Tell HN: US Government is surveilling HN | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: US Government is surveilling HN

22 pointsperihelions13 comments

According to Jospeh Cox at 404media [0], who today published leaked documents from an American surveillance-tech company, "ShadowDragon". I thought it may be of interest to HN that "YCombinator" is named [1] as a target.

[0] https://www.404media.co/the-200-sites-an-ice-surveillance-co... ("The 200+ Sites an ICE Surveillance Contractor is Monitoring")

[1] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1VyAaJaWCutyJyMiTXuDH...

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It's public... You can download the whole thing

https://github.com/HackerNews/API

Gets surveilled by people like me.

Trying to find "interesting" content in a large archive is pretty difficult, see

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43344195

looking at the famous Enron Emails, I think the best thing I found was somebody talking about the training they did back in the army.

The disclosure isn't that HN's comments are public (of course they're public), it's that the US government has decided to start trawling them in bulk. That's not exceptionally surprising either, but it wasn't certain, and it's IMO notable that that's now a confirmed thing.

it's that the US government has decided to start trawling them.

It's some ICE contractor make-work, an actual obvious case of government waste.

And "Facebook", "Flickr", "Fetlife", "Fediverse" [1], "FlightFinder", and "Furaffinity" in the F's. Not to mention "PGP", "Peleton", "AnimePlanet", "Apple Music", "Bodybuilding", "Companies House"... It would be news if any site got left out -- gotta tell them they got to keep an eye on "DPReview".

[1] but not Mastodon, Pixelfed, etc. I got the feeling these folks might have trouble finding some of the sites that want to surveil

That's unsurprising. All major social platforms are surveilled in near real-time for people on watch lists, e.g., people who are somewhat, maybe, or could be baddies and protestors; people who aren't enemies of the state but are potentially dangerous by trade such as specops and infosec employees. This has been in place for over 15 years in the US. Also, it's probable public media is scoured continuously for political and/or intelligence leaks as well.

The Intercept wrote an article about ShadowDragon and SocialNet a few years ago:

https://theintercept.com/2021/09/21/surveillance-social-medi...

What does it even mean to do surveillance on PGP or Tesseract OCR?

Of course the US government is surveilling HN, the US government is surveilling everyone, everywhere, all the time. You think they wouldn't pay close attention to a forum owned by a billion dollar startup incubator that hosts talks by Elon Musk and was once run by the guy who went on to run OpenAI? Shit yeah they're surveilling HN.

And SV has always had deep connections to the military industrial complex. Feds post here, they doubtless have influence programs running here. Look up the relationship between Google and the CIA sometime. This was never a safe space from the government.

I sometimes wonder if there is a whole generation that has no idea who Snowden is. Or even if they know who he is they have no idea what secrets he released to the world.

I think a lot of them for whatever reason believe HN doesn't exist in the context of the real world, and its rules don't apply.

He is still _very_ well-known in govvie circles

100%.

In-Q-Tel (CIA venture capital) invested in Google forever ago, for example, and Silicon Valley used to be/still is a huge DoD R&D center (Fairchild, HP, etc.)

Which is why our govt gutting major departments and having so much AI development come from the private sector is so troubling to me.

I mean I'd be surprised if they _weren't_. It's easier to assume that every public website is being surveilled by multiple different entities.

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