[xnull6guest]

Let's be clear about what the "FREEDOM Act" does. It does not make NSA Bulk Collection of phone data illegal. What it does is rearrange the laws and request process and more carefully enumerate and define procedures by which the NSA may acquire and query phone records that are stored in bulk.

It also focuses primarily on phone records and one phone record program. There are dozens of phone record programs and hundreds of different types of signals that are collected that are not subjects of the "FREEDOM Act".

Now (like it presumably was before) the NSA will not have full takes of all American phone records. They will force companies to keep these records for them though, and they will continue to have the ability to query them.

It doesn't matter if nobody is watching 99.5% of CCTV footage. If CCTVs watch every square inch of a city and record it for later possible inspection, that's surveillance. It does not matter if human analysts do not inspect 99.5% of the bulk data. It is still surveillance.

It was also surveillance when the KGB forced private citizens to keep tabs on one another. It does not matter whether it is Google, Yahoo, Apple, Microsoft, Dropbox, Facebook, and Comcast doing the surveillance on compulsion of the Fed. All of our data and communications are being stored and processed.

It is still, categorically, surveillance.

[swombat]

It's quite sad that even a relatively smart and educated community like HN fell for the "oh, they're putting restrictions on surveillance" thin veneer of bullshit when it's pretty damn obvious as soon as you look at the details that this act is doing exactly the opposite of what it claims to do.

If we here are not smart enough to see through this bullshit, then the vast majority of the US certainly will also fall for this.

[illumin8]

I've found that a very easy way to quickly determine whether an act of congress harms our rights is in the name itself. They almost always use doublespeak. In other words, an act called the FREEDOM Act is more likely to harm freedom than help it.

[lewisl9029]

Well said.

I think the Internet needs more communication services that operate on the client-side and communicate in a decentralized manner.

Only truly distributed, client-side services can resist the kinds of mass metadata collection that governments force service operators to engage in.

I personally have long since lost faith in the political systems of the world to safeguard the interests of their people. It's about time we took the matters into our own hands and start coming up with technological solutions.

[woah]

Check out secure scuttlebutt

[takeda]

When they were phone tapping in Eastern Bloc during communism they at least were nice enough to remind you about it through prerecorded message[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_tapping_in_the_Easte...

[swombat]

My parents and grandparents lived in Romania at the time. There was no prerecorded message, just fear and uncertainty.

[takeda]

I guess it was just in Poland then.

[mikerichards]

I guess you have an ideological bent that considers it a shuffling of deck chairs. At the end of the day, I would rather have private companies holding the records than government for reasons that should be obvious.

[EdSharkey]

But isn't this just like forcing these businesses to be a free-of-charge private cloud storage for the government? Oh, silly me, of course there's gonna be payola bigtime for providing a service like this.

If the government can query the whole trove whenever she deems there is a need, what difference does it make where the hard drives live?

Just more lacklustre theatre where nothing really changes and the partners/cronies get some extra loot.

[carboncopy]

Sadly you're right, our tax bucks are going to go toward huge overcharging by these companies.

As of 2013, the FBI was paying $325 per wiretap (http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2013/07/10/what...)

[asgard1024]

> I would rather have private companies holding the records than government for reasons that should be obvious

They are certainly not obvious to me. With government, there is a democratic oversight, you can (at least in theory) vote to have these records destroyed or stop collecting them and so on.

However, when private company does it, what kind of control do you have over them? Especially if they are 3rd party.

[DennisP]

The only reason we have any democratic oversight over the NSA's actions is that Snowden broke the law to let us know what they were actually doing.

[jgroszko]

Yeah I don't see why it's better to have private companies hold the data either. Private companies have a different set of incentives, such as mining that data for advertising...

[rev_null]

Government has a monopoly on violence. Private companies do not.

[dragonwriter]

In the theory from which that line originates, it is definitional rather than descriptive: under that theory, whatever has a monopoly on legitimate use of force in a territory is called the State, whether or not it is the thing that purports to be "the government" or not.

[zaccus]

There's a bill of rights and a system of checks and balances that protects me from the government. None of those things exist with private companies, not even in theory.

[mauricemir]

And what given American history makes you think that companies will behave better than government?

At least Governments are somewhat accountable.