As if the South Africans can decrypt anything. They can enjoy receiving non-SSL traffic. They're not going to get my shit.
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South African authorities admit to mass surveillance
111–120 of 145 posts
Re: South African authorities admit to mass surveillance
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
It means that people think the leaks say what Greenwald claimed they said instead of what they actually said, and when those people tell their parents what Greenwald said, they sound like lunatics. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20456352
A, the BS "there's an added hop so it's not happening/serious" defense. People still fall for this?
The added hop means that the NSA can't request anything they want from the Internet messaging companies. They can only see foreigner data from the specific users the FBI has already wiretapped via court order. There are no leaked documents that say otherwise and plenty of documents that corroborate my assertions.
This is why it hasn't been ruled illegal. Do people actually believe that phone metadata collection is illegal but the crazy thing Greenwald misread PRISM to be is not? That's going to trip grecy's university-educated family's bullshit detector.
Re: South African authorities admit to mass surveillance
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
[1] Personal story from a fellow colleague from Botswana. [2] http://www.statssa.gov.za/?p=11129
Heads up: Either you're a different person, or your throwaway account is now linked to your other one.
Noprocrast prevents edits directly after submission.
Re: South African authorities admit to mass surveillance
#114Not helping the security of the country very much. SA has one of the highest murder rates in the world.
Re: South African authorities admit to mass surveillance
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
Someone makes this exact same comment every time there is a privacy story - not realising there is a very big gap between speculating on what a governments capability is and having it confirmed Sure - people in privacy circles may suspect this and sneer at the general public for thinking it is news, but it is a big deal to have it confirmed, to raise awareness of it and actually do something about it
I think the Trump tweet from the other day confirms that this speculation is not at all unfounded. I think 20cm resolution from satellite images is even better than most people speculated.
From what I can tell that image was pretty much in line with what everyone watching the US spy satellite program expected and wasn't hugely far off what's commercially available now. For instance, this was the first article I found when looking for information about the resolution of commercial satellite images (up to 30cm apparently), and it puts Keyhole spy satellites in the 7-10cm resolution ballpark: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/04/21/h...
The significance of that release was overblown because it helped support a narrative about Trump damaging national security that the media and people on social media liked. In reality it doesn't seem to have revealed anything about the US satellite imaging capabilities that wasn't already known.
Re: South African authorities admit to mass surveillance
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's how I read being able to do it because you have "the best, largest, fastest, most advanced machines that money can buy".
My pet conspiracy theory is that at least some large governments have quantum computers of useful strength. It's probably more likely that they're just trudging along with side-channel attacks, CA fuckery, breaking into servers, and doing targeted attacks though. Cheaper and likely works well enough.
I'd be pretty surprised if they had quantum computers to where they could decrypt https, but it's at least possible.
The more prosaic means you're describing, plus zero days and phishing (unless that's included in "targeted attacks"?), can still get them a long way.
Re: South African authorities admit to mass surveillance
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's how I read being able to do it because you have "the best, largest, fastest, most advanced machines that money can buy".
Might be easier to steal keys... Seeing this photo makes me think that's more likely. https://blog.encrypt.me/assets/img/posts/2013/11/05/nsa_slid... Pardon the source but I'm on mobile.
That image is a shows an NSA diagram of Google's network, with the links on the "public internet" side labeled "SSL" and on the "Google cloud" side labeled "clear text". You don't have to steal keys to exploit that, you just need physical attacks against the fiber links between Google's datacenters. Google had been working on encrypting that traffic, which was then massively accelerated when they learned it was being actively exploited: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/11/googl...
(Disclosure: I work at Google)
Re: South African authorities admit to mass surveillance
#118> it also covers information about organised crime Let's just pause a bit here. In South Africa, if your phone gets stolen and you go to the police, they may well respond with: "Yes we know the guy, but we're not going to do anything." [1] I think that surveillance doesn't have the same twang in South Africa that it has in the US and EU. Organised crime and unorganised violent crime for that matter in one thing that…
"surveillance is not new at all in South Africa and in fact is much less than under the previous, non-democratic government."
This is a sort of sad irony of our day. It turns out that technology/accessibility are more important than ideology in determining how much surveillance happens. Non democratic surveillance states like apartheid SA or stazi East Germany might have been ideologically in favour of using surveillance to depress democracy but even ostensibly liberal-democratic regimes today do more of it.. because it's cheap, easy and "standard practice around the world."
Re: South African authorities admit to mass surveillance
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I can’t understand how this news would surprise anyone I tried to tell my family about the Snowden leaks and the implications just a year ago. They are all university educated people. They categorically did not believe that what I was saying was real, and when I showed them all the leaks they did not believe the content was true. Billions of people simply don't believe it's true.
You should show them the reactions of elected representatives to hearing about it. (I know of only a few clear verifications, if anyone more knowledgeable wants to chime in with a list that would be welcome.)
With deep fakes even that is up for dispute.
Re: South African authorities admit to mass surveillance
#120> it also covers information about organised crime Let's just pause a bit here. In South Africa, if your phone gets stolen and you go to the police, they may well respond with: "Yes we know the guy, but we're not going to do anything." [1] I think that surveillance doesn't have the same twang in South Africa that it has in the US and EU. Organised crime and unorganised violent crime for that matter in one thing that…
To think of surveillance as a solution against violent crime is fantasy anyway. It wasn't a requirement at least for all other countries getting it to manageable levels.
Sure, you might catch some guys but as you yourself reported, it may not even matter if there is evidence.
But the incentive to abuse surveillance is certainly something western nations have readily helped with their active approval that couldn't even net results besides more civil resistance.
So I am not pointing the finger on South Africa here.