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
"Saying you don't need privacy because you have nothing to hide is like saying you don't need freedom of speech because you have nothing to say." - Edward Snowden
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.
And governments are always doing something wrong...
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.
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.
I'll bet that pair has stories to tell.
Every time one of them goes to a particular medical facility, he has to explicitly decline having them merge their charts.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/taylor-lautner-taylor-dome-wife...
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.
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.
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-...
Usually just make a quip about having curtains then move onto discussing just how moist the turkey is this year
Yes, I've heard that exact wording from cops.
From normal people, the more common way of saying it is along the lines of "well I don't really care if the cops see anything on my computer".
Not that exact phrase, it is too elaborate. Most people grunt "eh, don't care" and "it's free, right?"
The average person really is that apathetic.
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.
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.
I know I'm already on some GOP list somewhere, but I figured I'd do whatever I could do to protect myself and my family from the local MAGAs in my area.
If I'm doing something wrong, the onus is on the government to prove this within the rules established to prevent such abuse (and on the people, their elected representatives, and the judiciary to ensure these rules are sufficient to accommodate the interests of all parties involved).
(I am from the EU, lived in US and China and am rich because of both, would not live in either ever again)
One of the interesting things the Epstein drama has kicked up is legal or not, the powerful get up to some wild things at parties. And in their business dealings just based on the background number of scandals. If there is an organised group of people allowed to look there is just endless blackmail material which is going to get used, just like LOVEINT.
Re the current US government I'd be more worried about their cruelty as illustrated by ICE, DOGE etc.
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. And this can be weaponized against you should any rival gain access to it.
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
Technically the full quote from Wyden is: "when it is eventually declassified, the American people will be stunned that it took so long and that Congress has been debating this authority with insufficient information."
It's a small thing, but I find the click-bait editorializing from techdirt a bit off-putting.
24 years of the Patriot Act, and counting...
Originally applied only to the largest communications companies, this now has effectively unlimited scope.
The only safeguard (which took years to add legislatively) was that the FBI had to clear it; but now the FBI is refusing even to record such requests, to avoid any record of abuse (and the person responsible is dubious).
Surveillance seems necessary, but in the wrong hands, it's systemically deadly: it grants overwhelming advantage, and destroys arms-length trust, driving transactions of any size into networks prone to self-dealing and corruption.
I like Ron Wyden but he should just employ his Congressional privilege here and read it out.
So as he gets older, the cost/benefit changes, but I believe that's why he hasn't, is that his calculus involves him being the only one this reliable on screaming about what's going on behind closed doors.
https://www.pointoforder.com/2013/08/06/congressional-releas...
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.
Plausible deniability is harder than just total protection.
https://chuniversiteit.nl/papers/browser-extension-fingerpri...
You know this, but "normal" patterns are less remarkable.
Under "Oversight", they point out that the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board concluded that that the government's Section 702 program operates within legal constraints, as recently as 2014! Wow! </sarc>
Another aspect is that we need to lower the bar for declassification in general. The reality of classified information is that it is almost universally boring and time limited in its value. Also, so many people have access to it that it leaks out slowly anyway. Just look at how much of the US military and contractors have or have had secret and higher clearances. [1] When multiple percentage points of Americans (and other governments) have access currently or have had access in the past to supposedly 'top secret' information then hiding it from the rest of the population just sounds silly. It is time to start re-asserting the public's requirement to be informed even if that has some potential risks or even actual harms associated with it.
[1] https://news.clearancejobs.com/2022/08/16/how-many-people-ha...
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)
Worth noting his full quote is that people will be “stunned that it took so long” for the info to come out. Which is not quite the same thing as being stunned in general.
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.
My "ethical" list has several dozen politicians, but it is definitely short. And their names don't seem to last very long into each career...
>On December 20, 2005, Judge James Robertson resigned his position with the court, apparently in protest of the secret surveillance,[11] and later, in the wake of the Snowden leaks of 2013, criticized the court-sanctioned expansion of the scope of government surveillance and its being allowed to craft a secret body of law.[12] The government's apparent circumvention of the court started prior to the increase in court-ordered modifications to warrant requests. In 2011, the Obama administration secretly won permission from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to reverse restrictions on the National Security Agency's use of intercepted phone calls and e-mails, permitting the agency to search deliberately for Americans' communications in its massive databases.
This is not the same thing as saying people will be stunned by how long it took to discuss/investigate the matter, which is what Wyden actually said…
Thank you for your service, Ron.
Also: Hello from Roseburg.
I can't name another indisputably ethical congressman. I dread the day he leaves office.
My word of caution is if you do have access to these systems or a shared password, tread very carefully.
Claim: We’ll Be “Stunned” By What the NSA Is Doing Under Section 702
Actual quote: I strongly believe that this matter can and should be declassified and that Congress needs to debate it openly before Section 702 is reauthorized. In fact, when it is eventually declassified, the American people will be stunned that it took so long and that Congress has been debating this authority with insufficient information.
He said people will be stunned that it took so long to be declassified; not that people will be stunned by what it is.
It was definitely swimming upstream in the post-9/11 days. I was hopeful for a while with Trump that we'd see more of a mainstream resurgence, but it's not looking like it to me anymore.
Anyway, I can only imagine what he's alluding to here...
Source: am Oregonian.
ON edit: Oops, sorry, 702 is up for renewal. Still not clear he could win a cloture vote, though.
"I don't need to care about privacy because I have nothing to hide" is trivially disproved:
Humans arrive at conclusions about other humans based on information. Sometimes these conclusions are incorrect because humans aren't perfect at reasoning and this happens more often with some kinds of information.
Therefore, it's perfectly rational to hide/not-disclose/obscure some information to lessen the chance that others take action based on faulty conclusions.
Like I'm having a hard time concocting a reveal that would be "Stunning"
"NSA wiretapped all major phone carriers, recorded every voice conversation and text message of every citizen"
Meh, not that stunning. at least not in a "violation of rights" kinda way. Maybe in a "wow they had the technical acumen to even handle all that data" kind of way
"NSA has secret database with all medical records", "NSA has logs of every credit card transaction", "NSA can compel anyone anywhere to spy and reveal all data on anyone for any reason"
Would any of these reveals actually be "stunning", frankly I've assumed the worst for so long that the response will be more like "wow, that all they're doing?"
like opening a diaper on a kid with IBS, you expect it to be so bad when it's a normal turd you're suddenly really happy about shit.
"In fact, when it is eventually declassified, the American people will be stunned that it took so long and that Congress has been debating this authority with insufficient information"
You are correct that the American populace has normalized this already. The fact that this is done without congressional oversight is indeed stunning. Or at least it would have been a decade or two ago.
Everyone knew the NSA spied on everyone, yet Snowden leaks were truly stunning, because no one had evidence of the sheer scale of what the NSA (and collaborators) were engaged in. Wyden Siren was already firing off about that many years beforehand, before we knew the actual truth, so considering his record, I'm also skeptical it'll be "truly shocking" for the average HN tech-nerd, but for the general public, to have evidence of what the government does? Probably will be "stunning", but the one who lives will see.
When we un-tether the possibile from tech-specific delineations, you'll find things get more and more alarming.
Whatever it is Wyden is sounding the alarm about, you can be certain the sole protection we have - the sole guiding principle and bulwark against abuse - is the agency's culture given the rampant "incidental" collection and the public claims that putting the equivalent of a removable sticky-note over the names of U.S. citizens from their personal data is sufficient to satisfy the 4th Amendment as the NSA searches through our persinal data in bulk.
And what is culture if not the people we have to promote the practices?
Boy am I glad we have an administration that lets agencies largely lead themselves and doesn't engage in efforts to replace a large part of various agency's workforce - specifically those who care about the agency's culture!
Most Americans have this kind of thing tuned out, that have bigger issues in their lives.
Or backdooring most major microprocessors (tpm).
Etc?
I am aware that similar accusations are leveled against Intel ME and AMD's Platform Security Processor.
You’re far more cynical than the typical citizen, who Ryder is addressing.
