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It's subtly transphobic that you limited the discussion to men and women.

I'm not clear on what you think I made up or what viewpoint you think I'm standing by.

It's terrible that you think reflexively apologizing is the same thing as politeness.

GHFigson NSA classifies Linux Journal readers as extremists

You also said that "members of US/UK Government may believe that if one provides "incidental help" to the current ideological enemies of the US you are a terrorist/extremist", which you haven't shown at all, and that "at the very least targetable under terrorism laws", which is meaningless, because anybody crossing the border can be detained and questioned by that statute.

GHFigson NSA classifies Linux Journal readers as extremists

Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act of 2000 does not require a person to be a "terrorist" or imply that anybody detained under its authority is thought to be one.

http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/11/schedule/7

GHFigson NSA classifies Linux Journal readers as extremists

I'm telling you because you're the one that thinks you're a target.

GHFigson NSA classifies Linux Journal readers as extremists

Because that's what this leak seems to be implying.

Are you looking at the evidence or the articles written about it? Because the evidence is simply that there exists a method to select Tor-related traffic out of a stream. That alone is nothing. You know very little about what the input is or where the output goes, or what conclusions are drawn by the people analyzing it.

To reach the paranoid conclusions that are getting such traction around here one has to presume that the same institution competent enough to construct this collection apparatus is so fantastically braindead as to make, on a continuing basis, elementary mistakes of analysis on the data that would undermine both their avowed purpose and whatever totalitarian scheming one wishes to imagine is "really" going on. Mistakes which, somehow, miraculously, every single reader with the slightest bit of understanding of the subject matter detects and avoids! I don't buy it.

GHFigson NSA classifies Linux Journal readers as extremists

You're right, they just monitor and log everything and everyone on Linux Journals forums.

That's a contradiction. If you believe the latter, you don't think I'm right.

GHFigson NSA classifies Linux Journal readers as extremists

You're nuts if you think there's significant overlap between yours and the activities of the people responsible for things like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents,_20...

GHFigson NSA classifies Linux Journal readers as extremists

Nowhere in the evidence is there any indication that the NSA classifies Linux Journal as an extremist forum, or that it considers the readers extremists.

GHFigson Xkeyscorerules100.txt

I say this because that was my first impression, which seemed off, leading me to google, then to wikipedia, and then back here in a huff.

I'm not sure I understand why you think an NSA analyst (who, inexplicably, is editing an XKEYSCORE rule file regarding Tor and Tails while being completely ignorant about Tor and Tails) is incapable of doing this same kind of information-gathering.

I'm not going to act like I think the NSA only hires the best and the brightest, but your example presumes the existence of an analyst that's all of: grossly undereducated for his duties, too mentally incompetent to be aware of it, and so far on the literal-minded end of the autism spectrum that they could be replaced by a shell script.

I believe any such analyst, if they existed, would have been promoted to management before they could cause any serious harm.

GHFigson Xkeyscorerules100.txt

There's no indication that there is such a rating exists, or that any such decisions are made based on automated rules. It's a tool for selecting some traffic out of all traffic, not for replacing human analysis or decision-making.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XKEYSCORE

GHFigson Xkeyscorerules100.txt

I think those assumptions are not supported by the available evidence[1], and that the authors they know this. Who cares what the NSA says? I'm looking at the same thing the authors are presenting and drawing different conclusions.

[1] Including the abundance of evidence already available about XKEYSCORE.

GHFigson Xkeyscorerules100.txt

Yes, I read it, and I stand by what I said. The article explains a set of rules used to filter a set of information out of another set, but it does not support claims about what is done with that set of information.

There is a lot of insinuation, but no example of any individual user of Tor or reader of Linux Journal, etc. being monitored or tracked simply for doing so.

GHFigson Xkeyscorerules100.txt

My point is that they (the authors of the article) don't have that context. They're just covering up the lack of information with FUD.

GHFigson Xkeyscorerules100.txt

We have no context for what "flagged" or "monitoring" means, though. There's no indication that these rules are taken to mean anything in isolation beyond what is frankly common sense. The idea that just Googling Tails means you're monitored is a narrative leap.

If I write an email about Viagra, the recipient's spam filter is undoubtedly going to consider it to have a non-zero probability of being spam. That doesn't mean it will be blocked, in the end. Nor does it mean that the spam filter is wrong to take notice.

GHFigson Xkeyscorerules100.txt

That doesn't make sense to me. It's a definition that relates to the people they're looking for. That it's explicitly more specific than "all Tails users" really doesn't seem disheartening to me.

That Tails is used by people other than extremists doesn't invalidate the comment, by someone interested in "comsec mechanisms used by extremists", that it is, in addition to anything else it may be, a "comsec mechanism advocated by extremists in extremist forums".

It's not like "legitimate extremists" have some totally parallel universe of software that's only used by them. It's fundamental to most of these tools that they'll be used by different people in different ways, and that some of those people will be by some standard or another "bad guys".

GHFigson Xkeyscorerules100.txt

The article commented has the whole context.

It really doesn't. In spite of repeatedly claiming things like that people searching for Tor are "monitored" or users are "tracked", it's completely vague about what that those terms actually mean and provides zero examples.

GHFigson NSA targets the privacy-conscious

Nobody said that.

GHFigson Cicada 3301

4chan : intelligent individuals :: Mos Eisley : Han Solo & Chewbacca

GHFigson Use of Drones for Killings Risks a War Without End

The definition that searching google gives is "the use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims", which drone attacks certainly fit into.

I think the point is that drone strikes (targeting angry people with guns and bombs) are meaningfully different than someone blowing themselves up in a a crowded market or mosque (targeting people whose religion is slightly different from his or her own).

You can say they're the same because they're "the use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims", but there's something of a different quality to those political aims that warrants a distinction.

GHFigson When Drones Fall From The Sky

Assuming you know the frequency a drone is flying on, it is trivial to jam.

Hence they make it hard to know the frequency: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_hopping

GHFigson When Drones Fall From The Sky

Apparently, USAF pilots aren't trained to watch out for mountains descending from above them.

GHFigson Cops hid use of phone tracking tech in court documents at feds’ request

this great comic strip

Talking points from this great book: "Amusing Ourselves to Death" by Neil Postman, from 1985: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_ourselves_to_death

GHFigson Julian Assange AMA on Reddit

I guess it suggests the character assassination attempts against him worked.

Plenty of people thought Assange was full of him self well-before the rape accusation (that pionar didn't even mention) or any other supposed character assassination.

It's not particularly hard to get a negative impression of him from his own writings, from his hype-man behavior for Wikileaks, his mercenary approach to selling access to media organizations, or from various first-hand accounts of people that worked with him.

GHFigson Twitter's GIF hack

I had a convoluted method using gifsicle to extract the frames and then encode as a stream of frames, but then sometime in the past year or so ffmpeg improved native gif support. This is what I use (the options are both for compatibility):

    ffmpeg -i foo.gif -pix_fmt yuv420p -vf crop=floor (in_w/2)*2:floor(in_h/2)*2 foo.mp4

Works for WebM just by changing the extension, too.

GHFigson Why we're suing the CIA

Or do they do striaghtforward police work, provide a detail of officers at protests and counterprotests just in case anything gets out of hand, and generally behave reasonably?

According to the documents Naomi Wolf (your link!) cites, this is pretty much what happened. Try reading them for yourself instead of ignorantly complaining about "propaganda".

GHFigson UK intelligence forced to reveal secret policy for mass surveillance

You may find this book interesting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_True_Believer

GHFigson Why we're suing the CIA

What are you even talking about? "Wrong" people? Aaron Swartz?

I'm just saying the documents mentioned above[1] don't back up your claims, and that what they do describe is mundane, expected behavior. (I know this because I read them myself, rather than relying on the summary of someone with a clear agenda.) If you weren't speaking in the context of the thread, why post in it?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7881884

One of the defaults on Hacker News is a general skepticism toward increasing police power.

First of all, that's not a default of Hacker News, that's a default of individual users of Hacker News. If you want a community of uniform opinion, I suggest digging out your dog-eared copy of 1984 and re-reading the scene of the two-minutes' hate to see where that leads.

Secondly, I'd like to point out that I share that default, but with the additional (and seemingly rare) default of skepticism toward reporting about increasing police power.

GHFigson An even slimmer pdf.js

All I can speak to is that I've never had a problem reading. I didn't even realize the recent versions support forms until this thread.