I've called President Obama to express my frustration over the damage the government is creating for all of our future.
This is why I am leaving government.
I am about the same age as Zuck and have been working in government at many levels for about 12 years now and I work with people who have been working policy for over 40 years. The president couldn't care less what most of us think think...but because Zuck has shitloads of money and manages this massive platform his voice apparently matters when it comes to national policy over people who do it on a daily basis. Don't misread this as a hit on Zuckerberg, it's not at all, it's just illuminating who the government listens to. Nothing new of course, but it does hit home over and over.
it's just illuminating who the government listens to
If Obama and the gov actually listened to Zuck, the problem would be fixed. Heck at this point, it is not too farfetched to think that parts of the government don't listen to the President, even.
Zuck is the wrong person to make entreaties to the President about this because it doesn't affect Zuck personally. As far as the Executive Branch is concerned, Zuck is just expressing an opinion about policy the way an airline CEO might about the FAA: as a business concern, not a legal nor civil liberties one. Obama already knows that the only thing Zuck is talking about is money, not people.
I don't think Zuck is talking about money, but freedom
This seems naive. Zuck has enough money to buty privacy, and he made his fortune by enabling the type of surveilance that the NSA does. Frankly, his actions here are about as credible as the Ivy League's moves towards embracing "diversity". They are just ploys, and their biz model is at risk, so this is like "I'sorry"... only that we got caught.
He already gets all the freedom he wants. Yes, I'm questioning not only his effectiveness, but his motivations.
He consequently simply may not be personally capable of having a freedom-oriented effect here. Said another say, he's a new-money kid, how much power can he really have?
It's not just because Zuckerburg has personal wealth. It's also because Facebook directly employs thousands of people, pays corporate taxes, enables new markets that rely on Facebook, and sells advertising to all those other corporations. His age has nothing to do with it.
"It's also because [] directly employs thousands of people, pays corporate taxes, enables new markets that rely on []..."
Insert {Halliburton, Exxon, AT&T, Comcast, BP, etc} into those brackets and you'll get a much better idea of the nature of political influence and lobbying in the U.S.
This is why I think all the bluster around Citizens United and the influence of money in politics is overblown. Because at the end of the day, a post-card listing the number of employees Exxon has in a Congressman's district is just as effective as a check.
Unless i am beng obtuse; i think youre missing the point:
Its not that any of these large companies should not have some influence; the problem is that having shit-tons of money is the seemingly only requisite to have ANY influence in government currently.
The term "oligarchy" has real and important meaning.
You are missing the point, because the grandparent post didn't mention money, he mentioned jobs and tax revenue. That's the real leverage big companies have over Washington, not the campaign donations which is what everyone harps about.
Take, for example, the last debate between Obama and Romney, where they took turns trying to show who was more pro-coal. You think it was because of campaign donations? Or all the coal mining/fracking jobs in key states like Pennsylvania?
>You think it was because of campaign donations? Or all the coal mining/fracking jobs in key states like Pennsylvania?
But that is called pandering. Do I think that they were concerned with any of the coal jobs? No, I think they were concerned with public perception at the time they were visible to said public.
Politicians have Schrodinger-Syndrome: They only appear to be working/accountable when you're staring at them through the lens of a national camera. All other times, they are fervently working on interests which are not yours.
Playing devil's advocate, for starters, you can consider the effects of having 175 billion dollars (FB's market cap) vanish from the economy, and the effects that would have on confidence in the market.
Not that I disagree with the overall premise that FB doesn't really add anything of much value (or at least anything that couldn't be quickly and easily replaced).
Let's just face it, extremely large and complex systems are unwieldy and unpredictable. You have incredible technical and regulatory debt, and eventually you need to start from scratch whether you like it or not. You don't have to scrap the whole project, but you do need to rethink every part.
This system will collapse. It's too big, too mean, and too proud.
> I work with people who have been working policy for over 40 years.
And in the words of Thomas Jefferson:
> "Unless the mass [of people] retains sufficient control over those entrusted with the powers of their government, these will be perverted to their own oppression ..."
> "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
> "I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them."
> "A people always preserves the right to revise, reform and change its constitution. A generation is not entitled to subject future generations to its own laws."
And to recap the current Federal Government: 1) The masses do not sufficiently control it. The representation per population has decreased and most politicians do not reflect the mosaic of the people but are a class of people on their own. 2) Americans are generally ignorant. Of others and themselves. Whether this is by design or by accident is up for debate. 3) The FED wants to pass extremely personal laws. Whether its for health or for safety, they all take up some of your personal responsibility, and hand it over. The War on Terror and Drugs are examples of the State declaring the right to protect you even against yourself. 4) How many reforms or repeals of laws do we see? How many new laws do we see? We should be reviewing and reforming old laws more than making new ones. Again we see another example of the Federal Government going against it's constitutional framer's vision for a free society.
I don't know about you, but I think the US is already a tyrannical oligopoly. Only instead of the bludgeon, it's weapon of oppression is apathy and propaganda.
In a democracy one person, one vote do mean equal influence per citizen, as in a democracy people decides policy.
The USA is not a democracy, it is a republic, a system where people vote for a small number of representatives who then decides policy in the name of the people.
Nowadays these two words have shifted in meaning in popular usage, what used to be democracy is now called direct democracy and what used to be a distinct republic is now indirect democracy or representative democracy a.k.a. democracy.
This kind of slippery semantics is most probably a consequence of years of propaganda to persuade people they live in a democracy so they won't ask for one.
Then again, in the USA as many other places around the world, this small number of elected representatives holding the power of policy are subjected to the oligarchic / plutocratic power and influence of a few wealthy entities.
Or as better said in this quote:
«the 20th century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: The growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy.»
Hey now, if you are going to be pedantic make sure you get your facts straight.
If I'm remembering right, prior to James Madison's writings, there wasn't a real distinction between democracy and republic, besides the fact that democracy was Greek and republic was Latin.
Madison in the Federalist Papers made the distinction between democracy and republic that are your talking about, but it is pretty arbitrary.
Now you are right that we don't live in a direct democracy (though states have features), but we are still a democracy and a republic.
Now that I am being pedantic someone will probably point out where I am in error, but I just felt like posting some information for whoever may find it useful. :)
No, the distinction between democracy and republic was well established before Madison. It appears in James Harrington's works. It also appears in works of Montesquieu, Rousseau, Tocqueville, and even Aristotle. I could find the precise quotes of their works to support my point, but I'm not at home. If you're into this kind of stuff, I recommend Bernard Manin's The Principles of Representative Government. Sounds boring but it's actually a great book.
I've always understood democracy to refer to suffrage, limited or universal, while republic basically amounts to "not a principality" (which is not very descriptive).
It's just clear that if you have money, and a lot of it, you have a voice in shaping the world. If you don't have money regardless of what position you are in, you don't have a voice (extreme popular outliers excluded).
> That’s why at Facebook we spend a lot of our energy making our services and the whole internet safer and more secure. We encrypt communications, we use secure protocols for traffic, we encourage people to use multiple factors for authentication and we go out of our way to help fix issues we find in other people’s services.
I have to call “bs” here. It took Facebook nine years – nine years! (2004–2013) – to turn HTTPS on by default (http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2012/11/19/facebook-https-t-...). Beforehand, anybody on your network could trivially hijack your Facebook session to gain access to your account (I made a video two years ago about how easy this attack was [and is] if you don’t know what I mean: http://youtu.be/g5mFbgxMHqQ?t=1m33s).
We allow anyone with your contact information to find you through the
Facebook search bar at the top of most pages, as well as other tools
we provide, such as contact importers - even if you have not shared
your contact information with them on Facebook
Random news items from last few years[2]
Facebook Removes Crucial Privacy Setting for Users’ Names
Facebook is improperly altering its privacy policy without proper user consent
Using names, images, and content of Facebook users for advertising without consent
Senator Al Franken has called on Facebook to reconsider expansion of its facial recognition activity
Facebook’s Beacon program disclosed personal information without user consent
Instagram announced several changes to the terms of service that will allow the company to use pictures in advertisements without notifying or compensating users
Instagram proposed that the parents of minors implicitly consent to the use of their childrens' images for advertising purposes
Facebook removed a privacy control that allowed users to hide themselves from strangers through Facebook’s search function
88% of Facebook Users Oppose Changes to Privacy Policy and Voting Rights
Facebook has proposed changes to its policies that would (1) end user voting, (2) remove spam blocking, and (3) share FB user data with affiliates without user consent
Consumer Groups Ask FTC to Investigate Facebook-Datalogix Data-Matching Arrangement
Facebook is under a 20 year consent decree from the FTC that requires express consent from users before disclosing personal information
While I am not trying to be an apologist for Facebook, I would like to point out that the majority of issues with Facebook are because people are members. It is easy to opt out of Facebook.
I would like to see you opt out of NSA monitoring. A lot of the actions which the NSA took and take are not made public, you data is collected from means which could be described as subterfuge, if not bordering on illegal.
The NSA isn't upset with Snowden for exposing their tactics, their upset because they got exposed altogether. They will continue to go down the path of monitoring citizens, and collecting data with or without your permission.
And you will never see them [NSA] offer a Terms and Conditions policy or a Privacy Policy.
I'm sorry, coming from Zuck, this statement means very little to me.
I guess I'm old school, but Zuck has shown disdain for the privacy of users in the past, FB actively tracks the movement of users across the net (likely without many realizing), and I'm under the impression that this culture that emphasizes sharing every fucking thing is more dangerous to people than the US government trying to get at data that they probably already have.
Don't get me wrong, I don't like that the US government is doing this, but I don't trust FB at all.
Nothing to see here folks. Just the old tug of war between governments and corporations for power, while the actual citizens get trampled.
I'm more afraid of government than private industry.
Facebook will never have a Gitmo. It'll never send someone to a torture camp in Egypt. It'll never invade a country. It'll never confiscate property. It'll never put someone on the no-fly list. It'll never harass you at the border.
Yes, we should be openly critical of powerful corporations. But the downsides of misguided governance are much worse than even the most powerful corporations can muster.
So, I don't believe it's fair to compare what Facebook does to warrantless government spying. And I'm glad Zuck is publicly taking on this issue.
It will never lobby for laws that impose severe penalties for non-violent crimes. It will never sue and bankrupt individuals and small businesses to grow, protect and solidify its market position. It will lobby for laws that literally steal trillions of dollars of value from the public domain. It won't influence international policy. It won't fight against legal reform in a country that rivals the most horrific, repressive regimes for incarceration.
If the government is misguided, it's because powerful corporations are leading it by the nose.
"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty or justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary."
Facebook will never have a Gitmo. It'll never send someone to a torture camp in Egypt. It'll never invade a country. It'll never confiscate property. It'll never put someone on the no-fly list. It'll never harass you at the border.
It may not do those things directly but who's to say it won't tip the government off about you? Tell them where you live and flag you for a disgruntled post or an idle threat. There's a lot Facebook could do to help the government crack down on dissidents.
When our engineers work tirelessly to improve security, we imagine we're protecting you against criminals, not our own government.
Why?
Any company that cares about 'security' and controls such a massive amount of personal data would know that governments do not always behave morally/legally.
This excuse should not work; we the public should expect better.
Yahoo did not use https. Facebook scans your IMs and tracks your website visits for ads.
When do we reach the point when plausible ignorance of governmental overreach and the need to 'monetize' are no longer considered valid excuses for compaines to be lax with the data they hold about you?
As an aside: as far as I can tell these are just crododile tears - if Zuckerberg truly cared, Facebook would back off from generating ad revenue off IM and would enable OTR.
Is it just me, or does this seem to be a sideways admittance/accusation that the US Government has been essentially 'attacking' Facebook attempting to extract data outside the normal channels of requests from law enforcement?
Either way, this needs to change. We're not on a slippery slope of losing privacy- we're going downhill like an avalanche.
It's already pretty much known, from the Snowden papers, that the government is doing man-in-the-middle attacks against internet services including Facebook. Here's a story from today's news which discusses one such mode of attack, and names Facebook specifically: http://www.wired.com/opinion/2014/03/quantum/
(Come to think of it, since this is today's news, it's possible that Zuck is responding to it...)
When I was his age and trying to show off, I probably would've said the same kind of thing, if I were in the right mood. I don't know or care whether Zuckerberg has any integrity (I don't use his service), but do people grow up and change.
Which is why NSA's surveillance and storage of our communications is problematic. Some 19 year old kid today may be president in the future. Should he have something stupid he said today hanging over his head when he's president?
Facebook was listed as one of the companies participating in PRISM, with a specific start date.
None of the denials or other announcements made by any of the companies the NSA seemed pretty sure were collaborating addressed why they appeared on that list. Until there is a good explanation for why the NSA thinks they were collaborating, denials ring pretty hollow.
It's not clear from the slides that the companies were "participating" at all. Further Snowden leaks showed that the NSA was cracking large internet companies' internal systems communications. PRISM doesn't necessarily need their cooperation at all.
Either the companies on the PRISM list are willingly collaborating, or NSA bribed one or more employees, or NSA attacked their infrastructure.
If it wasn't willing cooperation, then the PRISM companies have a security breach to solve. None of them have said whether they have such a breach or not.
Right, I was just pointing out the possibility of your latter two options. There was also the possibility that PRISM was just a database of formal, court-ordered information.
That's no excuse. Someone in senior management has been bribed? You have a serious security breach unreported, undiagnosed? That's a whopping shareholder lawsuit coming at you if you don't hunt it down and terminate it.
Tech companies are in a very awkward situation with regards to surveillance. It's hard to argue that individuals have an "expectation of privacy" in their Facebook content, when their thousand closest friends at Facebook are mining that information to sell them advertising. Indeed, you have the opposite of an expectation of privacy: you expect that your information will not be private.[1]
The business model built on harvesting user data to sell advertising is just fundamentally at odds with the scope of the 4th amendment's protection of privacy.
[1] You may expect that the government won't look at it, but that's not what "private" means for the purposes of the 4th amendment. It doesn't just mean anything you don't want the government to see. To analogize, your house is private: you may invite selected guests in, but not your thousand closest friends at Facebook.
What I share with my 1000 friends at Facebook may be different from what I share with my 1000 friends at Google, which might be different than what I share with my 1000 friends at Amazon, my friends at Verizon, and my friends at PG&E.
Things that can be inferred by combining all of these may well be things that I would expect to be private.
This is what I like to call the "slut" defense. "Ah, come on, don't give me that line, you were showing your stuff all around, flaunting it, putting it out there, and now you're claiming you didn't want me to use it? lol"
Your analogy involves an escalation, using someone's showing off as an excuse to violate their bodily integrity. That would be like if the government asserted you had no privacy interest in the contents of your hard drive, just because you posted some pictures of facebook. But what we're talking about is data collection where the government doesn't have anything you didn't already share with your thousand closest friends at Google. It's more like distributing a picture of yourself smoking weed among your school, then getting mad when your parents got a hold of a copy.
>But what we're talking about is data collection where the government doesn't have anything you didn't already share with your thousand closest friends at Google
Yeah, exactly: "Honey, we aren't looking at anything you haven't already shown your last thousand boyfriends".
You're mixing together two different hypotheticals.
In your first one, you have someone provacatively dressed. In this hypothetical, the government isn't a rapist escalating their level of access, but someone on the street who can see the same thing everyone else does. I.e. the government isn't using your Facebook posts as justification for hacking into your computer. If it has access to something, so do hundreds of people at ATT, Google, or FB. There's no escalation beyond what you're broadcasting into the world.
In your second one, you have a serial monogomist. But showing anything special to a boyfriend or girlfriend is a 1:1 interaction, even if you do it thousands of times. But the government isn't claiming access to your emails on the theory you regularly email hundreds of people. Web mail or a Facebook post isn't 1:1, but rather something in which you invite hundreds of unknown people into any single interaction.
You can't mix and match bits of each analogy to avoid the distinctions that keep each one from fitting the situation you're trying to compare it to.
> Web mail or a Facebook post isn't 1:1, but rather something in which you invite hundreds of unknown people into any single interaction.
This is false. In both cases I sent it to known, specific, authorized people. You're employing exactly the same "slut!" logic I criticized before: "well, you were okay with all those people seeing it, I guess you don't mind everyone seeing it, if you didn't want the rest of us to have a taste you shouldn't have been so promiscuous".
Hold on. No matter how many people I privately shared it with, and no matter how liberal you think my standards are, I still shared it in private. The typical person does not expect that the general public can read what they're posting to their friends or email recipients.
And before you say, "but some designated employees get to look at it sometimes for debugging" -- again, same logic. "Come on, you live in an apartment, you know maintenance comes in now and then, I guess anyone can come and take a look around. Gee, if you're so liberal that you leave your stuff right were the handyman can see, what, what's the problem? What, you expect that just because your contract says that entrance is limited to designated people and situations that the whole world can't take a peak into your bedroom?"
I get that you're not convinced; that you think, "hey, those people send their data to anyone, it seems, so what's the problem?" And you don't seem to be bothered by how close the argument is to "she was a slut anyway"; I just hope that you'll at least recognize there's a good source of well-tested rhetoric you can draw from, albeit from unsavory characters.
Your landlord doesn't rifle through your apartment to see what kind of laundry detergent you buy so that he can sell that info to advertisers. There are also very well defined limits on how your landlord can access your apartment, and you have a property interest as a renter. Read Facebook's TOS and tell me there are any such limits to what Facebook can do with your data, and explain to me how you have a property interest in the data Facebook collects about you.
In a struggle to make your analogy work, you're posing s hypothetical online service very different than the ones that exist. If Facebook and Google didn't mine your data and provided strong contractual protections limiting the situations in which their engineers could access it, like landlords do, then you'd have a much stronger argument that these things are protected by the 4th amendment.
Enough with these PR stunts, Mark. Put your money where your mouth is. Put your company where your mouth is. Add end to end encryption for your users chats, and encrypt everything as much as possible, to the highest security standards, and end-to-end wherever possible (like for FB chat and Whatsapp, where you could use the TextSecure ratchet).
Until then, all of your "calls for privacy" are not worth the digital paper they are being written on.
I don't think I've read anything about FB lobbying for stricter PII laws. Until that happens, I'll write up this little "rant" as a lip service and nothing more.
It's a little bit weird how a few years ago all those powerful tech company heads were meeting with the President. Then finally it came out that they all had made deals directly with the NSA and colluded to give them access to user's data. And now all of these companies seem to be working very hard to reverse all of it. It's a good thing that they are, and they seem to be genuinely doing it. But it's still seems a bit odd. Zuckerberg talks about the government needing to be more transparent, but FB and the like haven't explained the details of the previous deal they made with the government. I imagine because they are still somehow gagged. I wonder how many drafts of this message went through FB lawyers.
The slides (as usual for slides) are pretty ambiguous, but http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)#In... says that the companies and Facebook in particular deny cooperation with PRISM, and the only quote from media sources that sounds skeptical about that is from WaPo wonkblog [http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/06/12/h...] which says that one of the slides talks about combining data provided by companies (with warrants, NSLs, and other legal orders) with data collected by adversarial means.
So, no, that link does not support the claim that Facebook cooperated with PRISM.
"which says that one of the slides talks about combining data provided by companies (with warrants, NSLs, and other legal orders) with data collected by adversarial means"
Cool story. If it was true, surely one of the nine companies listed on the PRISM slides would have adopted it as an explanation for why they are listed.
There are five quotes explaining it that way right in the wikipedia article. The only company quoted that doesn't admit to complying with court orders is Dropbox; they flatly deny involvement in anything such as PRISM.
I'm not saying there is proof of lack of wrongdoing, but it would be great if people would stop claiming without evidence that these companies made deals with NSA. Evidence-based decision making is better than paranoia.
That citation might be tough. But what do you honestly believe?
Personally, at this point, with all the Snowden revelations, it should be up to Facebook to prove to me that they aren't sharing information with the government.
The cynical nitpicker in me would like to express frustration over Facebook tracking both people who use it and people who don't when they visit websites that have Facebook widgets.
To those naysaying Mark for selling out our privacy--sure he does that, for profit--but I'd rather a company sell my shopping and searching habits to another company than the government take something I say on Facebook out of context and put me on the no-fly list, or worse an enemy combatant---the more power the NSA has the further towards Nazi Germany and Gespacho / Secret police territory we go...so good for you mark--you could do a LOT more to ensure our privacy, and maybe you will -- hopefully this isn't just 'posturing' but as he's a 30 something techy geek who probably hangs out on hackernews as much as the rest of us, he may actually be sincere about it.
Check our defense budgets. They don't go down. The NSA has massive data farms that are not constrained by budgets. That's not exactly the problem.
The more outlandish the plots on Scandal and House of Cards, and the funnier Jon Stewart gets to be, the more and more awful the truth revealed in the real news seems to be. We get the truth we're willing to accept... what else will come?
I so totally agree. But what's the alternative? We all quit?
Since Schneier's crypto reputation is not in question, I think it's reasonable to believe that there is a possible statelmate end state.
If everyone goes all in on certificate transparency, HSTS, and Cert Pinning, engineers can at least make life miserable on the Surveliance Industrial complex for a little while.
As if Facebook was better with collecting data. This reminds me of the new Facebook Android app which I have refused to install so far:
http://i.imgur.com/tDX8yrB.png
> The internet works because most people and companies [spend a lot of our energy making our services and the whole internet safer and more secure.]
By any metric of privacy, security or safety, I don't see how anyone could claim the internet works.
Also, no amount of encryption or 2-factor authentication could turn Facebook into a part of the internet "I want to build." Which is why I deleted my Facebook account and got off (nearly all) Google services. I vote with my feet, and what I spend my time building.
I'm not a facebook user, so, is it possible to use Facebook completely privately? Without anybody else than your friend seeing your information, not even third parties?
I cannot help but think Facebook, Google and such companies business model of monetizing logs of people's usage of the internet is used by governments to legitimise their spying.
The argument would be, if it is okay for big business to record all activity and data mine it for profit then it is okay for governments to record all activity and data mine it to help govern the people.
This is why I am leaving government.
I am about the same age as Zuck and have been working in government at many levels for about 12 years now and I work with people who have been working policy for over 40 years. The president couldn't care less what most of us think think...but because Zuck has shitloads of money and manages this massive platform his voice apparently matters when it comes to national policy over people who do it on a daily basis. Don't misread this as a hit on Zuckerberg, it's not at all, it's just illuminating who the government listens to. Nothing new of course, but it does hit home over and over.