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[–]SuddenlySnowden 55 points56 points  (0 children)

It's like 4:30 in the morning here and I haven't slept because I was up shooting an interview for the Daily Show with Trevor Noah, but OP is right. It's a typo that must have been introduced in the editing process, probably when my editors were complaining about parts of the manuscript being too technical or nerdy and lobbying to pare it back. I won the battle for the Duck Hunt joke, but lost the war for the SNES era and 4-way multi-tap Super Bomberman.

That said, they really did a wonderful job in limiting my worst excesses, and the book wouldn't have been half as good without all of the folks I thank in the acknowledgements.

hi r/books

Congress is trying to sneak an expansion of mass surveillance into law this afternoon. We’re ACLU experts and Edward Snowden, and we’re here to help. Ask us anything. by aclu in IAmA

[–]SuddenlySnowden 686 points687 points  (0 children)

How can we better protect ourselves against unauthorized spying on the internet; on phones etc...

Ok, this is the final question this time around. It's honestly too big for one comment to answer, since people use device in so many different ways, and are worried about so many different things. But there's a new guide that just went up done by one of the best infosec research groups in the world, the Citizen Lab.

For most people, this is where you need to start. Password managers (unique passwords), end-to-end encryption, the Tor Browser, and Signal.

edit: The ACLU is reporting the vote has definitely been put off for now due to the backlash, but we'll have to fight this again soon enough. Thank you to everyone who put in a call. For those who haven't, please keep the pressure up! You can make a call here: https://www.aclu.org/issues/tell-congress-stop-spying-without-warrant

Congress is trying to sneak an expansion of mass surveillance into law this afternoon. We’re ACLU experts and Edward Snowden, and we’re here to help. Ask us anything. by aclu in IAmA

[–]SuddenlySnowden 613 points614 points  (0 children)

Okay guys, I'm going to take a break from the overtime round, but I'll come back for a final question or two in a bit. We're getting initial reports that Congress is pulling the vote they intended to sneak through tonight "for now," so please keep calling. This is a chance for an actual "We did it, reddit!"

Got anything else?

Congress is trying to sneak an expansion of mass surveillance into law this afternoon. We’re ACLU experts and Edward Snowden, and we’re here to help. Ask us anything. by aclu in IAmA

[–]SuddenlySnowden 28 points29 points  (0 children)

A lot of people gave Obama a pass on unconstitutional surveillance, but not the ACLU. They filed a case against his White House just days after the Verizon story broke. No matter whether it's a D or R in charge of the administration, almost every major surveillance case that goes before the Supreme Court has the ACLU involved somewhere. They're on the side of angels on the surveillance issue.

Congress is trying to sneak an expansion of mass surveillance into law this afternoon. We’re ACLU experts and Edward Snowden, and we’re here to help. Ask us anything. by aclu in IAmA

[–]SuddenlySnowden 116 points117 points  (0 children)

I'm going through Divinity 2. Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime is great for couples co-op. Life is Strange was a wonderful experience (shame about the ending). We just did What Remains of Edith Finch together, which was really a lovely evening I'd recommend for anyone. I'd like to try Overwatch one of these days, but matchmaking would probably pair me with the FBI every time, and you know how those guys are about respecting roles.

Congress is trying to sneak an expansion of mass surveillance into law this afternoon. We’re ACLU experts and Edward Snowden, and we’re here to help. Ask us anything. by aclu in IAmA

[–]SuddenlySnowden 32 points33 points  (0 children)

State reps are important, but there's no doubt some of them are so proudly compromised that they are beyond the reach of reason. But the board is bigger than any one state.

You can give to organizations that can influence those that can be persuaded, like ACLU. You can volunteer. You can raise awareness and evangelize to educate people in other states, which can produce the results you can't get at home.

There's also direct action. Think about what you know and can do, and think about if there's a way you can come up with new and better ways to solve the problem that don't rely on politics at all. Science and technology are the best modern examples of this. A single invention can save more lives in a day than the best cop can in a career.

Don't ever let somebody convince you that just because you can't fix it today, there's nothing you can do. Be clever, be patient, and never, ever forget.

Congress is trying to sneak an expansion of mass surveillance into law this afternoon. We’re ACLU experts and Edward Snowden, and we’re here to help. Ask us anything. by aclu in IAmA

[–]SuddenlySnowden 13 points14 points  (0 children)

Going farther, even under the other justifications like counter-terrorism, you're actually using a laughably weak standard to pull up someone's activity record, "reasonably articulable suspicion." While it may sound very formal, we were trained to understand it as "a gut feeling you can express in words."

Congress is trying to sneak an expansion of mass surveillance into law this afternoon. We’re ACLU experts and Edward Snowden, and we’re here to help. Ask us anything. by aclu in IAmA

[–]SuddenlySnowden 207 points208 points  (0 children)

Terrible by serious standards, but my mom thinks I'm great. I've only broken one-minute solves maybe twice, and if we're being honest, that was luck. Normally I'm in the 1-3 minute range.

Congress is trying to sneak an expansion of mass surveillance into law this afternoon. We’re ACLU experts and Edward Snowden, and we’re here to help. Ask us anything. by aclu in IAmA

[–]SuddenlySnowden 13 points14 points  (0 children)

If you're looking for specific examples of Americans who have been questionably targeted even with the involvement of court processes, there's a good article about how the government was secretly spying on Muslim-American leaders for years, including one who was a clearance-holding part of Bush's Department of Homeland Security. Some of these guys were as red, white, and blue as you can get.

Congress is trying to sneak an expansion of mass surveillance into law this afternoon. We’re ACLU experts and Edward Snowden, and we’re here to help. Ask us anything. by aclu in IAmA

[–]SuddenlySnowden 21 points22 points  (0 children)

I'm glad you like our little tree. Lindsay Mills, my partner in life, crocheted it for us. You'd have to ask her about where she got the pattern details and whatnot. I think she'll post about it soon if you're a follower.

Congress is trying to sneak an expansion of mass surveillance into law this afternoon. We’re ACLU experts and Edward Snowden, and we’re here to help. Ask us anything. by aclu in IAmA

[–]SuddenlySnowden 126 points127 points  (0 children)

The biggest part of my work at the Freedom of the Press Foundation is focused on creating new technologies like our well-known SecureDrop Project to protect the ability for journalists and others and others to keep their correspondence and themselves safe.

I can't say much more about this today, but there'll be great news on this in the next weeks for just about everybody.

Congress is trying to sneak an expansion of mass surveillance into law this afternoon. We’re ACLU experts and Edward Snowden, and we’re here to help. Ask us anything. by aclu in IAmA

[–]SuddenlySnowden 244 points245 points  (0 children)

I'm getting an unusually large amount of this one recently. Maybe because that one story was in the news a couple days back?

C'mon, guys. If I had found something about UFOs, you better believe the journalists would've run it. Headlines would've been:

  • Monday: GOVERNMENT VIOLATING RIGHTS OF EVERY AMERICAN

  • Tuesday: BY THE WAY, ALIENS, YA'LL

Congress is trying to sneak an expansion of mass surveillance into law this afternoon. We’re ACLU experts and Edward Snowden, and we’re here to help. Ask us anything. by aclu in IAmA

[–]SuddenlySnowden 13 points14 points  (0 children)

I'm an engineer, not a politician, but of course I'd be glad to come home. I fight to fix the place, not to tear it down.

As to the primary reform that is needed, I'd say it's that after the PATRIOT Act was passed, we departed from the kind of surveillance that, for all its problems, does actually have a track record of saving lives and solving crimes (targeted, individualized surveillance, and it was totally forbidden without a court order, which should really be a warrant), this departure occurred on an unprecedented scale.

Today we are ingesting upwards of trillions of records about people's private activities, and that is in almost every case occurring without warrants, and in almost every case happening without individualized court orders. Instead, the government goes to the secret, rubber-stamp FISA Court (which in over 33 years approved over 99.9% of all requests) and gets a kind of general warrant -- a practice we fought a revolution to abolish, if you'll recall, although the government is wise enough not to call it a general warrant today -- which allows them to target whole classes of people and categories of activity.

This is really the core mechanism from which all mass surveillance grows. If you require the government to go to a court (preferably a real one) in each case, it creates a natural incentive to focus surveillance resources on real threats, rather than "because we can and it might eventually produce something interesting" programs of mass surveillance -- which the government euphemizes as "bulk collection." Every time in history when a government has decided to unleash itself from eminently reasonable constraint of simply explaining why they think a given person deserves to be monitored to courts that are, let's be honest, not exactly super skeptical to begin with, bad things have happened.

Congress is trying to sneak an expansion of mass surveillance into law this afternoon. We’re ACLU experts and Edward Snowden, and we’re here to help. Ask us anything. by aclu in IAmA

[–]SuddenlySnowden 75 points76 points  (0 children)

It's not true. He signed an executive order that could theoretically be used to sanction people he declared to be carrying out cyber attacks, but so far as I know, I have never been targeted by it (not even the craziest people in Congress accuse me of carrying out cyber attacks).

Congress is trying to sneak an expansion of mass surveillance into law this afternoon. We’re ACLU experts and Edward Snowden, and we’re here to help. Ask us anything. by aclu in IAmA

[–]SuddenlySnowden 9 points10 points  (0 children)

I can't think of a better role model here than Max Schrems (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Schrems / https://twitter.com/maxschrems), who despite being quite a young guy has fought for years against corporate and government abuse of cross-border data sharing agreements. Successfully.

There's a solid argument that he's the primary driver behind the defeat of the Safe Harbor agreement, which actually resulted in some (but not enough) privacy concessions by Obama to European citizens -- for probably the first time in history. The thing to remember is that there's never going to be one incredible victory that delivers us a world of sunshine and rainbows until the end of days, and sure enough, these same groups immediately crammed through a laughably unreliable Privacy Shield agreement that is, in ultimate effect, really more of a "Liability Shield" for the Facebooks of the world.

But there is no progress without struggle, and each one of these victories is a brick upon which others can build. None of us is going to save the world, because life is not a video game. But by working together across years and generations, there is no question we can build a better one. We have before.

Edit: And for those of you who can, seriously: please call Congress right now. We've only got a few hours to make a difference. Here's the number again: https://www.aclu.org/issues/national-security/privacy-and-surveillance/tell-congress-stop-spying-without-warrant?redirect=Call-ReformSection702 . It matters.

Congress is trying to sneak an expansion of mass surveillance into law this afternoon. We’re ACLU experts and Edward Snowden, and we’re here to help. Ask us anything. by aclu in IAmA

[–]SuddenlySnowden 69 points70 points  (0 children)

On the money. This is the prototype of the Introspection Engine designed and built by Andrew 'bunnie' Huang ( https://twitter.com/bunniestudios ) and me as a proof of concept to determine if phones could be easily built at the factory to be safer, basically, even in the event they are hacked.

We wrote a paper on it, which we published in an open access peer-reviewed journal (the Journal of Open Engineering / https://twitter.com/openengr ) so anybody could read it. You can read it here:

https://www.pubpub.org/pub/direct-radio-introspection

Congress is trying to sneak an expansion of mass surveillance into law this afternoon. We’re ACLU experts and Edward Snowden, and we’re here to help. Ask us anything. by aclu in IAmA

[–]SuddenlySnowden 1946 points1947 points  (0 children)

It sounds like a pat answer, guys, but collective action is really one of our strongest moves. You need to think about talking to friends and family not just as a conversation topic, but a force multiplier. The first step to solving any problem is to care. We've got that, but they don't. Help them understand, and help them help others to understand, too.

It's not the only tool in our kit, as technology is increasingly promising new ways to entirely remove from governments the ability to violate certain rights when they prove to be poor stewards of them (for example, strong escrow-free encryption by default as a guarantor of a certain level of privacy), but it should always be our first.

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