3 ms·

Maybe elaborate on what you mean? The single acronym in your reply doesn't actually expound a point of view.

eternalban 10y ago
NGO is very commonly understood to mean Non-Govermental Organizations. OP proposes that staying "off wires" is a remedy. Simple point made is that intelligence agencies have recourse to wide ranging sensory networks, including NGOs (whether complicit or simply surveilled.)
- SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
  Except that pointing out that an agency can, with investment, have limited, targeted active surveillance isn't really saying anything about what's effective from stopping that same agency from wide-scale, passive surveillance. NGOs (even in the case where you're having their help by carrying scanners around for you) aren't within orders of magnitude of the information collected by the average person carrying a cell-phone and tapping the network. You would have to install expensive and complex monitoring equipment over the entire city and install the backend to process it to get even close -- a capability that the US government doesn't have to do everywhere. Which is why they made use of already deployed networks in the first place. Stopping their passive surveillance strips them of 90% of their power, and NGOs (or other organizations) don't put even a tiny dent in that change. Which is why many of us were looking for a little more argument than what was given: it's not clear, at all, why either you or the original person thought that NGOs have anywhere near the penetration in to everyday life or surveillance capability that cellphones have.
  - dannypgh 10y ago
    NGOs aren't used by intelligence agencies as a means of boosting signal intelligence, they're used as a means of boosting human intelligence. NGOs tend to have overlapping members and social circles as grassroots organizations. They don't need to gather cell phone signal intelligence, they can just ask their staffers "what do you think of these protests?" Different threat vector entirely.
    - SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
      > Different threat vector entirely. My point was exactly that it's a different threat to have them have to collect human intelligence from NGOs rather than have every text message, phone call, email, etc from and up-to-the-minute location data on every person they're looking for intel on. I don't care if the CIA can call up every NGO on the globe and talk to 50 different people there to get 50,000 reports on the current civil unrest across the globe, collate them down in to usable intelligence, and present that to our leaders. That's literally their job. They should do that. Lots of that. All of it they can. (I would be shocked if the CIA didn't already heavily extract intelligence from NGOs.) It's just a completely different scale from being about to know where every person is minute-by-minute, and everything they say, text, email, read online, etc. forever, to be looked up and cross-referenced whenever you need. Particularly because the conversations with NGOs have to focus on targets of interest, while they can literally just watch every phone and digital transaction. All of them. All the time. So I'll be blunt: you guys are just wrong that them being able to get any kind of intelligence from NGOs, be it sigint or humint, that would make up for the firehose of digital exchanges being shut down or rendered useless.

NGO is very commonly understood to mean Non-Govermental Organizations. OP proposes that staying "off wires" is a remedy. Simple point made is that intelligence agencies have recourse to wide ranging sensory networks, including NGOs (whether complicit or simply surveilled.)

SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
Except that pointing out that an agency can, with investment, have limited, targeted active surveillance isn't really saying anything about what's effective from stopping that same agency from wide-scale, passive surveillance. NGOs (even in the case where you're having their help by carrying scanners around for you) aren't within orders of magnitude of the information collected by the average person carrying a cell-phone and tapping the network. You would have to install expensive and complex monitoring equipment over the entire city and install the backend to process it to get even close -- a capability that the US government doesn't have to do everywhere. Which is why they made use of already deployed networks in the first place. Stopping their passive surveillance strips them of 90% of their power, and NGOs (or other organizations) don't put even a tiny dent in that change. Which is why many of us were looking for a little more argument than what was given: it's not clear, at all, why either you or the original person thought that NGOs have anywhere near the penetration in to everyday life or surveillance capability that cellphones have.
- dannypgh 10y ago
  NGOs aren't used by intelligence agencies as a means of boosting signal intelligence, they're used as a means of boosting human intelligence. NGOs tend to have overlapping members and social circles as grassroots organizations. They don't need to gather cell phone signal intelligence, they can just ask their staffers "what do you think of these protests?" Different threat vector entirely.
  - SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
    > Different threat vector entirely. My point was exactly that it's a different threat to have them have to collect human intelligence from NGOs rather than have every text message, phone call, email, etc from and up-to-the-minute location data on every person they're looking for intel on. I don't care if the CIA can call up every NGO on the globe and talk to 50 different people there to get 50,000 reports on the current civil unrest across the globe, collate them down in to usable intelligence, and present that to our leaders. That's literally their job. They should do that. Lots of that. All of it they can. (I would be shocked if the CIA didn't already heavily extract intelligence from NGOs.) It's just a completely different scale from being about to know where every person is minute-by-minute, and everything they say, text, email, read online, etc. forever, to be looked up and cross-referenced whenever you need. Particularly because the conversations with NGOs have to focus on targets of interest, while they can literally just watch every phone and digital transaction. All of them. All the time. So I'll be blunt: you guys are just wrong that them being able to get any kind of intelligence from NGOs, be it sigint or humint, that would make up for the firehose of digital exchanges being shut down or rendered useless.