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

Internet companies should not be monitoring terrorists or anyone else

techfruit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–49 of 49 posts

Re: Internet companies should not be monitoring terrorists or anyone else

#41

Post by drivingmenuts »

amirmc wrote: post #17
rwmj wrote: post #7

It's also impossible. "I'm going to kill some soldiers when I get back" might refer to my super secret terror plot, or my PlayStation-related plans for the evening.

Here's my solution to that. Gather all the information possible, including things you've purchased so that I know whether or not you actually have those games or any of your friends do (and whether you actually play them). Assess, whether any major life changes have occurred for you based on all my data-mining and algos and assign a risk-factor for that particular statement. Monitor/filter your subsequent (or even pr…

The NSA is building a whole installation in the Western US specifically so they can do exactly what you propose, or as close as they can get at this time.

So, don't be surprised. Be a little bit afraid.

Re: Internet companies should not be monitoring terrorists or anyone else

#42

Post by ptaffs »

I thought the global intelligence services already had access to Facebook etc. data, maybe the question in-light of the Ed Snowden leaks, is why they didn't see this. Except, as commented there would be an extreme false-positive rate. In which case, why do we continue to fund the intelligence services...

Re: Internet companies should not be monitoring terrorists or anyone else

#44

Post by amirmc »

pjc50 wrote: post #31
smtddr wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>I expect most us agree that banks _should_ be held accountable for the legitimacy of their customers behaviour. I don't think most people have this expectation. Banks to be accountable for customers breaking law? What's an example of this? If I open a bank account in a different country, under an LLC, to illegally avoid paying taxes or to receive kickbacks it's up to the bank to figure that out? I do not expect ban…

Enough people have shot up schools that I think some sort of response to "I'm going to kill people at school" is warranted. A conviction may not be the best outcome, but I don't think it's entirely safe to ignore all of them.

How about trying to understand and deal with the root-cause of people shooting up schools?

Re: Internet companies should not be monitoring terrorists or anyone else

#45

Post by pbhjpbhj »

amirmc wrote: post #44
pjc50 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Enough people have shot up schools that I think some sort of response to "I'm going to kill people at school" is warranted. A conviction may not be the best outcome, but I don't think it's entirely safe to ignore all of them.

How about trying to understand and deal with the root-cause of people shooting up schools?

You can do both.

Re: Internet companies should not be monitoring terrorists or anyone else

#46

Post by pbhjpbhj »

Is this just the first offer in a bid to get police access to data for investigation purposes - like ask for the world and then asking just for a mountain sounds reasonable.

In this case it would be asking that service providers monitor everyone; but, the actual desire is to allow investigative authorities (police, MI5, ...) access to suspected terrorists online dealings via the service providers at the back end.

In the Lee Rigby case it seems that the exchange about murdering soldier would have been sufficient to push the suspect in to the camp of making terrorist threats and allowed for an arrest.

It's curious in some ways as Adebowale had been the focus of investigations and yet GCHQ clearly didn't have information on all his online exchanges (that could be tied to him), yet a company in the USA did have access. This suggests that the level of integration in to online communications that GCHQ has is far less than we've recently been led to believe. We're being told left-and-right that government spooks know our every move and whisper - this seems not to be true, not even for people associated with terrorism investigations.

Re: Internet companies should not be monitoring terrorists or anyone else

#47

Post by tim333 »

I don't think it's practical to require the likes of Facebook to monitor for terrorists and the like. After all one man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter. However it would be quite reasonable for them to choose to look out for that and bullying, grooming and the like especially if the posts are semi public.

Re: Internet companies should not be monitoring terrorists or anyone else

#48

Post by LLWM »

moe wrote: post #38
LLWM wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's so obviously wrong, in fact, that suggesting this is the level of stupidity things would actually be implemented with is a bit of a strawman. A false positive rate of 99.99% isn't useful to anybody. You'd also monitor their netflix history to see if they're just reading up on something they saw on Dexter or Breaking Bad last night, you'd look at searches around the same time period to guess the intent more accur…

You'd also monitor their netflix history [...] guess the intent [...] have a general psychological profile [...] have purchase records DHS has actual professionals working on this And what could possibly go wrong with that kind of power in the hands of "DHS professionals"... Is that the world you want to live in?

Yes, it is. Isn't that obvious from my tone?

Re: Internet companies should not be monitoring terrorists or anyone else

#49

Post by bruceboughton »

pjc50 wrote: post #31
smtddr wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>I expect most us agree that banks _should_ be held accountable for the legitimacy of their customers behaviour. I don't think most people have this expectation. Banks to be accountable for customers breaking law? What's an example of this? If I open a bank account in a different country, under an LLC, to illegally avoid paying taxes or to receive kickbacks it's up to the bank to figure that out? I do not expect ban…

Enough people have shot up schools that I think some sort of response to "I'm going to kill people at school" is warranted. A conviction may not be the best outcome, but I don't think it's entirely safe to ignore all of them.

In the UK, there isn't a day that goes by without me muttering something about killing one of my colleagues.

Thankfully in the UK, I do not really have the means to do this so it is obviously interpreted as an exagerated expression of annoyance.

In the US, the possibility of every exagerated threat being an actual, actionable threat is much higher.

Censorship is not the answer.

Post reply on HN