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Assange in 2011: "They have automated the process."

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Re: Assange in 2011: "They have automated the process."

#11

Post by tshile »

k-mcgrady wrote: post #6
tshile wrote: post #3

I'm curious if my friends, family, and co-workers that rolled their eyes at me or laughed at me when I explained why I deleted my facebook account years ago even remember the conversation, or what their response was, when they read the latest revelations about the government having access to their databases.

Deleting your Facebook account isn't a solution to this problem. Gmail may contain even more personal information. Dropbox contains your files and is essentially giving them access to documents you would have stored offline 10 years ago. The problem is that none of these services are safe anymore and we need specific legislation detailing what the government can and can't do with the information we have stored on the…

I didn't mean to imply that it was a solution to the problem. Just pointing out the problem seen long before today by many - for most of us here, this issue is not new. It's been discussed and debated for years. There's just now concrete proof that is irrefutable.

I'm more excited about these recent revelations than shocked and appalled, because now it is finally a national conversation with real outrage behind it. I've been waiting for this for years. Being called crazy, paranoid, anti-American, etc for years for voicing concerns about this has led me to a position of vindication on some level; however small or petty that may be.

Re: Assange in 2011: "They have automated the process."

#12

Post by muyuu »

k-mcgrady wrote: post #6
tshile wrote: post #3

I'm curious if my friends, family, and co-workers that rolled their eyes at me or laughed at me when I explained why I deleted my facebook account years ago even remember the conversation, or what their response was, when they read the latest revelations about the government having access to their databases.

Deleting your Facebook account isn't a solution to this problem. Gmail may contain even more personal information. Dropbox contains your files and is essentially giving them access to documents you would have stored offline 10 years ago. The problem is that none of these services are safe anymore and we need specific legislation detailing what the government can and can't do with the information we have stored on the…

Deleting FB alone might not be a solution, but it's a part of it.

Out of these, I only have a gmail account. No personal data in it is real. I never email anyone I know in person from that account, nor I give it to anybody who knows me.

I think I'm on the safe side.

I operate similarly with my phone and basically everything else.

Re: Assange in 2011: "They have automated the process."

#13

Post by jeremy6d »

The problem with Facebook is not that government has access to it -- at least, that's not a problem unique to FB (Gmail, as one commenter says, is probably worse in terms of raw access to personal details). The problem with Facebook is that it is personal details specifically organized into a dossier-like format. It's one thing for the NSA, for instance, to be able to tap into the hose of undifferentiated data streaming through the network. It's quite another thing for that data to be specifically organized for the purposes of quickly discovering key information about somebody, such as their social network, their political interests, their latest photos, etc. all indexed and searchable. Think about the cost of taking Gmail's data and turning it into something useable by intelligence organizations -- work that FB "empowers" us to do for them!

What we need are tools that allow us to connect in ways that are difficult not only to detect but also to make sense of (not necessarily encryption, but an ad-hoc format that can't be easily parsed and aggregated). We need the ability to use the network for our own particular, peculiar interests rather than having to fit our interactions into some other authority's template for their interests. The idea that social networking never occurred before Friendster, FB, MySpace is ridiculous -- it just happened more informally before.

I'd like to see a return to this informal mode of using TCP/IP, where the internet itself is the social network rather than merely a transport layer for some centralized system. This may make it harder for everyday people to benefit, but it also means they learn how to drive before they use the roads. Social networking's hyped-up promise has always been to passively connect people, but the promise of the internet has always been to allow people to actively connect (or not connect). Once we have a broader suite of tools for this latter purpose, we'll see people reject centralized dossier services like FB.

Re: Assange in 2011: "They have automated the process."

#14

Post by junto »

I would now consider paying for services that offer real private email, social networking and file sharing / cloud backups, where none of those services were controlled by an US controlled entity and where the NSA couldn't snoop around in my private life. However boring my private life is, it is still mine.

I wonder if anyone else would part with cold hard cash though, or is it just me? There maybe a niche there.

Re: Assange in 2011: "They have automated the process."

#15

Post by kcorbitt »

pointernil wrote: post #8
dsleno wrote: post #5

Prescient. Will these NSA spy revelations hurt US internet companies? If I am German or Russian or Brazilian... do I really want to go out of my way to feed the U.S. intelligence beast?

First: as such you probably already do feed them Second: that kind of thinking could be a nice way to "motivate" the creation of alternative products out side of the us of a. Third: but how realistic are such endeavors in today's world?

On the other hand, there are relatively few governments worldwide that I would trust more (or distrust less, I guess) than that of the US to abuse this kind of information. The US isn't perfect, but a lot of places out there are worse.

Re: Assange in 2011: "They have automated the process."

#16

Post by lotsofcows »

tshile wrote: post #3

I'm curious if my friends, family, and co-workers that rolled their eyes at me or laughed at me when I explained why I deleted my facebook account years ago even remember the conversation, or what their response was, when they read the latest revelations about the government having access to their databases.

No. They didn't care then and they don't care now. The government can data mine my facebook page as much as they want - it's my library lending record I'm worried about...

Re: Assange in 2011: "They have automated the process."

#17

Post by JamisonM »

junto wrote: post #14

I would now consider paying for services that offer real private email, social networking and file sharing / cloud backups, where none of those services were controlled by an US controlled entity and where the NSA couldn't snoop around in my private life. However boring my private life is, it is still mine. I wonder if anyone else would part with cold hard cash though, or is it just me? There maybe a niche there.

Unfortunately such a social network would probably be so dominated by tinfoil-hat crazies that it would be unusable. The thing about social networks is of course that the people you want to socially network with need to be there.

On the other hand you would be fully up to date at all times on the evils of vaccines and water fluoridation.

Re: Assange in 2011: "They have automated the process."

#18

Post by wavefunction »

junto wrote: post #14

I would now consider paying for services that offer real private email, social networking and file sharing / cloud backups, where none of those services were controlled by an US controlled entity and where the NSA couldn't snoop around in my private life. However boring my private life is, it is still mine. I wonder if anyone else would part with cold hard cash though, or is it just me? There maybe a niche there.

Paying with your credit card? That's being tracked. Your back account transactions are being indexed and collated.

They're probably in all of our computers already. I've been operating a windows7 honeypot as my "main" computer for several years, generating what appears to be legit "personal" traffic. You wouldn't believe the shit I've found, and it doesn't appear to be your garden variety cyber criminals or foreign state actors. And I'm not even that smart.

Re: Assange in 2011: "They have automated the process."

#19

Post by jedbrown »

grandalf wrote: post #10
k-mcgrady wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Deleting your Facebook account isn't a solution to this problem. Gmail may contain even more personal information. Dropbox contains your files and is essentially giving them access to documents you would have stored offline 10 years ago. The problem is that none of these services are safe anymore and we need specific legislation detailing what the government can and can't do with the information we have stored on the…

The best approach is to keep profiles/accounts on all of those services and use them periodically to create a "clean" trail. Meanwhile, if you need any actual privacy, find alternate/private channels. Considering the enormous amount of data being collected and the relative ease of setting up a clean trail, this kind of spying makes it even easier for low/moderate-suspicion individuals to achieve secure communications…

purpose-built linux distro

That seems to be the intent of Tails [1]; see also [2].

[1] https://tails.boum.org

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5838140

Re: Assange in 2011: "They have automated the process."

#20

Post by cinquemb »

pstuart wrote: post #2

Government spying on my Facebook account is bothersome in regards to privacy limits of power but it is Facebook and anything I put there I should expect to be public at some point. We need more public spying on the government....

>We need more public spying on the government...

Are there public databases that collect information on officers/ agents?

If not what kinds of information would be valuable (to the public) to collect/ what kind of processes would be good to use(crowd-sourcing, web-scraping, .gov apis, etc)?

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