Al Gore And Tim Berners-Lee Condemn NSA Surveillance: Appalling And Unconstitutional
from the and-one-of-them-actually-invented-the-web dept
There’s the famous (incorrect) meme out there that Al Gore once took credit for inventing the internet (he didn’t), but it does appear that he has one thing very much in common with the guy who actually invented the web (which, of course, is not the internet), Tim Berners-Lee: they’re both absolutely disgusted by the NSA’s surveillance activities. Al Gore slammed the NSA in a speech in Montreal, saying that the NSA’s activities were “outrageous” and “completely unacceptable.” He even went so far as to say that Snowden “revealed evidence of what appears to be crimes against the Constitution of the United States.” Furthermore, he took on the oft-repeated claim from the NSA and its defenders that they need to collect all the haystacks by quoting a scholar on the CIA: “when you are looking for a needle in a haystack, it’s not always wise to pile more hay on the haystack.”
Meanwhile, Berners-Lee gave an interview with The Guardian, in which he similarly ripped into the NSA and the GCHQ for their efforts to weaken security standards so they could crack stuff more easily themselves:
He said the agencies’ decision to break the encryption software was “appalling” and “foolish”, as it directly contradicted the efforts of both the US and UK governments to fight cybercrime and cyberwarfare, which they have identified as a top national security priority. Berners-Lee also decried the move as a betrayal of the technology industry.
He went on to argue that the oversight of the intelligence community appeared to be “dysfunctional and unaccountable,” and praised whistleblowers like Snowden, saying that civilization has “depended on whistleblowers, and therefore you have to protect them.”
Filed Under: al gore, nsa, surveillance, tim berners-lee
Comments on “Al Gore And Tim Berners-Lee Condemn NSA Surveillance: Appalling And Unconstitutional”
Obama phone call to Al Gore in 3…2…1
Pity Mr Berners-Lee would not condemn DRM in HTML5.
You are correct Al Gore said:
“During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet.”
This is a heck of a lot closer to what he said then the Sarah Palin quote of “I can see Alaska from my house”. Which she did not say either.
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It’s no closer than the Palin smear. Gore-haters take that line out of context to give them a cheap shot (and lie in the process). In context, he was talking about legislative initiative, not technical, and his statement is accurate.
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False equivalence.
It IS closer than Palin’s claims. Gore has indeed been a tremendous help to the development of the internet during his political career.
Source: Snopes, with a full debunking of Gore haters
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I meant that the claim that Al Gore said he invented the internet is not closer to being true than the claim that Palin said she could see Russia from her house.
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John Fenderson is correct, and those of us who lived through that time, when it wasn’t at all certain that the various networks we’d built would ever interoperate cleanly, are grateful for what Gore did. He had the vision to see the potential in our work — scattered and disjointed as it was — and to see that it got funding. That, as much as any technical innovation, was essential.
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Misunderstanding 😐
Re: Alaska
I’m pretty sure Sarah could see Alaska from her house, as that’s where her house was sitting. What she couldn’t see from there was Russia, but as you say she never claimed she could.
Still glad that she’s not your VP though. A scary thought.
But it's not just NSA. It's corporate surveillance systems TOO.
“Former security advisor Mark Rasch, an attorney who had worked in the Department of Justice?s cyberfraud department during the Clinton administration, and was writing for Security Focus, raised a very interesting problem. If Google could search through and read your email without explicit legal authorisation, then surely the security agencies could do the same.“
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/07/google_nsa_intercepts_the_register_forecast_9_years_ago/
You kids are not going to be able to separate and protect your precious Google while condemning NSA. Logic requires to recognize that all spying is the same: its purpose is social control. And particularly since every bit of info that Google or Facebook or Apple or Microsoft gets, NSA will get too, every piece that fails to mention the co-conspirator corporations is both wrong in practice and lying by omission.
And whoever gets money by selling info obtained without any actual legal basis to do so: a supposed agreement that I can’t stop except by foregoing the net entirely is not only NO agreement at all, it’s force and fraud, then you too are in the conspiracy, and will one day regret your small part in helping the fascist state take over.
The phony deal that evil people (and gullible fools) try to force on us: You can’t have the benefits of technology unless give up all privacy.
08:05:13[j-26-4]
Re: But it's not just NSA. It's corporate surveillance systems TOO.
This is a better argument than that “what’s with all the barges in the harbor huh??” rant from recently.
I agree. But, although I pretty much despise Google, there is one difference which doesn’t lessen the problem but alters the contract: the fact that they’re often very willing to fully inform the idiot who uses their service that he/she has no expectation of privacy, because they will be scanning their shit.
One can and should avoid Google, but as with all monopolies, they’re hard to ignore and evade. We need a distributed, FOSS, peer-to-peer alternative for Google. A sort of “Seti@Home” but for search indexing.
Now, you seem to have some obsession with Techdirt for not sufficiently taking Google to task for their involvement in this (and I admit their “fuck you NSA” PR move was ridiculous) but from where I sit, Techdirt is doing an awesome job reporting on all of this. And I’m taking the entire media landscape into account, because I’ve been following this closely.
Re: Re: But it's not just NSA. It's corporate surveillance systems TOO.
We need a distributed, FOSS, peer-to-peer alternative for Google. A sort of “Seti@Home” but for search indexing.
Already exists.
http://yacy.de/en/index.html
Re: Re: Re: But it's not just NSA. It's corporate surveillance systems TOO.
I had hoped for a response like this =)
Although I did expect there to already be something like this, I don’t think I knew this project. But.. we also need it to take off and eventually overtake Google.
I’ll try to do my part. I’ll check it out. Thanks for the link!
Re: Re: Re: But it's not just NSA. It's corporate surveillance systems TOO.
Sadly i tried this in the past even letting it run on a pair of reasonably powerful servers. It required too much babysitting to run under Linux. Kept crashing.
Why in gods name Java. A great idea murdered…..
Re: Re: Re:2 But it's not just NSA. It's corporate surveillance systems TOO.
Why in gods name Java. A great idea murdered…..
Yeah, I agree about the Java. I’ve had to mess around with a bunch of the default settings in YaCy to keep it from sucking to many CPU cycles and bandwidth.
I keep hoping someone forks a compatible version in some other language.
when you are looking for a needle in a haystack, it?s not always wise to pile more hay on the haystack
well, yeah, unless it’s the hay you are interested in and using the specter of needles as justification.
Crimes against the Constitution and American People, indeed.
Of all the points to focus on in comments...
…the Gore Palin stuff is what you chose? What happened to the readers who used to have intelligent insights? I guess the sock puppets got wind of TechDirt a couple of months ago and have taken charge. Sad. Pitiful. Adolescent.
Really think Gore would have done any better?
It’s because he did not become president that he can say this.
Al Gore did not invent the Internet.
Al "Clipper" Gore?
Is that the same Al Gore that promoted the Clipper Chip? You know, the encryption scheme that would have guaranteed that the US government would have had access to every encrypted conversation?