Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 162 posts

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

#121

Post by justsid »

nobodyCloak wrote: post #116
smashah wrote: post #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.

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

This is the bar we have? If you don’t murder your citizens for being gay you are a good guy and if not then you are bad?

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

#122

Post by JumpCrisscross »

dragonwriter wrote: post #119
nobodyCloak wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> some axis irrelevant to the issue at hand

Someone asked why Israel is considered a "beacon of democracy" in the region. That opens the conversation to why liberal democracies elevate it over the region's autocracies. The tolerance it shares with other liberal documents is germane.

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

#123

Post by jackson1442 »

hoseja wrote: post #47
tommit wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems a bit over the top to me. I don't think I agree with your overall sentiment, even though I share some of the fear. Our phones were certainly not designed to be surveillance devices, that's just a side effect of having one central device that includes pretty much all of your life's data. As convenient as it is to have everything that matters to you on one device, it simply makes spying that much easier. I'm…

Education, especially history education is very thinly veiled nationalist-and-obedient-worker indoctrination.

I'm curious where you got this idea from. If anything, my university history classes looked at US history as a power struggle and certainly not through rose-colored glasses.

Sure, elementary education glosses over the state's transgressions and the like, but it doesn't seem exactly appropriate to go into detail about how native americans were raped and murdered by colonizers to a 9 year old.

Education teaches people to think critically, which is incredibly important to liberal society and, if anything, would encourage people to _not_ be obedient workers.

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

#124

Post by Popegaf »

trompetenaccoun wrote: post #30
turbinerneiter wrote: post #12

It's a fight we are only ever gonna lose. I.e. in Germany, I have seen wave after wave of surveillance passed. People try to fight back each time. Often the supreme court cancels the unconstitutional laws. But they always try again. And it only takes a football euro cup or Worldcup, or Olympic games or a natural catastrophy to provide the distraction for the public to pass another law. Our governments want to surveil…

> The figth will only start after enough innocent surveillance victims are harmed in the real world (i.e. their data is leaked or worse) Sadly I doubt even this will happen. I lived in China and watched the CCP built their digital surveillance state. Like others say most people don't care because they have comfortable lives and/or are concerned with other issues they find more pressing. And so what if the government…

The reason people don't think it's bad to lose their privacy, is the same as why they don't take climate change seriously: the effects are more than a year out. Most likely they won't even feel the effects directly in their lifetime.

On another note, have Chinese citizens ever been "free" since the one party system?

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

#125

Post by lisper »

radarsat1 wrote: post #88
jnsie wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

^ This I am going to make a weird, but IMHO apt, comparison to Type 1 Diabetes. T1D is an attritional disease caused by the pancreas's inability to produce enough/any insulin and the list of complications is long and deadly. As someone who has lived with the disease for decades what makes the disease particularly insidious is immediate effort versus delayed impact. The disease affects everything ...every single part…

This is an incredibly insightful point of view for understanding people around me on this topic. And maybe a useful analogy for talking about it. Thank you.

Climate change is another area where this analogy is apt.

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

#126

Post by dnautics »

js8 wrote: post #31
Jorengarenar wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are saying it as if "in bands of no more than 300 people" there was no hierarchy. It starts appearing at few dozens, let alone few hundreds. Proof of it being biological? Look at other primates. They form groups of way less than few hundreds and still maintain (strict) hierarchy.

It's nowhere as clear-cut as you try to portray it. First of all, there are differences among primates, how are these hierarchies structured and some of it is also, surprisingly, cultural. (Look for example at work of Robert Sapolsky.) I for example believe that hierarchies are a cultural artifact of civilization, not a biologically inherent human value. The inherent human value is deference to authority, which is us…

I don't think deference to authority is inherently human, there are plenty of humans who resist authority to various degrees independent of socialization. It might be a "median" human quality though

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

#127

Post by eloff »

manquer wrote: post #120
eloff wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That does sound closer to the the relationship between the state and say a defence contractor company.

That doesn't mean everything the company does is to support the objectives of the state, or approved by the state, but it does mean they're not unaffiliated either.

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

#128

Post by tootie »

pattusk wrote: 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…

This case isn't even about mass surveillance. It's still very targeted. The question is who is being targeted and by whom? The implication of what we know so far is that the surveillance is allowing bad actors to target political enemies.

And not that this isn't terrible but just throw it on the pile. Did they sell the Saudis access to Khashoggi's wife's phone? Maybe but we definitely sold them a fleet of fighter jets too. Trump campaigned on it and got huge applause from crowds. So I wouldn't expect a lot of outrage over this.

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

#129

Post by RcouF1uZ4gsC »

My pessimistic take is that it won’t. Most people are not journalists. In fact, in the political climate, there is a significant portion of the population that despises journalists. Hearing that journalists are being spied on is not going to cause a lot of people any consternation.

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

#130

Post by manquer »

eloff wrote: post #127
manquer wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That does sound closer to the the relationship between the state and say a defence contractor company. That doesn't mean everything the company does is to support the objectives of the state, or approved by the state, but it does mean they're not unaffiliated either.

Refusal to allow to sue on grounds that they are already regulated by the government ministry is basically saying their client list/operations is approved by the government ?
Post reply on HN