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Folks, take a step back and take a look what is going on here. When you were a child, would any of you have believed that one day in the early 21st century, you

• muyuu 13y ago
  The US and UK governments among others are textbook terrorist states at this point. The war on terror rhetoric is plain pathetic now. Any self defence measure taken by citizens would be classified as terror by these governments now.
• arethuza 13y ago
  I honestly believe that the "morals" (for lack of a better word) of the UK government haven't actually got any worse over the last 50 years or so - what has changed is that now technology allows so much more so they are quite happy to do it. For example, in the 1980s there was an almighty fuss because an excellent journalist found out that the UK government had wasted vast amounts of money on a failed spy satellite project - that had Special Branch raiding magazine offices and occupying the BBC offices in Glasgow: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zircon_affair http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zircon_affair http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duncan_Campbell_%28journalist%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duncan_Campbell_%28journalist%2... [NB I can strongly recommend Duncan Campbell's "Secret Society" series from 1987 - some of them are on YouTube and they really are scary/tragic - a lot of his concerns are rather prophetic.]
  • api 13y ago
    As an outsider (American) it's long appeared to me that the British government thought 1984 was a utopian blueprint rather than a dystopian novel. :(
    • deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
  • teh_klev 13y ago
    You don't have to trawl through YouTube looking for them, you can find pretty much all of DC's broadcast material here: http://www.duncancampbell.org/content/broadcasting http://www.duncancampbell.org/content/broadcasting
• api 13y ago
  Well, I can say that if Osama bin Laden "hated our freedom," then... well... 9/11 worked, and he won.
  • dhimes 13y ago
    This is the saddest truth.
• GotAnyMegadeth 13y ago
  When I was a kid I assumed that was already happening, and was relieved to find out that it wasn't.
• keithwinstein 13y ago
  > would any of you have believed Yes, honestly. For more than 20 years, the basic message of the cipherpunks and related communities has been that the NSA spends tens of billions of dollars to spy on everything "foreign" that it can possibly get its hands on, and its foreign adversaries are doing the same, so you'd better use PGP (or more) if you want any chance of keeping your communications secret from the government. This is even more true post-9/11 and post-2008 than it was in 1993, milestones that have hardly gone undiscussed in the public discourse about government intelligence gathering. The M-x spook feature of emacs is not a new thing! After all, 40 years ago the Nixon Administration sent thugs to burgle Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist, looking to steal medical records that would reveal embarrassing information about Ellsberg. Hopefully _that_ has gotten better and will never be repeated, but this stuff is just not unprecedented in our history and not something an informed observer would rationally disbelieve. Popular books like "Blind Man's Bluff" document the storied history of the U.S. and adversaries' going to extraordinary lengths to snoop on each other's undersea communications for 70 years. Boeing and Airbus have been publicly accusing each other of profiting from U.S. and French espionage since forever. I think if you read the 2001 European report on Echelon, and coverage of the 2002-2003 U.S. and British spying on the U.N. discussions of the Iraq war resolutions, and the 2005 New York Times coverage of warrantless wiretapping, and the 2006 revelations of NSA back rooms in AT&T fiber closets, and the 2006 USA Today coverage of the NSA call records program, and the subsequent public outcry, culminating in the 2008 FISA Amendments Act that retroactively immunized the telephone companies for their participation (an Act that then-Senator Obama voted for), all to much controversy and angst in these parts, you would not find the contents of the recent Snowden disclosures that surprising. I do think the Snowden disclosures have added incrementally to the public understanding and made it much more precise, although in the places where they hint at something more dramatic -- e.g. the PRISM program -- the conflicting statements (and relative silence from Snowden himself) mean that so far we are still mostly in the dark about what PRISM really is or does. The PowerPoint slides are nice but it would be a lot nicer to have somebody who actually knows this stuff, or at the least something more verbose than PowerPoint. Obviously, the Snowden disclosures also have performed a valuable service in bringing this matter back into the public discourse, because most people do not pay that close attention and probably do not remember the 2001 Echelon report or the 2003 and 2005 and 2006 articles or the debate over the 2008 law and they probably stopped using M-x spook back when Clipper stopped being a threat. And the Snowden slides seem to be causing Congress to pay closer attention to the issue, which is a good thing even if they may not literally be giving the committees any information they didn't already have. And of course the theatrics of running away to Hong Kong and getting stuck in Russia and getting locked up for nine hours in Heathrow and having a newspaper's hard drives smashed by British spy thugs are extraordinary and read like a spy novel. But if the question is -- for somebody who did pay attention (as an informed amateur outside observer) to the debate post-9/11 about tearing down "the wall" between intelligence collection and criminal investigations, and who followed the prominent discussion in major national newspapers over the last 15 years, would you have believed the recent Snowden materials? I think the answer so far has to be yes, and more than that, you would have known most of what has come out so far already, albeit with less precision and less certainty. I'm less on top of the way the U.K. treats their news outlets, but I think the recent stuff is not out of character for them, given their routine use of their official secrets act to suppress information. We're more fortunate in the U.S., partly as a result of cases like the Pentagon Papers that could have gone the other way if things had shaken out differently. [This thread has summoned up memories of visiting the NSA (well, super.org, which is practically an NSA subsidiary) as a high-school student in 1999 and trying to grill them about Echelon and the Menwith Hill facility, and also about whether they could crack RSA. They were not very responsive to any of those questions, which I guess was good training for the future. In their machine room, they had a CM-5 with all the blinkenlights just like in "Jurassic Park" which was definitely the coolest part of the tour. They said they had a debate about whether they would have to classify the CM-5 blinkenlights (which display, like, the 17th bit of every megabyte in memory or something like that) but apparently they decided it was ok.]
• alistair77 13y ago
  I listened to an interview with the Home Secretary, Theresa May, yesterday. She explicitly stated several times that she had no say in the Miranda's detention as it was a police matter. Odd, then, that she is responsible for the secret services and it is MI5, not the police, who are the primary in all anti-terrorism investigations.
  • josephlord 13y ago
    The police in the UK do have sufficient independence to arrest against the Home Secretarry's wishes and MI5 have no arrest powers they normally get the Special Branch of the Metropolitan Police to do the arresting I believe. However I think that if she had politely suggested that they be careful not to stretch anti-terror laws to far that they would have probably listened.
• fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
  >When you were a child, would any of you have believed.... Actually, yeah. I read 1984 at age 10, and somehow grokked enough about what that would mean. >Like a cheap sci-fi novel has become reality? Like Orwell, Huxley, Bradbury, with a little Kafka thrown in. I'm not sure "cheap" is the word I'd use here. >I for one am more scared, appaled by what has been bubbling to the surface every week, almost every day since Snowden. I'm glad that I'm not 'crazy' anymore. It's a good thing that it is out in the open now. It was more frightening when nearly everyone ignored it.
  • swombat 13y ago
    More than a little Kafka. The secret laws interpreted by secret courts with secret opinions being used to secretly murder citizens "legally" without the slightest hint of a trial is solid Kafka. The innocent people held in high-security prison indefinitely on secret charges because it's too difficult to work out a legal framework to set them free are also solid Kafka.
  • einhverfr 13y ago
    > I'm glad that I'm not 'crazy' anymore. Someone called me 'crazy' today for mentioning the Guardian hard drive story. I wonder.... how many people have blinders on :-( The thing is I am not convinced the technology is actually good enough to make sense of what they get. They have to decide to look at someone first. This means that it is a way to discredit and jail or worse people who become sufficiently inconvenient to the powers that be.
• rainsford 13y ago
  I certainly get the "cheap sci-fi novel" feeling reading a lot of commentary on the Internet. But honestly, taking a step back and looking at what's actually happening puts things in a much different perspective and makes comments about living in a dystopian future seem more than a little silly. Look at the David Miranda situation. The Internet reaction about living in a police state was immediate, but the rhetoric didn't seem to match what really happened (at least to me). A non-UK citizen (as far as I'm aware) was transporting classified information through a UK airport almost certainly for the purposes of releasing that information, information the UK government considers damaging if it was to be released. The information is confiscated, but the man himself is let go. And afterwards, the man's journalist husband more or less openly threatens the UK government with the release of more classified information in retaliation. That's not quite how I remember sci-fi police state stories usually going.
  • CaptainZapp 13y ago
    Well, the whole affair sounds a bit like a he-said, she-said. There are claims that Mr. Miranda was a courier and that they offered a lawyer and water during the 9 hour ordeal. The law office, which represents Mr. Miranda categorically denies that legal representation was ever offered to him, for example. Now, I don't know the truth, but even assuming he had documents they wanted to get their hands on, or files on his devices that they thought pertinent they could have handled the whole thing in 30 minutes max and then let him go on his merry way. That they held him - almost to the minute - for the legal maximum of 9 hours looks not only vindictive it looks as if they indeed intended to send a message. Put that into context with other documented occurrences, like the totally senseless destruction of hardware and sandbagging the Guardian into this action (and yes, The Guardian has here more credibility then the UK government, which denies any threats, but that's just me) and we get a whole other picture. While totalitarian police state may be an over exaggeration , we should be very careful about the direction this is going into. Assume you're a journalist and suddenly the government(s) have a truckload embarrassing material on you (from Google searches, Facebook accounts, Skype calls and whatever your friendly operating system leaks directly to the NSA's vacuum cleaners) to directly blackmail you. And no, I don't consider myself a member of the black helicopter faction, but nevertheless find those developments extremely worrying.
• Mordor 13y ago
  Spying on people is terrorism and should stop ASAP.
  • twoodfin 13y ago
    So you'd describe what the folks at Bletchley Park did 70 years ago as terrorism?
    • antman 13y ago
      They were not spying on people as far as I know.
      • twoodfin 13y ago
        Huh? The whole facility, and the brilliant minds working there, existed entirely to enable the successful decryption of Axis transmissions. If that's not "spying", I don't know what is.
    • LoganCale 13y ago
      Spying on military communications during active wartime is part of the game of war and is acceptable. Spying on the general public en masse is not.
      • twoodfin 13y ago
        That's not what the comment I responded to claimed.
  • lttlrck 13y ago
    No. https://www.google.com/search?q=spy+define https://www.google.com/search?q=spy+define
• edw519 13y ago
  When you were a child... When I was a child, the President of the United States was murdered in front of thousands of onlookers and the primary suspect was murdered on live television (while I was watching) by a mob hit man. As far as we know, everyone behind this got away with it and got everything they wanted. Since then, not much has really surprised me.
• antman 13y ago
  -would any of you have believed that one day in the early 21st century no I always thought it would be at one day in the late 20th century. Probably because my parents had found and bought me in comics "1984" and the "Animal farm" when I was a kid
• Keyframe 13y ago
  Coming from a country where this was the norm only 20 something years ago, I never had any thoughts that it would be otherwise in US or anywhere else basically.We were on the edge of Iron curtain, why would I think cold war main conflicted parties would live within their borders without mechanisms such as this, albeit toned down? Cold war never stopped, it switched objectives from war to control and finance.
• drzaiusapelord 13y ago
  I guess if you ignored the decades of reporting on the NSA and recent items like Echelon, Carnivore, Total Informational Awareness, etc you might be a little surprised. Or the equivalant programs in Germany, France, England, Israel, Australia, Canada, etc that have also surfaced.
• dalore 13y ago
  Yes but when you professed such beliefs you were labelled a conspiracy nutter. Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't listening.
• zanny 13y ago
  I was born in '91, and grew up under the Internet, and from a very young age (3?) I realized everything that was leaving my home on a network connection was easily recorded and monitored. I never assumed otherwise. Anything I don't want my Internet provider, government, or hostile snooper to know I just don't put online. I don't think I ever expected any less, since I was raised knowing the horrors and atrocities of the last hundred years between ww2 and the treatment of the Japanese and the cold war and the treatment of pretty much everyone.
• wslh 13y ago
  I mean, isn't this almost surreal? Like a cheap sci-fi novel has become reality? Not surreal but I ask the HN community: will this ignite a hacker revolution against the government(s)? At one point the different governments are in a weaker situation since there are a huge amount of cybersecurity attack vectors against them.
• adammichaelc 13y ago
  What do we do about it? Is it possible to disrupt the government? Somehow create a system that renders them obsolete?
  • betterunix 13y ago
    Governments of some kind are needed as soon as you have a large enough population. Our ability to cooperate and peacefully resolve our problems breaks down when there are too many people involved. At the very least we need courts and agreed upon laws, or else we will just splinter off into little gangs that start killing each other whenever there is a disagreement. The problem here is not the existence of a government, but the specific government that we have. Here in the USA we have soldiers enforcing our laws, and a legal code that can and frequently does turn a routine traffic stop into a multiyear prison sentence. The major political parties in this country are united in their support for this tyranny. In addition, we have spent decades ceding more and more power to the executive branch and creating a government that operates behind a veil of secrecy. For the Americans here, I propose the following: be brave, vote third party and risk "the other guy" winning. In exchange for a few years with the wrong lizard in power, you will have sent a strong message to the major party that thought it could count on your vote. If the major parties do not learn, eventually the third parties will have so many people voting for them that they will replace the major parties. Either way we will have made progress towards repairing our government.
• bowlofpetunias 13y ago
  Well, my wife would have. But she was born and raised on the other side of the Berlin wall.
• adrianwaj 13y ago
  "Who's the real terrorists in 2013?" Comfort-maximizing system-lickers.
• rdtsc 13y ago
  > When you were a child, would any of you have believed that one day in the early 21st century, you would wake up in a world where your own government spies on each and every single citizen, plus whoever is connected to them in another country, where they send agents to newspapers to oppress the freedom of the press? Yes. But I was living in the Soviet Union ;-)
• wissler 13y ago
  When you were a child, would any of you have believed that one day in the early 21st century, you would wake up in a world where your own government spies on each and every single citizen... A child with a proper education in history would not have been surprised. Nor would a child with a proper education think it was perfectly fine to have the institution of government so intrusively involved with the education of children.