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 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?
I mean, isn't this almost surreal? Like a cheap sci-fi novel has become reality?
Who's the real terrorists in 2013? I for one am more scared, appaled by what has been bubbling to the surface every week, almost every day since Snowden.
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:
[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.]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you changed the story to be a known drug dealers wife, it isn't that out of line. Can Miranda clearly say he has NEVER TRANSPORTED leaked documents or known where his partner keeps them? Really? Even more so, can he prove his partner has never tried to use him as a mule to pass confidential information across international borders?
This was just like grabbing a drug dealers wife hoping the drug dealer was just a little too greedy and his stuff in her packages.
The Guardian's lawyer eventually got to see Miranda an hour before he was released.
The Guardian destroyed their own laptops rather than handing them over the to security services (my reading is the security services were concerned about the laptops falling into the wrong hands)
I don't like the way the UK government has behaved but the Guardian is omitting things in it's reports and that leads to questions about its credibility too.
One key part of the story is that the UK government basically accused Miranda (and Greenwald and Poitras) of aiding terrorists by intending to publish that classified information. That's a hairsbreath away from the charge of aiding the enemy that Manning was (just barely?) found innocent of in the US.
I think that defining news reporting to be aiding the enemy is pretty darn close to a lot of what one sees in sci-fi police states.
So a government can apply terrorism law to a person having information that's damaging to its interests?
That certainly looks like police state to me. And I'm not even mentioning the 9 hours detention, not needed at all to recover the damaging information.
Let's say you were the british security services, you didn't like Greenwald, and you wanted to show him who was boss. And his partner was travelling through an airport.
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.]
The M-x spook feature of emacs is not a new thing!
I was just looking at the code for that, 5 minutes before I read your comment. It was written in May 1987. A comment near the top says "Help defeat the NSA trunk trawler!". It's interesting how our preceptions of this kind of counter-surveillance tool (primitive as it is) has changed from "OK, man, that's just crazy talk" to "Huh, I guess it really is happening!".
In regards to your first paragraph, its a question I keep wondering. What was different about these leaks then all the previous? Why NOW are people caring?
I mean just having "Super secret spy details" on Powerpoint means its not being handled by "our top people". George Smiley is not carefully placing a glass board under his cipher paper before taking a micro-copy.
This is spying on everyone, passed around like candy at the middle-managers meeting
Its the sheer mundane, ordinariness that has driven it home for me - they are so used to this, so utterly unashamed they put it on Powerpoint. FFS
> just having "Super secret spy details" on Powerpoint means its not being handled by "our top people"
So if it was being handled by the top people, they would have outsourced the documentation to a graphic design company, to generate a super-professional looking PDF?
(Seriously, how do you expect the high level management to communicate with each other?)
I expect them to communicate in person, or over the phone. You use PowerPoint to distribute information to GROUPS of people, which implies it's more than just high level management that will be seeing the PowerPoint.
I took "our top people" to mean "our best people, who understand the severity of what they're doing and try hard to keep it from leaking, so don't just save the info in a PPT".
Which begs the question: what additional programs do the best of the best at the NSA know about?
For me this is important because we're getting closer and closer to a tipping point where complete surveillance (i.e. a full take on everyone) is possible.
That's not possible yet, but it's clear that they are working towards it, and in the case of the UK, they already have almost complete surveillance of all communications for a period of days, and then of metadata for longer. Coupled with the fact that almost every mundane action or movement is now tied to communications (often involuntary) via our phones or other devices, that makes it very hard to escape surveillance. That ambition of a full take has always been there, but only now is it becoming possible, and instead of restraining the security services, it appears our politicians are encouraging them. I'm not sure that they, or we, even understand the implications yet, or what will happen when this data leaks or is misused on a large scale.
Even just the analysis of public internet data (like twitter feeds) will at some point in the future have profound effects, let alone the private data our security services are collecting. Retrospective and yet complete surveillance will I believe be the most dangerous part of these programmes, not real-time surveillance. That wasn't possible in the past, and is only just possible now.
So because of the future implications of a full-take on everyone's life spanning decades and our developing abilities to make sense of all that data in instants, relating and cataloguing thousands of people, this is a qualitative change in surveillance capability, and these leaks have shed light on that in a way that previous ones have not.
I would argue that, in general, people aren't caring.
We are caring; the small band of software and technology enthusiasts who develop software and online businesses. We care. But in the grand scheme of things, people don't care so much about this. In the grand scheme of things we are a special interest group, like Anti-Fracking protesters or Animal Rights activists.
Until I hear my mother or my girlfriend or my old university pal - none of whom work in computing - talking about this issue I really don't expect things to change. The difference between now and then is that we have forums like this where everyone can instantly express their outrage, but I think all that builds is a small self-fueling bubble of outrage that nobody else who lives outside the bubble knows or cares about.
You think Animal Rights Activists and Anti-Fracking Protesters don't care about their privacy? You think they aren't your natural allies on this? They may not understand the mechanisms by which it is all happening, but they are certainly down with the sentiment.
The way I see it, geeks have been complicit with the system for a long time, always under the guise of being "moderates". It's only now that massive corruption is starting to cramp on our style, and the reaction should be much more humble than "we're alone in understanding how bad things are".
Except that technically competent people are alone in understanding how bad things are. Most people simply do not understand computers or the Internet well enough to really grok what these revelations mean. It is not just about the mechanisms by which the surveillance is occurring, but the extent to which is can happen (and the extent to which is likely is happening). Until most people understand the difference between policy and technology -- e.g. the difference between "privacy settings" and encryption -- "geeks" will be the only people who really understand these matters.
Proof. Overwhelming proof. And all of the media reacting on this at once. There have been a few stories about spying before but at best each site ran one story about it and that was it. The next day everyone moved on.
I think both the brilliance of Greenwald/Guardian to launch a new story every few days and the stupidity of the US government when abusing its power to stop the press or Snowden, is what kept this for so long, and hopefully will continue to happen.
It's too soon to tell whether this time will be different -- that depends on whether Congress or the executive branch actually changes something in the end. So far it isn't different.
From the perspective of the U.S. and U.K., the Chinese and Israelies and French are undoubtedly doing their best to spy on as much of the Internet as they possibly can, and they're probably pretty successful at it, so why would we unilaterally disarm?
> From the perspective of the U.S. and U.K., the Chinese and Israelies and French are undoubtedly doing their best to spy on as much of the Internet as they possibly can, and they're probably pretty successful at it, so why would we unilaterally disarm?
From the perspective of the US: It doesn’t really help to assure your so-called ‘allies’ that they are indeed your ‘allies’ and not your vassals if you spy on them to such an extreme. Since you furthermore still rely on said nations for logistical reasons (and being friends with them likely couldn’t hurt anyhow), you might want to scale down your spying to accommodate the public perception. In addition, you’re hurting your own industry, especially service providers such as Google, Microsoft & Facebook, by giving the impression that it is unsafe to provide them with data.
From the perspective of the UK: I never quite got what you want to do, but you can’t expect to be even part of a free trade zone if you spy on the other member states of this free trade zone. This holds in particular if it is revealed that said spying is not necessarily restricted to catching terrorists, but also might get your domestic companies some trade secrets, which really doesn’t bode well in other member states that pride themselves on their innovation. Of course if you want to provoke being kicked out of that FTZ and join the union of your over-seas friends, that might actually make sense. Just don’t expect candy from the rest of us, then.
We should not merely disarm; we should build up defenses so that our citizens cannot be targeted. At the very least people who operate remailers and Tor exit nodes should not have to live in fear of having teams of soldiers assault their homes.
This is a classic problem for governments when it comes to cryptography and computer security. On the one hand it is easy for enemies to take advantage of the poor state of computer security, committing various acts of industrial espionage or shutting down critical systems. On the other hand law enforcement agencies want to be able to investigate people, and computer security systems can hamper those investigations; similarly our own spies want to ensure that our enemies are not able to protect themselves.
I believe it's because of the reporting on the topic. The Snowden case has been high drama, with its recent crescendo with Miranda's detention. If the media hadn't reported on it like it had...
As for the systems themselves, based upon what I've read, I've come to the tentative supposition that their data storage, categorization, and compartmentalization is relatively minimal and undifferentiated. [1]
This would be in line with what we learned about the structure (or rather, lack thereof) of intelligence systems of the State Department and military that allowed Manning to acquire such a broad range of documents undetected.
What I've seen cited of the documents from "agency who shall not be named" appear to describe and show that definitions of and limits upon what is searched for, are largely manually constructed and executed by the human operators performing those searches. "You may search for this OR that, but not both. You may search for this other but only in conjunction (AND) with this other term.
It all reminds me rather of one job I had that involved extensive data mining. I started with a mass of raw detail records and winnowed things down. It was entirely up to me what ended up being winnowed out, and I required both extensive knowledge of the domain and careful and precise execution in order to come up with the correct results.
The whole "unnamed agency" situation has developed rather a similar smell, for me.
As an aside, today when I read about the Manning sentencing, one of my first thoughts was, "Supposing that this prosecution has been 'fair' and 'necessary' (not that I necessarily agree with this supposition), then where is the prosecution and sentencing of those responsible for the criminally negligent design and management of the data intelligence systems he 'exploited'?"
For all its vaunted capabilities, I suspect that data management at the NSA is similarly fucked up, and that there are managers and contractors who should and would, in a fair world, be sent to prison for this.
--
[1] Perhaps with a few exceptions, e.g. for senior government officials and favored members of the private "elite" class, e.g. the C suite and board of Goldman and the like.
> 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?
-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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I mean, isn't this almost surreal? Like a cheap sci-fi novel has become reality?
Who's the real terrorists in 2013? I for one am more scared, appaled by what has been bubbling to the surface every week, almost every day since Snowden.