11 ms·

Snowden reveals GCHQ spy programme with link to Scottish police

245 points by ghosh 10y ago

rl3 10y ago
>... and more serious organised crime, were our security services not using the bulk surveillance data ... In the unlikely case these aren't pranks, they would almost certainly be GCHQ astroturfing accounts. Of course, the astroturfing itself is of so poor quality that they probably outsourced the job to either some apathetic social media/perception management firm, or clueless interns. I could easily see a social engagement platform that's primarily used to spam Disqus comment sections also having support for HN, just for the sake of ticking the box.
- hackenthorpe 10y ago
  Anyone who disagrees with you must either be joking or astroturfing? How impolite.
  - rl3 10y ago
    >Anyone who disagrees with you must either be joking or astroturfing? How impolite. More like anyone who creates two fresh accounts within minutes of each other, one replying to the other in agreement—is either astroturfing, or trying to make it appear as if they are. Personally, I think you're just a decent troll. If so, at least it was creative.
    - hackenthorpe 10y ago
      There was nothing trollish at all in my earlier comment - you just wish not to believe it.
      - rl3 10y ago
        >There was nothing trollish at all in my earlier comment - you just wish not to believe it. You're correct in that I do not wish to believe that astroturfing either directly or indirectly commissioned by GCHQ could be so incompetent. It sullies their good name. Granted, what you're doing would actually qualify as somewhat competent if the goal was to simply to derail meaningful discourse.
        hackenthorpe 10y ago
        All these accusations of trolling and astroturfing are completely off topic. If anyone is trying to derail the discussion here, it's you.
        086421357909764 10y ago
        it seems like a lot of people here are in a feedback loop, only upvoting / listening to what they think fits. Everyone's quick to believe they know it all, when in fact that is the very issue the arguments are about. I get why you used a throw away. I'm not against civil discussions, I just hate when people don't use logic and take all evidence with a grain of salt. I don't for a second doubt parts of the govt. are hiding valid evidence for the conversation any more than the media is lying to sell their narrative too. Bottom line is the media has the upperhand, they can make baseless claims and choose what to say knowing damn well that the Govt. can't refute it.
        rl3 10y ago
        There's nothing wrong with throwaway accounts or opposing views; both are perfectly welcome. What's problematic is when there's two throwaway accounts created at the same time, replying to one another in agreement, using the same writing style, and advancing same the narrative that's worded as if it's straight out of a public relations office. HN has seen at least one NSA employee and one American intelligence community member posting in the wake of Snowden, and both were overwhelmingly treated with respect by the community despite their views. I myself often express views here that are staunchly anti-Snowden in nature. The throwaway accounts you're defending received such hostility because they were perceived as being insincere due to their suspicious posting behavior. It was not due to their views or opinions.
  - ksrm 10y ago
    Come on though, you're not even trying. You created this account purely to post in this thread, at exactly the same time as did another account. Better luck next time.
- dang 10y ago
  We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11889046 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11889046 and marked it off-topic.
pjc50 10y ago
It would have been interesting if this had come out before the Indyref. What did happen to Willy McRae, anyway?
mwti 10y ago
Can’t we all just admit that Snowden is a limited hangout who’s sole purpose is to benefit the establishment and NSA? The forms of spying he discusses are trivial at best (backdoors in COTS technologies) without peep said about real advances in espionage. I want to hear about how TEMPEST-based projects are so good they can passively grab memory (and encryption keys) from miles away over the air, if that machine uses DDR memory buses. I don't care if the Scots are spying on me (after all I'm Scottish); I want to know who's spying on the spies in Scotland thereby allowing terrorists safe passage because they now the see holes in their security. Damn turtles.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- rl3 10y ago
  >Can’t we all just admit that Snowden is a limited hangout who’s sole purpose is to benefit the establishment and NSA? No, because that's absurd. A "limited hangout" is fundamentally a damage control measure. At the time Snowden went public, there wasn't any damage to control. Most of it had already been done many years prior with the 641A scandal. If you want to suggest that Snowden was an overarching plan to somehow influence public perception in the NSA's favor, then perhaps /r/conspiracy would be more receptive.
- eternalban 10y ago
  But Washington Post says he is for real. So does the Guardian. And he is telling us which programs to use and which crypto is or isn't broken.
  - buttcoin 10y ago
    I love that he went from being a network admin to the savior of the internet. At what point in his career did he have perfect visibility into every topic he's quoted on. He wasn't even a part of the groups he tried to out (TAO). My guess is he was genuine in his curiosity, something happened that frustrated him (maybe he was worried about being let go from yet another contracted position, maybe he was denied on his application to join the Remote Operations Team in TAO for the third time due to lack of technical acumen and personality conflicts.....). My guess is through Greenwald and Co, he was sold a narrative to drive him to collecting data they otherwise wouldn't have had (he himself was socially engineered). It's amazing how much money they've made off the leaks and yet that topic hasn't really come up at all. Everyone has a motive, many have multiple.
matthew_morgan 10y ago
So glad he blew the whistle on this one, on the internal security of an ally. Snowden is a traitor to the USA, and an enemy to its friends.
liquidise 10y ago
Metadata includes who a surveillance target is calling, emailing, what websites they visit, and, when location data is available, a person’s movements. That an impressive definition of "metadata". To the defenders of these efforts i continue to point to the common trend among these agencies: expansion. First the definition of terrorist expanded without merit. Then the application of spy tracking data expanded similarly. Now metadata, the comfy term these agencies have used to limit public outcry, is expanding as well. This is a frustrating time we live in. Far too few are taking the necessary steps to prevent this serial erosion of, what just some years ago, was common privacies and judicial rights.
- dasunbekannte 10y ago
  Let's say you tear down the FVEY agencies. Enemy nations can then go rampant. If we collect, then it's obvious they must as well and they have less laws than we do limiting what we can do. Having been on both sides, it is difficult to see the good they are doing, because they are shrouded in secrecy due to necessity.
  - pastProlog 10y ago
    The US did shut down its WWI-era spying in 1929. The (Republican!) Secretary State did so with the simple comment "Gentlemen do not read each other's mail". > Enemy nations can then go rampant The main enemy of the FVEY agencies has always been the population of the FVEY countries. This goes back a long time - in the era that US Republicans actually did believe in smaller government and Stimson was shutting down the Black Chamber, British intelligence was manufacturing the Zinoviev letter to bring down the Labour government in 1924. Peter Wright discussed more modern efforts by MI5 against the Labour party in Spycatcher, especially in the 1970s, and this has been discussed in other sources. Similar machinations were happening in the USA in the 1970s, with Nixon using ex-CIA operatives to, among other things, break in to the national Democratic campaign headquarters in order to rig the election his way. That's against the background of COINTELPRO, spying on blacks seeking their civil right to vote and such, or that part of the electorate that wanted to withdraw from a war in Vietnam that the top brass and chiefs were privately saying was a lost cause. FVEY intelligence also helped bring down Gough Whitlam's Australian Labour government in the 1970's, an American, Christopher Boyce went to jail for, among other things, revealing this news to the Russians. Insofar as enemy nations, England has had a litany of enemy nations in the 20th century - Indians who wanted independence, Argentinians who wanted the Malvinas returned, Irish who wanted English troops out of Ireland and on and on - think of John Cleese in the Meaning of Life waning on about efforts to "keep China British!" US intelligence caused Daoud Khan to turn his back on the Soviets who had helped propel him to power, and when the Russians backed another horse and their former friend was ousted, the US said the "enemy nation" of Saur Afghanistan with Soviet backing was "going rampant", so the US helped launched a mujahideen-led jihad against secularizing Afghanistan, financing and arming Osama bin Laden and other proto-Al Qaeda and Taliban forces. Then years later the US decided to plant military bases in Saudi Arabia, causing this Arab nationalist to send his fighters with planes into the Pentagon. Now we're told we need we need to work and be taxed to finance these FVEY agencies to protect us from these dangers which they themselves created. Whereas the real enemy they are fighting against is their own populations - as MacDonald, McGovern and Whitlam could all attest to.
Velox 10y ago
One of the more concerning matters on this is that the BBC, for some reason, are choosing not to report on this at all. Gone are the days when the BBC were the most trusted and reputable news source. http://www.bbc.com/news/scotland http://www.bbc.com/news/scotland
- duncanawoods 10y ago
  Meh. Its not clear to me this is news - its secondary reporting about an Intercept article that doesn't appear on the intercept front page nor on any other Scottish newspaper.
  - notahacker 10y ago
    And it's not even the main theme of the Intercept article, which focuses far more on the intelligence agencies collecting far more data than they actually had the capability to use and failing to read harvested emails of identified suspects. https://theintercept.com/2016/06/07/mi5-gchq-digint-surveillance-data-deluge/ https://theintercept.com/2016/06/07/mi5-gchq-digint-surveill...
- touristtam 10y ago
  I am not surprised at all. The BBC is the voice of the UK Government more or less.
- touristtam 10y ago
  I am not surprised at all. The BBC is the voice of the UK Government more or less.
tr1ck5t3r 10y ago
If you want to know why Snowden exists, consider what Zimbardo explains here. https://www.ted.com/talks/philip_zimbardo_on_the_psychology_of_evil?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/philip_zimbardo_on_the_psychology_... Snowden is a global pys ops designed to shape human behaviour on a global scale. Considering how many websites exist, just visiting a few websites regularly is enough to identify who you are. Its all in the patterns. If you cant stay off line, then at least stick with using the most popular devices, and only visit the most popular websites from public or work places in a futile attempt to blend in with the crowd. So the application of specialist knowledge like using the Linux distro Tails to supposedly cover your tracks using Tor is enough to highlight you when considering how many people know about the existence of Tails, how many in your area even if your ISP fudges your location, and the time of day regularly visiting your favourite websites, especially when considering how many are online compared to those doing other tasks like being at (shift) work, watching TV or simply out and about. You can soon whittle the numbers down to id the individual. You can even tell if someone is using a 32bit version of an OS which comes in 32bit and 64bit flavours because 32bit OS's always run faster as there are less addresses and pointers available in 32bit compared to 64bit. You can even work out the type of processor in the device by the speed some things occur online, when considering the instructions sets that exist in cpu's and those that have to be emulated by code. If you use a PC with UEFI bios, your bios is the backdoor into your system as its just a cut down posix system which allows remote access along with Intel Wake on Lan and everything they have developed like out of band support ie Intel AMT/vPro. FreeBSD as another example has some "bugs" which allow you to bypass any block rules you might setup in PF as one example. So you can forget using things like PFsense. Very few people in the world have found the hidden partition which exists in Windows 7 which is activated by a switch in your PC bios reporting everything you click and type back to Amazon cloud servers to cover the hackers aka spooks trails. Spooks have been spying since the earliest telephone exchanges existed which required calling the operator to be put through to someone. The operators were typically women and as we see today with MI5 recruiting women because women are the best liars/fakers as they dont have the physical attributes namely strength to otherwise get themselves out of a tricky situation http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2980933/The-s-Bond-Jane-Bond-MPs-call-female-spies-recruited-MUMSNET.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2980933/The-s-Bond-J... Even your medical records, your finance details, school reports are used to psychologically profile you automatically with big data, so coupled with your parents behaviours and their genes passed onto you, effectively your card will be marked as soon as you are born whether you like it or not! Theres your Minority Report pre-cog. Most people dont have a clue how big brother it is today, even encryption can be used against you if you trust a certificate authority to issue your certs considering how they have been hacked and no company has to admit they have been hacked to their users. Are you even competent enough to understand the code in your opensource distro to spot the bugs? If you trust the HW companies who built the components in your devices, more fool you. Govts and big business have been in cahoots well before WW2, although WW2 history shows how some big businesses played both sides. And if you believe the spooks dont break the law, think again. They will break into your property if they want to, if you are in the UK, they will even use your NHS treatments to dispose of you if need be. When you are the law, you can do what the fuck you like, even the supposed free press in the UK is actually licenced and you will find useful puppets who will do anything for money or status where ever you look, although blackmail is the most common tactic against individuals including journalists. Just look at whistleblowers and how they become ostracised. Manipulating people when you have the unlimited resources to print your own cash is very very easy, and the ultimate tool is money, which is why the Bankers were bailed out in 2008. Today AI's like Hey Google, Siri and others are always listening and recording with your personal reporting device aka your mobile phone. Is Google a manhatten project for the 21st century? Manhatten projects are always top secret.
tr1ck5t3r 10y ago
https://theintercept.com/2015/03/16/howthefbicreatedaterrorist/ https://theintercept.com/2015/03/16/howthefbicreatedaterrori... Until people stop supporting hierarchical power structures, ie voting for presidents, working for a company where there's a single boss at the top and so on, using only a limited number of sources to obtain your data (ie media) which fuels your bias making your knees jerk and the current implementation of the financial system, people will always distrust new faces in the neighbourhood, foreigners in "enemy" countries and so on. Its all too easy to give out just enough info to get people chasing after the wrong thing. Misdirection is one of the key elements of the spooks work in order to maintain secrecy. Trust is the key element here, how can trust something done in secret?
- 086421357909764 10y ago
  Then how can you trust the intercepts cherry picking of the documents trove snowden took? My argument is it's pretty ballsy to call people out about transparency knowing they can't argue and that there are likely contradictions or at least further details being omitted by hand selecting documents for dissemination. It's really the same issue on both sides. Neither are telling the whole story. I would argue your comment "Its all too easy to give out just enough info to get people chasing after the wrong thing." is a correct statement for both sides.
  - tr1ck5t3r 10y ago
    The Intercept is just making money, people will do what they can to make money, including murder sometimes as our armed forces demonstrate, as do other killers. Capitalism is the best control system which no one can buy. But I also believe Snowden is a false flag global psychological experiment to see if human behaviour can be shaped with the "leaked" knowledge from Snowden. If you watch this https://www.ted.com/talks/philip_zimbardo_on_the_psychology_of_evil?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/philip_zimbardo_on_the_psychology_... If you know you are being watched will you "behave" better? This is in effect what is going on, and the spooks already admit that some "suspects" have gone to ground since Snowden. The debate on whats right and wrong which forms our laws will still rage on though. Perhaps The Intercept is just a useful idiot including Snowden in the scheme of things. I saw a comment that said Snowden has never thanked Putin or Russia for giving him asylum, and apparently its very rare for Russia to give asylum. I agree about calling out those who cant speak out due to be being bound by secrecy, but this is the problem. Today us humans have created a society that could well come back to bite us due to technological advancements. Sometimes its not what is said that counts but the actions that ensue which matters more, or who benefits from the disclosure. In this case if you take spying/hacking, one of the things thats now going on is other countries like Russia and China are now concentrating on developing their own chips, HW, software and generally improving security at a country as well as a business & individual level. This helps the spooks in some ways as they no longer have to defend their own in the same way or with as much resource. Likewise this also promotes innovation after all, what will the Chinese or Russians or anyone else come up with in a bid to keep "foreign" hackers out of systems? Take religion, it was generally an effective method to control the uneducated by putting the fear of god into people. Could you or anyone else come up with anything better than religion all those hundreds of years ago? We had limited knowledge, limited tools, less communication which includes travel so as always intelligent people "mis"directed less informed/educated people. Its human nature to climb the monkey tree so to speak. Who doesnt want to be top dog? Some people learn from being dictated/taught and others learn from experience. So fast forward to today and we are still dealing with the ramifications of decisions think ISIS with their religous killings made by people hundreds of years ago still causing problems even though at the time it was thought to be the best solution, after all who could have imagined todays technology back then? Arguably we are now capable of playing god with what has been developed today. But at the same time we face new problems like a still increasing global population on a finite planet with limited resources. Ok the development of agrichemicals has helped increase farm yields so we can now feed more people today than ever before, and money also helps control people as you cant do much without x amount of money, but as we now go into a grand solar minimum, famine is the biggest issue we now potentially face right when this planets population is at its greatest. The population exploded with the discovery and development of oil. If we took fossil fuels out of the equation the global population would fall over night very rapidly and chaos would ensue. Who wants to put their kids through a dystopian future? So whilst there may be justifications for the actions of the spooks, their methods imo stink as it could be argued they including Govt have betrayed our trust. So Snowden has been useful for focusing our attentions using perhaps the best method to get us to stand on our own two feet with regard to computer security. Lets face it, due to Dunbars number most people only care about themselves, and upto about 150 other people. On a planet with 13billion people thats alot of people not giving a toss about alot of other people. Our own human nature could be our ultimate downfall unless we can be manipulated into what todays supposedly intelligent people deem fit for today and tomorrow, just like religion was useful for keeping the uneducated masses in check in ye olde times. Take WW2 that was in part due to limited resources, in fact studies into legumes in the 50's were to see if they could be used as a safe food source. Today the UN advocates eating insects in order to find another protein source on this overpopulated finite planet. Dont get me wrong, I have experienced some of the methods used by the spooks due to family which is another story, but I see both sides of the coin and whilst we all generally want a good happy fun filled life, we also have differences and consolidating those differences which could have been created due to the data (teachings, media et al) we have been exposed to over out lifetime which in turn fuels our biases and beliefs is what needs tackling. Likewise power corrupts, its a heady mix, much like testosterone or cocaine so the structures in place, the clandestine meetings of top knobs in business and govt like we see with the Bilderberg meetings and other soirees is largely driven by what people want. As a race and guardians of the planet we cant sit on our laurels, so we need to be manipulated, coerced or "mis"directed into the "right" directions and actions whatever they maybe in order to continue to survive the threats which we face today. At the same time, those at the top dont want to relinquish their privilege, beit inherited or worked and those at the bottom will always want to be at the top. So its complicated as always, but also interesting including pushing boundaries including playing devils advocate in whatever shape or form that might be. Sometimes all the brain storming in the world cant find a solution until put in that situation which dictates the need for a solution.

245 points by ghosh 10y ago

rl3 10y ago

>... and more serious organised crime, were our security services not using the bulk surveillance data ... In the unlikely case these aren't pranks, they would almost certainly be GCHQ astroturfing accounts. Of course, the astroturfing itself is of so poor quality that they probably outsourced the job to either some apathetic social media/perception management firm, or clueless interns. I could easily see a social engagement platform that's primarily used to spam Disqus comment sections also having support for HN, just for the sake of ticking the box.

hackenthorpe 10y ago
Anyone who disagrees with you must either be joking or astroturfing? How impolite.
- rl3 10y ago
  >Anyone who disagrees with you must either be joking or astroturfing? How impolite. More like anyone who creates two fresh accounts within minutes of each other, one replying to the other in agreement—is either astroturfing, or trying to make it appear as if they are. Personally, I think you're just a decent troll. If so, at least it was creative.
  - hackenthorpe 10y ago
    There was nothing trollish at all in my earlier comment - you just wish not to believe it.
    - rl3 10y ago
      >There was nothing trollish at all in my earlier comment - you just wish not to believe it. You're correct in that I do not wish to believe that astroturfing either directly or indirectly commissioned by GCHQ could be so incompetent. It sullies their good name. Granted, what you're doing would actually qualify as somewhat competent if the goal was to simply to derail meaningful discourse.
      - hackenthorpe 10y ago
        All these accusations of trolling and astroturfing are completely off topic. If anyone is trying to derail the discussion here, it's you.
        086421357909764 10y ago
        it seems like a lot of people here are in a feedback loop, only upvoting / listening to what they think fits. Everyone's quick to believe they know it all, when in fact that is the very issue the arguments are about. I get why you used a throw away. I'm not against civil discussions, I just hate when people don't use logic and take all evidence with a grain of salt. I don't for a second doubt parts of the govt. are hiding valid evidence for the conversation any more than the media is lying to sell their narrative too. Bottom line is the media has the upperhand, they can make baseless claims and choose what to say knowing damn well that the Govt. can't refute it.
        rl3 10y ago
        There's nothing wrong with throwaway accounts or opposing views; both are perfectly welcome. What's problematic is when there's two throwaway accounts created at the same time, replying to one another in agreement, using the same writing style, and advancing same the narrative that's worded as if it's straight out of a public relations office. HN has seen at least one NSA employee and one American intelligence community member posting in the wake of Snowden, and both were overwhelmingly treated with respect by the community despite their views. I myself often express views here that are staunchly anti-Snowden in nature. The throwaway accounts you're defending received such hostility because they were perceived as being insincere due to their suspicious posting behavior. It was not due to their views or opinions.
- ksrm 10y ago
  Come on though, you're not even trying. You created this account purely to post in this thread, at exactly the same time as did another account. Better luck next time.
dang 10y ago
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11889046 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11889046 and marked it off-topic.

pjc50 10y ago

It would have been interesting if this had come out before the Indyref. What did happen to Willy McRae, anyway?

mwti 10y ago

Can’t we all just admit that Snowden is a limited hangout who’s sole purpose is to benefit the establishment and NSA? The forms of spying he discusses are trivial at best (backdoors in COTS technologies) without peep said about real advances in espionage. I want to hear about how TEMPEST-based projects are so good they can passively grab memory (and encryption keys) from miles away over the air, if that machine uses DDR memory buses. I don't care if the Scots are spying on me (after all I'm Scottish); I want to know who's spying on the spies in Scotland thereby allowing terrorists safe passage because they now the see holes in their security. Damn turtles.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
rl3 10y ago
>Can’t we all just admit that Snowden is a limited hangout who’s sole purpose is to benefit the establishment and NSA? No, because that's absurd. A "limited hangout" is fundamentally a damage control measure. At the time Snowden went public, there wasn't any damage to control. Most of it had already been done many years prior with the 641A scandal. If you want to suggest that Snowden was an overarching plan to somehow influence public perception in the NSA's favor, then perhaps /r/conspiracy would be more receptive.
eternalban 10y ago
But Washington Post says he is for real. So does the Guardian. And he is telling us which programs to use and which crypto is or isn't broken.
- buttcoin 10y ago
  I love that he went from being a network admin to the savior of the internet. At what point in his career did he have perfect visibility into every topic he's quoted on. He wasn't even a part of the groups he tried to out (TAO). My guess is he was genuine in his curiosity, something happened that frustrated him (maybe he was worried about being let go from yet another contracted position, maybe he was denied on his application to join the Remote Operations Team in TAO for the third time due to lack of technical acumen and personality conflicts.....). My guess is through Greenwald and Co, he was sold a narrative to drive him to collecting data they otherwise wouldn't have had (he himself was socially engineered). It's amazing how much money they've made off the leaks and yet that topic hasn't really come up at all. Everyone has a motive, many have multiple.

matthew_morgan 10y ago

So glad he blew the whistle on this one, on the internal security of an ally. Snowden is a traitor to the USA, and an enemy to its friends.

liquidise 10y ago

Metadata includes who a surveillance target is calling, emailing, what websites they visit, and, when location data is available, a person’s movements. That an impressive definition of "metadata". To the defenders of these efforts i continue to point to the common trend among these agencies: expansion. First the definition of terrorist expanded without merit. Then the application of spy tracking data expanded similarly. Now metadata, the comfy term these agencies have used to limit public outcry, is expanding as well. This is a frustrating time we live in. Far too few are taking the necessary steps to prevent this serial erosion of, what just some years ago, was common privacies and judicial rights.

dasunbekannte 10y ago
Let's say you tear down the FVEY agencies. Enemy nations can then go rampant. If we collect, then it's obvious they must as well and they have less laws than we do limiting what we can do. Having been on both sides, it is difficult to see the good they are doing, because they are shrouded in secrecy due to necessity.
- pastProlog 10y ago
  The US did shut down its WWI-era spying in 1929. The (Republican!) Secretary State did so with the simple comment "Gentlemen do not read each other's mail". > Enemy nations can then go rampant The main enemy of the FVEY agencies has always been the population of the FVEY countries. This goes back a long time - in the era that US Republicans actually did believe in smaller government and Stimson was shutting down the Black Chamber, British intelligence was manufacturing the Zinoviev letter to bring down the Labour government in 1924. Peter Wright discussed more modern efforts by MI5 against the Labour party in Spycatcher, especially in the 1970s, and this has been discussed in other sources. Similar machinations were happening in the USA in the 1970s, with Nixon using ex-CIA operatives to, among other things, break in to the national Democratic campaign headquarters in order to rig the election his way. That's against the background of COINTELPRO, spying on blacks seeking their civil right to vote and such, or that part of the electorate that wanted to withdraw from a war in Vietnam that the top brass and chiefs were privately saying was a lost cause. FVEY intelligence also helped bring down Gough Whitlam's Australian Labour government in the 1970's, an American, Christopher Boyce went to jail for, among other things, revealing this news to the Russians. Insofar as enemy nations, England has had a litany of enemy nations in the 20th century - Indians who wanted independence, Argentinians who wanted the Malvinas returned, Irish who wanted English troops out of Ireland and on and on - think of John Cleese in the Meaning of Life waning on about efforts to "keep China British!" US intelligence caused Daoud Khan to turn his back on the Soviets who had helped propel him to power, and when the Russians backed another horse and their former friend was ousted, the US said the "enemy nation" of Saur Afghanistan with Soviet backing was "going rampant", so the US helped launched a mujahideen-led jihad against secularizing Afghanistan, financing and arming Osama bin Laden and other proto-Al Qaeda and Taliban forces. Then years later the US decided to plant military bases in Saudi Arabia, causing this Arab nationalist to send his fighters with planes into the Pentagon. Now we're told we need we need to work and be taxed to finance these FVEY agencies to protect us from these dangers which they themselves created. Whereas the real enemy they are fighting against is their own populations - as MacDonald, McGovern and Whitlam could all attest to.

Velox 10y ago

One of the more concerning matters on this is that the BBC, for some reason, are choosing not to report on this at all. Gone are the days when the BBC were the most trusted and reputable news source. http://www.bbc.com/news/scotland http://www.bbc.com/news/scotland

duncanawoods 10y ago
Meh. Its not clear to me this is news - its secondary reporting about an Intercept article that doesn't appear on the intercept front page nor on any other Scottish newspaper.
- notahacker 10y ago
  And it's not even the main theme of the Intercept article, which focuses far more on the intelligence agencies collecting far more data than they actually had the capability to use and failing to read harvested emails of identified suspects. https://theintercept.com/2016/06/07/mi5-gchq-digint-surveillance-data-deluge/ https://theintercept.com/2016/06/07/mi5-gchq-digint-surveill...
touristtam 10y ago
I am not surprised at all. The BBC is the voice of the UK Government more or less.
touristtam 10y ago
I am not surprised at all. The BBC is the voice of the UK Government more or less.

tr1ck5t3r 10y ago

If you want to know why Snowden exists, consider what Zimbardo explains here. https://www.ted.com/talks/philip_zimbardo_on_the_psychology_of_evil?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/philip_zimbardo_on_the_psychology_... Snowden is a global pys ops designed to shape human behaviour on a global scale. Considering how many websites exist, just visiting a few websites regularly is enough to identify who you are. Its all in the patterns. If you cant stay off line, then at least stick with using the most popular devices, and only visit the most popular websites from public or work places in a futile attempt to blend in with the crowd. So the application of specialist knowledge like using the Linux distro Tails to supposedly cover your tracks using Tor is enough to highlight you when considering how many people know about the existence of Tails, how many in your area even if your ISP fudges your location, and the time of day regularly visiting your favourite websites, especially when considering how many are online compared to those doing other tasks like being at (shift) work, watching TV or simply out and about. You can soon whittle the numbers down to id the individual. You can even tell if someone is using a 32bit version of an OS which comes in 32bit and 64bit flavours because 32bit OS's always run faster as there are less addresses and pointers available in 32bit compared to 64bit. You can even work out the type of processor in the device by the speed some things occur online, when considering the instructions sets that exist in cpu's and those that have to be emulated by code. If you use a PC with UEFI bios, your bios is the backdoor into your system as its just a cut down posix system which allows remote access along with Intel Wake on Lan and everything they have developed like out of band support ie Intel AMT/vPro. FreeBSD as another example has some "bugs" which allow you to bypass any block rules you might setup in PF as one example. So you can forget using things like PFsense. Very few people in the world have found the hidden partition which exists in Windows 7 which is activated by a switch in your PC bios reporting everything you click and type back to Amazon cloud servers to cover the hackers aka spooks trails. Spooks have been spying since the earliest telephone exchanges existed which required calling the operator to be put through to someone. The operators were typically women and as we see today with MI5 recruiting women because women are the best liars/fakers as they dont have the physical attributes namely strength to otherwise get themselves out of a tricky situation http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2980933/The-s-Bond-Jane-Bond-MPs-call-female-spies-recruited-MUMSNET.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2980933/The-s-Bond-J... Even your medical records, your finance details, school reports are used to psychologically profile you automatically with big data, so coupled with your parents behaviours and their genes passed onto you, effectively your card will be marked as soon as you are born whether you like it or not! Theres your Minority Report pre-cog. Most people dont have a clue how big brother it is today, even encryption can be used against you if you trust a certificate authority to issue your certs considering how they have been hacked and no company has to admit they have been hacked to their users. Are you even competent enough to understand the code in your opensource distro to spot the bugs? If you trust the HW companies who built the components in your devices, more fool you. Govts and big business have been in cahoots well before WW2, although WW2 history shows how some big businesses played both sides. And if you believe the spooks dont break the law, think again. They will break into your property if they want to, if you are in the UK, they will even use your NHS treatments to dispose of you if need be. When you are the law, you can do what the fuck you like, even the supposed free press in the UK is actually licenced and you will find useful puppets who will do anything for money or status where ever you look, although blackmail is the most common tactic against individuals including journalists. Just look at whistleblowers and how they become ostracised. Manipulating people when you have the unlimited resources to print your own cash is very very easy, and the ultimate tool is money, which is why the Bankers were bailed out in 2008. Today AI's like Hey Google, Siri and others are always listening and recording with your personal reporting device aka your mobile phone. Is Google a manhatten project for the 21st century? Manhatten projects are always top secret.

tr1ck5t3r 10y ago

https://theintercept.com/2015/03/16/howthefbicreatedaterrorist/ https://theintercept.com/2015/03/16/howthefbicreatedaterrori... Until people stop supporting hierarchical power structures, ie voting for presidents, working for a company where there's a single boss at the top and so on, using only a limited number of sources to obtain your data (ie media) which fuels your bias making your knees jerk and the current implementation of the financial system, people will always distrust new faces in the neighbourhood, foreigners in "enemy" countries and so on. Its all too easy to give out just enough info to get people chasing after the wrong thing. Misdirection is one of the key elements of the spooks work in order to maintain secrecy. Trust is the key element here, how can trust something done in secret?

086421357909764 10y ago
Then how can you trust the intercepts cherry picking of the documents trove snowden took? My argument is it's pretty ballsy to call people out about transparency knowing they can't argue and that there are likely contradictions or at least further details being omitted by hand selecting documents for dissemination. It's really the same issue on both sides. Neither are telling the whole story. I would argue your comment "Its all too easy to give out just enough info to get people chasing after the wrong thing." is a correct statement for both sides.
- tr1ck5t3r 10y ago
  The Intercept is just making money, people will do what they can to make money, including murder sometimes as our armed forces demonstrate, as do other killers. Capitalism is the best control system which no one can buy. But I also believe Snowden is a false flag global psychological experiment to see if human behaviour can be shaped with the "leaked" knowledge from Snowden. If you watch this https://www.ted.com/talks/philip_zimbardo_on_the_psychology_of_evil?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/philip_zimbardo_on_the_psychology_... If you know you are being watched will you "behave" better? This is in effect what is going on, and the spooks already admit that some "suspects" have gone to ground since Snowden. The debate on whats right and wrong which forms our laws will still rage on though. Perhaps The Intercept is just a useful idiot including Snowden in the scheme of things. I saw a comment that said Snowden has never thanked Putin or Russia for giving him asylum, and apparently its very rare for Russia to give asylum. I agree about calling out those who cant speak out due to be being bound by secrecy, but this is the problem. Today us humans have created a society that could well come back to bite us due to technological advancements. Sometimes its not what is said that counts but the actions that ensue which matters more, or who benefits from the disclosure. In this case if you take spying/hacking, one of the things thats now going on is other countries like Russia and China are now concentrating on developing their own chips, HW, software and generally improving security at a country as well as a business & individual level. This helps the spooks in some ways as they no longer have to defend their own in the same way or with as much resource. Likewise this also promotes innovation after all, what will the Chinese or Russians or anyone else come up with in a bid to keep "foreign" hackers out of systems? Take religion, it was generally an effective method to control the uneducated by putting the fear of god into people. Could you or anyone else come up with anything better than religion all those hundreds of years ago? We had limited knowledge, limited tools, less communication which includes travel so as always intelligent people "mis"directed less informed/educated people. Its human nature to climb the monkey tree so to speak. Who doesnt want to be top dog? Some people learn from being dictated/taught and others learn from experience. So fast forward to today and we are still dealing with the ramifications of decisions think ISIS with their religous killings made by people hundreds of years ago still causing problems even though at the time it was thought to be the best solution, after all who could have imagined todays technology back then? Arguably we are now capable of playing god with what has been developed today. But at the same time we face new problems like a still increasing global population on a finite planet with limited resources. Ok the development of agrichemicals has helped increase farm yields so we can now feed more people today than ever before, and money also helps control people as you cant do much without x amount of money, but as we now go into a grand solar minimum, famine is the biggest issue we now potentially face right when this planets population is at its greatest. The population exploded with the discovery and development of oil. If we took fossil fuels out of the equation the global population would fall over night very rapidly and chaos would ensue. Who wants to put their kids through a dystopian future? So whilst there may be justifications for the actions of the spooks, their methods imo stink as it could be argued they including Govt have betrayed our trust. So Snowden has been useful for focusing our attentions using perhaps the best method to get us to stand on our own two feet with regard to computer security. Lets face it, due to Dunbars number most people only care about themselves, and upto about 150 other people. On a planet with 13billion people thats alot of people not giving a toss about alot of other people. Our own human nature could be our ultimate downfall unless we can be manipulated into what todays supposedly intelligent people deem fit for today and tomorrow, just like religion was useful for keeping the uneducated masses in check in ye olde times. Take WW2 that was in part due to limited resources, in fact studies into legumes in the 50's were to see if they could be used as a safe food source. Today the UN advocates eating insects in order to find another protein source on this overpopulated finite planet. Dont get me wrong, I have experienced some of the methods used by the spooks due to family which is another story, but I see both sides of the coin and whilst we all generally want a good happy fun filled life, we also have differences and consolidating those differences which could have been created due to the data (teachings, media et al) we have been exposed to over out lifetime which in turn fuels our biases and beliefs is what needs tackling. Likewise power corrupts, its a heady mix, much like testosterone or cocaine so the structures in place, the clandestine meetings of top knobs in business and govt like we see with the Bilderberg meetings and other soirees is largely driven by what people want. As a race and guardians of the planet we cant sit on our laurels, so we need to be manipulated, coerced or "mis"directed into the "right" directions and actions whatever they maybe in order to continue to survive the threats which we face today. At the same time, those at the top dont want to relinquish their privilege, beit inherited or worked and those at the bottom will always want to be at the top. So its complicated as always, but also interesting including pushing boundaries including playing devils advocate in whatever shape or form that might be. Sometimes all the brain storming in the world cant find a solution until put in that situation which dictates the need for a solution.