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Comment by aspensmonster | Hacker News Reader

50 points, 3 hours ago, not on front page. Definitely nothing screwy going on here. Regardless, here's the link to the memorandum:

https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/7854...

My favorite part:

>1.d) This agreement is not intended to create any legally enforceable rights and shall not be construed to be either an international agreement or a legally binding instrument according to international law.

Hey Israel, we're totally against you violating the constitutional rights of American citizens --to say nothing of the human rights of all people-- but it's not like this is a "legally binding instrument" or anything. Just don't be bad, m'kay?

M'kay.

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Its the HN Gods.. I tried to ask the question a few hours ago and it got killed..

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6366987

EDIT

That link is DELETED. Here was the TEXT.

I tried to submit a NSA* story a couple days ago about how the N S A(1) is snooping on iPhone that directly related to the FSF article(2) today while connecting it to something I read on HN 2 years ago...(3). While it isn't startup news, it does directly show and relate to EFF that the iPhone can't be a trusted platform. It seems that you directly removed the ability to add comments as well as see articles that are related to any N S A information. Why? Are you trying to control HN and dictate the direction?

(1) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/09/nsa-steve-jobs_n_38... (2) https://www.fsf.org/news/free-software-foundation-statement-... (3) http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-13145562

So why didn't you post this information in the relevant FSF thread yesterday? There was an entire thread of commenters defending Apple to the bitter end.

I wish there was a more active discussion on the NSA being able to tap into any phone to access users data. That HuffingtonPost link also linked to a story with a bit more detail[1].

>"The U.S. National Security Agency is able to crack protective measures on iPhones, BlackBerry and Android devices, giving it access to users' data on all major smartphones....in which the agencies describe setting up dedicated teams for each type of phone as part of their effort to gather intelligence on potential threats such as terrorists."

This is news to me, I assume they could pull any data from an iPhone/Android/Blackberry, maybe even activate the camera if "need" be.

[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/08/nsa-smartphone-der-...

Why is it that some people are flagging these stories? The NSA surveillance topic is highly relevant as it intersects with technology. What does plugging ones ears and looking the other way solve?

Maybe if these people are so 'sick' of hearing about it they should do something to stop it. Or is willful ignorance bliss?

Just because people don't want to hear about it on Hacker News doesn't mean they're trying to avoid the topic. I read about it everywhere else I go: it's a topic on google news for me along with drones and a couple other things, on reddit there are plenty of subreddits that discuss NSA stuff daily.

Not saying all NSA stuff is off-topic, just that it's irritating to open a thread about something interesting and wade through tangential political discussion. We used to punt that stuff elsewhere and for good reason.

I agree with you that it's relevant to technical news, but I don't think it has anything to do with "plugging ears" or "willful ignorance."

I don't flag them (it's pointless I think), but I think the people flagging these stories are doing so because they're tired of hearing about it, and because one interpretation of the HN Guidelines supports it.

Flagging to often will cause you to very quickly lose the ability to flag at all (the 'flag' link is removed for you entirely). If people are flagging heavily and are allowed to continue to do so, then it seems to me that HN is in some form approving of their flags.

  > The NSA surveillance topic is highly relevant as it
  > intersects with technology.

Do you realize that "intersects with technology" isn't the criteria for judging what material is on-topic for HN?

I sure do! Do you realize this forum is primarily full of white males that work in nothing but technology (some who have developed the privacy-eroding tools that the NSA now slurps)?

Discussion of NSA surveillance is certainly something 'that good hackers would find interesting' - hence the current thread being on the front page and the hundreds of tech stories submitted and upvoted here daily.

There was a report about 12 years ago on the Israeli company Amdocs that is enlightening:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H20Naj176M0

Amdocs "helped" install the phone lines in the White House in 1997.

Amdocs' main product is billing software, so it aggregates raw Call Data Records (CDRs) from telco switches, and turns them into customer and peer billing data amongst other things.

Just like Narus' main product was aggregating raw Internet Transmission Records from telco switches and turning them into customer and peer billing data for network usage?

No, Amdocs does billing software, which is precisely as unexciting as it sounds. CDRs contain a motherload of metadata (who called whom, how long etc), but have zero content about the actual content of the call, and they're generated by the other systems that feed into the billing system so their contents can't be changed.

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