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Comment by t-sauer | Hacker News Reader

That person already got targeted last summer. I doubt they are as uninteresting as they believe/claim to be.

You'd be surprised. A college student in an interesting field is an interesting target. Doesn't mean he's done anything nefarious or even shady.

Industrial espionage is a thing.

Why would a college student be an interesting target simply for being a college student in an interesting field? If they work at an interesting company or something like that I would understand, but the knowledge that is accessible in colleges is not some super secret stuff or am I missing something?

The conversation here is focussing on industrial espionage, but that's only one use case for this kind of active measure. An association with an opposition political party could easily get one on a surveillance list.

Yep, imagine an international postgrad student from an NSO client-state who criticizes their home country's leadership online, or is perceived to be a political activist is likely to be targeted by their own government for additional on-device monitoring via spyware. This could provide a springboard into monitoring other groups the victim may be a member of.

We've had this problem quite a bit in Australia.

Chinese students attending protests have had their families back home warned.

Personally know friends this has happened to.

Colleges are basically outsourced green field R&D setup through professors as well as Patent departments to monetize their internal/grant research spend.. Sampling in a large company what you would happen upon is mundane additions to complex solutions you would be unlikely to want to copy if you weren't along for the earlier parts of the ride.

They are gullible and they need the money.

Student debts are a harsh reality a lot of people cannot escape from.

It doesn't take much to be a target. CIA spy maybe not, but the net is wide when it comes to surveillance. Infrastructure providers, higher education, research labs are all common targets.

>It doesn't take much to be a target.

I wonder how to quantify this. Even folks in those industries listed while there may be reason we could imagine to target them... I would imagine lots of folks in those same industries are NOT targeted.

Of course we'd have to identify "targeted", personally I wouldn't include "your name ended up on a list after someone grepped a bunch of data". I would think of as targeted as a more curated type list / process / and then the call was made to "target" someone.

Otherwise, heck random scanning on the internet would be "targeted".

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