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Comment by gizmo686 | Hacker News Reader

Shit like looking at the data that Big Tech has been collecting on American citizens?

The NSA is incapable of building the type of mass surveillance infastructure we see today. That infrastructure is built and maintained by private tech companies. The NSA comes along repurposes that already collected data to their own ends.

Further, the NSA's usage of said information has never been linked to any population wide mental health crises, unlike big tech.

There is also a wide range of work the NSA does, and most people working there don't know much beyond their own need to know.

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It's certainly another one of those public-private partnerships, for example the NSA keeps its fiber-optic splitters on domestic trunk lines in AT&T buildings, to vacuum up all traffic (including that between US citizens, of course, which seems to be something of a violation of warrantless spying):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2348156

"AT&T has a fiberoptic splitter copying our data to NSA" (eff.org)" (2011, 200 comments)

However there's also the massive Ogden Utah data storage center run by the NSA and contractors, which has a constant demand for 65 MW of power, I think that counts as mass surveillance infrastructure.

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

Seems pretty Orwellian.

If someone is transiting sensitive data without encryption over the internet, and the NSA is included in their threat model, then they need to rethink a lot of things.

Assuming the NSA catches and stores the traffic (i.e. it passed a keyword/subject filter), they still have to break the encryption.

And even if they have devices capable of doing so, they don't have capacity to do so on an unlimited volume of messages.

A dystopian system would be more interested in the metadata, which can't really be hidden. The Gestapo or STASI would work by making graphs of who was in communication with who, and then, they'd go kick down doors and round up everyone on their list for interrogation, because they were somehow connected to some bad person via the metadata. Of course, this would have a stifling effect on communication and lead to constant fear and paranoia in the general population, which is precisely what an authoritarian regime would want.

They're still pushing this stuff today, not surprisingly:

https://www.ctinsider.com/news/article/NSA-director-pushes-C...

> "WASHINGTON (AP) (Jan 12 2023) — A top U.S. intelligence official on Thursday urged Congress to renew sweeping powers granted to American spy agencies to surveil and examine communications, saying they were critical to stopping terrorism, cyberattacks and other threats."

"Other threats" such as what, populist movements unhappy with the increasingly feudalist-aristocratic nature of the United States and the gross corruption seen in Congress and the federal bureaucracy?

Metadata is increasingly shifting into the encrypted payload, and networks are shifting away (conceptually and physically) from p2p channel-based to packet-routed via intermediaries.

At some point, the metadata is (user X talks to SaaS service Y), and then the trail goes private.

This is the NSA we’re talking about. They will simply put their hooks inside service Y and collect the data there.

The NSA isn't some all-powerful entity. They play by different rules, but there are still rules.

If ATT had really pushed back, the NSA would have been hard pressed to install and run tapping equipment. And that's on hardline voice, where CALEA obviously applies. But as far as I know ATT didn't really fight, once they were legally covered from liability.

The modern large scale cloud or social providers are younger companies, have fewer government ties, and (critically) have worldwide business.

I would automatically assume they all have data sharing agreements with the NSA, as a maximal threat assumption, but as a likely threat I expect it'd be a lot harder for the NSA to co-opt them.

I.e. why the NSA instead chose to tap Google's private fiber between their data centers

> If someone is transiting sensitive data without encryption over the internet, and the NSA is included in their threat model, then they need to rethink a lot of things.

You still think that the "security" certificates make you secure ? that s in https stands for security ?

Why would a spy agency collect TB of data without a mean to decrypt it ?

Encryption doesn't require certificate authorities and TLS.

And the NSA is doing that because they can break a percentage of it, or anticipate they can in the future.

And it's order of exabytes of data.

I'm not defending big tech. That's a whole other topic. But as for the government, it is supposed to be held to a high(er) standard. This is codified into law: the limitations the constitution imposes on the government are not imposed on civilians/corporation. This is with good reason: quis custodiet ipsos custodes.

If you blow the whistle on big tech for doing something illegal, you get a pat on the back and a cash reward. Blow the whistle on the US government doing something illegal and you're either hanging out with your new friend Vlad or in pound me in the ass prison.

>The NSA is incapable of building the type of mass surveillance infastructure we see today. That infrastructure is built and maintained by private tech companies.

This is false, the snowden releases showed they have extensive infrastructure that aggregates data from many different sources.

Parent's point is that any NSA system falls far short (in comprehensiveness and freshness) of what Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple have (in addition to their analogs in other countries).

At the end of the day, worldwide profit scales systems faster than even national security dollars.

And parent's point is wrong, because A) the NSA has broader legal powers to collect and use data, and B) the NSA's mission is literally signal intelligence. They aren't in the business of making phones or serving ads. Of course without inside knowledge of how companies are collecting and using data and what exactly the NSA is doing there's no way to know for sure. But the public revelations of what the NSA are doing go far beyond what we've heard tech companies are doing.

Yet it was private companies that managed to get almost everyone to carry around a microphone, video camera, accelerometer, gps device which they also use to store and transmit the majority of their personal conversations.

Granted, they do not snoop on you to the maximum extent the hardware of these devices allow. But, take a look at [0]. Unless you are one of the few people who goes out of their way to limit tracking, do you think that the NSA would be able to get that detailed tracking of everyone's movements.

And this is just the obvious part (which Google is nice enough to share with its users as a feature). Big tech companies have also built detailed models of most people's interests; which is simply not possible without the large amount of data that comes from people actually interacting with them.

All of the NSA's dragnet surveillance is built on the back of private industry, and works because that private industry has convinced people to participate in it.

[0] https://www.google.com/maps/timeline

It's true that state surveillance infrastructure is mostly built on top of civilian infrastructure, the original post just made it sound like the NSA didn't have its own enormous datacenters and wasn't slurping and processing an extraordinary amount of data.

Data collection has never been used by government agencies to do bad stuff? You must have forgotten about Nazi Germany. Where it suddenly was very convenient the state knew who was Jewish.

The Holocaust would have been horrendously more effective had Nazi Germany convinced Europe's citizens to self-register on Facebook and declare their own religion.

Many of Europe's citizens actively helped to identify and genocide Jews

Many of Europe’s citizens got to keep Jewish apartments, jewelry, and assets for free. Heck take Ukraine, where did all those Jewish belongings go? Ukraine had 1million Jews die in ww2. Even more fled. Yet all the wealth from those Jews was never returned to the families or survivors.

Why is it always framed as a verses conversation? This isn't helpful. It is quite possible that people don't like either form of surveillance. But let's also not pretend that surveillance capitalism is identical to a surveillance state.

  The NSA is a big old bitch,
  "so are your fangs and VCs"
  says the crowd who has the itch
  for cool projects but sees
  all really as prostitution. Stitch
  up the foul mouth hey, one who pees
  in the water is bound to filth drink,
  work, make, grow rich but don't think.

In the context of this thread, because we are talking about the NSA hiring laid-off Big Tech workers. The question at issue is not, in general, if people have a problem with Government surveillance. Rather, the question is if people who have built their careers around private surveillance have a problem with government surveillance.

Large capital is indivisible from the state. I'm not sure making that distinction serves any real purpose, because a government that doesn't regulate surveillance capitalism effectively makes its stance pretty clear about surveillance in general.

> Shit like looking at the data that Big Tech has been collecting on American citizens?

Yes. When we elect our officials we grant them significant power. We have rules they must abide by to protect us from that power (I.e. using this data to interfere with elections to continue/advance their power.)

This is substantially different than private industry. Don’t get me wrong, surveillance capitalism is its own shade of gray. But the government laundering away constitutional rights through collaboration with private industry and protecting themselves from prosecution for their crimes by labeling these collaborations a state secret?

Between their clandestine organizations, their militaries, and their law enforcement - the government is capable of perpetuating more crimes against humanity than their private industry counterparts.

Ahh, you mean TikTok right /s

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