Comment by orthecreedence | Hacker News Reader

Comment by orthecreedence | Hacker News Reader

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Title should be "EVERYONE, everything you do ONLINE is monitored." Also, webcams don't switch themselves on. This is ridiculous.

First off, the government doesn't give a rat's ass about you. You are not even a number on a list. You are a number in a number. You are incredibly obscure and tiny; you are the molecule to their galaxy. So are they monitoring you in the 1984 sense? No. You are not the type of person the government cares about monitoring. You are not a special and unique snowflake. Get it through your heads. Nobody cares that you have a realdoll or a foot fetish. Nobody cares that you actually like the Backstreet Boys. In fact, nobody cares that you are radically anti-government...but even if you are, use Tor!! It's that easy.

Secondly, what people don't seem to realize that the internet isn't some place where you get stuff for free. You ask for things and generally get them, but you exchange information in order to do so. People want to have their cake and eat it too. If you want complete privacy, unplug your computer and don't use a cell phone. You don't have to be a government agent to tap into a radio frequency or sniff TCP traffic. Anybody can do this! If you really cared about communicating anonymously, you'd use SSL and Tor for everything. Nobody can decrypt SSL, and if you use Tor, it's very difficult to tell where a specific piece of information came from.

I don't get why people have this idea in their heads that everything they do online is or should be private. This is a public network. Use at your own risk. Anyone who really wants to can look at anything they want. If you really have something you need to hide, then encrypt and obscure your communications. Problem solved.

Also, this is more of a problem for people in the middle-east than Americans, if you asked me.

(written by an American)

i ended my spree of lurking and made an account just so i could come in and second this. it's absolutely absurd to say that the government can spy on you via your webcam. most webcams (all?) don't even harbor their own direct connections to the internet so in order to access something like that, the government would have to assume full control of your machine, then install a streaming service and pray your router was configured to allow such connections.

while this is far from the only problem with the article (like cell phones that have been "completely turned off" being remotely tapped), i don't think most of its other flaws are even worth addressing. i just hope that the author secured his tin foil hat... you never know who's listening to your braiiiiiiiiiin waaaaaaaaaaaaaaves.

edit: i'd like to thank the author for his reply and comment on the other poster's reply. it was me who flew the tin foil hat flag, and for that i apologize to the author. surely there is some grounding for his statements and it is not my place to cast my own prejudices over his opinion. all i really aimed to get across was the fact that some of these things cannot be true for, if they were, as orthecreedence mentioned, the implications would be far beyond the surveillance capabilities. i think it's clear that the government has a strong hold over internet communications, but there are both ways around it (encryption -- they can't be breaking rsa unless they've got some fancy quantum computers we haven't been told about) and, as was stated, many reasons not to care. i just think you need to be more careful before you go inspiring fear in the hearts of others.

also, i looked into the resources you linked regarding the cell phones. the affidavits linked by the article were incredibly vague and gave no real technical evidence to your claims. the cnet article admits to speculation, seeing as how they had no concrete evidence past the suppositions of various people involved in security and law enforcement. while i can't rule out the possibility of this "remote handset activation", i'd hesitate to say it were possible.

Thanks for posting the rebuttal to the article I wrote over at SHTFplan. While I won't disagree with your assessment that "nobody cares," it's become increasingly clear that all digitally processed data is being fused into complex 'social network' like databases. The Fusion centers mentioned in the article do just this. They aggregate data looking for flags. No, there isn't a person sitting around listening specifically to your phone calls, or specifically monitoring your internet traffic or emails... It's all plugged into digital monitoring systems. You really don't matter.... until you're flagged.

We can play this game all day long, but the fact of the matter is that systems like this do exist. Operation Echelon, as I pointed out in this article, is designed for this specific purpose and has been used extensively in over 15 countries in Europe in the 1990's, and has likely expanded by now. This is verifiable and confirmed by the US and British governments - just look it up - don't be scared. Computers ARE listening to your conversations utilizing speech recognition technology. And if you happen to say a keyword, or string of keywords, the conversation is flagged and dispatched for human analysis. This is FACT, not tin foil stuff.

With regards to cell phones and the comment from "fredu golon" here in your rebuttal, again, this is not science fiction. This is CONFIRMED by the FBI as early as 2006. It's called "Roving Bug" technology and it is active in most every cell phone that comes to market: http://news.cnet.com/2100-1029_3-6140191.html . While the 'camera' side of this is unconfirmed, it's obvious that the technology is possible and likely in use right now.

Likewise is the technology possible to monitor microphones and cameras on your home PC... It's as simple as accessing your network. While I certainly don't know how to do it. And you don't know how to do it. Are you really of the thought that top-level intelligence agencies do not have this capability? And if they do, how long before the technology is integrated with monitoring systems so that computers can, at the push of a button, listen to entire networks of users having conversations at home? My view is that the purpose Fusion networks and centers is exactly this over the long-term.

I have no paranoia or delusions about what's going on here, and I realize I am but a speck of dust on a beach of billions of digitally-connected internet and cell phone users. The point here was not to necessarily suggest the YOU, specifically, are being monitored, but that the system as a whole has the capabilities to do so and is actively doing it right now.

Call it tin foil, that's fine. But the evidence, some of which was cited above, simply cannot be denied.

Thanks.

Mac Slavo www.SHTFplan.com

Thanks for your reply. While I don't deny the existence of flagging of voice and text communications (this has been a well-known fact for years), my point was not "no, they aren't watching." My point was "yes, they are watching...but who cares??" If you have something you want to hide from the government (or other organization), encrypt it.

Also, even having access to my home network (which is firewalled once by my router, and again by my computer) there is still no way to just "flip the switch" and monitor my webcam. I would have to

a. have a port available PUBLICLY through both firewalls that allowed someone to connect and view a live stream of my cam (which would require streaming software running in the background, AKA I'd have to purposefully turn it on) or

b. have a trojan installed unbeknownst to me that somehow figures out, in every model of laptop, how to turn on the camera but disable the "camera is on" hardware light, connect to a remote server (without the operating system knowing about it (not bloody likely)) and send a stream of everything happening. There would have to be a standard API implemented by all PC/camera manufacturers that allows this trojan to do this, which has also been kept entirely secret (impossible, if more than one organization is involved) and also the trojan would have to be installed on all computers and ignored by all virus scan software. The trojan would also have the ability to open a hidden connection that the operating system would allow but not report as an active connection.

Like I said previously, this is ridiculous. Perhaps this could MAYBE happen in Windows/Mac (good luck keeping this secret), but not an open-source OS like linux. So yes, maybe you don't know how to do it, but I do...and I'm telling you that I would have to purposefully allow it to happen. Please don't spread misinformation just because you think it may be possible or because you saw it in a movie.

Also, note that at no point did I call you paranoid or mention a tinfoil hat. I simply stated my disagreement to your main points, which you have still not argued against:

1. You are on public networks here. Your computer is connected to the largest public network in the world...consider it a free for all. Your cell phone transmits information using radio waves...meaning anybody (anybody) can listen in.

2. Nobody cares what you are doing or saying. You'd have to actually be planning some sort of attack to become any sort of priority on a keyword monitoring system. Which brings us to

3. If you really do want to hide something -- from the government, from corporations, from anyone -- you have to encrypt it if you are going to send it over public channels. Airwaves are public, the internet is public. Don't expect free privacy.

I'd like to point out that although I believe my arguments stand, it is very important that people do realize that monitoring is there, so if they do have a problem they can take steps to prevent it.

Mac, I think it's a valiant cause to create awareness, and I admire that you're doing that. However, I feel that you are using scare tactics more than factual evidence. That's not to say you don't have factual evidence, but you are also writing to invoke a feeling of fear, which isn't necessary, and in most cases causes more harm than good.

This isn't a hopeless situation, we just need to be aware of how we communicate and who's listening...and also be aware of the fact that although some of us may be extremely privacy-conscious, most people (at least in America) just want to buy shit off Amazon and browse Facebook and they don't care who's watching.

It's like monitoring a fish tank ;).

I don't think anyone is arguing that none of these technologies exist, but saying that the average person shouldn't be overly concerned with any of this.

I don't really care if companies, the government, or my family know what sites I visit, where I travel, or who I speak with and which topics I'm interested in.

Certainly, there are people (like you and others) who have passionate objections to all of this. There is an easy solution: Do not use technology.

On another note, I'm sure many of the readers on this site are actually the individuals responsible for building some of these systems. :)

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