alt Hacker NewsSo I don't think I actually have a problem with businesses handing over their customer data if there is a valid warrant or subpoena. That's the system working as intended.
The main crux of the problem here is that the DHS has been granted a wide berth by congress to issue administrative subpoenas - i.e. not reviewed by a real judge and not directed at criminals. In "good" times this made investigations run smoothly. But the reality now is that ICE is doing wide dragnets to make arrests without any judicial oversight and often hostile to habeas corpus.
(Also, my understanding is that when banking is involved, it may also fall under the Banking Secrecy Act and Know Your Customer Rules - a whole other privacy nightmare.)
I know we instinctively want to frame this as a privacy problem, but the real problem we need congress to act on is abolishing these "shadow" justice systems that agencies have been able to set up.
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There will always be the opportunity for the foibles of humans to affect the procedures of the law. Trying to play "guess if the shadowy government agency is doing the right thing this week" is a losing game. They always take the proverbial mile, they are not ever going to be satisfied with the inch.
I don't see how what has been described here as "the system works as intended".
A free state should not be able to sniff after people for made up reasons.
>In "good" times this made investigations run smoothly.
Yeah no. This was always bad and is often abused by law enforcement (& people pretending to be law enforcement)
https://gizmodo.com/fake-cops-stole-user-data-from-meta-and-...
> administrative subpoenas - i.e. not reviewed by a real judge
I have some bad news for you about magistrates.
Or the FBI’s FISA system which was abused to gather intel. [1]
Government agencies are prone to abuse.
> In "good" times this made investigations run smoothly.
In good times they were still a blatant form of government abuse however the majority were completely unaffected and so didn't get riled up about it.
Similar to how a vigorous defense of freedom of speech is somehow consistently less popular among constituents of whichever party happens to be in power, as well as when applied to "objectionable" political views.
I'm not an expert in fourth amendment but I do know that assuming a subpoena without judicial oversight violates the fourth amendment is not correct. All the fourth amendment guarantees is unreasonable search and seizure. In some circumstances a judicial subpoena may be necessary and others not. An administrative subpoena implies that there has been a legal procedure and the administrative agencies are not exactly run like the wild west.
It's kind of sort of glorious how Google and ICE are both setting their reputation on fire like this at the same time.
The cloud has such a long legacy of being the safe easy convenient place that you just don't have to think about. Nations have somewhat kept their fingers out of the cookie jar.
But now it's just wanton unchecked madness, with no real process, with no judicial review. Google giving in to ICE so quickly is absolutely existentially destructive to Google's business model, of the cloud being a default place you can put your stuff & rely on.
The cloud never deserved this reputation, and there was a certain freight train of inevitability that was coming crashing in from the future, that nations would make the cloud untenable & hostile a space. That felt inevitable. But this is so much harder worser faster dumber than could be expected.
> I know we instinctively want to frame this as a privacy problem
> In "good" times this made investigations run smoothly.
Or as Jefferson put it
The time to guard against corruption and tyranny, is before they shall have gotten hold of us. It is better to keep the wolf out of the fold, than to trust to drawing his teeth and talons after he shall have entered.
> but the real problem we need congress to act
Jefferson himself writes a lot about this tbh. It is why we have a system of checks and balances. Where the government treats itself adversarially. But this is also frustrating and makes things slow. So... power creeps.
So the real problem we need to solve is educating the populous. They need to understand these complexities and nuances. If they do not, they will unknowingly trade their freedom to quench their fears.
And this is why it is a privacy problem. Because we the people should always treat our government adversarially. Even in the "good times". Especially in the "good times". The founders of the US constitution wrote extensively about this, much like the privacy advocates write today. I think they would be more likely to take the position of "why collect this information in the first place?" than "under what conditions should this information be collected?". Both are important questions, but the latter should only come after the former. Both are about privacy. Privacy of what is created vs privacy of what is accessed.
[0] You mentioned banking, so a recent example might be the changes in when transactions of a certain level trigger a bank report. The number has changed over time, usually decreasing. It's with good intention, to catch people skirting the laws. You'll never get 100% of people so if this is the excuse it an be a race to reporting all transactions. Maybe you're fine with Mr Rogers having that data, but Hitler? You have to balance these things and it isn't so easy as the environment moves. You solve a major part of the problem with the first move but then the Overton window changes as you've now become accustomed to a different rate of that kind of fraud (and/or as adversaries have adapted to it). A cat and mouse game always presents a slippery slope and unless you consider these implicit conditions it'll be a race to the bottom.
So what about the Amsterdam government handing over the records to the new Nazi government in the past century? Under the back then new laws this was legal and lead to the genocide of countless people who happened to have the wrong belief listed in that data.
Please never make the mistake to confuse something being legal for something being fair or ethical.
"Administrative subpoenas" have always been bullshit that mostly rely on there being no penalty for companies that hand over user information to anyone with a badge and then justify it with a five-hundred-page TOS document.
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> In "good" times this made investigations run smoothly.
These times never existed.
>"So I don't think I actually have a problem with businesses handing over their customer data if there is a valid warrant or subpoena. That's the system working as intended."
This person right here is the problem in our society. Things never and will never get isolated to "valid warrant".
Look around us, social after social media in order to "protect the kids", you must provide your personal information to them. Many people see nothing wrong with that and yet, service after service, business after business are being breached left and right.
Discord will mandate ID verification, just recently they have been breached.
Back to the article, if Google can do that for an immigrant, what make you think that Google won't do the same with your data as citizen whenever for whatever reason??
Don't agree with things you don't fully understand its consequences.
> I know we instinctively want to frame this as a privacy problem, but the real problem
Both can be true at the same time.