OK, we 're not really surprised, and as others say, the onion had predicted it years ago. What are the results? Can somebody ask for anonymized copies of these publicly-funded data? You know, for research purposes and all...
Please stop saying "we are really not surprised", whether you actually mean it or trying to joke about it. It legitimizes such behavior for some people who are not very privacy conscious and it really takes out the sting from the gravity of such incidents.
Gravity of what incidents? Because if you are talking about the NSA using data from Facebook, then the you shouldn't be surprised answer is correct: No one in their right mind ought to think putting all that data on Facebook didn't have massive privacy implications. If not from the NSA, than from companies like Facebook itself. No amount of legal safe guards can prevent that problem and preserve those free social networks because it's an inherent business property of those networks. You are the product and we shouldn't let people delude themselves otherwise.
If you are talking about the use of phone log data and other meta-data that develop incidental to your use of a communications system that are supposed to be private because they exist for limited purposes, then sure I agree with you.
But let's not pretend that the NSA looking at Facebook is really much worse than anyone else doing it. The reason raison d'etre for these things is to record such information.
Again, you're really minimizing the impact of this. 99% of people have no framework to understand the implications of facebook, and that doesn't make them out of their right mind.
Saying no one in their right mind ought to think this isn't a logical consequence of the existence of Facebook is not the same thing as saying anyone who hasn't yet come to that conclusion is out if their mind.
Telling people you shouldn't be surprised is telling them it is an expected consequence, not something exceptional that can be prevented. It's telling them that if after actually thinking through the implications of Facebook existence , they shouldn't be surprised. They should have seen it coming.
Conversely, telling people that this is surprising make it seem like the government did something monumentally evil that we did't expect them to be capable of and if we merely make the government not evil, it goes away. It doesn't. Facebook can and still will do those things and sell it to advertisers. The government can and will do it with public profiles.
As a side note, most of the article isn't about "social networks" like Facebook. It's about actual people's networks of social interactions as extracted from phone, email, and other metadata. The fact that the government is doing analysis on a huge scale should both be surprising and deeply distressing.
Everything that is technically exploitable will be exploited, I prefer to be cautious rather than live in a bubble and assume that powerful entities will care for my concerns.
And by the way, IANAL, but the collecting of data was not technically illegitimate, right?
Hard to say, until someone gets indicted. The courts in the USA have traditionally limited themselves to letting someone with "standing" sue over a particular law, or letting law enforcement charge someone. There's no real way to pre-emptively say "illegal" on some law or action.
If one branch of the Federal Government doesn't prosecute members of another branch, we've got no way to say.
In that case, "we don't know." Seems laws and court findings should be written down somewhere, though, right? To ensure the US continues to be a nation of laws and not of men?
No, I want you to acknowledge the gravity of the incident, by saying "oh I am really not surprised", you are in fact lying because you have no way to know for sure the extend of the privacy infringement. You might have thought "I bet NSA is snooping my facebook activity" but thats not the same as saying "I know NSA is snooping on my FB to such and such extend."
Now that the NYT (who has been known to collude with intelligence agencies in the shaping of public opinion) has released something, we now know the full extent of privacy infringement and the world will magically turn into a better place…
When NSA whistleblowers have been trying to do outreach to the public for years prior to the Snowden leaks[0], to be upset because some people want to take a pragmatic approach/perspective after witnessing an apathetic public for years at large, is pretty farcical IMO.
At this point, I don't expect anything from congress nor many of my "friends" on social networks. If I want to be secure in my communications with them, I will/have taken the steps to do so through means discussed at length plenty of times on HN. If governments across the world want to go on witch hunts, they'll only get more of what has happened because of them: "If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you always got".
The way I see it, the point of no return was long ago…
I do acknowledge the gravity of the situation, and have done for some time. I don't see what being surprised has to do with that. I don't see why (dishonestly, imo) characterising recent events as unpredictable is a useful message. And, I am not surprised. To say otherwise would be a lie.
Finding out something for sure that was previously only suspected does not typically make someone surprised. In order to be surprised it is necessary to have not suspected the thing discovered. It seems very accurate (and in no way diminishing of the gravity of the situation) for people who suspected these things to say that they are unsurprised. You must be doing some pretty wild mental gymnastics to see it differently. Perhaps what you mean is that you don't think it is particularly useful for people to talk about how they aren't surprised, in which case I agree.
The NSA spying on social networks is not surprising; your local cops do that. On the other hand, the NSA deliberately sabotaging the software that is widely used in our own government, even by the military, is pretty surprising. You can find people on sci.crypt and the cryptography mailing list who pointed to the NSA's other mission (the one they apparently ignore), "Information Assurance," as a reason to believe that AES did not have some secret back door.
It is not a lie to claim that at least some of these revelations were surprising to a lot of people.
