6 ms·

I wonder how many people reading this helped build the systems that integrate with NSA

by AsymetricCom 13y ago

DamnYuppie 13y ago
I am sure quite a few but how many could talk about it if they did?
- PavlovsCat 13y ago
  What's worse, how many of them can even properly think about it? The "nothing to see here" stuff in the last weeks really made me wonder, and all the splitting hairs about individual puzzle pieces without ever looking up at the puzzle itself. When it comes to this on HN, there are many insightful comments, but also a lot of telling sophistry, and I think even more interesting are the patterns of silence. Would I expect a ranking member of the Chinese Communist Party to reflect upon their role in history, or have a meaningful discussion with others beyond "you're all wrong" and pouting, thinking the topic is beneath them when it's the other way around? Nah, something like that hardly ever happens, it is left to others.
  - coldtea 13y ago
    >What's worse, how many of them can even properly think about it? The "nothing to see here" stuff in the last weeks really made me wonder, and all the splitting hairs about individual puzzle pieces without ever looking up at the puzzle itself. When it comes to this on HN, there are many insightful comments, but also a lot of telling sophistry, and I think even more interesting are the patterns of silence. That. In a community where several people have worked in such schemes and/or with the government, I guess that's to be expected. There's this notion that "tech guy == liberal" or at least against any kind of suppression of freedom of information and such, but real life doesn't work that way. There have been tons of tech guys and/or scientists that have willingly and cheerfully helped every rotten regime on the planet. It's a profession, after all, not an ideology.
    - PavlovsCat 13y ago
      I didn't mean to point fingers at people, I mean, really, I blame a lot of people for a lot of things, and myself for most of them as well -- but I still found it frustrating at first, and then really telling. People think walking out of it ends the discussion and the thought process -- but it simply means I am thinking about you instead of with you, and you get to hear it from others instead of directly. Some things are too big to end at the sensibilities of any person on this planet. Since I know for a fact that the people at the top are deluded and could really use some saving from themselves -- without knowing any of them, simply because power and wealth as ends in and of themselves are black holes, and only the mediocre pursue them -- there is simply nothing left to tip toe around, just a lot to discuss. And the initial condescension reminded me of this quote, the bit about privilege: I've heard quite a lot of people that talk about post-privacy, and they talk about it in terms of feeling like, you know, it's too late, we're done for, there's just no possibility for privacy left anymore and we just have to get used to it. And this is a pretty fascinating thing, because it seems to me that you never hear a feminist say that we're post-consent because there is rape. And why is that? The reason is that it's bullshit. We can't have a post-privacy world until we're post-privilege. So when we cave in our autonomy, then we can sort of say, "well, okay, we don't need privacy anymore, in fact we don't have privacy anymore, and I'm okay with that." Realistically though people are not comfortable with that. Because, if you only look at it from a position of privilege, like, say, white man on a stage, then yeah, maybe post-privacy works out okay for those people. But if you have ever not been, or if you are currently not, a white man with a passport from one of the five good nations in the world, it might not really work out well for you, and in fact it might be designed specifically such that it will continue to not work out well for you, because the structures themselves produce these inequalities. So when you hear someone talk about post-privacy, I think it's really important to engage them about their own privilege in the system and what it is they are actually arguing for. -- Jacob Appelbaum ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3h46EbqhPo&t=7m46s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3h46EbqhPo&t=7m46s ) Maybe outrage isn't helpful, as a constant emotional state that is, but let's say "if you're not discussing this seriously, you're not paying attention", neither to today nor to history.
droithomme 13y ago
Many Palantir employees, including high level ones, have made little secret of their participation on Hacker News, mentioning their company in posts here. You may recall they were involved in plotting to destroy journalist Glen Greenwald and his family. http://www.salon.com/2011/02/15/palantir/ http://www.salon.com/2011/02/15/palantir/ Plotting to destroy journalists who out government corruption and illegal behavior. Can't think of anything more undemocratic, actually the correct description is that an organization that plots to destroy journalists can not be described as anything other than a terrorist organization which is at war with the american people. But these terrorists at Palantir are proud of their affiliation with this terrorist crime syndicate. http://wiki.echelon2.org/wiki/Palantir http://wiki.echelon2.org/wiki/Palantir From posts on HN we see either that fascism and a hatred of freedom and democracy are extremely common in the tech industry OR there are a lot of organized sock puppet and persona accounts here. I personally think the latter is more likely - look at the "top voted" comment from a 1 day old account. Legit votes pushing it to the top? No way.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- pstuart 13y ago
  So when do we start the campaign questioning Peter Thiel's role in this?
- rozap 13y ago
  I know we often try to keep it civil around here, but shame on them. Actually, let me rephrase, Fuck Palantir. There is a point at which I disregard the technical hurdles that they overcome, due to the fact that they're at odds with our constitution. They are far, far past that point.
  - droithomme 13y ago
    Yeah, the things they are up to are bad. There's another thread on HN right now about Palantir's involvement with mobile license plate readers and the extent to which these are photographing and tracking the movements of tens of millions of people without warrant or cause and feeding the results into intelligence fusion centers. The article below notes the case of a security consultant who filed a request for his own info and found he had been photographed 112 times by just one of these programs, including one photo that was a photo of his daughters in the driveway of his own house, apparently taken by cameras installed on randomly passing police cars which just scan in everything they see and feed it to computers for analysis. http://www.cryptogon.com/?p=35851 http://www.cryptogon.com/?p=35851 http://cironline.org/reports/license-plate-readers-let-police-collect-millions-records-drivers-4883 http://cironline.org/reports/license-plate-readers-let-polic... Anonymous got a lucky break and found out about what was really going on at a few of these firms. There are a lot more firms and it isn't going to be so easy for grey hats to break in and release documents in the future. This doesn't mean that these firms aren't still engaging in widespread programs that make the Stasi look like a child's birthday game.

I wonder how many people reading this helped build the systems that integrate with NSA

DamnYuppie 13y ago

I am sure quite a few but how many could talk about it if they did?

PavlovsCat 13y ago
What's worse, how many of them can even properly think about it? The "nothing to see here" stuff in the last weeks really made me wonder, and all the splitting hairs about individual puzzle pieces without ever looking up at the puzzle itself. When it comes to this on HN, there are many insightful comments, but also a lot of telling sophistry, and I think even more interesting are the patterns of silence. Would I expect a ranking member of the Chinese Communist Party to reflect upon their role in history, or have a meaningful discussion with others beyond "you're all wrong" and pouting, thinking the topic is beneath them when it's the other way around? Nah, something like that hardly ever happens, it is left to others.
- coldtea 13y ago
  >What's worse, how many of them can even properly think about it? The "nothing to see here" stuff in the last weeks really made me wonder, and all the splitting hairs about individual puzzle pieces without ever looking up at the puzzle itself. When it comes to this on HN, there are many insightful comments, but also a lot of telling sophistry, and I think even more interesting are the patterns of silence. That. In a community where several people have worked in such schemes and/or with the government, I guess that's to be expected. There's this notion that "tech guy == liberal" or at least against any kind of suppression of freedom of information and such, but real life doesn't work that way. There have been tons of tech guys and/or scientists that have willingly and cheerfully helped every rotten regime on the planet. It's a profession, after all, not an ideology.
  - PavlovsCat 13y ago
    I didn't mean to point fingers at people, I mean, really, I blame a lot of people for a lot of things, and myself for most of them as well -- but I still found it frustrating at first, and then really telling. People think walking out of it ends the discussion and the thought process -- but it simply means I am thinking about you instead of with you, and you get to hear it from others instead of directly. Some things are too big to end at the sensibilities of any person on this planet. Since I know for a fact that the people at the top are deluded and could really use some saving from themselves -- without knowing any of them, simply because power and wealth as ends in and of themselves are black holes, and only the mediocre pursue them -- there is simply nothing left to tip toe around, just a lot to discuss. And the initial condescension reminded me of this quote, the bit about privilege: I've heard quite a lot of people that talk about post-privacy, and they talk about it in terms of feeling like, you know, it's too late, we're done for, there's just no possibility for privacy left anymore and we just have to get used to it. And this is a pretty fascinating thing, because it seems to me that you never hear a feminist say that we're post-consent because there is rape. And why is that? The reason is that it's bullshit. We can't have a post-privacy world until we're post-privilege. So when we cave in our autonomy, then we can sort of say, "well, okay, we don't need privacy anymore, in fact we don't have privacy anymore, and I'm okay with that." Realistically though people are not comfortable with that. Because, if you only look at it from a position of privilege, like, say, white man on a stage, then yeah, maybe post-privacy works out okay for those people. But if you have ever not been, or if you are currently not, a white man with a passport from one of the five good nations in the world, it might not really work out well for you, and in fact it might be designed specifically such that it will continue to not work out well for you, because the structures themselves produce these inequalities. So when you hear someone talk about post-privacy, I think it's really important to engage them about their own privilege in the system and what it is they are actually arguing for. -- Jacob Appelbaum ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3h46EbqhPo&t=7m46s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3h46EbqhPo&t=7m46s ) Maybe outrage isn't helpful, as a constant emotional state that is, but let's say "if you're not discussing this seriously, you're not paying attention", neither to today nor to history.

droithomme 13y ago

Many Palantir employees, including high level ones, have made little secret of their participation on Hacker News, mentioning their company in posts here. You may recall they were involved in plotting to destroy journalist Glen Greenwald and his family. http://www.salon.com/2011/02/15/palantir/ http://www.salon.com/2011/02/15/palantir/ Plotting to destroy journalists who out government corruption and illegal behavior. Can't think of anything more undemocratic, actually the correct description is that an organization that plots to destroy journalists can not be described as anything other than a terrorist organization which is at war with the american people. But these terrorists at Palantir are proud of their affiliation with this terrorist crime syndicate. http://wiki.echelon2.org/wiki/Palantir http://wiki.echelon2.org/wiki/Palantir From posts on HN we see either that fascism and a hatred of freedom and democracy are extremely common in the tech industry OR there are a lot of organized sock puppet and persona accounts here. I personally think the latter is more likely - look at the "top voted" comment from a 1 day old account. Legit votes pushing it to the top? No way.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
pstuart 13y ago
So when do we start the campaign questioning Peter Thiel's role in this?
rozap 13y ago
I know we often try to keep it civil around here, but shame on them. Actually, let me rephrase, Fuck Palantir. There is a point at which I disregard the technical hurdles that they overcome, due to the fact that they're at odds with our constitution. They are far, far past that point.
- droithomme 13y ago
  Yeah, the things they are up to are bad. There's another thread on HN right now about Palantir's involvement with mobile license plate readers and the extent to which these are photographing and tracking the movements of tens of millions of people without warrant or cause and feeding the results into intelligence fusion centers. The article below notes the case of a security consultant who filed a request for his own info and found he had been photographed 112 times by just one of these programs, including one photo that was a photo of his daughters in the driveway of his own house, apparently taken by cameras installed on randomly passing police cars which just scan in everything they see and feed it to computers for analysis. http://www.cryptogon.com/?p=35851 http://www.cryptogon.com/?p=35851 http://cironline.org/reports/license-plate-readers-let-police-collect-millions-records-drivers-4883 http://cironline.org/reports/license-plate-readers-let-polic... Anonymous got a lucky break and found out about what was really going on at a few of these firms. There are a lot more firms and it isn't going to be so easy for grey hats to break in and release documents in the future. This doesn't mean that these firms aren't still engaging in widespread programs that make the Stasi look like a child's birthday game.