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After a while all these news items about the NSA and GCHQ can seem a bit too much, but not if we take a step back and really understand the enormity of it all.
by r0h1n 13y ago
After a while all these news items about the NSA and GCHQ can seem a bit too much, but not if we take a step back and really understand the enormity of it all.
The NSA and its cohorts set up fake Facebook websites, spoof security certificates, secretly record webcam streams, vacuum up everything they can lay their hands on etc.
Meanwhile the CIA coolly wipes hundreds of documents from the machines of those who are investigating it, and when caught, threaten their overseers with criminal charges.
Given the scale of their operations, tens of billions of dollars in budgets and how many years they've been at it (this article essentially talks about what the NSA was doing in 2009), is it now futile to think that govt. agencies around the world can ever be expected to turn the clock back?
I mean, really, is there any possible reality that involves the NSA/GCHQ deleting the mountains of data they have surreptitiously recorded? And unplugging or reversing the hundreds of traps, backdoors, viruses, intercepts, decoys that are aimed at common citizens?
- bananas 13y agoYes it's called a revolution at which point we storm the bases and burn the data centres and monitoring stations to the ground. But, as Huxley was so keen to point out, that's not going to happen when people are staring at Honey Boo Boo and Hollyoaks.
- JulianMorrison 13y agoRevolution is a tool of limited usefulness, and violent ones very often put something back in that is just as bad as what they ejected (see also: the KGB).
- bananas 13y agoIt's more complicated than that. ----->[ good times ]---->[ hard times ] ---> [fascism] --\ ^ | \-------------------[revolution] <--------------------/ Revolution merely starts the cycle again. We'll always end up with the KGB, Stasi, NSA, GCHQ, CIA etc so you have to deconstruct society regularly to flush it out. We're stuck in a pretty long loop at the moment just verging on hard times. Edit: the "good times" above is optional.
- sillysaurus3 13y agoLuckily, our founding fathers built in a way to achieve the same effects as a revolution without any violence. If you were to start an armed insurrection, the government would be totally justified in ending you. Not a smart decision given today's level of technology. It was through sheer luck that the American revolution worked at all: the British commanders were so incredibly incompetent that they checkmated themselves.
- JoeAltmaier 13y agoActually its been remarkably effective in other countries, have you been reading the news? Our own soldiers have not been terribly effective at pacifying unrest, and the locals have nothing but rifles etc.
- sillysaurus3 13y agoIt's kind of interesting to think about. Remember the hullabaloo just after the Boston bomber lit off the bomb but wasn't caught yet? Imagine all of that societal rage focused on a small group of people who have started an armed conflict and killed a few policemen, and you can imagine how quickly that group will be annihilated.
- JoeAltmaier 13y agoYeah, you suppose one person - easy to find and contain. But a diffuse population of unrest? Impossible.
- unethical_ban 13y agoWhen I think about Dorner or the Boston bombers, I think about how much chaos they caused, and the fact that they evaded regional manhunts for days while accomplishing their goal. To contrast your observation: Imagine what a group of dedicated, intelligent agents could do to stir things up.
- 13y ago
- Spooky23 13y agoBureaucracy survives revolutions, and often flourishes, as the bureaucats know how to get things done and more importantly how to exert control. Security orgs especially. Consider Mr. Putin's past as an example. If you work with government, you'll observe this first hand. The second echelons of management that are "professional" staff run the day to day operations, and can often bend or break political directives.
- venomsnake 13y agoJust a nitpick. It was Cheka(ЧК) and NKVD that were the scary secret police in the bad years of USSR. KGB as an agency didn't exist yet.
- chongli 13y agoLet's say we do that and then what? The NSA/GCHQ decides to build a fully decentralized spy network. Millions of nodes connected all over the place; a botnet of spying. Sound familiar?
- bananas 13y agoCut the cables. All of them. Leased, backbone, local loops. Poison the routing tables. Jam the wireless. Take out root DNS. I cringe slightly at quoting Firefly but it's similar in nature: "If your quarry goes to ground, leave no ground to go to."
- Crito 13y agoDuring a revolution, those organizations would be burning their own data because when those organizations lose power the data becomes a liability rather than an asset to them. It becomes evidence of their crimes. When the Berlin Wall fell, the Stasi began burning and shredding everything they could. German citizens stormed their buildings and much of the documents were saved, so that the crimes of the Stasi could be documented for prosperity. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi#Recovery_of_the_Stasi_files http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi#Recovery_of_the_Stasi_fil...
- hershel 13y agoThis time they'll just encrypt everything.
- Crito 13y agoYeah, and destroying the key will be much easier than destroying paper by the ton.
- a3n 13y agoSo when you storm the barricades make sure that you keep the electricity on, so that all those disks and data will be decrypted at that moment. (And remember in your home and biz life, if you do whole disk encryption, you need to hibernate or shut down to get your disk/data back into its encrypted state.)
- Crito 13y agoI fear that this will never happen. In the best case scenario that I consider realistic, the TLAs will sense their impending doom well in advanced and will safely and quietly destroy all the data that might incriminate them of anything. This destruction might be punishable, but I think it is more likely that we will never even realize that it occurred. The only way to take out a TLA and seize the incriminating data is swiftly and without warning. With warning times on the order of minutes, I don't think this is possible politically or otherwise. The best we can hope for is to shut them down, and the best we can do afterwards is punish those responsible in absence of specific evidence against them (but I don't think that we have the guts necessary to do that. However as a real-world example of that sort of response, consider the show trial and execution of Nicolae Ceaușescu: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolae_Ceau%C8%99escu http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolae_Ceau%C8%99escu)
- neverminder 13y agoEverything is how it is because that's how it's supposed to be. It's the old "Dragon is dead, long live the Dragon" phenomena. It's because of human weaknesses - greed, lust for power, etc. Whatever we do it will always come full circle. And then it will begin again.
- work_account_2 13y agoOr posting on HN and Reddit.
- infinity0 13y agoYes, it is possible. Stop being defeatist, you're doing NSA/GCHQ propaganda for them for free.
- gizmo686 13y ago>for free How do you know r0h1n is doing this for free?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- infinity0 13y agoI don't, but it's a general good ethical principle to Assume Good Faith in the absence of other information. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:AGF http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:AGF
- TrainedMonkey 13y agoRecently I had been operating under "Assume it is being done, unless you can come up with a really good reason[0] of why it would not be done" [0] Such as it is physically impossible or prohibitively expensive.
- Consultant32452 13y agoYou don't have to get them to delete it. Just defund them so they can't afford to do it in the future. The data will be worthless pretty quickly as it ages.
- julie1 13y ago> I mean, really, is there any possible reality that involves the NSA/GCHQ deleting the mountains of data they have surreptitiously recorded? They will: it costs a lot of money to keep data alive. And it is a shame, NSA data for research purpose should be put under the UNO protection: - it holds lower bits of informations interlaced with the "big data" like how flu is propagating; - we could analyse causality chains and propagation of ideas (the impact of culture); - we could see corruptions effects, measure it and decide if it worths the price; - we can record the variation and evolution of natural langage/style; These data are a treasure, the should be opened after X years, but for economic reason, they will be deleted.
- fit2rule 13y agoOne word for you: sedition. Its gonna happen.
- a3n 13y ago" Sedition often includes subversion of a constitution ..." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedition Ah, so that's the NSA's game.
- pjc50 13y agoIn the UK, we did manage to get the identity cards scheme killed and all the data collected destroyed. Admittedly it was still in the pilot stage. The key to effective political action is getting all the other existing politically active groups to realise that they don't want to do politics under surveillance either. Everyone from the NRA to the NAACP should oppose this. Talk about guns on the internet? It's trivial to keyword match make and model names, and the NSA can presumably correlate this back to home addresses. They already have the database of who the gun owners are if they were to want to confiscate them. Remind nonwhite people about the FBI's attempts to blackmail MLK. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/07/fbi-office-break-in-1971-come-forward-documents http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/07/fbi-office-brea... Everyone should understand that this infrastructure can and will be used to interfere with domestic politics, not to mention being used to attack democracy abroad (see 20th century South American history). You cannot support a system that is unjust to your enemies and assume smugly that it will never be turned around on you (Diane Feinstein passim).
- eli 13y agoOfftopic, but I've always been surprised there wasn't more uproar over the passage of the Real ID Act. Basically a sneaky way to turn your state-issued driver license into a national ID card.
- pjc50 13y agoThe tragic thing is that some of the Baltic states (eg Estonia) have shown nifty ways to make ID cards benefit the public, having keypairs on the card and application integration etc. But this is only useful IF we can trust the system won't be abused - which at the moment we really can't. In the west an ID system would be primarily used for making immigrants second class citizens and turning everyone into immigration enforcement vigilantes.
- saraid216 13y agoThis. There's a vicious cycle of government inefficiency, privacy advocacy, and all-around distrust that keeps happening over and over again, reinforcing memes and justifying a lot of backwards thinking.
- motters 13y agoYes. All of that usually happens when totalitarian regimes fall. These systems are made and run by people, so they can be remade or disbanded if they are no longer wanted. For now it's probably useful to concentrate upon emphasising how illegal/unconstitutional all of the above activity is and that the buck has to stop somewhere. Someone has to be held accountable.
- lern_too_spel 13y agoDon't be so melodramatic. There are solutions. Also, they don't "vacuum up everything they can lay their hands on." According to this article, they exploit on the order of tens of thousands of systems and have a control system to pull data and recordings from targeted users.
- nitrogen 13y agoIf you combine this article with the dozens of others from the past ~year, the vacuum analogy is not at all hyperbolic.
- lern_too_spel 13y agoTwo NSA bulk collection programs have been outed: the NSA collects call log metadata to this day, and they used to collect email headers from unencrypted email deliveries entering or leaving the US until a few years ago. The remaining articles about NSA data collection have been about targeted programs. Though I disagree with some of their methods, they are not vacuuming up everything they can get their hands on by a long shot, and spreading ggp's view distracts from solving the problems with what they are doing.
- glitchdout 13y ago> The remaining articles about NSA data collection have been about targeted programs. Cut the crap. * XKeyscore: NSA tool collects 'nearly everything a user does on the internet' [1] * NSA collecting phone records of millions of Verizon customers daily [2] * NSA taps Skype chats, newly published Snowden leaks confirm [3] * NSA collects millions of text messages daily in 'untargeted' global sweep [4] * Optic Nerve: millions of Yahoo webcam images intercepted by GCHQ [5] I'll quote: > Sweeps up emails, social media activity and browsing history [1]: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/31/nsa-top-secret-program-online-data http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/31/nsa-top-secret-... [2]: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone-records-verizon-court-order http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone-recor... [3]: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/07/nsa-taps-skype-chats-newly-published-snowden-leaks-confirm/ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/07/nsa-taps-skype-ch... [4]: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/16/nsa-collects-millions-text-messages-daily-untargeted-global-sweep http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/16/nsa-collects-mi... [5]: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/27/gchq-nsa-webcam-images-internet-yahoo http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/27/gchq-nsa-webcam...
- atmosx 13y agoSeems terrible, but it's only the beginning of the Anglosaxon leadership demise. Historically, empires usually fail from inside...