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Big Data Firm Says It Can Link Snowden Data To Changed Terrorist Behavior

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Re: Big Data Firm Says It Can Link Snowden Data To Changed Terrorist Behavior

#51

Post by danielweber »

atmosx wrote: post #21
tptacek wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that al Qaeda might not be a terrorist group is a false controversy, as is the idea that participating in open source might be treason.

I think it's safe to assume that a 15 year old kid in Palestine is much more terrorised at the sight of Benjamin Netanyahu than Bin Laden. It's also safe to assume that a kid in Ukraine is terrorised by Russians or by US/EU depending on which side of the country was he lives. So, to you Al Qaeda is a terrorist group and I totally get that (to me too). But you have to understand that to Afghans (and a huge load of pop…

Whatever redeeming qualities this comment may have had, it was absolutely certain to lead to a political flame war.

Re: Big Data Firm Says It Can Link Snowden Data To Changed Terrorist Behavior

#52

Post by jjoonathan »

localhost3000 wrote: post #37
x1798DE wrote: post #16

Even assuming it's true and these leaks made it harder to catch terrorists (I would be surprised if it made a huge difference), I have to say I really don't care. Terrorism is not a very significant real risk to people living in the first world (compared to the risk of fatal lightning strike or drowning in a bathtub, for example), but pervasive mass surveillance is. In general, it's kinda absurd to imagine that anyth…

"Terrorism is not a very significant real risk..." ...I get what you're saying but tell that to anyone who was living in or near NYC in 2001. Or anyone in or near Copley square last year. (I qualify for both...) the "More people die from [insert ridiculous thing like bee stings]!" argument doesn't work for me because there's not much you can do about bees/lightning/the existence of bathtubs but there's plenty to be d…

For every person that died in NYC, ~10 died in Afghanistan and ~30 died in Iraq. I suspect their families and the people around them feel much the same way. It's fortunate for both of us that they can't effectively fight back.

Re: Big Data Firm Says It Can Link Snowden Data To Changed Terrorist Behavior

#53

Post by atmosx »

bkmartin wrote: post #43
atmosx wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's safe to assume that a 15 year old kid in Palestine is much more terrorised at the sight of Benjamin Netanyahu than Bin Laden. It's also safe to assume that a kid in Ukraine is terrorised by Russians or by US/EU depending on which side of the country was he lives. So, to you Al Qaeda is a terrorist group and I totally get that (to me too). But you have to understand that to Afghans (and a huge load of pop…

Is it? Which part of Palestine? Gaza or the West Bank? I guess that maybe it is true, since Bin Laden is dead and Netanyahu is alive...you got me there... Ukrainian kids terrorized by US/EU? Really? What are you talking about? Even in the rebel held areas, how has the US/EU EVER terrorized them? To some Afghans, we could be seen that way, but most of the population in Afghanistan would rather not take their chances w…

> But innocent civilians are NEVER OUR TARGET.

I'm getting for granted that you are the USA. So in order to avoid never-ending discussions here you go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rXPrfnU3G0

They look pretty much civilians to me.

ps. You know, the guy who released this video... Is hiding in an Embassy in the UK because he is terrorised by someone who call him a terrorist, food for thought!

Re: Big Data Firm Says It Can Link Snowden Data To Changed Terrorist Behavior

#54

Post by abhv »

The actual report is now linked here:

https://www.recordedfuture.com/al-qaeda-encryption-technolog...

First point: AlQ is now using well-studied encryption algorithms (possibly in the correct way, but not investigated in this story)

Second point: Some claim about the software not being malware. Could not deduce the technical point they want to make here.

But it is an embarrassing analysis that DOES NOT support their headline-seeking claim.

Re: Big Data Firm Says It Can Link Snowden Data To Changed Terrorist Behavior

#55

Post by jfasi »

TheCondor wrote: post #22
jfasi wrote: post #12

This provides a useful way to frame people concerns' about Snowden's revelations. Every intelligence service exists at the intersection of two completely opposite goals: in order to fulfill their mandate to protect their country from its enemies, they need as much information about the actions of their enemies as possible. On the other hand, in order to protect their country from themselves, they need to have as ligh…

You have some points. There is a lot of missing data though. Do we know that cracking their program was significant in gathering intelligence? Do we know if they even regularly use it? The lack of oversight, or at least effective oversight, makes it difficult to trust the efficacy of their supposed tactics. Also if you want to be really pedantic about it how do you suss out causation vs correlation regarding Snowden?…

To your second point, oversight is orthogonal to my original point: no matter where you land on the breadth of collections spectrum, more oversight is better. I agree with you there and in hindsight I could have done better to point that out in my original post.

Now the first point deserves a response. This demand for proof of effectiveness for various intelligence gathering techniques misses the point of my initial comment. The public doesn't know if cracking this program was a significant source of information. On the other hand, neither does Al Qaeda. Spreading fear, uncertainty, and doubt among your enemies is part of role of intelligence gathering, to the point where spreading the same among the population can be acceptable.

Consider the revelation that the NSA is gathering only a relatively small sample of phone records [1]. This information came out through a leak. Why didn't the NSA rebut allegations that they were sucking up every single conversation by revealing this information? It probably wouldn't have saved them in the public eye, but it would have at least dispelled the extremely damaging public perception of the NSA as an unstoppable Big Brother-style surveillance machine that's going to murder you for the contents of your emails, as opposed to an agency that, despite their twisting the letter of the law, is still forced to operate within legal boundaries. Why didn't this report come out to try to at least correct the public's paranoia?

The answer is because doing so would have given the US's enemies guidance on how to run their operations, which would allow them to more effectively evade detection. In this context, this sort of secrecy and fear appears to be a hateful but ultimately necessary part of intelligence: you can't assuage the public without assuaging your enemies.

At the same time, the public still have to be protected from a spy agency, and this is where mandatory oversight and regulation comes into play. While Congress has vowed to implement strengthened oversight over the NSA, the public isn't satisfied because this oversight is performed in secret. I'm sort of prepared to let myself be convinced that this oversight exists, but the truth is that whatever solution is implemented is bound to be unsatisfying for exactly the reason I point out above: hateful secrecy is necessary.

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-is...

Re: Big Data Firm Says It Can Link Snowden Data To Changed Terrorist Behavior

#56

Post by jfasi »

samirmenon wrote: post #15
jfasi wrote: post #12

This provides a useful way to frame people concerns' about Snowden's revelations. Every intelligence service exists at the intersection of two completely opposite goals: in order to fulfill their mandate to protect their country from its enemies, they need as much information about the actions of their enemies as possible. On the other hand, in order to protect their country from themselves, they need to have as ligh…

Is a sustained lack of oversight (from Congress, or anyone else) a necessary part of this compromise?

No, and I should have address this in my initial comment. I expanded on this in another comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8119589

Re: Big Data Firm Says It Can Link Snowden Data To Changed Terrorist Behavior

#57

Post by x1798DE »

localhost3000 wrote: post #37
x1798DE wrote: post #16

Even assuming it's true and these leaks made it harder to catch terrorists (I would be surprised if it made a huge difference), I have to say I really don't care. Terrorism is not a very significant real risk to people living in the first world (compared to the risk of fatal lightning strike or drowning in a bathtub, for example), but pervasive mass surveillance is. In general, it's kinda absurd to imagine that anyth…

"Terrorism is not a very significant real risk..." ...I get what you're saying but tell that to anyone who was living in or near NYC in 2001. Or anyone in or near Copley square last year. (I qualify for both...) the "More people die from [insert ridiculous thing like bee stings]!" argument doesn't work for me because there's not much you can do about bees/lightning/the existence of bathtubs but there's plenty to be d…

There's something you can do for all of those things. You can avoid beestings by always wearing a beekeeper's outfit. You can avoid lightning strikes by always keeping yourself grounded. You can avoid dying in a bathtub by never taking a bath. These are actually way easier deaths to prevent than stopping terrorism, where you have an active adversary who, without your intervention, will work to attack you. There's always a cost-benefit tradeoff with every risk you take.

Terrorism is an insanely small risk - in 2012 33,000 people died in motor vehicle accidents, which is about 2750 people each month. Compare to 9/11, which was the worst terrorist attack in history, where 3000 people died. Basically, there is accidental death on the scale of 9/11 happening every single month on US roads. And I'm not even saying we need to do something about that - everyone's pretty comfortable with the level of risk they take when driving. It's just not a big flashy risk like the kind that shows up on the news.

Terrorism probably feels riskier because it happens in big clumps. If you were anywhere except a very specific building in New York or a very specific building in Washington, DC on 9/11, you were at pretty much zero risk of dying of terrorism, but a huge fraction of the people in those two places were at extremely high risk for death by terrorism. By that logic, we should be spending a whole lot more on near-earth asteroid defenses and research into how to stop the Yellowstone caldera from exploding, because even though neither of those things is particularly likely to be the thing that kills any of us, if they do go off they'll kill a remarkably large number of people.

Re: Big Data Firm Says It Can Link Snowden Data To Changed Terrorist Behavior

#58

Post by snarfy »

walshemj wrote: post #38
snarfy wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Al Qaeda literally translated means 'the camp'. They would catch people proclaiming they had to 'get back to al qaeda'. There is no organization. That's just TV make believe, a label they put on any group that doesn't like western views and is a possible threat. "It must be another Al Qaeda cell." It's all nonsense.

This is meaningless semantics a word can have more than one meaning eg "hacker" and one real word example Sinn Féin means Ourselves Alone so that means the IRA and PIRA are not Terrorist organisations?

The point is there is not one overarching mastermind organization controlling it all, but that's what it's made out to be. They might as well call it COBRA so they can send GI Joe in to save the day. Al Qaeda. Bah. If the IRA didn't exist long before 9/11, they would have been labeled Al Qaeda too.

Re: Big Data Firm Says It Can Link Snowden Data To Changed Terrorist Behavior

#59

Post by bkmartin »

atmosx wrote: post #53
bkmartin wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it? Which part of Palestine? Gaza or the West Bank? I guess that maybe it is true, since Bin Laden is dead and Netanyahu is alive...you got me there... Ukrainian kids terrorized by US/EU? Really? What are you talking about? Even in the rebel held areas, how has the US/EU EVER terrorized them? To some Afghans, we could be seen that way, but most of the population in Afghanistan would rather not take their chances w…

> But innocent civilians are NEVER OUR TARGET. I'm getting for granted that you are the USA. So in order to avoid never-ending discussions here you go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rXPrfnU3G0 They look pretty much civilians to me. ps. You know, the guy who released this video... Is hiding in an Embassy in the UK because he is terrorised by someone who call him a terrorist , food for thought!

I see you've been downvoted.. thankfully. If you would watch that video, which I reluctantly did... because I want to make sure that I'm speaking from the right position, then you would see that in the beginning of that there were 2 men with AK-47s in the open plus one with an RPG. Notice throughout they were verifying that weapons were present. Its a terrible tragedy that any innocent people died in that sequence of events as there appears to be 2 journalists that had. But they were not TARGETED EVEN WHEN KNOWN OR THOUGHT TO BE INNOCENT. Notice that they wouldn't even take a kill shot on the injured journalist (which they had no idea he was) until they could verify that he was going to pick up a weapon! So while it is tragic, I don't see how that video proves that was are purposely targeting innocent people.

Re: Big Data Firm Says It Can Link Snowden Data To Changed Terrorist Behavior

#60

Post by tptacek »

celticninja wrote: post #42
tptacek wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that al Qaeda might not be a terrorist group is a false controversy, as is the idea that participating in open source might be treason.

One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. I grew up in Northern Ireland in the 70,s and 80's. The distinction between the 2 depended on which street you lived on and which street they lived on. Usually they were no more than a stones throw from one another.

Well, one axis on which we can evaluate this issue: is the group in question (a) fighting for freedom or (b) fighting to prevent women from seeing doctors or driving cars? If (b), we can comfortably assume: "not freedom fighters".
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