Let's be clear about what the "FREEDOM Act" does. It does not make NSA Bulk Collection of phone data illegal. What it does is rearrange the laws and request process and more carefully enumerate and define procedures by which the NSA may acquire and query phone records that are stored in bulk.
It also focuses primarily on phone records and one phone record program. There are dozens of phone record programs and hundreds of different types of signals that are collected that are not subjects of the "FREEDOM Act".
Now (like it presumably was before) the NSA will not have full takes of all American phone records. They will force companies to keep these records for them though, and they will continue to have the ability to query them.
It doesn't matter if nobody is watching 99.5% of CCTV footage. If CCTVs watch every square inch of a city and record it for later possible inspection, that's surveillance. It does not matter if human analysts do not inspect 99.5% of the bulk data. It is still surveillance.
It was also surveillance when the KGB forced private citizens to keep tabs on one another. It does not matter whether it is Google, Yahoo, Apple, Microsoft, Dropbox, Facebook, and Comcast doing the surveillance on compulsion of the Fed. All of our data and communications are being stored and processed.
I'm sorry you lost the text - it is so frustrating when that happens.
Getting the government to change itself is a game - and a more opaque one. Which representatives in upcoming elections are clear wins for the way that America is waging cyberwarfare, including its use of domestic surveillance? There are no such choices. The complexity of the issues and the pressing national security concerns (from an awakening Ottoman Empire, revisionist Russia and ambitious China, to the hollowing of an old American-centered European world).
The wise player, I think, doesn't only criticize Microsoft, AT&T, etc. The wise player criticizes all of the players complicit in the game: voluntary actors (like Microsoft), the Administration, shadow government, global incentives, allied interests alike.
(The government itself would say: don't hate us, the player! Hate the world game where we are compelled to reach for these powers or lose control of [y]our global dominance.)
Hating the game means hating it all - not choosing an exclusive player. So I think it makes sense to hate on Microsoft while hating on policy and surveillance law.
Much of what the government did (and does do) is not techically legal - in that they can not force companies to disclose or backdoor access to information beyond what is listed in the Patriot Act, CALEA and associated constellations of law.
Various mechanisms are used to get partnerships with companies including financial threat (QWest), legal threat (Yahoo), infiltration (Facebook), and appeal (Microsoft, Google). If it is more difficult to get cooperation from a company if they believe that customers will hate, snark and boycott them, or if it will damage their image it will be more difficult for agencies to make deals with companies in extralegal ways.
Discouraging customers from criticizing companies for voluntarily making deals doesn't seem fair to me. I think the OPs misgivings, however informed, are about voluntary rather than compulsed, action taken by Microsoft leadership.
Can you clarify what changes you would expect Felten to bring into the government? I'm a little frustrated by the lack of specifics in both the article, the Wiki page, and these comments. What about his technology background and history make him a particularly viable candidate - and what changes will we expect him to bring to bear from his background?
The US Chief Technology Officer was set up in the E-Government Act of 2002, which states the role's responsibilities as:
* To provide effective leadership of Federal Government efforts to develop and promote electronic Government services and processes by establishing an Administrator of a new Office of Electronic Government within the Office of Management and Budget.
* To promote use of the Internet and other information technologies to provide increased opportunities for citizen participation in Government.
* To promote inter-agency collaboration in providing electronic Government services, where this collaboration would improve the service to citizens by integrating related functions, and in the use of internal electronic
* Government processes, where this collaboration would improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the processes.
* To improve the ability of the Government to achieve agency missions and program performance goals.
To promote the use of the Internet and emerging technologies within and across Government agencies to provide citizen-centric Government information and services.
* To reduce costs and burdens for businesses and other Government entities.
* To promote better informed decision making by policy makers.
* To promote access to high quality Government information and services across multiple channels.
To make the Federal Government more transparent and accountable.
* To transform agency operations by utilizing, where appropriate, best practices from public and private sector organizations.
* To provide enhanced access to Government information and services in a manner consistent with laws regarding protection of personal privacy, national security, records retention, access for persons with disabilities, and other relevant law
Or take Sunstein's appointment after his work on systems of domestic 'guidance' of public discussion through 'nudging' and 'choice architecture' through the study of behavioral economics.
It's less of a crowning as it is bringing in those who can transform, with leadership, the mechanisms and operating procedures of a department.
Something I've been thinking about for a long time - I'll add this here because you and others at HN are more likely to be able to act on it than I am.
It seems to me that hiring teams of programmers that are known to work well together and have proven track records is a smart idea. The reason is that hiring individual programmers, who may or may not get along with one another, and whose individual hire decisions may or may not cover the breadth needed or may result in redundancies - is an inefficient and strange practice.
What if you needed an IT department and could hire groups of programmers who have, collectively, proven track records of managing IT well? Need a website done? Yeah, you could hire a designer, a backend server woman, a database guy, a CMS guru - and hope they all get along well and work together.
Or we could imagine hiring a team of people who manage themselves to get the result you're asking for.
The problem is when there are confluences of conditions that systemically prevent someone (or their 'class') from having the mobility to exit their condition, even when they have enough merit to otherwise warrant it.
Take for example indentured servitude, or third world sweat shops. Sure, working for $0.28 a day in a (dangerous, unsanitary) factory is better than subsistence farming. But if this opportunity is enough to feed a family but not enough to lift the family from a condition whereby it can exit from needing to work in the factory, how is this so very different from perpetuated servitude?
Take serfs. While serfs were 'bound to the land', the condition of the serf was voluntary and mutually beneficial: Wikipedia reads "Serfs who occupied a plot of land were required to work for the Lord of the Manor who owned that land, and in return were entitled to protection, justice and the right to exploit certain fields within the manor to maintain their own subsistence."
Certainly it was a better deal for the serf to labor underneath a lord than live in the wild - especially since all fertile lands had already been captured by lords. And indeed, you see the language and argumentation during the time period repeat a variant of your argument: both the serf and the lord benefit from the situation and therefore it is good. Similarly, whites made similar arguments about black slavery throughout the history of American slave trade.
But a situation where both parties have no benefit by changing their 'local' stratety by small amounts represents a local Nash-like equilibria at the best - and not anything one could argue is a 'global' optimum. And in fact, if one truly buys that markets are meritocratic, one should be willing to subsidize the equality of opportunity so that as many people start off on an even footing as possible.
In sum this is to say that, like Braess's Paradox, locally rational decisions lead to local but not global maxima - whose gaps can be seen to be gigantic from history. When we discuss opportunities for labor, wealth and quality of life, this becomes an ethics question.
It is not so clear, at least to me, that the principle of trade (especially given its other major problems not covered here) should be prioritized over ethical considerations. Quandaries like this do lead us to ask what sorts of wages and opportunities are 'fair'.
The CIA definitely has taken people from the US - even innocent ones - not necessarily 'from the streets'. It has also targeted and killed US citizens without trials.
I think it is being informed by these facts along with similar feelings towards the CIA's 'kidnapping' and 'manslaughtering' of innocent non-citizens, that is repugnant to those with the palate for more civil tone and direction of real defense and intelligence objectives.
The other way to understand the present is to be read up on current events.
The current DoD involvement in Silicon Valley is not a callback to the ARPANET so explicitly - the analogies are rough. But it's true that now, like then, the DoD sees the US in extreme danger of collapsing as a superpower like its old soviet rivals due to the huge changes and the challenges of the 21st century.
Today it is China, the Eastern tip of Eurasia and the Asia-Pacific arena that concerns the United States. Having been overtaken as the largest economy by China, and having grown only 0.2% this quarter compared to China's 7+%, and facing existential threats by China's ambitions to build the Chinese Dream of a New Silk Road and to become a great nation, the US is doing everything it can muster to arrange economic and security conditions in the world to maintain its order and its position at the top.
The Defense Department investment in cyber and the partnership with Silicon Valley is just one of many of these investments.
This appeals to me, but I think at this point we are preaching to ourselves.
Re: realism. Some outrage is a nice way to temper realism with civility. If we temper it instead with only a pragmatic calculus or some Randian or Social Darwinism there's a chance we can delude ourselves into a fascism, jingoism or militarism. I prefer to play tit-for-tat - lead with the pillow, reply to sticks with hammers. But if in pursuit of the pragmatic we abandon the ideals, we're going to optimize the 'wrong' objective. In other words - the outrage is a way to call for the US to recognize inalienable rights (which mean that no nationality, nor any government, gives them to you), to pursue fair trails, and to be accountable for mistakes, and to perform justice through a court system where it can be seen for the good thing it is. It is not outrage for outrage's sake.
The thresholds needed to achieve Quantum Error Correction are extremely close to being achieved nowadays (props in particular to Martini's group - and Google for hiring him). It appears that D-Wave is doing something Quantum - though nobody knows what. Furthermore, DARPA and the Obama administration's initiatives to get Probabilistic Programming adopted by the industry will create both software that can run natively on Quantum Computers and programmers that are able to think in the terms necessary for writing Quantum Software. Lockheed Martin funded research has discovered software algorithms for Quantum Computers that could (not without technical challenges) solve systems of equations that create stealth profiles for fighter jets that are an order of magnitude more effective.
If QC is not possible for some new underlying principles (not lack of engineering capability) then it would mean our understanding of QM is fundamentally wrong. This could be the case (we've been wrong in physics many times) even though QM has been verified to more digits of precision than any other physical theory.
Trying to build computers in this case and diagnosing the errors then are likely to give us the data necessary for the discovery of the new, better theory.
Now, if it is possible in principle but not practical to engineer - that's what we need a golden age of engineering research to find out.
> Are there any experts here who can give a reason why error correction in quantum computing will scale polynomially or better?
Because it takes a finite number of Toffoli/Hadamard/whatever gates to error correct local errors.
That is to say it's like check (or ECC) bits in traditional RAM. It's a couple extra transistors per memory location. Error correcting codes in general tend to be very lightweight and can be made to work locally - the the quantum world is the same.
Washington believes, and there's probably some truth to it, that the ability to project soft power comes after, or at least in tandem with, hard power guarantees.
The US utilizes soft power all the time and is and has been heavily invested in soft power. But soft power taken too far looks like coups or staged dissent, and America's soft power can sometimes be powerful enough to look like - or actually be - this.
That is to say that the overuse of soft power, or perhaps just the clumsy wielding of it, also dilutes the brand.
The recent investment in Nepal is a great example of soft power done right (IMO).
It also focuses primarily on phone records and one phone record program. There are dozens of phone record programs and hundreds of different types of signals that are collected that are not subjects of the "FREEDOM Act".
Now (like it presumably was before) the NSA will not have full takes of all American phone records. They will force companies to keep these records for them though, and they will continue to have the ability to query them.
It doesn't matter if nobody is watching 99.5% of CCTV footage. If CCTVs watch every square inch of a city and record it for later possible inspection, that's surveillance. It does not matter if human analysts do not inspect 99.5% of the bulk data. It is still surveillance.
It was also surveillance when the KGB forced private citizens to keep tabs on one another. It does not matter whether it is Google, Yahoo, Apple, Microsoft, Dropbox, Facebook, and Comcast doing the surveillance on compulsion of the Fed. All of our data and communications are being stored and processed.
It is still, categorically, surveillance.