Spy agencies target mobile phones, app stores to implant spyware
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It should be legislation that any government agency discovers a security issue that it must be disclosed, promptly to software vendors, then after patched, it must also disclose to the public. Accountability is the keyword here. A major security agency must be accountable to security issues it finds, crazy right? After all, these agencies are suppose to be protecting their own citizens, or one would hope so...
It is hypocritical of them to rattle on about "cyber terror" and conduct their own cyber war with the same weapons.
Surely the real story, the original Snowden story, was about PRISM the way large corporations do the bidding for spy agencies letting them tap information at the source. This was quickly drowned in a sea of other stories, and is hardly ever mentioned any more.
My personal take from the whole Snowden saga was the degree of collusion with "do no evil" tech corporations, something which their PR teams have obviously effectively suppressed.
It turns out they're spying on us. That's a big difference. And it's a problem.
> Respecting agreements not to spy on each others' citizens, the spying partners focused their attention on servers in non-Five Eyes countries,
If you've ever talked to 2 co-workers who have a different understanding of a particular decision, then you know the phenomena.
That said, it would be perfectly plausible that spy agencies could have maintained a policy of, "We will passively collect and analyze all transmissions, including our own citizens" along with one of, "We will actively infect devices, but make an attempt not to be attacking our own citizens in the process."
So it is possible that both documents were completely correct.
I largely agree with where you're coming from. Any cultrual shift to bring back to data privacy will have to apply to government and indivudials/companies. You can't really have "but it's different when I do it" in a moral standard.
Spy agencies should SPY, but spreading malware in the name of spying goes a step beyond spying. A line need to be drawn somewhere, and what better place than where sabotage begin?
All of the variations and permutations of that are part of the same story.
PRISM was a particularly egregious example. And US companies are now losing billions/year because people in other countries won't trust data to them. Furthermore it was shocking to me that it was carried out in such a way that the people in charge of the companies were not allowed to know about what was happening inside of their own companies.
That said, nobody has been shouting from the rooftops what I consider the most disturbing part of what I understand about it. And that is that any NSA analyst who wishes to get involved in politics can simply start digging up information on what is happening inside campaigns they don't like, and then can feed it to campaigns they do like. Nobody has to know about it. The campaigns already hire people to follow other campaigns, and those people already get tips. So you've just got a really good anonymous tipster. Think of it as a version of Watergate on steroids with plausible deniability and no physical burglary to leave traces.
But it gets better. According to the interpretation of the Constitution that the NSA operates under, deliberately attempting to find out which NSA agents were looking at Americans is a search of said Americans, which is prevented by the 4th. This is why they could not, by their own rules, tell Congress how many Americans had been accidentally searched.
If my understanding of this policy is correct, then the NSA is operating under rules that mean that they cannot even try to monitor for rogue agents who are doing what I just suggested.
Now let's suppose that we trust 99.9% of NSA agents to be good people, following the internal rules and operating in good faith.
It just takes ONE acting in bad faith to distort our political system. And enough thousands of people have access that I consider it guaranteed that this nightmare scenario is actually happening.
Scared yet?
I don't care if the bug finder is a white hat researcher or a spy working for NSA: It's the writer of the bug who puts the user in danger, not the finder of it.
Selling 0 day exploits also puts the user in more danger.
Posting exploits publicly without attempting to notify the maintainer also puts the user in more danger.
Keeping exploits secret also puts the user in more danger (though less than selling them).
Because this leak wasn't a "publish everything at once" leak. Snowden wanted the journalists to decide what to release, and that requires work, which takes time.
It's like they're trying to release them just slowly enough so that public outrage never quite reaches critical mass. They can still trickle all they want, but I would appreciate it if they released these stories a bit more regularly and closer together.
That's a good way to generate a 'new normal'. I imagine there's pros/cons of that, but one of the biggest is probably not to be forgotten.
I'll contend that if the initial revelations weren't enough to reach critical mass, no rate will. The collective mass of self-serious commentators and politicians triangulate towards citizen apathy.
FFS we now know without a doubt we tortured people and it didn't reach critical mass. What happened? No war crimes trails, just some blowhards on TV defending the practice to this day.
When Greenwald started publishing, he said something to the effect of "there's enough publishable material here for the next 10 years or so". Still a long way to go, I guess.
According to Wikipedia, it routes all data through a proxy which modifies the data in order to improve performance on mobile platforms (e.g., by using compression). I think that proxy is a much more likely target for attacks than 500 million individual phones.
On the surface it's a hilarious first person shooter with a gun that harmlessly puts holes in things in almost exactly the way normal guns don't. Yet it's actually a place where human life and safety is meaningless, where unconciable acts of terror and horror happen everyday (or at least did). And their PowerPoint slides are just awful. It's clear there's a systemic problem in the facility with sustainable testing. Aperature Science may be the most evil corporation ever, and it ends up being funny simply because they're so incompetently banal about it.
It's helpful to remember that giant machines chewing through our world and wreaking havoc on our lives are just side effects of lots of like-minded people working together for a common cause. Teamwork can bring you Star Trek or it can bring you Aperature Science.
There's a moral to be had there, but I'll be damned if I know what it is...
Really, someone should write up some of these political stories in terms of TVTropes so I can know how I feel about how the plot's progressing. So far it seems like we're in a poorly written mockumentary.
Most current crises have a referent in "Yes Minister", including this one - when the PM denied the bugging of an MP's phone. ("He should not have denied something of which he had no knowledge.")
This indicates how few fundamental situations or tensions exist in modern government, and how often they reoccur.
At any rate, I really like the idea that there really isn't bad people conspiring but just a badly formed/tuned system. (I'm a process engineer, so I suppose that gives me hope where others wouldn't see any.)
>These documents are interchangeable with some plumbing and heating supply chain company
Efficiency is universal. Powerpoint-like presentations work in the corporate structure. Memos, emails, etc are used for a reason. Look at Al Qaeda's job application form, its bizarrely corporate. Or how Osama Bin Laden's bookshelf is straight out of a HN reading list. Or how drug dealers hire Ivy League finance guys to run operations that, if you didn't know the product, would assume it was some boring commodity widget being sold.
There's no James Bond-ish school of super technology or unique processes. Whatever management fads are popular in the business world work their way into government, and that includes intelligence, military, space programs, etc. I'm always a little surprised at how cheap looking every NASA press conference is and how many technical issues they always seem to have (mic issues, streaming issues, etc). If there's really a balality of evil, I'd say that's just a subset of the banality of all bureaucracies.
If anything, unique organizations that are successful tend to be extremely rare. Startup culture and other 'progressive organizations' just end up being 'office lite' until they go mainstream/IPO/whatever then they fully embrace becoming a regular office. The only non-trivial organization I can think that is successful and has a unique structure is probably Valve, with its fascinating flat management style.
edit: downvotes for suggesting that maybe the NSA shouldn't be compared to the party that gassed 6 million people solely for their ethnicity? Grow up, HN.
Totally agree. Please stop me if I ever do that. Those other kind of SIGINT programs, the ones that attempt to collect every single email and phone call and GPS location and internet search in my life and store it indefinitely, are a little more of a direct comparison though, don't you think?
> Efficiency is universal.
Efficiency is actually fairly hard to come by I think. It's terribly designed presentations with bad clip art, illegible diagrams, and meaningless and redundant process slides that seem to be universal as far as I can tell.
The powerpoint bashing seems silly to me. You guys should be bashing meetings. There's a real forest for the trees aspect here. Amazon bans it, and instead they have everyone read a 6 page memo. Both are terrible if you ask me. 90% of meetings and presentations shouldn't exist. Stop-gap measures to "fix" useless meetings will just re-invent the next Powerpoint.
tldr; the culture of meetings is broken, not the tools
PS: I would suggest flat out banning it from your meetings. If you want to get your point across send a document with your presentation in it, and then open up the meeting for question and answers about that document. Another huge win is to ban 1 hour meetings 30 minutes or the whole day is fine, but 1 hour blocks tend to become a wasteful default.
The parent never mentioned Nazis. "Banality of Evil" does not equal Nazis, even if that was the context where you first heard the term.
"America's interests" (an insignificant 4% of the global population) are not the same as the world's interests, and in many cases are directly opposed to them. They also historically involve tons of bloodshed and lots of support for dictatorships and friendly lackeys in power worldwide.
>downvotes for suggesting that maybe the NSA shouldn't be compared to the party that gassed 6 million people solely for their ethnicity?
No, but US did spray poisonous gas to several million people for other reasons, like "strategic interests" -- and that's 10.000 miles away from their soil. As to what they did on their own soil, this includes the Native American's genocide and concentration camps (which Hitler admired), and the black slavery.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_Orange
For the millions victims of such interventions, including the 200.000 men, women and children vaporized in Nagashaki and Hiroshima, it makes little difference if "Nazis" did it or not. It is, however, a nice scheme, to hold up a picture of "pure evil" to make everything else OK by comparison.
I really liked your comment, but I downvoted you, let me explain why. I did so because your first sentience is likely to derail the conversation rather than further it. Yes, the phase Banality of Evil comes from a book on the Holocaust, but CPLX was using it in a more general sense. You seem to agree with this usage when you say:
>If there's really a banality of evil, I'd say that's just a subset of the banality of all bureaucracies.
This is what I understand the banality of evil to mean.
Comparisons based on common themes are not the same as holding that the things being compared are equal. The source material for the quote is a general comment upon evil, drawn from a reflection upon Eichmann. It is not a specific comment upon the Nazis, but that normal people doing things that seem perfectly normal (indeed right) to them can perpetuate terrible crimes. The observation goes something like this:
"The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and our moral standards of judgement, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together, for it implied… This new type of criminal… Commits his crimes under circumstances that make it well-nigh impossible for him to know or feel that he is doing wrong" (s.276)
"It was as though in those last minutes [of Eichmann's life] he was summing up the lesson that this long course in human wickedness taught us – the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil." (s.252)
- Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the Banality of Evil. Hannah Arendt.