[CanSpice]

People should be allowed to share what they want. At the same time, people should be allowed to restrict others from sharing information about them.

These two are not at odds with each other. The whole idea of "look at these people with 15,000 Foursquare checkins complain that the NSA is watching them" is fallacious. People choose to share their location with Foursquare; they don't choose (and currently cannot choose) to share their location with the NSA.

[cookiecaper]

Any information placed into a communications medium like the internet without proper precautions should be considered publicly accessible, including accessible to governmental intelligence services. The user chooses to upload a history of his/her location. Tag-along listeners, whether it's a shoulder surfer or a packet sniffer (including highly sophisticated state-level packet sniffers), should be considered and accounted for before this information is published.

Instantaneous perfect replication of massive strings of digits (into which meaningful information is encoded) is a double-edged sword, and it's scary for the same reasons it's valuable, and that's what people need to be educated on if they want to able to conduct private business on a major public communications platform.

I love Bruce Scheiner's quote: "trying to make digital bits uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet". Fast, viral, sometimes uncontrollable replication is an inherent property of the medium we've established. It cannot be extracted without fundamentally modifying the essence of the 'net. We must learn to accept and cope with this.

[Amadou]

The problem here is that government intelligence services exist to serve the people. If the people do not wish for their government to spy on them, it needs to stop.

This isn't about making bits uncopyable, this is about keeping our employees on task and within scope.

[cookiecaper]

The point is that it's a public comms platform and you can never be sure who's listening, even if you're on a supposedly-private website. Who's looking at that data on the other side? Which of your friends is lax about logging out and will leave your info exposed for the next visitor at the library to peruse? Which of your friends is running a crawler and saving all of that data for posterity, and what will happen to these archives?

It's just like going out on a public square -- you may hope that you'll have basic dignities respected and that no nefarious or malicious players are observing/recording, but since you can't be sure you must take reasonable precautions against potentially egregious misuses.

If Congress says the NSA is no longer allowed to this, it doesn't really affect anything -- because the NSA or a close cousin will most likely defy the essence of such an order via loophole exploitation, etc., but mostly because any reasonable expectation of privacy from any and all entities, intel service or not, while sending comms through a public platform like the internet, requires heavy, explicit defensive measures like correct usage of PGP.

That's how people need to view the network, because that's the reality. In almost all cases, your packets go through a dozen or more routers all around the world before they hit the intended recipient, and it's ridiculous to presume that none of these many nodes are an entry point for an actor who may not have your best interest at heart. It's like going out to the mall naked, and getting upset that someone took and published photos. We may hope that the people at the mall at a given time would not do this, but people realize that this is not realistic and wear clothing to prevent the exposure of their nude bodies. They take the initiative directly and personally.

That is how the internet must be viewed. If you don't want something exposed, you can hope that no "bad people" will come in contact with it, but it's much wiser to personally ensure it's covered before you take it out "in public" (aka, bouncing between dozens of anonymous nodes, sitting on a server which any employee can access (including the cleaning lady, or someone posing as the cleaning lady...), exposed to hundreds of "friends", all of whom have total freedom to copy those bits and replicate them elsewhere, intentionally or not).

[Amadou]

Everything you wrote is indeed true, the one key point you miss is that while we should plan for dealing with the worst-case scenario that should not stop us from holding our government a higher standard than that worst-case scenario.

In fact we can do both - develop tools to make centralization of collected data harder and develop laws that make that centralization harder. Neither will ever be perfect, but the effort is still vitally important.

[mhurron]

Except they are at odds. People are making information publicly available and are then turning around complaining that people are looking at their publicly available information.

People get to choose to share or not to share, but when they scream it out in public they do not get to choose who hears it.

[declan]

This is incorrect. I haven't seen any complaint about FBI agents perusing public web sites, or deputy US Marshals poking around public portions of Facebook to try to track down a fugitive.

The flap over the last few weeks has been about government surveillance of information that was not intended to be public. Private email, private IMs, private Facebook messages, etc. Where Americans do have a reasonable expectation of privacy.

[nkassis]

I don't think the majority of the complaints with NSA surveillance is about publicly available information. The issue is with information that they assume is private such as emails, im conversation, call records etc...