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The NSA Can't Tell the Difference Between an American and a Foreigner
- Systemic33 13y agoThere is a joke in that title somewhere...
- foobarbazqux 13y agoWhat's the difference between an American and a Foreigner?
- mehmehshoe 13y agoReplace "foreigner" with "hole in the ground"
- ivanca 13y agoReplace "foreigner" with "Jew" to remember a history lesson that America should not repeat.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- david_shaw 13y agoIsn't the fact that the NSA can't tell if you're American their entire justification for harvesting everyone's data? If they could tell the difference, then there would be no justification for dragnet surveillance.
- codex 13y agoYou also have to presume that terrorists will attempt to look like U.S. citizens (e.g. "John Smith" connecting from a U.S. IP via tunnel) to avoid surveillance.
- sneak 13y agoWhen you monitor all of the network traffic, you can easily deanonymize (even encrypted) tunnels via simple timing attacks. VPNs don't help. I keep getting into discussions with people this month about Tor, and they keep bringing up the fact that "we don't know how many tor nodes are run by the government or other attackers". Fact is, if you can monitor all of the long-haul network traffic in full, you don't need to run _any_ tor nodes to deanonymize all of the users. You can just watch the traffic flows as they go into the tor network, bounce around, and pop out - encrypted or not.
- codex 13y agoAgreed. But when you have "John Smith" coming in over VPN from a foreign IP to a domestic email account, how can you tell if they are an expat citizen or a masquerade? Presumably this is why the NSA monitors whenever at least one half of the connection is foreign.
- sneak 13y agoThe number of expat citizens is small enough as to be statistically insignificant at this scale of monitoring. For all intents and purposes they can just be treated as foreigners. I mean, what real American would ever deign to leave the homeland?! If you leave the USA to go live in some stupid foreign land you must not want your human rights anyway.
- eru 13y ago> If they could tell the difference, then there would be no justification for dragnet surveillance. ... of Americans.
- o0-0o 13y agoE-X-A-C-T-L-Y Although I would make a case for profiling based on names.
- Ihmahr 13y agoRight one brother! Those arab named bastards. Just like that??
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- ck2 13y agoHas anyone else become seriously depressed over all this? I mean the TSA was one thing, they are still horrible but I never fly or take a bus or train, I just hate the idea of them existing. But since the NSA exposure, I just feel seriously depressed about the state of who is running this country and the "just try to stop us" thug mentality. It's a weight on my mind constantly this past month.
- mehmehshoe 13y agoWhat is even more depressing is this: http://www.buzzfeed.com/rosiegray/exclusive-documents-illuminate-ecuadors-spying-practices http://www.buzzfeed.com/rosiegray/exclusive-documents-illumi... I wonder who gave buzzfeed secret documents to make Ecuador look bad? Sigh.. The good part of the story was Ecuador's response.
- mpyne 13y ago"The people who provided BuzzFeed with these documents say that they attempted to leak them to WikiLeaks three days ago, but were unsuccessful. WikiLeaks spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson called this claim “false” and said “No one in our team recognises having been approached with such material as you describe.”" Anyone want to try again with the line that WikiLeaks isn't simply opposed to the U.S. Government, but wrongdoing from governments around the world? Well WikiLeaks, here's your chance to "leak" it for real now that BuzzFeed has co-opted you.
- Volpe 13y agoMaybe goto http://wikileaks.org/ http://wikileaks.org/ There is more than US only leaks... Guess that wouldn't fit your narrative though, so maybe don't go.
- mpyne 13y agoWell I went. Didn't see anything about the Ecuador leaks though. Should I wait another few months maybe? I did see Syria Files though, and was even briefly excited, but I see that WikiLeaks was able to work in a dig at the whole West in the synopsis alone so now I'm sad again.
- joshuaellinger 13y agoIt's a feature, not a bug. They want to case a wide net.
- adventured 13y agoI think the NSA considers this a feature, rather than a bug. If they can't tell the difference it makes it far easier to suspend rights reserved for Americans in the process of spying.
- dfc 13y agoSingle Page: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/06/27/the_nsa_cant_tell_the_difference_between_an_american_and_a_foreigner?page=full http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/06/27/the_nsa_can...
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- marze 13y agoFunny...
- btilly 13y agoWow, the article managed to explain the comment that I had been holding out as the most ridiculous comment ever. And I understand why it was said. The comment was that it would violate the privacy of Americans to try to figure out how many Americans were under surveillance. The key to understanding this is that the NSA believes that it can avoid having to follow the 4th as long as it never intentionally "searches Americans" by doing any analysis on data collected about identified Americans, and immediately throwing away analysis already done once the identification was made. Figuring out how many Americans had been caught up in the dragnet would require doing analysis on identified Americans. That triggers the protection of the 4th, and can only be done under their legal theories with a real warrant. Which they don't have. Therefore attempting to answer that question really does cross the line that they have set for what is and is not legal.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- enraged_camel 13y agoAt this point everyone knows that the NSA cares very, very little about what is legal or not. They are confident that Obama will cover their asses in any way he can, and any judge that tries to rule against them - including the Supreme Court judges - will be branded an activist terrorist-lover.
- pjmlp 13y agoMaybe that is my European view, but how can anyone seriously expected secret services to respect any laws?
- mtgx 13y agoThat doesn't mean they shouldn't be punished when found to be abusing their powers, though. Otherwise we might as well agree to having a shadow government in our democracies, and be fine with it.
- Qantourisc 13y ago
- rurounijones 13y agoAs a "foreigner" (From the American POV) I am getting increasingly annoyed at the whole "American vs foreigner" issue as if spying on normal people from other countries is perfectly ok. Is it so much to ask that I be given the same privacy levels as a US citizen and not be caught in overly-broad privacy invading dragnets?
- krapp 13y agoI keep hearing this from non-Americans. And while I respect it, I always wonder what country they come from that apparently makes no legal distinction between its own citizens and anyone else, and which apparently has no intelligence service at all... This isn't really something that's unique to America, this 'us vs them' attitude is something that's fundamental to the way nations operate, I think.
- rurounijones 13y agoI would argue that most other countries to not have such far-reaching interception programs with access to so much internet traffic[1] and therefore, while their intent is the same, their capability is wildly different which changes priorities somewhat. [1] As the NSA presentation said, an awful lot of backbone traffic passes through the US.
- krapp 13y agoYes, but the political and social barrier between 'citizen' and 'foreigner' is still more or less the same wherever you go, especially where governments are concerned. When I leave the United States, I become a foreigner. My money may be welcome but my motives may be suspect, and I probably don't have the same rights as the locals. The internet shouldn't be a part of it, though. I agree with that 100%. The internet is not America's, we don't own it, we can't act as if anything going through our part of it belongs to us, to do with what we will.
- rurounijones 13y agoActually reading back I didn't make my point correctly. I am naturally outraged at the antics of the NSA and similar organisations (GCHQ etc.). But right now I am really annoyed that the entire debate seems to have focused on "This is affecting us". It seems to have been accepted by everyone (Government, News, Public) that spying like this on foreigners is fine and dandy. I just wish there was a bit more outrage / discussion on the "Is it actually ok to spy on foreigners like this?"
- vasundhar 13y agoNot knowing what is self, and non self is called Immunity disorder than an organisation protecting people. In Human Body it causes death, in a System it causes Death of Democracy, In a family it causes chaos.
- alan_cx 13y agoYet they can enough to deny foreigners any rights.