From Radio to Porn, British Spies Track Web Users’ Online Identities
theintercept.com
theintercept.com
Want to push a bill through the House of Commons to curb GCHQ's powers? Think again Mr. Politician. Someone might just leak your sexual deviances to the newspaper.
1: You're banging them
2: You want to bang them
3: It's your kid and they're underage.
Considering what his government gets up to, it's completely clear he has no conscience at all.
I don't expect it'll ever change, as by the time someone's made it to high office, then the agencies will have collected enough material to keep them quiet and on side.
If your kid isn't underage, then presumably they are capable of making rational decisions about with whom and to what they consent. And at that point it's none of your damn business.
I like your choice of the word "bug." That's why I come to HN.
The question is whether democracy needs bureaucracy, and if so, how much.
Obviously, democracy requires certain decisions to be made according to certain processes, which take time.
So you can't do away with all bureaucracy.
The documents aren't going to push themselves. :)
This is a classic case of the just world fallacy.
Historically, representative democracy with one man one vote exists because that was the result of the last compromise between the underclasses and elites trying to keep them from getting out of hand.
It isn't any more theoretically reasonable than the compromise before that (no women voting), or the one before that (no blacks) or the one before that (nobody votes who doesn't own property) or the one before that (nobody votes).
Who is experiencing the bias here, the founders of the representative democracy or me for pointing to the political theory? I assume you're talking about some system that isn't the US government, because otherwise your recollection of history is way off.
"Theoretically", we had kings because of the divine right of kings. Theoretically the American expansion was justified by manifest destiny. Theoretically women were not allowed to vote because "90% did not want it" or because it would "place the government under petticoat rule".
Theoretically, today, we have representatives in government because the people aren't smart enough to represent themselves.
Every system of power and domination creates a justification for its own existence and it's nearly always bullshit.
You might want to reserve the use of the word "fallacy" for cases where an argument's logic does not follow. Ironically, use the word otherwise often betrays one's own cognitive biases.
As far as my endorsement, I don't think I could state my position any more clearly than I already have: "...maybe we should reconsider the wisdom in granting some small portion of our freedom to every other voter. 42% of Americans believe in ghosts..."
You have yet to make an argument that "representatives are theoretically there to guard against majority tyranny." If you had, it wouldn't be a just world fallacy.
Correct, I have no interest in arguing that position. Any highschool graduate should immediately recognize "majority tyranny" and the political theory that it is connected to. If I had argued the virtue of representative democracy, it might have been biased by the just world fallacy, but I haven't - so it wasn't.
Also, Switzerland does not vote on every law with a referendum.
But all through history, human beings had some notion of a private space. The catholic confession booth is the only counter example i can think of, and even there it was just between you and you priest which was trained specifically for that role, and you had some control of what you did expose there.
And at least some psychologists ,when asked about this issue, believe that a right for privacy is critical for the psychological well being of people, not something we can give away without consequences.
This CBC series, The Origins of the Modern Public, would dispute that idea (specifically - and I don't know if this is what you are talking about - the positive sense of privacy). Luckily, a nice HNer ripped the mp3s. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2984068
Here's the specific episode (8) on privacy
http://www.cbc.ca/player/Radio/Ideas/Full+Episodes/2010/ID/1...
Regarding age of consent, what if a mature 15yr old seduces a naive and vulnerable 21yr old and causes lasting emotional harm? How is that "none of my business" but the reverse isn't?
What if a 16 year old from England travels to America and has sex with a 20 year old? Is that OK (UK law) or not (US law)?
What you call a revolution sounds more like the way it already is for many people, and is full of arbitrary and changeable definitions that unfairly discriminate against harmless activity while also allowing harmful activity.
No. Some sexual acts are still seemed shameful by society.
Leaning on a politician is an obvious tactic, but it's somewhat heavy-handed. If the politician were to fight back, there could be expensive blowback. Worse, it's a single (or nearly single) point of failure. The bill could pass regardless of the actions of that one politician. A talented blackmailer should only want to directly lean on someone as a last resort.
There is much better tactic: find the people who may organize other people against your interests. If you take out the potential future leaders, journalists, and educators - aka, the people that will organize the writing of that bill - then you prevent the problem before it starts. When the FBI was busting up the hippies, this was known as COINTELPRO. It's laughable to think the program ended with the Church Committee - like "total information awareness", the program was simply split up into various existing programs.
A politician could be idealistic and fight back against blackmail. With social network information, a counter intelligence program can avoid this risk by leaning on the target's friends or family instead.
Last-second blackmail isn't really the best way to defeat a political movement. Compromising the central figures in organizing the movement -- not necessarily "taking them out", but potentially just reducing their involvement or creating some alienation -- when the movement is still young is the way to really stop it.
Before you choose to share information, you're going to find out who will actually use it effectively which implies research. Then once you share the information, you're going to pay attention to what they write with it. In both cases, since you're not doing the actual leak then, you're unlikely to take any countermeasures, let alone effective ones.
For example, odds are Snowden researched Greenwald before he released anything to him. He probably read a ton of his pieces, looked at his wikipedia, and dug into his professional, etc profiles. And then after the leak, he probably continued to check Greenwald's regularly keeping an eye out for the new pieces. Even if we didn't know who Snowden was, a program like this would uncloak* him relatively quickly.
* Or at least narrow down the suspects.
The "digital exhaust" we leave behind is extremely revealing. I usually use COTRAVELER as my example of how just a few data points (without any PII) can reveal a LOT about your social interactions, but browser history is another powerful data source.
I believe this is why Dan Geer, in his incredible talk last year[1], suggested that "privacy" should now be defined as "the effective capacity to misrepresent yourself". To avoid exactly the type of analysis, you need the capability to misrepresent yourself, and you need to regularly be in the habit of use use that capability.
Misrepresentation is using disinformation to frustrate data fusion
on the part of whomever it is that is watching you. Some of it can
be low-tech, such as misrepresentation by paying your therapist in
cash under an assumed name. Misrepresentation means arming yourself
not at Walmart but in living rooms. Misrepresentation means swapping
affinity cards at random with like-minded folks. Misrepresentation
means keeping an inventory of misconfigured webservers to proxy
through. Misrepresentation means putting a motor-generator between
you and the Smart Grid. Misrepresentation means using Tor for no
reason at all. Misrepresentation means hiding in plain sight when
there is nowhere else to hide. Misrepresentation means having not
one digital identity that you cherish, burnish, and protect, but
having as many as you can.
Within the services, this is colloquially called the 'sluts & nuts' file.
I wonder what this query returns: _@_
or: _._._._
And the justification textbox has a default width that accommodates about 7 words.
At one point in the article it says the domain of a logged website is considered metadata but the path (full URL) is considered content. However, this screenshot shows a logged HTTP GET including its full path: https://firstlook.org/wp-uploads/sites/1/2015/09/cryptome.pn...
"When compared to surveillance rules in place in the U.S., GCHQ notes in one document that the U.K. has 'a light oversight regime.'" ... and UK is one of the US's Five Eyes partners, so the US has a light oversight regime, in effect.
At least the GCHQ shows some honest self-awareness in naming their surveillance apps. Karma Police. For a minute here, it seems like the intelligence agencies have lost themselves. http://genius.com/Radiohead-karma-police-lyrics ... I particularly like the last comment on the page analyzing the song, which begins, "This song is about the projection of guilt onto the Other", and concludes: "Prisoners, soldiers, soldiers' victims; these are all sacrifices, onto which we project our guilt, so that we can be saved."
These last few years have really started to wear me down. The indiscriminate mass-surveillance, the savaging of our public services by an obviously corrupt government, the blatent hyprocrisy of our foreign policy, the repeated and unfettered fraud of the City of London financial sector that has yet to see anyone prosecuted or any institution meaningfully punished.
I really hate this place.
The UK establishment are nuts.
Australia? Hmm, wasn't there something about data retention? And maybe Western Australia trying to change the laws so protestors would have to prove that they weren't about to do something illegal when they were arrested?
New Zealand? Baaah.
Aside from lots of sheep, what's wrong with New Zealand?
"All they can do is protect you, so it's against malware or a virus. ... On your computer at home you almost certainly have Norton Antivirus...that is exactly what that is, at a much higher level."
And the good people of NZ decided they didn't mind. Because. I don't know. I give up. It's like the world is determined to make a mess of itself.
[1] http://www.3news.co.nz/tvshows/campbelllive/john-key-defends... (from 8:00 in the video)
Move to Greece. They can't afford surveillance.
At least we have the joys of privatized services now (I'm serious). They are an order of magnitude better than the public railway, gas and electricity infrastructure we had. Controversially perhaps, I've had much better service from the NHS since they moved to a service model.
I'm not ashamed of my identity at all.
Order of magnitude more expensive, maybe. Better? No.
No. Absolutely not. It's much better now. Orders of magnitude better. Every train was late. There were engineering works overruns every Monday and weekend service was so bad you might as well walk.
And no not more expensive. People couldn't afford the train then and regularly took the inferior busses. If you went long distance, it was coach.
Either way you were doomed to a face full of diesel fumes from a Paxman or a Leyland and spend the entire day with your nose running black snot. Incidentally this is what killed my father; he was a bus driver.
The list could go on.
Your shame is proportional to your knowledge, the level of reprehensible action is a constant.
I've never been so ashamed to be British.
I accept our history, I'm not ashamed of it, it's history and I wasn't there.
However I am ashamed to be British for the things we currently do.
There's no legitimate reason why a government needs to know anything about citizens sexual preferences or habits, but such information is perfect for shaming or threatening. I will note that the collection and analysis of this sort of information far surpasses anything envisioned in dystopian fiction or actually practiced by the likes of Stasi/KGB during the worst of times.
EDIT: there were actually a bunch of documents published with this article. I'll check those out then re-comment.
For me as a Brit the UK establishment is the biggest threat to people in the West. I really hope the UK has a big financial crash and the resulting chaos leads to a full regime change.
The UK really scares me a lot more than Isis.
We are in diminishing returns for how much worse our government could be without going outright "pick up that can" authoritarian.
The list of scandals, corruption, privacy invasions and out right shittiness just goes on and on.
To echo the GP, I worry alot more about what the politicians are up to than I do terrorists.
Okay, see, you are just wrong there. I personally know about 5 people who are crazy good programmers (systems programming and all) who have been unable to find jobs. They say they have trouble finding employment because of their age... time commitments (can only put in 40 hours, need to take care of kids), etc. It absolutely is the fact that some of these people take these jobs because they pay competitively and meet with their requirements. I know this because I personally know some of them and they told me exactly this.
it really makes you wonder what sort of people their roles appeal to...
almost all of the mathmos I knew really thought GCHQ would be an amazing place to work, and about 50% ended up there, with the other 50% at quant funds (more or less correlated with religion).
this was of course prior to the Snowden disclosures, I'm not sure it's such a hot place to work these days...
I grew up in the shadow of the doughnut (it was sheds then) and they recruited 'second 11' folks from my school, the ones that didn't get A's. The buy in is that they can pay a mortgage, brings some more kids into the world and not have to leave Gloucestershire. They are all kept in little boxes so none know the big picture, except they believe they are protecting the world from Osama/kiddie porn.
Although no hard evidence, I believe the doughnut people also have everyone's school reports too. Imagine the lengths or procedures in place to do that. Yep, the spy on kids.
I suppose the only way you can do this work is by being delusional, they likely seek the quality out.
Religious zealots fit perfectly the psychological profile of the typical alphabet agency stooge.
They're dogmatic, conformists, traditionalists/conventionalists, authoritarians by nature (more specifically RWA[0]), malleable to chauvinistic rhetoric and propaganda, averse and hostile to opposition's rhetoric and dissenters.
That explains why these folks are attracted to these positions and why those spy agencies seek them aggressively and make no mistake some of them are very bright and innovative but unfortunately their brain is severely compartmentalized and the one chamber holding the religious and nationalist stuff is extremely deficient in terms of mental capacity and reasoning.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-wing_authoritarianism
Who has the courage to shame these people to their face for collaborating in our oppression? It's easy to wax poetic and spit fire on the internet, but it's much harder to actually shun someone standing in front of you.
God knows how many there are doing these jobs.
Also, if you get a reputation for hiring the brightest and best, you also get people who've spent so long being told they're the brightest and best that they may have little concern for whatever lesser beings get spied on, shamed, discredited, disenfranchised during their fun intellectual challenges.
Right, I'm on a list somewhere now! Hi echelon.
And it IS a cult, make no doubt about it!
People who work for these agencies deserve no quarter, and they serve no useful place in a free and open society. I don't view myself as a 'mean' person, and I probably wasn't particularly effective when abusing this guy, but I like to think it's the thought that counts.
Really? Wow. I am concerned at the lack of human decency, the unwillingness to at least conduct a civil dialogue about his point of view. "Breaking" a person is really quite manipulative, harsh, and implies their existing person and personality are 'wrong', and I am concerned that is even considered as a valid action. Even the devil deserves his fair day in court.
FISA? In my dealings with sociopaths, or merely the deluded, nothing sets the record straight like a public calling out on their bullshit.
The softly softly approach with these enablers doesn't work quick enough, unless you meet them regularly. You want the experience to stick.
Jaywalking, sure. Homicide, not so much.
I don't understand why someone would choose to say that the NSA or their workers are innocent, as we have mountains of evidence to their obvious malfeasance.
There is 0 path to justice in holding our government accountable, so welcome to the impotent rage of the masses.
You are mistaken if you think people should only be taken to task within a court hearing.
In any case these guys are never going to court.
The point was to publicly challenge the people that work for the surveillance-industrial-complex. That is simply free speech. The other party has the right to yell back if the desire, or to simply leave[1]l.
All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.
There is a difference between crude or vulgar name-calling/insults and challenging someone with language that is frank, strong, and maybe a bit rude. One is just trying to make people angry and the other is seeking to throw a bucket of cold water onto someone's naive or harmful point of view.[2]
[1] Free speech doesn't guarantee you an audience.
[2] Failure to understand this distinction is why some people perceive Linus Torvalds as being rude and "foul mouthed".
Total Surveillance is a Crime Against Humanity.
If the government were building a device to blow up the moon, would saying "that's what we pay them to do" (due to us paying tax) be a valid excuse?
There's a reason for external oversight and governance - you don't need malice in a large organisation to get a really shitty outcome, just a bunch of cogs in the machine each chasing local optima.
Didn't the US government organisation responsible for security checking millions of employees and presumably storing all kinds of sensitive information about them in the process just have a huge leak?
I have a sense of Schadenfreude about that particular incident from the point of view of a government collecting too much data and itself becoming the victim, but when you look at it on the level of the individuals involved and presumably also their family and friends in some cases, it's pretty hard to see any real upside to that kind of result.
I know you are upset about the spying on private citizens for deceptive purposes, but lets not throw out the good with the bad. Yes, the agencies are overzealous and have overstepped their mandate, but that does not mean every single person working for them is an evil person out to get you. Real people work there, and nearly all of them probably have nothing to do with this. Reform, not harassing innocent bystanders, should be the aim here.
There certainly are problems with the excessive government surveillance -- it is also the duty of a government in any civilised, democratic nation to protect its citizens from itself, after all.
However, it seems unconstructive to go all gung-ho against people who are probably mostly just trying to do some good from what is inevitably sometimes an awkward position. It's like arguing we'd be better without a police force because sometimes bad people manage to become police officers and sometimes their colleagues can't just flick a switch and shut them off, or arguing that we shouldn't invest in military forces because it gives the government the power to kill people from afar and in any case diplomacy is preferable to violence. Those things may all be true, but that doesn't mean we'd really be better off if the organisations with a degree of corruption or inadequate safeguards were eliminated rather than fixed.
This is not intrinsically the case; though modern general-purpose police organizations tend to be paramilitary (however, specialized regulatory law-enforcement bodies with police powers often aren't paramilitary in structure and operation the way most general police agencies working for the same government are.)
So, I don't think this is a situation that is fundamentally not subject to reform, though it might require rethinking fairly fundamentally the role of law enforcement, and redistributing much of what is now the role of general law enforcement agencies into domain specific agencies that are not defined by being enforcement agencies despite including enforcement functions within their domain as part of their brief.
That seems pessimistic.
For one thing, any organisation made of real people is in reality affected by the views of those people. Even if there are some bad spies/cops/soldiers out there, a lot of people who get into that line of work do do it for the right reasons and because they genuinely want to make the world a safer place. If very bad things start happening, none of these organisations is going to universally side with a government that is doing those things.
For another thing, any organisation that requires funding is subject to influence by whoever funds it. As long as someone has to pay PC Smith's salary and there is enough civilisation left for essentials to require money to buy them, PC Smith is going to be accountable on some level because he or she literally can't afford not to be.
For a third thing, any organisation that enjoys special privileges that most people do not have, for example greater resources provided by the state or powers to do certain things legally when they would otherwise be illegal, is always under threat of having their special status revoked. The natural order is that everyone has the same rights and powers and resources, and the only ways that change are either through democratic acceptability as with policing by consent or through an actual dictatorship/police state scenario. And for reasons 1 and 2 above, it is highly unlikely we would ever actually reach the latter, which means the only way the police and security services get to keep doing what they're doing (and the only way the politicians get to keep their jobs) is by maintaining sufficient public support and trust. As we've seen in recent elections, there isn't a lot of that going around lately, so it seems unlikely that anyone wants to rock the boat unnecessarily.
Finally, it's worth remembering that we're talking about Britain here, which means the police very much isn't a paramilitary force in the way that many other countries have. Neither our citizens nor our police routinely carry firearms, for example, and while there are certainly specialist units in the police that do have that kind of equipment, they don't have anything like the numbers or equipment to put down a serious popular revolt. At the end of the day, there are still only 150,000 or so people working for the police, out of a population of well over 60,000,000.
This is why I think we're still a very, very long way from the kind of brutal dictatorships and police states that some people in the world still tragically live under today, and why I think despite the flaws of our various government organisations and the need to be mindful of their power and restrict it appropriately we are still a long way from any point of no return in terms of the balance of power between the state and its citizens. We've just let paranoia after a few high profile but actually relatively minor incidents tip the balance too far towards authoritarian tendencies in recent years -- which is, after all, why it's called "terrorism". At some point, we as a society are going to realise that this just plays into the bad guys' hands and stop putting up with it, and the balance will tip back again.
If anything history has taught us that this isn't true. Oragnisations like the police and army of any dictatorhip get swept up in it and become part of it.
But we aren't starting from a position of dictatorship in the West, nor do we have things like an army formed primarily from conscripts or a police force whose members live in fear of some secret police force hurting their families if they don't comply.
I know my example is a little extreme, but it's kind of what GCHQ and NSA do, too. They use their powers maybe 10% of the time to look for terrorists and whatnot, and then the other 90% to get data on everyone, including people in power that they can blackmail and influence. Don't think this is just a theory. There have been articles in the UK press about MI5 for instance covering up child abuse by politicians because they wanted to blackmail them with that. Enough said?
However, my appraisal of "safety" markedly differs (like most people's appraisals of things) and I am more concerned with an overzealous government than a foreign attacker. I would trade my google search history for a bullet-proof vest if I was in a war-zone. However, I am not, and I don't think giving it to the government makes me safer.
However, people view the risk to the country and themselves differently and they also put markedly different values on their own privacy[0]. Also, this article should come as absolutely NO surprise to anyone in the HN community (or even anyone with internet).
edit: [0] which they use as a framework to assess how others value their own privacy AND the value they themselves put on others privacy.
The point I was sort of facetiously making here was that the people who implement these things don't think about it the way we do. They probably don't feel ashamed and do it out of a misplaced sense of patriotism, power or coercion(if they got caught doing wire crimes).
More granularly, if you believe you are protecting America from a 9/11 scale attack I could certainly see trading away some of your fellow countrymen's privacy.
These aren't my personal views on privacy or security I was making the point that some engineers won't be ashamed implementing this sort of stuff. I am pro freedom and privacy to be clear, and, I wouldn't make the above trade.
Citation?
I've seen articles like this, http://news.sky.com/story/1523821/child-abuse-pm-tells-polic..., but none that give the reason for the coverup as being enabling MI5 to blackmail people.
I agree. Those engineers are just following orders. They bear no personal responsibility at all...
"The standard you walk past, is the standard you accept."
Jacob Appelbaum gave a very interesting talk[2] about a month ago where he specifically addressed[3] this problem (among other topics - the entire talk is worth watching). He even gets a question from someone from the NSA[4] who was in the audience, who also asked about this problem.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QaqpoeVgr8U
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9Xw3z-8oP4
There are definitely a lot of areas that wouldn't suffer from this problem. I'd be surprised if a cryptographer couldn't distinguish between working on civilian signals intelligence vs military (since the first will be using published ciphers).
Any how far does the scope of assisting the organization go? If you work for the FBI in a non-surveillance capacity, are you still part of the machine since the FBI and NSA cooperate on counter-terrorism? Should everybody at the FBI with a conscience quit because some in the organization have taken advantage of overextended surveillance powers?
Also it's not like the UK has conscription into GCHQ.
Does that means mobsters also shouldn't be reviled?
When what they've done, effectively, is surveil everyone including the very people who are supposed to be able to exercise oversight and enact reforms how can oversight succeed?
I for one think the corruption is simply too deep to root out while keeping these orgs intact. They need to be torn down and rebuilt with clear missions consistent with our constitution (in the us), strict boundaries, and oversight. Reform is insurmountable when they still hold this wealth of illegally gathered surveillance data and retain their existing command structure.
The data must be destroyed. These orgs must be broken up and rebuilt so they are fit for purpose. Criminal, not overzealous is the word for what they've done. That in no way makes every person working there a criminal and I don't think demonizing the rank and file is productive or appropriate but we cannot keep watering down the severity of the problem for the sake of their feelings either.
A single 1To hdd may contain 10Ko of information on every UK citizen. So while we clean, we'd better check every single pocket of every employee...
History shows that the only way this is likely to happen is when the revolutionaries storm the building, such as the collapse of East Germany and the Stasi, or the Libyan security files blowing around in the street after the airstrikes.
Then there's the whole business of supplying intelligence to support the policy of invading Iraq, and the mysterious death of Dr. David Kelly. The Iraq invasion made us considerably less safe at the cost of about a million (non-coalition) lives.
But what would we do if we wanted to provide total security? The naive and most popular approach is to give total control to the government. Not secure yet? More control then. Technology is the most promising way to achieve total control yet, and it's actually growing much faster than any global threat.
Anytime I read an article about some spying technology, I can imagine those developers looking at the existing infrastructure and internet technologies, thinking "we can totally do something to control this and that as well". That will actually be the "office culture" in places like the NSA. I know that's how I would think if I was sure my organization was serving a legitimate purpose. My colleagues would agree, and we'd high-five each other about redirecting yet another stream of information into our system. And whenever anyone has any doubts, group-dynamics or -think will take care of that. And if that's still not enough, maybe you need deeper philosophical help? https://boingboing.net/2015/08/11/the-failed-writer-who-beca...
With all those leaked documents, I've not even once heard about any limits. None. There's no "we'd like to know and control much more, but obviously we'll stop at that". If you gave the CIA the ultimate device that could provide them with all the information about every single human being on the planet and would also allow them to kill any individual instantly, they would immediately start using that. They don't want any oversight, they don't want anyone to control them, they don't want to have to respect anyone's privacy. They think they have a certain mandate or duty, and those things are by nature standing in their way of fulfilling it.
These developers absolutely should hang their heads in shame. Because every last one of them should understand that their organizations won't stop for ethical reasons, or deny themselves certain powers which should not be concentrated in the hands of a few people, no matter how well they think they mean. Being a "real person", not being out to get the average joe (but still spying on him), and generally meaning well - that doesn't make you any less guilty. At best it means you're a naive idiot who trusts authority too much, at worst you don't care and just want to play with your cool toys.
The world definitely isn't all roses and sunshine. Just because you think you're working for your country, making sure those who promise to protect it get all the help they could ever wish for and more, that doesn't mean the things you create will actually be used for "good". All it means is that someone further up now has more power than before, and they will use it the way everyone uses their power - to further their own interests. You simply hope your interests and theirs are the same and along the lines of "sticking it to those terrorists", but if history has shown anything, it's that power corrupts. I have zero doubt that those systems will be used against all of us eventually.
Let's be clear here. This is the first time in the history of the world that nearly all ordinary communications by ordinary citizens, globally, are aggressively being monitored. The impact hasn't yet been fully felt by the global populace, but the power of these tools to rig the system and suppress dissent is very large and there is currently no effective check on these powers that is subject to public scrutiny.
there are rogue nation-states and rogue actors
NO! THIS IS NOT HOW A FREE SOCIETY WORKS!
The corruption of government begins with its secrets. A truly free people keep no secrets.
If you continue to justify this corruption, you are encouraging the downfall of Western society. We did not attain the heights we have through secrecy and class warfare disguised as security theatre.
We must discourage involvement in these organizations to the same degree that we discourage teenagers from going on jihad. It is truly the same degree of bigotry and intolerance which allows such machinations to persist in our society - on the one hand, violent extremism. On the other hand: covert extremism.
My former GCHQ-supporting associate recently left, to start his own hardware company in an unrelated (non-surveillance-state) field. As much as I appreciate his design and skill at producing appealing devices (synthesizers), I strongly boycott his business. We must punish this "secret clearance class" of society with utter disdain, disrespect, shame and discouragement. We must not let future generations rise to assume that this totalitarian/authoritarian control system is the norm - it may be too late, but nevertheless, civil discouragement must be perpetuated in light of the total failure of our supposed democratic institutions to protect us from this covert violence.
I've written a small-scale system for VoIP calls, to archive and index all network traffic - it's amazingly useful for debugging. Several years back, on a single quad-core machine with 1 disk, I was able to handle 5TB (several billion messages) of signalling data per day - indexing, archiving, searching. I'm nothing amazing. (I went to SF thinking I could somehow turn this indexing system into amazing profit. First guy I showed says "oh yeah I recognize this, go get <some intro db textbook>". Oops, so much for breakthrough ideas.)
A team of me-equivalents (with some that _have_ gone to school) and a nice budget could end up designing something like these spy systems. They aren't the Manhattan Project requiring new knowledge no one in the world has. I'm no 3-sigma intellect. There are dozens of millions of people more intelligent than me. Complaining about it and shaming engineers will not work against such critical projects.
I wouldn't be so sure - GCHQ recruits heavily from Cambridge and Oxford, and I once met a Mathematics PhD who told me in the UK his two main options for employment were academia or the service. They have a lot of crypto talent there and they're not working on the big data systems talked about here.
Besides inventing public key cryptography?
Replace porn with '*' and now we're really cooking...
1: We should never assume any online activity isn't being tracked by someone.
2: The above doesn't give the government a pass on due process when citizens choose to avoid tracking by encryption or otherwise.
And even if they don't, they won't get a warrant. They'll get a certificate from the relevant politician that'll authorise them to do it.
Jesus fucking christ.
Even though I already knew most of the stuff, rehashing it all over again makes it so much more impactful. Overall, highly recommended for anyone who cares about our world now and in the future.
P.S. The government's idea that by somehow ingesting all of this data and effectively spying on everyone collectively will somehow protect us the helpless citizens sounds pretty bonkers (to use an UK phrase) to me. It's all just wasteful money spending as usual.
Stop the scaremongering.
https://medium.com/the-wtf-economy/we-ve-got-this-whole-unic... - see how useful the assistants can be - people will use them
I mean, personally my initial reaction when I first heard about the early Snowden leaks two years ago was "welp, hope the NSA enjoyed reading all that Tony Stark/Bruce Banner fanfic as much as I did."
I wonder if this "black hole" is backed by a huge HDFS cluster? When I was working in government consulting a few years back I used to alway see job posting at Fort Meade for Hadoop experts, and I know the government is (or was) a customer of Cloudera as of 2009. Incidentally, Amazon created a separate cloud service like EC2 for government data a few years back also I believe.
I assume the NSA must be utilizing Hadoop, HDFS, Impala and/or Facebook Presto - or have a system they built internally but never released that can processing and store data at the same order of magnitude.
If these documents are all true and we assume they are currently collecting more, not less data, then they were in 2012, then they are probably storing more data than Facebook/google on a daily basis
EDIT - i guess the might not be storing as much data as Facebook or google because this sounds like mostly text, no images or video. It still must be a shitload of data though! I also realize that GCHQ is not the same thing as the NSA, but I assume they are doing similar things with similar size data sets
Thoughts?
So do the brits have all my porn records or only the porn I watched in the last 60 days? The article didn't make it clear.
- The Sun[1], can't find a search box
- Daily Mail[2], yes!
- Daily Mirror[3], yes!
- Evening Standard[4], no
- Daily Telegraph[5], no
- Daily Express[6], no
- Daily Star[7], no
- The Times[8], no
- i / The Independent[9], no
- Financial Times[10], no
- Daily Record[11], no
- The Guardian[12], no
[1] uh [2] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/search.html?sel=site&searchP... [3] http://www.mirror.co.uk/search/simple.do?destinationSectionI... [4] http://www.standard.co.uk/search/site/gchq [5] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/search/?queryText=gchq&sort=recen... [6] http://www.express.co.uk/search/gchq [7] http://www.dailystar.co.uk/search/gchq [8] http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/public/sitesearch.do?querystri... [9] http://www.independent.co.uk/search/site/gchq [10] http://search.ft.com/search?queryText=gchq [11] http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/search/simple.do?destinationSec... [12] http://www.theguardian.com/uk/gchq
If you don't want people spying on your porn habits then boycott sites like this. And if you're running a porn site, consider going HTTPS only, turning off access_logs (or purging them regularly), and providing a Tor hidden service.
I always figured virtual geo-fencing of online maps usage was probably a thing.
Also: "MEMORY HOLE"? Someone seriously approved that as a code name?
I'm suggesting a global setting in the browser that means it won't send any cookies to any plain HTTP site, regardless of what the site says.
If enough people enabled an option like this, sites would have to move to HTTPS if they wanted to reliably use cookies, which doesn't seem problematic.
In many cases of the above sites, authenticated requests (ie those with cookies) are made via https and so they would not have otherwise had access to the plaintext version to extract the identifying usernames/etc.
My gut reaction is that HTTPS isn't generally broken (though is probably susceptible to implementation flaws and targeted attacks to e.g. steal a priv. key) or we'd have seen more direct evidence in the leaked documents. That said, given the volume of documents that remain unpublished (or even unleaked), and the time that has passed since they were written, it's difficult to say for sure.
I don't see how, the Stasi was Communist, not Nazi. Perhaps you're thinking about the Gestapo.
An interesting article [1] was published in Nature a few days ago. I haven't read the entire paper yet but the abstract claims, "group-level ability to produce complex innovations is maximized when social information is easy to acquire and when individuals are organized into large and partially connected populations." Imagine the innovations and industries that would be created if all the information governments and corporations are sitting on were freely available.
I hope there will eventually be a broad 'free data' movement. If Google and Facebook are secretly pushing propoganda that privacy is dead (as stated in some conspiracy theory I recently saw on HN), and if these campaigns work, then the public will eventually not mind having their data open and available. But they should mind that it's all locked behind closed doors. Data is power! Do we want these massive corporations or governments to have so much power over the economy? Should they hinder social and technological progress by keeping their data unavailable? I have no answers but I think these problems will grow in time.
[1] http://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms9398.epdf?shared_access...
The first term is used by Jaron Lanier to describe computer systems that, like "sirens" of the sea, lure everyone into their beautiful environs, collect all of the data on them, and statistically model all of this data in ways that effectively master the nature of this individual - her beliefs, her abilities, her emotions - until ultimately that individual is made both completely vulnerable and completely powerless. Lanier's book is intentionally provocative and controversial, while rather intelligent and compassionate in its spirit, and I recommend checking it out: http://www.amazon.com/Who-Owns-Future-Jaron-Lanier/dp/145165....
The second term comes from a talk at Google in 2014 called "Social Physics: How Good Ideas Spread" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMBl0ttu-Ow) by MIT Professor Sandy Pentland. He describes research supporting the recent Nature publication you link to on social and cultural progress, which concludes that our connectivity - free and fast flow of data on networks, people on roads, goods and services across nations, etc. - is our greatest economic and social virtue. His statistical modeling results really strongly show - "like a law" - that the more connected we are, the wealthier we are as a society.
It's really interesting to consider how we could concentrate on using all of the data and models to make deep positive impacts on our society, while respecting our human dignity. To quote Pope Francis's address to the U.N. today: "Integral human development and the full exercise of human dignity cannot be imposed. They must be built up and allowed to unfold for each individual, for every family, in communion with others, and in a right relationship with all those areas in which human social life develops – friends, communities, towns and cities, schools, businesses and unions, provinces, nations, etc."
The US might have a secret court with secret judges but all it takes for surveillance to be signed off on in the UK is the signature of a minister in the currently governing party.
They don't feel the need to justify it legally, especially when oversight is sitting down with the head of GCHQ over dinner and asking if there's anything dodgy going on.
>Mass tracking has been accepted by the high courts
By the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, maybe - but that's not a real court and it's barely part of the court system at all.
Tracking is by definition of an identifiable group or individual. If you can't be sure that the track you are looking at refers to the same individual throughout its length then you are not tracking, at least not successfully. Conversely if you are tracking you cannot reasonably also claim that you don't know who you are tracking except in the trivial sense that you, perhaps, don't know their name or some other attribute; although you could look it up.
Tails?
Good luck to y'all.