7 ms·

We know now that communications are being intercepted in bulk as a matter of intelligence gathering, but that does not equate to everyone being surveilled by th

by ginush 10mo ago

We know now that communications are being intercepted in bulk as a matter of intelligence gathering, but that does not equate to everyone being surveilled by the government. What this actually provides, first and foremost, is the capability to perform targeted surveillance more rapidly, and to do so temporally by reaching into datasets already recorded. Obviously this provides a much-needed capability for legitimate investigations, where the target of interest and their identifying markers may not yet be known.

ok123456 10mo ago
>We know now that communications are being intercepted in bulk as a matter of intelligence gathering, but that does not equate to everyone being surveilled by the government. Yes it does.
- ginush 10mo ago
  No it doesn't. Think about it. Some computer somewhere that is involved in bulk interception happens to record your browser connecting to, say, the Hacker News website, at various dates and times. This is stored in a dataset. No-one ever views these connection records. No-one ever writes a query for the dataset that returns these connection records. These connection records are automatically deleted after the retention period is up. Clearly, you are not being surveilled.
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
  - Larrikin 10mo ago
    Analytics are mining the data on here every second. Hacker News is a wildly popular site with higher ups in major Fortune 500 company posting anonymously and publicly here. Say anything bad about a major country's government (or even a minor country like Israel or Palestine) and all kinds of accounts you've never seen before start defending and attacking. Everything you are saying is being actively monitored at this point on every major website even if you don't believe it's negatively affecting you yet
    - ginush 10mo ago
      An analyst who is tasked with investigating, say, terrorist threats, is not going to be remotely interested in the browsing habits of random people who pose no threat whatsoever. It's just pure paranoia. Yes, we know bulk interception is being done by intelligence agencies. No, they're not watching you. They have more important things to be getting on with.
      - Larrikin 10mo ago
        Your are arguing from a green account that everyone should ignore all evidence contrary to what you are saying and just calling everyone paranoid for not pretending that evidence doesn't exist. The same government that is demanding all visitors to the United States show them all posts they have made online as a condition of entry. It is not an argument worth engaging with anymore.
        ginush 10mo ago
        That supports my point. If there really was a mass surveillance regime as the paranoics claim, there would be no need for the border control agents to ask for social media posts to be shown on entry. They would already have this information.
        LargoLasskhyfv 10mo ago
        No, it does not! Doppelt genäht hält besser! https://dict.leo.org/german-english/Doppelt%20gen%C3%A4ht%20h%C3%A4lt%20besser https://dict.leo.org/german-english/Doppelt%20gen%C3%A4ht%20.... Also plausible deniability and/or competition/mistrust between different actors/agencies.
      - LargoLasskhyfv 10mo ago
        R U sure/serious? There is the concept of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragnet_(policing) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragnet_(policing) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentiment_analysis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentiment_analysis Combine that with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geofence_warrant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geofence_warrant and enjoy the possible hassle of being 'by-catch'.
  - nhhvhy 10mo ago
    I thought about it, and now I’m even more convinced we are being surveilled.
  - DennisP 10mo ago
    So your claim is that this massive data collection, done at massive public expense, is not used at all? That seems unlikely. And given how good computers are at natural language processing these days, the data is more usable than ever.
    - ginush 10mo ago
      Of course it is used. But unless you're a target of interest to intelligence analysts, the metadata generated by your online activities will be of no interest whatsoever. It won't even be looked at.
      - DennisP 10mo ago
        The whole point of mass data collection is that you can check everyone to see if they should be targets of interest. And as societies get more totalitarian, what qualifies you to be a target becomes less and less dramatic. Doing this is easy these days. You keep using phrases like "looked at" as if humans had to manually read through the records.
      - sunaookami 10mo ago
        It leads to a Chilling Effect which has a huge negative impact on society.
timschmidt 10mo ago
William Binney, former technical director of NSA disagrees: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3owk7vEEOvs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3owk7vEEOvs I see further down the thread you claim that surveillance data is deleted without ever being looked at. Must be why they need a half dozen gargantuan datacenters full of storage and compute.
- jeffbee 10mo ago
  This is the correct point of reference, but you are misinterpreting it and I urge you to think about it again. All of the government's facilities put together amount to almost nothing in the data center landscape, therefore it should be quite obvious that they certainly are not equipped to broadly intercept, store, and search "everything".
  - timschmidt 10mo ago
    "A former senior U.S. intelligence agent described Alexander's program: "Rather than look for a single needle in the haystack, his approach was, 'Let's collect the whole haystack. Collect it all, tag it, store it ... And whatever it is you want, you go searching for it."" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_B._Alexander#NSA_appointment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_B._Alexander#NSA_appoint...
    - jeffbee 10mo ago
      What you're describing is a program from 20 years ago design to surveil limited parties in a limited geographic region overseas, during a war, in a place that enjoyed Stone Age information systems. That is not in the sense that the people in this discussion meant by blanket surveillance. They are talking about broad interception of all communications by U.S. persons, an undertaking that it should be obvious to you if you are in this industry would be economically if not thermodynamically impossible.
      - timschmidt 10mo ago
        "After 9/11, they took one of the programs I had done, or the backend part of it, and started to use it to spy on everybody in this country. That was a program I created called Stellar Wind. That was seperate and compartmented from the regular activity which was ongoing because it was doing domestic spying. All the equipment was coming in, I knew something was happening but then when the contractors I had hired came and told me what they were doing, it was clear where all the hardware was going and what they were using it to do. It was simply a different input, instead of being foreign it was domestic." - William Binney https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=590cy1biewc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=590cy1biewc
ProllyInfamous 10mo ago
I was sitting in the auditorium, early 2010s at DEF CON ~X[¿I?]X~, when General Alexander gave the headlining speech of that conference (then-Director of NSA). Within the speech he defined the world "intercept," within the intelligence community, as meaning a human operator has (in some manner) catalogued some piece of information. The implication was that all data in stored forever, and machine learning tasks were making associations without meeting their definition of "having been intercepted" — even with the elementary ML of fifteen years ago, this was a striking admission. ---- This was among the first things I thought about during my initial weeks using GPT-3.5 (~January 2023): that most of these conversations wouldn't be considered "intercepted" despite this immense capability of humanless understanding. Now, almost three years later, I_just_hope_our_names_touch_on_this_watchlist.jpg
protocolture 10mo ago
>We know now that communications are being intercepted in bulk as a matter of intelligence gathering, but that does not equate to everyone being surveilled by the government. Yeah it does. Especially because its being added to a very searchable database that can be accessed via a bewildering number of people.

by ginush 10mo ago

ok123456 10mo ago

>We know now that communications are being intercepted in bulk as a matter of intelligence gathering, but that does not equate to everyone being surveilled by the government. Yes it does.

ginush 10mo ago
No it doesn't. Think about it. Some computer somewhere that is involved in bulk interception happens to record your browser connecting to, say, the Hacker News website, at various dates and times. This is stored in a dataset. No-one ever views these connection records. No-one ever writes a query for the dataset that returns these connection records. These connection records are automatically deleted after the retention period is up. Clearly, you are not being surveilled.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- Larrikin 10mo ago
  Analytics are mining the data on here every second. Hacker News is a wildly popular site with higher ups in major Fortune 500 company posting anonymously and publicly here. Say anything bad about a major country's government (or even a minor country like Israel or Palestine) and all kinds of accounts you've never seen before start defending and attacking. Everything you are saying is being actively monitored at this point on every major website even if you don't believe it's negatively affecting you yet
  - ginush 10mo ago
    An analyst who is tasked with investigating, say, terrorist threats, is not going to be remotely interested in the browsing habits of random people who pose no threat whatsoever. It's just pure paranoia. Yes, we know bulk interception is being done by intelligence agencies. No, they're not watching you. They have more important things to be getting on with.
    - Larrikin 10mo ago
      Your are arguing from a green account that everyone should ignore all evidence contrary to what you are saying and just calling everyone paranoid for not pretending that evidence doesn't exist. The same government that is demanding all visitors to the United States show them all posts they have made online as a condition of entry. It is not an argument worth engaging with anymore.
      - ginush 10mo ago
        That supports my point. If there really was a mass surveillance regime as the paranoics claim, there would be no need for the border control agents to ask for social media posts to be shown on entry. They would already have this information.
        LargoLasskhyfv 10mo ago
        No, it does not! Doppelt genäht hält besser! https://dict.leo.org/german-english/Doppelt%20gen%C3%A4ht%20h%C3%A4lt%20besser https://dict.leo.org/german-english/Doppelt%20gen%C3%A4ht%20.... Also plausible deniability and/or competition/mistrust between different actors/agencies.
    - LargoLasskhyfv 10mo ago
      R U sure/serious? There is the concept of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragnet_(policing) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragnet_(policing) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentiment_analysis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentiment_analysis Combine that with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geofence_warrant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geofence_warrant and enjoy the possible hassle of being 'by-catch'.
- nhhvhy 10mo ago
  I thought about it, and now I’m even more convinced we are being surveilled.
- DennisP 10mo ago
  So your claim is that this massive data collection, done at massive public expense, is not used at all? That seems unlikely. And given how good computers are at natural language processing these days, the data is more usable than ever.
  - ginush 10mo ago
    Of course it is used. But unless you're a target of interest to intelligence analysts, the metadata generated by your online activities will be of no interest whatsoever. It won't even be looked at.
    - DennisP 10mo ago
      The whole point of mass data collection is that you can check everyone to see if they should be targets of interest. And as societies get more totalitarian, what qualifies you to be a target becomes less and less dramatic. Doing this is easy these days. You keep using phrases like "looked at" as if humans had to manually read through the records.
    - sunaookami 10mo ago
      It leads to a Chilling Effect which has a huge negative impact on society.

timschmidt 10mo ago

William Binney, former technical director of NSA disagrees: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3owk7vEEOvs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3owk7vEEOvs I see further down the thread you claim that surveillance data is deleted without ever being looked at. Must be why they need a half dozen gargantuan datacenters full of storage and compute.

jeffbee 10mo ago
This is the correct point of reference, but you are misinterpreting it and I urge you to think about it again. All of the government's facilities put together amount to almost nothing in the data center landscape, therefore it should be quite obvious that they certainly are not equipped to broadly intercept, store, and search "everything".
- timschmidt 10mo ago
  "A former senior U.S. intelligence agent described Alexander's program: "Rather than look for a single needle in the haystack, his approach was, 'Let's collect the whole haystack. Collect it all, tag it, store it ... And whatever it is you want, you go searching for it."" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_B._Alexander#NSA_appointment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_B._Alexander#NSA_appoint...
  - jeffbee 10mo ago
    What you're describing is a program from 20 years ago design to surveil limited parties in a limited geographic region overseas, during a war, in a place that enjoyed Stone Age information systems. That is not in the sense that the people in this discussion meant by blanket surveillance. They are talking about broad interception of all communications by U.S. persons, an undertaking that it should be obvious to you if you are in this industry would be economically if not thermodynamically impossible.
    - timschmidt 10mo ago
      "After 9/11, they took one of the programs I had done, or the backend part of it, and started to use it to spy on everybody in this country. That was a program I created called Stellar Wind. That was seperate and compartmented from the regular activity which was ongoing because it was doing domestic spying. All the equipment was coming in, I knew something was happening but then when the contractors I had hired came and told me what they were doing, it was clear where all the hardware was going and what they were using it to do. It was simply a different input, instead of being foreign it was domestic." - William Binney https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=590cy1biewc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=590cy1biewc

ProllyInfamous 10mo ago

I was sitting in the auditorium, early 2010s at DEF CON ~X[¿I?]X~, when General Alexander gave the headlining speech of that conference (then-Director of NSA). Within the speech he defined the world "intercept," within the intelligence community, as meaning a human operator has (in some manner) catalogued some piece of information. The implication was that all data in stored forever, and machine learning tasks were making associations without meeting their definition of "having been intercepted" — even with the elementary ML of fifteen years ago, this was a striking admission. ---- This was among the first things I thought about during my initial weeks using GPT-3.5 (~January 2023): that most of these conversations wouldn't be considered "intercepted" despite this immense capability of humanless understanding. Now, almost three years later, I_just_hope_our_names_touch_on_this_watchlist.jpg

protocolture 10mo ago

>We know now that communications are being intercepted in bulk as a matter of intelligence gathering, but that does not equate to everyone being surveilled by the government. Yeah it does. Especially because its being added to a very searchable database that can be accessed via a bewildering number of people.