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Comment by 1024core | Hacker News Reader

Since when did the NSA become the copyright industry's police? There were no security implications of Kim's operation; why was he targeted by the NSA?

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If you remember the Snowden revelations, then you also remember that the NSA had been using their power for other then "legal" purposes, such as for economic espionage, and for a long time already.

The US intelligence apparatus exists to protect the interests of the citizens of the United States. A foreigner who violates millions of dollars of intellectual property belonging to American citizens and companies is a threat to our interests, and also of the interests of the nearly 200 nations that participate in the global copyright regime, whose copyrights he was also violating. Foreigners on foreign soil have no rights as far as US law is concerned.

You are right, or something resembling right, as regards Kim Dotcom in relation to the US.

But there is still something troubling here for Americans, because it means that there is an existing mechanism (and/or set of social relations) in place by which American copyright interests can turn the intelligence agencies into their servants. Once such machinery exists, it is at least as dangerous to Americans as it is to foreigners.

I am not usually in the "if you have nothing to hide..." crowd, but this isn't some kid in Minnesota who downloaded a Metallica album. This is someone who created a business enterprise to circumvent US law. This is someone who pulled in tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars from this business. For a time this business was the single biggest source of pirated content in the world. All of this was done basically in the open. If this guy was an American citizen I doubt there would have been any resistance to getting warrants for this information. The slope would have to be very slippery for it to get to the level that the average American citizen would be the target of this type of investigation.

> someone who created a business enterprise to circumvent US law

Kinda like Uber? rim shot

But I'm still kinda serious. Your whole comment works if you swtich "pirated content" for "unlicensed, unregistered taxi service"

If you truly wanted to dig through my comment history, you would find numerous posts criticizing Uber and AirBnb for basically establishing businesses on ignoring the law. However there is still a difference between feigning ignorance of the law and turning your middle finger up at it like Kim Dotcom did.

That are a vast number of laws that are designed to enrich one party at the expense of another. They are nearly always portrayed by the captured regulators as being for the safety of the citizenry when actually they are primarily for the purpose of enriching themselves and their cronies. One could argue that it is every citizen's duty to circumvent or directly violate those laws in the interest of fairness to all citizens. One could go further and assert that supporting such laws is immoral since as a result many people lose freedom of choice, freedom of speech, freedom to associate or move about, have reduced access to knowledge and opportunities, and the list goes on.

The ideals behind your post are great, but can we not pretend that Kim Dotcom is Rosa Parks? There is a difference between civil disobedience in which your comment advocates and profiteering from breaking those unjust laws.

Airbnb and Uber certainly broke some laws that were only put in place to protect monopolies. I think that is good for society. But they also broke plenty of laws that were legitimately for public health and safety. I don't think the former absolve the later and I don't think it is up to you, me, Airbnb, or Uber to decide which laws fall into which buckets. That is the job of our judicial system.

I don't think the former absolve the later and I don't think it is up to you, me, Airbnb, or Uber to decide which laws fall into which buckets. That is the job of our judicial system.

Strongly disagree. The 4th branch of the government should be called "public outcry". If corrupt laws are on the books, trusting ivy league-trained judges to fix it is foolhardy.

I acknowledge your distinction between civil disobedience and profiteering. But a further nuance is that effective civil disobedience may in some cases require a for-profit activity in order for it to become significant. In this case I am more on the side of Kim Dotcom than the MPAA and RIAA. And that is separate from the fact that they were able to use their influence to take down Dotcom in the way they did, an armed raid on his home using scores of law enforcement.

I disagree that it is not up to each citizen to decide which laws are just or unjust. In fact I feel it is the duty of each citizen to do so and to actively work for/against laws that one considers just/unjust.

AirBnB and Uber didn’t make a business out of stealing other people’s property and profiting from it.

Everyone in an Uber or AirBnB transaction is a willing participant. Huge difference.

Don't forget youtube. People seem to forget the years that it was almost entirely piracy.

Uber isn’t stealing the property of others. There isn’t a federal law that you must have a taxi medallion.

Owning a taxi medallion of declining value is a consequence of the market.

Having songs you have recorded, spent money marketing on be stolen? That causes financial harm to the artists.

Imagine spending 40 million to make a movie. Now have your work given away for free to anyone that wants it. That is theft.

An unlicensed “taxi” service isn’t harming the rights of innocent people. It isn’t stealing. Who are the actual victims of Uber (besides women employees?) Really nobody. If you own a taxi, nothing is stopping by you from driving with Uber. Uber isn’t stealing your car.

So what happens when a US citizen starts publishing stuff China (or Russia, or the UAE, or England, or any other state that doesn't protect free speech as we do) doesn't like?

What happens in 40 years, when the US is on much less-firm footing as de facto World Cop?

> So what happens when a US citizen starts publishing stuff China (or Russia, or the UAE, or England, or any other state that doesn't protect free speech as we do) doesn't like?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Satanic_Verses_controver...

Didn't take any US precedent.

Never forget Thucydides' wisdom from 2500 years ago, as true today as then and as in 2500 more years:

"Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must."

Tying our hands today will do nothing to help us when we are the weak and someone else is the strong.

Of course, acting with moral authority extends the lifespan of leaders, because such leaders get more support than the nakedly self-interested. And thus tying your hands today does in fact put off the day when you're weak.

It is up to a government to protect its own citizens. There is a reason why Kit Dotcom is fighting the government of New Zealand currently and not the US government.

I think it is unrealistic to expect the US government to willingly give up one of their citizens to China or Russia over an issue of free speech anytime soon. And frankly I think it would be irrational for the average citizen to fear they would be involved in such an exchange.

> Foreigners on foreign soil have no rights as far as US law is concerned.

Except for, you know, treaty rights. Which there are a lot of.

And it is indeed incorrect because the constitution and the bill of rights do apply to foreign citizens who are visiting the us. Of course there are laws which are designed to protect citizens but don't protect foreigners but they are not actually part of the constitution

> protect the interests of the citizens of the United States

Namely the RIAAA and MPAA in this particular case.

And the artists that make the content. RIAAA doesn’t actually own copyrights – artists and labels do.

(Un)Fortunately they have the tools that others want to use, so other agencies request info & access. Very similar to how the FBI manages a database of faces for facial recognition [1] and your local LEO can query w/o a warrant or probable cause [2].

1. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/06/smile-youre-in-t... 2. ...I'll try to find the link but recently watched a YouTube video of a government hearing on this where the senator or congressman was very unhappy about this situation.

>(Un)Fortunately they have the tools that others want to use, so other agencies request info & access.

The bigger thing there is the fact that a kind of well orchestrated "operation" took place is now proven, disclosed, and fully admitted by NZ officials. The info disclosed gives a lot of background on how US NSA solicits "favors" from other states and on what pretexts

You phrase it as if this is a daily occurrence, "other agencies request info & access". In Germany, when intelligence agencies merge with ordinary law enforcement, we call it Gestapo.

There should be by definition very little overlap between the two. Law enforcement works nationally, where law applies; intelligence agencies can not work where law applies, because they would be in flagrant violation of it.

> "In Germany, when intelligence agencies merge with ordinary law enforcement, we call it Gestapo."

Who is "we" in this context? At least in the Germany I know most people actually call this "Gefahrenabwehr" (literally: danger prevention) or "Staatsschutz" and can't remember any historic event which has shown that this is a bad idea.

If right-wing terrorist join the party people call it "Nationalsozialistischer Untergrund" (National Socialist Underground) [0]

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Undergrou...

I'm more interested in how much corporate espionage and counter-espionage they do. If a foreign company steals/hacks domestic IP and that hurts the US economy, I wouldn't be surprised if they took action. So, if we can agree that this type of action is reasonable by the NSA, then I could see them justifying the surveillance of Kim Dotcom under industrial counter-surveillance.

It's not just protective. Snowden indicated that part of what they consider national security involves economic security. In their interpretation, their mandate includes corporate and economic espionage, and ensuring that the US maintains its economic edge.

See:

Spying on Petrobas, a a Brazilian oil company: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/09/nsa-spying-bra...

Spying on an EU Anti-trust official: https://www.cnet.com/news/nsa-spied-on-eu-antitrust-official...

And there are a number of cases where the NSA spied on payment processing companies. I haven't included those because you could argue that those may be related to tracking terrorism funding.

Economic security is national security. You can't really separate them once you're thinking past the immediate short term. A richer enemy will have better weapons, better technology, better surveillance, and better leverage.

The agency's existence is politically feasible because people see it as protecting them from terrorists and foreign governments. Peforming spy-work to marginally improve the bottom line of American companies doesn't really stack up on that scale; even if you beleive the beggar-thy-neighbour economics that it implies.

And even if we naively assume some economic gain to the US, isn't that outweighed by the cost of their own war on encryption and instence on backdoors and other meddling in the ordinary functiong of the US tech industry?

> Peforming spy-work to marginally improve the bottom line of American companies doesn't really stack up on that scale

That's laughable. The Russians and Chinese have made a gold mine out of ripping off America's military and commercial technology. The cold war would have been very different if the Russians/Soviets hadn't stolen the US (and allied) technology on the atomic bomb.

It's neither naive nor some economic gain to be had. It's blatantly obvious and it's vast. If - as one example - China is really going to be a serious long-term competitor to the US economy (and its technology interests) over time, and it certainly appears they are, then the US needs to be capable of advanced economic espionage, exactly the same as China has been doing to the US on their way up. If they come up with some new marvel of technology (it's bound to happen given their economic scale at this point), the US should plunder it exactly the same as China and Russia would happily do to the US.

>The agency's existence is politically feasible because people see it as protecting them from terrorists and foreign governments.

I don't think the US public really cares about the privacy of foreigners against US intelligence agencies. Further, it's not just some marginal benefit. If piracy became user friendly (think Netflix or better) and easy to do with impunity, it would be a massive threat to the entire American creative industry. No one is under the fantasy that we can root out piracy altogether.

> Economic security is national security. You can't really separate them once you're thinking past the immediate short term. A richer enemy will have better weapons, better technology, better surveillance, and better leverage.

Economic security for the well-connected comes at the expense of economic security for the average citizen.

It gave economic security to Ford Motor Company when a law imposing 30% tariffs on all foreign trucks was passed. Did that give economic security to the average citizen though? They must now pay a massive tax every time they buy a foreign truck.

It gives economic security to about 12,000 Ford employees and their families in Dearborn, MI and Kansas City, and probably another 50,000-100,000 people in supplier and supporting roles.

I thought this was common knowledge long before Snowden, it's been a core responsibility of intelligence gathering agencies from the very beginning.

You are assuming they are. This Dotcom clown could say there were aliens in his bedroom, would be compelled to believe that?

Something surely went on between the NZ Key government who were negotiating for the filming of the Hobbit. The studio seemingly found that massive tax breaks weren't enough, and it's been suggested that the curtailing of Dotcom's efforts was part of it.

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