skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Australian here. Government departments are slowly starting to catch on to this sort of thing.

One application I work on stores data from DEEWR and FaHCSIA and this year they've "cracked down" on that data going overseas.

The application's data (and the bits we get back from the government) has always been stored in Australia on our hardware. My understanding is that some of our competitors using AWS and Rackspace had to work hard to quickly get their stuff hosted locally (or are in the process of bringing it back here).

You can get an idea of what DEEWR expects providers using cloud services to adhere to from here: http://foi.deewr.gov.au/documents/policy-use-cloud-hosted-so...
> How many liberal democracies can you point to that have gone the way of totalitarianism, mass imprisonment, and genocide?

How many 200 year old liberal democracies can you point to? There's no historical data to look at. This history of the United States itself is an indicator that democracy is self-defeating. Compare the amount of classical liberalism in 1800 and 2000. Whether that can continue past the middle and into full-blown totalitarianism is untested.

> It's not rational to be so worried about government surveillance while giving a free pass to the companies creating a surveillance apparatus that can be abused by corporations.

It's also not rational to give the government a free pass. Don't think that companies can collude with each other. The government can also collude with companies, as PRISM indicates that they have been doing.
The security clearance process basically looks for reasonable, honest Americans free of foreign influence.

If government actors are abusing their power to such an extent that reasonable, honest Americans free of foreign influence feel morally obligated to blow the whistle, then there are going to be more leaks.

It's not a flaw in the system; It's a safeguard against corruption and abuse of the system.
Cloud computing is a trap, warns GNU founder Richard Stallman (2008)
Alot of countries have libel or otherwise stupid laws that criminalizes freedom of the press in the name of protecting privacy. Despite surveillance and the DMCA American laws are very friendly to digital publishers compared to other nations.

Compare Britain for example which has developed a reputation for libel tourism. People of different nations hire a local law firm to file a libel suit on their behalf against local critics. This bankrupts the critics who have to travel all the way to Britain to defend themselves or risk the local government respecting a British damages judgement.
What Android has that iOS doesn't
Being in HK for the summer, I honestly don't get the impression that anybody here cares about this particular issue.
A core principle of politics is that you're responsible for everything that happens on your watch. If you don't believe that, go listen to the past 40 years of broadcasted debates, and count the number of things that the opponent didn't personally do but was called to account for.
So I won't say that RMS is totally correct, but he's not entirely wrong, which is more than I usually agree with him.
Be careful, they might consider it an instruction book.
I don't expect non-Americans to be all that familiar with my country, and vice versa.

But think about it. The NSA has been around since 1952. They now have N billions of dollars of black budget. The relevant Congressional oversight committees are prohibited from talking about what they learn. They are (supposedly) constitutionally prohibited from spying on Americans. If they aren't (or say the aren't) spying on Americans, then they're spying on y'all.

Some of it, plus the rest of it, equals all of it. We're some of it. Venn says y'all are the rest of it.
But as an Australian citizen we have our courts and public opinion to try and fight for us. Not to mention the people doing the snooping have far less incentive to pass commercial information along to a competitor.
Valid nitpick, I saw this on the wiki page, they are indeed up to spec
Depends on how complicated your project is and his skill level
They'll be doing something like the old Echelon trick.

US spy agencies can't spy on Americans, so they spy on Australians, Canadians and Britons. In return, Australians spy on Americans, Britons on Canadians etc etc. Then they swap intelligence and get to claim that "we didn't spy, it was given to us by our allies who are under no such regulations".
Obviously slate.com's journalist doesn't understand how most of Silicon Valley works with recruiting these days and those "top companies" contributing to PRISM's dataset.
No, this sort of thing has been going on long before Obama. If anything he will just be the one that got unlucky enough to be in charge when people found out some of the details.
> And the Executive Branch may request an opinion regarding legality of a law from the US Supreme Court? Correct?

Not directly, no. Article III of the US Constitution only authorizes the federal courts to hear "cases and controversies." That means so-called "advisory" opinions are not allowed by any federal court, including the Supreme Court.

Thus, as far as I know, there is no procedure for either Congress or the Executive Branch to request an opinion on the constitutionality of a law from the Supreme Court. Instead, a plaintiff with standing must file suit alleging harm by the law. That's the "case or controversy" requirement.

Federal courts is a complicated and dry topic, so this is a broad (and somewhat inaccurate) description. If you'd like to learn more, I recommend the book "Federal Jurisdiction" by Erwin Chermerinsky.
"Verax", in exchanges with Post reporter, made clear he knew risks
I'd noticed that too. Given that Jobs seems to have had the juice to get away with signficant and brazen securities fraud, he may have been in a fairly secure position to say 'no' to PRISM. But for that matter Twitter's CEOs, much less mighty figures, also seem to have been able to say 'no' too. Or maybe the rickety state of Apple's Web services (MobileMe and all that) had something to do with it...
There should be a button that lets you pause a particular task from being selected next. I think it would jive with the minimal approach
1984 vs. Brave New World
Your last line is a really interesting one. Most governments probably are to some extent self aware, insofar as there's an executive branch. But I think the self awareness you are referring to is a kind of secretive adaption of sorts, where the response is not aligned necessary with the public interest, but with the interest of those in power (to stay in power).
Why is this on crowdtilt? The financial transaction will be blocked by the US. Use bitcoin.
Snooping Whistleblower: Hero Or Traitor?
Which schedule would that be?
He comes off as a fairly intelligent person in the interview.

The tech community should be the most understanding when it comes to overlooked people who kick ass on the job. Too many tech companies today are focusing on university names, this isn't the way it always was.

Is being nice to Edward Snowden considered aiding a terrorist? The NSA probably just fired off a warrant for the rest of my communications.
it's possible being visible is in his best interest, since it reduces the amount of skullduggery that can be accomplished out in the open.
I've always been surprised so many companies have their servers based in the USA.

Iceland seems a safer place to me from a democracy standpoint.
Oh the irony of using facebook to rally people for this.

You'd think this would help bring back individual websites and running your own smtp/pop3 setup.
Europeans tend to have higher standards for protecting the privacy of the personal data of their citizens from access and use by private corporations.

But what the U.S. NSA is doing is sifting data for connections to foreigners who are suspected of being terrorists. I would be shocked if Euro intelligence agencies are not doing the same thing.
Hong Kong is not the worst choice, maybe even the best of a bunch of shitty options. Given that the US will absolutely seek to extradite (or worse), the biggest factor is who is willing and able to offer at least temporary protection. Small, well-integrated countries aren't likely to fit that description, and China will at least put the brakes on while they figure out what to do, which will take a while.

There's also the fact that China and the US just had an "informal" summit and are having further high-level talks in July.
PRISM: Why You Should Wait To Pass Judgement
For myself, there are a few criteria. First is the visitor test. If my family members comes to visit me, can I give them a week's worth of stuff to do that is nearby, or are we driving over an hour each way to find something to do? Would my relatives in Australia be stoked if they came to visit me, or would they be bummed they skipped over Hawaii and Disneyland? Second, can I easily meet new people outside of work? Third, is there a good bookstore? Fourth, can I do outdoor sports I like, such as bicycling and skateboarding easily, or is it a headache and/or dangerous? Lastly, if I didn't have to work here, would I still live here?

A few places I've lived, such as NYC, Tokyo and Paris, have had all these things, but also a whole bunch of other stuff going on I wouldn't have ever thought of. A few other ones have had all this stuff, but didn't really surprise me in any way, like SF, Boston, Minneapolis, Seattle and Portland. Most places I've been meet some of these criteria, but not all. I found that Cupertino did not have anything on my wish list, and also didn't have any other stuff going on that I wouldn't have thought of. In addition, there was a lot of stuff that seemed additionally negative: driving everywhere, expensive, bad rental properties, mediocre food, etc.
> I'm questioning whether it's wise to store my data in a US service

It definitely isn't, and I'm wondering why this issue wasn't on top of your mind before that?
Enable in-app voice chat for your mobile app
What is both his experience and yours in creating a software product? Are you adding new requirements/functionality each week? If so, stop and lock the 1,2 or 3 tops that need to be launched. Is your co-founder experienced in the areas he's developing in, or is he having to learn on the fly? Many newer dev's have a hard time setting tasks and priorities. However, it can also seem to you that he's doing nothing, when in actuality he's doing mountains of work - which may not be visible to you. Ask him to explain in "laymans terms, like I'm your grandmother" what he's doing each week, and the problems, and ask how it could be made more simple, and easier. Just my 2 cents.
well, he is fairly skilled (or so I was lead to believe), and his main goal has been to just have a working search function that is pulling data from an API, and that's it. A few other developers have said that should take no more than a few hours, so I'm left sitting here saying wtf?
He is safer in the limelight. If he ends up slipping in the bathtub and dying in a tragic accident, the world will be less likely to buy the story.
BCrypt is superior to the SHA family of hash algorithms.

That should be reason enough not to use SHA.
I'm personally most interested in ACLU's challenges about Tor/VPN providers and FAA.
Good luck. I don't see other countries innovating at even half the rate of the U.S. with tech stuff. Leaving the umbrella will be like turning out the lights. It gets boring and cold in the dark after a while.
I'm not sure I follow you.

Americans are, theoretically, in a much stronger position vs NSA snooping. US law is meant to make it illegal for their spy agencies to look inwards and the US Constitution has its famous "search and seizure" clause which can, if you find the right judge, have some formidable teeth.

As Australian citizens we have no such protections and we have no standing in US courts to get any restitution. We're fair game.

Further, as Australians, while we enjoy some protection from our own outward-looking agency (ASIS), the inward-looking agency (ASIO) can and does investigate Australian citizens with a broad range of powers, including powers to intercept telecommunications. Their powers compound of investigation with the Australian Federal Police's powers of arrest, sometimes without cause or notice.

In theory, ASIO requires the Attorney-General to grant warrants to exercise most of its powers. Statistics on the warrants haven't been published, so we have no idea if they're granted begrudgingly or rubberstamped. My guess is going to be the latter -- which Minister wants to the one who was "soft on communism/terrorism"?
They could have worded it as "This report might not include certain requests whose secrecy is mandated by the law, like FISA requests. Google does not confirm nor deny having received such requests."
I think you're probably on the right track because if its a couple months with no useful progress, not even a skeleton of a site, you're probably getting snowed. Then again, if you're actually pivoting he could be blowing you off because he has no faith.
No, it cannot - Federal Courts do not issue advisory opinions. To attain standing there must be a specific act that has taken place (or will imminently occur) that affects the interests of a party seeking to challenge the law. This is the so-called "case or controversy" requirement. See Chisholm v. Georgia, 2 U.S. 419 (1793).
This is exactly the reasoning I've heard from people at Facebook in the past week for why they don't release a transparency report. They said that any report they'd release would be complete bullshit because of these FISA requests.
How were you lead to believe he was skilled? Does he have any completed solo projects?
"Everybody's doing it!" isn't really a good excuse once you turn about 12 years old.
> If not Obama, someone at the head of the table is going to abuse this information one day.

I'd worry less about someone at the head of the table -- who has a lot of visibility and responsibility -- and more about the legion of prosecutors and officers (plus their friends they owe favors to) who all have incentives to catch bad guys... whether they're actually bad, or just barely find themselves on the wrong side of an interpretation of some statute, or just fit the profile.

And of course, the occasional less duty-oriented reasons for making your life difficult.
Well obviously many governments have spies. There's even a genre of entertainment constructed around spies. And generally in the spy narrative the spy is after guys from the other country, not his own.

The revelation here is that if you are a non-American your data that you store via a company based in the US is available to the US government with virtually (maybe even literally?) no protections. And this isn't tin foil paranoia, the US Government just told you that in public discourse.
Wasn't Australia already implicated as a collaborator in ECHELON?
No. It has always been true that federal law enforcement can gain access to your data at Google (or any other company) with a valid warrant.

The revelation with Prism is how it automated that process, and it allowed the NSA and CIA to participate.
True. We know so far that they've limited the original PRISM scope to major infrastructure providers and social media. This is obvious since that would cast the widest net.

As a startup founder, if your operation does get popular enough to catch the eye of the NSA, realistically there's absolutely nothing you can do to fight it. That's how far ingrained the instruments of our own deconstruction are. And they're buried in plain sight in U.S. law. I don't see that changing overnight with a few amendments or acts introduced here and there. It would take an overhaul of the very principles of government we've taken for granted (and quite possibly never really existed).

The fact that we're aware of this aspect of hopelessness will, in the end, be far more damaging to the U.S. economy than any foreign entities being aware of it.

After all, why would American founders found and base anything on U.S. territory if they cannot do it freely and on their own terms? They'd rather found a startup in Hong Kong.
I think the issue for foreign governments is closer to countries not wanting other countries to have easy reach into their data. For them it's not a civil liberties issue, it's a security issue.
He is a web-dev for a local technology company, and has been for the last 3 years. I've been on the business side of 2 startups, but have never been CEO and directly in charge of managing development and overall milestones.

As far as features and functionality go, we aren't adding new features each week. His main goal was to create a search function that pulled results from an API that we're using, and that's it. We haven't been able to plan any other features or weekly/monthly requirements because we can't seem to get past point A.

His excuses have been that he's truly researching the best possible way to do this, but I can't seem to shake the feeling that he is spending too much time on research instead of producing very minimal results.
Nothing new at all, history just repeating itself. Everything mentioned in this article was already assumed by people. I did laugh when they aid we don't do domestic spying. I think they don't know in US how many people in the world are living outside the all mighty US. Maybe it's just bad geography and limited national political thinking.
This seems like a pretty clear case of 9th circuit = best circuit. I personally factor "remaining in the 9th" heavily into my decisions about where to live and work within the US.
If you grow up living in a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon and are repeatedly told it is there to protect you from evil doers not good people like yourself, is your resulting behaviour still truly that of a free person, or has your behaviour been modified?

I live in a rich western democracy which has no capital punishment, torture, extraordinary renditions, executive executions and about 1/5th as many people in prison by population. I don't think it terribly polite to tell friends how to conduct themselves but I feel for all my countries considerable shortcomings, for the most part we conduct ourselves in a way which is morally superior. I continue to be surprised that a country founded on some very high minded principles (equality, separation of powers, rule of law etc) seems to be continuing to develop down a path increasingly at odds with other highly developed democracies and I continue to wonder with a free press and a politically involved citizenry why that should be?
Is it Ironic? If we are trying to send them a message I don't mind if they listen in on it.
He passed away June 5, 2012. I had to double check, because I thought this was "new".

Is there some significance that I'm missing that would put this back on the frontpage of HN?
It thinks I am already a PhD student; funny! Neat. I do daydream about applying for the Computer Science PhD program at Stanford and moving out to the bay area, but then I snap back to my senses and focus on building my company.
You shouldn't be surprised about Amazon. They pulled the plug on wikileaks as a favor, and they give the CIA their own private $600M cloud:

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2013/03/21/amazo...
If I've got nothing to hide, then they have nothing to find and thus no reason to look.
he has a few completed solo projects, and was a friend of a friend, so I was able to spend time with him learning about his skill-set, which I then ran past the CTO of a local company.

It all seemed to check out. I really like him as a person, and I know that he has the ability to build this, but I'm stuck on the management aspect of it. because I'm not technical and I respect the process so much, it's hard for me to know when I need to push harder or let off the gas. Not to mention the fact that he's a co-founder, so that relationship has to look a little bit different than "I'm your manager, get shit done"
None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free. ("Niemand ist mehr Sklave, als der sich für frei hält, ohne es zu sein.") -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
In the same way that Americans are in a stronger position vs NSA snooping Australians are in a stronger position vs our own snooping.
The good news is, if we make this a big deal and companies start to feel the pressure, we'll have millions of lobbying dollars on our side.
The extradition decision will be done at a high-level for someone like Snowden. Whether or not the common citizens of HK care about the NSA hoopla doesn't really factor into it.
The error on Obama's part was to emphasize hacking, rather
than IP theft. On the accusation of government hacking to
steal trade secrets, the US does have the moral high
ground.

That's purely speculative.

(1) We have no proof that the NSA is not also involved in IP theft, because our surveillance programs have no transparency and no third-party oversight. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

(2) Perhaps there is no IP theft, only accusations of such. Or perhaps the IP theft by China are simply isolated incidents instead of some common phenomenon. Maybe the US has been hacking these American companies via Chinese IP addresses so that they can (a) hide what they are doing; (b) point the finger at China; (c) gain public support for "militarization" of the Internet, etc.

If we now look as bad as China does, that is our own fault. We should have taken the moral high ground and abstained from lowering ourselves to blanket surveillance of all our citizens.

The egg on our face is of our own doing.
It varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. You can indeed be financially liable for leaving your keys in the ignition, if the car is taken and a crime is committed.

http://blog.lawinfo.com/2011/06/22/if-you-leave-your-keys-in...
I think the real thing to take home here is that they trusted him and he broke that trust. Who else are they trusting that they shouldn't be?
It would appear that the FISA court agrees with that interpretation as well, correct?
Is anybody else reading this guy's twitter account? He comes off like a massive asshole, and he throws around his PhD like Officer Farva. Is this indicative of the people who run the country's intelligence community?

It feels like they have no sense of perspective for the rest of society; it's like they're saying, "trust us you nerds, the ends-justify-the-means." Do they not realize that this nation is democracy, and the country decides as a whole our course, not just a select few? Wonder what his opinion on Aaron Schwartz is.
Apple hopes to end iPhone product funk
That's possibly because of a few advantages that US companies had due to quicker exposure to leading edge technology. However, when privacy becomes a unique selling point that US corporations can no longer provide - suddenly the competition will see a reason to appear.

I'm on the lookout for reasonably good Google apps alternatives, if they don't exist right now - this is a time that a solid market just got created. I'm sure someone out there will be interested in making it happen!
If they were using facebook to organize a boycott of facebook, then that would be ironic. This really isn't.
The government's position is that both Congress and the courts provide accountability here, and the reason for not being transparent is that they do not want the people who are being monitored to be aware of exactly what capabilities the USA does and does not have.

The rest of your argument is about reality as civil libertarians see it, and not how the government sees it. (Because, after all, they think that the briefing that Congress gets and the oversight of the FISA court is sufficient protection.)