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Posted by cf100clunk 3 hours ago

The Wyden Siren Goes Off Again: We'll Be "Stunned" by NSA Under Section 702(www.techdirt.com)
200 points | 71 comments
wing-_-nuts 1 hour ago|
Everyone who's not terribly worried about privacy always uses the line 'if you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about', but my line of thinking is not 'do i trust the government' it's 'do I have faith in all future forms of government who will have access to this data'

Given how fast and lose I've seen the DODGE folks play with the data they have, absolutely not. I still shudder over the fact that my OPM data was hacked years ago

tomwheeler 1 hour ago||
> it's 'do I have faith in all future forms of government who will have access to this data'

And even this assumes that the government can and will protect the data from the various bad actors who want it, something they have absolutely failed to do on multiple occasions.

alpple 1 hour ago|||
if you're not doing anything wrong, a government that is doing something wrong may not like it
EGreg 48 minutes ago||
This, exactly.

And governments are always doing something wrong...

briffle 1 hour ago|||
I have seen what happens with garbage-in/garbage-out in databases, so this kind of stuff terrifies me. I often think of a case where we had a person listed twice in our database, with same address, birthday, etc, only thing different was gender, and last 2 digits of SSN were transposed..

After we 'fixed' the issue a few times, they BOTH showed up to our office.

Both Named Leslie, born on same day, a few small towns apart, same last name and home phone since they had been married. Back then, SSN were handed out by region sequentially, so one had the last two digits 12 and the other 21.

cestith 1 hour ago|||
My uncle married a woman with the same first and middle name as one of his sisters. My new aunt chose to use her husband’s name as her married name, without hyphenation or anything. His sister, my aunt, never married. One was an RN and the other is an LPN.

They were born in different years. Their SSNs were not close. For one of them the name was her maiden name. For the other, a married name. They went to different colleges and had different credentials. They did live in the same town.

When my aunt died, all the credit companies and collections companies tried one of two recovery tactics. Some tried to make her brother pay the debts as her surviving spouse. The others tried to assert that the debts were incurred by his wife and that the mismatch of other data in their own databases was evidence of fraud.

quesera 1 hour ago|||
That's funny as a human, amazing as a developer, and terrifying as a data processor. All at the same time.

I'll bet that pair has stories to tell.

Ancapistani 1 hour ago|||
I'm a man in my 40s. My eldest daughter is 17. We have the same first name (spelled differently, at least) and have had many cases where medical records have gotten confused.

We always double-check dosages for medications before taking them.

briffle 54 minutes ago|||
They both showed up in person, because that was NOT the first time that had happened.
kasey_junk 1 hour ago|||
Does anyone ever actually use that line? Most people will argue that the trade off in privacy is worth it for security.

That is, if you frame your argument such that you believe people don’t understand the trade off it allows you to not engage with the fact they just disagree with your conclusion.

rootusrootus 1 minute ago|||
[delayed]
Zigurd 56 minutes ago||||
Have you ever sat on a jury in a criminal case? A frighteningly high percentage of people will swallow every lie a cop tells, even when thoroughly discredited in cross-examination. There's no shortage of people to guard the concentration camps.
arealaccount 53 minutes ago||||
Yes all the time and it’s not worth debating them as they are not about to say anything interesting.

Usually just make a quip about having curtains then move onto discussing just how moist the turkey is this year

wat10000 1 hour ago||||
Constantly. Most people have a hard time dealing with tradeoffs and think in absolutes. It goes along with "if you're not a criminal, you have nothing to fear from police," another disturbingly common sentiment.

Some prominent examples:

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-22832263

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DSVJmOajGDe/

https://thestandard.nz/if-you-have-nothing-to-hide-you-have-...

fragmede 1 hour ago|||
The mistake would be reading Hacker News and walking away with the conclusion that because people don't post that reasoning here that it doesn't exist (and even then, you do find that does come up here on occasion). People with "nothing to hide" do actually believe that, and while they may not post it to HN for vigorous debate. The easy counterexample from history is the list of Jews kept by the Netherlands which was later used against them after they were conquered by Nazi Germany, but you'd have to interested in history to buy that reason. Some people simply shrug at the "if you don't have anything to hide then you won't mind me filming your bedroom" scenario as you being the creep in the equation. Some people just don't want the trouble and are fine with being surveiled because the powers that be are doing it.
quickthrowman 1 hour ago|||
> but my line of thinking is not 'do i trust the government' it's 'do I have faith in all future forms of government who will have access to this data'

This is how I view privacy as well. You never know who will be in power and who will access that information in the future with ill intent.

This line of thinking kept me away from the Mpls ICE protests. All of the people that protested had their face, phone, and license plate recorded and documented.

I’m not even afraid of being persecuted by the current administration, it’s the possibility of a much worse administration in the future that gave me pause.

CamperBob2 26 minutes ago|||
I’m not even afraid of being persecuted by the current administration, it’s the possibility of a much worse administration in the future that gave me pause.

Unfortunately, your (entirely understandable) position is exactly what will enable such an administration to come to power.

What you are doing in 2026 is what you would have done in 1936.

EGreg 48 minutes ago|||
Not even future governments. There's also this: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/10/salt-typhoon-hack-show...
CamperBob2 28 minutes ago|||
Everyone who's not terribly worried about privacy always uses the line 'if you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about'

The people who say "I'm not doing anything wrong, so I have nothing to hide" simply don't understand that it's not their call.

the_af 8 minutes ago|||
> Everyone who's not terribly worried about privacy always uses the line 'if you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about'

The right way to reply to that is: not everything that's legal must be public.

You probably don't want the rest of the world to see you poop, or pick your nose, or listen to every word you say. Almost everyone has things they'd be embarrassed to disclose to other people.

themafia 23 minutes ago|||
"If you have money in your pocket you always have something to worry about."
capricio_one 17 minutes ago|||
[flagged]
dylan604 1 hour ago||
DOGE != DODGE

They may have dodged, ducked, dodged the rules while they DOGE'd their way through the government, but not sure if they used RAM trucks while they did it

tehwebguy 1 hour ago||
The interpretation of the law is classified? That’s stupid and everyone who protected that classification, regardless of whatever the interpretation is, is a traitor!
simulator5g 1 hour ago||
Secret laws, secret courts... Jeez, man.
Analemma_ 1 hour ago||
This is why I'm never giving a penny to OpenAI again, now matter how much damage control Altman tries to do with "look, we reworded the contract to have redlines too!". Yeah, legal redlines that the administration can bypass with their secret memos and secret rubberstamp courts. This isn't even a Trump thing: the Bush DOJ wrote secret memos making torture legal, the Obama DOJ wrote secret memos making it legal to assassinate American citizens. Non-technical redlines which aren't under the vendor's control aren't worth a piss squirt.
palmotea 7 minutes ago|||
> This is why I'm never giving a penny to OpenAI again, now matter how much damage control Altman tries...

Altman is like Musk: he showed his true colors long before the current politically-inflected drama.

Musk was over-promising about self-driving, so much and for so long it became pretty clear he was a shameless liar. There are also so many reports of Altman lying (e.g. that's apparently why he got fired) and engaging in Machiavellian manipulations that you can be pretty sure he's a shameless liar too.

Gud 1 hour ago|||
By using ChatGPT, OpenAI are losing money.

So if you want them to die faster, use their services.

Analemma_ 21 minutes ago||
Contra the popular memes, I don’t think they’re losing money with every query sent (the money pit is capex on new models and hardware, but I don’t think inference itself is unprofitable), so this wouldn’t actually work.

I was already paying for Claude Max before the War Department fiasco, so there’s not much more I can do to hurt OAI apart from complain about it online, although I did persuade several people on various group chats I’m on to switch.

stackghost 28 minutes ago||
Probably the actual classified artifact is an NSA policy document that details the NSA's own interpretation of the law and thus forms part of its governance.
rootusrootus 3 minutes ago||
One of the things I am proud of as an Oregonian is that Wyden is one of my senators. And it looks like maybe, possibly, he is starting to make Merkeley a true believer as well. Which is good, Wyden is getting kinda old, and there aren't enough people like him in Congress, by a long shot.
blueone 1 hour ago||
I’ve stayed private for most of my adult life. Network wide dns, vpns, alternative personas online for different purposes, etc. Nonetheless, my personal data has been exposed numerous times.

Once in a while, I’d get into a conversation with a friend or a stranger I met at some random function, and they’d ask how to stay private online and protect their data. I used to go in depth about how to do it, with excitement. Now I just say: be normal, fit in with the crowd, freeze your credit.

MengerSponge 5 minutes ago||
It's very hard to participate in a digital society while truly remaining private. The things you do to ensure privacy generate their own type of unique signal!

https://chuniversiteit.nl/papers/browser-extension-fingerpri...

You know this, but "normal" patterns are less remarkable.

newsclues 1 hour ago||
As someone that worked in an illegal industry (urban pharmaceuticals), you need to appear normal and hide your crimes. If you just hide your crimes, you stick out and become a target.

Plausible deniability is harder than just total protection.

blueone 54 minutes ago||
Yes.
JohnMakin 1 hour ago||
I can't imagine it's anything people haven't been suspecting for years - if I had to take a wild guess, it's the government's interpretation of not needing a warrant to scour things for intelligence on citizens using things like adtech and stuff that probably should require a warrant.
contubernio 2 hours ago||
Secrecy is anathema to governance accountable to the governed.
dlev_pika 1 hour ago||
So glad to see my Oregon senator regularly on the money.
anigbrowl 48 minutes ago||
The whole concept of 'secret interpretations of law' is anathema to me. Secret information makes sense, there are lots of reasons a government might legitimately want to maintain a veil of obscurity. Secret interpretations of law are a manifestation of tyranny.

I like Ron Wyden but he should just employ his Congressional privilege here and read it out.

dmix 16 minutes ago||
FISA courts are not sufficient oversight of this stuff. Not to mention there’s little rules for foreign data, including Americans talking to foreigners on the phone. As long as one end is foreign…
snowwrestler 1 hour ago|
The warnings are nice but he could just say what it is. Members of Congress have immunity for what they say on the floor of their chamber in session, classification or no.
alwa 58 minutes ago|
Immunity from prosecution, maybe, but not immunity from consequence. I can’t imagine congressional leadership would think of it as a good look—and isn’t the “need to know” based on the congressperson’s role? For example don’t they brief only congresspeople in specific roles on specific matters, like the so-called “Gang of Eight” on intelligence matters? [0]

It feels a little like keeping the filibuster around: maybe technically it’s within their power to change the norm, but once unilaterally spilling secrets becomes The Done Thing, it’s hard to imagine it wouldn’t spin out into a free-for-all.

For all the mud that gets slung around, I think congresspeople really don’t get there without some kind of patriotic instinct, some kind of interest in the United States’ ongoing functioning. And I certainly can’t imagine they’d keep getting access to new secrets after pulling something like that, one way or the other…

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gang_of_Eight_(intelligence)

anigbrowl 46 minutes ago|||
You can say the same thing about secret laws and tyrannical executives.
themafia 21 minutes ago|||
> congressional leadership would think of it as a good look

Why do they have any power? Wyden was elected by his constituency. The "congressional leadership" can go pound sand. To the extent they have any power here it should immediately be completely neutered and then removed.

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