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

Further ties of NSA to Equation Group hackers

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 83 posts

Re: Further ties of NSA to Equation Group hackers

#51

Post by LLWM »

ctchocula wrote: post #31
tokenadult wrote: post #12

Not an astroturfer or an apologist here. I've never had any employment connection with NSA or any other intelligence agency of any government. I'm a United States citizen who has spent six years of my adult life living outside the United States. I'll agree with a previous lower-level comment here that it is possible to publicly protest NSA abuses (as I did, with my whole family, in view of news media cameras and poli…

"I am absolutely certain that there are enough politicians ready to mobilize to roll back NSA surveillance programs if they really think the programs are excessive in their scope." This seems a very paternalistic view of politics that assumes politicians inherently know better than the public and that the people here are overblowing the dangers of NSA surveillance. I can imagine an alternate universe where there was…

We lived in that universe for a long time before the leaks, and many people still live in that universe today, either out of ignorance or apathy. How are they worse off for it?

Re: Further ties of NSA to Equation Group hackers

#53

Post by [deleted] »

tokenadult wrote: post #12

Not an astroturfer or an apologist here. I've never had any employment connection with NSA or any other intelligence agency of any government. I'm a United States citizen who has spent six years of my adult life living outside the United States. I'll agree with a previous lower-level comment here that it is possible to publicly protest NSA abuses (as I did, with my whole family, in view of news media cameras and poli…

[deleted]

Re: Further ties of NSA to Equation Group hackers

#54

Post by krapp »

cryoshon wrote: post #46
arkem wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about whether there is any astroturfing going on, it's preemptively calling it out, implying that everyone who disagrees is astroturfing. It's similar to people who say things like "I know I'm going to get downvoted, but". Instead of making assumptions about the nature of a discussion in a comment people should wait for the discussion to develop before judging. If you know someone is astroturfing call it out…

Fair enough, but I really do think there are some (admittedly non-NSA) situations where the astroturfing campaign can be easily predicted beforehand. In these easily predictable situations, it's better to warn people... Specifically, conversations regarding Israel's involvement with Palestine or Russians involvement in Ukraine tend to become very quickly polluted by vast swathes of low-quality comments which effectiv…

Many of those low-quality sub-threads stem from accusations that other posters are shills and propagandists. Anyone sufficiently invested in a particular point of view can "easily" spot the enemy from a mile away, and Hacker News is packed with ideologues and zealots.

Maybe the quality of discussion on HN would be better if there were fewer such 'warnings', and not more?

Re: Further ties of NSA to Equation Group hackers

#55

Post by [deleted] »

alecco wrote: post #43
arkem wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment would be stronger if you omitted the final sentence. Fortifying your opinion by preemptively calling other people contributing to the discussion "astroturfers and apologists" is poor form.

Yeah? What about what obviously happened in this story a couple of months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8905643 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8905321

[deleted]

Re: Further ties of NSA to Equation Group hackers

#56

Post by jMyles »

pnathan wrote: post #33

It should be extremely clear: the NSA should be expected - and I don't know of anyone outside of anarchist circles who doesn't expect - to have extremely sophisticated targeting operations for espionage. While I fully support limiting the mass surveillance, stopping the NSL practice, and indiscriminate data collection being performed (along with other Star Chamber-esque behaviors), it is pure folly to expect targeted…

Simply put, I don't want the NSA to exist at all. Does that ensure that I run in "anarchist circles" in your mind? I don't think my view is far from the mainstream on this matter - many reasonable people are for abolition.

Re: Further ties of NSA to Equation Group hackers

#57

Post by tptacek »

lawnchair_larry wrote: post #38
tptacek wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what repercussions there should be for that, but any consideration of repercussions has to consider the alternative to electronic attack, which is airplanes dropping munitions from great heights onto buildings with people in them. People should probably not kid themselves about geopolitics and military competition vanishing if we somehow manage to regulate "electronic warfare".

This is a false dichotomy of the most offensive kind.

Please explain. I am still on the fence about Stuxnet, but the conventional wisdom is that it did exactly what I suggested that it did: it forestalled a military attack on Iran's nuclear program. And "forestall" is all it did; we're presumably a phone call and double-digit seconds away from that attack today.

Re: Further ties of NSA to Equation Group hackers

#58

Post by arca_vorago »

cryoshon wrote: post #32
ccvannorman wrote: post #17

The reason it's a big deal is because as more power accumulates in the hands on the "adults in the room", the more likely those adults are to become creepy, overbearing assholes -- There are many examples, the most prominent one in my mind being that the FBI/Hoover tried to convince MLK to kill himself, fully backed by the government. As the NSA et al get more [unchecked] power it will become more corrupt, isn't this…

Yes, power corrupts, and the US government is exceptionally powerful and exceptionally corrupt. The NSA is included in this, of course. We already know the NSA's power has been extensively abused with "SEXINT" (stealing people's private photos for personal enjoyment and likely blackmail), JTRIG (discrediting people not accused or suspected of any crime), PRISM (monitoring every communication via to/from data and othe…

Nice to see someone else remember what Russ Tice said. He wasn't even a Senator yet when Russ said the papers came across his desk. That means that they are targeting any potential political candidate of any note.

I would just like to remind everyone that surveillance is about control, not security. Some may claim it's security through control, but that's not the social contract I was taught to understand my country worked under.

Re: Further ties of NSA to Equation Group hackers

#59

Post by happyscrappy »

cryoshon wrote: post #32
ccvannorman wrote: post #17

The reason it's a big deal is because as more power accumulates in the hands on the "adults in the room", the more likely those adults are to become creepy, overbearing assholes -- There are many examples, the most prominent one in my mind being that the FBI/Hoover tried to convince MLK to kill himself, fully backed by the government. As the NSA et al get more [unchecked] power it will become more corrupt, isn't this…

Yes, power corrupts, and the US government is exceptionally powerful and exceptionally corrupt. The NSA is included in this, of course. We already know the NSA's power has been extensively abused with "SEXINT" (stealing people's private photos for personal enjoyment and likely blackmail), JTRIG (discrediting people not accused or suspected of any crime), PRISM (monitoring every communication via to/from data and othe…

> Yes, power corrupts, and the US government is exceptionally powerful and exceptionally corrupt.

So if someone, say Europe, became more powerful than the US they would be extremely corrupt. Where does that tautology leave us?

Re: Further ties of NSA to Equation Group hackers

#60

Post by arca_vorago »

LLWM wrote: post #39
cryoshon wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shrug. Consider JTRIG: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Threat_Research_Intellig... They're very blatantly using astroturfing and shilling to silence people who go against their idea of the way things should be. I doubt HN is going to have an astroturf quotient as high as someplace like reddit, though.

Did you even read the article? If they cared to actually silence someone, they would, and you would never know. People (or even robots) disagreeing with you on an internet forum is so far from effective that it's almost insulting to accuse them of it.

"People (or even robots) disagreeing with you on an internet forum is so far from effective that it's almost insulting to accuse them of it."

The evidence and movement of the "cyber war department" says otherwise. Within the last 5 years or so there has been an explosion of government requests for bids for persona management and other sock puppetry accounts, and quite a few companies have been making quite a bit of money off it, very quietly of course.

Now, lets not be hasty and call anyone who disagrees with a thing a "shill", but also lets not bury our head in the sand and pretend it's not happening and a very real threat to the normal evolution of discussion on the internet.

Instead of dumping a ton of RFB links I'll just give you a guardian article.

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-ope...

Post reply on HN