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U.S. Used Patriot Act to Gather Logs of Website Visitors
- tsjq 6y agohttps://archive.is/4a1oh https://archive.is/4a1oh Curious. 4 minutes, no comments, and this in top-5 here. How ?
- est 6y agoif no comments submissions never reache the top how are people going to discover them?
- tsjq 6y agoMy point is: if a post gathered enough votes (in 4minutes) to be on top-5, how come there's not a single comment yet? Generally, 4min old posts are found in the new items page.
- tomhoward 6y agoIt takes more than 4 minutes to see the article there, read it, come back to HN and write/submit a comment.
- tomhoward 6y agoIt's not related to comments, it's based on votes and time - i.e., the vote count is downweighted as the time since posting increases. So, a small number of legit votes soon after posting can easily get it to the top of the page, but then if there are no more votes it will drop quickly.
- Scoundreller 6y agoI wish the big Canadian ISPs had better transit and IX connections in Canada instead of exchanging local traffic so often in USA. I’m tired of local Toronto packets going through Chicago or NYC. Meanwhile the smaller providers do their best to spend as little on transit as possible and use local IXs as much as possible. Doesn’t help on wireless though :(
- 14 6y agoWhat basic steps can a Canadian do to preserve a little bit of privacy? Currently with Shaw. Not sure how they fair for respecting privacy but wouldn't mind stepping up my efforts. Like a VPN for example. Thanks
- Scoundreller 6y agoCheck some trace routes and see where things go. Not sure how bad Shaw is with ignoring any and all IXs. But Rogers and Telus would send some 5km away end-point packet on a tour of the USA. No wonder why voip.ms seemed so shaky. Like, hey Telus, you’re a Canadian ISP. Maybe peer in Canada instead of US only? https://www.peeringdb.com/net/76 https://www.peeringdb.com/net/76 Teksavvy sells service in Shaw areas. Not sure which other independent ISPs do. Can always use tor or VPNs, but need to understand their limitations and problems too.
- ampdepolymerase 6y agoThe major anglophone countries make up the five eyes. In practice anything you do would be marginal at best unless your goal is to only thwart commercial surveillance.
- freeflight 6y agoUse startpage.com [0] for your Google searches, DDG even has the !sp bang for that. Be very cautiousness about whom you share your mobile number for what, it's used to cross-reference account ownership across services. Many services use them for 2-step, but very likely also share them past that, that's also how the numbers end up with spammers/scammers. VPN I'm a bit lukewarm on, heavily depends on the VPN because in the worst case you will funnel all your traffic trough one party giving them very convenient access. Least of all look for a VPN that offers anonymous payment options, afaik there are even some that accept cash-drops or money sent in. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Startpage.com#Startpage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Startpage.com#Startpage
- swiley 6y agoAny VPN other than TOR just moves the problem somewhere else and likely makes it worse.
- dvduval 6y agoOkay, I'm editing this post because I guess Google incognito mode just doesn't include the history on my own device, but I assume that means that it's fair game for the government. So that means the government is getting info from my ISP sort of like they do in China, right?
- hunter2_ 6y agoThe only thing that protects you from is other users of your computer who snoop through history, local cache, etc. -- stuff that your computer would normally store, but doesn't due to incognito.
- darig 6y agoOh no, not logs. People are being killed. People's children are having guns pointed at them for speaking truth to power. U.S. Used Distraction to Make You Forget.
- Scoundreller 6y ago> Specifically, one order had approved collection of logs revealing which computers “in a specified foreign country” had visited “a single, identified U.S. web page.” Anyone want to take a guess at what this could be about?
- boomboomsubban 6y agoProbably something like Iran and google. Somewhere controversial enough to get approved and a site common enough to be able to track the entire world.
- mikeyouse 6y agoIn the Russian election interference investigation, they found that the spear-phishing sites setup to mimic google login pages all used the same link shortening service - this could be something like “Which Russian IP addresses accessed bit.ly/JohnPodesta” or a similar request.
- runawaybottle 6y agoI don’t think a discussion on the Patriot Act can not not be political. What people don’t realize is that Trump’s transparency of character didn’t allow him to snake through bills like the Bush administration (I’m oddly suggesting the man was too honest to succeed in politics long term). A competent Trump could have orchestrated messaging similar to what the neocons did. Just look at the name of this thing, ‘Patriot Act’, whereas Trump’s initiatives failed so hard at messaging that things got called ‘The Muslim Ban’, which many could argue the Patriot Act might as well have been called initially. We lucked out that this guy was more into his own schtick than actually being part of deliberate cohort with an agenda. If someone on the right-wing gets the messaging right, intermixed with competent political infrastructure, we could easily see more bills like the Patriot Act in the future, especially since Trump showed there is a massive appetite for some of the toxic rhetoric in this country. Anyone that can package those ideas in a palatable way can snake in nasty bills named ‘Totally not nasty and very good Act’.
- thre4234324 6y ago> If someone on the right-wing gets the messaging right Sadly, left-wing is often far better at this, and even worse, they are almost never scrutinized. Obama's presidency is a case in point.
- vlovich123 6y agoEdgy empty points are easy to score. I think this site tends towards more reasoned arguments. Can you please articulate in what ways you see Obama (or Clinton) as having had a presidency that was worse for America as compared with Bush or Trump’s legacies. Clinton maybe fucked up the free trade agreement a bit and hurt some important constituencies within the Democratic Party that were pretty important? Sure. Is that bad for the Democratic Party? Sure. Was it bad for America overall, long term? I don’t know. Obama misspoke (or potentially even lied) a few times about the implications of the bill? Sure. Is America better off with the ACA? By all accounts very much so. Was Obama more of a war hawk with drones than I might have liked? Sure. Was he as measured as he could have been? Maybe not. You ask others they’ll say he was too measured. Pretty difficult spot to navigate. Trump and Bush? Two major wars, 1 recession, 1 near major depression. And that’s just what Bush accomplished.
- goodrubyist 6y agoIt's quite unfortunate that so few lawmakers take lead on opposing mass surveillance (Ron Wyden and Ran Paul come to mind). This issue is without doubt way more important than most issues politicians choose to demagogue about ("cancel college debt", e.g. Sigh).
- bitcharmer 6y ago>so few lawmakers take lead on opposing mass surveillance There is even a bigger problem underneath it - US government institutions were also proven (on numerous occasions) to unlawfully spy on citizens without any repercussions. No amount of law will rectify the issue unless the law gets enforced.
- colordrops 6y agoHow is this any different from a totalitarian state?
- phobosanomaly 6y agoIt doesn't actually affect the daily life of the vast majority of Americans in a way that visibly alters the trajectory of their life to a degree that they care enough to get upset about it. The CIA isn't dropping-in to ship Fred down the street off to a reeducation camp for committing thoughtcrime. Cops might shoot you for reaching into the glove compartment for your insurance and registration during a traffic stop over a broken taillight though. So, people were pretty willing to riot in the streets. Because it actually affects them in a meaningful way (at least the way they see it).
- rayiner 6y agoIt’s completely different? > adjective relating to a system of government that is centralized and dictatorial and requires complete subservience to the state. The word “totalitarian” has a meaning—the root “total” reflects the intrusion of government and enforcement of behavioral norms in every facet of life. Even snooping on the content of everyone’s calls, which the US never did, wouldn’t make it a “totalitarian state.” Snooping in everyone’s calls and prosecuting everyone who said anything bad about the President would be closer to the real meaning of the word.
- Dobby2020 6y agoFrom the Russian military archive I found that the US Patriot act is a result of Russian influence and early stage interference in democratic mechanisms. Revenge for USSR destruction. Since then, the US compromised system slowly eats its core - American people. A snake that bites its tail. Hijacked liberty that smashes the heart of freedom.
- mtgx 6y agoBiden has gone around bragging about how he created a very similar version of the Patriot Act. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/andrewkaczynski/surveillance-joe https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/andrewkaczynski/surveil... Was that Russian influence, too?
- taylorfinley 6y agoI'm sure I'm one of many who would be interested in knowing more about this, are you aware of any open sources on this?
- Dobby2020 6y agoIt took more than 4 years and more than 500 pages of CIA report full of indirect evidence to prove that Russians elected Trump as a president for US. The biggest lie needs more time to be uncovered. Look how the down vote my post. These are all evil Russians who don't want this truth pop up. God, help us!
- ChrisRR 6y agoWhy do conspiracy theorists have this instantly recognisable way of speaking? Full of weird metaphors and never actually presenting any facts Well, I know the reason for the second part
- Lammy 6y agoThis part of the article was most interesting to me: "But the government stops short of using that law to collect the keywords people submit to internet search engines because it considers such terms to be content that requires a warrant to gather" …because it turns out it is legal to go the other way around and ask the provider for a list of people who searched for a certain keyword: https://www.cnet.com/news/google-is-giving-data-to-police-based-on-search-keywords-court-docs-show/ https://www.cnet.com/news/google-is-giving-data-to-police-ba... "There are few things as revealing as a person's search history, and police typically need a warrant on a known suspect to demand that sensitive information. But a recently unsealed court document found that investigators can request such data in reverse order by asking Google to disclose everyone who searched a keyword rather than for information on a known suspect."
- mtgx 6y agoIsn't that the very definition of a fishing expedition? "Let's find all the people that committed X crime in this database." It's insane with how much of this unconstitutional stuff the U.S. government has gotten away with, all because Congress has suffered from systemic corruption for decades and no longer cares about the little guy, in the sense that it's no longer that dependent on the "little guy" to keep their jobs (as Larry Lessig would put it). If they can get donations from rich corporations or friends, it's fine by them to screw over the little guy, because that's mostly all they need to keep their jobs.
- rachelbythebay 6y agoGonna say my usual thing every time this comes up: Rackspace, Indymedia, 2004. I'll add some additional color this time, though: I was one of the people who went digging around the images of their drives, since I was working that night when they came in from the UK datacenter. They did their homework and logged "noip" in their Apache logs, so we were unable to provide the IP addresses associated with whatever activity it was they cared about. This is very very old news. I guess it was less shocking when 9/11 was only 3 years old?
- lostlogin 6y agoIs there a longer write up of the episode or of your experience somewhere?
- johnchristopher 6y agohttps://www.eff.org/cases/indymedia-server-takedown https://www.eff.org/cases/indymedia-server-takedown
- neonate 6y agohttps://archive.is/4a1oh https://archive.is/4a1oh
- sixQuarks 6y agoWhy aren’t all the anti-maskers making an uproar about things like this?
- jjgreen 6y agoCould you elucidate? I can't see what the efficacy of masks (or otherwise) has to do with this ...
- sixQuarks 6y agoThe anti-maskers are claiming the govt is taking away our freedoms
- jjgreen 6y agoWell that's hardly in dispute, clearly forced masking is a reduction in freedom. Pro- and anti-maskers disagree as to whether this is justified by the health situation, and that generally boils down to whether or not you think mask work. But I still don't get what that has got to do with the U.S. government's dubious mass surveillance, that's been going on since long before Covid came along ...
- sixQuarks 6y agoI just think it's ridiculous that these same people are usually the ones that DONT protest mass surveillance or airport security checks. Masks are a trivial thing, they should be just as passionate about mass surveillance.
- Triv888 6y agoI wish Obama would have repealed the "PATRIOT" Act like he said he would... Thats one of the 3 reasons why I voted for him.... Another one was the closing of Guantanamo....
- threatofrain 6y agoNo one party can take on the democratically popular Patriot Act. In your mind, how was this going to go down? Obama gives up health care to trade for Patriot Act? American voters punish Democrats for the loss of patriotism and healthcare?
- amcoastal 6y agoIt comes up for renewal all the time, he easily could've vetoed it.
- Der_Einzige 6y agoObama had the political capital from 2008-2010 and didn't use it because he cares about "norms" and "working with the other side" rather than engaging in legislating from the oval office like his successor. The real lesson is that obama should have expanded executive power even more and done anything he could (including norm breaking) to executive order away as much of the patriot act and guantanamo as the courts would give him.
- threatofrain 6y agoObama and the democrats together only had the political opportunity to squeeze a fraction of his healthcare vision, after which it has since been withering away. The fact that presidents are very expected to be re-elected, but not this time, implies that American voters want a return to norms.
- MeinBlutIstBlau 6y agoTo be honest, Obamacare is a slap in the face to poor people.
- pupdogg 6y agoThis is what I don’t understand of the Biden Administration over Trump’s. I thought they were for the people? As much fluff as Trump talked about, we did not see any state surveillance advancements during his time.
- wil421 6y agoWhy did you ever believe something like that? The Obama Admin expanded drone strikes and some of the surveillance the Bush admin started. They lessened the amount of troops in the Middle East while expanding drone sticks around the area.
- pupdogg 6y agoContext of my comment was domestic surveillance and had nothing to do with international affairs. The Obama administration essentially pushed the gas pedal on state surveillance started by Bush administration. If you recall, Snowden was one of the outcomes of this.
- dalbasal 6y agoThese laws, norms, and such have been with us for a while now... essentially since the internet usage dataset started becoming what it is. From a legal standpoint, what matters is principle/precedent. Law works on principle, and doesn't often deal with volume issues. But this is a digital issue. With data, quantity is a quality. On one end of the spectrum, you can have a cop obtaining a printout that he can read, evaluate and use for an investigation. Practically, this is similar to obtaining a building's visitor log or CCTV footage. On the other end of this spectrum, you have the police version of Google or FB's datasets. Everyone's data, lots of data points. NN evaluation and all that goes with it. Operationalising that yields a different way of policing entirely. I have no complaints to judges or lawyers that treat this all in the same way. That's their job. Legislators, OTOH, do need to make this distinction. The volume of data, and policing methods utilizing it matter a lot. It also dovetails with commercial data gathering and utilization. Ultimately, I think we need some new principles, new articulations of rights and limits on power. Working by analogy to pen and paper has the tendency to make sense in landmark examples, but miss the actual implications. Legislators need to think outside of a lawyerly frame where analogies and principled comparisons are the basis.
- bitxbitxbitcoin 6y agoThe DNI only admitted to one instance in the last year and it is rationally likely that other instances of the Patriot Act being used like this exist from pre2019.
- 93po 6y agoI am not sure how much to care about this specific instance of surveillance. My assumption at this point is that virtually every single large tech company and ISP have been given NSLs that allow unfiltered and unlimited access to the entirety of these tech company's data. It is my assumption that this access is used to permanently store the entirety of everyone's web history and activity. I also assume that this collection can be searched with very little accountability by government agents. If you sign up with an email that can be traced to you, or if you ever mention your email in a PM, or post it in a comment, or access an anonymous account in a browser that has been fingerprinted and tied to another account in your real name - my assumption is that this can all be tied back to you. I think anonymous activity on the web is completely dead unless you're using Tor or a VPN with a browser that can't be fingerprinted (nonviable for nearly everyone), and even then there is speculation.