'Sending a message': what the US and UK are attempting to do
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
I mean, isn't this almost surreal? Like a cheap sci-fi novel has become reality?
Who's the real terrorists in 2013? I for one am more scared, appaled by what has been bubbling to the surface every week, almost every day since Snowden.
The war on terror rhetoric is plain pathetic now. Any self defence measure taken by citizens would be classified as terror by these governments now.
For example, in the 1980s there was an almighty fuss because an excellent journalist found out that the UK government had wasted vast amounts of money on a failed spy satellite project - that had Special Branch raiding magazine offices and occupying the BBC offices in Glasgow:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zircon_affair
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duncan_Campbell_%28journalist%2...
[NB I can strongly recommend Duncan Campbell's "Secret Society" series from 1987 - some of them are on YouTube and they really are scary/tragic - a lot of his concerns are rather prophetic.]
Yes, honestly.
For more than 20 years, the basic message of the cipherpunks and related communities has been that the NSA spends tens of billions of dollars to spy on everything "foreign" that it can possibly get its hands on, and its foreign adversaries are doing the same, so you'd better use PGP (or more) if you want any chance of keeping your communications secret from the government. This is even more true post-9/11 and post-2008 than it was in 1993, milestones that have hardly gone undiscussed in the public discourse about government intelligence gathering.
The M-x spook feature of emacs is not a new thing!
After all, 40 years ago the Nixon Administration sent thugs to burgle Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist, looking to steal medical records that would reveal embarrassing information about Ellsberg. Hopefully _that_ has gotten better and will never be repeated, but this stuff is just not unprecedented in our history and not something an informed observer would rationally disbelieve.
Popular books like "Blind Man's Bluff" document the storied history of the U.S. and adversaries' going to extraordinary lengths to snoop on each other's undersea communications for 70 years. Boeing and Airbus have been publicly accusing each other of profiting from U.S. and French espionage since forever.
I think if you read the 2001 European report on Echelon, and coverage of the 2002-2003 U.S. and British spying on the U.N. discussions of the Iraq war resolutions, and the 2005 New York Times coverage of warrantless wiretapping, and the 2006 revelations of NSA back rooms in AT&T fiber closets, and the 2006 USA Today coverage of the NSA call records program, and the subsequent public outcry, culminating in the 2008 FISA Amendments Act that retroactively immunized the telephone companies for their participation (an Act that then-Senator Obama voted for), all to much controversy and angst in these parts, you would not find the contents of the recent Snowden disclosures that surprising.
I do think the Snowden disclosures have added incrementally to the public understanding and made it much more precise, although in the places where they hint at something more dramatic -- e.g. the PRISM program -- the conflicting statements (and relative silence from Snowden himself) mean that so far we are still mostly in the dark about what PRISM really is or does. The PowerPoint slides are nice but it would be a lot nicer to have somebody who actually knows this stuff, or at the least something more verbose than PowerPoint.
Obviously, the Snowden disclosures also have performed a valuable service in bringing this matter back into the public discourse, because most people do not pay that close attention and probably do not remember the 2001 Echelon report or the 2003 and 2005 and 2006 articles or the debate over the 2008 law and they probably stopped using M-x spook back when Clipper stopped being a threat. And the Snowden slides seem to be causing Congress to pay closer attention to the issue, which is a good thing even if they may not literally be giving the committees any information they didn't already have. And of course the theatrics of running away to Hong Kong and getting stuck in Russia and getting locked up for nine hours in Heathrow and having a newspaper's hard drives smashed by British spy thugs are extraordinary and read like a spy novel.
But if the question is -- for somebody who did pay attention (as an informed amateur outside observer) to the debate post-9/11 about tearing down "the wall" between intelligence collection and criminal investigations, and who followed the prominent discussion in major national newspapers over the last 15 years, would you have believed the recent Snowden materials?
I think the answer so far has to be yes, and more than that, you would have known most of what has come out so far already, albeit with less precision and less certainty.
I'm less on top of the way the U.K. treats their news outlets, but I think the recent stuff is not out of character for them, given their routine use of their official secrets act to suppress information. We're more fortunate in the U.S., partly as a result of cases like the Pentagon Papers that could have gone the other way if things had shaken out differently.
[This thread has summoned up memories of visiting the NSA (well, super.org, which is practically an NSA subsidiary) as a high-school student in 1999 and trying to grill them about Echelon and the Menwith Hill facility, and also about whether they could crack RSA. They were not very responsive to any of those questions, which I guess was good training for the future. In their machine room, they had a CM-5 with all the blinkenlights just like in "Jurassic Park" which was definitely the coolest part of the tour. They said they had a debate about whether they would have to classify the CM-5 blinkenlights (which display, like, the 17th bit of every megabyte in memory or something like that) but apparently they decided it was ok.]
I mean just having "Super secret spy details" on Powerpoint means its not being handled by "our top people". George Smiley is not carefully placing a glass board under his cipher paper before taking a micro-copy.
This is spying on everyone, passed around like candy at the middle-managers meeting
Its the sheer mundane, ordinariness that has driven it home for me - they are so used to this, so utterly unashamed they put it on Powerpoint. FFS
So if it was being handled by the top people, they would have outsourced the documentation to a graphic design company, to generate a super-professional looking PDF?
(Seriously, how do you expect the high level management to communicate with each other?)
Which begs the question: what additional programs do the best of the best at the NSA know about?
From the perspective of the U.S. and U.K., the Chinese and Israelies and French are undoubtedly doing their best to spy on as much of the Internet as they possibly can, and they're probably pretty successful at it, so why would we unilaterally disarm?
At least in 1984 you only had to suffer the attentions of one of Oceania, East Asia or Eurasia!
From the perspective of the US: It doesn’t really help to assure your so-called ‘allies’ that they are indeed your ‘allies’ and not your vassals if you spy on them to such an extreme. Since you furthermore still rely on said nations for logistical reasons (and being friends with them likely couldn’t hurt anyhow), you might want to scale down your spying to accommodate the public perception. In addition, you’re hurting your own industry, especially service providers such as Google, Microsoft & Facebook, by giving the impression that it is unsafe to provide them with data.
From the perspective of the UK: I never quite got what you want to do, but you can’t expect to be even part of a free trade zone if you spy on the other member states of this free trade zone. This holds in particular if it is revealed that said spying is not necessarily restricted to catching terrorists, but also might get your domestic companies some trade secrets, which really doesn’t bode well in other member states that pride themselves on their innovation. Of course if you want to provoke being kicked out of that FTZ and join the union of your over-seas friends, that might actually make sense. Just don’t expect candy from the rest of us, then.
This is a classic problem for governments when it comes to cryptography and computer security. On the one hand it is easy for enemies to take advantage of the poor state of computer security, committing various acts of industrial espionage or shutting down critical systems. On the other hand law enforcement agencies want to be able to investigate people, and computer security systems can hamper those investigations; similarly our own spies want to ensure that our enemies are not able to protect themselves.
I think both the brilliance of Greenwald/Guardian to launch a new story every few days and the stupidity of the US government when abusing its power to stop the press or Snowden, is what kept this for so long, and hopefully will continue to happen.
We are caring; the small band of software and technology enthusiasts who develop software and online businesses. We care. But in the grand scheme of things, people don't care so much about this. In the grand scheme of things we are a special interest group, like Anti-Fracking protesters or Animal Rights activists.
Until I hear my mother or my girlfriend or my old university pal - none of whom work in computing - talking about this issue I really don't expect things to change. The difference between now and then is that we have forums like this where everyone can instantly express their outrage, but I think all that builds is a small self-fueling bubble of outrage that nobody else who lives outside the bubble knows or cares about.
The way I see it, geeks have been complicit with the system for a long time, always under the guise of being "moderates". It's only now that massive corruption is starting to cramp on our style, and the reaction should be much more humble than "we're alone in understanding how bad things are".
That's not possible yet, but it's clear that they are working towards it, and in the case of the UK, they already have almost complete surveillance of all communications for a period of days, and then of metadata for longer. Coupled with the fact that almost every mundane action or movement is now tied to communications (often involuntary) via our phones or other devices, that makes it very hard to escape surveillance. That ambition of a full take has always been there, but only now is it becoming possible, and instead of restraining the security services, it appears our politicians are encouraging them. I'm not sure that they, or we, even understand the implications yet, or what will happen when this data leaks or is misused on a large scale.
Even just the analysis of public internet data (like twitter feeds) will at some point in the future have profound effects, let alone the private data our security services are collecting. Retrospective and yet complete surveillance will I believe be the most dangerous part of these programmes, not real-time surveillance. That wasn't possible in the past, and is only just possible now.
So because of the future implications of a full-take on everyone's life spanning decades and our developing abilities to make sense of all that data in instants, relating and cataloguing thousands of people, this is a qualitative change in surveillance capability, and these leaks have shed light on that in a way that previous ones have not.
I was just looking at the code for that, 5 minutes before I read your comment. It was written in May 1987. A comment near the top says "Help defeat the NSA trunk trawler!". It's interesting how our preceptions of this kind of counter-surveillance tool (primitive as it is) has changed from "OK, man, that's just crazy talk" to "Huh, I guess it really is happening!".
This would be in line with what we learned about the structure (or rather, lack thereof) of intelligence systems of the State Department and military that allowed Manning to acquire such a broad range of documents undetected.
What I've seen cited of the documents from "agency who shall not be named" appear to describe and show that definitions of and limits upon what is searched for, are largely manually constructed and executed by the human operators performing those searches. "You may search for this OR that, but not both. You may search for this other but only in conjunction (AND) with this other term.
It all reminds me rather of one job I had that involved extensive data mining. I started with a mass of raw detail records and winnowed things down. It was entirely up to me what ended up being winnowed out, and I required both extensive knowledge of the domain and careful and precise execution in order to come up with the correct results.
The whole "unnamed agency" situation has developed rather a similar smell, for me.
As an aside, today when I read about the Manning sentencing, one of my first thoughts was, "Supposing that this prosecution has been 'fair' and 'necessary' (not that I necessarily agree with this supposition), then where is the prosecution and sentencing of those responsible for the criminally negligent design and management of the data intelligence systems he 'exploited'?"
For all its vaunted capabilities, I suspect that data management at the NSA is similarly fucked up, and that there are managers and contractors who should and would, in a fair world, be sent to prison for this.
--
[1] Perhaps with a few exceptions, e.g. for senior government officials and favored members of the private "elite" class, e.g. the C suite and board of Goldman and the like.
Actually, yeah. I read 1984 at age 10, and somehow grokked enough about what that would mean.
>Like a cheap sci-fi novel has become reality?
Like Orwell, Huxley, Bradbury, with a little Kafka thrown in. I'm not sure "cheap" is the word I'd use here.
>I for one am more scared, appaled by what has been bubbling to the surface every week, almost every day since Snowden.
I'm glad that I'm not 'crazy' anymore. It's a good thing that it is out in the open now. It was more frightening when nearly everyone ignored it.
Someone called me 'crazy' today for mentioning the Guardian hard drive story. I wonder.... how many people have blinders on :-(
The thing is I am not convinced the technology is actually good enough to make sense of what they get. They have to decide to look at someone first. This means that it is a way to discredit and jail or worse people who become sufficiently inconvenient to the powers that be.
Look at the David Miranda situation. The Internet reaction about living in a police state was immediate, but the rhetoric didn't seem to match what really happened (at least to me). A non-UK citizen (as far as I'm aware) was transporting classified information through a UK airport almost certainly for the purposes of releasing that information, information the UK government considers damaging if it was to be released. The information is confiscated, but the man himself is let go. And afterwards, the man's journalist husband more or less openly threatens the UK government with the release of more classified information in retaliation. That's not quite how I remember sci-fi police state stories usually going.
Now, I don't know the truth, but even assuming he had documents they wanted to get their hands on, or files on his devices that they thought pertinent they could have handled the whole thing in 30 minutes max and then let him go on his merry way.
That they held him - almost to the minute - for the legal maximum of 9 hours looks not only vindictive it looks as if they indeed intended to send a message.
Put that into context with other documented occurrences, like the totally senseless destruction of hardware and sandbagging the Guardian into this action (and yes, The Guardian has here more credibility then the UK government, which denies any threats, but that's just me) and we get a whole other picture.
While totalitarian police state may be an over exaggeration , we should be very careful about the direction this is going into.
Assume you're a journalist and suddenly the government(s) have a truckload embarrassing material on you (from Google searches, Facebook accounts, Skype calls and whatever your friendly operating system leaks directly to the NSA's vacuum cleaners) to directly blackmail you.
And no, I don't consider myself a member of the black helicopter faction, but nevertheless find those developments extremely worrying.
This was just like grabbing a drug dealers wife hoping the drug dealer was just a little too greedy and his stuff in her packages.
The Guardian destroyed their own laptops rather than handing them over the to security services (my reading is the security services were concerned about the laptops falling into the wrong hands)
I don't like the way the UK government has behaved but the Guardian is omitting things in it's reports and that leads to questions about its credibility too.
What would you do differently?
That certainly looks like police state to me. And I'm not even mentioning the 9 hours detention, not needed at all to recover the damaging information.
I think that defining news reporting to be aiding the enemy is pretty darn close to a lot of what one sees in sci-fi police states.
Greenwald goes to lengths to refute this interpretation in the article and elsewhere.
When I was a child, the President of the United States was murdered in front of thousands of onlookers and the primary suspect was murdered on live television (while I was watching) by a mob hit man. As far as we know, everyone behind this got away with it and got everything they wanted.
Since then, not much has really surprised me.
no I always thought it would be at one day in the late 20th century. Probably because my parents had found and bought me in comics "1984" and the "Animal farm" when I was a kid
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't listening.
I don't think I ever expected any less, since I was raised knowing the horrors and atrocities of the last hundred years between ww2 and the treatment of the Japanese and the cold war and the treatment of pretty much everyone.
Not surreal but I ask the HN community: will this ignite a hacker revolution against the government(s)? At one point the different governments are in a weaker situation since there are a huge amount of cybersecurity attack vectors against them.
Is it possible to disrupt the government? Somehow create a system that renders them obsolete?
The problem here is not the existence of a government, but the specific government that we have. Here in the USA we have soldiers enforcing our laws, and a legal code that can and frequently does turn a routine traffic stop into a multiyear prison sentence. The major political parties in this country are united in their support for this tyranny. In addition, we have spent decades ceding more and more power to the executive branch and creating a government that operates behind a veil of secrecy.
For the Americans here, I propose the following: be brave, vote third party and risk "the other guy" winning. In exchange for a few years with the wrong lizard in power, you will have sent a strong message to the major party that thought it could count on your vote. If the major parties do not learn, eventually the third parties will have so many people voting for them that they will replace the major parties. Either way we will have made progress towards repairing our government.
Comfort-maximizing system-lickers.
Yes. But I was living in the Soviet Union ;-)
A child with a proper education in history would not have been surprised. Nor would a child with a proper education think it was perfectly fine to have the institution of government so intrusively involved with the education of children.
I'd rather drop 100 comments on general FEELING towards the news, for 1 or 2 comments suggesting 'Let's create a campaign site' or 'There is nothing we can do, lets just sit here in silence'
Edit: For what it's worth my ONLY suggestion is that a campaign site similar to that for SOPA, etc. is put together - ideally on GitHub or similar so it can be rapidly put together.
In addition to simply exposing these events, it also associates their own rhetoric with abuses.
It is as powerful a phrase as we can get!
Bullshit.
There's plenty ordinary people can do. Look at the results here:
http://nbcpolitics.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/07/24/19658896-hou...
That's close enough that the right application of pressure, work and money would have made a difference. Perhaps in the Senate it would take other numbers, but no one said it'd be easy.
Indeed, it's not. It'll take hard work, time, and money.
Comments like yours are a complete and total waste of time - they accomplish nothing other than to suck energy out of people who might otherwise do something. I helped to get a law changed - every so slightly - in Italy, which is not an easy place to do politics. Tons of people basically laughed at me for even trying, but here it is: http://www.governo.it/Notizie/Presidenza/dettaglio.asp?d=690... - it's imperfect, but it's progress, at least.
I'm not much of a fan of political articles like these on this site, but this poster at least has the right idea. Instead of hyperbolic, sophomoric babbling about how the US is "a terrorist state" he's asking "what can we DO?". That's the right first step.
In terms of the 'nothing to hide' line, turn the thing on its head: if Snowden had that kind of access, think how many other people there are who could be paid to spy for the Chinese, Russians, or simply competing US companies. What if politicians lean on them to spy on ... [insert some movement the individual identifies with]. With very little oversight, it seems. You can't trust people when there are no checks and balances.
This accomplishes three things. 1) It makes you familiar with encryption for when you actually need it. 2) It increases the cost of surveillance and 3) It gives you an opening to discuss the topic with non-tech friends when they ask about your gibberish attachment.
"He who has the ability to act on an injustice, but who stands idly by, is just as guilty as he who holds the knife."
How Google handles this will be its defining moment. This is could be an opportunity for Google to win the world over by showing it truly stands on its principles, or it could be its downfall, destroying its credibility, losing the trust of its users.
Maybe Google is working behind the scenes putting a game plan together, or maybe it's getting something out of the situation -- let's hope it's the former. Like Eisenhower said, "A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both."
I wish people would stop quoting this. It means nothing, and is not binding in any way. It sounded good, and it was a great marketing slogan - but it means absolutely nothing in reality.
Binding or not, it's a social contract, and it could mean the world if Google stands by it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_be_evil
I've got my own very grave reservations about the company, but it has done some good stuff. I'm hoping we'll hear from them eventually. Truth is, much of The System is the way it is because the various participants have one another by the balls.
You might as well have said, "Dear God, please save us!"
Sorry, but you won't be saved by any corporate entity; they're in bed with the surveillance state anyways. It is people like us, yes, you included, who have to take up the baton and run with it.
Here are things you can do:
- Talk to your non-techie friends, and bring them up to speed
- Explain to them why "giving up rights for temporary safety" doesn't work
- Tell them why this sort of surveillance is against the core democratic principles this country was founded on
- Suggest to them that they should vote out any politician who supports such policies. In the end, it is the Congress' job to keep checks and balances; and they've failed miserably. Time for all of them to go.
Corporations hold more influence with Congress than voters. Google has enormous power, but it lives and dies by its users. If we hold Google accountable to the point it has to act, its lead could trigger a movement among the Internet giants, and that's a mighty big lever.
Corporations are convenient fictions. The truth of the matter is individuals with lots of money and connections hold more influence with Congress individuals without lots of money and connections.
And the 2010 Supreme Court decision in Citizens United (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._Federal_Elec...) removed the ban which prevented corporations from using their treasury funds for direct advocacy.
It isn't to fall on it's sword and risk the entirety of the company fighting the US government on principale. I'd argue that doing that putting out of work tens of thousands of people in the worst case would "be evil".
"Focus on the user and all else will follow." (http://www.google.com/about/company/philosophy/)
Don't you think safeguarding its users data and keeping their trust would fall under that?
From a business perspective, if Google loses the trust of its users, it's the beginning of the end. Safeguarding user trust should be priority #1.
Because they are legally required to be silent. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732394990457853...
On September 27-30 in Brussels there will be workshops and hearings with MEPs: https://wiki.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/Freedom_Not_Fear_201...
Organize a local event - add it to the list - don't be afraid that it is small, even if not many people come locally - you'll be a part of a global crowd.
Twitter hashtag: #fnf13 IRC: #fnf PirateIRC (irc.piratpartiet.se / irc.piraattipuolue.fi / irc.pirateparty.org.uk)
I think we need to start explaining the privacy/surveillance issue and how the advent of powerful technology makes universal surveillance possible and, as others have commented, rather banal.
As one example of a possible 'hook':In the UK, there have been reports on the extent to which ordinary police officers are using the National Police Computer for purposes unrelated to police work (checking out boyfriends/girlfriends for instance). I imagine the potential for misuse is much higher with the comprehensive capturing of data from all communications. That might get people thinking.
What I don't think they realize is that the dog they're kicking is also the most technically capable one on the planet. They're not poking Al Qaeda with a stick, they're poking every programmer and hacker who cares about privacy with a stick. While they may have unlimited financial resources, I would pit unlimited technical resources and creativity against that any day of the week. If they manage to create an organized group of highly technical opposition I think they're going to be very surprised by how capable it is.
They are the ones with unlimited technical resources. You don't have armed drones nor biological nor nuclear weapons. You are an hostage like everyone else. You might as well accept that fact for now and just enjoy life.
For example, I know for a fact that a large number of intelligence tools are written on top of open source projects. That base did not come from the technical resources of the government (in most cases) but rather the collective ingenuity of the hackers and programmers that built it for various reasons. You can already see projects springing up with the intent of circumventing government technical oversight. This is going to result in an endless game of technical whack-a-mole where one side is motivated by a paycheck and the other is motivated by ideals and the desire for liberty.
I'm all for OSS. I believe this is going to cause a lot more people to take it and security seriously.
I don't see how that's really relevant, at all. Did you expect the USG to continue to use Windows instead of Linux for everything? Of course they're going to use tools available that others create. It doesn't mean they don't have unlimited resources. They can easily hire extremely intelligent and creative technical minds (we're talking about the NSA here, come on) and unfortunately, IQ does not mandate a specific political view. This was hard for me to accept, but there are some people much smarter than I am that hold very different positions on things. (Edit: To my knowledge, they are wrong, but caused by operating from different priors than I have.)
You're deluding yourself if you think that somehow the only good tech people are going to be "good guys".
As I read this I tried to imagine how to reset my digital life, now that all my passwords are exposed. You just about have to become a brand new person, and abandon every account you currently have. Any change to a current account would be observed by the NSA and GCHQ. To the extent that this guy had any privacy or security at all, he's screwed for the rest of his life.
Nope, straight forward intimidation. I cannot imagine how they thought it would work, so either we assume the security services are incompetant, or there is some other cunning plan. Sadly the latter is very unlikely these days.
The most salient point is how regular individuals are authorized to receive user passwords, and they're able to use them too. The article clearly states that the low-level thugs checked his email within his presence rather than him communicating the passwords to more secure individuals.
Forced, how? Threat of detention beyond the 9 hour window?
If so, it's easy to speculate I would call their bluff and refuse. But in the situation, probably not so easy.
What about using a hidden volume in TrueCrypt for plausible deniability? [1]
I suppose that would work effectively for documents. There's no plausible deniability for stuff like Facebook and Gmail. They can easily see if you gave them access to the real/full thing, or not.
However given the revelations David Miranda of all people would have to assume his Gmail, FB, et al have _already_ been compromised.[2] So the only interesting, still-private stuff would be any documents.
[1]: http://www.truecrypt.org/docs/plausible-deniability
[2]: Not that this makes it right to demand the passwords at LHR.
"You must answer all questions and hand over any data or documents requested" and
"If you fail to comply you could be prosecuted under ..Terrorism Act."
You have no rights. You will disappear in a very deep, dark hole for a very long time if you try to call their bluff.
Welcome to the Patriot Act/Terrorism Act world.
No, the threat of 2 years in jail.
"The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIPA), Part III, activated by ministerial order in October 2007, requires persons to supply decrypted information and/or keys to government representatives. Failure to disclose carries a maximum penalty of two years in jail."(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_disclosure_law#United_Kingd...).
TrueCrypt is no escape if they have reasonable suspicion there is a hidden volume. And you will have to prove that there isn't one.
“The technotronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society.
Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values.
Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen.
These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities.”
Author: Zbigniew Brzezinski, United States National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter from 1977 to 1981.
You can find this at: http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/162691-the-technotronic-era-...
On the subject, I think the biggest problem is how to make people understand how serious this is, make them see that the similarities between what is happening and totalitarianism and even fascism is to disturbing.
Today I was speaking with a friend about faceCrap and he just doesn't care about it, he doesn't even try to get properly informed and said that no one would do anything against him because the information he shares is not relevant. I tried to explain the problems with the greed ones controlling the information (hence truth) of the planet, the political and economical advantages it brings to people that doesn't care about society and how his data could say a lot about him but at the end he told me I am paranoid :).
So the political problem we are facing, in my opinion, is a consequence of lack of interest and even selfishness.
If the laws don't allow us to monitor our citizens lets just change the laws or interpret the words differently.
locking up a dissenter's partner doesn't count, right?
This is an important part of this argument. When we make it illegal to discuss the crime, the warrant, and have secret court proceedings, you can't just sit there on your high horse and tell us there is no abuse. You are not allowed to know of any abuse.
Nothing that's been reported. Or Hasn't happened yet....
Hell, they may already be using it for political purposes. How would any of us now barring a whistleblower exposing it? That is why this situation is so dangerous.
"For the benefit of all".
We already live in virtual reality where most of the things we do is just to numb our perception. Nothing to do with advancements in energy, space travel, consciousness. Going where no man has gone before.
And we lough and down talk anyone daring to, so we create spying/regulatory system, government that picks oddities and puts them in place. It works well, very well, so well that now we are stuck in place where we want to be, beer Fridays, pizza Saturday, sunny ice cream Sundays, something to look forward after week long slavery you hate so much.
It is so complicated and weaved trough all of us and all out needs/wishes/predicaments. To long and want something, you create opposite situation that makes that "something" so amazing.
Sometimes I wonder, what would take this organism(humanity) to evolve/change. Searching for health(happiness) in cancer(fear)? Or total annihilation for something else to come in play.
Political candidates, lobbying initiatives and legislation can all be directly impacted, in the current framework they exist under, by crowdsourcing. While Kickstarter and Indiegogo have shown us it's possible with art and industrial design and dozens of other media, there's not a go-to place to do it for politics.
So if this community really wants to change our dystopian future, then that's the answer. We could have the NSA completely defunded in a year if we wanted.
Destroying the hard drives was an exercise in dominance, 'do as we say or face the consequences' which had no impact (aside from inconvenience and the cost of a couple of Macbook Pros) to The Guardian but has made the UK .gov look foolish.
Pulling Miranda, abusing the terrorism laws, sending a message is another dominance play but it's back fired awfully. Brazil is annoyed, GG is annoyed, America has calmly washed it's hands and said "leave us out of it". In terms of strategic decisions it can't be described as an excellent one. What's the UK .gov gotten out of it? Some encrypted data and social network passwords, it's not a win.
If you're in the UK and you think this is unacceptable for our government to be trying to intimidate the journalists who're revealing the uncomfortable level of surveillance we now live under, and what the security apparatus has become, then write to your MP. That's what they're there for. We can't just hope that it'll surge through the halls of Parliament, we need to be heard that we think it's not acceptable and not representative of what we want Britain to be.
How soon utnil they send out the drones into the foreign lands where they have not so great a political strongarm?
"Drone bombing in brazilian airport kills dozens"
"Sadly it was necessary as one of the passangers carried terrorist intel that would put our free world at risk"
That doesn't surprise me one bit.
It's fairly simple:
Journalists who break the law to bribe police and others for information, hack voicemails of private individuals, and intrude on the privacy of individuals should be punished. These things are not in the public interest, there is no excuse for doing them just to make money by publishing the (often prurient) details of someone's life.
Journalists who shed light on what the state is doing (even if that means publishing secret documents), if they can argue that is in the public interest, should not.
Of course there are some grey areas between the two, but the constrast of Murdoch's News organisation bribing policemen and the Guardian publishing stories based on top-secret documents from a whistleblower is an edifying one I think.
Most of the Leverson suggestions were about correcting a power imbalance between normal members of the public and the media/government elite. Making it easier for ordinary people to seek reparations from a newspaper is not 'government harassment'. Requiring papers to print retractions after being proven wrong in a court of law is hardly the same as the prime minister personally ordering the destruction of computers, confiscation of equipment and detention of journalists to prevent reporting about an issue.
It may be more insidious now because the technology to aggregate spying on "we the people" is available. Welcome to the truly post-privacy era.
Furthermore, the average person is not outraged by this. Cue the shock and awe for one to ten minutes after the biggest breaking stories about it and after that, for the common (wo)man, its all yawns.
Plus, it is quite a dilemma. How does the government protect against terrorism while trying to protect the citizens' privacy when a citizen, or anyone moving among us citizens, could be a terrorist or sympathizer?
The intent is not bad but what could come of this kind of stealthy access is bad if it falls into the wrong hands or becomes guided by ill-intent.
The mission and organisational capability of the government as changed dramatically. Nations in the late 18th Century (1776+) didn't have intelligence agencies per se. Some had military intelligence that was focused outward and they had various figures and organisations that would informally engage in domestic espionage usually in an extremely targeted fashion. Remember that formal police departments didn't exist until the 20th Century. Most of what we think of as the Government didn't exist in your Great-Grandfathers time. None the following existed in the US in my Great-Grandfathers time:
1. Intelligence agencies CIA/NSA/CSS/NRO,
2. Dept. of Defense,
3. Welfare,
4. Police Local, State, FBI, DHS,
5. FDA (Drugs were unregulated),
6. Income Tax/IRS,
7. EPA and consumer protection agencies,
8. Public Education in its present form,
9. Federal Reserve Bank
The US Federal Government was the Postal Service to most citizens. It is really important to understand that we are living at the height of Federal power in the history of the US.
The closest thing that Europe pre-18th Century had to the NSA was the Inquisition and it was more focused on "investigation".
Fighting terror with terror. How can it be that no one in the UK government agencies responsible for this can see the irony? How can it be that they don't understand their actions are degrading society just as much as those of the terrorists?
I wouldn't get my hopes up though, these so called leakers seem more stringently against full pubic disclosure than the people they are leaking against.
Yet the picture shows a (PCIe?) extension card, which can not be found in Macbooks. The green PCB isn't a Macbook part either. And no part of a HDD is shown at all.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/danhodges/100231711/why-do...
- The law is to detain suspected terrorists, nobody thinks the UK believed he is a terrorist, so they were abusing the law;
- If, as the UK government now says, they just wanted any electronic devices he had so they could see what he was carrying, that would have taken less than an hour to confiscate them and ask for whatever passwords Miranda had, not the close to nine hours they held him.
Nobody is above the law. I am sure the reason Miranda was travelling from Berlin back to Rio and not Greenwald was that Greenwald knew he would be detained and thought perhaps Miranda would not. But just like Miranda is not above the law, neither is the UK government. If they misuse a law to harass and intimidate then they should be held to account.
There's always some jackass journalist who thinks they should take the other side, no matter how contrary to the facts, to get some attention. I am just surprised it's at outfits like The Telegraph and Reuters.
I'm not sure why. David Cameron could literally murder a baby on live TV and Dan Hodges would describe it as a 'political headache for Miliband'. Nobody takes him seriously; his columns are just fodder for Telegraph readers looking to confirm what they already believe.
Not to mention all the wacko conspiracy theories about climate change that they print.
Why would you be surprised? It's a given that NSA and friends have people to write stories for them on "reputable" sources. No need for jackass journalists.