NSA spied on UN, breaking active agreements | Hacker News Reader

NSA spied on UN, breaking active agreements

spiegel.de

70 pointssarnowski20 comments

Some English translations from the original German:

  New documents prove to SPIEGEL information: 

  Even the United Nations headquarters in New 

  York was tapped by the U.S. NSA, although an 

  agreement prohibiting just that. Even the U.S. 

  Consulate in Frankfurt served as a listening post.

  -----

  The U.S. Secret NSA has not only the European Union 

  bugged, but also the headquarters of the United 

  Nations. This is evident from the NSA secret 

  documents, the DER SPIEGEL has analyzed.

  -----

  > "The traffic gives us the internal video 
     teleconferencing the UN (yay!)." 

  Within three weeks, the number of decrypted 

  communications had risen from 12 to 458th

  In one case, the NSA had also caught the Chinese 

  intelligence in it, also a spy.

See also, GigaOM article:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6271259

Very difficult to read if you do not understand German. The German text is clearly written, but The google translation is awful. Is it a plot of Google to convince people to learn foreign languages ?

> The German text is clearly written, but The google translation is awful. Is it a plot of Google to convince people to learn foreign languages ?

Automated German to English translation has never been a walk in the park. Nicht wahr?

But it could be worse -- it could be English to German, which is in some ways worse, among other things always longer than the original.

Not only did the NSA spy on the UN, but Hillary Clinton instructed State Department employees to spy on the UN. Here's an article from Der Spiegel from 2009 that I stumbled upon:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/diplomats-or-spook...

And this spying by the State Department may have provided the NSA with the information they needed to do their own spying:

"The State Department was also particularly interested in the UN's internal communications facilities. In her wish list, Clinton wanted to find out everything possible about the organization's telecommunications infrastructure and also extensive information on "current technical specifications, physical layout, and planned upgrades to telecommunications infrastructure and information systems, networks, and technologies used by top officials and their support staffs." The intention seems clear: This information would make it easier for the National Security Agency, the US intelligence agency responsible for wiretapping of phones and interception of electronic communications, to easily attack telephone, computer and e-mail accounts."

This information came from the diplomatic cables leaked to WikiLeaks by Bradley Manning.

To summarize my two other comments, talk of anything remotely against the whims of HN mods gets your account, your submissions deaded.

Nevermind how _hackers_ who have taken on the White House, Washington Post and others are defecting against Assad due to his chemical attacks[1]. The topic involves a whiff of politics so it must be moderated against! Any hacker, technical, code related aspects are ignored if one shred of the topic goes against the whims of HN mods.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6252592

If you keep going like this I think you'll need a new account soon. HN is pretty fair when it comes to talking about things that go against the whims of the moderators, if it weren't I would have been banned long ago.

From the other posts, it seems this individual has spare accounts to burn.

Sorry for the late-ish reply, but the point I think I failed to elaborate on fully enough was that the topic of politics is tolerated here as long as it is relate-able to most.

But if it involves a topic like Syrians, even if the topic involves Bluecoat.com's hardware being used to track dissidents, something most users here fear the NSA/GCHQ may be doing, it is down-voted.

The accounts that post it have been hell banned if they dare point out the relevance of the issue if ethnic and national borders are ignored.

"If I keep going on like this," this is something I have to do, before I have examples of white dissidents to show as well.

One of my accounts was hell-banned for this very topic.

If HN wants to halt discussion they are finding a very effective way to do so.

edit: Why is this comment getting down-voted? Must I start collating a list of users complaining their submissions are being overrode by others? Or show how they get down-voted/dismissed when bringing it up?

Is this what HN has come to?

Maybe you should try writing a more coherent comment, instead of spamming the thread with a lot similar comments. You can also edit your comment.

If form is the best critique you can muster, please don't even comment. If you wish to read a longer more heart-felt comment of mine regarding egregious copyright violations, here[1]. It is a topic that pains me to this day, take a moment to read if you will.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6262162

Edit: Read before down-voting.

This is not a critique, just an observation:

You're well on track to get hellbanned again. Do you learn from your own mistakes?

One article I submitted was overridden by an elder member when he submitted it. Long after the thread gained positive discussion. Pointing out this flaw, received me one of my first hell-bans.

What I am to learn from this? Do not submit things older members may later submit? Do not point out the flaws in such a system?

edit: Thanks swombat for ending with a question, a way to further discussion instead of making it a pointed statement. :)

One article I submitted was overridden by an elder member when he submitted it.

I'm not sure what you mean by "elder member" -- do you mean someone with more karma? Someone whose account was created before the account of yours to which you're referring? An individual whose age is greater than yours? An account that makes daily posts and receives regular upvotes?

Also I'm confused about why you're spending so much effort to make yourself noticed -- it's weekend late night/early morning for most of HN's readership, which means your effort has significantly less effect than it would about 50-60 hours from now...

Well some people submit articles with '?' at the end or other such nonsense to post the same article others have. But in many instances submissions from 'green' accounts that have gained traction suddenly poofed in favor of the same article from a more established (account age) user.

I was not exactly concerned by it until it the same occurred to me. When the issue was raised, I received a wave of down-votes. To boot further submissions were hell-banned!

Flabbergasted, my tone and demeanor on this site has changed since. Cheers for the conversation instead of silent down-votes or condescending commentary, stephengillie.

It's the wrong conclusion. For example, yesterday there were two submissions of "Linux 3.9 introduced a new way of writing socket servers"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6269332 (222 points)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6270330 (dead, 3 points, 5 hours later)

The second one was submitted by a user with more karma, average, and days in HN.

Sometimes a story is submitted by two persons and the dupe detector fails. One of them get traction, the selection is by random events, like the hour of the submission, how many upvotes it get's in the first hours, which other stories are in the first page, ... I have seen some good stories that get only 2 or 3 points, and after a month someone else submits a similar story from another source and it gets 50 points. It's also a matter of luck.

Was the second article posted with the '/2' at the end of the link? Things like that seem to cause most filter hiccups, I tried to discount those obviously.

For science and all that, can you think of other examples?

edit: Oh I see it is different chapters, /1 /2 etc. Nevermind that.

To make a different but related reply, see the comment in which I responded to a submission from another? I attempted to direct the discussion to the hacker/technical aspects of the "Syrian Electronic Army." Their prolific hacking of large entities is rather noteworthy. I noted how a 'western' company named Bluecoat had their hardware installed by Assad, the logs were later leaked showing tracking of sexual and religious activity.

I tried by best to steer the conversation into a realm that truly does relate to "Hacker News." The real life ramifications of producing spyware, ISP data mirroring hardware. Of course the topic was deaded and my commments down-voted.

Is HN a place for commentary on Snowden and Manning sexual habits or for the details and real ramifications for our work?

I've been hell-banned and down-voted for trying to steer discussion into more than social observations of the actors involved. It lowers faith in this community and those involved moderating it.

Infact, in another topic I provided very technical details to an event being linked[1]. That article was deaded, rendering my commentary on the technical aspects useless.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6248144

edit: In-case users are down-voting before reading what was linked. The comments I provided showed how monitoring hardware was used to track people of 'interest' like religious followers. I have been attempting to focus on the ramifications for hardware like Bluecoat's ending up being used to monitor and persecute others.

This persecution is not just using to harass others but to know what leaders of Sunnis to 'cleanse' as to make populating Alawites easier[2].

[2] http://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/syrian-army-ren...

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