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Comment by scott_w | Hacker News Reader

The major news is stalking love interests, not the UN. It's news like this that gets people riled up, as it's more easy to relate.

I want to know if anyone was sacked, or went to prison, over this. I refuse to believe that nobody abused this power for revenge against an ex or someone who didn't return their affections. UK police officers have been in court for similar things e.g. looking up new partners on the criminal database

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The stalking love interests bit puts the lie to any warrants required by the way. I'm not sure why that wasn't brought to a more prominent notice but I'd like to see the warrant issued to spy on a spouse.

Sadly if you keep stuff in secret you could try this justification - the person spies on terrorists - so you have connection to them. S/He is connected to you so is only two hops away. So is legitimate person of interest.

Yeah but following this logic, the analyst himself becomes a person of interest since connected to his former spouse..

Yes, they are. That's why they have to go through the invasive process of getting clearance.

Believe me, I'm not claiming it's a perfect process or that it has been perfectly applied, but the system as a whole does acknowledge that analysts are intrinsically "persons of interest", and takes steps that are at least appropriate in principle to deal with that.

If anyone's read the Philip K. Dick novel A Scanner Darkly, this conversation is teeming on the book's plot where the protagonist is assigned to spy on himself and his associates.

>The major news is stalking love interests, not the UN. It's news like this that gets people riled up, as it's more easy to relate.

Yes, because god forbid an inane and infantilized population can understand the significance of actual politics without human interest stories in them...

While I agree with the sentiment, I would rather have people caring about the NSA spying for the "wrong" reasons than not caring at all.

That's a hollow victory. The momentum is much weaker in most cases when people care about something for the wrong reasons and then it gets easily quelled by distractions. In fact, that's how a lot of this nonsense stayed on for so long.

Imagine if more people cared about Iraq for more than the price of oil. Some did, but not nearly enough in number.

Again, that's great in theory, but pragmatically, most people don't see the problem with government spying if they're "not doing anything wrong". So until you have a plan to change that, I'd still prefer they care for the "wrong" reasons than not at all.

I don't. All they have to do is announce that analysts will need approval to investigate anyone that can be connected to their personal lives, fire two or three people for violating the new policy, and suddenly all NSA spying is vindicated.

I once had a dog, he liked to urinate on things, I didn't see the point in getting worked up and cynical about the fact that he was simply doing what was in his nature. Then again I didn't ask him to vote on my major life decisions either, so there's that.

Humans really aren't that much different at a macro level. Maybe it's not humans that are the problem but the assumptions of our political systems.

Well the "love interest" story is much worse. The stasi maintained the authoritarian political and psychological control over the german population through blackmail and spying.

Invading the privacy of (innocent, or incidentally guilty) citizens turns the NSA from a national security agency into a secret police.

>Invading the privacy of (innocent, or incidentally guilty) citizens turns the NSA from a national security agency into a secret police.

They've already announced that invading the privacy of the innocent is official policy. The fact that errant analysts take 10 minutes off from executing algorithms that mine your mother's phone history in order to read their girlfriend's emails is a distraction.

After the revelations about spying on other G8 attendees, a portion of posters on HN and elsewhere proved their worldly, jaded cynicism and acceptance of the status quo with posts saying "of course they do" and "everyone knows that" and "no news here". In this very discussion there's a poster saying "The real surprise is everyone is shocked".

These people won't care about the UN story - but the stalking love interests they might care about.

I would make an argument that giving Mr Obama every morning a brief what is going in secret in UN, Kremlin and Beijing is NSA mandate. They were created to collect that kind.

It is intelligence agencies work to collect intelligence.

So basically - trying to open Merkel inbox from NSA or GRU = totally fine and vice versa. NSA collecting data on millions of people that are disconnected from the politics is not fine. So is checking out what is your loved one doing on facebook with tools inaccessible to the normal people.

>I would make an argument that giving Mr Obama every morning a brief what is going in secret in UN, Kremlin and Beijing is NSA mandate. They were created to collect that kind. It is intelligence agencies work to collect intelligence.

Some people seem to think that collecting intelligence means breaking 24/7 into sovereign countries (and allies) leaders' communications...

How about they fucking do it the old fashioned way: talking to people, gathering diplomatic sources, analysing press and political statements, checking budget uses, the odd snitch here and there, getting some leaks, etc etc?

The UN story, like the G8 story, honestly is old news. The US has been spying on diplomats for a long time now (see the last section in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Naval_Treaty for instance).

>These people won't care about the UN story - but the stalking love interests they might care about.

True, but those people are so beyond fixing, that I don't think it would matter even if they started to care about those issues.

The big question I have about the LOVEINT thing is how confident they are that people haven't got away with it. The government have been spinning it as "rare", but what if it's only people getting caught that's rare?

Their auditing sounds weak. They seemed to have no idea what documents Snowden had taken.

While I don't have the source handy, I read recently that most of these LOVEINT "discoveries" were actually caused by the people admitting to it before a polygraph test

The major news is stalking love interests,

Remember in MiB when J uses surveillance satellites to check up on his love interest?

I don't know the granularity of FB access logging, but I imagine employees aren't verboten from looking up anything about anyone. At one time, it was a perk ("Join us and SPY ON ALL YOUR FRIENDS! LOL!").

There have been reports of google sysadmins stalking people (ex-lovers) by using their root-level gmail/account access. Supposedly google has since instituted finer grained access logging that will alert if someone is working outside of their authority (but, who locks down executive/CEO authority?).

I'm paranoid. I think, in Sergey's office, there's page that looks like google.com, but it flatly searches every gmail/gtalk/gvoice message ever sent or received. Their speciality is search and you give them all your private communications? Yeah, that'll end well.

Unauthorized access to profiles has been a fireable offense at FB for several years.

This is absolutely the crux of the matter. The power granted by these programmes involves granting power to entirely fallible human beings. Conceptually there may be good reasons for allowing this level of control, but as abuse is always possible in a closed system, this level of control should never be allowed.

> I refuse to believe that nobody abused this power for

> revenge against an ex or someone who didn't return their

> affections

What about vetting potential candidates? Say you met someone on a dating site, had chatted a few times, and wanted to know whether they were telling the truth or not?

Not saying it's any more excusable - jail time should still be involved - just that it doesn't have to be on the scary-revenge side of stalking. Just a more intrusive, privacy-invading version of Googling a date.

It is actually a big deal. Assuming the surveillance took place in New York, this constitutes warrantless domestic surveillance, something which is explicitly forbidden by law and has been repeatedly denied by authorities.

No, the NSA can intercept communication between "non-U.S. persons" at either end.

According to the articles I've seen, spying on the UN is prohibited by international law.

When did the US start to care about international law? We tend to use it as an excuse for military action abroad, but we routinely ignore international law, treaties, agreements, etc. when it suits us.

Non-citizens in the United States have the same protection from warrantless search and wiretapping as US citizens. The NSA is forbidden by law from intercepting domestic-domestic communications.

EDIT: looks like I'm wrong. The headquarters are technically international territory.

Why is spying on the UN worrisome? Countries spy on each other, because countries lie to each other all the time. It's how countries find out what's really happening as opposed to what's said publicly.

If you spy on the UN, you own it. You have a disproportionate advantage in all negotiations (unless other countries are also effective at spying[1]). You might think that it is fine that the US effectively owns the UN, but its credibility is ruined.

The compromised UN is effectively a body for representing and legitimizing the wishes of the cabal of US allies as if they were the actual consensus of all UN member states.

[1] But it is still not possible for any nation to be more effective at spying than the US, given the UN's location.

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