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Comment by TAForObvReasons | Hacker News Reader

The article was a response to a guardian article that ultimately cited https://siliconangle.com/blog/2013/06/14/duckduckgo-the-pris...

> “By not storing any useful information, DuckDuckGo simply isn’t useful to these surveillance programs,” says Weinberg. “We literally do not store personally identifiable user data, so if the NSA were to get a hold of all our data, it would not be useful to them since it is all truly anonymous.”

DDG is "unfairly singled out" for good reason, namely that company representatives made an incorrect assertion. DDG is still useful for ongoing surveillance, as the article pondered:

> But what if DuckDuckGo provided a splitter-feed to the NSA? DuckDuckGo can claim without lying that they store no personal information, but that speaks nothing of a collaborating partner storing it.

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Not to get off topic but there's a part of me that suspect the Equifax hack has the NSA (or will ultimately filter back to them). When I read Dragnet Nation a couple years ago one of the things that left an impression on me was the fact that the gov can buy "private" personal data on the open market just like anyone else can. That is, it's not spying (and a violate of right / laws) if the data is on the free market.

Obviously, DDG isn't perfect. I'm not naive. But for me there's some value in trying not to succumb to Google's desire to have us all assimilate.

> there's a part of me that suspect the Equifax hack has the NSA

This is ridiculous. It makes no sense why the NSA or any other members of the US Intelligence Community would cause this sort of reputational damage and nationwide outrage to a company when they could simply walk up to them with one of those fancy national security letters with a built in gag order and take the information with much less of a fuss.

Other than that, I agree. Google should buy me a god damn drink if they really want to get to know me. :)

Ridiculous? Not at all.

In the context of the history of the CIA and NSA it's standard procedure. And that's just the stuff we know about. Certainly Snowden taught us anything is possible, that they have no restraint.

On the other hand, politely asking an outfit like Equifax for (just about) ALL their data with no real reason would be out of character. Why bother? Why go on record?

It's pretty simple. Why would they get via hack? Answer: Because they can.

> Snowden

Snowden, a man who worked from home in Hawaii as an NSA contractor making over $200k a year with his smoking hot girlfriend, who suddenly decided he had a moral compass, was able to download tons of classified files over VPN to his laptops and run off to meet Greenwald et. al. to divulge all this information, then flee to Russia where he sends out anti-Russian tweets.

Meanwhile, nothing has happened. The NSA is still spying. PRISM seems to be something everyone has forgotten about (did it even exist? Most companies denied it). His evidence were all rededicated power point slides.

Question the narratives that are given to you.

What does Snowden's girlfriend have anything to do with... well, anything?

I'm not sure what the poster was getting at - are security contractors with smoking hot girlfriends making 200k a year less credible such that we should explore conspiracy theories?

If so, poor security contractors (and their apparently less appealing girlfriends) with our cynical assumptions.

Probably just salty that Snowden gets to have a hot girlfriend and also be a hero.

This vaguely reminds me of the time a paranoid coworker told me not to store tax documents on the cloud because the government could get at it.

You're missing the point. That is it's possible, if not probable (per books like Dragnet Nation, Snowden, etc.) that data is being collected and you have no idea why, who, etc.

I'm not saying i think that's what happened. I'm saying there's a part of me that has good reason it it's possible it could be that. Crazy? Not more than some of things we know the intelligence community has done or tried to do.

I'm not missing the point. I'm not saying it isn't happening because it's some crazy Tom Clancy plot. I'm saying the intelligence agencies have better ways of getting that data without also giving it to a ton of other bad actors

You should read Dragnet Nation. I'm not talking about bad actors. I'm talking about legit data collection and resale outfits.

We're being tracked. One click/visit at a time.

The accessed data at Equifax are SSNs, DOB and address. Why should the state hack a company to access data they already have? After all, SSN is state-issued and addresses at Equifax will be known to at least one agency (probably IRS).

That's a good question. My reply would be I'm not sure the intelligence community / legal profession can collect and hoard such things without legal approval.

Certainly Equifax has other data. Maybe they didn't get what they wanted? Maybe Equifax isn't being transparent? Maybe they don't know?

That's a lot of maybes to support an already unlikely scenario.

Unlikely? Because in the history of the NSA or CIA there has never been an "No way??!! They did what???"

What do you think the NSA is doing with all that computing (and storage) power? Processing cat photos? :)

>But what if DuckDuckGo provided a splitter-feed to the NSA? DuckDuckGo can claim without lying that they store no personal information, but that speaks nothing of a collaborating partner storing it.

Not to mention they don't need to provide anything themselves. Unless DDG has their own cables to users homes, after DDG connect to the internet backbone and before the user connects to DDG, the various agencies have all kinds of opportunities to get their feeds. It surely isn't SSL that will prevent them.

Can you be a bit more specific on your claim that the various agencies can break TLS?

They don't have to DDG runs on AWS. In theory, court orders could grant access to the underlying VMs via Amazon without DDG even being notified.

They provide a tor hidden service.

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