7 ms·

> when it comes to large-scale webapps (e.g. Obamacare, UK NHS systems, UK taxation systems.) There's absolutely no reason to believe the spy tech isn't as poo

> when it comes to large-scale webapps (e.g. Obamacare, UK NHS systems, UK taxation systems.) There's absolutely no reason to believe the spy tech isn't as poorly implemented and terrible value for money as the examples you mention. Given their secretive nature it's even more likely to be the case I'd suspect.

drzaiusapelord 12y ago
This is my thinking as well. A lot of what spy tech is, is the ability to throw a warrant or NS letter into someone's face and force them to open the gate. The mythical uber-competent security services seem to be a pretty questionable premise. The few criminals caught via these tools are almost always the low hanging fruit of unconnected crazies, who seem to be harmless cranks and not real terrorists. Five eyes didn't stop or predict Snowden, Assange/Manning, Boston bombers, the rise of ISIS, Putin's advance on Crimea and Eastern Ukraine, the massive cyberwar Russia and China have declared on us, etc. In fact, all these things were major surprises to these security services, at least from what we can tell. There's a lot of federal tax money spent on what is cargo cult science and cargo cult intelligence. The NSA has the ability to buy a lot of PhD's but they are stuck with the same batch of incompetent and profiteer federal contractors the rest of the government is stuck with.
- secfirstmd 12y ago
  I think it's also related to policy-makers... These days too many of them are a bit intimidated by the mere presence and aura of people in uniform, intel people, cops etc...Years ago, many of them had served in the military or a had a very good understanding of what they can really do (not what they claim they can do) how they worked/the types of people behind them(JFK, Churchill etc) so were rightly sceptical of their claims. I mean, has anyone ever met a cop/spook/politician who didn't want more power to do X, more money to do Y, more people, more secrecy etc? One of the main problems for intel agencies is that they are merely one conduit to policy-makers, amongst many these days. Ultimately it is those policy-makers who need to (and increasingly are incapable of) using this information for strategic decision-making...Tactically it is easy to say "arrest/shoot that guy," because they get kudos and less blame if some thing goes wrong. Strategically it is harder to say "don't shoot that guy, keep him alive and in 5 years we can negotiate with him." It took the British a long time to learn how to do this in Northern Ireland, and it was only when they did that they managed to start to move towards peace with the IRA. I'm not sure would that be possibly in the bloggy, politically polarised, short-term, tabloid, Sky/Fox News type of world we live in these days. After all, even if they did predict the rise of ISIS, Boston, it is the policy-maker who must decide what action to take. Difficult when: a) There are sooo many warnings coming across their desk b) Limited resources C) Not many real policy instruments available. For example, the US public would not have been up for attacking for acting on intel available about ISIS 18 months ago, thus that policy option was thus not available.
- xnull1guest 12y ago
  That's because these systems were not designed for, or used very often for, antiterrorism purposes. These capabilities are every bit about decision advantages and sabotage on international and geopolitical levels. * Brazilian competitor PETROBRAS hacked by NSA on behalf of US oil companies. * German elite, including Merkle, spied on during the Eurozone crisis. * Iranian nuclear efforts sabotaged for several years by Stuxnet, and then by other cyber weapons. * Syrian Air Force hacked and grounded during ISIS and civil war activity. * "FISA" & FISA courts = Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act
- click170 12y ago
  It can't help that the Secret Service is losing top talent to private security firms like Academi (aka Blackwater), which draws a parallel with parts of the tech industry. It makes me wonder exactly how much worse it is in the Intelligence industry. I agree with others in this thread, given the secrecy involved I expect it to be orders of magnitude worse than what we see in the private sector. It also makes me wonder about the private Intelligence industry, about how much better they must be than their government counterparts, and about how they work together with government to "fight terror" and other demons. Combine that with the idea that government IT is losing talent to private firms in the same way... Maybe we should be more worried about private Intelligence firms than we currently are.
- superuser2 12y ago
  >The few criminals caught via these tools are almost always the low hanging fruit of unconnected crazies This is true of the criminals caught via FBI counterterrorism's more traditional police work that ends in civilian courts. It remains entirely possible that the intelligence establishment enjoys some success in penetrating more sophisticated groups, but doesn't write press releases about it (since it will be acted upon with further covert operations to get further into those organizations, or with secret assassinations.)
- kevin_thibedeau 12y ago
  Manning couldn't have happened if they followed their own policies for locking down PCs and restricting access to writable media.
colordrops 12y ago
Why does every post on this subject always have someone come in to slam home the notion that the government is always inept in everything they do? Its really good propaganda for keeping the public pacified. But it doesn't reflect reality. The government as well as its component organizations are not monolithic, and are made up of both bafoons and geniuses. Based on conversations I've had with people that have been part of the apparatus, the CIA is known to be somewhat incompetent when it comes to computer tech, but the NSA is phenomenal. Stop apologizing for the government, whether conscious or not.
- username223 12y ago
  > Why does every post on this subject always have someone come in to slam home the notion that the government is always inept in everything they do? Because it's being read by programmers, a significant portion of whom are "libertarians." Just ignore them.
  - dmix 12y ago
    HN used to have a libertarian lean to it back when it was a smaller community of programmers who were starting companies like Dropbox and AirBnB, people discussing SICP/Lisp, and willing to fill the homepage with Erlang articles to scare aware newbs. Now that it has been fully transitioned into mainstream site and much more like reddit, it is much less libertarian and more /r/politics. So that generalization doesn't apply so cleanly here anymore.
    - username223 12y ago
      > starting companies like Dropbox and AirBnB, people discussing SICP/Lisp, and willing to fill the homepage with Erlang articles to scare aware newbs. That seems like "greed-heads, nerds, and old-school Usenet trolls."
- lorddoig 12y ago
  Because they keep proving it over and over again? (at least in certain problem domains they do.) Government activities are generally important to a lot of people, if not because said people are direct consumers of the alleged benefits then because they paid for them. We keep paying and they keep ballsing it up, and everything we know about the theory of government (in an economic sense) tells us this is a design flaw and, ergo, not something that can be expected to self-resolve. And it's not that they're totally inept all the time (although ineptitude is a recurring theme) - sometimes they do get good stuff done. The much harder question to answer in these cases is how efficient was it? How much tax money was shat away in admin/stupid compliance BS, and is all that wasteful pomp really a necessary price to pay for democracy? Could there be another way? It's all very contentious, high-stakes stuff and if you disagree strongly enough with it all to wilfully not comply you'll soon find the whole system is propped up on various threats: they'll take your money, your home, your pride - they may even take you. And they'll do it all under a banner of moral righteousness that turns it into you vs. "society". How could that ever not be a talking point? I talk about it most days in one way or another, and not because I'm some horrible right-wing fanatic who wants to wipe my ass with money and glee in the suffering of others, but because it's an incredibly fragile, wasteful system that perpetually sits on a knife edge and I suspect does just as much harm as good. It's misguided in so many ways and so, so hard to change that all I can do is moan about it and hope that my moans contribute in some way to getting the volume of the debate loud enough to think that something could change. So, yeah, that's why I think it keeps coming up.
fixxer 12y ago
Well said. And even more of a reason to insist they respect your privacy. Even if you think "you don't have anything to hide," you still don't want your personal information held on a system designed by anyone with that government contractor level of QA/QC.
alexqgb 12y ago
There's no need to merely suspect. You can be (depressingly) sure thanks to Thomas Drake, who blew the whistle on the NSA for not only not doing things the right way, but for spending gargantuan sums of money to do things in a way so wrong that the only thing done at all was something that flatly violated the Constitution.

drzaiusapelord 12y ago

This is my thinking as well. A lot of what spy tech is, is the ability to throw a warrant or NS letter into someone's face and force them to open the gate. The mythical uber-competent security services seem to be a pretty questionable premise. The few criminals caught via these tools are almost always the low hanging fruit of unconnected crazies, who seem to be harmless cranks and not real terrorists. Five eyes didn't stop or predict Snowden, Assange/Manning, Boston bombers, the rise of ISIS, Putin's advance on Crimea and Eastern Ukraine, the massive cyberwar Russia and China have declared on us, etc. In fact, all these things were major surprises to these security services, at least from what we can tell. There's a lot of federal tax money spent on what is cargo cult science and cargo cult intelligence. The NSA has the ability to buy a lot of PhD's but they are stuck with the same batch of incompetent and profiteer federal contractors the rest of the government is stuck with.

secfirstmd 12y ago
I think it's also related to policy-makers... These days too many of them are a bit intimidated by the mere presence and aura of people in uniform, intel people, cops etc...Years ago, many of them had served in the military or a had a very good understanding of what they can really do (not what they claim they can do) how they worked/the types of people behind them(JFK, Churchill etc) so were rightly sceptical of their claims. I mean, has anyone ever met a cop/spook/politician who didn't want more power to do X, more money to do Y, more people, more secrecy etc? One of the main problems for intel agencies is that they are merely one conduit to policy-makers, amongst many these days. Ultimately it is those policy-makers who need to (and increasingly are incapable of) using this information for strategic decision-making...Tactically it is easy to say "arrest/shoot that guy," because they get kudos and less blame if some thing goes wrong. Strategically it is harder to say "don't shoot that guy, keep him alive and in 5 years we can negotiate with him." It took the British a long time to learn how to do this in Northern Ireland, and it was only when they did that they managed to start to move towards peace with the IRA. I'm not sure would that be possibly in the bloggy, politically polarised, short-term, tabloid, Sky/Fox News type of world we live in these days. After all, even if they did predict the rise of ISIS, Boston, it is the policy-maker who must decide what action to take. Difficult when: a) There are sooo many warnings coming across their desk b) Limited resources C) Not many real policy instruments available. For example, the US public would not have been up for attacking for acting on intel available about ISIS 18 months ago, thus that policy option was thus not available.
xnull1guest 12y ago
That's because these systems were not designed for, or used very often for, antiterrorism purposes. These capabilities are every bit about decision advantages and sabotage on international and geopolitical levels. * Brazilian competitor PETROBRAS hacked by NSA on behalf of US oil companies. * German elite, including Merkle, spied on during the Eurozone crisis. * Iranian nuclear efforts sabotaged for several years by Stuxnet, and then by other cyber weapons. * Syrian Air Force hacked and grounded during ISIS and civil war activity. * "FISA" & FISA courts = Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act
click170 12y ago
It can't help that the Secret Service is losing top talent to private security firms like Academi (aka Blackwater), which draws a parallel with parts of the tech industry. It makes me wonder exactly how much worse it is in the Intelligence industry. I agree with others in this thread, given the secrecy involved I expect it to be orders of magnitude worse than what we see in the private sector. It also makes me wonder about the private Intelligence industry, about how much better they must be than their government counterparts, and about how they work together with government to "fight terror" and other demons. Combine that with the idea that government IT is losing talent to private firms in the same way... Maybe we should be more worried about private Intelligence firms than we currently are.
superuser2 12y ago
>The few criminals caught via these tools are almost always the low hanging fruit of unconnected crazies This is true of the criminals caught via FBI counterterrorism's more traditional police work that ends in civilian courts. It remains entirely possible that the intelligence establishment enjoys some success in penetrating more sophisticated groups, but doesn't write press releases about it (since it will be acted upon with further covert operations to get further into those organizations, or with secret assassinations.)
kevin_thibedeau 12y ago
Manning couldn't have happened if they followed their own policies for locking down PCs and restricting access to writable media.

colordrops 12y ago

Why does every post on this subject always have someone come in to slam home the notion that the government is always inept in everything they do? Its really good propaganda for keeping the public pacified. But it doesn't reflect reality. The government as well as its component organizations are not monolithic, and are made up of both bafoons and geniuses. Based on conversations I've had with people that have been part of the apparatus, the CIA is known to be somewhat incompetent when it comes to computer tech, but the NSA is phenomenal. Stop apologizing for the government, whether conscious or not.

username223 12y ago
> Why does every post on this subject always have someone come in to slam home the notion that the government is always inept in everything they do? Because it's being read by programmers, a significant portion of whom are "libertarians." Just ignore them.
- dmix 12y ago
  HN used to have a libertarian lean to it back when it was a smaller community of programmers who were starting companies like Dropbox and AirBnB, people discussing SICP/Lisp, and willing to fill the homepage with Erlang articles to scare aware newbs. Now that it has been fully transitioned into mainstream site and much more like reddit, it is much less libertarian and more /r/politics. So that generalization doesn't apply so cleanly here anymore.
  - username223 12y ago
    > starting companies like Dropbox and AirBnB, people discussing SICP/Lisp, and willing to fill the homepage with Erlang articles to scare aware newbs. That seems like "greed-heads, nerds, and old-school Usenet trolls."
lorddoig 12y ago
Because they keep proving it over and over again? (at least in certain problem domains they do.) Government activities are generally important to a lot of people, if not because said people are direct consumers of the alleged benefits then because they paid for them. We keep paying and they keep ballsing it up, and everything we know about the theory of government (in an economic sense) tells us this is a design flaw and, ergo, not something that can be expected to self-resolve. And it's not that they're totally inept all the time (although ineptitude is a recurring theme) - sometimes they do get good stuff done. The much harder question to answer in these cases is how efficient was it? How much tax money was shat away in admin/stupid compliance BS, and is all that wasteful pomp really a necessary price to pay for democracy? Could there be another way? It's all very contentious, high-stakes stuff and if you disagree strongly enough with it all to wilfully not comply you'll soon find the whole system is propped up on various threats: they'll take your money, your home, your pride - they may even take you. And they'll do it all under a banner of moral righteousness that turns it into you vs. "society". How could that ever not be a talking point? I talk about it most days in one way or another, and not because I'm some horrible right-wing fanatic who wants to wipe my ass with money and glee in the suffering of others, but because it's an incredibly fragile, wasteful system that perpetually sits on a knife edge and I suspect does just as much harm as good. It's misguided in so many ways and so, so hard to change that all I can do is moan about it and hope that my moans contribute in some way to getting the volume of the debate loud enough to think that something could change. So, yeah, that's why I think it keeps coming up.

fixxer 12y ago

Well said. And even more of a reason to insist they respect your privacy. Even if you think "you don't have anything to hide," you still don't want your personal information held on a system designed by anyone with that government contractor level of QA/QC.

alexqgb 12y ago

There's no need to merely suspect. You can be (depressingly) sure thanks to Thomas Drake, who blew the whistle on the NSA for not only not doing things the right way, but for spending gargantuan sums of money to do things in a way so wrong that the only thing done at all was something that flatly violated the Constitution.