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Comment by Graphon1 | Hacker News Reader

ok , so DPRK is installing spyware on tablets that are sold in DPRK.

Reading this article, it occurs to me that it's not very different than the surveillance that the NSA is performing on US Citizens, except the NSA is smarter about it and taps the network access, at the network provider.

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Are you joking? We couldn't even have this conversation on North Korean devices. As bad as the NSA might be, this is on a completely different level.

Do you have access to the dprk's intranet, or how would you know?

That commenter doesn't have access to that country's internet. The commenter does have access to many of the rest. That supports the commenter's point already.

I don't know. While there's no literal comparison, I concede, it's possible the OP had a figurative one in mind.

Reading his argument charitably: the Snowden revelations showed us that the penetration of the tentacles of our surveillance is at least an order of magnitude greater than we imagined, and that many things we thought rendered it technically or economically infeasible are in fact quite feasible if the resources of the NSA are thrown at it. More significantly: our surveillance is fantastically disproportionate to the lyrical encomiums we sing to our free society and democracy and so forth. At least in North Korea it's par for the course.

Its only a different level because of the amount of control the NSA has over the technological infrastructure, and the degree of force that can be brought to bear - through multiple independent factions of the US military-industrial infrastructure - upon those whom the establishment deem, through surveillance, to be un-savoury.

You probably haven't been paying attention, but the US Gov't make dissidents disappear all the time. They just do it with a velvet glove on, whereas we're more accustomed to complaining about/being distracted by the heavier hand represented by the propaganda against North Korea.

The US gov't is not as innocent as you might think when it comes to handling dissidents. Its just very, very good at maintaining the facade that its all done 'for the greater good of the people of the United States and its possessors'. The USA is, after all, a PR-first nation.

Are we really comparing the DPRK with the US? This thread has jumped the shark. Anyone in the US could be a dissident -- it's called the first amendment. Unless you are from the People's Republic of Fantasia, there's a good chance your country isn't a shining example of freedom either. But, it seems that the fashion on HN is to complain about the US at every opportunity -- even within an article about North Korea.

This could be a story about Hilter and people would find a way to engage in moral relativism.

The point is that the USA is not the shining beacon of moral authority that it, and its peoples, claim it to be - and before we go off launching yet another military-industrial misadventure to 'solve' the problems of the world, we might ought to use some of those resources locally, at home, in our own - free, so far - societies, in order to improve the lives of our fellow humans.

It makes not one iota of difference if the human lives we improve are in Kaesong, North Korean, or Jackson, Indiana. Does it? Then, start at home: get rid of the NSA. Close Guantanomo. Cancel privatized prison systems that incarcerate more prisoners in the world than any other nation.

> fashion on HN is to complain about the US at every opportunity -- even within an article about North Korea

See "Whataboutism"

> it's not very different than the surveillance that the NSA is performing

Here's one obvious way: the Norks "Viewer" app shows you what they've collected on you which is itself a form of control (though it could be used to hunt for blind spots). The NSA doesn't really want you to know what they know or how they learnt it.

There is a big difference. A compromised device would mean that _everything_ you do is being open to surveillance. Passive taps limits the eavesdropper to rely on either the transport being unencrypted or vulnerabilities in related software. In other words, passive network surveillance will only reliably provide a limited subset of information, such as meta-data, rather then content of the payload which may or may not be available to the organisation undertaking the surveillance.

WhatsApp can't defend against screenshots on your device. The article states -

It runs in the background and takes a screenshot every time the user opens an app.

Perhaps you're not familiar with Intel's management engine?

If you are suggesting that the IME is being used by the NSA to spy on Americans, there is no [citation needed] big enough for your comment.

Not necessarily, but unless every part of the stack is open, how can you truly be certain? For desktops it's not as big of a deal, since you can monitor the network activity through a router. But for a smartphones it seems like it'd be much harder to detect.

EDIT: Active spying might be pushing it too far, but backdoors? It wouldn't surprise me to learn my hardware has a few backdoors.

"How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork." -Orwell, 1984.

There's no concrete evidence of such a thing, but keep in mind that the ME is advanced enough and exerts enough control over the installed system that it can be hacked and a keylogger covertly installed.

Knowing what I know of enterprise coding standards, the likelihood is greater that it is being abused than it isn't.

I might have agreed with you pre-Snowden, but now we know that there seem to be no such limits.

The NSA isn't attempting to control what you do on your devices in any way.

Well truth be told, I think that's a more powerful mechanism of control because it provides an illusion of privacy and control to the user.

As horrible as it is, the censorship provides a means of protection for the end user. In the US we just let people access things, and then prosecute/persecute, them accordingly.

With the above said-- I'd still prefer to be in the US to the DPRK any day of the week, month, year, or century.

Ever heard of the Panopticon [1]? The NSA is a modern, digital, version of it.

There was a time when a person could go online to look up recipes or shop for backpacks [2] without thinking twice about it. Not anymore, Panoptes has eyes on us all. Our minds know this, and in turn, our behavior changes.

I realize that this isn't exactly what you're saying, and living under the DPRK is absolutely worse than NSA surveillance. But, there are unseen repercussions to the death of privacy that are often overlooked, or downplayed. Ahead of everything else, the NSA and the DPRK control our devices by controlling us.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon [2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/01/new-york-polic...

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