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Huge data leak shatters the lie that the innocent need not fear surveillance

theguardian.com

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Re: Huge data leak shatters the lie that the innocent need not fear surveillance

#111
post #3

I don't think the problem is with the "lie" that the innocent need not fear surveillance. Most people will agree that mass-surveillance will negatively affect some people that are indispensable to healthily functioning liberal society: journalists, activists, academics, public figures... The problem is that even if most people don't subscribe to the "nothing to hide" argument in general, they do not care about themse…

Because the 'time and effort required to maintain my privacy' part requires immediate and sustained and rigorous action and sacrifice of various comforts, all for a nebulously perceived, personally theoretical risk. The ultimate trajectory of liberal democracy is towards anarchism. But humans are anything but evolutionarily suited for that. We are biologically built to function in a hierarchy, even if the top of that…

> sacrifice of various comforts

Yes and I would take this even further -- Google, Facebook, and our phones, have become such an integral part of our daily (hourly) lives that to ask the average person to give up even a portion of these things or to change their habits is akin to social ostracization or educational handicapping.

Re: Huge data leak shatters the lie that the innocent need not fear surveillance

#112
Some smart people in the comments section have pointed out that the problem isn't "the innocent need not fear surveillance" argument, but a very common "I don't care" or "I'm powerless to stop it, so why bother" attitude that is the problem. I can assure you all this is the common problem, not only with the surveillance debate, but many others.

For those of you who are struggling with this I would like to try to help you understand why those attitudes are more common and therefore results in inaction so that you can be more effective in getting people to take a position, rather than ignore the problem. As an example, I'm going to be citing something anecdotal which is nevertheless true, in order to establish the necessary psychology you have to combat.

The vast majority of people that live outside the inner city don't worry about someone breaking into thier homes. Breakins do happen, but for most people you only occasionally hear about them as happening to a friend of a friend. Occasionally a large string of burglaries will make the news, but generally the thief was caught by the time the news can begin reporting on it. This is the same way myths and legends are spread, and people don't view such things as happening to themselves, but to vague other people they've never met. They don't know the statistics and if they do they are still unlikely to change behavior or pay for a security service beyond having a yard sign. They do this because the perspective they have toward the problem is that of being unaffected. Possibly losing a TV or random jewelry is only worrying if you believe it could happen to you, and impactful enough that the pain of it happening exceeds to pain of doing something to protect themselves. If birgarlies are common enough where you live you might believe it could happen to you, but if you think of the loss in terms of money the cost of a security service over ten years is likely to exceed tge cost of what they might steal. However, if they think about potential loss in terms of something personally importanr to them they become more likely to hiring a security service. The chance that you might have to buy a new TV is less compelling than the possible loss of the wedding ring your grandmother gave you or the possibility that a rare photograph of your great grandfather might be destroyed by a meth addict carelessly throwing it against the wall while they search your room for jewelry.

Data leaks like this establish that thier data can and probably will be stolen, but it doesn't establish how it can emotionally impact them. Most people are not journalists are significantly critical of the government and will continue to take for granted that journalist are sometimes targeted because as far as they can tell it isn't impacting thier lives. You have to put it in perspective of something they care about, like the government might collect and look at thier nudes, or collect and leak thier banking details such as account passwords. That's not even taking into account that surveillance can cause things like dropped calls, and some government agencies attempt to block consumer protections solely so they can continue to spy on you.

Imagine just for a moment that the FBI and CIA find it convenient that phone companies haven't fixed the phone number spoofing and scam auto dialing problem because it means they send a spam call to any number at any time and appear as something other than a goverent phone number. This can allow them to force your cell phone to ping the nearest towers so they can triangulate your position even if you have GPS turned off. This works even if you reject the call, but it won't work if you're using Google Voice and you block the spammer's number because Google won't forward the call to your phone. The FBI or CIA doesn't even have to bother with setting up a fake spam auto dialing scam because the spammer's already call every active phone number multiple times a day. You might not care that the government is collecting your data, but those spammer's are really fucking annoying, so even if you don't care about the surveillance itself, you should probably care about how annoying some of thier methods for achieving surveillance can be.

Now, does the FBI or CIA care about whether phone companies implement the necessary anti-spoofing protections? I have no idea, but we know enough about recent surveillance history to say that they have used invassive and outright annoying methods. They've infected people's phones with Spyware that runs in the background all the time, killing battery life. They've installed key loggers on all kinds of devices that can screw up the responsiveness of keyboard inputs. They've used malware that can change setting in your browser like search history, which could expose the porn search terms you've looked for (don't pretend that possibility doesn't scare a lot of you when you have to look something up in front of friends, we all know it does). They've demanded private companies create or leave in backdoors into people's devices and accounts that have later been abused by hackers to steal nudes and other embarrassing information (or found vulnerabilities and not reported them so they could abuse them and they were later discovered and abused by hackers).

My point to all of this book of a response is that you need to figure out what the person you're talking to cares about so that you can establish not only that unwanted surveillance can happen to them, but that it will impact thier life in ways they care about. Shit that annoys regularly or has the potential to cause severly awkward or embarrassing situations tend to work better than a quantifiable loss of money or even time.

Re: Huge data leak shatters the lie that the innocent need not fear surveillance

#113

My next phone is going to be a Linux phone, and this is partly why. Individuals need to be the ones in control of the software and hardware that they use, not the other way around.

This is the perfect example of how the burden is on the little guy to stop surveillance and it's a losing battle of attrition. You might secure the software but it doesn't matter if there are undocumented CPU instructions to break into all phones on the market.

Re: Huge data leak shatters the lie that the innocent need not fear surveillance

#114
Hopefully some will ask themselves why the "beacon of democracy" in the region is so ready and open to sell tools used almost solely to prevent the spread of true democracy to their neighbours? And then maybe we should all have a long hard think about how this translates to our own disgusting arms industries as a whole.

Re: Huge data leak shatters the lie that the innocent need not fear surveillance

#115
post #27

Pegasus is what the Saudis used to capture Khashoggi. While it’s very impressive software, it’s incredibly dangerous in the wrong hands.

I'm unclear on what it does beyond normal spyware that every scammer in the world uses. Is it just really good spyware?

Re: Huge data leak shatters the lie that the innocent need not fear surveillance

#116

Hopefully some will ask themselves why the "beacon of democracy" in the region is so ready and open to sell tools used almost solely to prevent the spread of true democracy to their neighbours? And then maybe we should all have a long hard think about how this translates to our own disgusting arms industries as a whole.

A lot can be said about Israel, and this NSO stuff is extremely alarming. However, they also should get some credit as (one of?) the only countries in the Middle East where the laws don’t dictate that people be persecuted and/or killed for being homosexual.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_Israel

Re: Huge data leak shatters the lie that the innocent need not fear surveillance

#117

Hopefully some will ask themselves why the "beacon of democracy" in the region is so ready and open to sell tools used almost solely to prevent the spread of true democracy to their neighbours? And then maybe we should all have a long hard think about how this translates to our own disgusting arms industries as a whole.

> Hopefully some will ask themselves why the "beacon of democracy" in the region is so ready and open to sell tools used almost solely to prevent the spread of true democracy.

I think you're conflating Israel the state with this Israeli company. AFAIK it has no ties to the state, and should no more be conflated with it than we should conflate McAfee or Facebook with the USA.

Re: Huge data leak shatters the lie that the innocent need not fear surveillance

#119

Hopefully some will ask themselves why the "beacon of democracy" in the region is so ready and open to sell tools used almost solely to prevent the spread of true democracy to their neighbours? And then maybe we should all have a long hard think about how this translates to our own disgusting arms industries as a whole.

A lot can be said about Israel, and this NSO stuff is extremely alarming. However, they also should get some credit as (one of?) the only countries in the Middle East where the laws don’t dictate that people be persecuted and/or killed for being homosexual. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_Israel

Is there a distinct name for this form or relative of whataboutism where some supposed superiority over some other group on some axis irrelevant to the issue at hand is raised to derail criticism of a regime or other group’s abuses?

Re: Huge data leak shatters the lie that the innocent need not fear surveillance

#120
post #117

Hopefully some will ask themselves why the "beacon of democracy" in the region is so ready and open to sell tools used almost solely to prevent the spread of true democracy to their neighbours? And then maybe we should all have a long hard think about how this translates to our own disgusting arms industries as a whole.

> Hopefully some will ask themselves why the "beacon of democracy" in the region is so ready and open to sell tools used almost solely to prevent the spread of true democracy. I think you're conflating Israel the state with this Israeli company. AFAIK it has no ties to the state, and should no more be conflated with it than we should conflate McAfee or Facebook with the USA.

Israeli courts have not allowed the case by amnesty international for suing the company saying that ministry of defense supervises the company so yes they are absolutely connected.
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