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Comment by jgrahamc | Hacker News Reader

So, let's see. The NSA does it, GCHQ does it, DGSE does it. The operating assumption should be that all countries are monitoring all communications for at least metadata. Personally, I would not be the slightest bit surprised to learn that all phone calls are being recorded and as much Internet traffic as possible.

I'm not surprised by this news at all. The technical means have been there for years and years. And the desire has been there for much longer. Anyone who reads the history of SIGINT will understand that the desire to capture all communications is perfectly normal in that environment.

Snowden's "revelations" are completely unsurprising to anyone who has thought about this and the technology. I'm still waiting for him to reveal something actually surprising.

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I'm not surprised by this news at all. The technical means have been there for years and years.

Have you thought through the implications of this? To me capturing and storing all the information we generate is really dangerous, and there's no way I'd want a log of everything in my life to be accessible to my secret service, my government, police, and the secret services of anyone they might wish to share it with (in particular the NSA) in secret and without my permission.

You've carefully avoided stating an opinion on these actions of our security services, but presented it as a fait accompli that we may as well just live with. I disagree. They've lied to us about what they were collecting (everything) and lied to us about what it is for (terror). I see no reason to trust any assurances or controls which are introduced on access, and the only way to stop abuse is to stop collection.

It appears they're not yet at the point where they can store all information indefinitely, but that point will arrive soon, and I think we should stop them before it does. I don't even trust the current politicians and police with this information on every citizen, let alone any conceivable politician who might come to power in the next few centuries.

IMHO we should have strong protections banning outright the collection and collation of this sort of material except where there are reasons to be believe someone is a serious criminal (violence, fraud, terror), with judicial oversight, for a limited time, with the data deleted after the trial. Just as the police are not allowed to demand DNA samples from entire populations in order to solve a crime, security services should not be allowed to store our every move and thought in the name of defending liberty, it makes a mockery of the concepts they claim to be protecting, and is extremely dangerous in the long term.

You've carefully avoided stating an opinion on these actions of our security services, but presented it as a fait accompli that we may as well just live with

You want my opinion? I agree: it's very dangerous for the state to have detailed information about an individual's life. The potential for abuse is enormous.

Thank you. I find that information far more interesting than whether you are surprised by surveillance, but perhaps that's just me.

The only winning move is not to play. And before you complain this is impossible, for the record, Stallman has been doing the same for years. He doesn't own a cellphone. Think about that for a moment; mull over the implications.

He's been saying for years that the allure of convenience is a mirage in terms of privacy. Is he doing something illegal? No, I think it's safe to say not. Most likely, neither are you.

So why do you continue to play?

I think it'd be a shame to sacrifice all the utility of the Internet and telephone services because of mass surveillance. I'd rather sacrifice some of the capabilities of GCHQ and the NSA instead.

Whether or not it's surprising is totally irrelevant and you should stop pretending it isn't, if that is what you're saying.

But you've got an interesting point in that the desire has always been to capture everything -- while the technical means to do it have been available for a couple of years. Along with a further shift in how people communicate towards easily moniterable technology, that is the crux of the matter.

It was one thing to have secret societies intent on capturing everything in the 60s, when technology limited the scope of the operation. It's another thing when that intention is not readjusted to the societal and technical realities of 50 years later.

That's why it seems like such a sudden, surprising change in policy to some who haven't kept up with the technical possibilities for surveillance, while others realize it's been a slow change going on for decades now.

And of course, for the past decades some of us have been trying to point out the technical possibilities to everyone who would listen, only to get told that just because it's possible doesn't mean it's being done -- we're not surprised by Snowden's leaks, but certainly vindicated.

This is a discussion on HN, not in a general public forum. Sure, the general public is probably surprised by what's been revealed but we should not be.

I've actually found the less technically savvy less surprised and less outraged.

Hmm. Maybe HN isn't the community I thought it was then.

Some. I think it depends if you can explain it properly. That was supposed to be the media's job, in the 'self-regulating' system of democracy. Obviously, that failed. So now we have non-democracy, and little way out except...

Why would it surprise anyone (HN or otherwise) that the NSA is trying to do what is available COTS for enterprise, for auditing and law enforcement (CALEA), on a massive scale? Especially in the current environment of civil liberty erosion? Because its outside their domain and expertise and/or they really haven't been paying attention.

EDIT: the point is that I don't believe that HN should be anymore knowledgeable about this than the General Public because it is a specialized domain. It's not 'the Internet'.

Being french, I am quite certain that this is a lesser news to french people than PRISM was to americans.

Read the comments (if you can read french), and you'll notice that the reactions are all a sarcastic combination of "not surprised at all" and "that darn government probably didn't even get this right".

To sum up the differences:

- PRISM was legal. That said, in France, legal coherency is a joke. Laws conflict with each other, and even when voted, they may not be applied.

- There is an implied contract in the US that the government won't spy on citizens. Nobody believes that in France.

- As a result of the above, the people behind this "revelation" won't even be sued.

- French people tend to use services from abroad (mostly american, sweden and german), so the government doesn't have much leverage to get information from companies. I doubt they broke TLS. They do have a huge understanding with ISPs, however. Incidentally, ISPs are severely distrusted by their users.

All in all, our democracy is even worse than yours. Yes, that is possible.

Being french too, when I first read about PRISM, I thought the american people would fight it fiercly. I just read about the french equivalent and I know the french people will never try to fight it.

Legal or not, it's our liberty they're taking away from us.

The people of the USA and France now feel powerless against our respective governments. We gave our votes to the executioners of our liberty.

> so the government doesn't have much leverage to get information from companies

Google, MS, Facebook, twitter and cell phone companies don't have facilities in France?

Here's the manual for the Amuses Eagle product, a French company: http://wikileaks.org/spyfiles/docs/amesys/99_eagle-glint-ope...

Isn't the point that no-one should be surprised any more?

We've recently had revelations suggesting that several intelligence services are essentially grabbing as much communications data as they can. Why would anything think if the US are doing it and the UK are doing it that anyone else with a reasonable budget and level of technical capability isn't?

Moving forward (even prior to this but certainly now) the assumption should be that if a country has the resources to have an intelligence service which can do this, they're doing it.

With regards to this the most likely constraining factor for any intelligence service is money and resources rather than morality, legality or anything else.

And for what, with surveillance like this, how is there still crime and terrorism?

either it's ineffective or they're overselling the capabilities or they're more interested in dissidents, and judging by the way activists and whistle blowers are being treated, i suspect this is the real reason these systems exist.

EDIT: Or there's some other threat none of us know about and these systems are working perfectly at keeping us all safe... but that's a long shot.

We have never been attacked by space aliens. The system works.

Actually, we have been. Twice. That you never heard about this is the proof the system works.

(don't ask me how I know about those attacks)

So the government is NOT trying to prevent terrorism but instead has setup these elaborate systems just to prevent activism and whistle blowing. You sure that aliens aren't involved somewhere in there ?

The FACTS are this. The head of the NSA has testified in front of congress that over 50 potential terrorist acts were thwarted because of PRISM since 9/11 including bombing of the NY subways and stock exchange. And there is no evidence that the infrastructure the NSA has is available to every single cop in every town in order to fight crime.

The head of National Intelligence testified in front of congress, too. When asked if they were collecting "any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans", he said, "No.". When the question was repeated, he said, "Not wittingly."

So he outright lied to congress. The information that you claim is a fact is from a source that I no longer believe.

That it's a fact that he said that doesn't make it a fact that it is so.

Oh, and the irony of thinking otherwise and mocking "tinfoil"; I never saw anyone resorting to that who didn't strike me as projecting. It's for example a conspiracy theory to simply note that buildings don't just fall into themselves because of office furniture fires, but it's not a conspiracy theory to believe Saddam is about to unleash WMD without even being able to name what he'd gain from it. It doesn't take genius to note that the deciding factor is not how realistic or dumb fucking stupid something is, or even physically possible for that matter, but wether it goes against or with power.

> It's for example a conspiracy theory to simply note that buildings don't just fall into themselves because of office furniture fires, but it's not a conspiracy theory to believe Saddam is about to unleash WMD without even being able to name what he'd gain from it. It doesn't take genius to note that the deciding factor is not how realistic or dumb fucking stupid something is, or even physically possible for that matter, but wether it goes against or with power.

Well, yeah, the phrase "conspiracy theory" refers to a theory that involves a massive conspiracy among the power elites to keep the truth about some important thing from the public.

So, yeah, the claims about Saddam's WMD's weren't a conspiracy theory, they were just lies by those in power (an accurate description of the nature and motivation of those claims would have been a conspiracy theory, which demonstrates also that "conspiracy theory" and "false" aren't the same thing.)

One thing I find helpful to keep in mind that if you hang a wall full of analog clocks, they will synchronize. That's just what happens, without any of the clocks ever formulating a plan and the rest agreeing to it.

In the same way, it's just common sense that powerful entities, while also competing with each other, synchronize in keeping the unwashed masses in check. If ants can do it, so can people. That in itself doesn't make any old claim valid, but it means looking out for signs of such "unspoken conspiracy" is simply paying attention instead of acting like a goldfish (by which I don't mean to diss goldfish, just trying to make a point).

I expect snow in winter; that doesn't mean I may claim rain is snow, but it means I wont stare for 30 minutes when it does start snowing, and wonder what all the white stuff is. It also means I sometimes get irritated with people who do.

Yes, there are nutty theories and nutty claims. But they are so in their own right, not "because it's a conspiracy theory". This is exactly as logically valid as saying "that's a Jewish-sounding argument", to Godwin this thing for good measure.

Not that you don't know all of this, I just felt like rambling a bit. HN prides itself in having argument instead of memes, but it's still tinfoil this and tinfoil that without even blushing sometimes, which is the lolcat of the domesticated pseudo-intellectual if you ask me.

A wall of analog clocks will synchronize? Elaborate?

I'm sorry, I meant the really old style analog clocks with a pendulum. After a while, they will swing in unison.

http://www.math.kyushu-u.ac.jp/eng/pages/laboratory04.html

Technically, they do "talk" to each other: "the two pendulums would exert a force on each other through minute vibrations in the wall". I would argue humans do the same. And not just "the" powerful either, everybody does. Sometimes for fun, sometimes for gain, sometimes just to be social, but hardly ever with a clearly formulated "plan", or meetings in dimly lit rooms. That's just not necessary when you already noticed you're in agreement with someone about crucial things, simply because you're both doing them.

Also, it's perfectly normal for people to "conspire" to do something without any of them even reflecting on what they're doing individually, much less as a group. It's possible to work in unison towards a common goal without even being consciously aware of that. Kinda like a flock of birds, or pendulum clocks :P

The only real fact that we have in this context is that the NSA and POUTS are both willing to lie.

You think this means there should be no crime by now? How would that work exactly?

You're straining my point I feel. I simply think that this sort of surveillance would have made a big impact on the $36 billion drug trade, what with the war on drugs being such a hot topic an all.

But no. It seems drug dealers don't use phones or computers or send mail to communicate with any of the cartels or drug lords we know of, and presumably coordinate their gargantuan logistical operations via telepathy.

Or, the government doesn't deem the drug trade worthy of scrutiny, despite the warnings that it funds terrorism.

> So, let's see. The NSA does it, GCHQ does it, DGSE does it. The operating assumption should be that all countries are monitoring [...]

USA, UK and France are not any contry the're all at the top of this list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_e...

It doesn't say much about other contries.

Sweden does it as well. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FRA_law

All countries spy.

USA, UK, France and the rest of the top produce. The rest buys.

or even more to the point, national intelligence agencies actually spy, news at 11.

if i were journalist i would compile a list of all of those agencies and then release a "story" each week.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_intelligence_agencies

enough to milk this topic for years.

i am austrian, so our HNA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heeresnachrichtenamt would be my "scandal". they run a sigint station smack in the center of vienna, located in a WW2 flaktower. public knowledge, but just add Snowden, Morales, some other bullshit and voila, another great feat of journalism.

It is still very useful to have proof. It dispels the image of conspiracy theory.

We are way past this now. If anything, we have the opposite problems of "apology theorists" and "coincidence theorists".

People have been trained to think "conspiracy" is some BS endeavour that includes aliens in Roswell, mind control, illuminati etc.

Fact is, most of history has seen covert action by governments and organisations. Those are also conspiracies (by definition), and it's totally wrong (and disingenuous) to lump them with BS conspiracy theories.

It's no big deal. We all suspected it.

It's so unsurprising that the US forced a foreign president to touch down and have his plane searched in a foreign country to try and catch the whistleblower.

You needed proof to know the US government was spying ? It isn't some giant secret you know:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Agency

Until recently, it was considered ridiculous to think that the NSA is spying on citizens of countries allied to the US. Now we have proof.

Ridiculous by whom? It wouldn't surprise me if we spied on our allies citizens and then sold the intelligence to our allies so they didn't have to.

I mean, we have in the past warned allies that one of their citizens was planning an attack. It should have been obvious that meant we were monitoring their citizens.

It was considered ridiculous by the mainstream. If I told that to some of my friends, they would have thought I'm crazy. Not anymore.

Just because it's unsurprising that doesn't make it ok.

We need to stop being so blasé about the way countries spy on each other and the general public. No, it's not anything new. Yes, spies spy, that's their job. But it shouldn't be their job.

Exactly.. so many unexamined assumptions go into all this.

I have good info that NORAD has been tracking Santa for years with GPS tracking by remotely enabling cell phones he's carrying as presents.

In seriousness though, you're absolutely right and I feel the same way. I think the important thing here is that it's the first time the general public (and much of the tech community) has been presented this information in a straight-forward way. Also, people who had long ago deduced everything being revealed now (like me) will hopefully see the full extent of everything that's been happening. I have additional things I figure have been going on but which I loathe to discuss for fear of sounding paranoid. However, I used to feel that way when talking about the gov't reading email and tracking your FB activities, so it's nice to finally be able to discuss that with people and not seem like a lunatic or have the issue immediately dismissed.

edit:

But let me make a tinfoil hat prediction now, and I can point back to this post one day to maybe win a bet:

The private data collected on everyone is being shared with government workers (and private contractors) on all levels in some form. I think that many, many depts and orgs across federal, state, and local levels are privy to our personal/private data at least in aggregate/anonymized form whether they realize it or not. For instance, I think at least a small portion of police and fire responses are triggered by our private data, perhaps in a way that those responders don't even realize. It's a crazy idea and perhaps I'll head over to the TwoPlusTwo forums to begin taking bets :)

Exactly, this is what I've been pointing out: Every government with the means to monitor domestic and foreign communications does so and invariably stretches the law in order to achieve it.

That's why I've felt the focus on the NSA and GCHQ (i.e. the US and and UK) was misplaced. The focus should be on better privacy protections and rolling back state surveillance in all countries, not just the two whose programs are the best-known. In fact the understanding of how widespread this is may reignite the push for better client-side privacy and anonymity protection tools.

It's no surprise but give me 6 months of your data and I will use it to turn you into a criminal. It's no surprise but it's a huge problem.

I think people too often discount the fact that for the NSA system, there's actually oversight. Or at least they try very hard to make it seem like there is. I haven't seen that in the European stuff, and that's what worries me.

>Snowden's "revelations" are completely unsurprising to anyone who has thought about this and the technology. I'm still waiting for him to reveal something actually surprising.

To someone used to an abusive relationship, no abuse is surprising.

"Oh, now he hit me with a metal club. Big fucking deal"

That doesn't make it acceptable or non dangerous.

So I wouldn't be waiting, like a mere spectator on something that doesn't affect me, for him to "reveal something actually surprising".

He didn't say "big fucking deal". A guy menaces you with a metal club. Then he hits you with it. That's a big fucking deal, and also not a surprise.

There's no reason to focus on the "not a surprise" part, as the comment did, except for trivialising the issue.

What are you talking about? The "not a surprise" part was the whole point of John Graham-Cumming's comment to which you're replying.

I hate, hate, hate comments like these. They serve absolutely no purpose other than saying I told you so.

Yes, some of us understood the spying is broad, but I don't think most of us expected the cables to be tapped directly, and take all the data like from a firehose and store it all. How can you say even that doesn't surprise you? And even if it doesn't you think 99% of the people out there understood this?

Does your mom or dad think it's okay their phone calls are stored and analyzed by the government?

Anyway, just because you (probably) knew this was going on, doesn't mean there shouldn't be a time to get outraged about it.

No. OP is saying that he is not outraged because he wasn't surprised. He may not like the fact that it is happening, but he is not outraged. That was the point of the comment. A little bit of 'I told you so', and a little more of 'stop getting so upset, because if you really cared you would have known.' The only thing that changed with Snowden is that now you know about it.

But lets be honest, we are talking about spying. If we didn't already know, we should have assumed, because the point of spying is to know everything. What did everybody thing spying was? Because it certainly isn't legal. And now that everybody understands what spying entails I am supposed to be outraged? Yawn. Wake me up when the secret police ACTUALLY start taking people away. Because until till then, the NSA is doing its job, and that is spying however legal or illegal it may be.

But when that day comes, if history serves as any precedent, I'll know about it before you do.

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