It is really sad and disturbing to me how little coverage the CLOUD act has gotten. A law was passed quietly that was snuck into page 2,201 of an unrelated spending/budget bill just before Congress voted on it to allow warrantless surveillance by foreign governments and law enforcement on any US citizen, and not one mainstream media source has written about it. It was signed into law by Trump just a couple days later without a single hearing or debate in Congress.
I personally believe the Facebook “scandal” is/was a smoke screen to draw the media attention away from this (4 or 5 year old scandal with regards to data collected for the Government to begin with). No private information was leaked (private messages, chats, etc) from Facebook as far as I am aware. I am not saying Facebook is innocent here – they are far from it, but I can’t stop thinking that the timing is too convenient and too much of a coincidence. Also recall that Zuckerberg liquidated around $500 million of Facebook stock in February.
All of the major tech companies (Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc) co-authored a letter supporting this legislation saying that it represents “notable progress to protect consumers’ rights.” despite the fact that it does the exact opposite. I think it will save them money from drawn out legal battles, legal fees, and the possibility of having to build additional data centers in other countries/continents to replicate and provide access to customer’s data for law enforcement agencies.
The CLOUD act allows access to ANY data including emails, private messages, etc. without requiring a warrant or having to inform the person that it is being collected. It gives additional power to the executive branch as the attorney general and certain members of the cabinet can access data on unsuspecting individuals without having to notify Congress or the Judicial branch. Also data collected from another party interacting with someone else could be used to criminally prosecute them even if they were not under any suspicion or investigation to begin with.
The CLOUD act allows domestic or foreign police to collect your data without a warrant, any review by a judge, or any awareness of the individual; and even explicitly allows foreign police to ignore existing US privacy laws applicable to US citizens
It’s edge cases like this that make me wonder about the whole concept of nations.
It makes citizens sound like property / cattle.
“I believe my cow pooped on your lawn. I demand the right to inspect your lawn for my cows poop to retrieve the poop. Expect further consultation if we decide you illegally benefited from that poop. I don’t care that you are ok with the poop or that the cow came to your lawn and pooped there of its own valition. In Cowville pooping outside of your allotted pen is illegal.”
Of course when you take that argument to its logical conclusion I may find that I’ve just argued for a firewall / vetting system that would prevent data leaving the national networks ‘illegally’. Maybe I am. Or maybe I’m arguing the other way, that national borders make less sense than ever and freedom of people, ideas and data requires a completely different take on national soverignty.
This is, precisely, how polities have always worked. Personal freedom of movement is circumscribed to lawfully prescribed means. It wasn't until after WW2 and airplanes when ordinary people gained the technical capability to move around. Before then, you had to have lots of money and time to travel. Serfs were considered part of the land, they needed permission to leave.
With the Renaissance came the loosening of identification from commoners being a part of the land, to being a part of the city / political region. The concept of people as property never really changed and is intrinsic to the idea of governance, which imposes rules that people must live by, and specifies what kinds of commerce can go on. Citizenship is just the loosening of who owns you from your city to your nation.
Things are changing, quite rapidly, but don't expect the idea of people as belonging to a polity to ever really go away. Governments require tax revenue to operate, and governments that don't have to rely on their citizens for those taxes are governments that don't have to be held accountable to those citizens. (See Russia) Your government is always going to treat you like a belonging, and demand the right to use your efforts for the good of the nation however it sees fit.
> This is, precisely, how polities have always worked. Personal freedom of movement is circumscribed to lawfully prescribed means. It wasn't until after WW2 and airplanes when ordinary people gained the technical capability to move around. Before then, you had to have lots of money and time to travel. Serfs were considered part of the land, they needed permission to leave.
[Citation needed]
From what I have been taught by friends of mine who studied International Migration & Ethnic Relations, people moved around a lot more freely before the nation state came into existence than they do now, because there were no borders to keep them out.
Sure, if you had the money, time and/or motivation. If you didn't, it was extremely difficult to travel. Nobody would trust you, and staying at inns was expensive. Get caught camping in lands where no one knew you, and you're at their mercy.
I'm trying to imagine in what historical period that would have been. Whether the border was that of a modern nation-state, a principality, or a village the effect would have been the same.
> What time period is that? I'm not sure what historians consider the first nation state.
There's disagreement about this, but the contemporary concept of the nation-state is believed to have merged between the 17th and 19th centuries. 1648 is usually given as the earliest date, though that's partly out of a desire to ascribe a specific year to what was actually a slow process.
Once corporations start deciding it's cheaper to just provide their own healthcare to its workers rather than going through the broken American system, watch out. Corporate fascism is the new feudalism.
This is literally how Kaiser Permanente was founded — pre-paid healthcare for industrial workers, eventually expanded to cover families of workers, eventually expanded as an integrated managed-care offering for companies to offer their employees. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaiser_Permanente#Early_years
Kaiser is regarded as one of the highest-quality providers, and the regional health plans it runs are operated as non-profits.
If one or two (million) US citizens data happen to get included, well that’s unfortunate. It’s not against the law in those countries. Purely by coincidence, these other countries can then notify the US government if they see something of interest, some dirt on a US citizen. Now there is something to be concerned about and the US government has cause to look more closely. Outsource all unkempt activity!
Not just a lack of media coverage, but no debate in Congress either. The bill was sneaked into the omnibus spending bill. That sort of thing is usually reserved for a certain type of bills (and I don't mean just budget bills, sadly) ...
It's a combination of corporate money in politics, and a nation of spectators, not citizens. The citizens have yielded their participation and power to corporations, on purpose, and many are proud that they've done this, if they care at all.
It's only hindsight being 20/20 that they go, oh fuck that was a bad idea, how did we get here? Complacency.
No one said democracy was easy. It requires constant vigilance. And people are too happy to be entertained by other things. Of course the better system would be the benevolent dictator for a push button operation, the small problem is they're not benevolent for very long.
> the small problem is they're not benevolent for very long.
Would it be possible to appoint a dictator, who has no other incentive other then serve the people. For ex, they ll sever every human relation, cannot own property, will have zero privacy, cannot reproduce and have children etc. But they ll be held to the highest honor and their every needs taken care of...
In short, something like the life of a religious saint or a nun.
>Will you turn over your leadership to the machines?
Translates to: Will you turn over your leadership to the humans running the machines?
I like the theory of a perfectly impartial AI dictator. However, I don't believe such a thing is possible since it must be programmed by people and carries any biases (deliberate or accidental) those people program into it.
Read Hobbes' Leviathan, it discusses this. A prerequisite for success the sovereign must establish a state religion, subjects comply or are executed.
And then John Locke, with emphasis on consent of the governed.
And why not the Catholic Church? The pope is essentially what you describe but they have been many bad Popes. Nevertheless as an institution it endures, with and without justice.
A sovereign who is completely selfless would not be a human. So you're necessarily searching for deities or an off worlder. And when they're done? Who then? Sounds chaotic and capricious.
Random stuff isn't what soldiers risk their lives for. Many see their community as an extension of their family. Others are idealistic. Some didn't realize the risk. It isn't random though.
Yes they are given reasons, volunteers tend to fight better that way. They are supposed to obey but they, in the USA anyways, swore to protect the constitution.
"They suffered and they did their duty so a sheltered homeland can enjoy the peace that was purchased at such a high cost." Eugene Sledge
No, mtreis86 is saying that, if US troops are given orders to, say, occupy Washington DC and arrest the members of Congress and the Supreme Court, on orders of the President, they're not supposed to do it, even though doing so would be obeying orders.
Not at all, I was specifically responding to "what soldiers risk their lives for"
That said, according to the UCMJ, the orders given to slaughter civilians in Vietnam were unlawful and a soldier refusing to obey them would not have been prosecuted.
"Obedience to orders. It is a defense to any offense
that the accused was acting pursuant to orders
unless the accused knew the orders to be unlawful or
a person of ordinary sense and understanding would
have known the orders to be unlawful."
What I was saying was, when someone sign up to join the Army, their ideal is to protect the country and it's citizens.
But when they ordered to go to a different country and fight a war over there. that is not what they originally signed up for, right? So they are putting their lives on line for the whims of someone in administration, and not for a cause they care about.
That is all I am saying.
So, my original argument is that, If we are able to make human beings to risk their lives for causes so disconnected from themselves, Why can't we have human beings that are ready to lead an enforced, selfless life devoid of normal human joys and full fillments in the service of their country?
My response stands, they are typically risking their lives for something close to them - their family and community, and not for some lofty ideals nor for the whims of an administration. Most know the risk going in.
While it might not have been your intention, you pretty much described the Hitlerjugend there, indoctrination of children for a "bigger cause".
Even if the cause might be a good one, we still value our individuality over mass enforced and indoctrinated conformism. It might be anything but harmonic, and quite chaotic, but individuality gives us a diversity of ideas and views, thus enabling adaptability, which is one of homo sapiens sapiens biggest advantages.
The most horrible and bloody dictators had only the best intentions in mind. The most bloody and horrible ideology in the world – communism – was driven by idealists.
I'll always take a corrupt politician over a benevolent dictator.
Most bloody? That's objectively true, in terms of total body count, and especially total body count of their own citizens. (Most bloody in terms of deaths per person per year that they had the opportunity to kill is probably the Nazis - although Cambodian Communism, if considered separately from all of communism, probably tops even the Nazis.)
Most horrible? It doesn't seem unreasonable to use body count of a country's own citizens as a proxy for "horror".
You're lumping a lot of different ideologies together under one umbrella term, even though 1) they were wildly different in practice and implementation, and 2) most of them only paid the tiniest bit of lip service to what Marx envisioned, and 3) were actually just good old tyrannical dictatorships, falsely using the promise of communistic ideals to pacify the populace.
Did you read the article?
I've found it a very common tendency to lump everything free market capitalists don't like as "communism bad!" and "socialism bad!", which I guess stems from decades and decades of cultural indoctrination, fueled by the military industrial complex.
For instance, an anarcho-communist is very far from whatever haphazard centrally planned mess was in place in the USSR at any given time.
> most of them only paid the tiniest bit of lip service to what Marx envisioned
Oh, the old "no real scotsman" argument. See, the whole communist ideology is like convincing people to jump of a cliff so they can fly: when they inevitably fall to their death, you just tell that since they didn't fly, it wasn't what you envisioned.
Dictatorship and blood is the inevitable outcome of Marx's ideas executed on scale of millions. As inevitable as gravity.
Yet another examples of a completely rigid worldview, no doubt caused by decades of anti-socialism propaganda and indoctrination. There is absolutely no call for the frothing-at-the-mouth reaction so commonly seen from free market/capitalism proponents.
Marxism and what happened in countries like USSR, China and Cambodia only have an extremely tenuous connection, most of it related to the propaganda fed to the populace to force the tyrannical regime on them, without too much opposition.
> no doubt caused by decades of anti-socialism propaganda and indoctrination
Dude, I live and Moscow. My whole family survived 70 years of communism. I seen first hand how capitalism and free markets raised us from hunger and poverty to first world country living standards.
Please, don't make assumptions about people on the internet, you may end up completely wrong.
In that case you should also have noticed the crushing poverty "enjoyed" by many Russians, while the über-capitalist oligarchs live in outrageous luxury.
If you think the majority of people in Russia enjoy a first world standard of living, you're sorely mistaken. Moscow is very much an outlier.
> In that case you should also have noticed the crushing poverty "enjoyed" by many Russians
Compared to Soviet Union, modern Russia is light years ahead. Of course, all this progress is built on the foundation laid down in the 90s, and is slowly deteriorating away for the last 10 years.
>I'll always take a corrupt politician over a benevolent dictator.
Am I wrong in saying that if you have enough resources, corrupt politicians and authorities will let you dictate the affairs under them?
So a dictator, as you say exerciser their power to enforce their own agenda. While a corrupt politician sells them off to the highest bidder, to enforce what ever agenda they have...
The only thing better in that scenario is that the "highest bidder" may have an incentive to not kill droves of people, since they probably have a business to run, and that often require people..Also, business does not really have an ideology or a philosophy. It just need to grow its profits..
In "A Reply to Professor Haldane", published in "Of Other Worlds", C.S. Lewis said the same thing as golergka. Lewis said that a robber baron may be satisfied with enough money (though I must say that history doesn't supply much hope of that). The robber baron may get lazy. And maybe, since on some level they know that what they do is morally sketchy, they may repent. But an idealist who holds their ideal or political theory with the force of a religion is far worse, because they commit their horrors in the name of doing good, and so their benevolent impulses seem to them to be temptations - something to be resisted in order to do what is "good".
In other words, a fool might end up doing more harm than a really cruel person. Of course.
> But an idealist who holds their ideal or political theory with the force of a religion is far worse, because they commit their horrors in the name of doing good, and so their benevolent impulses seem to them to be temptations - something to be resisted in order to do what is "good".
We are talking about a benevolent dictator here. If you are saying that they ll resist their benevolent impulses, how are they a benevolent dictator in the first place?
"Benevolent" = "wanting to do good". But that applied (I think) even to the Communists. They wanted to free the proletariat from oppression. That was their moral imperative. To do it, they were willing to execute their "oppressors". The temptation to have mercy on some of the oppressors rather than execute them had to be resisted, because it would hinder the cause.
So by that definition, should an ideal dictator stand by and watch if there is an invasion? Because resisting it would be likely be killing the invaders?
So I think there is always an Idea of the subset of people you are meant to serve, and their well being being your highest priority. In your example, the "proletariat" were that subset, so it is only their duty to protect them from oppression.
It's also the second time in the last few months that Microsoft has settled with the government instead of pushing forward the privacy fight. The government pinky-promised that it wouldn't abuse the gag orders anymore, and that's all it took for Microsoft to give up:
It was starting to look like Microsoft's Chief Legal Officer Brad Smith was starting to care a bit about privacy with all the things he was proposing (like the Digital Geneva Convention) and these recent lawsuits he pushed the company to start against the government. But it looks like that fight was very short-lived and the pro-surveillance people in the company (Nadella, probably, going by how they implemented law enforcement's whole wishlist into Windows 10) won that debate.
So I guess we can no longer trust Microsoft to fight for privacy at all anymore. And with the CLOUD Act, nobody should trust any US-based company anymore anyway.
This isn't Microsoft's fault. Don't blame Microsoft because they're unwilling to continue a case which what just rendered moot.
The law changed and the case now lacks merit. The legal question at issue in the SCotUS case can't magically include the CLOUD Act. That's not how the courts work. Microsoft will have to start over and file complaints against data requests under the CLOUD Act, but since that involves a different question of law this case before SCotUS is moot. Regardless of the decision in this case, the Federal government could just make another request under the CLOUD Act.
First Mondays (http://www.firstmondays.fm) did an interview with Microsoft's Chief Legal Officer about the Supreme Court case and the CLOUD Act.
The combination of these sources made both the CLOUD Act and this call for dismissal somewhat unsurprising. It was pretty clear that the Supreme Court wanted congress to clarify the now antiquated Stored Communications Act.
Agree that this isn't as surprising or impactful as others are reporting and strongly second your audio recommendations.
For the oral arguments, check out Oyez (https://www.oyez.org). I like it much better because it:
* has argument audio from cases going back 50+ years (as compared to 8 yrs on scotus.gov), so you can listen to big cases from before 2010 (e.g. Citizens United), and when modern cases draw heavily on prior decisions, you can go back and listen to the reasoning in the previous case (e.g. Vieth for Gill/Benisek, Bakke for Fisher).
* has the audio synced to the court transcript, which helps identify voices and follow when there's poor audio quality.
* has audio of opinion announcements when they're given (so you know the outcome and reasoning of the decision without looking it up)
* lets you sort by popularity, which makes it easier to find the cases that are important and interesting rather than merely politically charged.
While the new law isn't the best, this particular course of action based on the law seems completely reasonable.
New law -> new warrant -> no reason to continue wasting government $$ on fighting a court case that now has federal law clarifying the issues. Microsoft gets to save some money as well.
They want a warrant for Microsofts data. The warrant comment is probably aimed at US citizens data on a third parties servers.
EFF explicitly says the Cloud Act enables:
'Empower U.S. police to grab any data, regardless if it's a U.S. person's or not, no matter where it is stored.'
So, if I’m following the cloud act, it sounds like I could find an officer (anywhere in the world) that needs $500 and in exchange get everything stored by Google and Facebook for a specific person.
I have no need for such a thing. However it’s not hard to imagine drug cartels or similar organizations using this right away.
Pretty exciting new feature. Surprised they buried it in the patch notes.
In many ways this case isn't settled until the foreign stakeholders agree with it also, or? I mean Ireland can still force Microsoft to not hand over the data because its on their soil? Or because its digital law makers assume the data is already in US. Doesn't this need agreements between countries? Anyone know more, I'm not super savvy on that topic.
Fairly unfortunate (mind understatement). Especially for the US Corp which literally added mandatory uploading and sharing of random end user docs to Win 10.
Hopefully this starts the ball rolling on Windows being completely unacceptable for use by all non-US goverments and business. Giving your docs to an unfriendly foreign state isn't cool. ;)
Windows 10 is known to upload random end user docs to Microsoft. For example, if a computer with Win10 on it crashes / has some level of fault (etc), it can upload docs it determines are related to MS (to assist diagnosis).
To bad if those docs happen to be medical records - or anything else sensitive. :(
Note - that's just one example. Win 10 really is a privacy shit show.
Apparently it's possible to temporarily turn it off.
Saying temporarily because there are (apparently) settings which can be used to minimise it (unsure about "complete off"). The setting names and meaning appear to be unstable though. eg the required settings change name, change their meaning, (etc) with subsequent Win 10 updates and releases
Just in case that sounds like it might be "on purpose" by Microsoft in order to make things difficult for their targets/end users to stop this abhorrent behaviour... it does seem that way.
Microsoft is absolutely not operating in good faith. :(
For in depth details, there's plenty of info available by looking online. Using HN's search feature should bring up a wealth of helpful pointers too.
Personally, I can't tell you the settings needed for disabling this stuff, as I've never run Win10 (due to this crap).
Everything possible has been migrated to non-Windows, and the last few pieces (running Win7) are on not-connected-to-the-internet VM's or hardware while non-windows alternatives are being tried out.
Yes, it's determined by whether the diagnostic data setting is at Full or at Basic. This is presented as a toggle in the initial OS install setup dialog and can be changed later in Settings->Privacy->Feedback & diagnostics. The only change to this since the initial version of Windows 10 (besides reducing the data collected at Basic level to comply with European law and regulations) was that the third, intermediate Enhanced level can no longer be set through the UI (it still exists as an enterprise configuration option) since the Creators Update release in spring 2017.
Yes, it prevents the scenario (user content files being included in diagnostic data) that you'd written about, and that the question was about. It doesn't turn off all diagnostic data, but that wasn't the question.
Because the current 9 people, who are not at all in touch with either the original writers or the current population, get total say in what the Constitution actually says. It is just like the rulings that allowed obscenity exception to the first amendment, a fully automatic exception to the second amendment, or for the commerce clause to apply to a person growing food for their own animals to eat,
Now, maybe in this case the 9 will claim it does require an amendment, but so many current exceptions and weird interpretations have been allowed that I can't have faith in the decisions of the 9.
Anyone could make your argument about any Supreme Court that has ever existed or will exist, when they don't agree with the decisions being made. What are you proposing exactly?
You could make this argument about not just any Supreme Court case, but about any law that exists. Someone or some group has to be the authority on interpreting any given law, and if they interpret a law that says "X is allowed" to mean "X is banned", then that is in their power to do so. Ideally when their interpretation becomes some blatantly against the will of the people, the people need to take action. In the case of the US, we need amendments to clarify things.
But so far this hasn't really been against the will of the people. So many wanted some level of obscenity ban. So many want some level of gun restrictions. And so many are willing to give up their privacy because of the promises made by those in power of the safety they will receive in turn. Sometimes when people play with fire, they aren't going to learn a lesson until they are burned, and there is nothing we can do other than try to protect ourselves from the blaze.
We have enough people right now wanting to restrict rights for promises of safety (even when those promises are not delivered on) that I'm not sure what we can do in the US. More education on reasons why one should not trust an all powerful authority, but we have plenty of evidence that teaching someone something is bad for them might do nothing to stop them from doing it anyways.
International law enforcement cooperation has existed for a long time and has rarely been abused. This new law is just extending current standards to cross-border digital assets. It's no different than extradition. The State Dept is allowed to negotiate treaties recognizing or denying the legitimacy of foreign search requests.
Please read:
- https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/03/23/cloud_act_spending_...
- https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/03/responsibility-deflect...
I personally believe the Facebook “scandal” is/was a smoke screen to draw the media attention away from this (4 or 5 year old scandal with regards to data collected for the Government to begin with). No private information was leaked (private messages, chats, etc) from Facebook as far as I am aware. I am not saying Facebook is innocent here – they are far from it, but I can’t stop thinking that the timing is too convenient and too much of a coincidence. Also recall that Zuckerberg liquidated around $500 million of Facebook stock in February.
All of the major tech companies (Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc) co-authored a letter supporting this legislation saying that it represents “notable progress to protect consumers’ rights.” despite the fact that it does the exact opposite. I think it will save them money from drawn out legal battles, legal fees, and the possibility of having to build additional data centers in other countries/continents to replicate and provide access to customer’s data for law enforcement agencies.
The CLOUD act allows access to ANY data including emails, private messages, etc. without requiring a warrant or having to inform the person that it is being collected. It gives additional power to the executive branch as the attorney general and certain members of the cabinet can access data on unsuspecting individuals without having to notify Congress or the Judicial branch. Also data collected from another party interacting with someone else could be used to criminally prosecute them even if they were not under any suspicion or investigation to begin with.