Offering software for snooping to governments is a booming business | Hacker News Reader

Offering software for snooping to governments is a booming business

economist.com

158 pointsPretzelFisch76 comments

LMFTFY: Offering software for snooping to the oppressors [0], the rich [1], the law-breakers [2], the law-makers [3], the advertisers [4] is a booming business. The modern day tech seems like a curse and a cancer, despite its enormous potential for good.

/rant

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19109474

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20336762

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16874999

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21346307

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18082017

...ad infinitum

Once upon a time I worked on a mobile app that was to be used by the VA to help with the management of medical trainees. I thought it was routine stuff (time logging, policy directories, etc)...

They actually wanted a system that would do that stuff too, but behind the scenes it would track the location of each user down to the room they were in. The administrators were suspicious that residents/trainees were sneaking off premises to "work from Starbucks" and they wanted ammunition to use against the sponsoring institutions to revoke payments (which go to resident salaries)... They weren't the slightest bit worried about the legal, moral, or safety implications. It never crossed their minds at all. (They never got what they wanted, at least not from me.)

It's an example of why collective bargaining is important in your relationship with a big company.

Standard terms dictated by an employer and accepted by the employee are that you have no expectation of privacy, period. With modern EDR tools and smartphones, even less sophisticated companies can do big-brother stuff that only a relative few could years ago.

I would prefer it if the journalists who wrote about issues like this would stop using cutesy words like "snooping" when they talk about government surveillance programs. It sounds like an effort to whitewash what "those naughty rogues" are doing. Same thing as saying that Politician X is a "fibber". No one out there, as far as I am aware, is clamoring for us to treat this behavior as "naughty", so I don't see why they've chosen to employ this langauge.

This is a common problem across reporting today. Scam, cheat, and fraud operations are diminished as "trolls". Lying is softened as "telling mistruths". Shills and hucksters are praised as "moderate". I think it happens because major media outlets have a strong political interest in perpetuating status quo where the ruling class remains untouchable.

>Lying is softened as "telling mistruths"

Lying is intentional deception. Telling mistruths can be either be misinformed or intentional. This makes it less likely they will be sued for slander/libel if it turns out it is an honest mistake.

Snoop means, according to Oxford: "Investigate or look around furtively in an attempt to find out something, especially information about someone's private affairs".

Surveillance is "Close observation, especially of a suspected spy or criminal".

Going by those definitions, I'd sure rather have someone surveilling me than snooping on me. I don't see why you consider the word "snooping" to be cutesy or for whitewashing.

Is this maybe a British vs. American difference? In the US "snooping" definitely has a sort of casual, comedic connotation. You snoop on an office conversation, not a foreign government. It would be weird to hear a journalist talk about "domestic snooping" instead of "domestic spying".

But in England the widespread nickname for some pretty serious legislation was "Snoopers' Charter", and the Economist is using the word in a similar manner.

Even the dictionaries disagree: Merriam-Webster defines it as "to look or pry especially in a sneaking or meddlesome manner". "meddlesome prying" feels substantially different from "furtive investigating" to me.

"Snooping", to me, brings to mind images of disapproving mother-in-law looking through your medicine cabinet or little kids trying to find where you hid the Christmas presents. Whereas "surveilling" implies gathering the information necessary to blackmail, imprison, or kill someone.

Agreed entirely. "Stalking" would also be an appropriate term.

It is also worth pointing out that your dictionary definition of 'surveil' discounts entirely the watching of law-abiding political dissidents. As we have seen, such software is used to monitor human rights workers and NGOs. Finessing a repressive government's characterization of such persons as spies or criminals is exactly the same justification used by the purveyors of the software itself - "it is not to be used for unlawful purposes".

IDK how to justify it but "snooping" seems cutesy to me as well.

Maybe because there’s a comic strip character with a similar name.

Is there a difference between untruthful and lying? They seem perfectly synonymous yet I see that one all the time

I think they're synonomous, but the key part to me is that "lying" is directly related to "liar", whereas "untruthful" doesn't have that relation with another word, at least to my knowledge. So saying that someone is "lying" is also attacking their character by implying that they are a "liar", while "untruthful" could mean that even though they are saying something that isn't true, it doesn't necessarily reflect on their character as a whole. It's just playing semantics, but I think it is treated different on a subconsious level.

That makes sense. One could be construed attacking the character in an article , unless said character makes a habit of lying.

What drives me nuts about this narrative is how it immunizes the companies making the most money from these government programs. You'll hear a lot about NSO, but not very much at all about Cisco's role, despite the fact that NSO's revenue from foreign surveillance apparatuses is a rounding error compared to Cisco's.

Probably because Cisco is a hardware vendor. NSO actually has support staff that will craft exploits to attack certain targets, fix your server so you won't get discovered, write phishing emails, if you need a hand getting off the ground. Big difference.

There is in fact not a big difference. Cisco's AM's know exactly what use their hardware is being put to, and Cisco makes far more money off their hardware than NSO makes off their exploit packs and implant software. They are equally blameworthy.

Selling surveillance technology is a booming and legal business in most jurisdictions subject to respective export control laws. But they are not as ethically challenged as companies who deliberately sell lemons and backdoors to their customers in return for a payout from the NSA like RSA (part of Dell EMC) did:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-security-rsa/exclusiv...

https://www.theverge.com/2013/12/20/5231006/nsa-paid-10-mill...

I don't agree. I think they're equally ethically challenged.

I accept that there will always be companies that sell offensive software to governments and the like. What gets my goat is when they aren't portrayed as what they are: sleazebag attackers.

This is why software engineers should also study some humanities.

They can and do!

The end result is that they're fired from Google for being too uppity about raising ethical issues.

Let's be honest, there's also a lot of money involved.

Who wants to trade their nice, comfortable, upper middle class lifestyle, in favor of joining the lines with the middle class or maybe even the poor depending on what happens? Jobs that provide an that sort of lifestyle are not as plentiful as people believe. I'm really uncertain whether or not people are truly aware of how much a Google engineer can make? Contrast a family's lifestyle in the presence of that sort of salary, against the very real fact that being middle class or poor these days entails a lot of uncertainty. At least in the US.

I'm just saying that there's a lot at play here, and it takes a certain kind of person to follow his/her convictions no matter the cost. It's definitely a case where it's easy to be critical, and at the same time a bit tough to empathize. But I think empathy leads to a better understanding of some of the important human dimensions of these issues.

You don't have to work for such a company. There are plenty of employers that don't snoop or track. It isn't a part of their business model.

What you're saying here is really "everybody has a price". That's never a flattering observation.

But it's almost always true.

With education and life experience our 'prices' can change for the better. And with collective action we can make the world better than it was before us. Consider that simply being an informed, relatively independent voter is a collective action too.

Perhaps, but only if you count nonmonetary things as part of the definition of "price".

However, that doesn't make it ethically supportable.

Is there substantive evidence that studying humanities or even ethics is causal to people behaving more ethically?

No. The evidence is that ethicists are as moral as everyone else.

https://blog.apaonline.org/2019/12/10/why-arent-ethicists-mo...

I can see an interest in ethics leading to its study. Not sure how much good the reverse will do by the time the person is old enough for university.

What if you are born and raised in Israel and you've watched Hezbollah carry out terrorist attacks for the past 40 years, would you maybe not be motivated to work for an Israeli firm who claims to make software that helps fight terrorism?

I'm not saying that's what everyone's story is at NSO, but I also don't think that company is full of soulless software engineers who skipped out on humanities classes.

Hezbollah didn't exist 40 years ago.

As someone who was raised in Israel - your idea of how Israelis think of working in high-tech is a figment of your imagination.

Hezbollah sent VBIEDs to the US Embassy in Kuwait, French Embassy in Kuwait, Kuwait Airport, Kuwaiti Power Plant were all bombed in 1983, so 37 years ago, sorry, I rounded up an entire 3 years.

So par for the course for 90% of the comments here.

How do stereotypical Israelis think of working in high tech?

What if you grew up in a communist state and watched the network of secret police and neighbor spies regularly bully and make people disappear when they heard anti-party, anti-authoritarian, and otherwise unconforming viewpoints?

"Everyone" never falls into any one category anywhere, but are you somehow suggesting that the engineers at these organizations are somehow exceptionally more in tune with ethics and the humanities than the rest? Because we are deficient across the board.

Software Engineers do study humanities. But, you know, there is big money involved.

Really? I can’t imagine the software engineers making better than average. I imagine this is where all the mediocre developers go. A top notch developer could go anywhere; why would they choose ... government surveillance tools?

Have you even considered the possibility that perfectly intelligent people simply might not always share your beliefs or values?

This entire sub-thread is so absurd. I can't tell if it's a wisecrack that people have run with, tongue in cheek, or if its lack of self-awareness is truly genuine.

"If everyone wrote more book reports on 'Catcher in the Rye', then no one would take jobs in the defense industry"? Come ON, people.

Some probably find it to be an interesting challenge.

Whether morality is learnable is something the ancient Greeks were already unsure of.

I'm surprised that Palantir isn't even mentioned in this article.

Palantir does not build surveillance technology. They build data visualization technology. They build tools to let organizations better view and correlate between the data they collect. This could be considered to be adjacent to surveillance technology, but the company does not in fact built surveillance tools.

Nothing I know is first hand, so I may be wrong. I've been influenced by articles like this over the past decade: https://theintercept.com/2017/02/22/how-peter-thiels-palanti...

That article illustrates the point I'm making:

> For example, a 2010 demo showed how Palantir Government could be used to chart the flow of weapons throughout the Middle East by importing disparate data sources like equipment lot numbers, manufacturer data, and the locations of Hezbollah training camps.

Government agencies are the ones collecting data. Palantir is building tools to browse it.

I understand what you're saying but I feel like it's splitting hairs.

https://thenextweb.com/artificial-intelligence/2019/12/11/re...

The issue here is the Palantir tool versus the Palantir company.

When I did DoD contracting work I worked both with the Palantir tool and worked on a competitor to it. The tool itself basically correlates data from multiple sources and works very well for that.

The AI work mentioned in this article, I believe, is separate contracting work.

Granted these two things (their AI work and their tool) may end up being combined. Also, as part of contracting work there may be times where they are directly connected to tools and could technically be considered as surveiling. But, in general, they're mostly used as the glue between a bunch of databases to let analysts better understand the data already collected.

So, in a way, I think you're both kinda right?

When I went on-site for an interview with Palantir about a year ago, I had the same idea going in and left very disturbed.

I'm not sure what else I can say under NDA, but anecdotally they have a frightening culture. I'm less worried about the tools they make and more about their motivations.

If it really is that scary, the world deserves that you should break the NDA and describe what you saw.

You don't say.

Someone's been reading Motherboard, I see.

If there's any justice in the world every person who participates in this sort of work will be shamed and ostracized in the future.

Leaving them no option but to continue building surveillance software?

Rather than hope for a chance to make someone else miserable I’d rather people just weren’t building this stuff to begin with.

It doesn't matter if they can't hire good talent. The guys running these businesses believe they're "just making tools for the good guys" (actual interview quote from a psychotic surveillance company I turned down a while back). We want to make sure they can only recruit the dumbest codemonkeys and spaghetti chefs that money can buy so their products go nowhere.

There's exceptionally few things I wouldn't do for enough money to retire and take care of my family comfortably for the rest of our lives.

I assume a lot of people think like that.

Ideally, there’d be a number of other things you could do that would work as well.

Shame and ostracization only works when the person cares about being accepted by you.

I am wondering why aren’t protests staged in front of these companies’ offices. If they have any in the US or the EU, doing it in saudi arabia, china, etc. means certain death.

I live in the Bay and even here physical protests aren’t taken very seriously, just kids trying to skip school and lonely elderly folks who are bored. The money’s too good, the tools will still be built and used protest or no.

A sad state of affairs to be honest.

Is there any possibility that some of this “snooping” actually keeps us safer? Ostracizing these people is not unlike ostracizing police. Even though police have abused power from time to time, I bet there isn’t a single one of us that wouldn’t call the police if our child has been kidnapped.

> Is there any possibility that some of this “snooping” actually keeps us safer?

Even if it does, is it worth violating rights in the process?

Honestly, if my child was kidnapped and the ransom was affordable... it makes sense to just pay it and avoid the police. Less chance of collateral damage in the pursuit of justice and all that

Government surveillance is a good thing. Change my mind. Its stated goal is to catch baddies and protect a country. Business surveillance is a bad thing. Its stated goal is to monetize user data and surveil everyone on the internet.

So basically everyone on hackernews that worked for a modern data-driven consumer-target company participates in adversarial data gathering. Even if you just gave your data to a FANG company, in exchange for comfortable features, you helped them more effectively spy on people like you. So shame on you!

Government surveillance from first world, liberal governments is not necessarily a bad thing. Surveillance by authoritarians focused on suppressing their population and political enemies is a bad thing.

But yeah, I absolutely agree that the NSA et al are less damaging than Google and friends.

The reason we like first world, liberal governments is that we can collectively hold them accountable. It’s not clear that we can do so with the NSA.

Any government activity conducted in secret is anti-democratic by definition. How can we ever hope to hold an agency accountable for policies that can't legally be disclosed?

It only takes few years to switch from a liberal government to oppressive one

The actual effect might not correspond to the stated goal.

For instance, it may be applied to "protect the people currently in power in the country" instead of "protect the [people living in the] country".

Business surveillance might be less problematic because laws and government are supposed to make businesses acting for their own interest not be a problem (or be less of a problem), while the same mechanism for governments (constitution and supreme courts) is less restrictive.

We give the police a monopoly on violence to fulfill its goal of to protect and serve. While there exists potential for misuse, this does not justify taking away that monopoly.

I am further under the impression that way more checks and balances are in place to make sure that government surveillance does not overstep its boundaries, where businesses don't really care, especially if the profit justifies the fines or stricter regulation.

Government surveillance is not a problem, it is a solution, and it helps save lives. Facebook tracking me without a profile and knowing that I am gay or religious is a problem, because the judge/courts is a room of unethical engineers drinking Red Bull.

While I am far more concerned about surveillance by the private sector than I am about surveillance by the (US, anyway) government...

> While there exists potential for misuse

It's not just the potential for misuse that is the problem, it is the reality of misuse that is the problem.

> I am further under the impression that way more checks and balances are in place to make sure that government surveillance does not overstep its boundaries

Those "checks and balances" are rather weak, and growing weaker over time. They don't reassure me as much as they should.

> Government surveillance is not a problem, it is a solution

Government surveillance really is a problem. It is also a solution for some things.

Government surveillance is crucial for effective counter-terrorism, counter-intelligence, foreign intelligence, and law enforcement. Government surveillance contributes to an increase in law and order of nations, and an increase in information, allowing these to faster develop, make better collective decisions, and defend itself when under attack.

Opponents mention that counter-terrorism is not effective for all cases of terrorism, in effect arguing for an increased and more efficient surveillance. "They were already on some watch-list.", of course, mass surveillance put them there successfully.

I hear of surveillance abuse, where privacy is violated (spying on ex-girlfriend). But, like the police has a monopoly on violence and can physically restrain your freedom, so has the government a monopoly on violence of privacy. If you deem your country incapable of holding that responsibility, I guess it is time to move to a country where the US government can gather even more than your telephone meta-data.

Finally, that we could end up in a totalitarian surveillance state, is a pessimistic projection akin to adversarial AGI or all police deciding to start abusing and shooting random citizens.

> Government surveillance is crucial for effective counter-terrorism, counter-intelligence, foreign intelligence, and law enforcement.

There is more than a little truth to this, although I think the argument is relied on more heavily than it should be.

Here's how I view the issue -- surveillance is inherently oppressive, but it also brings certain benefits in terms of safety. So it's a tradeoff. Where the balance should be is something that reasonable people can, and do, differ about.

My bent is that I'd rather live free in a dangerous world than to live oppressed in a safe world. That's simply my bias -- I wouldn't want to live in a world that exists at either extreme, of course, but I want to preserve whatever freedom I have left.

We have been seeing a serious erosion of that freedom over the past couple of decades, primarily because of the actions of the private sector, and I am highly resistant to letting it erode even further.

You speak of surveillance (and other) abuse as if they are rare things that people make too much fuss over. I don't think that they're nearly rare enough, personally.

So, while I am not a privacy absolutist, I am of the opinion that we've already set the balance far too towards the "oppression" side of the scale, and we need to resist having it slide even further in that direction.

> If you deem your country incapable of holding that responsibility, I guess it is time to move to a country

As a patriotic citizen, I consider it my duty to not abandon my nation when I think it is behaving badly. It's my duty to help correct it.

Laws do not always stop businesses in search of profit.

There are many laws (e.g. Sarbanes–Oxley, Dodd–Frank, etc.) that were created to prevent unscrupulous acts in search of greater profits.

Business surveillance and government surveillance can be equally problematic if the people behind it have bad motives.

> Its stated goal is to catch baddies and protect a country.

I don’t think it actually does this as well as the government would like you to believe.

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