7 ms·

This story (assuming it's true) should serve as an excellent example of why you need privacy even if you think that you don't. In peace time the NSA is only loo

by belval 5y ago

This story (assuming it's true) should serve as an excellent example of why you need privacy even if you think that you don't. In peace time the NSA is only looking for "terrorist" and leaves everyone alone, but in case of war they would start creating lists for any and everything. All it takes is one "tough" agent trusting their gut feeling/algorithm based on your browsing history and shopping habits to put a target on your back and you are done. EDIT: Replacing "if there's any truth to it" by "assuming it's true". I did not mean to imply that the author made up the whole story and thought both expressions were equivalent.

meowface 5y ago
Very good point. Everything is framed under the status quo. If shit hits the fan, all those assumptions immediately fly out the window. If the writ of habeas corpus is suspended, NSA instantly transforms from shady to Stasi.
sam0x17 5y ago
Combined with a continual state of "war on terror" and a post-conventional-warfare world, this time is basically all the time anyway.
not2b 5y ago
The "if there is any truth to it" remark was unnecessary. The author was very well known on the net when it was a much smaller place (the old Usenet days), and implying that he made it up is, to say the least, impolite. His Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Earnest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Earnest
- belval 5y ago
  You may know him but I did not, so I erred on the safe side and added the "if there is any truth to it" as it's a much safer default to assume that everything I read on the Internet is possibly made up.
  - SamBam 5y ago
    I'd say it still sounds a bit hostile. I'd suggest "assuming it's true" as a nicer way of saying it.
    - belval 5y ago
      Seeing the reply I'm getting, I think this is just the "English is my second language" showing on my side. I always assumed both expression were somewhat equivalent but clearly they aren't.
      - fuzzybear3965 5y ago
        As a native speaker it appears to me that your audience is being a little uncharitable (they being, ironically, intellectually ungenerous toward you).
      - registeredcorn 5y ago
        I wouldn't concern yourself with it too much. Both of your statements were entirely reasonable and polite in tone and candor. Hair trigger, induced outrage is common among Englisch. They are much less prone to such gewinsel in public, the knives only come out online for whatever reason. Anyway, it is important to recall that with every move that is made, it will disturb someone else. Impudence should be avoided, but the trivialities and whims of Englisch are of little concern.
  - HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago
    I think what /u/not2b was getting at in the bigger picture, is that we can decide for ourselves if something is not likely to be the truth. But if you explicitly add "if there is any truth to it" to your post, then it suggests to the reader that the story is probably false and that's not a very useful premise to start from.
  - wyre 5y ago
    I don’t think assuming stories as untruthful is using good faith. I think this line of thinking heavily contributes to this post-truth society we live in; if everything online is a lie that leaves the individual to create their own truth from the lies leading to this idea of post-truth. Obviously there is more nuance than this because websites need views for ad revenue and people like lying online for imaginary internet points or attention, but I see little reason to lie on HN unless it’s for a company’s PR.
- YeBanKo 5y ago
  I believe that this happened, but I don’t think that details are accurate. Specifically stories told by FBI agents. Memory is flawed, kids tend to exaggerate things(he was 11 at the time). As far as I understand, it was retold him by his mother, etc.
grej 5y ago
relevant, and worth rereading: https://jacquesmattheij.com/if-you-have-nothing-to-hide/ https://jacquesmattheij.com/if-you-have-nothing-to-hide/
- jacquesm 5y ago
  I was wondering where all that traffic suddenly came from. As for those neighborhoods that were raided: the 'new' City Hall of Amsterdam is built right on top of one of the largest of them. Not a house left standing of those blocks.
tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
"and you are done" While I agree about the need for privacy, I don't think this story is a good argument for it. One of the interesting aspects of this story is that the main actual consequence of this privacy invasion was that he got his glasses back.
- belval 5y ago
  But that's probably because he was a child, not of Japanese descent, and one of the two agent actually believed the story. If he had been a 30 years old Japanese weirdo that likes to keep "codes" in his wallet I am pretty sure the story would be very different.
- goodpoint 5y ago
  Only because he was white and born in US. Had he been the son of a middle-eastern immigrant in 2011, daddy would have disappeared.
toshk 5y ago
nickysielicki 5y ago
> In peace time the NSA is only looking for "terrorist" and leaves everyone alone If you say so.
- DonHopkins 5y ago
  You can't spell uNSAvory without NSA.
_moof 5y ago
> In peace time And honestly, when was the last time of any significant duration when the US was not involved in a military conflict?
BizarroLand 5y ago
Seems like the safest bet would be to fully inventory every human, know everything about them as well or better than they do, and then, once you're highly assured of their safety to the commonwealth of the country monitor them for even the slightest changes in their disposition or regular pattern of activity. Of course, you would have to completely disregard any concept that people would have a freedom to privacy to do that, and you would also have to account for natural changes over time. People make new friends, get exposed to new ideas, and gradually change no matter how hard you try to lock them in a box. The data storage and processing requirements to monitor America's 350 million people would be understated as staggering, the man hours for perfect enforcement incalculable, and even if you reached Pareto parity (monitoring 80% of the highest-risk individuals 100% of the time) you're still going to have people slip through the cracks. I would place a $100 bet on this already being the practice of the 3 letter agencies and if they haven't fully rolled it out I would hazard an extra tenner on that they're within 5 years of completing it as long as their funding isn't disrupted. The only defense most of us have against it is that we're not individually interesting so we probably never register as more than a blip on a hard drive somewhere under most circumstances, human eyes never prying into the worlds we make for ourselves.
- kromem 5y ago
  Where this apparatus gets really interesting is the addition of AI. Suddenly cross-referencing pockets of activity in the giant trove of permanently stored data can be done for every citizen, not just ones of interest. You can start modeling and simulating behavior off that data to predict future actions like in Minority Report. But if you look far enough into the future on that trend and link it into Microsoft's recent patent on resurrecting dead people as AI chatbots from social media data, the treasure trove of all online activity for every citizen becomes a curious anthropological artifact as the people in it die off. Did you have a nuclear scientist on the verge of a fusion breakthrough die before they could finish their paper? Just feed the entirety of their digital life into the system and extrapolate the non-digital using generalized "human experience" models built off everyone else to resurrect a copy of them (or many copies) in a simulated continuation of their day to day thinking and working. Very few people fully understand the extent of the digital footprints we are leaving behind in the context of trends in big data. The data we are leaving behind in mass collection will eventually take on (literally) new life.
drfuchs 5y ago
Yeah, he's for real, and I heard him tell this story (and a number of others) about 40 years ago, for what that's worth. In addition to his other info on the web mentioned elsewhere here, there are also quite a selection of his files from the Stanford AI Lab (SAIL) system, that have been pulled off of old backup tapes, and with permission appear at https://www.saildart.org/LES https://www.saildart.org/LES (note the 3-letter account name, and 3-letter, single-level subdirectory names that you can click down into).
- dekhn 5y ago
  Cool. I mean, wow, that's a great old resource. I like https://www.saildart.org/[OLD,LES]/ https://www.saildart.org/[OLD,LES]/ (always interested in what academic researchers at stanford and berkeley were doing around the time I was born, especially machine learning)
  - drfuchs 5y ago
    Well, then you're sure to like https://www.saildart.org/JMC https://www.saildart.org/JMC (John McCarthy).
    - dekhn 5y ago
      Thanks! Some pretty amazing stuff in there including his comments before the four color theorem was proved
2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
NSA is for foreign surveillance.
- standardUser 5y ago
  That is not true. The NSA operates domestically as well.
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
    https://www.nsa.gov/about/ https://www.nsa.gov/about/
    - boring_twenties 5y ago
      Oh, okay then, case closed. In other news, North Korea says they're a democratic republic, so that's another thing we don't have to worry about.
      - 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
        The 4th Amendment
        boring_twenties 5y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction
        dotnet00 5y ago
        Doesn't mean shit without enforcement, which is conveniently also handled by the same cabal. I can't believe this basic fact has to still be argued in a tech focused forum despite the Snowden leaks.
        2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
        https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/court-finds-fbi-use-of-nsa-database-violated-americans-fourth-amendment-rights/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/court-finds-...

by belval 5y ago

meowface 5y ago

Very good point. Everything is framed under the status quo. If shit hits the fan, all those assumptions immediately fly out the window. If the writ of habeas corpus is suspended, NSA instantly transforms from shady to Stasi.

sam0x17 5y ago

Combined with a continual state of "war on terror" and a post-conventional-warfare world, this time is basically all the time anyway.

not2b 5y ago

The "if there is any truth to it" remark was unnecessary. The author was very well known on the net when it was a much smaller place (the old Usenet days), and implying that he made it up is, to say the least, impolite. His Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Earnest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Earnest

belval 5y ago
You may know him but I did not, so I erred on the safe side and added the "if there is any truth to it" as it's a much safer default to assume that everything I read on the Internet is possibly made up.
- SamBam 5y ago
  I'd say it still sounds a bit hostile. I'd suggest "assuming it's true" as a nicer way of saying it.
  - belval 5y ago
    Seeing the reply I'm getting, I think this is just the "English is my second language" showing on my side. I always assumed both expression were somewhat equivalent but clearly they aren't.
    - fuzzybear3965 5y ago
      As a native speaker it appears to me that your audience is being a little uncharitable (they being, ironically, intellectually ungenerous toward you).
    - registeredcorn 5y ago
      I wouldn't concern yourself with it too much. Both of your statements were entirely reasonable and polite in tone and candor. Hair trigger, induced outrage is common among Englisch. They are much less prone to such gewinsel in public, the knives only come out online for whatever reason. Anyway, it is important to recall that with every move that is made, it will disturb someone else. Impudence should be avoided, but the trivialities and whims of Englisch are of little concern.
- HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago
  I think what /u/not2b was getting at in the bigger picture, is that we can decide for ourselves if something is not likely to be the truth. But if you explicitly add "if there is any truth to it" to your post, then it suggests to the reader that the story is probably false and that's not a very useful premise to start from.
- wyre 5y ago
  I don’t think assuming stories as untruthful is using good faith. I think this line of thinking heavily contributes to this post-truth society we live in; if everything online is a lie that leaves the individual to create their own truth from the lies leading to this idea of post-truth. Obviously there is more nuance than this because websites need views for ad revenue and people like lying online for imaginary internet points or attention, but I see little reason to lie on HN unless it’s for a company’s PR.
YeBanKo 5y ago
I believe that this happened, but I don’t think that details are accurate. Specifically stories told by FBI agents. Memory is flawed, kids tend to exaggerate things(he was 11 at the time). As far as I understand, it was retold him by his mother, etc.

grej 5y ago

relevant, and worth rereading: https://jacquesmattheij.com/if-you-have-nothing-to-hide/ https://jacquesmattheij.com/if-you-have-nothing-to-hide/

jacquesm 5y ago
I was wondering where all that traffic suddenly came from. As for those neighborhoods that were raided: the 'new' City Hall of Amsterdam is built right on top of one of the largest of them. Not a house left standing of those blocks.

tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago

"and you are done" While I agree about the need for privacy, I don't think this story is a good argument for it. One of the interesting aspects of this story is that the main actual consequence of this privacy invasion was that he got his glasses back.

belval 5y ago
But that's probably because he was a child, not of Japanese descent, and one of the two agent actually believed the story. If he had been a 30 years old Japanese weirdo that likes to keep "codes" in his wallet I am pretty sure the story would be very different.
goodpoint 5y ago
Only because he was white and born in US. Had he been the son of a middle-eastern immigrant in 2011, daddy would have disappeared.

toshk 5y ago

nickysielicki 5y ago

> In peace time the NSA is only looking for "terrorist" and leaves everyone alone If you say so.

DonHopkins 5y ago
You can't spell uNSAvory without NSA.

_moof 5y ago

> In peace time And honestly, when was the last time of any significant duration when the US was not involved in a military conflict?

BizarroLand 5y ago

Seems like the safest bet would be to fully inventory every human, know everything about them as well or better than they do, and then, once you're highly assured of their safety to the commonwealth of the country monitor them for even the slightest changes in their disposition or regular pattern of activity. Of course, you would have to completely disregard any concept that people would have a freedom to privacy to do that, and you would also have to account for natural changes over time. People make new friends, get exposed to new ideas, and gradually change no matter how hard you try to lock them in a box. The data storage and processing requirements to monitor America's 350 million people would be understated as staggering, the man hours for perfect enforcement incalculable, and even if you reached Pareto parity (monitoring 80% of the highest-risk individuals 100% of the time) you're still going to have people slip through the cracks. I would place a $100 bet on this already being the practice of the 3 letter agencies and if they haven't fully rolled it out I would hazard an extra tenner on that they're within 5 years of completing it as long as their funding isn't disrupted. The only defense most of us have against it is that we're not individually interesting so we probably never register as more than a blip on a hard drive somewhere under most circumstances, human eyes never prying into the worlds we make for ourselves.

kromem 5y ago
Where this apparatus gets really interesting is the addition of AI. Suddenly cross-referencing pockets of activity in the giant trove of permanently stored data can be done for every citizen, not just ones of interest. You can start modeling and simulating behavior off that data to predict future actions like in Minority Report. But if you look far enough into the future on that trend and link it into Microsoft's recent patent on resurrecting dead people as AI chatbots from social media data, the treasure trove of all online activity for every citizen becomes a curious anthropological artifact as the people in it die off. Did you have a nuclear scientist on the verge of a fusion breakthrough die before they could finish their paper? Just feed the entirety of their digital life into the system and extrapolate the non-digital using generalized "human experience" models built off everyone else to resurrect a copy of them (or many copies) in a simulated continuation of their day to day thinking and working. Very few people fully understand the extent of the digital footprints we are leaving behind in the context of trends in big data. The data we are leaving behind in mass collection will eventually take on (literally) new life.

drfuchs 5y ago

Yeah, he's for real, and I heard him tell this story (and a number of others) about 40 years ago, for what that's worth. In addition to his other info on the web mentioned elsewhere here, there are also quite a selection of his files from the Stanford AI Lab (SAIL) system, that have been pulled off of old backup tapes, and with permission appear at https://www.saildart.org/LES https://www.saildart.org/LES (note the 3-letter account name, and 3-letter, single-level subdirectory names that you can click down into).

dekhn 5y ago
Cool. I mean, wow, that's a great old resource. I like https://www.saildart.org/[OLD,LES]/ https://www.saildart.org/[OLD,LES]/ (always interested in what academic researchers at stanford and berkeley were doing around the time I was born, especially machine learning)
- drfuchs 5y ago
  Well, then you're sure to like https://www.saildart.org/JMC https://www.saildart.org/JMC (John McCarthy).
  - dekhn 5y ago
    Thanks! Some pretty amazing stuff in there including his comments before the four color theorem was proved

2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago

NSA is for foreign surveillance.

standardUser 5y ago
That is not true. The NSA operates domestically as well.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
  https://www.nsa.gov/about/ https://www.nsa.gov/about/
  - boring_twenties 5y ago
    Oh, okay then, case closed. In other news, North Korea says they're a democratic republic, so that's another thing we don't have to worry about.
    - 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
      The 4th Amendment
      - boring_twenties 5y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction
      - dotnet00 5y ago
        Doesn't mean shit without enforcement, which is conveniently also handled by the same cabal. I can't believe this basic fact has to still be argued in a tech focused forum despite the Snowden leaks.
        2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
        https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/court-finds-fbi-use-of-nsa-database-violated-americans-fourth-amendment-rights/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/court-finds-...