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Going Through Snowden Documents, Part 1

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Re: Going Through Snowden Documents, Part 1

#141

Post by Larrikin »

ginush wrote: post #130
Larrikin wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Analytics are mining the data on here every second. Hacker News is a wildly popular site with higher ups in major Fortune 500 company posting anonymously and publicly here. Say anything bad about a major country's government (or even a minor country like Israel or Palestine) and all kinds of accounts you've never seen before start defending and attacking. Everything you are saying is being actively monitored at this…

An analyst who is tasked with investigating, say, terrorist threats, is not going to be remotely interested in the browsing habits of random people who pose no threat whatsoever. It's just pure paranoia. Yes, we know bulk interception is being done by intelligence agencies. No, they're not watching you. They have more important things to be getting on with.

Your are arguing from a green account that everyone should ignore all evidence contrary to what you are saying and just calling everyone paranoid for not pretending that evidence doesn't exist. The same government that is demanding all visitors to the United States show them all posts they have made online as a condition of entry. It is not an argument worth engaging with anymore.

Re: Going Through Snowden Documents, Part 1

#142

Post by timschmidt »

jeffbee wrote: post #100
timschmidt wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The Utah Data Center (UDC), also known as the Intelligence Community Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative Data Center, is a data storage facility for the United States Intelligence Community that is designed to store data estimated to be on the order of exabytes or larger." "The structure provides 1 to 1.5 million sq ft (93,000 to 139,000 m2), with 100,000 sq ft (9,300 m2) of data center space and more th…

Exactly. That is a toy-sized data center. It would fit in the janitor's closet of a real data center.

According to Sandvine, the vast majority of internet traffic from 2013 (chosen to coincide with the Forbes storage estimates) was video such as Netflix and Youtube[1] and remains so today[2]. Assuming NSA is aware of industry standard techniques such as data de-duplication and compression, Forbe's estimate of 3 - 12 exabytes in 2013 would have been sufficient to store the entire year's world internet traffic in full.

In 2025 The Internet Archive holds approximately 100 exabytes[3] and contains data dating back to 1995[4]. Adjusting the 2013 Forbes numbers for the Utah Data Center for 2025 storage density (4Tb drives in 2013, 36Tb drives in 2025) yields 27 - 108 exabytes. Which demonstrates clearly that a datacenter on the scale of the Utah Data Center is capable of storing and retaining a versioned history of a significant fraction of the world's internet over a significant period of time.

Assuming they prioritize metadata and unique traffic further extends the horizon on how much can be stored and for how long.

1: https://macaubas.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Sandvine_Glo...

2: https://www.applogicnetworks.com/blog/sandvines-2024-global-...

3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Archive#Web_archiving

4: https://archive.org/post/60275/what-is-the-oldest-page-on-th...

Re: Going Through Snowden Documents, Part 1

#143

Post by ginush »

Larrikin wrote: post #141
ginush wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An analyst who is tasked with investigating, say, terrorist threats, is not going to be remotely interested in the browsing habits of random people who pose no threat whatsoever. It's just pure paranoia. Yes, we know bulk interception is being done by intelligence agencies. No, they're not watching you. They have more important things to be getting on with.

Your are arguing from a green account that everyone should ignore all evidence contrary to what you are saying and just calling everyone paranoid for not pretending that evidence doesn't exist. The same government that is demanding all visitors to the United States show them all posts they have made online as a condition of entry. It is not an argument worth engaging with anymore.

That supports my point. If there really was a mass surveillance regime as the paranoics claim, there would be no need for the border control agents to ask for social media posts to be shown on entry. They would already have this information.

Re: Going Through Snowden Documents, Part 1

#144

Post by DennisP »

ginush wrote: post #132
DennisP wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So your claim is that this massive data collection, done at massive public expense, is not used at all? That seems unlikely. And given how good computers are at natural language processing these days, the data is more usable than ever.

Of course it is used. But unless you're a target of interest to intelligence analysts, the metadata generated by your online activities will be of no interest whatsoever. It won't even be looked at.

The whole point of mass data collection is that you can check everyone to see if they should be targets of interest. And as societies get more totalitarian, what qualifies you to be a target becomes less and less dramatic.

Doing this is easy these days. You keep using phrases like "looked at" as if humans had to manually read through the records.

Re: Going Through Snowden Documents, Part 1

#145

Post by shakna »

hypeatei wrote: post #92
yogurtboy wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Here's the result of the vote, in case anyone notices these representatives running for reelection: https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1...

It's quite surprising that Bernie didn't vote on that bill considering he was vehemently against the Patriot Act. Disappointing.

He was recovering from a heart attack at the time, and remote voting was prohibited.

Re: Going Through Snowden Documents, Part 1

#146

Post by opo »

timschmidt wrote: post #138
opo wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...which calls for "A New Pearl Harbor": Reading through your link, I don't see how one can say it "calls for a "A New Pearl Harbor": >...Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor. Domestic politics and industrial policy will shape the pace and content of transformation as much a…

> Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor. You may not see this as calling for a new Pearl Harbor, but it's incredibly conspicuous considering that it's exactly what an administration made of PNAC alums got, predicted a year in advance, via nationals of https://en.wikipedia.org/w…

While conspiracy theories about 9/11 being some sort of an inside job are widespread, they are not supported by evidence.

Re: Going Through Snowden Documents, Part 1

#147

Post by timschmidt »

opo wrote: post #146
timschmidt wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor. You may not see this as calling for a new Pearl Harbor, but it's incredibly conspicuous considering that it's exactly what an administration made of PNAC alums got, predicted a year in advance, via nationals of https://en.wikipedia.org/w…

While conspiracy theories about 9/11 being some sort of an inside job are widespread, they are not supported by evidence.

That's a funny response to well-sourced facts and a document outlining strategy which was later enacted by the same folks who wrote it.

Plenty of actual conspiracies throughout history:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_conspiracies

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Conspiracies

The existence of modern conspiracies should hardly be surprising. And are precisely the business of intelligence services such as those with established links to the attackers. The attack itself was, by definition, a conspiracy. There's a great deal of conjecture about who exactly was involved in that conspiracy besides the attackers themselves, and a great deal of evidence both concrete and circumstantial. Too much for a single HN comment. But I've made no claims about that beyond "Rebuilding America's Defenses" being conspicuously prescient. Which it demonstrably was.

Re: Going Through Snowden Documents, Part 1

#148

Post by bncndn0956 »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #15
jjordan wrote: post #7

If you've ever watched the movie "Enemy of the State", which came out in 1998, I don't know how you can come away from that movie thinking anything other than someone in that script writing pipeline had some insider knowledge of what was happening. So many of the things they talk about in the film were confirmed by the Snowden releases that it's kinda scary. Today, it's almost a national societal resignation that "yo…

:) I've long held that a useful counterintelligence strategy is to weave real operations into fictional films, such that if someone catches on and tries to tell people about it, the response is simply "you schizophrenic - that's the plot of Die Hard 4!" Slightly less conspiratorial version is that agents and clerks with knowledge of operations get drunk at the same bars as Hollywood script writers

It's generally called as pressure release valve. Talk about something adnauseum that it becomes so commonplace that it doesn't evoke strong feelings at all.

Re: Going Through Snowden Documents, Part 1

#149

Post by jdycbsj »

GuinansEyebrows wrote: post #84
bandofthehawk wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My memory is that Hacker News comments were even more anti-Snowden at the time, but I could be mistaken. I would have thought people here would be very supportive of his whistle blowing, but I think a lot of people on this site unfortunately have a strong loyalty to the government organizations that were exposed.

i think a lot of people on this site work on the same types of projects snowden worked on and blew the whistle over, for the same organizations, and feel good about it. i wonder how many users here are happily employed by booz allen hamilton?

Even if they do, they are not the people who shape policy or have any Power. When is the last time you saw someone with real wotld power show up and comment on HN? So its like worrying about what farm animals think about how the farm runs. What Snowden/Assange/Panama Papers/DOGE teaches us is that it doesnt matter what info about the farm is public, there is a pecking order. If you want to change something about how the farm works and how the farm animals are treated then you have to learn how to be a farmer. No free lunch and shortcuts just because you access info.

Re: Going Through Snowden Documents, Part 1

#150

Post by protocolture »

ginush wrote: post #32
asdefghyk wrote: post #5

Some what (vaguely) related to this topic About surveillance. I recall a local political and business figure making statements you and/or I are being surveilled by the government. Everyone thought that's not likely , its not possible, he is a bit imbalanced.. After the dumping of documents' from Snowden and Assange it was shown to be possible Things like, if its even possible , it could plausibly be happening. The go…

We know now that communications are being intercepted in bulk as a matter of intelligence gathering, but that does not equate to everyone being surveilled by the government. What this actually provides, first and foremost, is the capability to perform targeted surveillance more rapidly, and to do so temporally by reaching into datasets already recorded. Obviously this provides a much-needed capability for legitimate…

>We know now that communications are being intercepted in bulk as a matter of intelligence gathering, but that does not equate to everyone being surveilled by the government.

Yeah it does. Especially because its being added to a very searchable database that can be accessed via a bewildering number of people.

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