"While Privacy International intended to file the Prism claim in the Administrative Court, which would have made the proceedings public, Government lawyers, upon receiving notice of our intention, vociferously notified us that we could not bring such a claim in the Administrative Court. Rather, the claim has been forced to be filed with the IPT, a secret tribunal that does not make its proceeding public or have to justify reasons for its decisions."
So what's the point then? It would be very easy to lean on a few tribunal members, and with no pressure in the opposite direction, which way we do reasonably expect them to act? They will side with intelligence services and we won't know why. Very unsatisfactory.
This is dystopian beyond words. Even in the fifties, the most outrageous, crime-filed years of communism, the People's Tribunals still justified their decisions. It was a facade -- everyone knew it was bollocks -- but all decisions were motivated.
I get private hearings (e.g. for security reasons, both the state's and the personal security of those who participate in them); they are used in many countries. But not having to publish a motivation for a decision, that's... beyond words.
A bunch of women who were conned into having relationships with, and in some cases having the children of, undercover police officers are currently fighting a case behind closed doors in the IPT, which presumably will not find in their favour. I imagine the IPT's purpose is to present an additional obstacle before they can go to the European Court of Human Rights. It's fucked up.
I'm surprised they listened to the "vociferous" Government lawyers, presumably they were compelled? It's a shame so much of UK law has been swept under the carpet with stuff like this.
One question that comes to my mind in all of this is the professional ethics of the engineering staff involved with building & maintaining these systems.
One of the core principles of ethics in the field of medicine is "first do no harm". The closest thing we have in IT is the ACM code of ethics (http://www.acm.org/about/code-of-ethics), but that gives conflicting guidance in some areas (e.g. "1.7 Respect the privacy of others" and "1.8 Honor confidentiality").
I understand that there are many good, well-intentioned people working for the NSA and similar organisations doing what they at least perceive to be something in service of their country. I also understand that many people just view their job as a source of income, and the moral or otherwise nature of their employer's business is something they consider to be outside of their concern.
I personally have refused to get involved with the local defense industry in my hometown of Adelaide (which is perhaps the largest employer of software engineers in my state) because I didn't want to find myself working on projects I was personally uncomfortable with.
Should the people involved with building and maintaining these systems (to the extent that they are aware of how the systems are used and the moral/ethical/legal violations involved) be considered responsible in part? There's no rule I'm aware of that says you can't just refuse to take part in a project if you're not comfortable with it.
EDIT: One other point I forgot to mention before is that these mass surveillance systems only exist because there are people willing to build them. If everyone said no, we're not going to do that no matter how much you pay us, governments would not have these tools.
This is something I think about a lot, too. But recently, I am thinking that ethics can't survive in a non-ethical world - especially in one that doesn't respect ethics.
It's very prevalent, too, not just in engineering. To give a different example: does Adriana Lima stop and think about what Victoria's Secret does to body image issues for girls? That the mass-media promotion of a model's figure gives a too high standard for beauty? No. She takes the money and models. Not only that - but we love her for it. She is insanely popular.
Now in such a world - if given the chance to model, wouldn't you? Even if you are morally against promoting 38000$ clothing items in a world where there are still starving children, even though you think it's absurd that all magazines have skinny female figures on their covers -- if given a chance to make a lot of money by modeling, wouldn't you take it?
By denying yourself the opportunity, you are 1) extremely unlikely to change the system, because you're not so unique that without you things wouldn't work and 2) not even getting appreciated for the ethical choice you made.
There are plenty of people with Victoria Secret levels of body fat percentage walking around in Asia. They are the norm by far, probably over %80 of the under-35 population there are that skinny or even skinnier, and it's not because they are starving. It's not Adriana Lima's fault that we live in a food culture and industry that pushes toward obesity. You don't have to be anorexic or bulimic to be that skinny, but you'll have to be constantly telling no to almost everyone to trying to invite you to eat more and more crap.
A coworker in a previous job was asked by her Korean coworkers at LG to take pictures of how fat people got in new jersey because they, never, ever saw people get that fat in Korea.
Let's be honest here, Korean food's not that exciting - it can be good, sure, but there's not a lot of variety. Plus, if you eat too much of their chilli and vinegar dominated kimchi, you wind up with stomach cancer. ("It is the leading cancer type in Korea, with 20.8% of malignant neoplasms.") That probably contributes to less fat people. Also, they're more image-centric than Hollywood! (I used to work above a Korean plastic surgery in Hollywood, it was a veritable production line)
I think the stomach cancer comes from the sodium actually, the Japanese have a similar problem. But you have to look at these causes of death on an even basis too. Cancer is a higher cause of death in Korea than heart disease, that's fairly impressive!
IIRC most of Asia / developing countries without inactive lifestyles, overzealous meat consumption and fatty/sugary modern pretend-foods don't have issues with heart disease.
I suspect that the NSA engineers have their own ecosystem where they are made to feel how important preventing terrorism is.
I also suspect that most of the people in the HN crowd feel that working for such govt organizations is not exciting. These guys are not working with the latest and greatest that we see every day on HN.
Hearing how they work at GCHQ, they can't have a cell phone or just google for a quick fix on Stackoverflow, having to rely on language manuals instead.
So we each go our different ways and wonder about the other.
> I also suspect that most of the people in the HN crowd feel that working for such govt organizations is not exciting. These guys are not working with the latest and greatest that we see every day on HN.
NSA and GCHQ probably have better quantum computing than D-Wave. Who, apart from Google and Lockheed have anything similar? They have big computers, big networks, big databases, big everything.
GCHQ is said to have a 3 day cache of all content transiting the UK. That's a lot of storage, but it's also interesting data mining.
> Hearing how they work at GCHQ, they can't have a cell phone or just google for a quick fix on Stackoverflow, having to rely on language manuals instead.
Stack overflow is great. But I imagine that working with people who know in depth about the language they're using is also great.
EDIT: I doubt "preventing terrorism" is part of the day to day moral justification that people use. "Providing good quality intelligence" sounds like a better fit.
It's also possible that those inside the system have more information about what is going on and why.
HN is often working on a very worst case assumption when it comes to these stories whereas internal employees probably have a lot more context about what is actually happening.
They'll also probably being seeing the internal disfunction of their organisation, as every insider does. From the outside the NSA, GCHQ etc seem scary, omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent beings. If instead you know the people doing the work, the internal politics etc you might be less afraid that the rights of normal people are being infringed.
I've worked in the sector in question as a consultant. Without breaking anything I've signed I can say the following:
The employees don't have any context either. They are strictly partitioned and assigned tasks. Most of the time they probably have no idea of the implications of what they are doing. People are forbidden from talking about work on a social level as well.
Likewise I also have no interest in any work which involves spying or building weapons. However, we're living through extremely difficult economic times and I can totally appreciate how for some people putting your personal beliefs to one side in order to feed your family and ensure that your home isn't repossessed is a trade-off which many will be willing to make.
Highly qualified engineer working for the government on a highly sophisticated data-mining system ? Please don't be so naive or at least make a better attempt at finding an excuse.
Exactly this is the problem! Similar to our little hn echo chamber these people are living in an echo chamber where they believe that what they are doing is the right thing to do.
Very, very difficult to disrupt that kind of thinking, especially when they have been subscribing to the "big government knows what is right for its little children" idea for too long.
If everyone said no, we're not going to do that no matter how much you pay us, governments would not have these tools.
And you wouldn't be reading this, because by an obvious extension of your logic, numerous modern technologies including the Internet wouldn't exist.
The flaw in your fundamental argument is that the technologies and access that can be abused for mass surveillance are exactly the same technologies and access that can be used for legitimate surveillance of actually bad people. The people plugging in the cables and writing the data mining code have no way to know how those systems will be used later.
There's a distinction between the core technologies (which are neutral in and of themselves, and can be used for good or bad), and the surveillance systems built using these technologies.
The examples of plugging in cables and writing data mining code fall into the former category. I'm not suggesting that those people are to blame. Most of the technology that people in our industry build is like this - such as the Internet and the web.
Where I would draw the line (in terms of me personally agreeing or disagreeing to be part of a given project) would be whether that project was specifically designed to operate in a manner that violate's peoples privacy in the manner so many people are upset about right now. This second category builds on the generic technologies of the first, but I consider agreeing to build something like PRISM to be something requiring ethical judgement, whereas the protocols and storage systems which comprise it would not be.
Where do you stand on so-called lawful interception, where communications of a specific suspect are monitored after appropriate legal authority has been obtained based on probable cause (or your local equivalent)?
I fully support this where there is probable cause. If there is sufficient evidence to suggest that someone may be involved in criminal and/or terrorist activity, and the authorities have gone to a (non-rubber stamp) court and been granted a warrant, then I agree that they should then be permitted to use whatever tools are at their disposal to track that person's communication. This is basically what the fourth amendment is about (as my understanding goes).
What I'm opposed to is wholesale collection of everyone's data, regardless of whether or not they are suspected of a crime. People who are innocent should not be subject to government surveillance.
That's my opinion at least; I know that some people disagree on that. But regardless of where any of us stand, the public should have full knowledge of the ways in which the government carries out its activities and this should be decided in an open debate in a democratic manner.
The Swiss Digital Society (Digitale Gesellschaft in German) – the Swiss Chaos Computer Club (CCC) is among the members – has also filed a legal complaint because of Prism, Tempora etc.:
I'm glad to see this happening. The programmes are unquestionably a breach of the ECHR; human rights violations on an unprecedented scale.
Alas, if the PRISM/Tempora/etc. scandal has taught us one thing, it's that governments consider themselves above the law.
Even in the exceptionally unlikely event that these complaints were upheld, and the government were held to account for their actions, the public have no way of verifying the programmes are dismantled, and not reassembled in a different guise.
It's over. There is no trust in government anymore.
That this case must be tried in a secret court which is not obligated to promulgate its decisisons ought to indicate what result and information we will see.
So what's the point then? It would be very easy to lean on a few tribunal members, and with no pressure in the opposite direction, which way we do reasonably expect them to act? They will side with intelligence services and we won't know why. Very unsatisfactory.