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Global Mass Surveillance – The Fourteen Eyes

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Re: Global Mass Surveillance – The Fourteen Eyes

#151

Post by l332mn »

stjohnswarts wrote: post #131
l332mn wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't really draw a direct comparison between PRC and the US, and ask how China would react to a 'Chinese Chomsky'. Their respective conditions and rational incentives for population control are not very similar. The US (after the fall of the USSR) is a country who's stability has not truly been threatened by criticism and dissident voices, while China is a state which has been and currently is extremely vulnerab…

I don't think any of what you say is true. The people in China would like to be free just like in the USA (although our freedoms are fading with time). People have the right to speak freely. What the CCP is doing is a dictatorship, plain and simple. They're afraid of free thought and criticism.

That's just not true. The Chinese don't consider themselves unfree, the CCP is very popular, and its approval rate has only increased in recent decades. Moreover, the US does not have a very good reputation around the world. Who envies their predatory health care system? Their high-cost system of education? Their oppressive police force? The world recognizes the failure of the US in providing for their citizens, "freedom" is ultimately just the excuse for society being the way it is.

Re: Global Mass Surveillance – The Fourteen Eyes

#152

Post by l332mn »

ahmedalsudani wrote: post #126
l332mn wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't really draw a direct comparison between PRC and the US, and ask how China would react to a 'Chinese Chomsky'. Their respective conditions and rational incentives for population control are not very similar. The US (after the fall of the USSR) is a country who's stability has not truly been threatened by criticism and dissident voices, while China is a state which has been and currently is extremely vulnerab…

Very brave of you to post this comment on HN ;)

Hm, what are you implying?

Re: Global Mass Surveillance – The Fourteen Eyes

#153

Post by l332mn »

chrisco255 wrote: post #99
l332mn wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Individual rights are not processes of checks and balances. Those rights can be withdrawn in a jiffy, whenever required or convenient. What good does the right to bear arms do you as an individual when you're deemed a dangerous criminal, or as a group when you're deemed a terrorist organization? What good does the right to free speech do you if your speech is inconsequential? > The fact that if a piece of evidence is…

No they can't. It's incredibly hard to amend the Constitution of the United States. That's by design. You need 2/3 vote in both the House and the Senate and 3/4 of all states to ratify an amendment in order to change it. You can't be deemed "a dangerous criminal" without having actually been convicted in a court of law by a jury of your peers. And even then, there's appeals, pardons, etc. > What good does the right t…

Look up COINTELPRO. They used a combination of framing, deceit, labeling people terrorists and criminals in order to systematically undermine a political movement (and still do, covertly). That's not even talking about how they operate abroad. Individual rights means nothing when the state deems you a threat of some kind.

Re: Global Mass Surveillance – The Fourteen Eyes

#156

Post by acoard »

shirakawasuna wrote: post #125

My general sense is that offensive capabilities are much better than defensive ones when it comes to security / surveillance. e.g., even using a VPN and a vanilla browser with no history and arbitrary window size is nearly worthless when it comes to many forms of surveillance. Are there any guides out there that consider all the means by which you can attempt to shield yourself from these intrusions, including a desc…

The first thing to do is answer what's your threat vector? What are you trying to protect against? And the second thing is answer and what are you willing to give up?

The best way is, of course, to not use technology. But that's not worth it to most folks.

If your threat vector is general dragnet government surveillance over the entire populous, you're fighting against a shadows. Basically all we know of these techniques come from Snowden. Assume all internet data is logged, whether encrypted or not, and they have direct access to the ISP infrastructure. Room 641A shows the USA has been at this since 2006[0]. Even if your messages are encrypted, it's possible the agency has a 0day. For example, the NSA had decrypted all BBM traffic which was advertised as encrypted. The lesson here is avoid new and popular tools. Instead, just use PGP or other arcane yet reliable encryption methods. If everyone used PGP, I bet the NSA would exploit it too. Don't use a smart phone at all. Using bootable Linux USB of something like Tails on a public computer is probably the best bet, but unsustainable. Even Tails and TOR isn't perfect but it's miles better than Windows, Mac, ChromeOS.

If your threat vector is a specific intelligence agency spying on you, (i.e. an APT), you have already lost. I don't think it even makes sense to try and protect against this level of threat. It's like worrying about a tank coming through your frontdoor.

If your threat vector is private companies spying on you (be it Facebooks or even private intelligence companies), you have a lot more power here. Besides ISPs, private companies don't own the infrastructure and are not legally allowed to use 0days like the NSA is. In general, end to end encryption is sufficient here.

It's all a sliding scale of compromise between security and convenience.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

Re: Global Mass Surveillance – The Fourteen Eyes

#157

Post by dang »

chrisco255 wrote: post #117
l332mn wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Obviously when the CCP controls the law, they are free to re-interpret it or rewrite it to place themselves clearly in those bounds That's the case with every state. Every state has absolute power. Every state, as the union of the legislative, judicial and executive branch are free to re-interpret, rewrite and judge according to how the state apparatus best functions. You seem to be confusing the issue at hand with…

> That's the case with every state No. No it's not. Apparently you've never heard of the US Supreme Court. Here's a list of the past 250 or so years of US Supreme Court rulings, which have a long history of protecting citizens rights against state and federal encroachments: https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-supreme-court I suggest you read a few of them, get educated, then come back to me and we can have an intell…

Please don't do political/nationalistic flamewars like this on HN. When things get to this stage, curious conversation died a long time ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Global Mass Surveillance – The Fourteen Eyes

#158

Post by pacamara619 »

pdonis wrote: post #55
eivarv wrote: post #24

The Norwegian parliament recently passed a bill that implements bulk metadata collection here as well. I tried debating with ministers, writing op-eds, and even organizing petitions (over 1000 security, privacy and tech professionals in a couple of days) before the vote. While every informed person I know thinks it's a bad idea, and every organization consulted massively criticized it as mass surveillance, a huge maj…

> how can we work against this on a technical level? As the saying goes, you can't use a technical solution to fix a social problem. One way to fix the social problem is to vote politicians out of office when they make bad decisions--not just about surveillance, but in general. People who don't have to pay a cost for bad decisions have no incentive to make better decisions. Another way is to not give powers like this…

You cannot vote someone out of office, you can only vote for someone else. Who do you vote for when every somewhat popular candidate doesn't even know how to change their WLAN password?

Re: Global Mass Surveillance – The Fourteen Eyes

#159

Post by shirakawasuna »

acoard wrote: post #156
shirakawasuna wrote: post #125

My general sense is that offensive capabilities are much better than defensive ones when it comes to security / surveillance. e.g., even using a VPN and a vanilla browser with no history and arbitrary window size is nearly worthless when it comes to many forms of surveillance. Are there any guides out there that consider all the means by which you can attempt to shield yourself from these intrusions, including a desc…

The first thing to do is answer what's your threat vector? What are you trying to protect against? And the second thing is answer and what are you willing to give up? The best way is, of course, to not use technology. But that's not worth it to most folks. If your threat vector is general dragnet government surveillance over the entire populous, you're fighting against a shadows. Basically all we know of these techni…

Thanks! This unfortunately comports pretty well with my general understanding, ha. Can protect from companies / non-governmental actors, governments either have assymetrical capabilities when they focus on you or have unknown and likely deep levels of surveillance power. Security becomes more a matter of just plain not using the internet for information you don't want to have snooped on, if it's paranoia-level stuff.

Re: Global Mass Surveillance – The Fourteen Eyes

#160

Post by vkou »

pdonis wrote: post #97
vkou wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And who adds or repeals constitutional amendments? The government.

> who adds or repeals constitutional amendments? The government. Yes, but that doesn't change the fact that Constitutional amendments usually impose some limitation on the government (Federal, and in many cases State as well). And once such an amendment is passed, it's much harder to repeal than an ordinary statute (only one US Constitutional amendment has been repealed, the one imposing Prohibition, and it's relevan…

> and it's relevant that that amendment was not one that imposed a limitation on the Federal government--it gave the Federal government more power, and it got repealed).

This is a bit off-topic, but I would like to point out that if the Federal government wanted to re-instate prohibition tomorrow, it could trivially do so without a constitutional amendment. It would do so by tying highway funding to states enforcing prohibition.

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