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Comment by chrisseaton | Hacker News Reader

> worrying is that the SSA has said that such surveillance and data collection is "common practice" globally

I think if you believe that any major country is not intercepting all undersea fibre cable traffic within their reach or even beyond it then you’re being very naive. I can’t understand how this news would surprise anyone.

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> I can’t understand how this news would surprise anyone

I tried to tell my family about the Snowden leaks and the implications just a year ago. They are all university educated people.

They categorically did not believe that what I was saying was real, and when I showed them all the leaks they did not believe the content was true.

Billions of people simply don't believe it's true.

I know I should not post reaction-posts here. But this is Truly Horrifying in more than one way.

Did they not even investigate your claim? Or did they just settle with labeling you a crackpot conspiracy theorist?

> Did they not even investigate your claim? Or did they just settle with labeling you a crackpot conspiracy theorist?

They kind of settled half way between "I don't believe that's possible / I don't care".

For them, it makes zero difference in their lives, so they just don't want to invest time and energy into thinking about it.

Same as climate change, no info is real... I'm not sure it is because we humans grow stupid or we grow so tired and sceptical that accept nothing what our own eyes see...

While still billions of people believe in Allah, God or whatever without any evidence. I dont know how this can happen...

>While still billions of people believe in Allah, God or whatever without any evidence. I dont know how this can happen...

Isn't it obvious? In both cases people do the smart thing (which is not necessarily the "objectively correct" thing).

Faith in Allah, God etc, is a good social glue, and is personally comforting, helping regulate emotions, etc.

Similarly, not believing the Snowden story helps them fit with their social group (e.g. republicans), relaxes their mind from a whole lot of worries and concerns, helps re-enforce their personal beliefs (e.g. in good government), etc -- and most importantly, has no real disadvantage in their day to day life and work...

See also: Pascal's Wager[1]

The leaks about mass-surveillance don't fit the criteria, as best I can tell. It's in their best interests not to, as you state.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_wager

Pascal's wager suffer from the fact that it can be any of the myrriads of religions that are correct. The chance of picking the correct one is infinitely small (assuming there are aliens that also have religions). Only a subset of the religions have anything like hell/heaven, further diminishing the risk.

I think the main issue with Pascal's wager is that it puts all its eggs in the basket of some afterlife being a certainty.

You can very well waste all your life in pointless prayer, like the monk who basically imprinted his feet on the wooden floor by praying several hours a day for decades.

Even getting out of that room to help someone in a trivial task would have been much more useful than the praying.

Not to mention the huge amount of censorship over your own thoughts that some religions impose on your life.

So, IMO, if you get the wrong end of Pascal's wager, you can waste your only life, every infinitely valuable second of it (because there's no afterlife), over a non-existent afterlife.

That's a hell of a wager to lose.

You should show them the reactions of elected representatives to hearing about it. (I know of only a few clear verifications, if anyone more knowledgeable wants to chime in with a list that would be welcome.)

With deep fakes even that is up for dispute.

Make them watch the movie. I find it gets the message across pretty well.

What did you think was in the leaks? In my experience, when people say their parents or friends didn't believe what they said was in the leaks, the parents and friends were usually right.

That the NSA and GCHQ were illegally collecting phone records and internet browsing details of anyone they wanted.

The fact that the UK government recently passed a law[0] to make this legal makes it pretty clear that this is real.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/29/snoopers-chart...

How do you know what grecy told their parents?

I'm sorry but you are either implying that the leaks were fake or that 'parents and friends' are always right. In both cases I'll disagree heavily.

I think they're implying that the leaks often don't say what people think they say.

(Not agreeing, just explaining.)

How often does that happen?

What does this comment even mean?

It means that people think the leaks say what Greenwald claimed they said instead of what they actually said, and when those people tell their parents what Greenwald said, they sound like lunatics. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20456352

A, the BS "there's an added hop so it's not happening/serious" defense. People still fall for this?

The added hop means that the NSA can't request anything they want from the Internet messaging companies. They can only see foreigner data from the specific users the FBI has already wiretapped via court order. There are no leaked documents that say otherwise and plenty of documents that corroborate my assertions.

This is why it hasn't been ruled illegal. Do people actually believe that phone metadata collection is illegal but the crazy thing Greenwald misread PRISM to be is not? That's going to trip grecy's university-educated family's bullshit detector.

Pro tip: Read the leaks. They are actual documents, that can be read. Try it!

That's what I did and what I suspect grecy did not do.

Someone makes this exact same comment every time there is a privacy story - not realising there is a very big gap between speculating on what a governments capability is and having it confirmed

Sure - people in privacy circles may suspect this and sneer at the general public for thinking it is news, but it is a big deal to have it confirmed, to raise awareness of it and actually do something about it

I think the Trump tweet from the other day confirms that this speculation is not at all unfounded. I think 20cm resolution from satellite images is even better than most people speculated.

From what I can tell that image was pretty much in line with what everyone watching the US spy satellite program expected and wasn't hugely far off what's commercially available now. For instance, this was the first article I found when looking for information about the resolution of commercial satellite images (up to 30cm apparently), and it puts Keyhole spy satellites in the 7-10cm resolution ballpark: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/04/21/h...

The significance of that release was overblown because it helped support a narrative about Trump damaging national security that the media and people on social media liked. In reality it doesn't seem to have revealed anything about the US satellite imaging capabilities that wasn't already known.

I'm surprised this wasn't interpreted by the media as a "flex" of the power of the US intelligence apparatus, frankly.

Which tweet?

He tweeted a picture allegedly from a classified spy satellite:

https://www.npr.org/2019/09/02/756673481/amateurs-identify-u...

It surprises me as a South African because I didn't know our government had the technical capability or capacity to store and process so much data, let alone splice undersea cables without detection.

Fellow South African here, you'd be very surprised then with the capabilities of our spy agency. Very secretive by hugely funded. The former apartheid spies went on to consult for the current government, and they were all very highly trained. In fact one of the precursors to the mass surveillance tech made famous by Snowden, was actually developed at a firm in Stellenbosch in the late 90's to early 00's. That was then sold on to various other state intel agencies, of which SA got a cut of the profit.

We've been developing very high level intelligence tools for years in private/public partnerships. It's all just highly secretive, and one of the areas that really does work, so it doesn't get any attention. Most of us, like yourself, just assume that because other areas here are awful, that our intel community must be to, but nothing could be further from the truth.

Lastly don't forget JZ himself was Head of Intelligence, so he always held it in high regard, and gave it the funding it required.

Not so secretive, in recent history VASTech (based in Stellenbosch's Technopark) were known to be supplying Gadaffi's Libya with telephone surveillance tech. [0]

Didn't know about the precursor tech being developed in Stellenbosch as well, do you have any sources on that? I'd be interested to see who was involved.

Agreed on the intel community generally being in a grey area as far as the law is concerned, it's a struggle enough keeping them impartial and not meddling in domestic affairs - talking about JZ being head of the ANC's intelligence in exile brings back memories of his ultimate succession of Thabo Mbeki and former spy chief Billy Masetlha's role in that.

[0] https://mg.co.za/article/2011-09-02-sa-firm-helped-gaddafi-s...

if they don't have the expertise, someone else with the expertise interested in access to the data will help them.

Often at exorbitant cost in our case. The SSA is an unaccountable financial black hole. Our former president send to have also used them for his political gain, this Fraser chap is responsible for many misdeeds.

Now parts of our country are literally burning, yet there's no crime intelligence about the very threats to the state that SSA should be monitoring for. There was an act of terror that was nearly committed 2 days ago, but we're seeing poor leadership from those involved.

> There was an act of terror that was nearly committed 2 days ago

Please can you provide a link to more info on this?

There are protests by truck drivers and some of these actions can be seen as terrorism.

https://www.iol.co.za/dailynews/news/kwazulu-natal/two-truck...

I don't think that is what they were alluding to. They said: "an act of terror that was _nearly_ committed"

Hasn't China been doing this all over Africa and South America?

Yup, in Africa China built and bugged (allegedly - China and the AU denied) the headquarters of the African Union in Addis Ababa: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/30/china-african-...

Not only China, there are more then enough western countries that export these technologies.

It's surprising to me at least because South Africa has a GDP per capita of $~6.1k, and perhaps can't afford access to that expertise.

Which I suppose suggests that they didn't pay for it, and another nation state 'helped out' via intermediaries.

GDP per capita isn't a great measurement for the capabilities of a state.

You're right, it's probably better to look at GDP overall, since that's basically the tax base theoretically.

1. Its not uniformlly distributed. 2. China has GDP/person of ~$9,600 3. South Africa merrilly mines 4km below ground 4. Previous efforts included a nuclear weapons programme 5. Whole parts of Amazon's infa a built in CT

Get out more.

Apologies, you seem to have taken this a bit more personally intended. All I was intending to suggest was that the SA gov budget would be somewhat constraining its ambitions, not that its people are technologically behind, or whatever else you seem to be implying here.

I strongly doubt they spliced the cables. From the article it sounds like they got a court order (probably unconstitutional), allowing them to intercept the data. So they probably just needed to install a couple of big servers at the landing sites.

You don't splice cables, you split the light with a prism and siphon of 10% of the light. All of it.

Every telco has locked rooms full of kit for this job.

And if not for their own use, selling access to other players.

I can imagine a sustainable business could be made operating a fleet of ships in international waters that pick up undersea cables, taps them, and uplinks the data in real time to whichever .gov subscribes to it.

The company taking the risk gets a big fat government check every month, and the governments get to deny they're tapping anyone's data.

You can't export the data wholesale from your ship though - you'd need another cable for that :D So you'd need sift and process that data on the ship.

You can't export the data wholesale from your ship though - you'd need another cable for that :D

The key word, though, was "uplink." Go straight to satellite, and let the intelligence agencies sift through what they want.

Are there sat links with enough bandwidth to siphon data off undersea cables?

I have no knowledge of this area but I always thought sat links can't compete with multi gbps cables.

Maybe I'm wrong though.

The return of Privateers (independent naval vessels commissioned to engage in hostile acts against enemy states, often in murky legal territory, and often blamed for the rise of piracy (successful privateering companies, when war was over, would be primed to simply become pirates))

That's great until another country declares you a hostile non-state actor and starts sinking your ships.

It's not easy to tap submarine fibre optic cables. The US Navy has a Nuclear Sub dedicated to the task. You can't just pick them up and stick a tap in them.

I wonder how they'd get the data off the ship again. I guess they'd need to mine the data on the ship before exporting it.

Global Passive Surveillance as a Service...

(BRB: making a pitch deck...)

Knowing it to be true is the most important step if you actually plan to hold your representatives accountable.

People are not surprised, they are angry at people responsible. And rightly so in my opinion.

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