Homeland Security Spying on Reddit Users | Hacker News Reader

Homeland Security Spying on Reddit Users

kenklippenstein.com

105 pointsduxup34 comments

Reminds me of the "oopsie" by Reddit when they revealed Eglin Air Force Base as the "most addicted city."

It takes 20mins to fet from base houseing to the gate, lord k ows what traffic is like by the causeways, its an hour of driving before you're anywhere worth being and then its a coin flip if its exciting, so its either the ft. Walton beach strip clubs or onbase recreation.

No wonder eglin is addicted hahaha.

But in all seriousness, there are teams of people on the data crunch side of things that seems like a pedestrian insight

More specifically, the Border Patrol are spying on reddit users. Why are they creating these reports themselves and not relying on other agencies to investigate? Does border patrol have jurisdiction over all national security matters?

>The spying is revealed in a January intelligence bulletin produced by the Border Patrol and leaked to me.

Is the bulletin stating that border patrol is performing the action, or is the bulletin making their agents aware of intel being shared by others?

I wouldn't consider consuming public Reddit posts "spying."

The OSINT folks aren't technically spying but they're a lot closer to it than this.

Why not? I definitely consider cameras recording our every move in public to be spying/surveillance. It is one thing for a person to see something in public. Quite another to have automated systems recording and analyzing everything for all time.

Yes! Re: United States vs Carpenter

Even if it's not spying, I think it is stalking to follow and aggregate information about people's activities in public spaces over time.

If someone follows you around in public taking pictures of everything you in publicly-visible locations, are you being spied on?

How about through your window, visible from the street?

All public and visible information.

Yes, if the government asks someone to do that on their behalf and you are literally doing that you could easily hit a United States vs Carpenter violation.

It’s not legal most likely.

If you target an individual using the vast resources of the government for exercising his\her rights under the Constitution... would it not be much worse than spying?

Would it surprise you - given the well-documented behavior of the Federally-supported ICE agents - that this "leak" was a strategic (insidious) move? We've seen this behavior before on numerous occasions across social media that it should not surprise any of us. Or am I reaching...?

[note: his account (/u/Budget-Chicken-2425) has been suspended. I don't know if it happened before or after the leak. This is important to know too.]

Perhaps this is another calculated move to intimidate American citizens from exercising their Constitutional rights under the First Amendment?

Speech, Press, Assembly, Petition (and religion).

And if so... the very Constitution is under attack when these protected rights are reframed as homeland threats. Would you consider this a valid position?

Not sure I would agree with the second statement, OSINT is spying, different mechanism but same intent.

To clarify, even if it is not strictly "spying" by some particular definition, the scope and scale is so large, and the channels to direct actual "spying" resources towards potentially relevant targets that are unveiled through OSINT methods really blur the lines.

This was an inevitable step for a surveillance state. Technology will consolidate the position of the leaders while making organised resistance impossible.

Bummer.

Leaders imply leadership. Rulers is more apt.

That’s the real reason behind the push of digital ID. Any other reason you hear is just a straight up lie.

They are spying on all of us. Not just Reddit users.

This is OSINT (open-source intelligence) and isn't spying by any technical standard because it's speech in a public venue, there isn't a way to raise hell like with e.g. Snowden. Spying would be going into their DMs without a warrant (which is probably happening).

> Reddit post about “spreading awareness” as though it were the secret messages of al Qaeda

Extreme waste of tax dollars, though. I guess this is an important lesson in Big Brother and "having nothing to hide." They will put something worth hiding in your hands and swiftly arrest you.

Plenty of spying concerns people, places, actions, etc in public

Reddit is a rich field of attack for all sorts of nefarious actors. Through the use of bot armies they can stir up trouble and encourage harmful behavior.

Nothing is easily tied to an actual human being, which is what differentiates it from free public speech. An entire discussion might appear to have thousands of people shouting for some political action, when it’s really one small team or even a single actor orchestrating it.

I think the government has been slow to respond, really. It’s a PsyOps battlefield.

A bit of an alarmist title. They would be negligent if they didn't.

Hopefully they are able to anticipate protests and handle these without getting anyone shot. A good part of this is intelligence, and reading reddit is not a very invasive type of intelligence.

Huh. Why do they need to anticipate protests? Why can't they simply respect the right of the people to assemble and complain? The only thing that's alarmist is all of the actions performed by ICE.

Presumably being prepared for an incident will reduce the chance that due to surprise that incident will be handled incorrectly

If you ask me, all US law enforcement are very trigger happy, but I always assumed it is a two-way street as in, more people in US are armed and try to shoot law enforcements than in other countries

And more US police officers die on duty due to more citizens willing to kill law enforcement officers.

As a defensive measure due to cops being so trigger happy. Until the US relaxes it's cultist obsession about the 2A, that won't change.

Compare innocent people shot by cops to cops shot by people at protests, and the numbers won't be remotely close.

This approach seems much more likely to induce an incident. It’s an adversarial approach; it’s how you end up shooting people for filming. Constant vigilance! Shoot the nurse on his knees, to be safe!

LOL Nobody should be shocked. I forgot who said it but someone said something to the tune of they don't need to wire tap because people openly post all over social media for everyone to see.

People see it as a way to share information with friends and family, meanwhile governments use it as a survaylance tool, always have been.

Tin foil hat time: DARPA wanted to create LifeLog to track everything about you. Now you post everything they wanted to know about you on Facebook.

/Rant

One of the mistaken beliefs of contemporary neofascists is that Pournelle's Iron Law only applies to bureaucracies. It would be much much less work for ICE to stop executing American citizens, stop abducting citizens and lawful immigrants, and stop keeping deportees in overcrowded and opaque concentration camps, and repair their own reputation by generally operating within the law like good faith public servants. But obviously doing that would not meet the needs of the expanding autocracy.

And stay within your own borders.

The best way to stop them is to cut off their money.

ROTFL Good luck

The Democrats are already working on it. They don't need luck for it. They already have representative power.

Feels like it’s once again a Lucy holding the football situation.

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