12 ms·

South African authorities admit to mass surveillance

266 points by iafrikan 7y ago

chrisseaton 7y ago
> worrying is that the SSA has said that such surveillance and data collection is "common practice" globally I think if you believe that any major country is not intercepting all undersea fibre cable traffic within their reach or even beyond it then you’re being very naive. I can’t understand how this news would surprise anyone.
- phkahler 7y ago
  And if not for their own use, selling access to other players.
- pfundstein 7y ago
  It surprises me as a South African because I didn't know our government had the technical capability or capacity to store and process so much data, let alone splice undersea cables without detection.
  - LegitShady 7y ago
    if they don't have the expertise, someone else with the expertise interested in access to the data will help them.
    - nevi-me 7y ago
      Often at exorbitant cost in our case. The SSA is an unaccountable financial black hole. Our former president send to have also used them for his political gain, this Fraser chap is responsible for many misdeeds. Now parts of our country are literally burning, yet there's no crime intelligence about the very threats to the state that SSA should be monitoring for. There was an act of terror that was nearly committed 2 days ago, but we're seeing poor leadership from those involved.
      - executesorder66 7y ago
        > There was an act of terror that was nearly committed 2 days ago Please can you provide a link to more info on this?
        nroets 7y ago
        There are protests by truck drivers and some of these actions can be seen as terrorism. https://www.iol.co.za/dailynews/news/kwazulu-natal/two-trucks-set-alight-in-durban-as-cops-go-on-high-alert-ahead-of-expected-drivers-strike-31702530 https://www.iol.co.za/dailynews/news/kwazulu-natal/two-truck...
        executesorder66 7y ago
        I don't think that is what they were alluding to. They said: "an act of terror that was _nearly_ committed"
    - godelski 7y ago
      Hasn't China been doing this all over Africa and South America?
      - dragonelite 7y ago
        Not only China, there are more then enough western countries that export these technologies.
      - madlodlombe 7y ago
        Yup, in Africa China built and bugged (allegedly - China and the AU denied) the headquarters of the African Union in Addis Ababa: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/30/china-african-union-headquarters-bugging-spying https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/30/china-african-...
    - jldugger 7y ago
      It's surprising to me at least because South Africa has a GDP per capita of $~6.1k, and perhaps can't afford access to that expertise. Which I suppose suggests that they didn't pay for it, and another nation state 'helped out' via intermediaries.
      - toomanybeersies 7y ago
        GDP per capita isn't a great measurement for the capabilities of a state.
        jldugger 7y ago
        You're right, it's probably better to look at GDP overall, since that's basically the tax base theoretically.
      - pinkfoot 7y ago
        1. Its not uniformlly distributed. 2. China has GDP/person of ~$9,600 3. South Africa merrilly mines 4km below ground 4. Previous efforts included a nuclear weapons programme 5. Whole parts of Amazon's infa a built in CT Get out more.
        jldugger 7y ago
        Apologies, you seem to have taken this a bit more personally intended. All I was intending to suggest was that the SA gov budget would be somewhat constraining its ambitions, not that its people are technologically behind, or whatever else you seem to be implying here.
  - matharmin 7y ago
    I strongly doubt they spliced the cables. From the article it sounds like they got a court order (probably unconstitutional), allowing them to intercept the data. So they probably just needed to install a couple of big servers at the landing sites.
    - pinkfoot 7y ago
      You don't splice cables, you split the light with a prism and siphon of 10% of the light. All of it. Every telco has locked rooms full of kit for this job.
  - mad_tortoise 7y ago
    Fellow South African here, you'd be very surprised then with the capabilities of our spy agency. Very secretive by hugely funded. The former apartheid spies went on to consult for the current government, and they were all very highly trained. In fact one of the precursors to the mass surveillance tech made famous by Snowden, was actually developed at a firm in Stellenbosch in the late 90's to early 00's. That was then sold on to various other state intel agencies, of which SA got a cut of the profit. We've been developing very high level intelligence tools for years in private/public partnerships. It's all just highly secretive, and one of the areas that really does work, so it doesn't get any attention. Most of us, like yourself, just assume that because other areas here are awful, that our intel community must be to, but nothing could be further from the truth. Lastly don't forget JZ himself was Head of Intelligence, so he always held it in high regard, and gave it the funding it required.
    - madlodlombe 7y ago
      Not so secretive, in recent history VASTech (based in Stellenbosch's Technopark) were known to be supplying Gadaffi's Libya with telephone surveillance tech. [0] Didn't know about the precursor tech being developed in Stellenbosch as well, do you have any sources on that? I'd be interested to see who was involved. Agreed on the intel community generally being in a grey area as far as the law is concerned, it's a struggle enough keeping them impartial and not meddling in domestic affairs - talking about JZ being head of the ANC's intelligence in exile brings back memories of his ultimate succession of Thabo Mbeki and former spy chief Billy Masetlha's role in that. [0] https://mg.co.za/article/2011-09-02-sa-firm-helped-gaddafi-spy https://mg.co.za/article/2011-09-02-sa-firm-helped-gaddafi-s...
- reaperducer 7y ago
  I can imagine a sustainable business could be made operating a fleet of ships in international waters that pick up undersea cables, taps them, and uplinks the data in real time to whichever .gov subscribes to it. The company taking the risk gets a big fat government check every month, and the governments get to deny they're tapping anyone's data.
  - bigiain 7y ago
    Global Passive Surveillance as a Service... (BRB: making a pitch deck...)
  - toomanybeersies 7y ago
    That's great until another country declares you a hostile non-state actor and starts sinking your ships. It's not easy to tap submarine fibre optic cables. The US Navy has a Nuclear Sub dedicated to the task. You can't just pick them up and stick a tap in them.
  - IggleSniggle 7y ago
    The return of Privateers (independent naval vessels commissioned to engage in hostile acts against enemy states, often in murky legal territory, and often blamed for the rise of piracy (successful privateering companies, when war was over, would be primed to simply become pirates))
  - ctack 7y ago
    You can't export the data wholesale from your ship though - you'd need another cable for that :D So you'd need sift and process that data on the ship.
    - reaperducer 7y ago
      You can't export the data wholesale from your ship though - you'd need another cable for that :D The key word, though, was "uplink." Go straight to satellite, and let the intelligence agencies sift through what they want.
- wp381640 7y ago
  Someone makes this exact same comment every time there is a privacy story - not realising there is a very big gap between speculating on what a governments capability is and having it confirmed Sure - people in privacy circles may suspect this and sneer at the general public for thinking it is news, but it is a big deal to have it confirmed, to raise awareness of it and actually do something about it
  - Zarath 7y ago
    I think the Trump tweet from the other day confirms that this speculation is not at all unfounded. I think 20cm resolution from satellite images is even better than most people speculated.
    - feanaro 7y ago
      Which tweet?
      - antonvs 7y ago
        He tweeted a picture allegedly from a classified spy satellite: https://www.npr.org/2019/09/02/756673481/amateurs-identify-u-s-spy-satellite-behind-president-trumps-tweet https://www.npr.org/2019/09/02/756673481/amateurs-identify-u...
    - makomk 7y ago
      From what I can tell that image was pretty much in line with what everyone watching the US spy satellite program expected and wasn't hugely far off what's commercially available now. For instance, this was the first article I found when looking for information about the resolution of commercial satellite images (up to 30cm apparently), and it puts Keyhole spy satellites in the 7-10cm resolution ballpark: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/04/21/heres-why-the-resolution-of-satellite-images-never-seems-to-improve/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/04/21/h... The significance of that release was overblown because it helped support a narrative about Trump damaging national security that the media and people on social media liked. In reality it doesn't seem to have revealed anything about the US satellite imaging capabilities that wasn't already known.
- grecy 7y ago
  > I can’t understand how this news would surprise anyone I tried to tell my family about the Snowden leaks and the implications just a year ago. They are all university educated people. They categorically did not believe that what I was saying was real, and when I showed them all the leaks they did not believe the content was true. Billions of people simply don't believe it's true.
  - lern_too_spel 7y ago
    What did you think was in the leaks? In my experience, when people say their parents or friends didn't believe what they said was in the leaks, the parents and friends were usually right.
    - arthurcolle 7y ago
      What does this comment even mean?
      - lern_too_spel 7y ago
        It means that people think the leaks say what Greenwald claimed they said instead of what they actually said, and when those people tell their parents what Greenwald said, they sound like lunatics. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20456352 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20456352
        coldtea 7y ago
        A, the BS "there's an added hop so it's not happening/serious" defense. People still fall for this?
        lern_too_spel 7y ago
        The added hop means that the NSA can't request anything they want from the Internet messaging companies. They can only see foreigner data from the specific users the FBI has already wiretapped via court order. There are no leaked documents that say otherwise and plenty of documents that corroborate my assertions. This is why it hasn't been ruled illegal. Do people actually believe that phone metadata collection is illegal but the crazy thing Greenwald misread PRISM to be is not? That's going to trip grecy's university-educated family's bullshit detector.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- raxxorrax 7y ago
  Knowing it to be true is the most important step if you actually plan to hold your representatives accountable. People are not surprised, they are angry at people responsible. And rightly so in my opinion.
api 7y ago
Assume all Internet connections are party lines and just encrypt all the things.
- beardog 7y ago
  That helps a lot, but metadata is very useful and is equally or perhaps harder to hide.
- darpa_escapee 7y ago
  Also, assume that states have access to root certificates.
  - api 7y ago
    No clue why this is downvoted. I would assume that at least for G7 and orher "first world" nation states.
option 7y ago
I’m no big fan of recent Google, but huge thank you to them for driving a push towards https by default
- quickthrower2 7y ago
  Thanks to Let's Encrypt too for making it easier and cheap to SSL your site. I now see "http://" http://" and think "that looks dirty, what's their excuse?".
  - cameronbrown 7y ago
    HTTPS has downsides too, let's not kid ourselves.
    - quickthrower2 7y ago
      What is the downside of using https over http?
      - luizfelberti 7y ago
        Nobody said the downsides were over HTTP. When talking about state sponsored espionage, the glaring downside of HTTPS is PKI and buying into the CA model.
      - cameronbrown 7y ago
        Other than what the sibling posted, which is true, there's an extra round trip for the TLS handshake, which makes a real difference when you're on a horrible 3G connection in a poor country (thankfully HTTP 2.0 fixes a lot of this, but again - complexity). Infra will catch up hopefully but it is a pain point for those who are less well off.
sofaofthedamned 7y ago
Wasn't it 6 years ago when Snowden made public his revelations and Google said 'nope' and encrypted the lot? Who now sends traffic over these links and doesn't encrypt them? So, what value do the SA government have in intercepting these links now?
- mindslight 7y ago
  It took well over a decade for this acceptance to go from "conspiracy theory" to common sense in the tech community, and patches of cognitive dissonance still remain. What makes you think that opsec has adjusted so quickly, especially with nowhere straightforward to go? Consider that metadata-spewing HTTPS still passes for security.
- somebodythere 7y ago
  * Many applications still aren't encrypted by default, like IRC. * If you have compromised a private key, you can get useful data from the cable intercept. * If you can collect ciphertext today, and decrypt it tomorrow (with, say, quantum computers), the cable intercept is very useful.
  - esmi 7y ago
    IRC sure, but the big win is email.
    - SXX 7y ago
      Majority of email traffic is by now for sure use s2s encrypted. Also considering how big major players are most of mail never leave Google / Microsoft / etc servers anyway and connections between them always only ever go over TLS.
      - schoen 7y ago
        You can get some statistics from Google at https://transparencyreport.google.com/safer-email/overview https://transparencyreport.google.com/safer-email/overview They're a lot better than I thought! (over 90% in each direction, although no data here about certificate verification and the presence or absence of backbone downgrade attacks) If you run your own mail service, check out my colleague's project at https://starttls-everywhere.org/ https://starttls-everywhere.org/
mschuster91 7y ago
The German BND snoops traffic at DECIX. UK snoops on transatlantic cables. Everyone snoops. Either we move to full e2e encryption or we organize democratically to tear down the modern Stasi.
- mindslight 7y ago
  Why not both? The possibility of wiretapping will always exist, even if not carried out wholesale by the government itself. And so will commercial services touting convenience in exchange for being MITMed.
- freeflight 7y ago
  > The German BND snoops traffic at DECIX. To forward a lot of it to the NSA [0], the same NSA that also messed with Germanys G10 laws to "legalize" these kinds of practices in the very first place [1] for exactly that reason. edit: UK is pretty much also NSA, because unlike the German BND they are at least part of FiveEyes [2] because real global surveillance is a rather exclusive club. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Eikonal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Eikonal [1] http://www.europarl.europa.eu/document/activities/cont/201403/20140307ATT80674/20140307ATT80674EN.pdf http://www.europarl.europa.eu/document/activities/cont/20140... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes
- toomanybeersies 7y ago
  If it's not state-run intelligence agencies, it's private actors (whether legally or not). Everyone's snooping, and we have to act accordingly in how we communicate.
- turk73 7y ago
  We won't, not until the next stage happens where all money is electronic and if they don't like you they turn off your ability to spend that money. Then maybe enough hungry people will wake up to the nightmare.
- derpherpsson 7y ago
  Full end-to-end encryption, with occasional onion routing, is maybe the best path ahead. The benefit is that it does not require any argumentation with other people, noone needs to be convinced or won over, and that it makes sense. It costs nearly nothing to deploy cryptographic solutions.
natal590 7y ago
How is this news, this was well known over 5 years ago
buyx 7y ago
If there’s any comfort to be had, South Africa’s intelligence agencies are a shambles, and unable to deal with real-life threats right under their noses. The idea that they’d be able to do anything actionable with bulk—collected electronic intel is laughable. The way things are going, wouldn’t be surprising if whole thing is a corrupt scheme linked to procurement of storage media.
- rcthompson 7y ago
  You mean other than leak (or sell) that intel to someone who can do something with it?
- bonyt 7y ago
  Is that comforting? It just leaves all the risks associated with an invasion of privacy with none of the claimed security upsides. Just because they can’t use it competently doesn’t mean they can’t abuse it.
  - turk73 7y ago
    The NSA is the same way. Just because they can hoover up all that data doesn't mean they can do much with it. I wrote an article about this issue years ago. The false positive rate looking for terrorists must be horrifying--like millions of false positives for every real positive. Utterly worthless. Then they changed the mission to identifying all kinds of criminal acts and passed the intel along to the FBI and other police agencies, who then lie about how they found out about the perpetrators and develop a "parallel construction" in order not to expose the intelligence collection apparatus. Unfortunately, parallel construction is illegal. This is the America we live in. I am patiently waiting for any justice to be visited in the right places. I will wait forever.
- vageli 7y ago
  > If there’s any comfort to be had, South Africa’s intelligence agencies are a shambles, and unable to deal with real-life threats right under their noses. The idea that they’d be able to do anything actionable with bulk—collected electronic intel is laughable. > The way things are going, wouldn’t be surprising if whole thing is a corrupt scheme linked to procurement of storage media. If anything, this is _more_ alarming because they are probably not securing the data they intercept all too well.
randomdrake 7y ago
Can’t believe it’s been over ten years. 2008 was when there were numerous undersea cable disruptions[1]. I wrote about them when it happened from the best sources I could find at the time[2]. It isn’t surprising to see that surveillance may have occurred as a result. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_submarine_cable_disruption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_submarine_cable_disruptio... [2] - https://randomdrake.com/2008/02/12/the-submarine-cables-a-complete-guide-to-the-2008-internet-outage/ https://randomdrake.com/2008/02/12/the-submarine-cables-a-co...
Apocryphon 7y ago
Wonder if they have any partnerships with the Five Eyes?
- jonnybgood 7y ago
  Given South Africa is a member of BRICS, it's not likely. > In addition to commercial motivations, the new fiber optic Silk Road could also have geopolitical and strategic implications. Russia and China evidently share a desire to shield themselves from U.S. and other Western intelligence agencies and probably believe that their own communications – both with one another and to and from Europe – will be better protected if cables run across their own territory rather than through the Indian Ocean or the U.S. The same motivation explains the announced Telebras cable, which will connect Brazil to Portugal without any U.S. technology, and the BRICS cable project, which will link Vladivostok to Brazil, via China, India and South Africa. https://thediplomat.com/2015/04/a-fiber-optic-silk-road/ https://thediplomat.com/2015/04/a-fiber-optic-silk-road/
scarejunba 7y ago
As if the South Africans can decrypt anything. They can enjoy receiving non-SSL traffic. They're not going to get my shit.
- Synaesthesia 7y ago
  Well they can still get all our social media posts and whatever is unencrypted and run that through their algorithms, which I don’t like. It’s also just telling how paranoid governments are about their own citizens, they are the enemy as far as they are concerned!
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
notinpersia 7y ago
If traffic is encrypted E2E or OE it should not be a problem that someone eavesdrop on traffic. Here is one to make public key crypto practical using AI+Human derived mnemonics: Btw, Jack Dorsey’s Twitter account was hacked recently, which is another interesting story. https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1f2k6fsIkDmIS1WyJAT0lXQmDuHIPeo9GDKfP1FY2rVc https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1f2k6fsIkDmIS1WyJAT0l...
blitmap 7y ago
It's worrying that developing countries can buy off-the-shelf solutions to surveil its citizens without going through the decades of cultural and social change other countries have. We asked questions like "Is this ethical?" before the technology became possible. For them, the tech is here and the social discussions were never started. Maybe this is the same thing. We haven't upheld our ideals on privacy anyway.
- raxxorrax 7y ago
  I see few uses in asking if it is ethical, doing it anyway and putting dissidents in prison, which also happened.
hairytrog 7y ago
While interception is common and probably ubiquitous, I think we overestimate the governments' ability and wherewithal to use all this data. At the end of the day, only the worst hackers work for government.
madiathomas 7y ago
Surveillance is nothing new in South Africa. It is not even a secret. We have a regulation with a name that fully disclose that your communications can be intercepted. It is called RICA, which is short for Regulation of Interception of Communications and Provision of Communication-Related Information Act 70 of 2002 [1]. When you buy a new SIM card, you have to register it using your identification document and proof of residence. Every legally obtained SIM card is accountable. That way they wil know they are intercepting communication of the right person. [1] http://www.justice.gov.za/legislation/acts/2002-070.pdf http://www.justice.gov.za/legislation/acts/2002-070.pdf
- mikorym 7y ago
  > legally obtained As an aside, you and I both know how easy it is to get an activated sim card... But I agree with you comment; this article is not really "news".
mikorym 7y ago
> it also covers information about organised crime Let's just pause a bit here. In South Africa, if your phone gets stolen and you go to the police, they may well respond with: "Yes we know the guy, but we're not going to do anything." [1] I think that surveillance doesn't have the same twang in South Africa that it has in the US and EU. Organised crime and unorganised violent crime for that matter in one thing that a lot of South Africans would like to see better monitored or "surveilled" if you will. South Africa has this sort of dichotomy between illiteracy and high level tech that I think many people outside of Africa are not aware of. There is 60% youth unemployment [2] and at the same time it's the most developed African country. I heard a story that some of the surveillance tech that Muammar Gaddafi used was built by a company in Stellenbosch. Most middle class people will have some form of armed response and cities especially are pro-surveillance for crime prevention, many of it by 3rd party security companies. I think that there is some kind of common sense notion of how to differentiate between security and privacy that the CIA or NSA could only dream of. Security means not being robbed; privacy means leave my life out of yours. As mentioned in some of the comments, surveillance is not new at all in South Africa and in fact is much less than under the previous, non-democratic government. But to summarise, South Africa is from a "freedom" point of view a really great country. You can pretty much do things and live the way you want. The level of crime and incompetency of the police is, however, too much to live with for some people.
- maxheadroom 7y ago
  You seem to have meant to put citations in (e.g.: [1], [2]) but forgot to include them. :(
  - throwawayza 7y ago
    [1] Personal story from a fellow colleague from Botswana. [2] http://www.statssa.gov.za/?p=11129 http://www.statssa.gov.za/?p=11129
    - Vinnl 7y ago
      Heads up: Either you're a different person, or your throwaway account is now linked to your other one.
pigeon888 7y ago
Not helping the security of the country very much. SA has one of the highest murder rates in the world.
iafrikan 7y ago
More details on South Africa's bulk interception of undersea fibre cables - https://www.iafrikan.com/2019/09/03/murray-hunter-digital-rights-surveillance-south-africa-spying/ https://www.iafrikan.com/2019/09/03/murray-hunter-digital-ri...

266 points by iafrikan 7y ago

> worrying is that the SSA has said that such surveillance and data collection is "common practice" globally I think if you believe that any major country is not intercepting all undersea fibre cable traffic within their reach or even beyond it then you’re being very naive. I can’t understand how this news would surprise anyone.

phkahler 7y ago
And if not for their own use, selling access to other players.
pfundstein 7y ago
It surprises me as a South African because I didn't know our government had the technical capability or capacity to store and process so much data, let alone splice undersea cables without detection.
- LegitShady 7y ago
  if they don't have the expertise, someone else with the expertise interested in access to the data will help them.
  - nevi-me 7y ago
    Often at exorbitant cost in our case. The SSA is an unaccountable financial black hole. Our former president send to have also used them for his political gain, this Fraser chap is responsible for many misdeeds. Now parts of our country are literally burning, yet there's no crime intelligence about the very threats to the state that SSA should be monitoring for. There was an act of terror that was nearly committed 2 days ago, but we're seeing poor leadership from those involved.
    - executesorder66 7y ago
      > There was an act of terror that was nearly committed 2 days ago Please can you provide a link to more info on this?
      - nroets 7y ago
        There are protests by truck drivers and some of these actions can be seen as terrorism. https://www.iol.co.za/dailynews/news/kwazulu-natal/two-trucks-set-alight-in-durban-as-cops-go-on-high-alert-ahead-of-expected-drivers-strike-31702530 https://www.iol.co.za/dailynews/news/kwazulu-natal/two-truck...
        executesorder66 7y ago
        I don't think that is what they were alluding to. They said: "an act of terror that was _nearly_ committed"
  - godelski 7y ago
    Hasn't China been doing this all over Africa and South America?
    - dragonelite 7y ago
      Not only China, there are more then enough western countries that export these technologies.
    - madlodlombe 7y ago
      Yup, in Africa China built and bugged (allegedly - China and the AU denied) the headquarters of the African Union in Addis Ababa: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/30/china-african-union-headquarters-bugging-spying https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/30/china-african-...
  - jldugger 7y ago
    It's surprising to me at least because South Africa has a GDP per capita of $~6.1k, and perhaps can't afford access to that expertise. Which I suppose suggests that they didn't pay for it, and another nation state 'helped out' via intermediaries.
    - toomanybeersies 7y ago
      GDP per capita isn't a great measurement for the capabilities of a state.
      - jldugger 7y ago
        You're right, it's probably better to look at GDP overall, since that's basically the tax base theoretically.
    - pinkfoot 7y ago
      1. Its not uniformlly distributed. 2. China has GDP/person of ~$9,600 3. South Africa merrilly mines 4km below ground 4. Previous efforts included a nuclear weapons programme 5. Whole parts of Amazon's infa a built in CT Get out more.
      - jldugger 7y ago
        Apologies, you seem to have taken this a bit more personally intended. All I was intending to suggest was that the SA gov budget would be somewhat constraining its ambitions, not that its people are technologically behind, or whatever else you seem to be implying here.
- matharmin 7y ago
  I strongly doubt they spliced the cables. From the article it sounds like they got a court order (probably unconstitutional), allowing them to intercept the data. So they probably just needed to install a couple of big servers at the landing sites.
  - pinkfoot 7y ago
    You don't splice cables, you split the light with a prism and siphon of 10% of the light. All of it. Every telco has locked rooms full of kit for this job.
- mad_tortoise 7y ago
  Fellow South African here, you'd be very surprised then with the capabilities of our spy agency. Very secretive by hugely funded. The former apartheid spies went on to consult for the current government, and they were all very highly trained. In fact one of the precursors to the mass surveillance tech made famous by Snowden, was actually developed at a firm in Stellenbosch in the late 90's to early 00's. That was then sold on to various other state intel agencies, of which SA got a cut of the profit. We've been developing very high level intelligence tools for years in private/public partnerships. It's all just highly secretive, and one of the areas that really does work, so it doesn't get any attention. Most of us, like yourself, just assume that because other areas here are awful, that our intel community must be to, but nothing could be further from the truth. Lastly don't forget JZ himself was Head of Intelligence, so he always held it in high regard, and gave it the funding it required.
  - madlodlombe 7y ago
    Not so secretive, in recent history VASTech (based in Stellenbosch's Technopark) were known to be supplying Gadaffi's Libya with telephone surveillance tech. [0] Didn't know about the precursor tech being developed in Stellenbosch as well, do you have any sources on that? I'd be interested to see who was involved. Agreed on the intel community generally being in a grey area as far as the law is concerned, it's a struggle enough keeping them impartial and not meddling in domestic affairs - talking about JZ being head of the ANC's intelligence in exile brings back memories of his ultimate succession of Thabo Mbeki and former spy chief Billy Masetlha's role in that. [0] https://mg.co.za/article/2011-09-02-sa-firm-helped-gaddafi-spy https://mg.co.za/article/2011-09-02-sa-firm-helped-gaddafi-s...
reaperducer 7y ago
I can imagine a sustainable business could be made operating a fleet of ships in international waters that pick up undersea cables, taps them, and uplinks the data in real time to whichever .gov subscribes to it. The company taking the risk gets a big fat government check every month, and the governments get to deny they're tapping anyone's data.
- bigiain 7y ago
  Global Passive Surveillance as a Service... (BRB: making a pitch deck...)
- toomanybeersies 7y ago
  That's great until another country declares you a hostile non-state actor and starts sinking your ships. It's not easy to tap submarine fibre optic cables. The US Navy has a Nuclear Sub dedicated to the task. You can't just pick them up and stick a tap in them.
- IggleSniggle 7y ago
  The return of Privateers (independent naval vessels commissioned to engage in hostile acts against enemy states, often in murky legal territory, and often blamed for the rise of piracy (successful privateering companies, when war was over, would be primed to simply become pirates))
- ctack 7y ago
  You can't export the data wholesale from your ship though - you'd need another cable for that :D So you'd need sift and process that data on the ship.
  - reaperducer 7y ago
    You can't export the data wholesale from your ship though - you'd need another cable for that :D The key word, though, was "uplink." Go straight to satellite, and let the intelligence agencies sift through what they want.
wp381640 7y ago
Someone makes this exact same comment every time there is a privacy story - not realising there is a very big gap between speculating on what a governments capability is and having it confirmed Sure - people in privacy circles may suspect this and sneer at the general public for thinking it is news, but it is a big deal to have it confirmed, to raise awareness of it and actually do something about it
- Zarath 7y ago
  I think the Trump tweet from the other day confirms that this speculation is not at all unfounded. I think 20cm resolution from satellite images is even better than most people speculated.
  - feanaro 7y ago
    Which tweet?
    - antonvs 7y ago
      He tweeted a picture allegedly from a classified spy satellite: https://www.npr.org/2019/09/02/756673481/amateurs-identify-u-s-spy-satellite-behind-president-trumps-tweet https://www.npr.org/2019/09/02/756673481/amateurs-identify-u...
  - makomk 7y ago
    From what I can tell that image was pretty much in line with what everyone watching the US spy satellite program expected and wasn't hugely far off what's commercially available now. For instance, this was the first article I found when looking for information about the resolution of commercial satellite images (up to 30cm apparently), and it puts Keyhole spy satellites in the 7-10cm resolution ballpark: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/04/21/heres-why-the-resolution-of-satellite-images-never-seems-to-improve/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/04/21/h... The significance of that release was overblown because it helped support a narrative about Trump damaging national security that the media and people on social media liked. In reality it doesn't seem to have revealed anything about the US satellite imaging capabilities that wasn't already known.
grecy 7y ago
> I can’t understand how this news would surprise anyone I tried to tell my family about the Snowden leaks and the implications just a year ago. They are all university educated people. They categorically did not believe that what I was saying was real, and when I showed them all the leaks they did not believe the content was true. Billions of people simply don't believe it's true.
- lern_too_spel 7y ago
  What did you think was in the leaks? In my experience, when people say their parents or friends didn't believe what they said was in the leaks, the parents and friends were usually right.
  - arthurcolle 7y ago
    What does this comment even mean?
    - lern_too_spel 7y ago
      It means that people think the leaks say what Greenwald claimed they said instead of what they actually said, and when those people tell their parents what Greenwald said, they sound like lunatics. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20456352 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20456352
      - coldtea 7y ago
        A, the BS "there's an added hop so it's not happening/serious" defense. People still fall for this?
        lern_too_spel 7y ago
        The added hop means that the NSA can't request anything they want from the Internet messaging companies. They can only see foreigner data from the specific users the FBI has already wiretapped via court order. There are no leaked documents that say otherwise and plenty of documents that corroborate my assertions. This is why it hasn't been ruled illegal. Do people actually believe that phone metadata collection is illegal but the crazy thing Greenwald misread PRISM to be is not? That's going to trip grecy's university-educated family's bullshit detector.
deleted 7y ago
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raxxorrax 7y ago
Knowing it to be true is the most important step if you actually plan to hold your representatives accountable. People are not surprised, they are angry at people responsible. And rightly so in my opinion.

api 7y ago

Assume all Internet connections are party lines and just encrypt all the things.

beardog 7y ago
That helps a lot, but metadata is very useful and is equally or perhaps harder to hide.
darpa_escapee 7y ago
Also, assume that states have access to root certificates.
- api 7y ago
  No clue why this is downvoted. I would assume that at least for G7 and orher "first world" nation states.

option 7y ago

I’m no big fan of recent Google, but huge thank you to them for driving a push towards https by default

quickthrower2 7y ago
Thanks to Let's Encrypt too for making it easier and cheap to SSL your site. I now see "http://" http://" and think "that looks dirty, what's their excuse?".
- cameronbrown 7y ago
  HTTPS has downsides too, let's not kid ourselves.
  - quickthrower2 7y ago
    What is the downside of using https over http?
    - luizfelberti 7y ago
      Nobody said the downsides were over HTTP. When talking about state sponsored espionage, the glaring downside of HTTPS is PKI and buying into the CA model.
    - cameronbrown 7y ago
      Other than what the sibling posted, which is true, there's an extra round trip for the TLS handshake, which makes a real difference when you're on a horrible 3G connection in a poor country (thankfully HTTP 2.0 fixes a lot of this, but again - complexity). Infra will catch up hopefully but it is a pain point for those who are less well off.

sofaofthedamned 7y ago

Wasn't it 6 years ago when Snowden made public his revelations and Google said 'nope' and encrypted the lot? Who now sends traffic over these links and doesn't encrypt them? So, what value do the SA government have in intercepting these links now?

mindslight 7y ago
It took well over a decade for this acceptance to go from "conspiracy theory" to common sense in the tech community, and patches of cognitive dissonance still remain. What makes you think that opsec has adjusted so quickly, especially with nowhere straightforward to go? Consider that metadata-spewing HTTPS still passes for security.
somebodythere 7y ago
* Many applications still aren't encrypted by default, like IRC. * If you have compromised a private key, you can get useful data from the cable intercept. * If you can collect ciphertext today, and decrypt it tomorrow (with, say, quantum computers), the cable intercept is very useful.
- esmi 7y ago
  IRC sure, but the big win is email.
  - SXX 7y ago
    Majority of email traffic is by now for sure use s2s encrypted. Also considering how big major players are most of mail never leave Google / Microsoft / etc servers anyway and connections between them always only ever go over TLS.
    - schoen 7y ago
      You can get some statistics from Google at https://transparencyreport.google.com/safer-email/overview https://transparencyreport.google.com/safer-email/overview They're a lot better than I thought! (over 90% in each direction, although no data here about certificate verification and the presence or absence of backbone downgrade attacks) If you run your own mail service, check out my colleague's project at https://starttls-everywhere.org/ https://starttls-everywhere.org/

mschuster91 7y ago

The German BND snoops traffic at DECIX. UK snoops on transatlantic cables. Everyone snoops. Either we move to full e2e encryption or we organize democratically to tear down the modern Stasi.

mindslight 7y ago
Why not both? The possibility of wiretapping will always exist, even if not carried out wholesale by the government itself. And so will commercial services touting convenience in exchange for being MITMed.
freeflight 7y ago
> The German BND snoops traffic at DECIX. To forward a lot of it to the NSA [0], the same NSA that also messed with Germanys G10 laws to "legalize" these kinds of practices in the very first place [1] for exactly that reason. edit: UK is pretty much also NSA, because unlike the German BND they are at least part of FiveEyes [2] because real global surveillance is a rather exclusive club. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Eikonal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Eikonal [1] http://www.europarl.europa.eu/document/activities/cont/201403/20140307ATT80674/20140307ATT80674EN.pdf http://www.europarl.europa.eu/document/activities/cont/20140... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes
toomanybeersies 7y ago
If it's not state-run intelligence agencies, it's private actors (whether legally or not). Everyone's snooping, and we have to act accordingly in how we communicate.
turk73 7y ago
We won't, not until the next stage happens where all money is electronic and if they don't like you they turn off your ability to spend that money. Then maybe enough hungry people will wake up to the nightmare.
derpherpsson 7y ago
Full end-to-end encryption, with occasional onion routing, is maybe the best path ahead. The benefit is that it does not require any argumentation with other people, noone needs to be convinced or won over, and that it makes sense. It costs nearly nothing to deploy cryptographic solutions.

natal590 7y ago

How is this news, this was well known over 5 years ago

buyx 7y ago

If there’s any comfort to be had, South Africa’s intelligence agencies are a shambles, and unable to deal with real-life threats right under their noses. The idea that they’d be able to do anything actionable with bulk—collected electronic intel is laughable. The way things are going, wouldn’t be surprising if whole thing is a corrupt scheme linked to procurement of storage media.

rcthompson 7y ago
You mean other than leak (or sell) that intel to someone who can do something with it?
bonyt 7y ago
Is that comforting? It just leaves all the risks associated with an invasion of privacy with none of the claimed security upsides. Just because they can’t use it competently doesn’t mean they can’t abuse it.
- turk73 7y ago
  The NSA is the same way. Just because they can hoover up all that data doesn't mean they can do much with it. I wrote an article about this issue years ago. The false positive rate looking for terrorists must be horrifying--like millions of false positives for every real positive. Utterly worthless. Then they changed the mission to identifying all kinds of criminal acts and passed the intel along to the FBI and other police agencies, who then lie about how they found out about the perpetrators and develop a "parallel construction" in order not to expose the intelligence collection apparatus. Unfortunately, parallel construction is illegal. This is the America we live in. I am patiently waiting for any justice to be visited in the right places. I will wait forever.
vageli 7y ago
> If there’s any comfort to be had, South Africa’s intelligence agencies are a shambles, and unable to deal with real-life threats right under their noses. The idea that they’d be able to do anything actionable with bulk—collected electronic intel is laughable. > The way things are going, wouldn’t be surprising if whole thing is a corrupt scheme linked to procurement of storage media. If anything, this is _more_ alarming because they are probably not securing the data they intercept all too well.

randomdrake 7y ago

Can’t believe it’s been over ten years. 2008 was when there were numerous undersea cable disruptions[1]. I wrote about them when it happened from the best sources I could find at the time[2]. It isn’t surprising to see that surveillance may have occurred as a result. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_submarine_cable_disruption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_submarine_cable_disruptio... [2] - https://randomdrake.com/2008/02/12/the-submarine-cables-a-complete-guide-to-the-2008-internet-outage/ https://randomdrake.com/2008/02/12/the-submarine-cables-a-co...

Apocryphon 7y ago

Wonder if they have any partnerships with the Five Eyes?

jonnybgood 7y ago
Given South Africa is a member of BRICS, it's not likely. > In addition to commercial motivations, the new fiber optic Silk Road could also have geopolitical and strategic implications. Russia and China evidently share a desire to shield themselves from U.S. and other Western intelligence agencies and probably believe that their own communications – both with one another and to and from Europe – will be better protected if cables run across their own territory rather than through the Indian Ocean or the U.S. The same motivation explains the announced Telebras cable, which will connect Brazil to Portugal without any U.S. technology, and the BRICS cable project, which will link Vladivostok to Brazil, via China, India and South Africa. https://thediplomat.com/2015/04/a-fiber-optic-silk-road/ https://thediplomat.com/2015/04/a-fiber-optic-silk-road/

scarejunba 7y ago

As if the South Africans can decrypt anything. They can enjoy receiving non-SSL traffic. They're not going to get my shit.

Synaesthesia 7y ago
Well they can still get all our social media posts and whatever is unencrypted and run that through their algorithms, which I don’t like. It’s also just telling how paranoid governments are about their own citizens, they are the enemy as far as they are concerned!
deleted 7y ago
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notinpersia 7y ago

If traffic is encrypted E2E or OE it should not be a problem that someone eavesdrop on traffic. Here is one to make public key crypto practical using AI+Human derived mnemonics: Btw, Jack Dorsey’s Twitter account was hacked recently, which is another interesting story. https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1f2k6fsIkDmIS1WyJAT0lXQmDuHIPeo9GDKfP1FY2rVc https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1f2k6fsIkDmIS1WyJAT0l...

blitmap 7y ago

It's worrying that developing countries can buy off-the-shelf solutions to surveil its citizens without going through the decades of cultural and social change other countries have. We asked questions like "Is this ethical?" before the technology became possible. For them, the tech is here and the social discussions were never started. Maybe this is the same thing. We haven't upheld our ideals on privacy anyway.

raxxorrax 7y ago
I see few uses in asking if it is ethical, doing it anyway and putting dissidents in prison, which also happened.

hairytrog 7y ago

While interception is common and probably ubiquitous, I think we overestimate the governments' ability and wherewithal to use all this data. At the end of the day, only the worst hackers work for government.

madiathomas 7y ago

Surveillance is nothing new in South Africa. It is not even a secret. We have a regulation with a name that fully disclose that your communications can be intercepted. It is called RICA, which is short for Regulation of Interception of Communications and Provision of Communication-Related Information Act 70 of 2002 [1]. When you buy a new SIM card, you have to register it using your identification document and proof of residence. Every legally obtained SIM card is accountable. That way they wil know they are intercepting communication of the right person. [1] http://www.justice.gov.za/legislation/acts/2002-070.pdf http://www.justice.gov.za/legislation/acts/2002-070.pdf

mikorym 7y ago
> legally obtained As an aside, you and I both know how easy it is to get an activated sim card... But I agree with you comment; this article is not really "news".

mikorym 7y ago

> it also covers information about organised crime Let's just pause a bit here. In South Africa, if your phone gets stolen and you go to the police, they may well respond with: "Yes we know the guy, but we're not going to do anything." [1] I think that surveillance doesn't have the same twang in South Africa that it has in the US and EU. Organised crime and unorganised violent crime for that matter in one thing that a lot of South Africans would like to see better monitored or "surveilled" if you will. South Africa has this sort of dichotomy between illiteracy and high level tech that I think many people outside of Africa are not aware of. There is 60% youth unemployment [2] and at the same time it's the most developed African country. I heard a story that some of the surveillance tech that Muammar Gaddafi used was built by a company in Stellenbosch. Most middle class people will have some form of armed response and cities especially are pro-surveillance for crime prevention, many of it by 3rd party security companies. I think that there is some kind of common sense notion of how to differentiate between security and privacy that the CIA or NSA could only dream of. Security means not being robbed; privacy means leave my life out of yours. As mentioned in some of the comments, surveillance is not new at all in South Africa and in fact is much less than under the previous, non-democratic government. But to summarise, South Africa is from a "freedom" point of view a really great country. You can pretty much do things and live the way you want. The level of crime and incompetency of the police is, however, too much to live with for some people.

maxheadroom 7y ago
You seem to have meant to put citations in (e.g.: [1], [2]) but forgot to include them. :(
- throwawayza 7y ago
  [1] Personal story from a fellow colleague from Botswana. [2] http://www.statssa.gov.za/?p=11129 http://www.statssa.gov.za/?p=11129
  - Vinnl 7y ago
    Heads up: Either you're a different person, or your throwaway account is now linked to your other one.

pigeon888 7y ago

Not helping the security of the country very much. SA has one of the highest murder rates in the world.

iafrikan 7y ago

More details on South Africa's bulk interception of undersea fibre cables - https://www.iafrikan.com/2019/09/03/murray-hunter-digital-rights-surveillance-south-africa-spying/ https://www.iafrikan.com/2019/09/03/murray-hunter-digital-ri...