[baku-fr]

Parisian sysadmin here.

I'm so appalled by this article. Our government voted absurd laws allowing law enforcement to sniff all Internet traffic in France (and beyond). They did this while taking advantage of post-January ruckus. Yet they cannot stop terrorists using their real id. On top of that, I read that policemen were aware of an imminent terrorist attack on 11/13 (but I've not yet confirmed this with reliable sources).

What can we do when nobody gives a damn about their freedom? Most acquaintances I hit up with this topic just don't care "as long as I'm safe". We're rolling down a dangerous hill which will lead to the defeat of our freedom and the victory of terrorists.

Pardon my French.

[song]

That's exactly what disgusts me. I listen to politician's speech that takes advantage of those attacks to push for more censorship, for more sniffing, for a ban on encryptions. It's a tragedy yet the actions of politicians after that makes it even more tragic by destroying our freedom.

It's at times like this that I am ashamed of being French but then I realize that it would be the same in any other country and I become ashamed at the irrationality of my fellow human beings.

[funkyy]

"some" countries, not all. Media wants you to believe all countries have those problems, but that is not true. There is at least two dozens countries that would act on such an event rationally. Damn, even Germany would probably do something about it.

[song]

I wish it were so but I'm not very optimistic. In the past 20 years, I've seen overreaction from politicians in the face of any terrorist attack.

And Germany doesn't have a very good track record when it comes to spying on it's own citizens despite having a substantial percentage of the population who had experience with the Stasi. But you're right that at least things seem to be getting better in Germany.

[Trill-I-Am]

The Snowden revelations plainly showed that all of Western Europe participates in Five Eyes mass surveillance of their populaces snd others

[hokkos]

Encryption limitation only come from CIA, FBI and US politicians.

Censorship of Islamist propaganda is needed when we have 1500 terrorists citizen in Syria and Iraq.

[song]

We had French politicians talking about limiting encryptions this time.

Censorship doesn't work. It just drives the discourse underground and often enough makes it even more attractive. The only way for censorship to work is to take it to at least the same extremes as China and have a system of delation in place to denounce people guilty of forbidden speech.

I, for one, am not ready to sacrifice my freedom like this for an hypothetical increase in security.

[zby]

I don't think this inefficiency will be permanent. This surveillance is a new thing, the tools are not yet used to their full potential. It will take time before many police officers understand all the possibilities and use the tools effectively. It is also possible that they are already used in their full potential against the adversaries that matter. Terrorist don't really matter in the power balance - they might be a nuisance - but only indirectly - via the public pressure. They don't pose any direct threat. They might be even useful.

Also if it was so ineffective than the lose of privacy would also be as ineffective. After all we fear the lose of privacy because we believe that the government, or the business could act upon the data they gather about us.

[mtgx]

No. It will never be effective. Here's why:

> Let's look at some numbers. We'll be optimistic -- we'll assume the system has a one in 100 false-positive rate (99 percent accurate), and a one in 1,000 false-negative rate (99.9 percent accurate). Assume 1 trillion possible indicators to sift through: that's about 10 events -- e-mails, phone calls, purchases, web destinations, whatever -- per person in the United States per day. Also assume that 10 of them are actually terrorists plotting.

This unrealistically accurate system will generate 1 billion false alarms for every real terrorist plot it uncovers. Every day of every year, the police will have to investigate 27 million potential plots in order to find the one real terrorist plot per month. Raise that false-positive accuracy to an absurd 99.9999 percent and you're still chasing 2,750 false alarms per day -- but that will inevitably raise your false negatives, and you're going to miss some of those 10 real plots.

This isn't anything new. In statistics, it's called the "base rate fallacy," and it applies in other domains as well. For example, even highly accurate medical tests are useless as diagnostic tools if the incidence of the disease is rare in the general population. Terrorist attacks are also rare, any "test" is going to result in an endless stream of false alarms.

This is exactly the sort of thing we saw with the NSA's eavesdropping program: the New York Times reported that the computers spat out thousands of tips per month. Every one of them turned out to be a false alarm.

And the cost was enormous -- not just for the FBI agents running around chasing dead-end leads instead of doing things that might actually make us safer, but also the cost in civil liberties. The fundamental freedoms that make our country the envy of the world are valuable, and not something that we should throw away lightly.

https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2005/03/why_data_mi...

[zby]

This is a good argument - but I don't entirely buy it - because a system like that does not need to lead the investigations, but can also be an additional source of information. A very powerful one - if the police is already investigating someone than the possibility to browse all his history, his contacts etc. would be very useful.

[barrkel]

That's even worse - "Give me six lines written by the most honest man in the world, and I will find enough in them to hang him" - if you're looking for guilty-seeming people, you'll find them.

And if you're trying to prevent atrocities, you'll convict them before they've done anything wrong.

[stefantalpalaru]

Mass surveillance is effective for gathering data about the past of a certain target so you can blackmail them. It's obviously not effective in preventing anything. There's just too much data to analyze and keyword based searches are a weak tool.

You also need to realize that people that were doing unpleasant surveillance in parked cars, at night, trying to figure out what a known arms dealer was up to, are now enjoying the comfort of a desk, looking at a database of intercepted SMSes that don't make any sense, and waiting for the shift to end.

[zby]

It is probably more useful for blackmail than in prevention - this is a good point. But it is far from obvious that it is ineffective in the letter case. If you believe that it is obvious - then please explain.

There is also another case which is finding out who did it - and in recent reports of police investigations there is always about use of surveillance cameras. The surety of being caught is also important in prevention. Maybe less in the case of suicide terrorists - but they are really a minority of all crime.

I have the feeling that people are so much against surveillance that they cannot stand any analysis of the arguments used. This is counterproductive.

[stefantalpalaru]

> It is probably more useful for blackmail than in prevention - this is a good point. But it is far from obvious that it is ineffective in the letter case. If you believe that it is obvious - then please explain.

Have you watched the news these last few days? Known extremists managed to get AK-47s and explosives in the middle of Paris, at the highest alert level of a military-on-the-streets Vigipirate program, while the borders were closed and the city's security was further elevated for an upcoming international meeting about climate.

They were known to law enforcement, they communicated over cleartext intercepted channels, they lost themselves in the noise of tens of millions of people joyfully filling some Stasi's storage units with their private conversations.

And all this less than a year since a similar event lead to the incompetents asking for even more data that they can stash for after the fact investigations. So there's a valid use: finding out, in retrospect, exactly how they failed to do their jobs. And maybe ask for even more funding, even more privacy invasions, even more power.

[javajosh]

In the ideal world, the people with the clearest and most honest understanding of the world win. Within a society, those are the people who get elected. Between societies, those are the ones that survive.

There is a very real distinction to be made between people who require proof for belief and those who don't. In this case, people believe that their security is proportional the the privacy they give up. That unfounded assertion, tacit in all conversations on this (even tacit in liberal conversations about it), needs to be clearly labelled as wrong and evil, and those who willfully promulgate it (like virtually all politicians in the US and Europe) need to be told: you are saying something that is wrong and evil, as bad as anything Hitler asserted about race and national power.

This isn't a joke, or a goof, or a HN thread thing. This is a very real, globe-spanning conflict that will define this Age. Governments by their control of violence can do anything they want, it is up to the people to ensure it's self-restraint--and if it stops restraining itself, it is the people's right to replace that government entirely. We are now transitioning from a government hiding behind secrecy and Byzantine legal structures to government boldly asserting it's right to know everything about everyone within it's borders. It was always going to be about security. And it was always a lie.

[bcoates]

People keep spreading stories about a secret government conspiracy to know everything and use that power for shady means, and in an uncertain world, that's kind of comforting.

The actual conspiracy is just a group of incompetents getting together to make a quick buck from the ambitious or the afraid. But just like the patent medicines sold by their 19th century counterparts, "Doesn't work" and "Doesn't hurt" aren't the same thing.

Actually creating a all-knowing, all-powerful security state would require resources and competence well beyond the capabilities of present-day western governments, but in trying they can leave devastation in their wake as the dangerous mistakes they make enable new and interesting kinds of abuse, crime, and fear.

[gotchange]

> People keep spreading stories about a secret government conspiracy to know everything and use that power for shady means, and in an uncertain world, that's kind of comforting.

Unfortunately, it is not comforting at all because we are not talking about one coherent group holding all the strings behind the scenes. No, there are many cabals fighting in the "shadow" government for domination and power and since they're above the law in theory and practice, it's really a scary scenario for all of us.

[javajosh]

Sorry, yeah, I guess I still vacillate between those two views (ignorance vs. evil - and what that implies about capability).

There is another possibility: the hubris of the geeks-cum-heroes at the NSA. They have a science-fictional desire to do the Batman surveillance trick (from Dark Knight Rises? I forget) and Save Us All From the Bad Guy. That's dumb, because Bad Guys statistically arise equally inside and outside government. Literally every programmer at the NSA should quit and go make a cool video game or something.

[gotchange]

> the defeat of our freedom and the victory of terrorists

I think by terrorists here, you mean the oligarchs within the regime who are either complicit by standing down or plotting outright against the citizenry or completely incompetent by not catching criminals before they wreck havoc, and not those scruffy bearded nutjobs in the desert?

[chongli]

Yes. This is, and always has been, the problem with society. Oligarchs wield their power to incite fear in the citizenry which in turn yields more power. It's a vicious cycle that's only occasionally punctuated by violent revolutions.

[hokkos]

Sorry but you live in an other world, terrorist killing 130 is enough to be scary, no need for politicians conspiring whatever your paranoid mind is thinking.

[GigabyteCoin]

>Most acquaintances ... just don't care "as long as I'm safe".

Moxie Marlinspike wrote a great blogpost 2 years ago titled "Why we should all have something to hide". [0]

I suggest that you read it so that you have some ammunition against those who are uninformed about why their privacy matters so much in the future.

[0] http://www.thoughtcrime.org/blog/we-should-all-have-somethin...

[hokkos]

So what are your suggestions ? Every rental car company should forward the identity of every client to the secret service ? Every hotel and airbnb host should send the name of their client to the DGSE ?

Don't you see that most of the laws they voted are just the transposition from what where done in the real world to the internet ? For example hidden microphone in a suspect home applied to the internet is a spyware.

Unconfirmed report didn't that said that policemen but the CIA equivalent the DGSE listened a conversation where a woman said she wanted to be a martyr. A meeting was scheduled with the FBI equivalent the DGSI but too late. This is undeniably a failure and the services should be quicker and more cooperative between them. But we don't know if they listen to the same threats every days, when there is 11000 extremist Muslims for 5000 secret agent and less than 10000 in both services.

[facepalm]

If you own a car or live somewhere, you actually have to register with the police. In that light it doesn't seem so far fetched to me to demand the same for temporary rentals.

[LBarret]

You have to draw the line somewhere. It is a balance between reasonnable information for the police and privacy.

Except when you're linked to an investigation, you don't have to proove you're innocent of any crime. Still, all those laws seems to think the opposite : police will have access to all your data like if you were convicted. Guilty until prooven innocent.

Beside, it's not like governments never abuse this kind of info.

[facepalm]

I'm just saying what is the status quo, at least in my country. But I assume it is the same in the US. If you have a car, you need to register a license plate. If you live somewhere, you have to announce your residency to the administration of your city.

I am not advocating anything.

[puppetmaster3]

I think these two paragraphs are the most important words of our times, the century we were alive in.

[awqrre]

In a world without privacy and freedom, democracy has issues and government abuses are going wild.

[danharaj]

I'm not sure how much freedom I actually have considering how much of my life has to be sold to someone else so I don't starve to death in the cold and rain.

[pauleastlund]

You need to look up "freedom." It doesn't mean "other people are required to meet all of your needs."

[bildung]

> You need to look up "freedom." It doesn't mean "other people are required to meet all of your needs."

There are quite a few definitions of freedom that actually require that (to a certain degree), even on wikipedia.

As in the theory of justice, there are two broad views on freedom: one side seeing freedom as something abstract (by law you are free to vote; the constitution does not discriminate against skin color, gender etc.) and the other side sees freedom as the concrete opportunity space of an individual (therefore studying should be free of cost, access to healthcare should be free etc.).

Interestingly, the abstract interpretation seems to match the common meaning in the U.S. and the concrete meaning of the word is more common in Europe. That seems to explain quite a few misunderstandings in spaces like HN :)

I can really recommend Amarty Sen's book 'The idea of justice' as a quite approachable introduction into the topic.

[jqm]

While I agree that it's true "freedom doesn't mean others should have to meet your needs" I find it a damn shame we can't stand on a little piece of ground hardly anywhere without paying someone.

We are born on earth and we are entitled to a little piece of it. Powerful people shouldn't get to own everything.

[staunch]

> Henry David Thoreau wrote that "[i]t is hard to have a Southern overseer; it is worse to have a Northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself."

> Some abolitionists in the United States regarded the analogy as spurious. They believed that wage workers were "neither wronged nor oppressed". Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans argued that the condition of wage workers was different from slavery, as laborers were likely to have the opportunity to work for themselves in the future, achieving self-employment. The abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass initially declared, "now I am my own master", upon taking a paying job. But later in life, he concluded to the contrary, "experience demonstrates that there may be a slavery of wages only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery, and that this slavery of wages must go down with the other". Douglass went on to speak about these conditions as arising from the unequal bargaining power between the ownership/capitalist class and the non-ownership/laborer class within a compulsory monetary market. "No more crafty and effective devise for defrauding the southern laborers could be adopted than the one that substitutes orders upon shopkeepers for currency in payment of wages. It has the merit of a show of honesty, while it puts the laborer completely at the mercy of the land-owner and the shopkeeper.".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery

[rorykoehler]

Much of our seeming choices are predetermined by a corporation/politician, the de rigueur political/economic philosophy of the day and also by the era we are born into. It's unfortunate this topic is out of bounds in most places. Even here on hackernews you're shutting him down. This conversation is potentially one of the most important we could be having today.

[sbuttgereit]

In securing your "freedom" in your own eyes, you clearly require the product of someone else's labor to consume.

Why what virtue are you worthy of such freedom and by what vice should someone else be required to provide for you? Or do you not realize that you require a worse oppression for someone else... that they should spend much of their life sold to someone else and for their own benefit.

[eternalban]

> ... Yet they cannot stop terrorists ..

The 'incompetence theories' are getting thinner by day. Analog to this is the "Muslim" terrorist du jour group's 'oil production' in plain sight of God knows how many intelligence platforms are in use in air and space over the area.

Possible that they don't want to stop these attacks?

Possible that they actually create these events?

Is is possible? Or is the narrative that the Western civilization managed to get to their pinnacle of achievement in spite of being governed and guided by "incompetent" leaders, systems, and institutions?

[soared]

> getting thinner by day

Source? Any proof at all that they aren't just incompetent? Its not a stretch to believe gov agencies are just incompetent, considering how useless they are in general when it comes to technology.

[TheLogothete]

See Opeation Gladio.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Gladio

[krapp]

Neither hypothesis is likely. Governments are neither perfectly malicious, nor perfectly incompetent.