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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

#51

Post by alan_cx »

barking wrote: post #27
a3_nm wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any evidence to suggest that the absence of 9/11-like attacks has anything to do with the TSA?

None. By their nature, measures like this annoy people. If this was the 12th of September 2001 would your opinion be different and if so, why?

As a Brit, I have a huge problem with all this. In the old days of US funded IRA attacks against amongst other things, our government, we never let the terrorists win. We didn't budge our principles or give up core freedoms. Sure our side did some very iffy things to combat the terror, but it was still illegal. We didn't try to legitimise it by tearing up principles that applied to normal people. But once 9/11 happened and the US gave US freedoms up, we and other nation states were heavily leaned on to also give up those freedoms and principles. Sadly, we capitulated to US pressure.

So, no my opinion never budged before, during or after 9/11. In fact, it hardened. But, I'm afraid the terrorism worked. We lost freedoms, rights and principles all due to the 9/11 attacks and US reaction to it. Terror won. Bin Laden won. We became more like them.

Re: Massive New Surveillance Program Uncovered by Wall Street Journal

#52

Post by morsch »

barking wrote: post #20
mtgx wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"…

OTOH they've been pretty successful at preventing attacks on America since 9/11.

They've also been effective at preventing UFO invasions.

Re: Massive New Surveillance Program Uncovered by Wall Street Journal

#54

Post by barking »

jlgreco wrote: post #46
barking wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Membership of the domestic terrorist groups in my country correlates very strongly with a history of juvenile anti-social behaviour. These youngsters frequently come into contact with these groups either when subject to vigilante punishment or 'get taken under their wing'. Most terrorists aren't university graduates

> Membership of the domestic terrorist groups in my country correlates very strongly with a history of juvenile anti-social behaviour. Is the reverse true?

Can you explain what you mean by the reverse?

Re: Massive New Surveillance Program Uncovered by Wall Street Journal

#55

Post by Create »

jlgreco wrote: post #44
buro9 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To reply to myself, the thing that I took away from his telling of this experience and watching his wife almost cry when they got to the part about boarding the plane back with the children... it's this: Every thing that you ever do is recorded somewhere. Every person has a file whether they think they do or not. This file will only ever be used against you. And Europe remembers such a thing... it was only 1990 that…

I think part of the problem is we have a perverted sense of "Godwin's law", such that making allusions to the past is considered "losing the conversation" . The past it seems is no longer something that we are supposed to learn from, and the notion that there may be parallels between the past and the present is now termed 'offensive'. In a lesser forum, you would likely be dismissed out of hand for mentioning the Sta…

obviously some needed the files the instant they were up for grabs:

CIA agents acquired the records after the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall

only to return them, when they became only a piece of history (I wonder about any copies)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/703303.stm

Re: Massive New Surveillance Program Uncovered by Wall Street Journal

#56

Post by Vivtek »

sliverstorm wrote: post #30
oelmekki wrote: post #14

> using “predictive pattern-matching,” to analyze it for suspicious patterns of behavior Here we are again : authoritarianism being rationalized.

Why is it that any kind of attempts to predict future criminal activities is always labeled "1984"? It seems to me that so long as you don't take it further than "being ready", done right it could be a good thing.

"Done right". There's your problem.

Done right, Marxism is a good thing. Done right, a dictatorship is the most efficient form of government.

But we are, in fact, dealing in sloppy reality, where many things - by their very nature - cannot be done right. No matter how hard we try, or how earnestly we believe in fairies, these things will not be done right. They will inevitably devolve into tyranny.

Re: Massive New Surveillance Program Uncovered by Wall Street Journal

#57

Post by meaty »

Devilboy wrote: post #6
propercoil wrote: post #4

Assume everything is recorded. don't expect anything less

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

And here's the Western European version which is much scarier:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAF_Menwith_Hill

I went on site there to install some engineering management software and you are escorted around with an SA80 pointing at you most of the time and told "no questions".

Re: Massive New Surveillance Program Uncovered by Wall Street Journal

#58

Post by meaty »

rdl wrote: post #7
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.

Universal point to point encryption with pre-shared keys would solve this instantly.

Re: Massive New Surveillance Program Uncovered by Wall Street Journal

#59

Post by barking »

alan_cx wrote: post #51
barking wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None. By their nature, measures like this annoy people. If this was the 12th of September 2001 would your opinion be different and if so, why?

As a Brit, I have a huge problem with all this. In the old days of US funded IRA attacks against amongst other things, our government, we never let the terrorists win. We didn't budge our principles or give up core freedoms. Sure our side did some very iffy things to combat the terror, but it was still illegal. We didn't try to legitimise it by tearing up principles that applied to normal people. But once 9/11 happen…

Is indefinite detention without trial (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment) of members of a particular 'native' ethnic group in your country a sign of a free society? This happened during the 1970's in Northern ireland

Just last week david cameron had to apologise for the UK security forces' actions in passing information to terrorist groups to enable the murder of, amongst others, a lawyer. He also had to apologise for cases where the security forces had prior knowledge of murder and did nothing about it and for the wilful destruction of evidence by the police and the army. Is that the 'iffy' stuff that you refer to?

Edit: link to youtube of apology http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcS_FswjqrM

Re: Massive New Surveillance Program Uncovered by Wall Street Journal

#60

Post by Vivtek »

stygianguest wrote: post #41
adventured wrote: post #36

Give a government trillions to spend in an era of massive government programs and vast new storage & surveillance technology, and it should be obvious what you're going to get. The only possible way to stop it is to starve the beast of funds to spend. Cut the government in half, and let's see if they can still afford all the shiny new big brother toys.

By this logic Europeans should be a total police state. To find a solution we need to discover what makes Americans so afraid that no gun is big enough, no military powerful enough, and due process can be suspended.

First, it hasn't been so long since Europeans had police states, and people in Europe actually remember it.

Second, "Europeans" are a myth. The French, Germans, Italians, Danes, Brits, Spaniards, Hungarians, Greeks, Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Romanians, Dutch, Belgians, Irish, and so on trust each other about as far as they can collectively throw one another. No one country can possibly get much centralized control. Not that they don't try.

Third, Americans have that exceptionalism thing: no matter how dangerous a course of action is, an American will succeed because, gosh darn it, God loves us and we're great! So something like TIA, well, sure, if Castro tried it or even some trustworthy but lesser nation like English did, it'd be terrible tyranny - but we can be trusted because we're Americans.

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