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Massive New Surveillance Program Uncovered by Wall Street Journal

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Re: Massive New Surveillance Program Uncovered by Wall Street Journal

#2

Post by nnq »

> allow databases about U.S. civilians to be handed over to foreign governments for analysis, presumably so that they too can attempt to determine future criminal actions

...where on the line did these guys lost the "innocent until proven guilty" part?! (the possibility of your government handing personal data of innocent civilians to foreign governments sounds "out of your freakyn minds" even for a foreigner like me! Imagine someone coming to the US in attempt to flee from an oppressive government and data about his whereabouts getting to a contract killer via an "en masse" exchange of data about "suspicious" civilians between governments...)

...keep it like this and the USA will be the last place on Earth someone would want to emigrate to, either to work or to open a business!!!

Re: Massive New Surveillance Program Uncovered by Wall Street Journal

#3

Post by buro9 »

nnq wrote: post #2

> allow databases about U.S. civilians to be handed over to foreign governments for analysis, presumably so that they too can attempt to determine future criminal actions ...where on the line did these guys lost the "innocent until proven guilty" part?! (the possibility of your government handing personal data of innocent civilians to foreign governments sounds "out of your freakyn minds" even for a foreigner like me…

It's been happening in the other direction for a number of years now.

My brother was turned back when he flew to Miami with his family to take his children to Disney World.

It turned out that because he had been arrested aged 19 and failed to declare it that the border people felt that he had answered fraudulantly when challenged on "Have you ever been arrested?".

My brother answered no because whilst he was arrested he was never charged or convicted. He had attended a demonstration in the North of England and when a few people caused trouble the police had just arrested everyone only to release the vast majority some hours later.

He'd forgotten about this because nothing had ever actually come of it and it was over 20 years ago, yet there he was being confronted by it at a US border.

Clearly the UK authorities already share data with the USA on its citizens, even those never charged or convicted.

That it may happen more does not surprise me the least. The only part that surprises me is that the data flow might go the other way too.

Re: Massive New Surveillance Program Uncovered by Wall Street Journal

#5

Post by mtgx »

nnq wrote: post #2

> allow databases about U.S. civilians to be handed over to foreign governments for analysis, presumably so that they too can attempt to determine future criminal actions ...where on the line did these guys lost the "innocent until proven guilty" part?! (the possibility of your government handing personal data of innocent civilians to foreign governments sounds "out of your freakyn minds" even for a foreigner like me…

If I want to fly to Latin America from Europe, I'd rather make the stop for the second plane in Europe, and then go straight to Latin America, than make the stop in US. I just don't want to deal with TSA in any way, especially after stories that now they even have data on what you tweeted and stuff like that, and they can take you aside or even arrest you for a while because of that.

Will TSA consider me "suspicious" just because I tweeted articles such as this one? Or maybe some Wikileaks-related articles or some OWS articles? That is ridiculous, and I don't even want to risk that by flying through the country, let alone want to live there (which is something I really wanted to do before). The world's view on America is changing fast and the view is increasingly more negative.

The world wants America to be its role model, something to aspire to, and a place where they want to live in. It doesn't want to see an America as the bully of the world, or a bully even of its own citizens. So yes, I do think this will impact tourism, cloud businesses, as well as other type of businesses, if they keep going down this road of increasing surveillance and more government abuses, not only against Americans, but against foreigners, too.

Re: Massive New Surveillance Program Uncovered by Wall Street Journal

#7

Post by rdl »

propercoil wrote: post #4

Assume everything is recorded. don't expect anything less

It's the responsibility of people in technology to design systems to defeat passive surveillance as a baseline. Defeating simple active-attack assisted monitoring (mitm with a different cert, etc.) is a nice additional step, and being able to resist targeted attack is basically beyond what we can do now, most of the time, but we should try.

Re: Massive New Surveillance Program Uncovered by Wall Street Journal

#9

Post by Semiapies »

buro9 wrote: post #3
nnq wrote: post #2

> allow databases about U.S. civilians to be handed over to foreign governments for analysis, presumably so that they too can attempt to determine future criminal actions ...where on the line did these guys lost the "innocent until proven guilty" part?! (the possibility of your government handing personal data of innocent civilians to foreign governments sounds "out of your freakyn minds" even for a foreigner like me…

It's been happening in the other direction for a number of years now. My brother was turned back when he flew to Miami with his family to take his children to Disney World. It turned out that because he had been arrested aged 19 and failed to declare it that the border people felt that he had answered fraudulantly when challenged on "Have you ever been arrested?". My brother answered no because whilst he was arrested…

Police records are routinely exchanged between various countries. This is an entirely different matter.
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