10 ms·

Laura Poitras Reveals Her Own Life Under Surveillance

325 points by eplanit 11y ago

lambdasquirrel 11y ago
Every time I hear one of these Bernie supporters talk, I want to remind them of Obama in '08. We thought Obama would be the guy to save the country this. But reality is a lot more complicated than ideals. It's actually a bit like startups in that sense. You can have all the ideals you want but it doesn't matter a whit without execution.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- rdl 11y ago
  This was mostly on GWB's watch.
  - ZoF 11y ago
    What was mostly on GWB's watch? The parent doesn't imply that Obama was president when events in the article took place. Also; Trump 2016. Make America Great Again.
    - mikeyouse 11y ago
      I can't tell if that's a sarcastic Trump endorsement since he's one of the few candidates pledging to expand the surveillance state.. Trump said his position in favor of the NSA data collection had been the same since before last month's terrorist attacks in Paris, which stoked fears of international terrorism and revived debate over government surveillance measures. "I assume when I pick up my telephone people are listening to my conversations anyway, if you want to know the truth," Trump told Hewitt. "It's a pretty sad commentary." [..] Trump said Tuesday that he would be "fine" with restoring provisions of the Patriot Act to allow for the bulk data collection, something candidates such as former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush have also called for that was banned with the passage of the USA Freedom Act, which Cruz supported. "As far as I'm concerned, that would be fine," Trump said. http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/261673-trump-sides-with-rubio-over-cruz-in-nsa-surveillance http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/26167...
- x0x0 11y ago
  The structure of the US government has an unusually high number of veto points. Presidents have, as opposed to similar positions in other countries, much less power to push their agenda. People who don't understand that change comes slowly in the US, and requires serious organization to push through the house and senate, are being silly and simultaneously sabotaging their ostensible goals. viz Obama supporters not voting in off-presidential year elections and hence crippling his ability to push legislation.
  - lambdasquirrel 11y ago
    Well go ahead. All of you mod me down. But you cannot explain the executive Branch's response to Snowden. Did the Republicans in legislature do that? No. That was purely the administration's choice.
    - dang 11y ago
      > Well go ahead. All of you mod me down The HN guidelines ask you not to comment like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
      - bigufufhug 11y ago
        Lol, yet another example of selective moderation. Keep up the good work of harassing the pov you disagree with.
        peterwwillis 11y ago
        Moderation is supposed to be selective. And a downvote is not harassment.
    - x0x0 11y ago
      The national security state has a lot of inertia. There's a long discussion to be had about what Obama's choices realistically were (and never forget I'd say there's at least a 50% chance the cia assisted in assassinating a sitting US president), but you seem more interested in the green lantern theory of the presidency. fyi I didn't mod you down
- chippy 11y ago
  > We thought Obama would be the guy to save the country this. But reality is a lot more complicated than ideals. People generally don't like being reminded that they have been duped into believing the hype, even when believing it was actually the best thing. It's also a human psychological trick that we cannot easily imagine what would have happened if we did not believe or did not have "hope". So there is fact that things didn't get rectified as much as promised, the fact that many people believed that would happen, and the probable actuality that things got much better than if they didn't believe.
- sitkack 11y ago
  It was pretty apparent in '08 that Obama wasn't going to _save_ anything. Obama, is, was and will always be a Statist. Everyone was exuberant for the removal of Bush and nothing more, the fact that he is considered black was just a bonus. In '12, it was literally the lesser of two evils.
- flurpitude 11y ago
  To his credit, Sanders has explicitly said that a president can't change the country singlehandedly and a grassroots political movement is needed to achieve any meaningful change. Any supporter who thinks electing him is the end of it isn't listening to his message.
GigabyteCoin 11y ago
>a book she’s publishing to accompany the exhibit includes her journal from the height of that surveillance, recording her first-person experience of becoming a spying subject, along with her inner monologue as she first corresponded with the secret NSA leaker she then knew only as “Citizenfour.” That line really highlighted the fallacy that "mass surveillance is effective" for me. They were actively spying on her concurrently while she was "the subject of a grand jury investigation" and still were unable to deduce that she was actively conspiring with Edward Snowden which would ultimately decimate their reputation worldwide.
- jlgaddis 11y ago
  PGP FTW!
  - mirimir 11y ago
    Yes, and Tor :)
    - nickpsecurity 11y ago
      Good that you two were wise enough to mention the only two that slowed and stopped NSA in the leaks. Keep it up at every opportunity. ;)
  - exo762 11y ago
    Technical means are not enough. We need political change.
    - sail 11y ago
      Historically technology has been more successful in affecting political change.
      - exo762 11y ago
        I believe that we have an example of such "success". In Stasi era total surveillance was too expensive. Today technology made it cheap, hence we do total surveillance. We could try to bet on technology-first approach. That means rewriting of all the stacks, create automated solutions that hack and/or patch systems (see DARPA Cyber Grand Challenge), hardening systems and protocols, etc. Now, this leaves us with dumb users that need to be retrained. And that can't be done. And there is other side of things. While we wait for thing that may not happen (dark internet), a) public money are being wasted b) surveillance is creating chilling effect TODAY c) wars with US involvement are raging, fuelling ranks of radicals in Arab world
rdl 11y ago
I was in Iraq at the time, and probably interacting with people one step away from the people involved in persecuting her. Based on everything I saw at the time, they were perhaps well meaning but utterly overwhelmed and without any handle on the situation, and once something like this starts, it snowballs and has a life of its own. The terrifying thing is when this happens to someone who isn't a white US citizen journalist...they can easily end up in local detention or even theater detention or more, indefinitely, or be killed. I wish I could apologize to her for what she went through. It probably is better for the world that she went through it, was then an even more effective journalist, and then in contact with Snowden, but it was a huge sacrifice I'm sure.
- x0x0 11y ago
  The iraq war, where we gave the bottom 10% of your high school class the ability to cause the US to harass this woman for a decade on a hunch. Sans evidence. As you obliquely mentioned, it also explains half or more of the people in Guantanamo. The whole thing should be viewed as a horrific embarrassment, but I think it reveals quite a bit about our actual (as opposed to our rah rah freedom) principles.
  - calibraxis 11y ago
    Yes, it's truly a polite understatement to call it a "horrific embarrassment". In a reasonable world, many of our software projects would center on the entire countries of people running away from the carnage our murderous rampage caused, what with the inevitable militias fighting over the remains. But of course refugees are not known for having the social status points we call "money" and obsess over, so the vast majority of us instead work to improve some dude's social point score. Truly a silly system.
  - acqq 11y ago
    > The whole thing should be viewed as a horrific embarrassment Even if her problems are something which can easier provoke empathy in readers here (as in "I could be her") they are insignificant compared to the problems of the people in Iraq in which they are as the effect of the political decisions of the government for which we assume that it did what its duty is and which got the wide support for the war: the US government which according to their own press statements did this "to bring democracy" and "because of WMD" in Iraq. It turned out there were no WMD there and that the "proofs" were a lie. http://www.salon.com/2015/05/20/george_w_bushs_cia_briefer_admits_iraq_wmd_intelligence_was_a_lie/ http://www.salon.com/2015/05/20/george_w_bushs_cia_briefer_a... The US soldiers who were there are probably the most credible source to talk about what they've actually brought there. For the current results just look at the map that includes ISIS controlled territories: https://pietervanostaeyen.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/img_5089.png https://pietervanostaeyen.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/img_50... And the statistics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraqi_insurgency_%282011%E2%80%93present%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraqi_insurg... Not to mention neighboring Syria and what's left from the country there. Are we able to have empathy for the people there too?
rl3 11y ago
>She notes her computer glitching and “going pink” during her interviews with NSA whistleblower William Binney, and that it tells her its hard drive is full despite seeming to have 16 gigabytes free. Peculiar. There's a decent chance that it wasn't related to espionage. There's also a smaller chance that it was espionage gone awry, but I highly doubt state level actors are that clumsy. If it was espionage it was probably intentional. To what end I'm not sure. Attempts to interfere with the interview seem pointless at best, at least for the sake of interference itself. Probably some sort of psychological game or intimidation. A unit like TAO likely has encyclopedic manuals dedicated to the art of using their capability to mess with people's heads. On the bright side, it's at least comforting that we aren't seeing privacy activists being locked away due to planted evidence that appears forensically legit. State actors have the capability to do this if they want.
- jlgaddis 11y ago
  > ... it's at least comforting that we aren't seeing privacy activists being locked away due to planted evidence that appears forensically legit. Yet. As far as we know, anyways.
- ptha 11y ago
  She sleeps badly, plagued with nightmares about the American government. She reads Cory Doctorow’s Homeland and re-reads 1984, finding too many parallels with her own life., the psychological aspect is very troubling. A government state doesn't actually have to put you under constant surveillance, they just have to make you think you're under constant surveillance. The unintended consequence of the surveillance may have hardened her resolve to be a privacy advocate, but it certainly didn't do her mental health much good.
  - Kristine1975 11y ago
    A government state doesn't actually have to put you under constant surveillance, they just have to make you think you're under constant surveillance. It's the old idea of the Panopticon as envisioned by Jeremy Bentham: Achieve compliance not by watching everybody all the time, but by creating a system where everybody could be watched at any time.
jlgaddis 11y ago
I pre-ordered her book on Amazon a few days ago and am anxiously looking forward to the day it arrives.
mynewtb 11y ago
I wish they would focus on releasing more documents instead of navel gazing...
- privong 11y ago
  > I wish they would focus on releasing more documents instead of navel gazing... Both are useful. In this case, it is providing an explicit, human narrative for the harm that surveillance can inflict. Many people respond more strongly to emotional anecdoes than to hard data (pretty much the reason why low-probability terrorist attacks are disproportionately feared over more common ways to die), so having a more emotional, anecdotal account of the actual effect of surveillance on people is also important.
vorg 11y ago
> the surveillance targeting Poitras had transformed her into a nervous wreck. [...] she describes feeling constantly watched, entirely robbed of privacy. “I haven’t written in over a year for fear these words are not private,” [...] She sleeps badly, plagued with nightmares Poitras and others being surveilled by people in the US and other governments represent an extreme point on a spectrum. Lower down the spectrum are many more people who each have one or more busybodies from government, academia, the media, business, entertainment/sports, or religion, etc after them for some reason/s. Those busybodies often discover and collude with each other. The resulting surveillance and interference against us is probably quite tame compared to what the US govt has done against Poitras, but intense enough that we can extrapolate to more easily appreciate what she's gone through.
webjames 11y ago
I'll preorder the book, interestingly it wont be available until May in the UK but Amazon will ship from the US. Can anyone recommend any other similar books in the meantime?
- Umn44 11y ago
  Shadow government http://www.amazon.com/Shadow-Government-Surveillance-Security-Single-Superpower/dp/1608463656/ http://www.amazon.com/Shadow-Government-Surveillance-Securit... No place to hide http://www.amazon.com/No-Place-Hide-Snowden-Surveillance/dp/1250062586/ http://www.amazon.com/No-Place-Hide-Snowden-Surveillance/dp/... Democracy Inc http://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Incorporated-Managed-Inverted-Totalitarianism/dp/069114589X/ http://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Incorporated-Managed-Inverte...
- Umn44 11y ago
  National security double goverment (?) http://www.amazon.com/National-Security-Government-Michael-Glennon/dp/0190206446 http://www.amazon.com/National-Security-Government-Michael-G...
dineshp2 11y ago
If you imagine yourself in the future(maybe 50 years in the future) and look back at the present and think about the present,specifically regarding privacy,mass surveillance,data collection,the state of the law and the power that the Government and corporations have over people's life, it seems totally ridiculous to me. This is a problem that can only be solved if the vast majority of the population gets involved and cares about the pressing issues in the world. One of the great side effects of the explosion of the internet is that it has created a potential medium for everyone to participate in the process of democracy and law making. With the awareness and the right tools to enable participation of the masses in every decision that the Government makes, we can limit the power that the Government and corporations have in the process of democracy and law making. And with participation of the common man,we can finally move towards a democracy in the true sense of the word.
- arca_vorago 11y ago
  Which is exactly why the totalitarian state has been kicked into high gear in response. Throughout history technological change that has enabled communication and the passing of information has been responded to by the oligarchy by taking control of and limited that media. Telegraph/gram, radio, telivision, the printing press and so on. Part of my theory is that it just took them a little while to understand exactly how dangerous the internet is to them, but now they have fully realized this it has almost forced the implimentation of the surveillance state so that later the cat can be walked back on dissidents. Its what William Binney and Thomas Drake call the "turn key totalitarian state". It may not be turned on yet, but the structure is being put in place. All it takes is a martial law enabling event and a potus willing to turn the key. Which is why I think everyones going to be amazed when Jeb gets the nom and steals the election.
  - infinite8s 11y ago
    And the 2 degree climate change over the next 50 years is likely just the trigger needed to justify martial law (much of coastal Florida is expected to flood, the North East of the US will have the extremes of weather that we've just started experiencing, much of the farm belt is expected to undergo drought).
secfirstmd 11y ago
Excuse blatant Plug :) When we built Umbrella, we had in mind the example of Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras meeting Edwards Snowden. Initially Snowden tried to make contact but Greenwald found the process of digital security too cumbersome and awkward. Poitras however was more persistant. Also, when Greenwald and Poitras went to Hong Kong, they knew little or nothing about physical security. We wanted to change that and make it easier to have everything a journalist like Glenn Greenwald would need to do to meet a source in their pocket - everything from sending a secure email to meeting a source in a high risk location where they may be under surveillance from a regime which may threaten their vital work. So we launched an open source Android app called Umbrella - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.secfirst.umbrella https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.secfirst.u... https://github.com/securityfirst/Umbrella_android https://github.com/securityfirst/Umbrella_android It's still a long way from being perfect but hopefully will make the life of future Laura Poitras, just a little bit easier.
- junto 11y ago
  While I think your cause is noble, can you really trust Android, and even if you can trust Android, can you really trust the baseband firmware?
  - secfirstmd 11y ago
    No. But as we all know, there is practically no firmware which can be trusted. I think the issue is always about measuring risk versus the threat level. Journalists that we train every day all over the world are always going to carry out high risk activities. The temptation is always to try to build a tool for the most extreme threat model and in the process, bypass the most common threats - leaving the average journalist with even less protection. Indeed, we increasingly find far much focus amongst our trainees on high level NSA Prism the stuff while little consideration of the basics - passwords, who has access to information in your own office, dealing with physical surveillance etc etc - all of which oir experience has taught us is far more common security hazard to journalists.
- nickpsecurity 11y ago
junto 11y ago
With regards to the excerpt below and out of general interest (since I'm not a journalist, nor know any), what ethical responsibility should journalists have concerning intervention when reporting in wartime? He later told the Army investigators that he “strongly believed”—but without apparent evidence—“POITRAS had prior knowledge of the ambush and had the means to report it to U.S. Forces; however, she purposely did not report it so she could film the attack for her documentary.” Should they remain objective in such a hypothetical situation? Are there standard rules of guidance for journalists?
- 15thandwhatever 11y ago
  http://keywiki.org/Laura_Poitras#Pre-knowledge_of_ambush.3F http://keywiki.org/Laura_Poitras#Pre-knowledge_of_ambush.3F
- lawnchair_larry 11y ago
  That one doesn't make sense to me unless all US reporters must also notify all locals that the US is planning a surprise attack. What gives them the impression that her duty is to preserve the life of one man (of an invading force, no less), but not another?
_jomo 11y ago
> it tells her its hard drive is full despite seeming to have 16 gigabytes free. If she has a lot of small files she might have run out of inodes [0] which will report "no space left on device" when trying to create a new file, although there's still space left. Inodes store a file's attributes. In ext4 they're limited to total disk space / 16Kb, so a lot of files <16kb will cause trouble. You can check inode usage via `df -i`. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inode https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inode

325 points by eplanit 11y ago

Every time I hear one of these Bernie supporters talk, I want to remind them of Obama in '08. We thought Obama would be the guy to save the country this. But reality is a lot more complicated than ideals. It's actually a bit like startups in that sense. You can have all the ideals you want but it doesn't matter a whit without execution.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
rdl 11y ago
This was mostly on GWB's watch.
- ZoF 11y ago
  What was mostly on GWB's watch? The parent doesn't imply that Obama was president when events in the article took place. Also; Trump 2016. Make America Great Again.
  - mikeyouse 11y ago
    I can't tell if that's a sarcastic Trump endorsement since he's one of the few candidates pledging to expand the surveillance state.. Trump said his position in favor of the NSA data collection had been the same since before last month's terrorist attacks in Paris, which stoked fears of international terrorism and revived debate over government surveillance measures. "I assume when I pick up my telephone people are listening to my conversations anyway, if you want to know the truth," Trump told Hewitt. "It's a pretty sad commentary." [..] Trump said Tuesday that he would be "fine" with restoring provisions of the Patriot Act to allow for the bulk data collection, something candidates such as former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush have also called for that was banned with the passage of the USA Freedom Act, which Cruz supported. "As far as I'm concerned, that would be fine," Trump said. http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/261673-trump-sides-with-rubio-over-cruz-in-nsa-surveillance http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/26167...
x0x0 11y ago
The structure of the US government has an unusually high number of veto points. Presidents have, as opposed to similar positions in other countries, much less power to push their agenda. People who don't understand that change comes slowly in the US, and requires serious organization to push through the house and senate, are being silly and simultaneously sabotaging their ostensible goals. viz Obama supporters not voting in off-presidential year elections and hence crippling his ability to push legislation.
- lambdasquirrel 11y ago
  Well go ahead. All of you mod me down. But you cannot explain the executive Branch's response to Snowden. Did the Republicans in legislature do that? No. That was purely the administration's choice.
  - dang 11y ago
    > Well go ahead. All of you mod me down The HN guidelines ask you not to comment like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - bigufufhug 11y ago
      Lol, yet another example of selective moderation. Keep up the good work of harassing the pov you disagree with.
      - peterwwillis 11y ago
        Moderation is supposed to be selective. And a downvote is not harassment.
  - x0x0 11y ago
    The national security state has a lot of inertia. There's a long discussion to be had about what Obama's choices realistically were (and never forget I'd say there's at least a 50% chance the cia assisted in assassinating a sitting US president), but you seem more interested in the green lantern theory of the presidency. fyi I didn't mod you down
chippy 11y ago
> We thought Obama would be the guy to save the country this. But reality is a lot more complicated than ideals. People generally don't like being reminded that they have been duped into believing the hype, even when believing it was actually the best thing. It's also a human psychological trick that we cannot easily imagine what would have happened if we did not believe or did not have "hope". So there is fact that things didn't get rectified as much as promised, the fact that many people believed that would happen, and the probable actuality that things got much better than if they didn't believe.
sitkack 11y ago
It was pretty apparent in '08 that Obama wasn't going to _save_ anything. Obama, is, was and will always be a Statist. Everyone was exuberant for the removal of Bush and nothing more, the fact that he is considered black was just a bonus. In '12, it was literally the lesser of two evils.
flurpitude 11y ago
To his credit, Sanders has explicitly said that a president can't change the country singlehandedly and a grassroots political movement is needed to achieve any meaningful change. Any supporter who thinks electing him is the end of it isn't listening to his message.

GigabyteCoin 11y ago

>a book she’s publishing to accompany the exhibit includes her journal from the height of that surveillance, recording her first-person experience of becoming a spying subject, along with her inner monologue as she first corresponded with the secret NSA leaker she then knew only as “Citizenfour.” That line really highlighted the fallacy that "mass surveillance is effective" for me. They were actively spying on her concurrently while she was "the subject of a grand jury investigation" and still were unable to deduce that she was actively conspiring with Edward Snowden which would ultimately decimate their reputation worldwide.

jlgaddis 11y ago
PGP FTW!
- mirimir 11y ago
  Yes, and Tor :)
  - nickpsecurity 11y ago
    Good that you two were wise enough to mention the only two that slowed and stopped NSA in the leaks. Keep it up at every opportunity. ;)
- exo762 11y ago
  Technical means are not enough. We need political change.
  - sail 11y ago
    Historically technology has been more successful in affecting political change.
    - exo762 11y ago
      I believe that we have an example of such "success". In Stasi era total surveillance was too expensive. Today technology made it cheap, hence we do total surveillance. We could try to bet on technology-first approach. That means rewriting of all the stacks, create automated solutions that hack and/or patch systems (see DARPA Cyber Grand Challenge), hardening systems and protocols, etc. Now, this leaves us with dumb users that need to be retrained. And that can't be done. And there is other side of things. While we wait for thing that may not happen (dark internet), a) public money are being wasted b) surveillance is creating chilling effect TODAY c) wars with US involvement are raging, fuelling ranks of radicals in Arab world

rdl 11y ago

I was in Iraq at the time, and probably interacting with people one step away from the people involved in persecuting her. Based on everything I saw at the time, they were perhaps well meaning but utterly overwhelmed and without any handle on the situation, and once something like this starts, it snowballs and has a life of its own. The terrifying thing is when this happens to someone who isn't a white US citizen journalist...they can easily end up in local detention or even theater detention or more, indefinitely, or be killed. I wish I could apologize to her for what she went through. It probably is better for the world that she went through it, was then an even more effective journalist, and then in contact with Snowden, but it was a huge sacrifice I'm sure.

x0x0 11y ago
The iraq war, where we gave the bottom 10% of your high school class the ability to cause the US to harass this woman for a decade on a hunch. Sans evidence. As you obliquely mentioned, it also explains half or more of the people in Guantanamo. The whole thing should be viewed as a horrific embarrassment, but I think it reveals quite a bit about our actual (as opposed to our rah rah freedom) principles.
- calibraxis 11y ago
  Yes, it's truly a polite understatement to call it a "horrific embarrassment". In a reasonable world, many of our software projects would center on the entire countries of people running away from the carnage our murderous rampage caused, what with the inevitable militias fighting over the remains. But of course refugees are not known for having the social status points we call "money" and obsess over, so the vast majority of us instead work to improve some dude's social point score. Truly a silly system.
- acqq 11y ago
  > The whole thing should be viewed as a horrific embarrassment Even if her problems are something which can easier provoke empathy in readers here (as in "I could be her") they are insignificant compared to the problems of the people in Iraq in which they are as the effect of the political decisions of the government for which we assume that it did what its duty is and which got the wide support for the war: the US government which according to their own press statements did this "to bring democracy" and "because of WMD" in Iraq. It turned out there were no WMD there and that the "proofs" were a lie. http://www.salon.com/2015/05/20/george_w_bushs_cia_briefer_admits_iraq_wmd_intelligence_was_a_lie/ http://www.salon.com/2015/05/20/george_w_bushs_cia_briefer_a... The US soldiers who were there are probably the most credible source to talk about what they've actually brought there. For the current results just look at the map that includes ISIS controlled territories: https://pietervanostaeyen.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/img_5089.png https://pietervanostaeyen.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/img_50... And the statistics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraqi_insurgency_%282011%E2%80%93present%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraqi_insurg... Not to mention neighboring Syria and what's left from the country there. Are we able to have empathy for the people there too?

rl3 11y ago

>She notes her computer glitching and “going pink” during her interviews with NSA whistleblower William Binney, and that it tells her its hard drive is full despite seeming to have 16 gigabytes free. Peculiar. There's a decent chance that it wasn't related to espionage. There's also a smaller chance that it was espionage gone awry, but I highly doubt state level actors are that clumsy. If it was espionage it was probably intentional. To what end I'm not sure. Attempts to interfere with the interview seem pointless at best, at least for the sake of interference itself. Probably some sort of psychological game or intimidation. A unit like TAO likely has encyclopedic manuals dedicated to the art of using their capability to mess with people's heads. On the bright side, it's at least comforting that we aren't seeing privacy activists being locked away due to planted evidence that appears forensically legit. State actors have the capability to do this if they want.

jlgaddis 11y ago
> ... it's at least comforting that we aren't seeing privacy activists being locked away due to planted evidence that appears forensically legit. Yet. As far as we know, anyways.
ptha 11y ago
She sleeps badly, plagued with nightmares about the American government. She reads Cory Doctorow’s Homeland and re-reads 1984, finding too many parallels with her own life., the psychological aspect is very troubling. A government state doesn't actually have to put you under constant surveillance, they just have to make you think you're under constant surveillance. The unintended consequence of the surveillance may have hardened her resolve to be a privacy advocate, but it certainly didn't do her mental health much good.
- Kristine1975 11y ago
  A government state doesn't actually have to put you under constant surveillance, they just have to make you think you're under constant surveillance. It's the old idea of the Panopticon as envisioned by Jeremy Bentham: Achieve compliance not by watching everybody all the time, but by creating a system where everybody could be watched at any time.

jlgaddis 11y ago

I pre-ordered her book on Amazon a few days ago and am anxiously looking forward to the day it arrives.

mynewtb 11y ago

I wish they would focus on releasing more documents instead of navel gazing...

privong 11y ago
> I wish they would focus on releasing more documents instead of navel gazing... Both are useful. In this case, it is providing an explicit, human narrative for the harm that surveillance can inflict. Many people respond more strongly to emotional anecdoes than to hard data (pretty much the reason why low-probability terrorist attacks are disproportionately feared over more common ways to die), so having a more emotional, anecdotal account of the actual effect of surveillance on people is also important.

vorg 11y ago

> the surveillance targeting Poitras had transformed her into a nervous wreck. [...] she describes feeling constantly watched, entirely robbed of privacy. “I haven’t written in over a year for fear these words are not private,” [...] She sleeps badly, plagued with nightmares Poitras and others being surveilled by people in the US and other governments represent an extreme point on a spectrum. Lower down the spectrum are many more people who each have one or more busybodies from government, academia, the media, business, entertainment/sports, or religion, etc after them for some reason/s. Those busybodies often discover and collude with each other. The resulting surveillance and interference against us is probably quite tame compared to what the US govt has done against Poitras, but intense enough that we can extrapolate to more easily appreciate what she's gone through.

webjames 11y ago

I'll preorder the book, interestingly it wont be available until May in the UK but Amazon will ship from the US. Can anyone recommend any other similar books in the meantime?

Umn44 11y ago
Shadow government http://www.amazon.com/Shadow-Government-Surveillance-Security-Single-Superpower/dp/1608463656/ http://www.amazon.com/Shadow-Government-Surveillance-Securit... No place to hide http://www.amazon.com/No-Place-Hide-Snowden-Surveillance/dp/1250062586/ http://www.amazon.com/No-Place-Hide-Snowden-Surveillance/dp/... Democracy Inc http://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Incorporated-Managed-Inverted-Totalitarianism/dp/069114589X/ http://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Incorporated-Managed-Inverte...
Umn44 11y ago
National security double goverment (?) http://www.amazon.com/National-Security-Government-Michael-Glennon/dp/0190206446 http://www.amazon.com/National-Security-Government-Michael-G...

dineshp2 11y ago

If you imagine yourself in the future(maybe 50 years in the future) and look back at the present and think about the present,specifically regarding privacy,mass surveillance,data collection,the state of the law and the power that the Government and corporations have over people's life, it seems totally ridiculous to me. This is a problem that can only be solved if the vast majority of the population gets involved and cares about the pressing issues in the world. One of the great side effects of the explosion of the internet is that it has created a potential medium for everyone to participate in the process of democracy and law making. With the awareness and the right tools to enable participation of the masses in every decision that the Government makes, we can limit the power that the Government and corporations have in the process of democracy and law making. And with participation of the common man,we can finally move towards a democracy in the true sense of the word.

arca_vorago 11y ago
Which is exactly why the totalitarian state has been kicked into high gear in response. Throughout history technological change that has enabled communication and the passing of information has been responded to by the oligarchy by taking control of and limited that media. Telegraph/gram, radio, telivision, the printing press and so on. Part of my theory is that it just took them a little while to understand exactly how dangerous the internet is to them, but now they have fully realized this it has almost forced the implimentation of the surveillance state so that later the cat can be walked back on dissidents. Its what William Binney and Thomas Drake call the "turn key totalitarian state". It may not be turned on yet, but the structure is being put in place. All it takes is a martial law enabling event and a potus willing to turn the key. Which is why I think everyones going to be amazed when Jeb gets the nom and steals the election.
- infinite8s 11y ago
  And the 2 degree climate change over the next 50 years is likely just the trigger needed to justify martial law (much of coastal Florida is expected to flood, the North East of the US will have the extremes of weather that we've just started experiencing, much of the farm belt is expected to undergo drought).

secfirstmd 11y ago

Excuse blatant Plug :) When we built Umbrella, we had in mind the example of Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras meeting Edwards Snowden. Initially Snowden tried to make contact but Greenwald found the process of digital security too cumbersome and awkward. Poitras however was more persistant. Also, when Greenwald and Poitras went to Hong Kong, they knew little or nothing about physical security. We wanted to change that and make it easier to have everything a journalist like Glenn Greenwald would need to do to meet a source in their pocket - everything from sending a secure email to meeting a source in a high risk location where they may be under surveillance from a regime which may threaten their vital work. So we launched an open source Android app called Umbrella - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.secfirst.umbrella https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.secfirst.u... https://github.com/securityfirst/Umbrella_android https://github.com/securityfirst/Umbrella_android It's still a long way from being perfect but hopefully will make the life of future Laura Poitras, just a little bit easier.

junto 11y ago
While I think your cause is noble, can you really trust Android, and even if you can trust Android, can you really trust the baseband firmware?
- secfirstmd 11y ago
  No. But as we all know, there is practically no firmware which can be trusted. I think the issue is always about measuring risk versus the threat level. Journalists that we train every day all over the world are always going to carry out high risk activities. The temptation is always to try to build a tool for the most extreme threat model and in the process, bypass the most common threats - leaving the average journalist with even less protection. Indeed, we increasingly find far much focus amongst our trainees on high level NSA Prism the stuff while little consideration of the basics - passwords, who has access to information in your own office, dealing with physical surveillance etc etc - all of which oir experience has taught us is far more common security hazard to journalists.
nickpsecurity 11y ago

junto 11y ago

With regards to the excerpt below and out of general interest (since I'm not a journalist, nor know any), what ethical responsibility should journalists have concerning intervention when reporting in wartime? He later told the Army investigators that he “strongly believed”—but without apparent evidence—“POITRAS had prior knowledge of the ambush and had the means to report it to U.S. Forces; however, she purposely did not report it so she could film the attack for her documentary.” Should they remain objective in such a hypothetical situation? Are there standard rules of guidance for journalists?

15thandwhatever 11y ago
http://keywiki.org/Laura_Poitras#Pre-knowledge_of_ambush.3F http://keywiki.org/Laura_Poitras#Pre-knowledge_of_ambush.3F
lawnchair_larry 11y ago
That one doesn't make sense to me unless all US reporters must also notify all locals that the US is planning a surprise attack. What gives them the impression that her duty is to preserve the life of one man (of an invading force, no less), but not another?

_jomo 11y ago

> it tells her its hard drive is full despite seeming to have 16 gigabytes free. If she has a lot of small files she might have run out of inodes [0] which will report "no space left on device" when trying to create a new file, although there's still space left. Inodes store a file's attributes. In ext4 they're limited to total disk space / 16Kb, so a lot of files <16kb will cause trouble. You can check inode usage via `df -i`. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inode https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inode