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Ask HN: Non-US citizen. Why should I care about NSA/PRISM?

18 pointsby mattquirosalmost 12 years ago
Hacker News has been full of links about NSA and PRISM lately but I don&#x27;t understand how that&#x27;s relevant to me. I&#x27;m not a US citizen and live outside the US--I&#x27;m just a developer with some startup dreams and a lot of curiosity to learn new stuff, which is why I&#x27;m (sometimes) here.<p>So I read the article from Wired that explains why &quot;I have nothing to hide&quot; is the wrong way to think about surveillance, hoping to get some answers:<p>http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wired.com&#x2F;opinion&#x2F;2013&#x2F;06&#x2F;why-i-have-nothing-to-hide-is-the-wrong-way-to-think-about-surveillance&#x2F;<p>But the points raised still don&#x27;t seem to concern me. Even if I had something to hide and American police can be abusive, I live outside the US and are bound&#x2F;protected by different laws, and a different police. The only potential problem I see is that the suspect US-born companies store my online footprints in their servers and I can&#x27;t download them for myself. However, I&#x27;m not even sure that&#x27;s a problem because what can they do to me with it?<p>Any thoughts? I was expecting this question to pop up much earlier in HN but it seems no one else was asking this themselves.<p>UPDATE: I&#x27;m from a developing country in southeast Asia that used to be a US colony, but I very, very highly doubt that we even have access to all that NSA&#x2F;PRISM data, let alone that we have an espionage program. Murderers can just get away with their crimes here even if they left hair or fingerprints, because they don&#x27;t even have those data to match against.

5 comments

yen223almost 12 years ago
As a non-US citizen, the whole PRISM scandal is actually <i>more</i> relevant to us than to Americans, since Obama (and disappointingly, a lot of commentators here) basically decided that its perfectly fine for the NSA to spy on foreigners. The scandal blew up only because the NSA decided to spy on <i>Americans</i>.<p>Other than that, the risks are the same as before. You have to trust that some unknown entity (in this case, the US government) will not misuse your private data.
shawn-furyanalmost 12 years ago
In many ways, this is an inherently unanswerable question, and it&#x27;s just about as unanswerable for US citizens as well. At it&#x27;s root, the problem is that you&#x27;ve left information scattered around the internet, much of this information is possibly stored indefinitely in various US intelligence agency databases and that this information can be used to make inferences (correct or not) and judgments (fair or not) about you and your actions. It is also possible that information may be framed in a manner so as to give a misleading impression of you and your actions.<p>Being outside the US is both an advantage and disadvantage with regard to these programs. The advantage is that you are in a bigger pool that is likely less interconnected with those who have access to this data, and so are less likely to be targeted by abuse of the information that has been gathered around you. The disadvantage is that it appears that if you did end up being targeted, it seems less likely that such targeting would rouse suspicion since the privacy rights of non-US citizens do not seem to be getting any consideration from US officials at all.<p>The difficulty with these questions is that people try to think of scenarios by which information can be used against them. This isn&#x27;t really a productive exercise since failure to come up with a reasonable scenario in no way proves that one doesn&#x27;t exist.<p>Perhaps a better question is &quot;Could anyone with access to this data ever want to hurt me, my relations or our respective reputations?&quot;. Implicit in the question is the assumption that anyone with said access is capable of hurting you or your reputation by releasing it strategically. Some may argue with this assumption, but I would challenge that few, if any of us really have a handle on just how much data we leave laying around on web servers outside of our control, and so are ill equipped to make judgements about how it might or might not be used against us. This question too is very difficult to answer with a reasonable level of certainty, but it at least leads us to some more productive questions that get at the breadth of the problem:<p>&quot;Do I, or any of my relations ever openly or privately (in channels controlled by US intelligence programs) make strong political statements?&quot;<p>&quot;Do I, or any of my relations play a visible role in any company or organization that someone with access to this data might find morally or politically disagreeable or inconvenient?&quot;<p>&quot;Have I, or any of my relations injured, spurned, rejected, humiliated, or otherwise hurt, physically or emotionally, anyone with access to this data?&quot;<p>&quot;Will there ever be a scenario where I, or any of my relations are put into direct or indirect competition with anyone with access to this data?&quot;<p>&quot;Could someone with access to this data ever want to randomly target me or my relations for kicks?&quot;<p>&quot;Could a malicious 3rd party ever gain broad access to this data and use it in a way that hurts me or my relations?&quot;<p>These questions get at just how broadly the effects of abuses of this data could reach. Will you be targeted for abuse? It&#x27;s extremely unlikely, there are 6 Billion people in the world, and there are certainly bounds on the amount of harassment that can be done secretly. But nobody is really immune from being effected by abuses of this kind of data. There are innumerable strong personal incentives for abusing data such as this, and the more of it that&#x27;s out there, and the more connected, organized and searchable it is, the more likely it is that abuses will happen.<p>[edited to improve formatting]
trevelyanalmost 12 years ago
In most cases no-one will want to blackmail you. But people do blackmail journalists, judges and&#x2F;or political figures with power. There is a track record of this sort of thing having been done even in countries like Canada (where the wife of a former PM was illegally monitored to try and get dirt on the guy). Or look at Nixon and Hoover.<p>In any environment where mass surveillance is technically possible and hidden from effective and comprehensive public oversight, abuse becomes permitted and hidden.<p>So standing up for privacy is not just a matter of protecting your own identity (although that is frankly reason enough). It is about protecting the conditions under which a free press and democratic society can survive, and in which individuals can act according to their moral conscience even when such conscience leads them to oppose entrenched power structures. And you should care about what happens in the United States not only because God knows how its security apparatus will use this data against your own country and elected leaders, but because American discourse influences global perceptions of what is seen as an acceptable level of state surveillance in other countries.
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Sealyalmost 12 years ago
Why is it relevant to you? Here&#x27;s a handful you should consider:<p>Do you use Facebook? Do you use Apple products? Have you used Skype?
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jdietrichalmost 12 years ago
Espionage is a global business. Your government probably has a reciprocal intelligence agreement with the US. There&#x27;s a good chance that your version of the NSA has access to PRISM data and the NSA has access to data gathered by your government&#x27;s intelligence agency.
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