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Comment by spzb | Hacker News Reader

Dupe (2002!) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21859581

With no context, I don't know why this is front page news today. Am I missing something?

This would be a repost rather than a dupe.

HN considers dupes to be stories with significant discussion repeated within a year. (Items with little or no discussion can be resubmitted a few times.)

Stories reshared after a year are reposts, and are perfectly fine, though its appreciated to have the item's original publication year included in the title.

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37312416>

<https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html>

Are you asking what reposts are?

No. I'm pointing out that (a) it's not marked as being from 2002 and someone would therefore assume it was some newly discovered backdoor and (b) there's no context or commentary as to why it is relevant in 2023.

Also, on closer inspection the story is from 1997 https://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/19.52.html#subj1

I've pinged mods to fix the year based on that, thanks.

I'd wager that its still relevant today because the NSA is still the worlds greatest wholesale violator of human rights, at massive scale, and literally nothing effective has been done about this situation - we are still tolerating this repression, because we don't see it and simply don't care enough about the human rights violations, as a people, to reign in this out of control agency.

Bringing these articles to light is of great utility to those of us who do not consider the NSA state of affairs to be, in any way, tolerable.

> the NSA is still the worlds greatest wholesale violator of human rights, at massive scale, and literally nothing effective has been done about this situation - we are still tolerating this repression

I don’t approve of their actions but turning the hyperbole up to 11 doesn’t help. There are millions of people in China who’d love to be only that repressed, for example.

You can always rely on an American to bust out the China hate train when challenged on the facts of their own empires crimes ..

Did you miss the fact that the NSA is literally violating the human rights of billions of people (including the Chinese), while China in the meantime has brought a billion people out of poverty conditions into their new middle class?

>There are millions of people in China who’d love to be only that repressed, for example

I seriously doubt you understand the nature of this fallacy. Meanwhile, how many families live under a broken bridge in the USA, just because Mom got cancer? Those 1,000 black-ops CIA sites around the world - you know for sure what they are being used for, eh? No torture?

Seriously, get a grip. The moral authority you claim is a fallacy.

... are you serious?

You don't think military invasions & communist dictatorships constitute "wholesale violation of human rights at a massive scale"?

If the NSA is spying on people, that's an invasion of their privacy, but it is nothing in comparison to those other violations

Its a massive, wholesale violation of human rights, which can then be used as further justification for more atrocities and calamity at the hands of the US' military industrial complex ..

And yes, the USA is still the worlds worst violator of human rights, bar none. The NSA is why.

It's completely unreal that you can think this.

Russia is invading a sovereign country right now. Civilians are getting killed. You'll hopefully agree that getting killed is a human rights violation?

Saudi Arabia is invading Yemen.

North Korea is running a giant state apparatus that lets one man lord it over tens of millions; all his whims are satisfied while they go literally hungry.

Venezuela is ruled by a dictator - millions are hungry and poor. Families torn apart by mass emigration.

China has 1.5 BILLION people in economic and political pseudo-slavery. They don't really own anything and are more or less forced to go along with the government.

But boo-hoo, the NSA can read your texts, so they're the ultimate bad guy?

Dude.

The USA is invading a sovereign country right now. It has occupied 1/3rd of its territory with the specific goal of denying the people of that nation access to those resources needed to rebuild their shattered state.

>Civilians are getting killed.

The USA has dropped a bomb on innocent people every twenty minutes for the last twenty years. The state of Ukraine today is not even close to the atrocities committed by the USA.

>The open genocide of Yemen by a known fascist totalitarian authoritarian dictatorship, with the support of the US military

Saudi Arabia has been sold the weapons it needs for its genocide by the USA. The genocide of Yemen is 100% on the American people - it wouldn't happen without your states' complicity. All those resources being provided to 'stop' the 'genocide of Ukraine' - where are they while 10 million Yemeni children are being starved to death?

North Korea? They wish they had the ability to govern their nations mindset the way the West does.

China has lifted a billion people out of poverty into their new middle class. The USA, meanwhile, has all but eradicated its middle class.

The NSA are violating human rights at massive scale; the USA is the worlds #1 supporter of terror and exporter of calamity, and has committed decades of war crimes, crimes against humanity and massive violations of human rights at scale - with impunity - precisely because of the utter ignorance citizens (or are you military) such as yourself demonstrate...

The NSA violates privacy at scale - a lot of little violations of civil liberties. It's the difference between robbing a man for everything he has, versus pick-pocketing 30 cents out of the pocket of every person on the planet.

Furthermore, they're part of a larger intelligence apparatus that has absolutely committed very large and very harmful violations of civil liberties. The NSA's sister org, the CIA, was overthrowing democratically elected left-wingers in South America for decades, replacing them with brutal dictators and tyrants that gave both Hitler and Stalin runs for their money. The CIA wrote the book on how to do so, arguably even moreso than the KGB did. In fact, the reason why Russia today[0] is so effective at information warfare and covert propaganda is specifically because they learned from observation.

[0] Not(?) to be confused with Russia Today

If you're thinking about overseas signals intelligence, then, like the signals intelligence practice in every industrialized state in the world, the chartered purpose of NSA is to conduct those privacy violations. The safeguards we're given against NSA --- take them as seriously as you want --- are about domestic surveillance.

Just because Americans believe they have domestic rights being protected doesn't mean their intelligence apparatus isn't violating human rights at massive scale.

Yes, the purpose of the NSA is to violate human rights at scale. No, this is not a tolerable situation for those of us in the free world.

You keep saying "NSA", but you mean "the intelligence agencies of every industrialized country in the world".

No, you mean that - in order to justify the continued existence of the NSA - but I really do mean NSA when I state NSA.

There are no other intelligence agencies coming even close to the human rights violations committed every millisecond by the American people.

Adding the date in the HN title would be better (it is not present in the article)

I think a Microsoft coder recently came clean about some pretty funky stuff from the 90s and 00's. Hope I didn't hallucinate that.

I feel like you might be talking about Dave Plummer: https://www.youtube.com/@DavesGarage

He recently have a good talk at VCF, too: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ig_5syuWUh0

Link?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjkBAl84PJs

Thanks!

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