court ruled over a court case regarding DHS searching phone and laptops at the border, including demanding passwords to unlock said devices.
The concept is so old that not only did both side do it, but the previous administration has a court case judged against them. What we should say to the current administration is what the court said to the previous, which is that the 4th amendment applies at the border (https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130308/13380622263/9th-c...). Password for social media, as with password to unlock the address book of a phone, cannot be demanded without reasonable suspicion.
While I am not a defender of insane cheetoh, the article itself says the Obama administration (but more importantly, the officials that work for the admin in every agency) crafted these initial ideas around social media affecting immigration
Regardless of party, I would invite you to google the following governmental overreaches and then see which parties were in office:
The Pirate Bay raid, NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, NSA surveillance revelations, Superpredators, War on Drugs, War on Crime...
Watch Boris Malagurski's film "The Weight of Chains" and see if you change your opinion
The West (mostly USA) bombed everyone regardless of ethnicity in Yugoslavia and then took their largest assets. If they really cared about democracy and freedom, and if the Serbs really were genocidal maniacs as many believe, then the evidence in this film that shows the contrary wouldn't exist
>Watch Boris Malagurski's film "The Weight of Chains" and see if you change your opinion
Off topic, but I cringe every time someone responds like that. It's essentially shows you can't (bother) to write a coherent response and instead want the other guy to waste 2 hours watching your video.
Ok, I can prepare a more detailed textual response for anyone who is interested, but for a very deep and thorough exposition of the topic, I really do think the _video evidence_ within the film will do more justice than I ever could
Upon Tito's death in 1980, Western European and US political and business interests _systemically destroyed_ Yugoslavia, undeniably.
They did so to "fight communism", "promote democracy", and more importantly, bomb Yugoslav mines, factories, etc that were competing with Western ones both in Yugoslavia and abroad.
Everyone from the IMF, UN, World Bank, Reagan Admin, Bush Admin, Clinton Admin (and all of their supporters like Biden and Albright), Germany, etc etc, all of these participants were DEEPLY and PUBLICLY involved.
The end result was the bombing of all ethnicities of people, including the ones that were supposed to be being "liberated", such as the Bosnians and Albanians.
So, lastly, to tie it back into my original point. In my opinion, if you view all of this video evidence, and still say "ONLY THE (democrats, republicans) DID THIS), then you are denying the vast evidence that it was a cross party, multi decade plan.
I hope you can take the time to reply on the quality of my analysis!
The NSA and mass data collection and the overall technology was massively developed by the previous administration. Both sides do it, its the same evil done in different ways.
It is even more disheartening when you consider that this isn't even due to "moneyed interests", but rather is just fairly popular politics. It is more politically mainstream to be worried about terrorism than privacy protections. Arguably, (some of) the founders knew this would be the case, which is why they put the protections directly in the Bill of Rights. (In general, I think you can read the Bill of Rights as protecting important, but unpopular, rights.)
Agreed, I came up with analogy that I intend to use whenever false equivalencies are used to try to scuttle an argument: there is a massive difference between going 65 (mph) in a 60 and 110 in a 60. While both are illegal, you can not use one to justify the other. We can have high standards and expect them to be met but if we cannot tell the difference in scale between two actions we are doomed.
I'm not really sure I agree with that analogy. My primary problem with it stems from the fact that current policies don't exist independently of previous policies.
I agree that on a scale of badness, Trump certainly seems worse to me than Obama.
But in your analogy it isn't so much that Trump took a car from zero to 110 in a 60 zone. The car he got in was already speeding thanks to the policies of the Obama administration, and prior administrations. I don't think pointing this out is necessarily excusing it through false equivalence.
So while I agree that it's important to tell the difference in scale, I think it's equally important to realize that in most cases these policies don't come about out of thin air, they are built and extended from prior policies.
Granted, its a very simple analogy but it needs to be simple because it can be used to counter an equal simple false equivalency in conversation.
My honest opinion is that we've unfortunately divided ourselves down the middle and we've picked causes and policies like we were picking players in dodgeball and you can only be on one team.
I think it so happens either by chance or by some kind of underlying tendency that one side tends to be more correct or at least more progressive (which tends to be more correct in the long run) than the other. I know plenty of people who correctly (I think and I think the data supports) acknowledge climate change is real and largely man-made but could no more discuss the actual causes or ramification than your average climate denier.
I want to be able to have honest, nuanced conversations with people but they typically end defensively and quickly (which is often the result of someone I agree with who can't help but be snarky and counterproductive) and I want to find quick and effective counters to some of these argument killers.
From your own link, this was the previous proposal:
> Visitors entering the country under the Visa Waiver Program, which allows citizens of some countries to visit up to 90 days without a visa, would not be required to list their social media accounts, and the forms would not ask for passwords.
> The department said that while it does not consistently examine social media accounts of applicants for visas or immigration, it has a list of nearly three dozen situations in which social media can be examined to screen applicants.
They say they didn't ask for passwords, which is the main objection, and also said it was optional (see also the same thing in this very article). How does it make sense to call it the same idea?
Most people involved in federal agencies don't get purged and replaced at every election; they have long careers in their chosen agency, regardless of who's in the White House. So it's easy to find someone who's been there through a few administrations and say "this guy has consistently proposed this idea under multiple administrations", but present it as "this idea dates to the administration I want to falsely paint as identical to another one".
The related trick is the West Wing bit with the reporter who keeps asking the press secretary to give an answer on whether the President has considered calling a lame-duck session of Congress: the reporter knows, and the press secretary knows, that if she asks the President whether it's been considered then it'll be true that the topic came up in a discussion the President was part of, and the reporter will be able to spin that to claim "PRESIDENT CONSIDERING LAME-DUCK SESSION" without an outright lie being involved.
I have to say that makes no sense to me: it's his administration, and therefore his (administration's) responsibility. Could it be that it's a distinction without a difference: after all, people are opposing it because they think it is a bad idea, not because it came from him. If so, what exactly is your point? I don't understand.
(I wish you wouldn't call him names, it's a little uncivil.)
Generally it's best to read the post being replied to if you want to make sense of a reply.
stuckagain wrote (above) that "Now we have insane cheetoh in office and we're getting insane cheetoh policy ideas", I was pointing out that while he may support it, this idea didn't came from the current POTUS, there was even a bill proposal during the previous administration.
Isn't that a kind of a narrow observation? I don't think the main objection to it that he came up with it, surely? Indeed that post didn't criticize the idea just because it came from him, it claimed that the idea was bad much like all the other things he believes. I think you misread that post completely.
There's a deeper industrial surveillance state at work. I thought that was the core insight of Snowden's work - was that it's not all tinfoil crazy talk.
The last administration didn't "brainstorm" it, they proposed, asked for feedback, and enacted it. They're fully responsible for why we have it today.
All of this is trivially verifiable, just look at when the proposal was submitted, accepted, and then enacted. All of them were before election day. All of it within the executive branch's umbrella (i.e. there was no act of congress).
> If you put it on the internet, it isn't private.
Access to social media accounts includes access to private communications, e.g. messages that were sent with the understanding that only the recipient would receive it.
But those nudes your girlfriend sent you are now in the hands of an immigration agent working in the name of "border security".
Yeah, and those nudes are also visible on whatever server they're stored on, with whatever rootkit is installed on it, or to whatever bored employee decides to look at them. Or to the jackass who saw you looking at your phone and took a picture, or the asshole who rooted your girlfriends phone, or the neighbor who hopped on your wireless router and guessed your "test12" password. God forbid anyone uses their phone to sign onto a public wifi somewhere, don't even get me started on that.
It is very foolish to consider anything, sent across any digital medium "private" in any sense.
Many of the examples you present are considered unlawful or, at the very least, unauthorized use.
I'll risk an analogy (I know, I know) and compare your examples of digital trespass to examples of physical trespass.
If someone can physically enter your (perhaps unlocked) home/place of business/doctor's office, etc. and expropriate copies and originals of documents associated with you--documents that are very likely protected by law as they are in the case of digital documents--would you also assert there is no such thing as something being "private"?
Your argument, to my mind, seems to blame people for having reasonable expectations of privacy and absolving criminals who violate that privacy.
This is another iteration of the usual debate over what is right (or legal) and what is realistic. For example: you should be able to walk through any area anywhere at any time and feel safe; as a practical matter, some areas at some times may lead to violence.
irishcoffee is taking the "don't walk there at that time, everybody knows that" position, and you're taking the "everyone should be able to walk there at any time" position. You're both right, and yet these two positions never ever get reconciled in a productive manner.
> irishcoffee is taking the "don't walk there at that time, everybody knows that" position, and you're taking the "everyone should be able to walk there at any time" position. You're both right, and yet these two positions never ever get reconciled in a productive manner.
irishcoffee is engaging in the victim blaming fallacy, which makes him wrong.
I'm being realistic. If you want something to be private, don't put it on the internet. It's like putting up a bulletin at your local gym, and getting mad when someone from out of state reads the bulletin. It just doesn't make any sense.
"They violated my privacy! I didn't intend for them to see that!"
They didn't. You put private information in a public place. I'm floored how on hn I'm having to describe how the internet works.
I think the comment was downvoted because it was unnecessarily rude, and the examples were almost all illegal. I don't think anyone argues it is possible to violate privacy by acting illegally.
The Internet is made almost entirely of other people's computers.
If you put something on the Internet, you are putting trust in those people (and companies).
I what was meant was, most people do not understand that when they send nudes to someone, that person is not the only person that has access to those nudes.
As an example, let's say Alice sends nudes to Bob, by way of a simple email. In this example they do not use encryption or even SSL.
Apart from Alice and Bob, there are others who can access the nudes:
* others on the local network
* the ISPs (of both parties)
* email server providers (of both parties)
* anybody recording internet traffic at any relevant point in this process
This is where the metaphor of sending a letter breaks down. People use the Internet as though messages only reach their desired recipients.
I'm assuming I don't need to name the specific agency which has been intercepting nudes and forwarding them to their colleagues.
It is true that that is illegal.
It is true that (most) people have an expectation of privacy.
It is also true that that expectation is broken on a regular basis.
Therefore, unfortunately, in the world we currently live in (which is not an ideal world where corporations and governments always follow the law), that expectation is unfounded.
We can discuss all we want whether it was wise for anyone to share, say, everyday normal photos of their children or themselves on Facebook.
If you think they shouldn't have shared normal, everyday, family photos on an online service, sure, fine, I don't know what to say. But let's say they did do so, which is pretty normal.
Are they entitled to some privacy from whatever pervs the DHS hires?
Remember "they" is the friends and family of the person visiting the US, not the person themselves.
Many of these friends and family will be US citizens, so arguments about differing rights for non-citizens, whether valid or invalid with respect to privacy rights, don't necessarily apply in those cases.