Folks, take a step back and take a look what is going on here. When you were a child, would any of you have believed that one day in the early 21st century, you would wake up in a world where your own government spies on each and every single citizen, plus whoever is connected to them in another country, where they send agents to newspapers to oppress the freedom of the press?
I mean, isn't this almost surreal? Like a cheap sci-fi novel has become reality?
Who's the real terrorists in 2013? I for one am more scared, appaled by what has been bubbling to the surface every week, almost every day since Snowden.
I honestly believe that the "morals" (for lack of a better word) of the UK government haven't actually got any worse over the last 50 years or so - what has changed is that now technology allows so much more so they are quite happy to do it.
For example, in the 1980s there was an almighty fuss because an excellent journalist found out that the UK government had wasted vast amounts of money on a failed spy satellite project - that had Special Branch raiding magazine offices and occupying the BBC offices in Glasgow:
[NB I can strongly recommend Duncan Campbell's "Secret Society" series from 1987 - some of them are on YouTube and they really are scary/tragic - a lot of his concerns are rather prophetic.]
More than a little Kafka. The secret laws interpreted by secret courts with secret opinions being used to secretly murder citizens "legally" without the slightest hint of a trial is solid Kafka. The innocent people held in high-security prison indefinitely on secret charges because it's too difficult to work out a legal framework to set them free are also solid Kafka.
Someone called me 'crazy' today for mentioning the Guardian hard drive story. I wonder.... how many people have blinders on :-(
The thing is I am not convinced the technology is actually good enough to make sense of what they get. They have to decide to look at someone first. This means that it is a way to discredit and jail or worse people who become sufficiently inconvenient to the powers that be.
When I was a child, the President of the United States was murdered in front of thousands of onlookers and the primary suspect was murdered on live television (while I was watching) by a mob hit man. As far as we know, everyone behind this got away with it and got everything they wanted.
I certainly get the "cheap sci-fi novel" feeling reading a lot of commentary on the Internet. But honestly, taking a step back and looking at what's actually happening puts things in a much different perspective and makes comments about living in a dystopian future seem more than a little silly.
Look at the David Miranda situation. The Internet reaction about living in a police state was immediate, but the rhetoric didn't seem to match what really happened (at least to me). A non-UK citizen (as far as I'm aware) was transporting classified information through a UK airport almost certainly for the purposes of releasing that information, information the UK government considers damaging if it was to be released. The information is confiscated, but the man himself is let go. And afterwards, the man's journalist husband more or less openly threatens the UK government with the release of more classified information in retaliation. That's not quite how I remember sci-fi police state stories usually going.
Well, the whole affair sounds a bit like a he-said, she-said. There are claims that Mr. Miranda was a courier and that they offered a lawyer and water during the 9 hour ordeal. The law office, which represents Mr. Miranda categorically denies that legal representation was ever offered to him, for example.
Now, I don't know the truth, but even assuming he had documents they wanted to get their hands on, or files on his devices that they thought pertinent they could have handled the whole thing in 30 minutes max and then let him go on his merry way.
That they held him - almost to the minute - for the legal maximum of 9 hours looks not only vindictive it looks as if they indeed intended to send a message.
Put that into context with other documented occurrences, like the totally senseless destruction of hardware and sandbagging the Guardian into this action (and yes, The Guardian has here more credibility then the UK government, which denies any threats, but that's just me) and we get a whole other picture.
While totalitarian police state may be an over exaggeration , we should be very careful about the direction this is going into.
Assume you're a journalist and suddenly the government(s) have a truckload embarrassing material on you (from Google searches, Facebook accounts, Skype calls and whatever your friendly operating system leaks directly to the NSA's vacuum cleaners) to directly blackmail you.
And no, I don't consider myself a member of the black helicopter faction, but nevertheless find those developments extremely worrying.
If you changed the story to be a known drug dealers wife, it isn't that out of line. Can Miranda clearly say he has NEVER TRANSPORTED leaked documents or known where his partner keeps them? Really? Even more so, can he prove his partner has never tried to use him as a mule to pass confidential information across international borders?
This was just like grabbing a drug dealers wife hoping the drug dealer was just a little too greedy and his stuff in her packages.
The Guardian's lawyer eventually got to see Miranda an hour before he was released.
The Guardian destroyed their own laptops rather than handing them over the to security services (my reading is the security services were concerned about the laptops falling into the wrong hands)
I don't like the way the UK government has behaved but the Guardian is omitting things in it's reports and that leads to questions about its credibility too.
One key part of the story is that the UK government basically accused Miranda (and Greenwald and Poitras) of aiding terrorists by intending to publish that classified information. That's a hairsbreath away from the charge of aiding the enemy that Manning was (just barely?) found innocent of in the US.
I think that defining news reporting to be aiding the enemy is pretty darn close to a lot of what one sees in sci-fi police states.
So a government can apply terrorism law to a person having information that's damaging to its interests?
That certainly looks like police state to me. And I'm not even mentioning the 9 hours detention, not needed at all to recover the damaging information.
Let's say you were the british security services, you didn't like Greenwald, and you wanted to show him who was boss. And his partner was travelling through an airport.
For more than 20 years, the basic message of the cipherpunks and related communities has been that the NSA spends tens of billions of dollars to spy on everything "foreign" that it can possibly get its hands on, and its foreign adversaries are doing the same, so you'd better use PGP (or more) if you want any chance of keeping your communications secret from the government. This is even more true post-9/11 and post-2008 than it was in 1993, milestones that have hardly gone undiscussed in the public discourse about government intelligence gathering.
The M-x spook feature of emacs is not a new thing!
After all, 40 years ago the Nixon Administration sent thugs to burgle Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist, looking to steal medical records that would reveal embarrassing information about Ellsberg. Hopefully _that_ has gotten better and will never be repeated, but this stuff is just not unprecedented in our history and not something an informed observer would rationally disbelieve.
Popular books like "Blind Man's Bluff" document the storied history of the U.S. and adversaries' going to extraordinary lengths to snoop on each other's undersea communications for 70 years. Boeing and Airbus have been publicly accusing each other of profiting from U.S. and French espionage since forever.
I think if you read the 2001 European report on Echelon, and coverage of the 2002-2003 U.S. and British spying on the U.N. discussions of the Iraq war resolutions, and the 2005 New York Times coverage of warrantless wiretapping, and the 2006 revelations of NSA back rooms in AT&T fiber closets, and the 2006 USA Today coverage of the NSA call records program, and the subsequent public outcry, culminating in the 2008 FISA Amendments Act that retroactively immunized the telephone companies for their participation (an Act that then-Senator Obama voted for), all to much controversy and angst in these parts, you would not find the contents of the recent Snowden disclosures that surprising.
I do think the Snowden disclosures have added incrementally to the public understanding and made it much more precise, although in the places where they hint at something more dramatic -- e.g. the PRISM program -- the conflicting statements (and relative silence from Snowden himself) mean that so far we are still mostly in the dark about what PRISM really is or does. The PowerPoint slides are nice but it would be a lot nicer to have somebody who actually knows this stuff, or at the least something more verbose than PowerPoint.
Obviously, the Snowden disclosures also have performed a valuable service in bringing this matter back into the public discourse, because most people do not pay that close attention and probably do not remember the 2001 Echelon report or the 2003 and 2005 and 2006 articles or the debate over the 2008 law and they probably stopped using M-x spook back when Clipper stopped being a threat. And the Snowden slides seem to be causing Congress to pay closer attention to the issue, which is a good thing even if they may not literally be giving the committees any information they didn't already have. And of course the theatrics of running away to Hong Kong and getting stuck in Russia and getting locked up for nine hours in Heathrow and having a newspaper's hard drives smashed by British spy thugs are extraordinary and read like a spy novel.
But if the question is -- for somebody who did pay attention (as an informed amateur outside observer) to the debate post-9/11 about tearing down "the wall" between intelligence collection and criminal investigations, and who followed the prominent discussion in major national newspapers over the last 15 years, would you have believed the recent Snowden materials?
I think the answer so far has to be yes, and more than that, you would have known most of what has come out so far already, albeit with less precision and less certainty.
I'm less on top of the way the U.K. treats their news outlets, but I think the recent stuff is not out of character for them, given their routine use of their official secrets act to suppress information. We're more fortunate in the U.S., partly as a result of cases like the Pentagon Papers that could have gone the other way if things had shaken out differently.
[This thread has summoned up memories of visiting the NSA (well, super.org, which is practically an NSA subsidiary) as a high-school student in 1999 and trying to grill them about Echelon and the Menwith Hill facility, and also about whether they could crack RSA. They were not very responsive to any of those questions, which I guess was good training for the future. In their machine room, they had a CM-5 with all the blinkenlights just like in "Jurassic Park" which was definitely the coolest part of the tour. They said they had a debate about whether they would have to classify the CM-5 blinkenlights (which display, like, the 17th bit of every megabyte in memory or something like that) but apparently they decided it was ok.]
The M-x spook feature of emacs is not a new thing!
I was just looking at the code for that, 5 minutes before I read your comment. It was written in May 1987. A comment near the top says "Help defeat the NSA trunk trawler!". It's interesting how our preceptions of this kind of counter-surveillance tool (primitive as it is) has changed from "OK, man, that's just crazy talk" to "Huh, I guess it really is happening!".
In regards to your first paragraph, its a question I keep wondering. What was different about these leaks then all the previous? Why NOW are people caring?
I mean just having "Super secret spy details" on Powerpoint means its not being handled by "our top people". George Smiley is not carefully placing a glass board under his cipher paper before taking a micro-copy.
This is spying on everyone, passed around like candy at the middle-managers meeting
Its the sheer mundane, ordinariness that has driven it home for me - they are so used to this, so utterly unashamed they put it on Powerpoint. FFS
> just having "Super secret spy details" on Powerpoint means its not being handled by "our top people"
So if it was being handled by the top people, they would have outsourced the documentation to a graphic design company, to generate a super-professional looking PDF?
(Seriously, how do you expect the high level management to communicate with each other?)
I expect them to communicate in person, or over the phone. You use PowerPoint to distribute information to GROUPS of people, which implies it's more than just high level management that will be seeing the PowerPoint.
I took "our top people" to mean "our best people, who understand the severity of what they're doing and try hard to keep it from leaking, so don't just save the info in a PPT".
Which begs the question: what additional programs do the best of the best at the NSA know about?
For me this is important because we're getting closer and closer to a tipping point where complete surveillance (i.e. a full take on everyone) is possible.
That's not possible yet, but it's clear that they are working towards it, and in the case of the UK, they already have almost complete surveillance of all communications for a period of days, and then of metadata for longer. Coupled with the fact that almost every mundane action or movement is now tied to communications (often involuntary) via our phones or other devices, that makes it very hard to escape surveillance. That ambition of a full take has always been there, but only now is it becoming possible, and instead of restraining the security services, it appears our politicians are encouraging them. I'm not sure that they, or we, even understand the implications yet, or what will happen when this data leaks or is misused on a large scale.
Even just the analysis of public internet data (like twitter feeds) will at some point in the future have profound effects, let alone the private data our security services are collecting. Retrospective and yet complete surveillance will I believe be the most dangerous part of these programmes, not real-time surveillance. That wasn't possible in the past, and is only just possible now.
So because of the future implications of a full-take on everyone's life spanning decades and our developing abilities to make sense of all that data in instants, relating and cataloguing thousands of people, this is a qualitative change in surveillance capability, and these leaks have shed light on that in a way that previous ones have not.
I would argue that, in general, people aren't caring.
We are caring; the small band of software and technology enthusiasts who develop software and online businesses. We care. But in the grand scheme of things, people don't care so much about this. In the grand scheme of things we are a special interest group, like Anti-Fracking protesters or Animal Rights activists.
Until I hear my mother or my girlfriend or my old university pal - none of whom work in computing - talking about this issue I really don't expect things to change. The difference between now and then is that we have forums like this where everyone can instantly express their outrage, but I think all that builds is a small self-fueling bubble of outrage that nobody else who lives outside the bubble knows or cares about.
You think Animal Rights Activists and Anti-Fracking Protesters don't care about their privacy? You think they aren't your natural allies on this? They may not understand the mechanisms by which it is all happening, but they are certainly down with the sentiment.
The way I see it, geeks have been complicit with the system for a long time, always under the guise of being "moderates". It's only now that massive corruption is starting to cramp on our style, and the reaction should be much more humble than "we're alone in understanding how bad things are".
Except that technically competent people are alone in understanding how bad things are. Most people simply do not understand computers or the Internet well enough to really grok what these revelations mean. It is not just about the mechanisms by which the surveillance is occurring, but the extent to which is can happen (and the extent to which is likely is happening). Until most people understand the difference between policy and technology -- e.g. the difference between "privacy settings" and encryption -- "geeks" will be the only people who really understand these matters.
Proof. Overwhelming proof. And all of the media reacting on this at once. There have been a few stories about spying before but at best each site ran one story about it and that was it. The next day everyone moved on.
I think both the brilliance of Greenwald/Guardian to launch a new story every few days and the stupidity of the US government when abusing its power to stop the press or Snowden, is what kept this for so long, and hopefully will continue to happen.
It's too soon to tell whether this time will be different -- that depends on whether Congress or the executive branch actually changes something in the end. So far it isn't different.
From the perspective of the U.S. and U.K., the Chinese and Israelies and French are undoubtedly doing their best to spy on as much of the Internet as they possibly can, and they're probably pretty successful at it, so why would we unilaterally disarm?
> From the perspective of the U.S. and U.K., the Chinese and Israelies and French are undoubtedly doing their best to spy on as much of the Internet as they possibly can, and they're probably pretty successful at it, so why would we unilaterally disarm?
From the perspective of the US: It doesn’t really help to assure your so-called ‘allies’ that they are indeed your ‘allies’ and not your vassals if you spy on them to such an extreme. Since you furthermore still rely on said nations for logistical reasons (and being friends with them likely couldn’t hurt anyhow), you might want to scale down your spying to accommodate the public perception. In addition, you’re hurting your own industry, especially service providers such as Google, Microsoft & Facebook, by giving the impression that it is unsafe to provide them with data.
From the perspective of the UK: I never quite got what you want to do, but you can’t expect to be even part of a free trade zone if you spy on the other member states of this free trade zone. This holds in particular if it is revealed that said spying is not necessarily restricted to catching terrorists, but also might get your domestic companies some trade secrets, which really doesn’t bode well in other member states that pride themselves on their innovation. Of course if you want to provoke being kicked out of that FTZ and join the union of your over-seas friends, that might actually make sense. Just don’t expect candy from the rest of us, then.
We should not merely disarm; we should build up defenses so that our citizens cannot be targeted. At the very least people who operate remailers and Tor exit nodes should not have to live in fear of having teams of soldiers assault their homes.
This is a classic problem for governments when it comes to cryptography and computer security. On the one hand it is easy for enemies to take advantage of the poor state of computer security, committing various acts of industrial espionage or shutting down critical systems. On the other hand law enforcement agencies want to be able to investigate people, and computer security systems can hamper those investigations; similarly our own spies want to ensure that our enemies are not able to protect themselves.
I believe it's because of the reporting on the topic. The Snowden case has been high drama, with its recent crescendo with Miranda's detention. If the media hadn't reported on it like it had...
As for the systems themselves, based upon what I've read, I've come to the tentative supposition that their data storage, categorization, and compartmentalization is relatively minimal and undifferentiated. [1]
This would be in line with what we learned about the structure (or rather, lack thereof) of intelligence systems of the State Department and military that allowed Manning to acquire such a broad range of documents undetected.
What I've seen cited of the documents from "agency who shall not be named" appear to describe and show that definitions of and limits upon what is searched for, are largely manually constructed and executed by the human operators performing those searches. "You may search for this OR that, but not both. You may search for this other but only in conjunction (AND) with this other term.
It all reminds me rather of one job I had that involved extensive data mining. I started with a mass of raw detail records and winnowed things down. It was entirely up to me what ended up being winnowed out, and I required both extensive knowledge of the domain and careful and precise execution in order to come up with the correct results.
The whole "unnamed agency" situation has developed rather a similar smell, for me.
As an aside, today when I read about the Manning sentencing, one of my first thoughts was, "Supposing that this prosecution has been 'fair' and 'necessary' (not that I necessarily agree with this supposition), then where is the prosecution and sentencing of those responsible for the criminally negligent design and management of the data intelligence systems he 'exploited'?"
For all its vaunted capabilities, I suspect that data management at the NSA is similarly fucked up, and that there are managers and contractors who should and would, in a fair world, be sent to prison for this.
--
[1] Perhaps with a few exceptions, e.g. for senior government officials and favored members of the private "elite" class, e.g. the C suite and board of Goldman and the like.
> When you were a child, would any of you have believed that one day in the early 21st century, you would wake up in a world where your own government spies on each and every single citizen, plus whoever is connected to them in another country, where they send agents to newspapers to oppress the freedom of the press?
-would any of you have believed that one day in the early 21st century
no I always thought it would be at one day in the late 20th century. Probably because my parents had found and bought me in comics "1984" and the "Animal farm" when I was a kid
Coming from a country where this was the norm only 20 something years ago, I never had any thoughts that it would be otherwise in US or anywhere else basically.We were on the edge of Iron curtain, why would I think cold war main conflicted parties would live within their borders without mechanisms such as this, albeit toned down? Cold war never stopped, it switched objectives from war to control and finance.
I listened to an interview with the Home Secretary, Theresa May, yesterday. She explicitly stated several times that she had no say in the Miranda's detention as it was a police matter. Odd, then, that she is responsible for the secret services and it is MI5, not the police, who are the primary in all anti-terrorism investigations.
The police in the UK do have sufficient independence to arrest against the Home Secretarry's wishes and MI5 have no arrest powers they normally get the Special Branch of the Metropolitan Police to do the arresting I believe. However I think that if she had politely suggested that they be careful not to stretch anti-terror laws to far that they would have probably listened.
I mean, isn't this almost surreal? Like a cheap sci-fi novel has become reality?
Not surreal but I ask the HN community: will this ignite a hacker revolution against the government(s)? At one point the different governments are in a weaker situation since there are a huge amount of cybersecurity attack vectors against them.
I guess if you ignored the decades of reporting on the NSA and recent items like Echelon, Carnivore, Total Informational Awareness, etc you might be a little surprised. Or the equivalant programs in Germany, France, England, Israel, Australia, Canada, etc that have also surfaced.
Governments of some kind are needed as soon as you have a large enough population. Our ability to cooperate and peacefully resolve our problems breaks down when there are too many people involved. At the very least we need courts and agreed upon laws, or else we will just splinter off into little gangs that start killing each other whenever there is a disagreement.
The problem here is not the existence of a government, but the specific government that we have. Here in the USA we have soldiers enforcing our laws, and a legal code that can and frequently does turn a routine traffic stop into a multiyear prison sentence. The major political parties in this country are united in their support for this tyranny. In addition, we have spent decades ceding more and more power to the executive branch and creating a government that operates behind a veil of secrecy.
For the Americans here, I propose the following: be brave, vote third party and risk "the other guy" winning. In exchange for a few years with the wrong lizard in power, you will have sent a strong message to the major party that thought it could count on your vote. If the major parties do not learn, eventually the third parties will have so many people voting for them that they will replace the major parties. Either way we will have made progress towards repairing our government.
I was born in '91, and grew up under the Internet, and from a very young age (3?) I realized everything that was leaving my home on a network connection was easily recorded and monitored. I never assumed otherwise. Anything I don't want my Internet provider, government, or hostile snooper to know I just don't put online.
I don't think I ever expected any less, since I was raised knowing the horrors and atrocities of the last hundred years between ww2 and the treatment of the Japanese and the cold war and the treatment of pretty much everyone.
Huh? The whole facility, and the brilliant minds working there, existed entirely to enable the successful decryption of Axis transmissions. If that's not "spying", I don't know what is.
When you were a child, would any of you have believed that one day in the early 21st century, you would wake up in a world where your own government spies on each and every single citizen...
A child with a proper education in history would not have been surprised. Nor would a child with a proper education think it was perfectly fine to have the institution of government so intrusively involved with the education of children.
When articles like this are submitted to HN, can we have a discussion on what us as individuals can actually do (if anything)?
I'd rather drop 100 comments on general FEELING towards the news, for 1 or 2 comments suggesting 'Let's create a campaign site' or 'There is nothing we can do, lets just sit here in silence'
Edit: For what it's worth my ONLY suggestion is that a campaign site similar to that for SOPA, etc. is put together - ideally on GitHub or similar so it can be rapidly put together.
Google was founded on the principle of "Don't be evil", it has the power and influence to effect change, and it helped lead the charge against SOPA. Why is Google so silent now?
"He who has the ability to act on an injustice, but who stands idly by, is just as guilty as he who holds the knife."
How Google handles this will be its defining moment.
This is could be an opportunity for Google to win the world over by showing it truly stands on its principles, or it could be its downfall, destroying its credibility, losing the trust of its users.
Maybe Google is working behind the scenes putting a game plan together, or maybe it's getting something out of the situation -- let's hope it's the former. Like Eisenhower said, "A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both."
You might as well have said, "Dear God, please save us!"
Sorry, but you won't be saved by any corporate entity; they're in bed with the surveillance state anyways. It is people like us, yes, you included, who have to take up the baton and run with it.
Here are things you can do:
- Talk to your non-techie friends, and bring them up to speed
- Explain to them why "giving up rights for temporary safety" doesn't work
- Tell them why this sort of surveillance is against the core democratic principles this country was founded on
- Suggest to them that they should vote out any politician who supports such policies. In the end, it is the Congress' job to keep checks and balances; and they've failed miserably. Time for all of them to go.
Corporations hold more influence with Congress than voters. Google has enormous power, but it lives and dies by its users. If we hold Google accountable to the point it has to act, its lead could trigger a movement among the Internet giants, and that's a mighty big lever.
> The truth of the matter is, corporations hold more influence with Congress than voters.
Corporations are convenient fictions. The truth of the matter is individuals with lots of money and connections hold more influence with Congress individuals without lots of money and connections.
Google's mission statement is: to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.
It isn't to fall on it's sword and risk the entirety of the company fighting the US government on principale. I'd argue that doing that putting out of work tens of thousands of people in the worst case would "be evil".
I didn't say corporate lobbying was a fiction, I said corporations as independent entities are a convenient fiction; corporations are tools through which individuals exercise power, not real entities that have power of their own.
'Google was founded on the principle of "Don't be evil"'
I wish people would stop quoting this. It means nothing, and is not binding in any way. It sounded good, and it was a great marketing slogan - but it means absolutely nothing in reality.
"Don't be evil. We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served — as shareholders and in all other ways — by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains" -- Google's 2004 IPO Prospectus (http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~hal/Courses/StratTech09/...).
Binding or not, it's a social contract, and it could mean the world if Google stands by it.
I've got my own very grave reservations about the company, but it has done some good stuff. I'm hoping we'll hear from them eventually. Truth is, much of The System is the way it is because the various participants have one another by the balls.
Organize a local event - add it to the list - don't be afraid that it is small, even if not many people come locally - you'll be a part of a global crowd.
I don't really see a solution, and I'm assuming that nobody else does really. Citizens and foreigners (like me) have equally little power over what their governments do, just a mild decision between two parties come election time. The general population seems to be apathetic about it all, I don't think I know a single person who has any opinion other than the tired "nothing to hide" line.
That's close enough that the right application of pressure, work and money would have made a difference. Perhaps in the Senate it would take other numbers, but no one said it'd be easy.
Indeed, it's not. It'll take hard work, time, and money.
Comments like yours are a complete and total waste of time - they accomplish nothing other than to suck energy out of people who might otherwise do something. I helped to get a law changed - every so slightly - in Italy, which is not an easy place to do politics. Tons of people basically laughed at me for even trying, but here it is: http://www.governo.it/Notizie/Presidenza/dettaglio.asp?d=690... - it's imperfect, but it's progress, at least.
I'm not much of a fan of political articles like these on this site, but this poster at least has the right idea. Instead of hyperbolic, sophomoric babbling about how the US is "a terrorist state" he's asking "what can we DO?". That's the right first step.
In terms of the 'nothing to hide' line, turn the thing on its head: if Snowden had that kind of access, think how many other people there are who could be paid to spy for the Chinese, Russians, or simply competing US companies. What if politicians lean on them to spy on ... [insert some movement the individual identifies with]. With very little oversight, it seems. You can't trust people when there are no checks and balances.
Sounds like we need a campaign against the "Nothing to hide" line. You could probably point out to them that there are so many laws now, they probably broke 10 of them before they left for work in the morning.
The path that seems to have worked best for me is to start with the argument that you can't have a democracy if the incumbent can spy on the opposing candidates to help dig dirt and that this data can and will be used for non-terrorist uses. The typical response is that they trust that they wont use it for non terrorist uses, to which I reply with the sharing of data between NSA and the DEA to arrest people as well as now the Miranda case.
That could work in a full conversation, but it needs to be packaged up more for our sound-byte/online-comments/tweet culture. You could circulate a hashtag on twitter like #things2hide to get popular conversation about it going.
We need more "leaks", especially of the kind that shows the politicians who repeat the "nothing to hide" line, that they themselves have plenty of things to hide ... So perhaps it's time to start digging through the private lives of some politicians.
"When articles like this are submitted to HN, can we have a discussion on what us as individuals can actually do (if anything)?"
I think we need to start explaining the privacy/surveillance issue and how the advent of powerful technology makes universal surveillance possible and, as others have commented, rather banal.
As one example of a possible 'hook':In the UK, there have been reports on the extent to which ordinary police officers are using the National Police Computer for purposes unrelated to police work (checking out boyfriends/girlfriends for instance). I imagine the potential for misuse is much higher with the comprehensive capturing of data from all communications. That might get people thinking.
As a peaceful protest / 4th Amendment exercise, please consider attaching an encrypted file with EVERY email you send from now on. It's easy enough to do using TrueCrypt. It needn't be a file the recipient needs to decrypt, or keep. You needn't even remember the password. If everyone did this every time they send an email to anyone, it would flood the Internet with literally millions, then billions, of encrypted files, thereby demonstrating our resolve to maintain some level of privacy, and protecting most if not all of us "fish" in the "school" from the "sharks" who prefer to eat us one at a time (a la Edward Snowden and Ladar Levison). When fish in a massive school move together in coordinated ways, it frustrates predators. If this idea seems worthwhile PLEASE COPY AND DISTRIBUTE
This accomplishes three things. 1) It makes you familiar with encryption for when you actually need it. 2) It increases the cost of surveillance and 3) It gives you an opening to discuss the topic with non-tech friends when they ask about your gibberish attachment.
This is taking quite a scary turn, but not, I think, in the direction that the governments are intending. Rather than intimidate people into silence they are actively creating a movement of people who are abhorred and appalled by these tactics. Kick that dog enough times and you're going to create an organized movement that can fight back. This is how unrest happens.
What I don't think they realize is that the dog they're kicking is also the most technically capable one on the planet. They're not poking Al Qaeda with a stick, they're poking every programmer and hacker who cares about privacy with a stick. While they may have unlimited financial resources, I would pit unlimited technical resources and creativity against that any day of the week. If they manage to create an organized group of highly technical opposition I think they're going to be very surprised by how capable it is.
"While they may have unlimited financial resources, I would pit unlimited technical resources and creativity against that any day of the week."
They are the ones with unlimited technical resources. You don't have armed drones nor biological nor nuclear weapons. You are an hostage like everyone else. You might as well accept that fact for now and just enjoy life.
I have to respectfully disagree. They have unlimited financial resources, which translates into unlimited storage capacity etc. But NOT (IMO) unlimited technical resources in the sense of brainpower and creativity. When I say technical resources I'm referring to the ability to create new tools.
For example, I know for a fact that a large number of intelligence tools are written on top of open source projects. That base did not come from the technical resources of the government (in most cases) but rather the collective ingenuity of the hackers and programmers that built it for various reasons. You can already see projects springing up with the intent of circumventing government technical oversight. This is going to result in an endless game of technical whack-a-mole where one side is motivated by a paycheck and the other is motivated by ideals and the desire for liberty.
I don't see "Them" ceding any power or capabilities. Nor do I see any long term solutions to this situation that don't cause worse problems in the future. Which is a shame, since there are other serious issues that will continue to be neglected till things do get really worse. Call me cynical, but I've read too much history in my life.
I'm all for OSS. I believe this is going to cause a lot more people to take it and security seriously.
> I know for a fact that a large number of intelligence tools are written on top of open source projects
I don't see how that's really relevant, at all. Did you expect the USG to continue to use Windows instead of Linux for everything? Of course they're going to use tools available that others create. It doesn't mean they don't have unlimited resources. They can easily hire extremely intelligent and creative technical minds (we're talking about the NSA here, come on) and unfortunately, IQ does not mandate a specific political view. This was hard for me to accept, but there are some people much smarter than I am that hold very different positions on things. (Edit: To my knowledge, they are wrong, but caused by operating from different priors than I have.)
You're deluding yourself if you think that somehow the only good tech people are going to be "good guys".
"Here is David Miranda explaining to BBC what it's like to be forced to turn over your passwords to security agents who have detained you under a terrorism law, so they can troll through your emails and Facebook account and Skype program while you are detained. Just watch that short video and judge for yourself."
As I read this I tried to imagine how to reset my digital life, now that all my passwords are exposed. You just about have to become a brand new person, and abandon every account you currently have. Any change to a current account would be observed by the NSA and GCHQ. To the extent that this guy had any privacy or security at all, he's screwed for the rest of his life.
They already were reading his gmail, if he still used it.
What they may have got were his PGP keys, which presumably he was using to talk to his boyfriend. I doubt however he had any real stuff on his laptop. That would be insane for a reporter who seems to have been as careful as Greenwald.
Nope, straight forward intimidation. I cannot imagine how they thought it would work, so either we assume the security services are incompetant, or there is some other cunning plan. Sadly the latter is very unlikely these days.
The difference is low-level thugs were able to get access rather than the automated collection services operated by the GCHQ, so now low-level thugs have his passwords.
The most salient point is how regular individuals are authorized to receive user passwords, and they're able to use them too. The article clearly states that the low-level thugs checked his email within his presence rather than him communicating the passwords to more secure individuals.
Forced, how? Threat of detention beyond the 9 hour window?
If so, it's easy to speculate I would call their bluff and refuse. But in the situation, probably not so easy.
What about using a hidden volume in TrueCrypt for plausible deniability? [1]
I suppose that would work effectively for documents. There's no plausible deniability for stuff like Facebook and Gmail. They can easily see if you gave them access to the real/full thing, or not.
However given the revelations David Miranda of all people would have to assume his Gmail, FB, et al have _already_ been compromised.[2] So the only interesting, still-private stuff would be any documents.
"The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIPA), Part III, activated by ministerial order in October 2007, requires persons to supply decrypted information and/or keys to government representatives. Failure to disclose carries a maximum penalty of two years in jail."(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_disclosure_law#United_Kingd...).
TrueCrypt is no escape if they have reasonable suspicion there is a hidden volume. And you will have to prove that there isn't one.
There are people who've been planning these things all along, just to give you a hint:
“The technotronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society.
Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values.
Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen.
These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities.”
Author:
Zbigniew Brzezinski, United States National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter from 1977 to 1981.
If you think there is nothing that can be done you should take a look at Gene Sharp's theory of nonviolent resistance: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_Sharp
Gene Sharp is excellent, I am reading From Dictatorship to Democracy.
On the subject, I think the biggest problem is how to make people understand how serious this is, make them see that the similarities between what is happening and totalitarianism and even fascism is to disturbing.
Today I was speaking with a friend about faceCrap and he just doesn't care about it, he doesn't even try to get properly informed and said that no one would do anything against him because the information he shares is not relevant. I tried to explain the problems with the greed ones controlling the information (hence truth) of the planet, the political and economical advantages it brings to people that doesn't care about society and how his data could say a lot about him but at the end he told me I am paranoid :).
So the political problem we are facing, in my opinion, is a consequence of lack of interest and even selfishness.
The policy of intimidation is working - it doesn't matter if the NSA/GCHQ really do have the technology which is actually capable of performing this scale of surveillance - something which I'm entirely unconvinced of, incidentally - they are spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) and being quite successful at it too. Are they capable of trawling so much data to the depth that is claimed? Probably not. Are they capable of intimidating individuals with wide reaching knock-on effects including among the general public? Absolutely. So which method is having the most impact? The threat is far more effective than the reality. Make people scared - it saves you having to actually do anything.
Lets condemn places like China, Russia, and Syria for they way they limit or monitor electronic communications but when the US and "Friends" do it its for mumble mumble TERRORISTS mumble mumble....
If the laws don't allow us to monitor our citizens lets just change the laws or interpret the words differently.
Except the US and friends aren't really "doing it" in the same sense that China, Russia, etc are. Those countries develop powerful surveillance capabilities and use them to target political dissent, among other anti-democratic things. Nothing that's been reported about the US comes even close to that sort of usage.
If FISA makes it illegal to discuss who is getting threatened via secret court orders, how would you remotely know if there are or aren't any chilling affects?
This is an important part of this argument. When we make it illegal to discuss the crime, the warrant, and have secret court proceedings, you can't just sit there on your high horse and tell us there is no abuse. You are not allowed to know of any abuse.
While not specific to NSA programs, the US gov't at the city, state, and federal levels have targeted political organizations, including infiltrating such organizations and tracking the movements of members in such groups. For examples see the information about spying on leftist groups for the 2004 Republican National Convention or how the NYPD targeted and helped dismantle occupy wall street last year.
The US and friends may not be openly targeting and censoring political dissent yet, but clearly the first step is developing the capability. If they develop the capability in an environment without any meaningful oversight or accountability, true abuse is one simple step away.
Hell, they may already be using it for political purposes. How would any of us now barring a whistleblower exposing it? That is why this situation is so dangerous.
Just pay attention to the messaging coming from some of these media sources. The gov't propaganda is growing less subtle; making it easier to identify who is working for whom.
Government is us, when stomach tries to fight with brain over trivial details like food you or giving, amount, quality and so on. One day brain will kill stomach with all the control mechanisms, it dies too.
"For the benefit of all".
We already live in virtual reality where most of the things we do is just to numb our perception. Nothing to do with advancements in energy, space travel, consciousness. Going where no man has gone before.
And we lough and down talk anyone daring to, so we create spying/regulatory system, government that picks oddities and puts them in place. It works well, very well, so well that now we are stuck in place where we want to be, beer Fridays, pizza Saturday, sunny ice cream Sundays, something to look forward after week long slavery you hate so much.
It is so complicated and weaved trough all of us and all out needs/wishes/predicaments.
To long and want something, you create opposite situation that makes that "something" so amazing.
Sometimes I wonder, what would take this organism(humanity) to evolve/change. Searching for health(happiness) in cancer(fear)? Or total annihilation for something else to come in play.
Almost anything can be crowdsourced nowadays. 237 years ago, the founders of the US tried to crowdsource power. I don't see why we can't reboot that whole idea.
Political candidates, lobbying initiatives and legislation can all be directly impacted, in the current framework they exist under, by crowdsourcing. While Kickstarter and Indiegogo have shown us it's possible with art and industrial design and dozens of other media, there's not a go-to place to do it for politics.
So if this community really wants to change our dystopian future, then that's the answer. We could have the NSA completely defunded in a year if we wanted.
Presumably, the Snowden leak files are distributed among Guardian employees. In order to insure against the destruction of all copies of these files due to a worst-case scenario, wouldn't it be a good idea to distribute the files globally? If the Guardian wants to maintain control of the divulgence of leaks, they could encrypt the leaks as a series of files in a bundle and distribute it over, say, BitTorrent. They could then release the key to decrypt each leak file as they see fit.
The British government looks like a farcical bully in this. A playground bruiser that intimidates his way down the hall before promptly slipping over.
Destroying the hard drives was an exercise in dominance, 'do as we say or face the consequences' which had no impact (aside from inconvenience and the cost of a couple of Macbook Pros) to The Guardian but has made the UK .gov look foolish.
Pulling Miranda, abusing the terrorism laws, sending a message is another dominance play but it's back fired awfully. Brazil is annoyed, GG is annoyed, America has calmly washed it's hands and said "leave us out of it". In terms of strategic decisions it can't be described as an excellent one. What's the UK .gov gotten out of it? Some encrypted data and social network passwords, it's not a win.
If you're in the UK and you think this is unacceptable for our government to be trying to intimidate the journalists who're revealing the uncomfortable level of surveillance we now live under, and what the security apparatus has become, then write to your MP. That's what they're there for. We can't just hope that it'll surge through the halls of Parliament, we need to be heard that we think it's not acceptable and not representative of what we want Britain to be.
Honestly I don't think the "write to your MP" action would have any result, for me this is just another tool to make people think that Democracy is being exercised, anyway, I am not saying that you shouldn't do it, please do it, but don't stop your actions there because it is just not enough.
It's a piece of the puzzle, it's a way for them to know what the concerns are and they can choose to act or ignore. You're right, it shouldn't just stop there but people should shout from every rooftop even if it's potentially ineffective.
Of course, remember that the Guardian was perfectly fine with the government harassing journalists
It's fairly simple:
Journalists who break the law to bribe police and others for information, hack voicemails of private individuals, and intrude on the privacy of individuals should be punished. These things are not in the public interest, there is no excuse for doing them just to make money by publishing the (often prurient) details of someone's life.
Journalists who shed light on what the state is doing (even if that means publishing secret documents), if they can argue that is in the public interest, should not.
Of course there are some grey areas between the two, but the constrast of Murdoch's News organisation bribing policemen and the Guardian publishing stories based on top-secret documents from a whistleblower is an edifying one I think.
Reporters are not immune from the law, despite the rhetoric coming from the Murdoch press. The police investigations into the News Of The World and The Sun are about clearly criminal behaviour: bribing police officers, harassment, phone and email hacking, theft and perjury. There was very little 'public interest' in any of that illegal activity.
Most of the Leverson suggestions were about correcting a power imbalance between normal members of the public and the media/government elite. Making it easier for ordinary people to seek reparations from a newspaper is not 'government harassment'. Requiring papers to print retractions after being proven wrong in a court of law is hardly the same as the prime minister personally ordering the destruction of computers, confiscation of equipment and detention of journalists to prevent reporting about an issue.
While dare say the Guardian isn't perfect (not that it's relevant) I would distrust anything coming from Spiked, a magazine whose modus operandi is to be contrarian on every issue. They are, in effect, professional trolls.
"Spiked" used to be "Living Marxism", which was the magazine of the Revolutionary Communist Party. The RCP members I used to know (only a handful) would revel in their own inconsistency - so since the demise of the RCP I can fully understand Spiked carrying on that particular tradition.
Another way to look at it was The Guardian was perfectly fine with consequences being meted out when people were illegally invading the privacy of others.
The Press Regulation Scheme is in no way similar to the use of MI5 and police resources to interrogate an individual who ,for all in intents and purposes, seems innocent of any terrorism related crime. I see no conflict here with the Guardian's stance on these issues.
The US government spying on citizens is not new at all. It has happened for as long as our nation has been one.
It may be more insidious now because the technology to aggregate spying on "we the people" is available. Welcome to the truly post-privacy era.
Furthermore, the average person is not outraged by this. Cue the shock and awe for one to ten minutes after the biggest breaking stories about it and after that, for the common (wo)man, its all yawns.
Plus, it is quite a dilemma. How does the government protect against terrorism while trying to protect the citizens' privacy when a citizen, or anyone moving among us citizens, could be a terrorist or sympathizer?
The intent is not bad but what could come of this kind of stealthy access is bad if it falls into the wrong hands or becomes guided by ill-intent.
>The US government spying on citizens is not new at all. It has happened for as long as our nation has been one.
The mission and organisational capability of the government as changed dramatically. Nations in the late 18th Century (1776+) didn't have intelligence agencies per se. Some had military intelligence that was focused outward and they had various figures and organisations that would informally engage in domestic espionage usually in an extremely targeted fashion. Remember that formal police departments didn't exist until the 20th Century. Most of what we think of as the Government didn't exist in your Great-Grandfathers time. None the following existed in the US in my Great-Grandfathers time:
1. Intelligence agencies CIA/NSA/CSS/NRO,
2. Dept. of Defense,
3. Welfare,
4. Police Local, State, FBI, DHS,
5. FDA (Drugs were unregulated),
6. Income Tax/IRS,
7. EPA and consumer protection agencies,
8. Public Education in its present form,
9. Federal Reserve Bank
The US Federal Government was the Postal Service to most citizens. It is really important to understand that we are living at the height of Federal power in the history of the US.
The closest thing that Europe pre-18th Century had to the NSA was the Inquisition and it was more focused on "investigation".
"sending a message" == getting you to doubt, think twice == instilling fear == creating terror == being a terrorist
Fighting terror with terror. How can it be that no one in the UK government agencies responsible for this can see the irony? How can it be that they don't understand their actions are degrading society just as much as those of the terrorists?
If they do succeed in "shutting the leaks down", I wonder if that would be enough for supporters to finally release all the docs publicly. Or for Assange to give out the key to one of his insurance files.
I wouldn't get my hopes up though, these so called leakers seem more stringently against full pubic disclosure than the people they are leaking against.
I could sense anger wash all over Mr.Greenwald again, as he typed that one out (which might have resulted in the typo I noticed "...They threatened the Guardian with prior restrained(t?) and then forced the paper to physically smash their hard drives in a basement..."). Heck, I was upset just reading it.
Yet the picture shows a (PCIe?) extension card, which can not be found in Macbooks. The green PCB isn't a Macbook part either. And no part of a HDD is shown at all.
The one good thing I see is that cross-party-lines anger by some politicians is actually happening. The party leaderships are fighting it but for once they might be powerless to stop it.
Straw man. Nobody argues he's above the law. They argue because:
- The law is to detain suspected terrorists, nobody thinks the UK believed he is a terrorist, so they were abusing the law;
- If, as the UK government now says, they just wanted any electronic devices he had so they could see what he was carrying, that would have taken less than an hour to confiscate them and ask for whatever passwords Miranda had, not the close to nine hours they held him.
Nobody is above the law. I am sure the reason Miranda was travelling from Berlin back to Rio and not Greenwald was that Greenwald knew he would be detained and thought perhaps Miranda would not. But just like Miranda is not above the law, neither is the UK government. If they misuse a law to harass and intimidate then they should be held to account.
There's always some jackass journalist who thinks they should take the other side, no matter how contrary to the facts, to get some attention. I am just surprised it's at outfits like The Telegraph and Reuters.
>I am just surprised it's at outfits like The Telegraph
I'm not sure why. David Cameron could literally murder a baby on live TV and Dan Hodges would describe it as a 'political headache for Miliband'. Nobody takes him seriously; his columns are just fodder for Telegraph readers looking to confirm what they already believe.
Not to mention all the wacko conspiracy theories about climate change that they print.
> There's always some jackass journalist who thinks they should take the other side, no matter how contrary to the facts, to get some attention. I am just surprised it's at outfits like The Telegraph and Reuters.
Why would you be surprised? It's a given that NSA and friends have people to write stories for them on "reputable" sources. No need for jackass journalists.
I mean, isn't this almost surreal? Like a cheap sci-fi novel has become reality?
Who's the real terrorists in 2013? I for one am more scared, appaled by what has been bubbling to the surface every week, almost every day since Snowden.