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Comment by stareatgoats | Hacker News Reader

Thanks to Snowden (who keeps on giving, even 5 years more or less to the day after his escape to Hong Kong), we can assume that Japan too conducts dragnet surveillance. It is the state of current affairs that it hardly raises more than a yawn.

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.

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> 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.

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).

It's important to remember that while the NSA is now a household name, it hasn't always been that name. I think until 1975 the existence of the agency was still secret, and even after that it was mostly shrouded in secrecy until the 90s or so.

The joke used to be that NSA stood for "No Such Agency".

Are they governed by law? I'm starting to feel that no one follows the law, or spirit of it at least, unless they have to or can write the laws themselves.

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.

It's worth reading Beyond Snowden which is written by Timothy Edgar, a former ACLU lawyer who got hired into the Obama administration as a PCL advisor and eventually worked at the NSA.

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.

According to the recent update of the Japanese Telecommunications act, its illegal to record the packet payloads without a court order. However recording the headers, e.g. TCP headers if fair game.

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.

Seeing as how the Japanese are so complacent, I doubt anything will change. From the moment you set foot in a public education system here you are taught to fit in, be quiet and don’t question the elders aka authority.

> It is the state of current affairs that it hardly raises more than a yawn.

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.

What’s horrifying is that it seems there’s little anyone can do about anything being disclosed by whistleblowers. Things go on business as usual. I wonder if this will ever make it to the Japanese mainstream media or if the state tv kills this fast.

Clearly they value secrecy over efficient cooperation of the branches, and I'm not sure this is particularly bad for their net contribution to society.

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