Hacker News Reader

Comment by Synaesthesia | Hacker News Reader

The US government is somewhat accountable to the public. Their spying agencies however are not. They never have been, have always operated in secret. The public certainly wasn’t consulted on the mass surveillance program.

View on HN

The mass surveillance was a result of the wide sweeping Patriot Act after 9/11. There has never in US history been a single intrusion into our civil liberties more than the Patriot Act. In specific, Section 215 is what allowed the bulk collection of our records.

Luckily, it has now expired and was not renewed. Some reading on this very controversial section:

https://www.csis.org/analysis/fact-sheet-section-215-usa-pat...

https://www.eff.org/cases/section-215-usa-patriot-act

> The mass surveillance was a result of the wide sweeping Patriot Act after 9/11.

As if the three-letter agencies never tried to cripple encryption before September 11th, 2001...

But it got demonstrably worse afterwards. It went from a quiet thing to a well funded effort, all in the name of "defending 'merica from terrorism". GW Bush and his admin enacted the law which Obama just made worse.

While I personally wasn't around in the 90's, I believe we're yet to see anything on the level of the Clipper chip and nineties' crypto wars in general in the 21st century. Or maybe they've learned to hide their activities better, but that's a bit of a Russell's teapot.

In the Snowden leaks, BULLRUN said they were secretly weakening every cryptosystem they could even in standards. The Core Secrets leak also said the FBI was "compelling" U.S. companies to "SIGINT-enable" their systems in secret. The groups doing this also operate secretly with effective, criminal immunity. Such a situation is way worse than them pushing an obviously-backdoored chip that we could've all spotted and worked around.

Their diffie hellman hack, and router 0 days are everything they wanted out of the clipper chip.

What diffie-hellman hack are you referring to? I'm curious.

https://thehackernews.com/2015/10/nsa-crack-encryption.html

https://weakdh.org/imperfect-forward-secrecy-ccs15.pdf

Basically, for about $100M per prime (probs cheaper now), you can pre compute a big table that you can use to decrypt the diffie hellman exchange. From there you have the negotiated private keys, and you're off to the races for a full, real time decrypt. Since before the Snowden leaks, there wasn't the public thought that the choice of primes for diffie hellman mattered really for it's security, most implementations hardcoded the prime. Something like 92% of the top 1 million https sites were using the same 2 primes, and similar numbers of VPN and SSH implementations were vulnerable too.

So for a one time cost of ~$200m the NSA was able to decrypt the vast majority of internet traffic as long as they caught the diffie hellman exchange at the beginning.

The spying agencies are as accountable as any other agencies. They do what they do at the behest of the public's elected representatives.

Did the Senate ask the CIA to spy on them?

"An internal investigation by the C.I.A. has found that its officers penetrated a computer network used by the Senate Intelligence Committee in preparing its damning report on the C.I.A.’s detention and interrogation program. "

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/08/01/world/senate-intellige...

Congress can vote to get rid of the CIA, or stop them from spying. The CIA exists because of an act of Congress and at the pleasure of Congress, which consists of elected representatives .

You just gave a non-answer to try to avoid answering it. Public agencies such as the CIA are politically armoured against any attempt to get rid of it. These organizations aren't accountable nor are they at the service of the US congress.

The CIA was created by an act of congress, and can be disbanded by an act of congress. That is ultimate accountability. Any other level of accountability is at the will of congress. These are basic facts of how the government works.

Maybe we'll know 50 years after everyone involved is dead. As your own article points out, the senators certainly had the power to hold the CIA accountable. The fact that they did not do so despite making angry noises in public can only be properly responded to with the thinking face emoji.

Exactly. Sure you don't directly elect them but they still face public scrutiny because nobody wants to be the swamp that some senator makes campaign promises to drain. Every few years (not nearly often enough IMO) an agency learns that lesson the hard way.

ICE is currently that swamp, CIA, NSA, FBI, and the VA are still dealing with the fallout of that loss of face.

>accountable

You do know they have the worst dirt on everyone right?

A downside of constantly electing dirty politicians.

but in US, the pressure-flow goes like this:

step1. public pressures on the electorate

step2. electorate pressures on spying agencies

... and step1 is impossible in China

How many people know about driving the cocain economy by the CIA throughout the 70s and 80s? About project Phoenix? MKULTRA? MKULTRA surfaced after 20y in the making. About the torture assistence in the South America? Now? At that time? How is there any eloctorate pressure on the CIA? Until recently not a lot of people even knew about the NSA, I wonder how there could have been electorate pressure. There is only pressure - even if there is - when some small facts surface like Iran–Contra.

No idea why you are being downvoted.

I will add more:

- where is the pressure to close Guantanamo?

- where is the pressure to como clean with the lies leading to the Irak war?

"- where is the pressure to close Guantanamo?"

There is a lot of it. However, it's countered by the pressure of, "Where do we send those people? My constituents don't want them in our district."

I get what you mean, but your word choice is off. The "electorate" means the people represented by the elected official, not he officials themselves. i.e. the electorate is the public

oh thanks for the correction. /s/electorate/gov_officials

step 2 happens behind closed doors. you can not publish what is discussed, you can not even mention that you are dicussing it. there is in fact no guarantee that step2 happens, at all, or that it has ever happened.

Which means theatre is as good as real reform is at satisfying step 1.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com