Japan's secret spy agency
theintercept.com
theintercept.com
Still an interesting article, since it reveals that the Japanese take their secrecy really, really seriously, and so we may not assume much of what they are up to, really.
The problem with secret government agencies is otherwise generally that they are notoriously difficult to reign in. They are governed by law, but are likely to develop their own agendas, and since lawmakers are kept in the dark they can end up meddling in policy, using all the means at their disposal.
Our ultimate line of defense against such, and only hope are the brave whistleblowers. Edward Snowden needs to be pardoned.
Corporations write their own laws through lobbyists and circumvent it when they can. Top secret agents don't really have anyone they are accountable to since they're so top secrete there isn't any public oversight.
For some reason the secret courts convened to check them (FISA) are just rubber stamp mills too because hey, those don't really have any oversight either.
It really doesn't seem like this stuff will get any better without a ton more oversight. It'll be interesting to see if the Japanese people are more appalled by this and more willing to stand up.
He gives a lot of insight into how things actually work with a deep understanding of the issues and the difficulty around these policy tradeoffs. The organizations do take oversight seriously, but there's still a risk of 'turn key tyranny' and there are improvements that can be made.
It's possible to have security and civil liberties, but you need effective policy and it can't happen in secret.
So its perfectly legal for ISPs and agencies to record the metadata. Then again Japan dosent have freedom of the press and many other things you might expect.
Pretty much all SIGINT agencies do. Maybe 1 in 20 Canadians even knows that CSE exists or what it does. It keeps a pretty low profile, within the limitations that it can, considering that the gross figures for its budget are public and other public info available from outside of classification.
(For the Americans: CSE is the exact equivalent of the NSA, it's been around for a long time and is one of the five eyes partners).
The joke used to be that NSA stood for "No Such Agency".
Do you mean here (roughly US, given posting time and time zones), internationally or domestically?
Certainly, internationally, I would think it should not be a great revelation. We all know / should have known, long before Snowden, that all countries with a decent GDP are doing international spying. Those with a poor GDP still spend great sums to do domestic spying. I don't think the [non]-novelty of it is a fair criticism.
Because, like you say, it is an interesting article. Kudos to The Intercept for a good piece. They could have taken a trivial approach but they didn't.
My criticism is, I wonder how the Japanese feel about it. It's too bad The Intercept didn't gauge that for us. Certainly the Japanese have a different standard for privacy than we (US) do, and different consideration of government.
yes.. it was a bad bad hacker who fueled demand for more money thrown at the defense industry and not someone acting on purpose.
I could go into a long discussion of Japanese culture and the relationship of Japanese society with the government, but... Really, you can't expect any large organisation to act rationally. All such organisations are made up of many, many people all of which have their own agenda. The action that is expressed at any given moment depends entirely on the ebb and flow of internal power struggles. You can't really predict it or reason about it in the same way you might for a single person. It could be anything.
I'm not OP, but I would be very surprised if the attack was the root cause for strengthening their spy agencies. In the United States we have seen time and again that laws for a stricter surveillance are passed with the pretext of anti-terrorism or anti-child pornography; Japan could very well be using such a case to justify their surveillance needs.
It is much more likely that the Military-Industrial Complex used the opportunity to push for more powers and funding. As all Military-Industrial Complexes do all around the world at every opportunity.
If we don't care that they're spying on us all, why would we care about the reason behind the spying?
Your argument is very logical and plausible, but we live in illogical and implausible times.
Snowden whistle blower greatest consequence was the initiative to create The Intercept.
They have a donation page if anyone is interested in helping https://theintercept.com/donate/
Read some of their articles about animal cruelty. The topics and information are great but the writing is littered with opinion and assumption instead of objective journalism.
I couldn't even take two podcast episodes before I stopped listening. They had skits mocking Trump. That's not journalism. That just makes people who like Trump shut down and call your site fake news. Stick to the facts and leave the BS to the bloggers.
... good riddance?
It's like arguing with a conspiracy theorist - you can't get anywhere near a real conversation as long as they're trapped in a feedback loop of defensiveness that makes critical self-examination impossible.
I am open to it - as long as there are compelling arguments made, it shouldn't matter either way. I'll admit I would have a bias against it, since I don't find much praiseworthy about Trump personally or politically, but I wouldn't dismiss it out of hand. But if I did, I would be guilty of the same thing.
If you flip my argument around and apply it to me, then you seem to be admitting that it does hold up, in general terms.
They appear to request processing assistance from NSA, so the most educated guess would be that they know the right satellites to collect from, but are not quite there yet in terms of normalizing and analyzing most of the data.
You can scroll to the bottom of linked article to view the source documents.
Japan always focuses heavily on the physical infrastructure. They meticulously build amazing machines, bridges and grid systems, but don't know what to do with them.
It makes me kinda sad that somewhere in a nondescript office building someone has to wipe the "No documents leaked since 67 years" counter off some whiteboard.
You need real white noise - not very loud, but it has to be random as in not predictable.
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=956894...
"And to prevent sophisticated laser devices from capturing the telltale vibration of his voice on the glass, music played between the panes."
Then you'd have to account for stuff like building sway.
With researchers like Mordechai Guri out there, I'd say the GP comment is solid general advice.
Take small microphone element that captures human speaking range vibrators and connect it to equally small retroreflector. Then you can read the sound from any angle using laser/sensor next to each other. There would be no electrical or radio frequency transmissions at all.
https://www.google.com/maps/@42.858905,141.7240164,913m/data...