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Laura Poitras: ‘Facebook is a gift to intelligence agencies’

224 points by Libertatea 12y ago

SCHiM 12y ago
Another nice thing for these agencies is that being on facebook already indicates certain things about you(as does not being on facebook). I know for a fact that here in the Netherlands, during a standard security check, our intelligence agency checks if you do or don't have a social network account. If even 'regular' security checks take this into account, then I'll bet you dollars to donuts that it's certainly looked at when they suspect you of something, or as dragnet profiling/surveillance.
xnull2guest 12y ago
Facebook onboarded to PRISM program and reporting to FISA ("Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act") Courts. Comments in here skeptical that they engage in any foreign surveillance.
pearjuice 12y ago
That is a bit of a bold statement given the circumstances. More than ever Facebook is trying to protect its data from three letter agencies. Intelligence agencies still have to comply with the law. If anything, Facebook is a gift to advertising agencies because they explicitly express this. Has Facebook ever been caught in the of letting intelligence agencies snoop? No. Trust them for a chance.
- uptown 12y ago
  "Intelligence agencies still have to comply with the law." What news have you been reading?
- vermontdevil 12y ago
  Of course laws cleverly created by lawmakers that does not necessarily support our rights.
  - MCRed 12y ago
    One thing that I think people miss is that they talk about "the law" as if there was one consistent law. The constitution is the law. But people talk about laws violating the constitution as if they are legitimate. If they are, then the constitution is a contradiction. National Security Letters, the TSA, even the existence of the FBI is in violation of the constitution. But once something's been around for a couple decades, people assume it's legal. It becomes the background, and anything they do then becomes "the law". Yeah, a law was passed creating the TSA, but that law did not repeal the fourth amendment, thus the TSA is still illegal, under both the fourth amendment and USC 18-242 which makes it a federal crime to violate a citizens constitutional rights.
- rmxt 12y ago
  Surely it's possible that Facebook can be both a gift to advertisers and a useful tool for those looking to observe social networks and monitor communications as a third party (e.g., three letter agencies, or any adversarial party at all)? Painting it as an "if anything" sort of scenario is forgoing the middle ground between complete skepticism and naive trust where the truth (and best course of action) probably lies.
- cafard 12y ago
  In the context she seems to be talking about people's willingness to share every little detail with the world. I know a woman who works for a contractor doing security clearance interviews for the federal government. She says that many of those she interviews have very little notion of privacy settings, and have publicly viewable photos and posts that contradict the image of the responsible type of person they try to put forward on their forms and in their interviews.
- cryptoz 12y ago
  > Trust them for a chance. Trust the NSA not to hack Facebook? No thanks, I won't do that. Facebook has amassed a single-source treasure trove of intelligence data, it's not up to them who gets to look at it. It's up the the biggest players in the hacking space, which seems to be the NSA. > Trust them for a chance. Oh, you mean trust the guy who said "Dumb fucks, they trust me!". No thanks.
- higherpurpose 12y ago
  > More than ever Facebook is trying to protect its data from three letter agencies Is it? Facebook has even built in "crime scanning" technology into their Facebook messenger, to report people to police. http://www.cnet.com/news/facebook-scans-chats-and-posts-for-criminal-activity/ http://www.cnet.com/news/facebook-scans-chats-and-posts-for-... When Kobeissi tried to build OTR over Facebook messenger, they announced Facebook messenger's API will shut down (a little suspicious, I think). http://www.net-security.org/secworld.php?id=16857 http://www.net-security.org/secworld.php?id=16857 > Intelligence agencies still have to comply with the law. Do they really? At best the intelligence agencies have shown they will comply with their interpretation of the law, which in most cases defies even common sense, such as 3-hop mass surveillance being "relevant" to an investigation, or defining mass collection as "not surveillance". > Trust them for a chance. Ha ha. No comment. Just laughter.
- hammock 12y ago
  >Has Facebook ever been caught in the of letting intelligence agencies snoop? No. Reacting to the Snowden leaks about PRISM, the United States Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, on June 7, 2013 confirmed in a statement that for nearly six years the government of the United States had been using Facebook to collect information. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_%28surveillance_program%29#Executive_branch http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_%28surveillance_program%2... Who are all these astroturf accounts commenting in here right now?
  - selmnoo 12y ago
    I honestly don't get it. This isn't 'Hacker News', at least, this 'Hacker News' forum is no longer occupied by 'Hackers'. Incidentally, this reminds me -- later Summer this year, I had the chance to meet a lot Linux kernel developers. At some point a handful were speaking casually about Facebook -- and guess what, each and every one of them were 20 times more paranoid about Facebook and its intent than I am (and I'm pretty skeptical of everything FB does). I'm honestly very confused. I don't want to make the jump and say "astroturfing" -- but I don't know, maybe we have some Facebook developers here who probably work on some engineering tasks and never are exposed to the questionable side of things and genuinely think FB is up to only good. In real world, every true hacker that I personally know greatly distrusts Facebook and all that Facebook touches. edit: ok, I think I may have said that a little too soon. Posts doubting Poitras are now more toward the bottom than the top, and my two posts are no longer negatively scored.
    - qq66 12y ago
      You don't have to be paranoid about Facebook's intent to realize that it's a huge storehouse of personal data. Nobody with a brain thinks that Facebook strategizes every morning about how to collect the most data for intelligence agencies. However, a side effect of their business model makes it an unprecedented treasure trove of data about hundreds of millions of people and their relationships/interactions with each other.
      - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 12y ago
- pessimizer 12y ago
  Intelligence agencies don't have to hack Facebook to get massively useful intelligence from it. They just have to read it. edit: And no one even claimed that they do in the interview. This is a stupid thread. ----- "L.P.: Sure, don't you think? It totally does. Facebook is a gift to intelligence agencies. People volunteer all their social information." ...is the entirety of the discussion of facebook.
- forgottenpass 12y ago
  That is a bit of a bold statement given the circumstances. The "... it's a gift ..." turn of phrase doesn't imply that Facebook (or any specific entity) is doing a conscious act of gift-giving. The outcome can be seen as a "gift" for the desirability of the item and the serendipitous way it is dropped on the receiver's lap. More than ever Facebook is trying to protect its data from three letter agencies. [...] Trust them for a chance. They're leverage their power over users to collect data. It is generally to be expected, and is now explicitly known, that collecting data like that is an attractive target for the government to leverage their power over businesses (both Facebook and the communication infrastructure between users and Facebook) to get at the data. We can bitch and moan about the existence and capabilities of those powers, but at some point facebook is choosing to consolidate data in a world where those powers exist. It's a tightrope balance for Facebook to minimize the collection possible through technical and legal means, and maintaining their business model hoovering up data. And that's fine, that's their business, whatever. It's just not trustworthy.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
josefresco 12y ago
Laura is out selling the film, expect these type of click-bait, one-liners to trickle out as they make the rounds. It's actually a very boring and obvious statement, but it includes Facebook so it plays well around the web as an attention grabbing headline. Sort of like Peter Thiel claiming that Twitter execs were smoking pot all day when promoting his book. Say crazy shit = eyeballs on your product. Edit: I should point out that I don't think the statement about Facebook was "crazy" or in this case even controversial. However my general statement about how PR uses click-bait headlines and takeaways holds true.
- xSwag 12y ago
  Isn't Thiel a billionaire? I don't understand why he would do so much to promote a £9.99 book.
  - AngrySkillzz 12y ago
    Getting exposure for your ideas is worth much more than however much money he would make on the book sales.
  - josefresco 12y ago
    It's a very intriguing question. But yet we see examples of people with exceptional personal wealth, doing things and saying things that seem ... petty or at least beneath them in the financial context. I think even billionaires want their causes to succeed, so even if it's a book that accounts for 1% of their wealth, they still want it to do well and will say and do things that help it to succeed. Also, as AngrySkillzz pointed out, the "ideas" put forth in the book are more important to them (than the money earned) and they can indirectly benefit their business by having these ideas, or opinions take hold.
- selmnoo 12y ago
  It is strange to read what you've written. Mostly because I personally think the long-term effects of corporations, particularly Facebook, ganging on our society is going to be immensely more deleterious than anything our government could do or wants to do. When Facebook thwarts free and organic growth of something in favor of content pushed by those who have money (shoddy companies selling fat-loss pills which are going to moreso fuck you up than make you lose weight), I consider that something seriously screwed up. When it reduces exposure of content that's non-compatible with your views on your feed to keep you warm and cozy, perhaps in an attempt to prime you for certain political ads, that's some serious shit. Facebook really IS something extremely horrible, people don't realize it. It's very sad that even on HN you see strong defense of Facebook. Facebook and its founder have been involved in one sleazy act to another (from privacy zuckering (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/facebooks-evil-interfaces/ https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/facebooks-evil-interfa...) to offering his friends private information -- "yea so if you ever need info about anyone at harvard; just ask; i have over 4000 emails, pictures, addresses, sns" - http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/09/20/the-face-of-facebook http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/09/20/the-face-of-fac...). Right now, it isn't Poitras who has done one thing after another to make me doubt the words coming out of her mouth, it's someone else.
zvanness 12y ago
The statement is somewhat fair considering that In-Q-Tel, early on, saw Facebook as a goldmine for human intelligence and decided to make an investment. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel#Software http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel#Software http://www.nzherald.co.nz/technology/news/article.cfm?c_id=5&objectid=10456534 http://www.nzherald.co.nz/technology/news/article.cfm?c_id=5...
peterkelly 12y ago
Relevant Onion link (which precedes Snowden revelations by several years): http://www.theonion.com/video/cias-facebook-program-dramatically-cut-agencys-cos,19753/ http://www.theonion.com/video/cias-facebook-program-dramatic...
- nabla9 12y ago
  Funny and informative at the same time.
- bradleysmith 12y ago
  "The New York Times has reported that Al-Qaeda has designed Foursquare to identify popular locations for bombings!" "Actually, Brooke, that's been discredited as any kind of real threat, the people that use that site are the people that no one would mind seeing bombed anyway."
- xnull 12y ago
  On serious topics I like to avoid clouding the message with satire. The Onion's article is great - just remember that the situation is no joke.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
- pessimizer 12y ago
  Intelligence agencies don't exist solely for the purpose of monitoring Islamic extremism.
- xnull2guest 12y ago
  Facebook manipulates content to sway populations and generations. http://minerva.dtic.mil/ http://minerva.dtic.mil/ Terrorists have faces too. When they take their masks off they engage in social networking just like everyone else. It is very useful to know their sleeping, and waking patterns, who they are 'friends' with, where their support comes from and what they like and dislike. Remember that Facebook, Google and others are trying to create at-scale automated psychological profiling - so that they can create better ads. All of this amounts to a huge amount of information they have about where you browse, what you by, when you comment. But yeah... those be TLA agencies aren't exclusively anti-terrorist. They deal with many international actors through which they can gain an advantage for the United States.
- ceejayoz 12y ago
  Terrorists are finding that recruiting via social media can be quite effective. They've made pretty big strides in getting their message out via Twitter, high production quality English-language magazines, etc.
ThomPete 12y ago
As someone who have spent a lot of time with a friend of mine doing facebook apps and trying out various things I can say that there is a lot of information that can be gained just by knowing a few tricks of the trade without doing anything wrong or against terms. So I have no doubt that a much more powerful agency like the NSA etc will have even better abilities to snoop around.
- ianlevesque 12y ago
  For example: here's an NSL, give me a big copy of your database.
  - ibrahima 12y ago
    Personally I'd rather have a small copy if it's all the same to you.
zeeshanm 12y ago
While we are at it, here is a good piece by rms: https://stallman.org/facebook.html https://stallman.org/facebook.html
- o0-0o 12y ago
  Brilliant article and well referenced. Thank you for sharing.
uptown 12y ago
For anyone interested in the topic, this is an interesting read: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/10/where-is-the-investigation-into-financial-corruption-at-the-nsa/381812/ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/10/where-is...
eyeareque 12y ago
I saw her new Snowden film last night. I loved it and highly recommend seeing it. It's an awesome behind the scenes look at how things went down. I really enjoyed seeing more footage of Snowden as I've been keeping up on pretty much every article that has came out since this whole thing broke.
- pwelch 12y ago
  I wish we could buy it directly... Looks like an interesting film though.
  - monsterix 12y ago
    MPAA is watching you!
- coldpie 12y ago
  I hope it comes to Netflix or has some other streaming option eventually. I really, really want to see it, but I'd rather not go to a theater.
plg 12y ago
This is reminiscent of Julian Assange's recent article in newsweek (http://goo.gl/hYbCa9 http://goo.gl/hYbCa9) which draws parallels between early companies of the "military-industrial complex" (e.g. lockheed-martin, general dynamics, raytheon, boeing, etc) and the new information-based internet companies like Google and Facebook. It's a bit William-Gibson-esque to think about things in these terms but on the other hand it seems like an eerily good fit. (PS instead of merely down voting me it would rather be more interesting for us all to read your comments)
koja86 12y ago
Quote from TFA: "I think that it's really important that the people who are doing free software and peer review can do vetting and ensure that things are backdoored." [ insert generic remark about journalists competence here ]
vph 12y ago
>Facebook is a gift to intelligence agencies. People volunteer all their social information. Yes. It's about social networks, not Facebook in particular. The alternative is choosing not to participate. This is an intrinsic problem. You participate in a social network; you choose to be connected; you learn more about people and things in general, and as a result, people learn more about you. With technologies, there've always been trade-offs.
- xnull 12y ago
  What we are talking about here is something very different than your neighbors and acquaintances learning more about you. Trade-offs for sure.
  - cube13 12y ago
    If you're screaming your information out to the entire world, it's hard to find fault when someone listens.
    - xnull 12y ago
      Facebook has a lot more information about you than what you post and 'privacy controls' presumably limit who gets access to the information you do. Both of these things are being abused.
- beagle3 12y ago
  > The alternative is choosing not to participate. That's wrong. I'm not participating, but I know that other people are posting pictures of me and reporting my whereabouts on facebook. I've read somewhere that at some point in East Germany, 30% of the population were informants for the secret police / intelligence agencies. Today, wherever Facebook has traction, it's more like 80%, and they report MORE data than those 30% did (But I wouldn't blame them, because, well, 99% of people "reported on" are also reporting on themselves). And I'm sure that every competent intelligence agency already has a live copy of the facebook database, whether by NSL or by bugging. If they didn't, they wouldn't be competent.
atmosx 12y ago
I've read a couple of articles in the past that linked Facebook and Google to CIA and that's a fair thought given the business that they're in. Of course the NSA and the CIA would like to have access to their data (and most probably they do in one way or another). That said, doesn't take anything away from Facebook as a service. Facebook adds extreme value to your social life connects you with people that you don't see daily, lets you know about birthdays, events, comments and what not. It's excellent at what it does IMHO and if used properly is really what web-2.0 is all about. I can say that if Zuckerberg didn't invent Facebook in ~ 2004, it would have been invented by now, by someone else because that was what people needed badly to stay connected. Facebook is just a tool. If you are in the intel business or you are a possible target (e.g. prominent figure of some sort) and fairly young to understand how the internet works, you use FB for PR and nothing else. Maybe not even that. Every social network can be used for data mining from intelligence agencies. Do most people care? No. Why? Because they don't see any kind of real threat. It doesn't interfere with their lives. The HN crowd is composed mostly by hackers. It's natural for us to see where all this might go wrong, because that's what we do and it's natural for others not to care until the shit hits the fan. I'm eagerly waiting for her Snowden related movie/documentary.
- selmnoo 12y ago
  > Facebook adds extreme value to your social life But you fail to catch a crucial part of this: it adds value to your social life at the expense of so many other things. It may add some social value to your life, but corrupts and molds society at large. I think the tradeoff is absolutely not worth it. I touched on this in a comment below as well. Social networking is a task that should probably be left for a 'Public Benefit Corp.' to do, as Ello seems to be trying to do. I'm hoping and praying that these sorts of companies start to take off, that pay-for-service becomes cool and commonplace again.
  - rhino369 12y ago
    Most people don't see a threat in a lack of online privacy. Since the beginning of mass commercial internet use our online usage has been tracked. It is sort of absurd to think what you do online is private. Your computer might in your bedroom, but the internet certainly isn't. You might prefer using sites and apps that guarantee your privacy, but most people simply don't care.
atmosx 12y ago
I've read a couple of articles in the past that linked Facebook and Google to CIA and that's a fair thought given the business that they're in. Of course the NSA and the CIA would like to have access to their data (and most probably they do in one way or another). That said, doesn't take anything away from Facebook as a service. Facebook adds extreme value to your social life connects you with people that you don't see daily, lets you know about birthdays, events, comments and what not. It's excellent at what it does IMHO and if used properly is really what web-2.0 is all about. I can say that if Zuckerberg didn't invent Facebook in ~ 2004, it would have been invented by now, by someone else because that was what people needed badly to stay connected. Facebook is just a tool. If you are in the intel business or you are a possible target (e.g. prominent figure of some sort) and fairly young to understand how the internet works, you use FB for PR and nothing else. Maybe not even that. Every social network can be used for data mining from intelligence agencies. Do most people care? No. Why? Because they don't see any kind of real threat. It doesn't interfere with their lives. The HN crowd is composed mostly by hackers. It's natural for us to see where all this might go wrong, because that's what we do and it's natural for others not to care until the shit hits the fan. I'm eagerly waiting for her Snowden related movie/documentary.
droopybuns 12y ago
This (http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/printout/0,29239,2036683_2037183_2037185,00.html http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/printout/0,29...) story from 2010 has this bizarre anecdote: "The door opened, and a distinguished-looking gray-haired man burst in — it's the only way to describe his entrance — trailed by a couple of deputies. He was both the oldest person in the room by 20 years and the only one wearing a suit. He was in the building, he explained with the delighted air of a man about to secure ironclad bragging rights forever, and he just had to stop in and introduce himself to Zuckerberg: Robert Mueller, director of the FBI, pleased to meet you. They shook hands and chatted about nothing for a couple of minutes, and then Mueller left. There was a giddy silence while everybody just looked at one another as if to say, What the hell just happened?" I'd love to think that the reporter answered that question- What is the director of the FBI doing at facebook? What does he mean he was just in the building? In what world does someone as powerful as the director of the FBI come into your company needing to burst in on the ceo rather than have a scheduled meeting with the CEO? Does he have an office in the same building? Instead, we get a puff piece about Facebook's growth.

224 points by Libertatea 12y ago

SCHiM 12y ago

Another nice thing for these agencies is that being on facebook already indicates certain things about you(as does not being on facebook). I know for a fact that here in the Netherlands, during a standard security check, our intelligence agency checks if you do or don't have a social network account. If even 'regular' security checks take this into account, then I'll bet you dollars to donuts that it's certainly looked at when they suspect you of something, or as dragnet profiling/surveillance.

xnull2guest 12y ago

Facebook onboarded to PRISM program and reporting to FISA ("Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act") Courts. Comments in here skeptical that they engage in any foreign surveillance.

pearjuice 12y ago

That is a bit of a bold statement given the circumstances. More than ever Facebook is trying to protect its data from three letter agencies. Intelligence agencies still have to comply with the law. If anything, Facebook is a gift to advertising agencies because they explicitly express this. Has Facebook ever been caught in the of letting intelligence agencies snoop? No. Trust them for a chance.

uptown 12y ago
"Intelligence agencies still have to comply with the law." What news have you been reading?
vermontdevil 12y ago
Of course laws cleverly created by lawmakers that does not necessarily support our rights.
- MCRed 12y ago
  One thing that I think people miss is that they talk about "the law" as if there was one consistent law. The constitution is the law. But people talk about laws violating the constitution as if they are legitimate. If they are, then the constitution is a contradiction. National Security Letters, the TSA, even the existence of the FBI is in violation of the constitution. But once something's been around for a couple decades, people assume it's legal. It becomes the background, and anything they do then becomes "the law". Yeah, a law was passed creating the TSA, but that law did not repeal the fourth amendment, thus the TSA is still illegal, under both the fourth amendment and USC 18-242 which makes it a federal crime to violate a citizens constitutional rights.
rmxt 12y ago
Surely it's possible that Facebook can be both a gift to advertisers and a useful tool for those looking to observe social networks and monitor communications as a third party (e.g., three letter agencies, or any adversarial party at all)? Painting it as an "if anything" sort of scenario is forgoing the middle ground between complete skepticism and naive trust where the truth (and best course of action) probably lies.
cafard 12y ago
In the context she seems to be talking about people's willingness to share every little detail with the world. I know a woman who works for a contractor doing security clearance interviews for the federal government. She says that many of those she interviews have very little notion of privacy settings, and have publicly viewable photos and posts that contradict the image of the responsible type of person they try to put forward on their forms and in their interviews.
cryptoz 12y ago
> Trust them for a chance. Trust the NSA not to hack Facebook? No thanks, I won't do that. Facebook has amassed a single-source treasure trove of intelligence data, it's not up to them who gets to look at it. It's up the the biggest players in the hacking space, which seems to be the NSA. > Trust them for a chance. Oh, you mean trust the guy who said "Dumb fucks, they trust me!". No thanks.
higherpurpose 12y ago
> More than ever Facebook is trying to protect its data from three letter agencies Is it? Facebook has even built in "crime scanning" technology into their Facebook messenger, to report people to police. http://www.cnet.com/news/facebook-scans-chats-and-posts-for-criminal-activity/ http://www.cnet.com/news/facebook-scans-chats-and-posts-for-... When Kobeissi tried to build OTR over Facebook messenger, they announced Facebook messenger's API will shut down (a little suspicious, I think). http://www.net-security.org/secworld.php?id=16857 http://www.net-security.org/secworld.php?id=16857 > Intelligence agencies still have to comply with the law. Do they really? At best the intelligence agencies have shown they will comply with their interpretation of the law, which in most cases defies even common sense, such as 3-hop mass surveillance being "relevant" to an investigation, or defining mass collection as "not surveillance". > Trust them for a chance. Ha ha. No comment. Just laughter.
hammock 12y ago
>Has Facebook ever been caught in the of letting intelligence agencies snoop? No. Reacting to the Snowden leaks about PRISM, the United States Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, on June 7, 2013 confirmed in a statement that for nearly six years the government of the United States had been using Facebook to collect information. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_%28surveillance_program%29#Executive_branch http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_%28surveillance_program%2... Who are all these astroturf accounts commenting in here right now?
- selmnoo 12y ago
  I honestly don't get it. This isn't 'Hacker News', at least, this 'Hacker News' forum is no longer occupied by 'Hackers'. Incidentally, this reminds me -- later Summer this year, I had the chance to meet a lot Linux kernel developers. At some point a handful were speaking casually about Facebook -- and guess what, each and every one of them were 20 times more paranoid about Facebook and its intent than I am (and I'm pretty skeptical of everything FB does). I'm honestly very confused. I don't want to make the jump and say "astroturfing" -- but I don't know, maybe we have some Facebook developers here who probably work on some engineering tasks and never are exposed to the questionable side of things and genuinely think FB is up to only good. In real world, every true hacker that I personally know greatly distrusts Facebook and all that Facebook touches. edit: ok, I think I may have said that a little too soon. Posts doubting Poitras are now more toward the bottom than the top, and my two posts are no longer negatively scored.
  - qq66 12y ago
    You don't have to be paranoid about Facebook's intent to realize that it's a huge storehouse of personal data. Nobody with a brain thinks that Facebook strategizes every morning about how to collect the most data for intelligence agencies. However, a side effect of their business model makes it an unprecedented treasure trove of data about hundreds of millions of people and their relationships/interactions with each other.
    - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 12y ago
pessimizer 12y ago
Intelligence agencies don't have to hack Facebook to get massively useful intelligence from it. They just have to read it. edit: And no one even claimed that they do in the interview. This is a stupid thread. ----- "L.P.: Sure, don't you think? It totally does. Facebook is a gift to intelligence agencies. People volunteer all their social information." ...is the entirety of the discussion of facebook.
forgottenpass 12y ago
That is a bit of a bold statement given the circumstances. The "... it's a gift ..." turn of phrase doesn't imply that Facebook (or any specific entity) is doing a conscious act of gift-giving. The outcome can be seen as a "gift" for the desirability of the item and the serendipitous way it is dropped on the receiver's lap. More than ever Facebook is trying to protect its data from three letter agencies. [...] Trust them for a chance. They're leverage their power over users to collect data. It is generally to be expected, and is now explicitly known, that collecting data like that is an attractive target for the government to leverage their power over businesses (both Facebook and the communication infrastructure between users and Facebook) to get at the data. We can bitch and moan about the existence and capabilities of those powers, but at some point facebook is choosing to consolidate data in a world where those powers exist. It's a tightrope balance for Facebook to minimize the collection possible through technical and legal means, and maintaining their business model hoovering up data. And that's fine, that's their business, whatever. It's just not trustworthy.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

josefresco 12y ago

Laura is out selling the film, expect these type of click-bait, one-liners to trickle out as they make the rounds. It's actually a very boring and obvious statement, but it includes Facebook so it plays well around the web as an attention grabbing headline. Sort of like Peter Thiel claiming that Twitter execs were smoking pot all day when promoting his book. Say crazy shit = eyeballs on your product. Edit: I should point out that I don't think the statement about Facebook was "crazy" or in this case even controversial. However my general statement about how PR uses click-bait headlines and takeaways holds true.

xSwag 12y ago
Isn't Thiel a billionaire? I don't understand why he would do so much to promote a £9.99 book.
- AngrySkillzz 12y ago
  Getting exposure for your ideas is worth much more than however much money he would make on the book sales.
- josefresco 12y ago
  It's a very intriguing question. But yet we see examples of people with exceptional personal wealth, doing things and saying things that seem ... petty or at least beneath them in the financial context. I think even billionaires want their causes to succeed, so even if it's a book that accounts for 1% of their wealth, they still want it to do well and will say and do things that help it to succeed. Also, as AngrySkillzz pointed out, the "ideas" put forth in the book are more important to them (than the money earned) and they can indirectly benefit their business by having these ideas, or opinions take hold.
selmnoo 12y ago
It is strange to read what you've written. Mostly because I personally think the long-term effects of corporations, particularly Facebook, ganging on our society is going to be immensely more deleterious than anything our government could do or wants to do. When Facebook thwarts free and organic growth of something in favor of content pushed by those who have money (shoddy companies selling fat-loss pills which are going to moreso fuck you up than make you lose weight), I consider that something seriously screwed up. When it reduces exposure of content that's non-compatible with your views on your feed to keep you warm and cozy, perhaps in an attempt to prime you for certain political ads, that's some serious shit. Facebook really IS something extremely horrible, people don't realize it. It's very sad that even on HN you see strong defense of Facebook. Facebook and its founder have been involved in one sleazy act to another (from privacy zuckering (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/facebooks-evil-interfaces/ https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/facebooks-evil-interfa...) to offering his friends private information -- "yea so if you ever need info about anyone at harvard; just ask; i have over 4000 emails, pictures, addresses, sns" - http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/09/20/the-face-of-facebook http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/09/20/the-face-of-fac...). Right now, it isn't Poitras who has done one thing after another to make me doubt the words coming out of her mouth, it's someone else.

zvanness 12y ago

The statement is somewhat fair considering that In-Q-Tel, early on, saw Facebook as a goldmine for human intelligence and decided to make an investment. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel#Software http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel#Software http://www.nzherald.co.nz/technology/news/article.cfm?c_id=5&objectid=10456534 http://www.nzherald.co.nz/technology/news/article.cfm?c_id=5...

peterkelly 12y ago

Relevant Onion link (which precedes Snowden revelations by several years): http://www.theonion.com/video/cias-facebook-program-dramatically-cut-agencys-cos,19753/ http://www.theonion.com/video/cias-facebook-program-dramatic...

nabla9 12y ago
Funny and informative at the same time.
bradleysmith 12y ago
"The New York Times has reported that Al-Qaeda has designed Foursquare to identify popular locations for bombings!" "Actually, Brooke, that's been discredited as any kind of real threat, the people that use that site are the people that no one would mind seeing bombed anyway."
xnull 12y ago
On serious topics I like to avoid clouding the message with satire. The Onion's article is great - just remember that the situation is no joke.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

pessimizer 12y ago
Intelligence agencies don't exist solely for the purpose of monitoring Islamic extremism.
xnull2guest 12y ago
Facebook manipulates content to sway populations and generations. http://minerva.dtic.mil/ http://minerva.dtic.mil/ Terrorists have faces too. When they take their masks off they engage in social networking just like everyone else. It is very useful to know their sleeping, and waking patterns, who they are 'friends' with, where their support comes from and what they like and dislike. Remember that Facebook, Google and others are trying to create at-scale automated psychological profiling - so that they can create better ads. All of this amounts to a huge amount of information they have about where you browse, what you by, when you comment. But yeah... those be TLA agencies aren't exclusively anti-terrorist. They deal with many international actors through which they can gain an advantage for the United States.
ceejayoz 12y ago
Terrorists are finding that recruiting via social media can be quite effective. They've made pretty big strides in getting their message out via Twitter, high production quality English-language magazines, etc.

ThomPete 12y ago

As someone who have spent a lot of time with a friend of mine doing facebook apps and trying out various things I can say that there is a lot of information that can be gained just by knowing a few tricks of the trade without doing anything wrong or against terms. So I have no doubt that a much more powerful agency like the NSA etc will have even better abilities to snoop around.

ianlevesque 12y ago
For example: here's an NSL, give me a big copy of your database.
- ibrahima 12y ago
  Personally I'd rather have a small copy if it's all the same to you.

zeeshanm 12y ago

While we are at it, here is a good piece by rms: https://stallman.org/facebook.html https://stallman.org/facebook.html

o0-0o 12y ago
Brilliant article and well referenced. Thank you for sharing.

uptown 12y ago

For anyone interested in the topic, this is an interesting read: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/10/where-is-the-investigation-into-financial-corruption-at-the-nsa/381812/ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/10/where-is...

eyeareque 12y ago

I saw her new Snowden film last night. I loved it and highly recommend seeing it. It's an awesome behind the scenes look at how things went down. I really enjoyed seeing more footage of Snowden as I've been keeping up on pretty much every article that has came out since this whole thing broke.

pwelch 12y ago
I wish we could buy it directly... Looks like an interesting film though.
- monsterix 12y ago
  MPAA is watching you!
coldpie 12y ago
I hope it comes to Netflix or has some other streaming option eventually. I really, really want to see it, but I'd rather not go to a theater.

plg 12y ago

This is reminiscent of Julian Assange's recent article in newsweek (http://goo.gl/hYbCa9 http://goo.gl/hYbCa9) which draws parallels between early companies of the "military-industrial complex" (e.g. lockheed-martin, general dynamics, raytheon, boeing, etc) and the new information-based internet companies like Google and Facebook. It's a bit William-Gibson-esque to think about things in these terms but on the other hand it seems like an eerily good fit. (PS instead of merely down voting me it would rather be more interesting for us all to read your comments)

koja86 12y ago

Quote from TFA: "I think that it's really important that the people who are doing free software and peer review can do vetting and ensure that things are backdoored." [ insert generic remark about journalists competence here ]

vph 12y ago

>Facebook is a gift to intelligence agencies. People volunteer all their social information. Yes. It's about social networks, not Facebook in particular. The alternative is choosing not to participate. This is an intrinsic problem. You participate in a social network; you choose to be connected; you learn more about people and things in general, and as a result, people learn more about you. With technologies, there've always been trade-offs.

xnull 12y ago
What we are talking about here is something very different than your neighbors and acquaintances learning more about you. Trade-offs for sure.
- cube13 12y ago
  If you're screaming your information out to the entire world, it's hard to find fault when someone listens.
  - xnull 12y ago
    Facebook has a lot more information about you than what you post and 'privacy controls' presumably limit who gets access to the information you do. Both of these things are being abused.
beagle3 12y ago
> The alternative is choosing not to participate. That's wrong. I'm not participating, but I know that other people are posting pictures of me and reporting my whereabouts on facebook. I've read somewhere that at some point in East Germany, 30% of the population were informants for the secret police / intelligence agencies. Today, wherever Facebook has traction, it's more like 80%, and they report MORE data than those 30% did (But I wouldn't blame them, because, well, 99% of people "reported on" are also reporting on themselves). And I'm sure that every competent intelligence agency already has a live copy of the facebook database, whether by NSL or by bugging. If they didn't, they wouldn't be competent.

atmosx 12y ago

I've read a couple of articles in the past that linked Facebook and Google to CIA and that's a fair thought given the business that they're in. Of course the NSA and the CIA would like to have access to their data (and most probably they do in one way or another). That said, doesn't take anything away from Facebook as a service. Facebook adds extreme value to your social life connects you with people that you don't see daily, lets you know about birthdays, events, comments and what not. It's excellent at what it does IMHO and if used properly is really what web-2.0 is all about. I can say that if Zuckerberg didn't invent Facebook in ~ 2004, it would have been invented by now, by someone else because that was what people needed badly to stay connected. Facebook is just a tool. If you are in the intel business or you are a possible target (e.g. prominent figure of some sort) and fairly young to understand how the internet works, you use FB for PR and nothing else. Maybe not even that. Every social network can be used for data mining from intelligence agencies. Do most people care? No. Why? Because they don't see any kind of real threat. It doesn't interfere with their lives. The HN crowd is composed mostly by hackers. It's natural for us to see where all this might go wrong, because that's what we do and it's natural for others not to care until the shit hits the fan. I'm eagerly waiting for her Snowden related movie/documentary.

selmnoo 12y ago
> Facebook adds extreme value to your social life But you fail to catch a crucial part of this: it adds value to your social life at the expense of so many other things. It may add some social value to your life, but corrupts and molds society at large. I think the tradeoff is absolutely not worth it. I touched on this in a comment below as well. Social networking is a task that should probably be left for a 'Public Benefit Corp.' to do, as Ello seems to be trying to do. I'm hoping and praying that these sorts of companies start to take off, that pay-for-service becomes cool and commonplace again.
- rhino369 12y ago
  Most people don't see a threat in a lack of online privacy. Since the beginning of mass commercial internet use our online usage has been tracked. It is sort of absurd to think what you do online is private. Your computer might in your bedroom, but the internet certainly isn't. You might prefer using sites and apps that guarantee your privacy, but most people simply don't care.

atmosx 12y ago

droopybuns 12y ago

This (http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/printout/0,29239,2036683_2037183_2037185,00.html http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/printout/0,29...) story from 2010 has this bizarre anecdote: "The door opened, and a distinguished-looking gray-haired man burst in — it's the only way to describe his entrance — trailed by a couple of deputies. He was both the oldest person in the room by 20 years and the only one wearing a suit. He was in the building, he explained with the delighted air of a man about to secure ironclad bragging rights forever, and he just had to stop in and introduce himself to Zuckerberg: Robert Mueller, director of the FBI, pleased to meet you. They shook hands and chatted about nothing for a couple of minutes, and then Mueller left. There was a giddy silence while everybody just looked at one another as if to say, What the hell just happened?" I'd love to think that the reporter answered that question- What is the director of the FBI doing at facebook? What does he mean he was just in the building? In what world does someone as powerful as the director of the FBI come into your company needing to burst in on the ceo rather than have a scheduled meeting with the CEO? Does he have an office in the same building? Instead, we get a puff piece about Facebook's growth.