4 ms·

Sometimes I feel we miss the wood for the trees. Spy agencies implant SPYware, not that surprising. Surely the real story, the original Snowden story, was abou

Sometimes I feel we miss the wood for the trees. Spy agencies implant SPYware, not that surprising. Surely the real story, the original Snowden story, was about PRISM the way large corporations do the bidding for spy agencies letting them tap information at the source. This was quickly drowned in a sea of other stories, and is hardly ever mentioned any more.

jacquesm 11y ago
The story is that agencies that are tasked with foreign spying are spying dragnet-fashion on their own citizens and citizens of allies.
- 3princip 11y ago
  I'd say mass-surveillance (dragnet as you say) is always a bad thing, making distinctions based on the location of people isn't much protection since they already have a way around it: we do it to your people, you do it to us and we can "share" intel. My personal take from the whole Snowden saga was the degree of collusion with "do no evil" tech corporations, something which their PR teams have obviously effectively suppressed.
- eternalban 11y ago
  I beg to differ. The real story here is the naiveté of the people at large.
- CPLX 11y ago
  Yes this is the real story. We expect our spy agencies to spy on enemies, or violent and malicious individuals or organizations out to do us harm. It turns out they're spying on us. That's a big difference. And it's a problem.
- tedunangst 11y ago
  ? Quoting the article: > Respecting agreements not to spy on each others' citizens, the spying partners focused their attention on servers in non-Five Eyes countries,
  - rjaco31 11y ago
    That's bullshit imho, Snowden's documents showed that GCHQ spied on American citizens & NSA spied on British citizens so that they could bypass the whole "don't spy on nationals" rule.
    - tedunangst 11y ago
      I clipped the next three words since they didn't seem relevant but maybe they are. "the document suggests." so some snowden documents are bullshit and some aren't?
      - btilly 11y ago
        Every Snowden document is authentically what someone in a large and complex organization said. That someone may or may not have had accurate information. If you've ever talked to 2 co-workers who have a different understanding of a particular decision, then you know the phenomena. That said, it would be perfectly plausible that spy agencies could have maintained a policy of, "We will passively collect and analyze all transmissions, including our own citizens" along with one of, "We will actively infect devices, but make an attempt not to be attacking our own citizens in the process." So it is possible that both documents were completely correct.
        tedunangst 11y ago
        All true. Mostly I'm just entertained by how HN resolves apparent conflicts between documents, and which bullet points trump which other bullet points.
forgottenpass 11y ago
The rhetorical dodge is to say of Facebook (or whoever, doesn't matter), A) pretend that the data they collect is necessary to provide their user facing features and B) a private company that blah blah blah you know where this goes and all sides of the arguments for / against. I largely agree with where you're coming from. Any cultrual shift to bring back to data privacy will have to apply to government and indivudials/companies. You can't really have "but it's different when I do it" in a moral standard.
belorn 11y ago
Is it acceptable behavior that spy agencies spread malwares? I do find that attitude a bit surprising as sabotage and other active attacks in peace time was considered outside the spy agencies operation scope in the past. I do want spies that spies, police and police, and tax collector that collect taxes. I do not want them however to overstep their bounds in the chase of those goals, and I object when they target innocents with military weapons. Spy agencies should SPY, but spreading malware in the name of spying goes a step beyond spying. A line need to be drawn somewhere, and what better place than where sabotage begin?
btilly 11y ago
The real story is that our spy agencies are indiscriminately spying on us with no oversight, despite the fact that they are not supposed to, and that they tell people who should give oversight (eg Congress) that they aren't. All of the variations and permutations of that are part of the same story. PRISM was a particularly egregious example. And US companies are now losing billions/year because people in other countries won't trust data to them. Furthermore it was shocking to me that it was carried out in such a way that the people in charge of the companies were not allowed to know about what was happening inside of their own companies. That said, nobody has been shouting from the rooftops what I consider the most disturbing part of what I understand about it. And that is that any NSA analyst who wishes to get involved in politics can simply start digging up information on what is happening inside campaigns they don't like, and then can feed it to campaigns they do like. Nobody has to know about it. The campaigns already hire people to follow other campaigns, and those people already get tips. So you've just got a really good anonymous tipster. Think of it as a version of Watergate on steroids with plausible deniability and no physical burglary to leave traces. But it gets better. According to the interpretation of the Constitution that the NSA operates under, deliberately attempting to find out which NSA agents were looking at Americans is a search of said Americans, which is prevented by the 4th. This is why they could not, by their own rules, tell Congress how many Americans had been accidentally searched. If my understanding of this policy is correct, then the NSA is operating under rules that mean that they cannot even try to monitor for rogue agents who are doing what I just suggested. Now let's suppose that we trust 99.9% of NSA agents to be good people, following the internal rules and operating in good faith. It just takes ONE acting in bad faith to distort our political system. And enough thousands of people have access that I consider it guaranteed that this nightmare scenario is actually happening. Scared yet?

jacquesm 11y ago

The story is that agencies that are tasked with foreign spying are spying dragnet-fashion on their own citizens and citizens of allies.

3princip 11y ago
I'd say mass-surveillance (dragnet as you say) is always a bad thing, making distinctions based on the location of people isn't much protection since they already have a way around it: we do it to your people, you do it to us and we can "share" intel. My personal take from the whole Snowden saga was the degree of collusion with "do no evil" tech corporations, something which their PR teams have obviously effectively suppressed.
eternalban 11y ago
I beg to differ. The real story here is the naiveté of the people at large.
CPLX 11y ago
Yes this is the real story. We expect our spy agencies to spy on enemies, or violent and malicious individuals or organizations out to do us harm. It turns out they're spying on us. That's a big difference. And it's a problem.
tedunangst 11y ago
? Quoting the article: > Respecting agreements not to spy on each others' citizens, the spying partners focused their attention on servers in non-Five Eyes countries,
- rjaco31 11y ago
  That's bullshit imho, Snowden's documents showed that GCHQ spied on American citizens & NSA spied on British citizens so that they could bypass the whole "don't spy on nationals" rule.
  - tedunangst 11y ago
    I clipped the next three words since they didn't seem relevant but maybe they are. "the document suggests." so some snowden documents are bullshit and some aren't?
    - btilly 11y ago
      Every Snowden document is authentically what someone in a large and complex organization said. That someone may or may not have had accurate information. If you've ever talked to 2 co-workers who have a different understanding of a particular decision, then you know the phenomena. That said, it would be perfectly plausible that spy agencies could have maintained a policy of, "We will passively collect and analyze all transmissions, including our own citizens" along with one of, "We will actively infect devices, but make an attempt not to be attacking our own citizens in the process." So it is possible that both documents were completely correct.
      - tedunangst 11y ago
        All true. Mostly I'm just entertained by how HN resolves apparent conflicts between documents, and which bullet points trump which other bullet points.

forgottenpass 11y ago

The rhetorical dodge is to say of Facebook (or whoever, doesn't matter), A) pretend that the data they collect is necessary to provide their user facing features and B) a private company that blah blah blah you know where this goes and all sides of the arguments for / against. I largely agree with where you're coming from. Any cultrual shift to bring back to data privacy will have to apply to government and indivudials/companies. You can't really have "but it's different when I do it" in a moral standard.

belorn 11y ago

Is it acceptable behavior that spy agencies spread malwares? I do find that attitude a bit surprising as sabotage and other active attacks in peace time was considered outside the spy agencies operation scope in the past. I do want spies that spies, police and police, and tax collector that collect taxes. I do not want them however to overstep their bounds in the chase of those goals, and I object when they target innocents with military weapons. Spy agencies should SPY, but spreading malware in the name of spying goes a step beyond spying. A line need to be drawn somewhere, and what better place than where sabotage begin?

btilly 11y ago

The real story is that our spy agencies are indiscriminately spying on us with no oversight, despite the fact that they are not supposed to, and that they tell people who should give oversight (eg Congress) that they aren't. All of the variations and permutations of that are part of the same story. PRISM was a particularly egregious example. And US companies are now losing billions/year because people in other countries won't trust data to them. Furthermore it was shocking to me that it was carried out in such a way that the people in charge of the companies were not allowed to know about what was happening inside of their own companies. That said, nobody has been shouting from the rooftops what I consider the most disturbing part of what I understand about it. And that is that any NSA analyst who wishes to get involved in politics can simply start digging up information on what is happening inside campaigns they don't like, and then can feed it to campaigns they do like. Nobody has to know about it. The campaigns already hire people to follow other campaigns, and those people already get tips. So you've just got a really good anonymous tipster. Think of it as a version of Watergate on steroids with plausible deniability and no physical burglary to leave traces. But it gets better. According to the interpretation of the Constitution that the NSA operates under, deliberately attempting to find out which NSA agents were looking at Americans is a search of said Americans, which is prevented by the 4th. This is why they could not, by their own rules, tell Congress how many Americans had been accidentally searched. If my understanding of this policy is correct, then the NSA is operating under rules that mean that they cannot even try to monitor for rogue agents who are doing what I just suggested. Now let's suppose that we trust 99.9% of NSA agents to be good people, following the internal rules and operating in good faith. It just takes ONE acting in bad faith to distort our political system. And enough thousands of people have access that I consider it guaranteed that this nightmare scenario is actually happening. Scared yet?