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Huge data leak shatters the lie that the innocent need not fear surveillance

800 points by ipster_io 5y ago

ipster_io 5y ago
Previous article listing few more details https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/18/revealed-leak-uncovers-global-abuse-of-cyber-surveillance-weapon-nso-group-pegasus https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/18/revealed-leak-...
- beermonster 5y ago
  They also have an upcoming talk on the topic.
  - beermonster 5y ago
    https://membership.theguardian.com/event/the-pegasus-project-revealing-a-global-abuse-of-cybersurveillance-163379288851 https://membership.theguardian.com/event/the-pegasus-project...
pattusk 5y ago
I don't think the problem is with the "lie" that the innocent need not fear surveillance. Most people will agree that mass-surveillance will negatively affect some people that are indispensable to healthily functioning liberal society: journalists, activists, academics, public figures... The problem is that even if most people don't subscribe to the "nothing to hide" argument in general, they do not care about themselves being the target of surveillance. Having unsuccessfully tried to make family and acquaintances more aware of privacy issue, I can confidently say that the "nothing to hide" argument is nothing next to the "I don't care" attitude. It's not just being the target of a wrongful accusation, arguments about unintended public shaming, identity theft, negative economic consequences (higher insurance premium or mortgage rates if your bank has more information about you), none of it will work. I think there is some sort of a Tverskyan study to be done here about expected value and perceived risk. Overall for most people the equation is always: (probability of data being mishandled) * damage < time and effort required to maintain my privacy.
- Santosh83 5y ago
  Because the 'time and effort required to maintain my privacy' part requires immediate and sustained and rigorous action and sacrifice of various comforts, all for a nebulously perceived, personally theoretical risk. The ultimate trajectory of liberal democracy is towards anarchism. But humans are anything but evolutionarily suited for that. We are biologically built to function in a hierarchy, even if the top of that hierarchy is tyrannical. This will take a long while to change. And enough efforts to educate are not being made. Not even close. PS. Also wanted to add that the "maintain my privacy" part is still far too technical for anyone except diehard nerds, and even they confess it takes great effort and thought. The entire system has been taken over at all levels of the stack by commercial and political powers. The average Joe doesn't stand a chance unless he wants to go entirely off-grid.
  - labster 5y ago
    Nah, we are biologically built to function in bands of no more than 300 people. Hierarchies are just the basic level of abstraction allowing bands to collectively form tribes, nations, and empires.
    - Jorengarenar 5y ago
      You are saying it as if "in bands of no more than 300 people" there was no hierarchy. It starts appearing at few dozens, let alone few hundreds. Proof of it being biological? Look at other primates. They form groups of way less than few hundreds and still maintain (strict) hierarchy.
      - js8 5y ago
        It's nowhere as clear-cut as you try to portray it. First of all, there are differences among primates, how are these hierarchies structured and some of it is also, surprisingly, cultural. (Look for example at work of Robert Sapolsky.) I for example believe that hierarchies are a cultural artifact of civilization, not a biologically inherent human value. The inherent human value is deference to authority, which is useful to maintain existing order and generational memory (and is the basis for what we typically call "conservative"). In tribes of 300 people or so, the hierarchies are easily challenged. In a civilization of 1000s of people, with incomplete information, this is much more difficult. (That being said, I think there are individuals who do not share typical human values, and try to subvert those for their personal benefit. So these individuals might subvert the value of deference to authority to create a hierarchy from which then they personally benefit. Just like existence of somebody, who might always take and never give back, doesn't invalidate reciprocity as a typical human value.) And in fact we increasingly live in a world where everybody is a member of multiple independent social hierarchies, and these apply situationally (and it's not even clear they are always needed). This really strains the claim that humans inherently favor hierarchies (which there should be only one), rather than just simply defer to authorities (which might be multiple or even chosen by each individual independently).
thejackgoode 5y ago
Fun fact: London has ~700k cameras and is top 3 in the world by cameras per capita, top 20 being almost exclusively Chinese cities https://www.comparitech.com/vpn-privacy/the-worlds-most-surveilled-cities/ https://www.comparitech.com/vpn-privacy/the-worlds-most-surv...
- edoceo 5y ago
  Just Fact, not Fun
- melomal 5y ago
  Exactly, literally every time I see these articles I just think of the UK. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance_in_the_Unite... I remember being questioned on terrorism charges outside St. Pauls Cathedral, alongside my friends by about 20 police with 4 vans. They told us that we need to leave London (lived outside of it) and they will watch us to ensure that we leave, if we do not then there will be further problems for us.
  - neilsense 5y ago
    What did you do to elicit that response?
  - theelous3 5y ago
    1. How can you say this without giving more context? 2. Presuming you aren't a terrorist or doing something so almost terroristish you were violating a public order statute - why wouldn't you just refuse?
    - redis_mlc 5y ago
      If you live in the US, then the UK will seem strange to you: - UK has pre-crime policing - anybody can file a hate charge, etc. based on socials - self-identifying trans people (a man claiming to be a woman) are sent to women's prisons automatically. You can guess what happens then - Disneyland for male predators. (This is starting to happen in the US.)
turbinerneiter 5y ago
It's a fight we are only ever gonna lose. I.e. in Germany, I have seen wave after wave of surveillance passed. People try to fight back each time. Often the supreme court cancels the unconstitutional laws. But they always try again. And it only takes a football euro cup or Worldcup, or Olympic games or a natural catastrophy to provide the distraction for the public to pass another law. Our governments want to surveil us, and they will do it whether we like it or not. People only stand up and fight if the damage if the fight is smaller than the damage of what they are fighting against. We live comfortable, so we will take a lot of this type of immoral behaviour of our leaders. The figth will only start after enough innocent surveillance victims are harmed in the real world (i.e. their data is leaked or worse) and enough people have felt negative consequences of this surveillance.
- shoto_io 5y ago
  I think it is even more depressing that there is no push back on EU level. Even worse, there are plans to further push for mass surveillance. https://european-pirateparty.eu/pirates-commissions-ai-proposal-opens-door-for-biometric-mass-surveillance/ https://european-pirateparty.eu/pirates-commissions-ai-propo...
- trompetenaccoun 5y ago
  >The figth will only start after enough innocent surveillance victims are harmed in the real world (i.e. their data is leaked or worse) Sadly I doubt even this will happen. I lived in China and watched the CCP built their digital surveillance state. Like others say most people don't care because they have comfortable lives and/or are concerned with other issues they find more pressing. And so what if the government looks at my holiday pictures, they think. What they don't realize is that it may not make a noticeable difference to them personally at first. But slowly the effects ripple through society. Independent journalism becomes risky, political activism gets pushed into the underground. It affects the people keeping our societies sound and healthy first. Once they're gone, it only gets worse and worse, because there's no one to keep the government in check anymore. By the time the ordinary citizen wakes up and realizes they're living in a dystopian nightmare it's way too late. In China there is 0 resistance anymore. Among the last ones were the Uyghur seperatists and you may know how that ended. Now is the time to fight back! Do not wait until the damage is irreparable. And in an ever more globalized world, we the people also need to unite globally and support each other.
mackrevinack 5y ago
its worth a try i suppose, but when it was revealed a few years back that 'yahoo video' was used by agencies to spy on millions of regular people 'by accident' it didn't seem to change public opinion hardly at all
trabant00 5y ago
I think the fight against mass surveillance needs first to be lost in order to even start. Right now the average citizen has not witnessed an impact on his life and there's no shortage of other problems he has to deal with. I'm not saying techies should just stay passive though. Special cases - journalists, activists, politically involved - need to be protected right now, and when the problem will be generally understood we need to have solutions ready for the average person: information, software, proposed legislation, etc.
- no_time 5y ago
  This is an interesting take. My only concern is that people consistently trade security for freedom in modern societies. I wonder how pervasive surveillance has to be to break this trend.
  - foxpurple 5y ago
    I’ll happily trade some privacy for security. I live in an apartment building which has security cameras in every public space. Sure, technically they could build a record of when I leave and enter, but I can also report people who leave trash bags out and they can be held accountable. There is a point where it goes too far, but not all surveillance is bad.
- Comevius 5y ago
  We already live in a world where surveillance changed the way people think and act, causing us to suppress non-conformist opinions. It is why mass surveillance exist in the first place, to foster collective conformity. Unfortunately we are prone to accept authoritarianism these days. The more economical and ecological uncertainties there are the more we desire order and stability, no matter the cost. For many having to look the other way is a small price to pay.
  - krapp 5y ago
    > We already live in a world where surveillance changed the way people think and act, causing us to suppress non-conformist opinions. I don't see many people suppressing non-conformist opinions anywhere. Rather, I see people defiantly shouting their non-conformist opinions from the rooftops at every opportunity. Spend an hour on Twitter or Facebook and tell me anyone is suppressing any of their radical hot takes on anything.
re-al 5y ago
"Few pause to think that their phones can be transformed into surveillance devices, with someone thousands of miles away silently extracting their messages, photos and location, activating their microphone to record them in real time." They were designed to be surveillance devices! Remember when you could replace your phone battery? They corrected that 'design flaw'. Smart phones, smart meters, smart cities, 5g... this is the infrastructure of the technocracy. Smart = spy. When papers like the guardian present articles like these as if they care, they are in fact doing a different job. They are actually acclimatising us to the future so that we are not shaken into action, but wring our hands for a bit and move on. To those talking about journalists needing to protect freedom, what world are you on? Have you heard of 'project mockingbird'? Have you not yet realised that journalism is just a part of the governance structure, along with education, and of course the government?
- tommit 5y ago
  This seems a bit over the top to me. I don't think I agree with your overall sentiment, even though I share some of the fear. Our phones were certainly not designed to be surveillance devices, that's just a side effect of having one central device that includes pretty much all of your life's data. As convenient as it is to have everything that matters to you on one device, it simply makes spying that much easier. I'm not going to go into the smart home debate. I personally don't think that most smart devices are actually spying on you, though a lot of them are security nightmares and could be easily configured to do so by a malicious third party. I don't share your sentiment towards the guardian at all. I think it's important they are writing articles like this -- thereby doing more to put an end to it than most. You not using a cell phone and telling your friends not to either is likely not having as much an impact on the public as such an article does. That last sentence of yours pretty much makes any debate pointless, however.
  - hoseja 5y ago
    Education, especially history education is very thinly veiled nationalist-and-obedient-worker indoctrination.
heidar 5y ago
Pegasus is what the Saudis used to capture Khashoggi. While it’s very impressive software, it’s incredibly dangerous in the wrong hands.
- christophilus 5y ago
  > in the wrong hands In any hands, I should think. Some things just shouldn’t exist.
- tootie 5y ago
  I'm unclear on what it does beyond normal spyware that every scammer in the world uses. Is it just really good spyware?
msravi 5y ago
Is there a link to the technical details of this whole Pegasus thing? I see a lot of results of the investigation but can't seem to find technical details of what was accessed and how the investigators came to the conclusions in the reports?
- quenix 5y ago
  Here you go: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/research/2021/07/forensic-methodology-report-how-to-catch-nso-groups-pegasus/ https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/research/2021/07/forensic-... Sleep tight.
christophilus 5y ago
My next phone is going to be a Linux phone, and this is partly why. Individuals need to be the ones in control of the software and hardware that they use, not the other way around.
- phillc73 5y ago
  I'm seriously considering just going with a feature phone. I am very careful about the apps I have installed on my phone and most of them are just for convenience and not critical. I could do without email, just wait until I'm at a desktop/latop. I could do without chat, again just wait until I'm at a desktop/laptop or use SMS. I could probably do without a browser as well, although this would probably be the most inconvenient loss. Other than that, I use my mobile phone as a phone, a camera and an alarm clock. If I want small, high quality digital camera I could buy one (or use a phone without a sim card and Wifi turned off 90% of the time). A feature phone would cover the phoning, SMS and alarm use cases. I'm really not sure what I'd be missing out on that was critical to my life. I'm about to have a three week summer holiday and I am sorely tempted to buy a sub-€100 feature phone just to try this idea. As I also don't want to take a laptop on holiday, I might need to take the smart phone with me to check things once a day. At least it would then only be in one specific location for a very short time.
- novaRom 5y ago
  Most modern phone's hardware needs proprietary drivers. Besides, some backdoors are embedded into hardware directly.
- saddata 5y ago
  Hope it’s not manufactured in China.
- alexfromapex 5y ago
  This is the perfect example of how the burden is on the little guy to stop surveillance and it's a losing battle of attrition. You might secure the software but it doesn't matter if there are undocumented CPU instructions to break into all phones on the market.
Folcon 5y ago
I do wonder whether things will change if the tools become even more accessible? I mean do you start caring about privacy when your local script kiddy can warrentlessly tap you? In my experience people tend only to care about things that directly affect them. Part of the lack of caring I think comes from the thought that why would "they" care about spying on me, it seems so distant and unlikely to happen. However when your personal rivals can do it and you could do it back to them, well the risk starts to feel more immediate. Sure there will be laws against it, but that doesn't stop some people, the main way to tackle it will be either reducing attack vectors or making any surveillance more visible, which will hopefully have a more global effect. Perhaps more people will start talking about surveillance because it suddenly got yet again easier be a thing? Though perhaps I'm being naive =)...
howaboutnope 5y ago
If you "don't fear surveillance" you are not innocent. You are complicit.
arthur_sav 5y ago
Power asymmetry will always be abused if not kept in check. Mass surveillance gives huge leverage to a handful of people under the pretext of safety and security. China is just a small taste of how population control will look like in the future.
advael 5y ago
There's no way to stop shit like this from happening at scale if we keep making exceptions for law enforcement and international espionage Until people stop accepting busting drug dealers by tapping their phones, they're going to keep getting journalists and other random people having their phones tapped too. The hard line we need to take is that there is no legitimate use of this capability
- mihaaly 5y ago
  I usually have an aversion to these clear cut principles and no exceptions here, in controlled situations we need tools to protect society, firarms are bad, arresting people should be avoided, track someone is a violation of privacy, but we need strongly controlled cases where we use it. Also forbidding it will not stop suveillance when it brings benefit to some.
  - advael 5y ago
    Society managed to not collapse for quite a long time without the ability to spy on every aspect of someone's life. Does the capability existing suddenly make it necessary? I don't buy this argument at all
  - cwkoss 5y ago
    Fundraising for the development of surveillance products would be much more challenging if there was no legal use for it. Right now, companies are encouraged to build whatever they think LEO and counter-terrorism would find useful, and people get shocked when they realize its also being sold to authoritarian third-world governments to use against political activists.
alfiedotwtf 5y ago
@dang: my comment has been deleted. Did the mods do this or is it some kind of shadow ban?
- yesenadam 5y ago
  Email hn@ycombinator.com to get answers to questions like these. I suspect the answer is that it wasn't posted in the first place, or something weird like that. Mods don't delete comments.
  - alfiedotwtf 5y ago
    My mistake... looking at the wrong thread :headslap:
ajb 5y ago
"But I assert before you all, that anyone who trembles - that man is guilty, because innocence never trembles in e the face of public vigilance" - Maximilien Robespierre (via Buchner) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOW6OfeOW10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOW6OfeOW10
adolph 5y ago
I've Got Nothing to Hide' and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy San Diego Law Review, Vol. 44, p. 745, 2007 GWU Law School Public Law Research Paper No. 289 28 Pages Posted: 12 Jul 2007 Last revised: 27 Feb 2014 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=998565 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=998565 Ham Sandwich Nation: Due Process When Everything is a Crime https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2203713 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2203713
naasking 5y ago
Surveillance can be fooled too. There's another story about this on the front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27878333 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27878333 I don't know why anybody believes the lie that surveillance won't harm innocent people.
badkitty99 5y ago
That constant push to always update everything, not going to help here. Hacks are updated in step with ios. $hell on earth...
WaitWaitWha 5y ago
I need to apologies to conspiracy theorists.
KingOfCoders 5y ago
So few phones have hardware switches.
nonameiguess 5y ago
Trying to be as charitable as possible to anyone who says they don't need to fear surveillance, I don't believe it is because they think the innocent have nothing to fear, but because the sufficiently uninteresting have nothing to fear. Dissident journalists and political activists may be in the right morally and possibly even legally in some countries, but governments nonetheless have quite a tremendous incentive to surveil, imprison, stop, and possibly kill them. That is still not the case for an average citizen. Trying to get people to care about stuff by convincing them it might someday directly impact them personally seems like a fool's errand to me. Even wars and genocides don't directly impact the vast majority of people, often even in the countries where they're happening. We instead need to figure out how to get people to care about bad things happening to other people. The case needs to be made to fight for freedom and against surveillance even if you're completely certain it will never impact you.
- tootie 5y ago
  I think half the comments in this thread are missing this point. The story at hand isn't mass surveillance like in the post-9/11 days. It's not the kind of dragnet that will scoop your grocery list and netflix habits while looking for Al Qaeda. It's very much targeted surveillance. The problem is who they are targeting and why. And they seemingly are targeting people serving public interests. Some of whom ended up dead. Jamal Khashoggi wasn't going to come to Thankgiving at my house or anything, but his reporting on the corruption in the Saudi government was making the world a better place by whatever little margin he could push the needle. And really, as much as the surveillance is crap, it does belie the point that he was also physically murdered. A point that didn't generate a lot of sympathy from the leader of the US despite him actually having a personal connection.
api 5y ago
"If you have nothing really valuable, you have nothing to fear from burglary."
tikiman163 5y ago
Some smart people in the comments section have pointed out that the problem isn't "the innocent need not fear surveillance" argument, but a very common "I don't care" or "I'm powerless to stop it, so why bother" attitude that is the problem. I can assure you all this is the common problem, not only with the surveillance debate, but many others. For those of you who are struggling with this I would like to try to help you understand why those attitudes are more common and therefore results in inaction so that you can be more effective in getting people to take a position, rather than ignore the problem. As an example, I'm going to be citing something anecdotal which is nevertheless true, in order to establish the necessary psychology you have to combat. The vast majority of people that live outside the inner city don't worry about someone breaking into thier homes. Breakins do happen, but for most people you only occasionally hear about them as happening to a friend of a friend. Occasionally a large string of burglaries will make the news, but generally the thief was caught by the time the news can begin reporting on it. This is the same way myths and legends are spread, and people don't view such things as happening to themselves, but to vague other people they've never met. They don't know the statistics and if they do they are still unlikely to change behavior or pay for a security service beyond having a yard sign. They do this because the perspective they have toward the problem is that of being unaffected. Possibly losing a TV or random jewelry is only worrying if you believe it could happen to you, and impactful enough that the pain of it happening exceeds to pain of doing something to protect themselves. If birgarlies are common enough where you live you might believe it could happen to you, but if you think of the loss in terms of money the cost of a security service over ten years is likely to exceed tge cost of what they might steal. However, if they think about potential loss in terms of something personally importanr to them they become more likely to hiring a security service. The chance that you might have to buy a new TV is less compelling than the possible loss of the wedding ring your grandmother gave you or the possibility that a rare photograph of your great grandfather might be destroyed by a meth addict carelessly throwing it against the wall while they search your room for jewelry. Data leaks like this establish that thier data can and probably will be stolen, but it doesn't establish how it can emotionally impact them. Most people are not journalists are significantly critical of the government and will continue to take for granted that journalist are sometimes targeted because as far as they can tell it isn't impacting thier lives. You have to put it in perspective of something they care about, like the government might collect and look at thier nudes, or collect and leak thier banking details such as account passwords. That's not even taking into account that surveillance can cause things like dropped calls, and some government agencies attempt to block consumer protections solely so they can continue to spy on you. Imagine just for a moment that the FBI and CIA find it convenient that phone companies haven't fixed the phone number spoofing and scam auto dialing problem because it means they send a spam call to any number at any time and appear as something other than a goverent phone number. This can allow them to force your cell phone to ping the nearest towers so they can triangulate your position even if you have GPS turned off. This works even if you reject the call, but it won't work if you're using Google Voice and you block the spammer's number because Google won't forward the call to your phone. The FBI or CIA doesn't even have to bother with setting up a fake spam auto dialing scam because the spammer's already call every active phone number multiple times a day. You might not care that the government is collecting your data, but those spammer's are really fucking annoying, so even if you don't care about the surveillance itself, you should probably care about how annoying some of thier methods for achieving surveillance can be. Now, does the FBI or CIA care about whether phone companies implement the necessary anti-spoofing protections? I have no idea, but we know enough about recent surveillance history to say that they have used invassive and outright annoying methods. They've infected people's phones with Spyware that runs in the background all the time, killing battery life. They've installed key loggers on all kinds of devices that can screw up the responsiveness of keyboard inputs. They've used malware that can change setting in your browser like search history, which could expose the porn search terms you've looked for (don't pretend that possibility doesn't scare a lot of you when you have to look something up in front of friends, we all know it does). They've demanded private companies create or leave in backdoors into people's devices and accounts that have later been abused by hackers to steal nudes and other embarrassing information (or found vulnerabilities and not reported them so they could abuse them and they were later discovered and abused by hackers). My point to all of this book of a response is that you need to figure out what the person you're talking to cares about so that you can establish not only that unwanted surveillance can happen to them, but that it will impact thier life in ways they care about. Shit that annoys regularly or has the potential to cause severly awkward or embarrassing situations tend to work better than a quantifiable loss of money or even time.
smashah 5y ago
Hopefully some will ask themselves why the "beacon of democracy" in the region is so ready and open to sell tools used almost solely to prevent the spread of true democracy to their neighbours? And then maybe we should all have a long hard think about how this translates to our own disgusting arms industries as a whole.
- nobodyCloak 5y ago
  A lot can be said about Israel, and this NSO stuff is extremely alarming. However, they also should get some credit as (one of?) the only countries in the Middle East where the laws don’t dictate that people be persecuted and/or killed for being homosexual. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_Israel https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_Israel
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    Is there a distinct name for this form or relative of whataboutism where some supposed superiority over some other group on some axis irrelevant to the issue at hand is raised to derail criticism of a regime or other group’s abuses?
    - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
      > some axis irrelevant to the issue at hand Someone asked why Israel is considered a "beacon of democracy" in the region. That opens the conversation to why liberal democracies elevate it over the region's autocracies. The tolerance it shares with other liberal documents is germane.
      - sudosysgen 5y ago
        There are straight up dictatorships that protect gay rights and democracies that don't. I don't see why it's a relevant axis.
        smashah 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
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RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago
My pessimistic take is that it won’t. Most people are not journalists. In fact, in the political climate, there is a significant portion of the population that despises journalists. Hearing that journalists are being spied on is not going to cause a lot of people any consternation.
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deleted 5y ago
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srr1 5y ago
Stop using your smartphone. Use a dumbphone instead. Don't communicate with your smartphone, use only it's smartness

800 points by ipster_io 5y ago

Previous article listing few more details https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/18/revealed-leak-uncovers-global-abuse-of-cyber-surveillance-weapon-nso-group-pegasus https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/18/revealed-leak-...

beermonster 5y ago
They also have an upcoming talk on the topic.
- beermonster 5y ago
  https://membership.theguardian.com/event/the-pegasus-project-revealing-a-global-abuse-of-cybersurveillance-163379288851 https://membership.theguardian.com/event/the-pegasus-project...

pattusk 5y ago

I don't think the problem is with the "lie" that the innocent need not fear surveillance. Most people will agree that mass-surveillance will negatively affect some people that are indispensable to healthily functioning liberal society: journalists, activists, academics, public figures... The problem is that even if most people don't subscribe to the "nothing to hide" argument in general, they do not care about themselves being the target of surveillance. Having unsuccessfully tried to make family and acquaintances more aware of privacy issue, I can confidently say that the "nothing to hide" argument is nothing next to the "I don't care" attitude. It's not just being the target of a wrongful accusation, arguments about unintended public shaming, identity theft, negative economic consequences (higher insurance premium or mortgage rates if your bank has more information about you), none of it will work. I think there is some sort of a Tverskyan study to be done here about expected value and perceived risk. Overall for most people the equation is always: (probability of data being mishandled) * damage < time and effort required to maintain my privacy.

Santosh83 5y ago
Because the 'time and effort required to maintain my privacy' part requires immediate and sustained and rigorous action and sacrifice of various comforts, all for a nebulously perceived, personally theoretical risk. The ultimate trajectory of liberal democracy is towards anarchism. But humans are anything but evolutionarily suited for that. We are biologically built to function in a hierarchy, even if the top of that hierarchy is tyrannical. This will take a long while to change. And enough efforts to educate are not being made. Not even close. PS. Also wanted to add that the "maintain my privacy" part is still far too technical for anyone except diehard nerds, and even they confess it takes great effort and thought. The entire system has been taken over at all levels of the stack by commercial and political powers. The average Joe doesn't stand a chance unless he wants to go entirely off-grid.
- labster 5y ago
  Nah, we are biologically built to function in bands of no more than 300 people. Hierarchies are just the basic level of abstraction allowing bands to collectively form tribes, nations, and empires.
  - Jorengarenar 5y ago
    You are saying it as if "in bands of no more than 300 people" there was no hierarchy. It starts appearing at few dozens, let alone few hundreds. Proof of it being biological? Look at other primates. They form groups of way less than few hundreds and still maintain (strict) hierarchy.
    - js8 5y ago
      It's nowhere as clear-cut as you try to portray it. First of all, there are differences among primates, how are these hierarchies structured and some of it is also, surprisingly, cultural. (Look for example at work of Robert Sapolsky.) I for example believe that hierarchies are a cultural artifact of civilization, not a biologically inherent human value. The inherent human value is deference to authority, which is useful to maintain existing order and generational memory (and is the basis for what we typically call "conservative"). In tribes of 300 people or so, the hierarchies are easily challenged. In a civilization of 1000s of people, with incomplete information, this is much more difficult. (That being said, I think there are individuals who do not share typical human values, and try to subvert those for their personal benefit. So these individuals might subvert the value of deference to authority to create a hierarchy from which then they personally benefit. Just like existence of somebody, who might always take and never give back, doesn't invalidate reciprocity as a typical human value.) And in fact we increasingly live in a world where everybody is a member of multiple independent social hierarchies, and these apply situationally (and it's not even clear they are always needed). This really strains the claim that humans inherently favor hierarchies (which there should be only one), rather than just simply defer to authorities (which might be multiple or even chosen by each individual independently).

thejackgoode 5y ago

Fun fact: London has ~700k cameras and is top 3 in the world by cameras per capita, top 20 being almost exclusively Chinese cities https://www.comparitech.com/vpn-privacy/the-worlds-most-surveilled-cities/ https://www.comparitech.com/vpn-privacy/the-worlds-most-surv...

edoceo 5y ago
Just Fact, not Fun
melomal 5y ago
Exactly, literally every time I see these articles I just think of the UK. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance_in_the_Unite... I remember being questioned on terrorism charges outside St. Pauls Cathedral, alongside my friends by about 20 police with 4 vans. They told us that we need to leave London (lived outside of it) and they will watch us to ensure that we leave, if we do not then there will be further problems for us.
- neilsense 5y ago
  What did you do to elicit that response?
- theelous3 5y ago
  1. How can you say this without giving more context? 2. Presuming you aren't a terrorist or doing something so almost terroristish you were violating a public order statute - why wouldn't you just refuse?
  - redis_mlc 5y ago
    If you live in the US, then the UK will seem strange to you: - UK has pre-crime policing - anybody can file a hate charge, etc. based on socials - self-identifying trans people (a man claiming to be a woman) are sent to women's prisons automatically. You can guess what happens then - Disneyland for male predators. (This is starting to happen in the US.)

turbinerneiter 5y ago

It's a fight we are only ever gonna lose. I.e. in Germany, I have seen wave after wave of surveillance passed. People try to fight back each time. Often the supreme court cancels the unconstitutional laws. But they always try again. And it only takes a football euro cup or Worldcup, or Olympic games or a natural catastrophy to provide the distraction for the public to pass another law. Our governments want to surveil us, and they will do it whether we like it or not. People only stand up and fight if the damage if the fight is smaller than the damage of what they are fighting against. We live comfortable, so we will take a lot of this type of immoral behaviour of our leaders. The figth will only start after enough innocent surveillance victims are harmed in the real world (i.e. their data is leaked or worse) and enough people have felt negative consequences of this surveillance.

shoto_io 5y ago
I think it is even more depressing that there is no push back on EU level. Even worse, there are plans to further push for mass surveillance. https://european-pirateparty.eu/pirates-commissions-ai-proposal-opens-door-for-biometric-mass-surveillance/ https://european-pirateparty.eu/pirates-commissions-ai-propo...
trompetenaccoun 5y ago
>The figth will only start after enough innocent surveillance victims are harmed in the real world (i.e. their data is leaked or worse) Sadly I doubt even this will happen. I lived in China and watched the CCP built their digital surveillance state. Like others say most people don't care because they have comfortable lives and/or are concerned with other issues they find more pressing. And so what if the government looks at my holiday pictures, they think. What they don't realize is that it may not make a noticeable difference to them personally at first. But slowly the effects ripple through society. Independent journalism becomes risky, political activism gets pushed into the underground. It affects the people keeping our societies sound and healthy first. Once they're gone, it only gets worse and worse, because there's no one to keep the government in check anymore. By the time the ordinary citizen wakes up and realizes they're living in a dystopian nightmare it's way too late. In China there is 0 resistance anymore. Among the last ones were the Uyghur seperatists and you may know how that ended. Now is the time to fight back! Do not wait until the damage is irreparable. And in an ever more globalized world, we the people also need to unite globally and support each other.

mackrevinack 5y ago

its worth a try i suppose, but when it was revealed a few years back that 'yahoo video' was used by agencies to spy on millions of regular people 'by accident' it didn't seem to change public opinion hardly at all

trabant00 5y ago

I think the fight against mass surveillance needs first to be lost in order to even start. Right now the average citizen has not witnessed an impact on his life and there's no shortage of other problems he has to deal with. I'm not saying techies should just stay passive though. Special cases - journalists, activists, politically involved - need to be protected right now, and when the problem will be generally understood we need to have solutions ready for the average person: information, software, proposed legislation, etc.

no_time 5y ago
This is an interesting take. My only concern is that people consistently trade security for freedom in modern societies. I wonder how pervasive surveillance has to be to break this trend.
- foxpurple 5y ago
  I’ll happily trade some privacy for security. I live in an apartment building which has security cameras in every public space. Sure, technically they could build a record of when I leave and enter, but I can also report people who leave trash bags out and they can be held accountable. There is a point where it goes too far, but not all surveillance is bad.
Comevius 5y ago
We already live in a world where surveillance changed the way people think and act, causing us to suppress non-conformist opinions. It is why mass surveillance exist in the first place, to foster collective conformity. Unfortunately we are prone to accept authoritarianism these days. The more economical and ecological uncertainties there are the more we desire order and stability, no matter the cost. For many having to look the other way is a small price to pay.
- krapp 5y ago
  > We already live in a world where surveillance changed the way people think and act, causing us to suppress non-conformist opinions. I don't see many people suppressing non-conformist opinions anywhere. Rather, I see people defiantly shouting their non-conformist opinions from the rooftops at every opportunity. Spend an hour on Twitter or Facebook and tell me anyone is suppressing any of their radical hot takes on anything.

re-al 5y ago

"Few pause to think that their phones can be transformed into surveillance devices, with someone thousands of miles away silently extracting their messages, photos and location, activating their microphone to record them in real time." They were designed to be surveillance devices! Remember when you could replace your phone battery? They corrected that 'design flaw'. Smart phones, smart meters, smart cities, 5g... this is the infrastructure of the technocracy. Smart = spy. When papers like the guardian present articles like these as if they care, they are in fact doing a different job. They are actually acclimatising us to the future so that we are not shaken into action, but wring our hands for a bit and move on. To those talking about journalists needing to protect freedom, what world are you on? Have you heard of 'project mockingbird'? Have you not yet realised that journalism is just a part of the governance structure, along with education, and of course the government?

tommit 5y ago
This seems a bit over the top to me. I don't think I agree with your overall sentiment, even though I share some of the fear. Our phones were certainly not designed to be surveillance devices, that's just a side effect of having one central device that includes pretty much all of your life's data. As convenient as it is to have everything that matters to you on one device, it simply makes spying that much easier. I'm not going to go into the smart home debate. I personally don't think that most smart devices are actually spying on you, though a lot of them are security nightmares and could be easily configured to do so by a malicious third party. I don't share your sentiment towards the guardian at all. I think it's important they are writing articles like this -- thereby doing more to put an end to it than most. You not using a cell phone and telling your friends not to either is likely not having as much an impact on the public as such an article does. That last sentence of yours pretty much makes any debate pointless, however.
- hoseja 5y ago
  Education, especially history education is very thinly veiled nationalist-and-obedient-worker indoctrination.

heidar 5y ago

Pegasus is what the Saudis used to capture Khashoggi. While it’s very impressive software, it’s incredibly dangerous in the wrong hands.

christophilus 5y ago
> in the wrong hands In any hands, I should think. Some things just shouldn’t exist.
tootie 5y ago
I'm unclear on what it does beyond normal spyware that every scammer in the world uses. Is it just really good spyware?

msravi 5y ago

Is there a link to the technical details of this whole Pegasus thing? I see a lot of results of the investigation but can't seem to find technical details of what was accessed and how the investigators came to the conclusions in the reports?

quenix 5y ago
Here you go: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/research/2021/07/forensic-methodology-report-how-to-catch-nso-groups-pegasus/ https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/research/2021/07/forensic-... Sleep tight.

christophilus 5y ago

My next phone is going to be a Linux phone, and this is partly why. Individuals need to be the ones in control of the software and hardware that they use, not the other way around.

phillc73 5y ago
I'm seriously considering just going with a feature phone. I am very careful about the apps I have installed on my phone and most of them are just for convenience and not critical. I could do without email, just wait until I'm at a desktop/latop. I could do without chat, again just wait until I'm at a desktop/laptop or use SMS. I could probably do without a browser as well, although this would probably be the most inconvenient loss. Other than that, I use my mobile phone as a phone, a camera and an alarm clock. If I want small, high quality digital camera I could buy one (or use a phone without a sim card and Wifi turned off 90% of the time). A feature phone would cover the phoning, SMS and alarm use cases. I'm really not sure what I'd be missing out on that was critical to my life. I'm about to have a three week summer holiday and I am sorely tempted to buy a sub-€100 feature phone just to try this idea. As I also don't want to take a laptop on holiday, I might need to take the smart phone with me to check things once a day. At least it would then only be in one specific location for a very short time.
novaRom 5y ago
Most modern phone's hardware needs proprietary drivers. Besides, some backdoors are embedded into hardware directly.
saddata 5y ago
Hope it’s not manufactured in China.
alexfromapex 5y ago
This is the perfect example of how the burden is on the little guy to stop surveillance and it's a losing battle of attrition. You might secure the software but it doesn't matter if there are undocumented CPU instructions to break into all phones on the market.

Folcon 5y ago

I do wonder whether things will change if the tools become even more accessible? I mean do you start caring about privacy when your local script kiddy can warrentlessly tap you? In my experience people tend only to care about things that directly affect them. Part of the lack of caring I think comes from the thought that why would "they" care about spying on me, it seems so distant and unlikely to happen. However when your personal rivals can do it and you could do it back to them, well the risk starts to feel more immediate. Sure there will be laws against it, but that doesn't stop some people, the main way to tackle it will be either reducing attack vectors or making any surveillance more visible, which will hopefully have a more global effect. Perhaps more people will start talking about surveillance because it suddenly got yet again easier be a thing? Though perhaps I'm being naive =)...

howaboutnope 5y ago

If you "don't fear surveillance" you are not innocent. You are complicit.

arthur_sav 5y ago

Power asymmetry will always be abused if not kept in check. Mass surveillance gives huge leverage to a handful of people under the pretext of safety and security. China is just a small taste of how population control will look like in the future.

advael 5y ago

There's no way to stop shit like this from happening at scale if we keep making exceptions for law enforcement and international espionage Until people stop accepting busting drug dealers by tapping their phones, they're going to keep getting journalists and other random people having their phones tapped too. The hard line we need to take is that there is no legitimate use of this capability

mihaaly 5y ago
I usually have an aversion to these clear cut principles and no exceptions here, in controlled situations we need tools to protect society, firarms are bad, arresting people should be avoided, track someone is a violation of privacy, but we need strongly controlled cases where we use it. Also forbidding it will not stop suveillance when it brings benefit to some.
- advael 5y ago
  Society managed to not collapse for quite a long time without the ability to spy on every aspect of someone's life. Does the capability existing suddenly make it necessary? I don't buy this argument at all
- cwkoss 5y ago
  Fundraising for the development of surveillance products would be much more challenging if there was no legal use for it. Right now, companies are encouraged to build whatever they think LEO and counter-terrorism would find useful, and people get shocked when they realize its also being sold to authoritarian third-world governments to use against political activists.

alfiedotwtf 5y ago

@dang: my comment has been deleted. Did the mods do this or is it some kind of shadow ban?

yesenadam 5y ago
Email hn@ycombinator.com to get answers to questions like these. I suspect the answer is that it wasn't posted in the first place, or something weird like that. Mods don't delete comments.
- alfiedotwtf 5y ago
  My mistake... looking at the wrong thread :headslap:

ajb 5y ago

"But I assert before you all, that anyone who trembles - that man is guilty, because innocence never trembles in e the face of public vigilance" - Maximilien Robespierre (via Buchner) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOW6OfeOW10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOW6OfeOW10

adolph 5y ago

I've Got Nothing to Hide' and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy San Diego Law Review, Vol. 44, p. 745, 2007 GWU Law School Public Law Research Paper No. 289 28 Pages Posted: 12 Jul 2007 Last revised: 27 Feb 2014 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=998565 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=998565 Ham Sandwich Nation: Due Process When Everything is a Crime https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2203713 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2203713

naasking 5y ago

Surveillance can be fooled too. There's another story about this on the front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27878333 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27878333 I don't know why anybody believes the lie that surveillance won't harm innocent people.

badkitty99 5y ago

That constant push to always update everything, not going to help here. Hacks are updated in step with ios. $hell on earth...

WaitWaitWha 5y ago

I need to apologies to conspiracy theorists.

KingOfCoders 5y ago

So few phones have hardware switches.

nonameiguess 5y ago

Trying to be as charitable as possible to anyone who says they don't need to fear surveillance, I don't believe it is because they think the innocent have nothing to fear, but because the sufficiently uninteresting have nothing to fear. Dissident journalists and political activists may be in the right morally and possibly even legally in some countries, but governments nonetheless have quite a tremendous incentive to surveil, imprison, stop, and possibly kill them. That is still not the case for an average citizen. Trying to get people to care about stuff by convincing them it might someday directly impact them personally seems like a fool's errand to me. Even wars and genocides don't directly impact the vast majority of people, often even in the countries where they're happening. We instead need to figure out how to get people to care about bad things happening to other people. The case needs to be made to fight for freedom and against surveillance even if you're completely certain it will never impact you.

tootie 5y ago
I think half the comments in this thread are missing this point. The story at hand isn't mass surveillance like in the post-9/11 days. It's not the kind of dragnet that will scoop your grocery list and netflix habits while looking for Al Qaeda. It's very much targeted surveillance. The problem is who they are targeting and why. And they seemingly are targeting people serving public interests. Some of whom ended up dead. Jamal Khashoggi wasn't going to come to Thankgiving at my house or anything, but his reporting on the corruption in the Saudi government was making the world a better place by whatever little margin he could push the needle. And really, as much as the surveillance is crap, it does belie the point that he was also physically murdered. A point that didn't generate a lot of sympathy from the leader of the US despite him actually having a personal connection.

api 5y ago

"If you have nothing really valuable, you have nothing to fear from burglary."

tikiman163 5y ago

Some smart people in the comments section have pointed out that the problem isn't "the innocent need not fear surveillance" argument, but a very common "I don't care" or "I'm powerless to stop it, so why bother" attitude that is the problem. I can assure you all this is the common problem, not only with the surveillance debate, but many others. For those of you who are struggling with this I would like to try to help you understand why those attitudes are more common and therefore results in inaction so that you can be more effective in getting people to take a position, rather than ignore the problem. As an example, I'm going to be citing something anecdotal which is nevertheless true, in order to establish the necessary psychology you have to combat. The vast majority of people that live outside the inner city don't worry about someone breaking into thier homes. Breakins do happen, but for most people you only occasionally hear about them as happening to a friend of a friend. Occasionally a large string of burglaries will make the news, but generally the thief was caught by the time the news can begin reporting on it. This is the same way myths and legends are spread, and people don't view such things as happening to themselves, but to vague other people they've never met. They don't know the statistics and if they do they are still unlikely to change behavior or pay for a security service beyond having a yard sign. They do this because the perspective they have toward the problem is that of being unaffected. Possibly losing a TV or random jewelry is only worrying if you believe it could happen to you, and impactful enough that the pain of it happening exceeds to pain of doing something to protect themselves. If birgarlies are common enough where you live you might believe it could happen to you, but if you think of the loss in terms of money the cost of a security service over ten years is likely to exceed tge cost of what they might steal. However, if they think about potential loss in terms of something personally importanr to them they become more likely to hiring a security service. The chance that you might have to buy a new TV is less compelling than the possible loss of the wedding ring your grandmother gave you or the possibility that a rare photograph of your great grandfather might be destroyed by a meth addict carelessly throwing it against the wall while they search your room for jewelry. Data leaks like this establish that thier data can and probably will be stolen, but it doesn't establish how it can emotionally impact them. Most people are not journalists are significantly critical of the government and will continue to take for granted that journalist are sometimes targeted because as far as they can tell it isn't impacting thier lives. You have to put it in perspective of something they care about, like the government might collect and look at thier nudes, or collect and leak thier banking details such as account passwords. That's not even taking into account that surveillance can cause things like dropped calls, and some government agencies attempt to block consumer protections solely so they can continue to spy on you. Imagine just for a moment that the FBI and CIA find it convenient that phone companies haven't fixed the phone number spoofing and scam auto dialing problem because it means they send a spam call to any number at any time and appear as something other than a goverent phone number. This can allow them to force your cell phone to ping the nearest towers so they can triangulate your position even if you have GPS turned off. This works even if you reject the call, but it won't work if you're using Google Voice and you block the spammer's number because Google won't forward the call to your phone. The FBI or CIA doesn't even have to bother with setting up a fake spam auto dialing scam because the spammer's already call every active phone number multiple times a day. You might not care that the government is collecting your data, but those spammer's are really fucking annoying, so even if you don't care about the surveillance itself, you should probably care about how annoying some of thier methods for achieving surveillance can be. Now, does the FBI or CIA care about whether phone companies implement the necessary anti-spoofing protections? I have no idea, but we know enough about recent surveillance history to say that they have used invassive and outright annoying methods. They've infected people's phones with Spyware that runs in the background all the time, killing battery life. They've installed key loggers on all kinds of devices that can screw up the responsiveness of keyboard inputs. They've used malware that can change setting in your browser like search history, which could expose the porn search terms you've looked for (don't pretend that possibility doesn't scare a lot of you when you have to look something up in front of friends, we all know it does). They've demanded private companies create or leave in backdoors into people's devices and accounts that have later been abused by hackers to steal nudes and other embarrassing information (or found vulnerabilities and not reported them so they could abuse them and they were later discovered and abused by hackers). My point to all of this book of a response is that you need to figure out what the person you're talking to cares about so that you can establish not only that unwanted surveillance can happen to them, but that it will impact thier life in ways they care about. Shit that annoys regularly or has the potential to cause severly awkward or embarrassing situations tend to work better than a quantifiable loss of money or even time.

smashah 5y ago

Hopefully some will ask themselves why the "beacon of democracy" in the region is so ready and open to sell tools used almost solely to prevent the spread of true democracy to their neighbours? And then maybe we should all have a long hard think about how this translates to our own disgusting arms industries as a whole.

nobodyCloak 5y ago
A lot can be said about Israel, and this NSO stuff is extremely alarming. However, they also should get some credit as (one of?) the only countries in the Middle East where the laws don’t dictate that people be persecuted and/or killed for being homosexual. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_Israel https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_Israel
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  Is there a distinct name for this form or relative of whataboutism where some supposed superiority over some other group on some axis irrelevant to the issue at hand is raised to derail criticism of a regime or other group’s abuses?
  - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
    > some axis irrelevant to the issue at hand Someone asked why Israel is considered a "beacon of democracy" in the region. That opens the conversation to why liberal democracies elevate it over the region's autocracies. The tolerance it shares with other liberal documents is germane.
    - sudosysgen 5y ago
      There are straight up dictatorships that protect gay rights and democracies that don't. I don't see why it's a relevant axis.
      - smashah 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

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RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago

My pessimistic take is that it won’t. Most people are not journalists. In fact, in the political climate, there is a significant portion of the population that despises journalists. Hearing that journalists are being spied on is not going to cause a lot of people any consternation.

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deleted 5y ago

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srr1 5y ago

Stop using your smartphone. Use a dumbphone instead. Don't communicate with your smartphone, use only it's smartness