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South African authorities admit to mass surveillance

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Re: South African authorities admit to mass surveillance

#31

Post by vageli »

buyx wrote: post #20

If there’s any comfort to be had, South Africa’s intelligence agencies are a shambles, and unable to deal with real-life threats right under their noses. The idea that they’d be able to do anything actionable with bulk—collected electronic intel is laughable. The way things are going, wouldn’t be surprising if whole thing is a corrupt scheme linked to procurement of storage media.

> If there’s any comfort to be had, South Africa’s intelligence agencies are a shambles, and unable to deal with real-life threats right under their noses. The idea that they’d be able to do anything actionable with bulk—collected electronic intel is laughable.

> The way things are going, wouldn’t be surprising if whole thing is a corrupt scheme linked to procurement of storage media.

If anything, this is _more_ alarming because they are probably not securing the data they intercept all too well.

Re: South African authorities admit to mass surveillance

#32

Post by jchw »

somebodythere wrote: post #8
sofaofthedamned wrote: post #5

Wasn't it 6 years ago when Snowden made public his revelations and Google said 'nope' and encrypted the lot? Who now sends traffic over these links and doesn't encrypt them? So, what value do the SA government have in intercepting these links now?

* Many applications still aren't encrypted by default, like IRC. * If you have compromised a private key, you can get useful data from the cable intercept. * If you can collect ciphertext today, and decrypt it tomorrow (with, say, quantum computers), the cable intercept is very useful.

Modern IRC servers tend to support TLS on port 6697 and SASL for authentication. I’ve been connecting to IRC over SSL for probably a decade at least.

Re: South African authorities admit to mass surveillance

#33

Post by nxc18 »

dmix wrote: post #25
sofaofthedamned wrote: post #5

Wasn't it 6 years ago when Snowden made public his revelations and Google said 'nope' and encrypted the lot? Who now sends traffic over these links and doesn't encrypt them? So, what value do the SA government have in intercepting these links now?

There were plenty of small samples in the various Snowden powerpoint slides of stuff NSA incepted from the pipes. It seems a ton of mobile apps are sending information with identifiers over HTTP (the ID is a key part for them legally to pick it up and store it in a DB, forever). I notified one developer that was sending real-time GPS data + an email address highlighted in one of the PPT slide's (just a screenshot of…

I'm curious about stats for iOS, with its app transport security being enforced for store submissions. There are exceptions, but I certainly hope that Apple is verifying that those are actually necessary before allowing them. I'd love it if Apple took a step forward and warned periodically for http use (similar to how it periodically reminds you that apps have location permissions).

Aside: I know at least for some orgs, ATS was helpful in convincing the older 'why isn't http good enough?' folks to finally get their act together. It may be shocking, but some people are quite resistant to typing in that extra 's'.

Re: South African authorities admit to mass surveillance

#34

Post by reaperducer »

chrisseaton wrote: post #2

> worrying is that the SSA has said that such surveillance and data collection is "common practice" globally I think if you believe that any major country is not intercepting all undersea fibre cable traffic within their reach or even beyond it then you’re being very naive. I can’t understand how this news would surprise anyone.

I can imagine a sustainable business could be made operating a fleet of ships in international waters that pick up undersea cables, taps them, and uplinks the data in real time to whichever .gov subscribes to it.

The company taking the risk gets a big fat government check every month, and the governments get to deny they're tapping anyone's data.

Re: South African authorities admit to mass surveillance

#35

Post by reaperducer »

sofaofthedamned wrote: post #5

Wasn't it 6 years ago when Snowden made public his revelations and Google said 'nope' and encrypted the lot? Who now sends traffic over these links and doesn't encrypt them? So, what value do the SA government have in intercepting these links now?

Who now sends traffic over these links and doesn't encrypt them?

Remember that the intelligence agencies don't only want today's data, they want yesterday's data. You get yesterday's data by storing it today. Then you can decrypt it at your leisure, or when computers become powerful enough to break through.

I know a lot of people on HN earn a living making sure internet traffic is encrypted. But honestly, I really believe there are multiple TLA's that can decrypt whatever they want in real time. Maybe not en masse, but certainly targeted streams.

Re: South African authorities admit to mass surveillance

#36

Post by reaperducer »

buyx wrote: post #20

If there’s any comfort to be had, South Africa’s intelligence agencies are a shambles, and unable to deal with real-life threats right under their noses. The idea that they’d be able to do anything actionable with bulk—collected electronic intel is laughable. The way things are going, wouldn’t be surprising if whole thing is a corrupt scheme linked to procurement of storage media.

wouldn’t be surprising if whole thing is a corrupt scheme linked to procurement of storage media.

Reminds me a little bit of a guy I knew in the late 90's who repeatedly set off fire alarms at his company in order to convince management to allocate money for off-site backups.

Re: South African authorities admit to mass surveillance

#38

Post by jonnybgood »

Apocryphon wrote: post #37

Wonder if they have any partnerships with the Five Eyes?

Given South Africa is a member of BRICS, it's not likely.

> In addition to commercial motivations, the new fiber optic Silk Road could also have geopolitical and strategic implications. Russia and China evidently share a desire to shield themselves from U.S. and other Western intelligence agencies and probably believe that their own communications – both with one another and to and from Europe – will be better protected if cables run across their own territory rather than through the Indian Ocean or the U.S. The same motivation explains the announced Telebras cable, which will connect Brazil to Portugal without any U.S. technology, and the BRICS cable project, which will link Vladivostok to Brazil, via China, India and South Africa.

https://thediplomat.com/2015/04/a-fiber-optic-silk-road/

Re: South African authorities admit to mass surveillance

#39

Post by nevi-me »

LegitShady wrote: post #28
pfundstein wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It surprises me as a South African because I didn't know our government had the technical capability or capacity to store and process so much data, let alone splice undersea cables without detection.

if they don't have the expertise, someone else with the expertise interested in access to the data will help them.

Often at exorbitant cost in our case. The SSA is an unaccountable financial black hole. Our former president send to have also used them for his political gain, this Fraser chap is responsible for many misdeeds.

Now parts of our country are literally burning, yet there's no crime intelligence about the very threats to the state that SSA should be monitoring for. There was an act of terror that was nearly committed 2 days ago, but we're seeing poor leadership from those involved.

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