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Comment by efitz | Hacker News Reader

Essentially the government has built a surveillance state by outsourcing it to private enterprise.

I think it would be interesting to know how people really feel about this. I would love to see a survey that actually truly explained the trade-offs and see how people felt about it, eg avoiding the “ should government be able to subpoena records from private business” but actually ask questions like “is it OK with you that with a subpoena that the government can get a list every website that you have visited?” And then present the trade offs and abuse cases. I really think that we’ve allowed the surveillance state to form without actually having a meaningful public debate about it.

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> Essentially the government has built a surveillance state by outsourcing it to private enterprise.

This has been going on for a long time. A decade ago, Microsoft purchased Skype and converted it from secure peer-to-peer[0][1] to sending all user data unencrypted through their servers while giving the government access to everything. "The 2013 mass surveillance disclosures revealed that Microsoft had granted intelligence agencies unfettered access to supernodes and Skype communication content."[2]

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0412017 (2004)

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-security-internet-germany... (2007)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Skype&oldid=10314... (2021)

But have they stopped terror and corruption? Does the benefit outweigh the costs?

There are so few actual terror attacks that the FBI has resorted to goading innocent buffoons into making incriminating statements so they can claim to have foiled something.

There was never a real problem for law enforcement to solve. All we ever needed were reinforced cockpit doors.

but the rest of the cost has created jobs! it's the great jobs program of our lifetimes.

This, but without the /s.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

I think it made some people incredibly rich, jobs are an unplanned side effect.

The scope of surveillace is not to stop terror or, god forbids, corruption. The scope is the suppresion of opposition.

That seems to be something literally all governments, from Belarus over Turkey to China, the US and Europe can agree upon. Surveillance of ones citizens is good, consequences of this surveillance vary by country so.

Also skype harvested users computers. I noticed that when skype was running the harddrive will be constantly accessed, on an otherwise idle computer. Checking with process explorer showed that skype has a lot of disk reads (hundreds of MB). This was the reason why it got uninstalled. But people are happy with microsoft products. - "They need telemetry to improve the product". - "But there is no improvement. The product is even worse". - "Maybe it's your experience, i already feel better using the new product". or - "I have nothing to hide. They are my friends". What happens when the regime is changed ? ( see Afganistan).

I believe Skype is dead by now for average users. Some still use it in business environments, but they sure did a good job in getting rid of it. Without much success though, since people just use other products.

I'm not so sure about that. I've been seeing it around more than I'd like recently. I even had to use it to talk to my thesis' supervisors.

I remember in the 2016 election Hillary Clinton's VP mentioned in a debate that their administration would make it easier for tech companies to share data with the government for "cybersecurity" and its obvious that what they wanted to do was legalize transfer of surveillance materials from corporations to government. And it's so frustrating because nobody seemed to notice that line and it feels like the public hears that and thinks "cybersecurity good" and doesn't think about it at all. Like if the democrats had come out and said "we're going to expand government surveillance by paying Microsoft and others for your data" it would have been extremely unpopular. But by using obtuse language they can actually claim a win while saying basically the same thing.

I don't think there is any big conspiracy there because it is already legal (and always has been) for companies to give surveillance data to the government.

The government can't take it by force without a warrant. But the company is free to give it to them if they ask nicely or otherwise.

The point is that they proposed expanding these relationships and they billed it as “security”. But anyone who really understands security knows that collecting more data and sending it to one big third party is the opposite of security. They wanted to expand surveillance while telling us they were protecting us.

"They wanted to expand surveillance while telling us they were protecting us."

The issue is that they (i.e. government) have always done this. I'm only 35, but I remember this being very clear immediately after 9/11. You just say the boogeyman is terrorism, and that is used to justify end-runs around the constitution via the "PATRIOT" Act, etc. etc. Before terrorism, the excuse was communism. Maybe I'm just cynical now or read too much "1984" as a teenager, but I feel like there will always be a new boogeyman that they use to justify more authority, more powers, and all the while saying it's for our own good and to 'protect' us.

Yes they have always been doing this and it is bad. I thought this one example of bad behavior was worth mentioning in this thread.

Problem is there is not much push back, in fact people are willing to give up most of their rights for better security.

Worse, most people do not even know what they are giving up. But I agree with your sentiment. It is deeply frustrating that the public does not know enough to care and even when they do they believe the government is really there to help us.

Are they willing, or is there simply no correct choice at the voting booth because of First Past the Post voting?

Our current electoral system: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo

Do you think that only one US political party supports this crap?

What about the patriot act?

There are tons of other examples about how this isn't a partisan issue, and getting people to think of it as partisan only helps their goal in getting it through.

No, I do not think one political party supports this. Just because I mention something Democrats did that I don’t like doesn’t mean I’m a Republican. I mentioned it because I grew up a Democrat and when I realized it was all a sham and all the politicians are lying I got mad at all the democrat constituents who don’t notice this stuff. I’m a libertarian leftist now.

This is exactly how you get around those pesky laws that prevent you from doing it yourself as a governing body. You just let/encourage/look-the-other-way as private companies do it for you then you just buy access from them. All perfectly legal since those private companies are busy selling your private data to anyone and everyone else.

The advent of smartphones, social media, search engines, pervasive online shopping are all absolute boons for surveillance entities.

And the best part is that the users/public just gives all of this info up willingly and for free.

> The advent of smartphones, social media, search engines, pervasive online shopping are all absolute boons for surveillance entities

The only way to avoid this would have been to design the Internet as something Tor-like from the beginning, which would have been impractical from an efficiency standpoint.

Yeah, today data is worth more than oil.

I don't know why. How many different ways do companies have to look at me to understand I am broke?

It's not your money they are after. Some advertisers are interested in your money. Other advertisers are interested in influencing your opinion.

If you are in the US: Should you support Israel?

If you are in the UK: Should you vote to leave the EU?

If you are in Germany: Should you support US troops in Asia?

If you are in Australia: Should you support economic treaties with China?

Advertising techniques can sway you - and large portions of the population - into supporting or not supporting many facets of policy. If the Arab states want to destroy the Jewish state today, they would not send troops. They would fund influence of opinion of the American and European population.

Actually, they already do.

Not sure if it’s any worse than the pre-internet days, with print media making everyone believe that there was only one single truth. Nowadays you hear a lot more diversity of opinion rather than just ISRAEL GOOD (ie, Israel maybe isn’t the good guy here and their troops maybe shouldn’t be shooting kids in the street and sexually harassing Palestinian women).

You do hear more diversity of opinion, however, the average quality has certainly lowered.

Unfortunately, the average person's intelligence has remained constant.

I think many users, even if they do know that their information is being sold around, don't care. They don't know how it may effect them negatively.

Especially since it's been happening for awhile now and nothing outright bad has happened to most individuals. They just enjoy using Instagram. They see a targeted ad and are like "oo scary... they know me" and then continue on.

> Essentially the government has built a surveillance state by outsourcing it to private enterprise.

Well, yes, that's essentially the whole point of silicon valley. The government and military fund the creation of startups that have tactical value. Those businesses become self-funding and improve the US economy, which also has military value since a robust economy is harder to attack. This has been explored in a few places, e.g. [0], [1].

But it's not like any of this was secret. The off-loading of government operations to private industry, combined with the lobbying for reduced regulations on private industry effectively gives the government carte blanche with the added bonus of plausible deniability.

Whether or not these trends are good has been debated for half a century in the US.

[0] https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-ci...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo

at least China is transparent in what they are, US does the same shit but uses loopholes. Before anybody says it isn't bad yet or comparing it to China is unfair, think about the fact that all this infrastructure is already in place, all it takes is 1 bad person to start fully abusing it. People in China are at least aware they should be careful, the average American has no clue they are effectively being tracked at all times

Sword of Damocles is hanging over our heads

Noam Chomsky talks about this in Manufacturing Consent. Under authoritarian regimes they can tell you about the bad stuff they're doing because you have no choice. In an apparent democracy they have to trick the public in to going along with the bad stuff by hiding what is really happening.

The US system isn't better because we don't have government officials who want to spy on us. The US system is set up assuming that's what all governments do eventually.

The US system is superior to China because we have checks and balances that actually: 1) uncover this stuff, 2) share it with the public, 3) have a system to provide feedback, 4) courts to uphold rights.

The US system isn't perfect and it isn't always fast, but the point is there is a system of checks and balances that hopefully bring it back to what the people intend it to be.

>The US system is superior to China because we have checks and balances that actually: 1) uncover this stuff, 2) share it with the public, 3) have a system to provide feedback, 4) courts to uphold rights.

1) surveillance of citizens in China it is public, no need to uncover anything 2) in China their government already shared it with the citizens since it's official policy 3) since when the feedback started to matter? 4) that it's very naive to assume that the laws and the courts will always be free of abuse and will always protect the freedoms of the citizens, protect their interests and protect the innocent, we are far from living in a perfect world: the only way to make someone can't abuse his power is to not give him that power. And they have courts in China too, if that matters.

That's my point. The US (and other countries) systems are superior because at least there is some mechanism to put a stop to it. In China there isn't - as you said it's official policy.

"we are far from living in a perfect world" well yes. And we never will live in a perfect world where privacy is never violated. There will always be people willing to break the rules to benefit themselves.

And since when has feedback mattered? It matters all the time? I mean the Democrats won an election and are now proposing a massive spending bill taking the country in a very different direction, just as one example.

Pray tell, how exactly do your checks and balances protect you from a government:

- with secret FISA courts whose cases and rulings are unknown

- that will imprison recipients from even saying they got a security letter

- threaten to imprison the very people who exposed the NSA spying on you.

- etc. etc.

Come now, some perspective and humility.

> The US system is set up assuming that's what all governments do eventually.

What good is it when the fundamental principes arising from those assumptions are constantly being eroded? It appears some american states restrict even the bearing of arms now. If the founders of the USA were to resurrect today, I wonder what they would think about the nation they created.

> If the founders of the USA were to resurrect today, I wonder what they would think about the nation they created.

I don't understand the fetishisation of the US "founding fathers". What does it matter what a bunch of people who lived 200 years ago thought and wanted and how they would feel about today's version of that? Considering some of the things that were normal in their time, like slavery, the subservient role of women in society, power only in the aristocracy or rich people ( even the "bastion of democracy" US wasn't a popular democracy where everyone had a vote until after WWI), segregation, etc. of course they'd disagree. And so would Louis XVI, Franz Josef, Queen Victoria, Hitler, etc.. so what?

Who cares what those people would theoretically think and why?

Meanwhile in China they're straight up mandating that companies transfer all data to state-owned storage platforms.

>A ministry supervising state companies, the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission, is mapping plans to set up more government-controlled providers of cloud services for data storage, people familiar with the agency’s workings say. Such services have been dominated by private companies, including Alibaba and Tencent.

>The city of Tianjin has ordered companies it supervises to migrate data from private-sector cloud platforms to state-owned ones within two months of the expiration of existing contracts, and by September 2022 at the latest, according to an official notice dated Aug. 12. More localities are expected to follow suit, the people say.

>Government-controlled entities are acquiring stakes and filling board seats in more companies to make sure they fall in line with the state’s goals. ByteDance Ltd., owner of the video-sharing app TikTok, and Weibo Corp. , which runs Twitter-like microblogging platforms, recently have sold stakes to state-backed companies.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/xi-jinping-aims-to-rein-in-chin...

"Essentially the government has built a surveillance state by outsourcing it to private enterprise."

There's a rather innocuous sounding name for this - "public private partnership" [1]. If you've ever experienced this scenario first hand, you'd truly be surprised how much government is run in partnership with private enterprise.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public%E2%80%93private_partner...

>Essentially the government has built a surveillance state by outsourcing it to private enterprise.

How long until the government finish outsourcing of all its attributions to private entities and corporations take ownership of governance? Then instead of voting, the citizens can manifest their interests through buying shares.

> the citizens can manifest their interests through buying shares.

Isn't this sort of how it already works? Although only a few (very rich) citizens hold enough shares to actually have any clout.

Government Alphabet agencies (see what I did there) don't just outsource, they run shell companies and real companies. They also invest in startups. Along with the revolving doors of regulation and regulated industries, nepotism, insider dealing one wonders if the labels such as Government and Corporate are just a distraction? The extent of this is probably unknowable but sometimes I wonder how much we all know for certain, because it is so obvious, is not actually so.

The "outsourcing" metaphor is mostly true but misses something important which is compulsion. Outsourcing implies a voluntary relationship, whereas a court order combined with an implicit threat of trouble if they don't follow, isn't.

It's optimistic to assume people feel anything at all. They'll just assume that the government won't actually target them with these powers. Just like violence seems like a distant reality until it happens to them.

Why is consent important when both mainstream political parties support the police state?

How would you vote to get to this meaningful debate in the first place?

This feels like classic Americanism. We’re so obsessed with freedom from the government and ensuring capitalism marches on that we never bothered to think our government might just buy it’s way into what it wants.

We kept the concepts separated, and weren’t paying attention.

The ones that did are rich nowadays, MURICA

>We’re so obsessed with freedom from the government and ensuring capitalism marches on

Then why is capitalism being killed and replaced with corporatism? Why is everything industry consolidating having one or few very big players and no medium and small businesses?

I like how ATT skirted around the question and lied. Well, not answering the question is...nevermind, they lied.

>I really think that we’ve allowed the surveillance state to form without actually having a meaningful public debate about it.

Isn't it for the "Greater Good™", as always? :D

I have hope that we here in the U.S. will be able to get out in front of this one. Despite all the complaining the justice system still mostly works and we have a libertarian streak a mile wide. Perhaps the thing to do is show those in power that they haven't escaped the dragnet...

All politicians, high rank officials, and tech leaders are basically owned by foreign intelligence. This data can be analised carefully to build profiles and strategies to influence.

Source on that first claim?

The US had a wiretap on Merkel. Do you think Russia, China, Germany, Israel, Iran and North Korea don't have the same on every other major political figure?

Let's face the truth: none of us is safe. Everything we do, even if we are just oedinary 9-5 office workers and not politicians or activists, is ending up recorded somewhere.

The only way out would be a nation-state effort of open source: everything from the VHDL of the chips over firmware to the OS, and enough money to fund audits of all components. At least, users could then somewhat trust at least their clients, and treat the network as a dumb leaky network of pipes.

>. Do you think Russia, China, Germany, Israel, Iran and North Korea don't have the same on every other major political figure?

Do you think US intelligence don't also have the same? We've already seen a sitting US president hire intelligence agents to bug his enemies and political rivals, it's not like there's any reason to suspect that was a one time occurrence.

Leaders under more authoritarian governments don't have to answer to rando voters. They only have to answer to their country's elites, who support what they're doing.

The intelligence agencies don't answer to voters either, they only answer to the countries elite who they've been shown to spy on.

> We've already seen a sitting US president hire intelligence agents to bug his enemies and political rivals,

Do you have a source for this claim?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watergate_scandal

Ha sorry, I just realized you must have meant Watergate. I misread your original comment as saying it was about the current sitting president.

Every 'interest' has this data. It comes down to money and time.

It might be unpleasant for the US citizens. But US is conducting mass surveillance against foreign nationals and that is not cool.

This may be a controversial opinion, but I think some level of surveillance can be good for people. If you are convicted for a crime, you should be able to use records to prove your innocence (eg. cell tower logs to show that you were nowhere near the murder and had an alibi). We already have this where traffic cameras can show who was responsible for car crashes.

However, a lot of current surveillance is more about snooping. That's where it crosses the line for me. I guess it comes down to ownership. I should own the text messages and call logs because I have access to them. AT&T can own the cell tower logs because they own the cell towers.

It is particulary controversial for a reason.

https://apnews.com/article/artificial-intelligence-algorithm...

> Employees can and do modify the location or number of shots fired at the request of police, according to court records.

It is certainly controversial, but also not very perspicacious. Towards whom do you need to prove your innocence? Against a encroaching state that convicts without evidence? Well, governments are guilty of that, sure. But then that is a problem in dire need of fixing, not tools that maybe provide you an alibi when stars align correctly. An alibi you shouldn't need in the first place.

Not really controversial but ignorant of how real life law enforcement works. You will never find yourself using tracking data to prove your innocence, that is TV/Hollywood fluff.

You will find yourself on the short list of suspects because you were in the area of a crime. If you actually read some news you will also find that it is often because one of the law enforcement decided their "gut" feeling was you are most guilty loooking and now they have a solid starting piece of evidence to use against you.

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