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Danish military intelligence uses XKEYSCORE to tap cables in co-op with the NSA

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Re: Danish military intelligence uses XKEYSCORE to tap cables in co-op with the NSA

#201

Post by segfaultbuserr »

arminiusreturns wrote: post #123
charlchi wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The people who visit this website are the people who are paid to create and administer all of this technology. Exactly, some falsely assume all technologists somehow share an enthusiasm for morality. Many of the most successful technologists I know simply work for the highest pay from military/intelligence contracts.

The term "hacker" in "hacker news" is too misleading, especially those of us who use the more RMS-esque definition of it. Petition to change to something more appropos.

I personally agree that the more RMS-esque or Steven Levy definition of "hacker" is a good idea. However, we must acknowledge that "hackers" is not never a homogeneous group, and even more so today. I know some greyhat hackers who do brilliant technical works that rightfully entitie them "hacker", but they have questionable ethics. Normally I use the generic definition from RFC 1392 as the compromise.

> hacker: A person who delights in having an intimate understanding of the internal workings of a system, computers and computer networks in particular.

Using this definition, calling this site "Hacker News" is not exactly accurate, but also not too far-off. I think this website is 40% "Silicon Valley & Startup" News, 40% "Hacker" News, and 20% misc.

Re: Danish military intelligence uses XKEYSCORE to tap cables in co-op with the NSA

#202

Post by HenryBemis »

segfaultbuserr wrote: post #201
arminiusreturns wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The term "hacker" in "hacker news" is too misleading, especially those of us who use the more RMS-esque definition of it. Petition to change to something more appropos.

I personally agree that the more RMS-esque or Steven Levy definition of "hacker" is a good idea. However, we must acknowledge that "hackers" is not never a homogeneous group, and even more so today. I know some greyhat hackers who do brilliant technical works that rightfully entitie them "hacker", but they have questionable ethics. Normally I use the generic definition from RFC 1392 as the compromise. > hacker: A per…

To add to that, even if the word "hacker" has a malicious connotation, today, the meaning of the word is closer to "the one who knows his/her stuff well and enjoys breaking them down and creating new things".

One of my favourite sites is the IKEAhackers.net (no affiliation). That site truly shows what a "hacker" does, in the furiture domain, but still, decomposing, redesigning, reusing.

Exactly like the RFC 1392 (aka "Internet Users' Glossary") as you mention. There is a distinction to the word "cracker" which shows malicious intent (what our dear friends on EF + NSA are doing).

This piece of news should also be a reminder to ALL, that these agencies that "protect" us (irrespective of flag) cannot and should not be trusted with/for anything. Especially not with the truth.

Re: Danish military intelligence uses XKEYSCORE to tap cables in co-op with the NSA

#203

Post by arminiusreturns »

kimjongtrill wrote: post #192
arminiusreturns wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The term "hacker" in "hacker news" is too misleading, especially those of us who use the more RMS-esque definition of it. Petition to change to something more appropos.

Lol petition to stop naming anything because eventually all labels become bad. /s

I guess I did forget my /s. All in good jest, and like a good jest, perhaps a modicum of truth is there.

Re: Danish military intelligence uses XKEYSCORE to tap cables in co-op with the NSA

#204

Post by nelaboras »

cblconfederate wrote: post #65
iconara wrote: post #34

It's very important that we keep Huawei out of our 5G networks! (what if they discovered things like this and told the citizens about it?)

As a european , i d rather have my surveillance camera phone china than the US. Google already knows too much about where and what i m doing, they dont need access to my camera. China OTOH doesnt have any kind of legal jurisdiction on me, we don't have some the kind of alliances that we share with US. Like during the cold war, arbitraging between spies was a safe bet.

As a European I prefer having Erikson and Nokia build our networks than unaccountable Chinese companies. 5G is a unique chance to get some tech sovereignty back as the two leaders (outside of state-supportrd Huawei and ZTE) are European.

Re: Danish military intelligence uses XKEYSCORE to tap cables in co-op with the NSA

#205

Post by nelaboras »

Dahoon wrote: post #133
cblconfederate wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a european , i d rather have my surveillance camera phone china than the US. Google already knows too much about where and what i m doing, they dont need access to my camera. China OTOH doesnt have any kind of legal jurisdiction on me, we don't have some the kind of alliances that we share with US. Like during the cold war, arbitraging between spies was a safe bet.

Couldn't agree more. So many people are so scared of China (the new red scare) but in reality if you did something illegal who do you have to fear more gets their hands on the data: The FBI or some PRC equivalent? There are hundreds of stories of FBI (and CIA) working in other countries but I have never heard of any PRC people kicking in the door of someone outside the PRC.

They are doing so certainly across Asia, their methods are just a bit different and it's usually focused on ethnic Chinese dissidents. https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/03/29/the-disappeared-china-r...

Re: Danish military intelligence uses XKEYSCORE to tap cables in co-op with the NSA

#206

Post by username90 »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #181
kaitai wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that conservative means "in support of a (certain kind of) status quo" in this case, rather than the American line-up of hot-button culture war issues. The upper middle-class wants stability, whatever it is, because of the structure of their income stream. That's why upper middle class people are basically centrists and don't want to rock the boat too much: they're doing very well in the boat, and rocking it…

Why do these points not apply to the upper class? I would expect them to be at least as conservative as the upper middle class, and all of these arguments fail to distinguish the groups. But the claim is that the upper-middle class is more conservative than the upper class. That's... weird?

Example: Upper middle class wants to limit immigration since it hurts their salaries. Upper class wants more immigration to get cheap labor into the country.

Re: Danish military intelligence uses XKEYSCORE to tap cables in co-op with the NSA

#207

Post by Lammy »

messo wrote: post #198
ToFab123 wrote: post #186

> In the mid-1990s, the NSA had found out that somewhere under Copenhagen there was a backbone cable containing phone calls, e-mails and text messages from and to countries like China and Russia, which was of great interest for the Americans. Tapping that cable, however, was almost impossible without the help of the Danes, so the NSA asked the FE for access to the cable. This was revealed in details about 20 - 30 yea…

This is really fascinating. I dug around a bit to see if I could find a digital copy of the article you mentioned. The Norwegian National Library have an impressive archive of scanned books and newspapers going back hundreds of years, but apparently no danish newspapers. Instead I found a reference to a book from 1996 by an author from New Zealand which seems to describe the same topic in great detail. This is basica…

TIL of the "ANZUS treaty" from the linked book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANZUS

Is the name of this thing an amazing runic pun, or am I just hoping it's that clever?

"Ansuz is known as Odin's Rune and indicates great power and knowledge to be revealed."

Re: Danish military intelligence uses XKEYSCORE to tap cables in co-op with the NSA

#209

Post by tester34 »

godelski wrote: post #71
jtchang wrote: post #24

All these comments about metadata not being useful are missing the point. Metadata is incredible valuable and sometimes just as valuable as the decrypted data itself. Knowing what sites a target visits, access patterns, changes in behavior: all this can be fed into ML algorithms to come up with fingerprints. You don't need to be able decrypt the data in transit if you know the endpoints and can somehow compromise the…

It honestly worries me that this is the top comment on hacker news. Not because it is wrong (it isn't) but because of all places that website filled with tech workers and experts in the full software stack, full of people that work on and exploit meta data, it still needs to be discussed how important metadata is. If we can't convince people with their ear to the ground, how does one convince the general public. Espe…

Well,

HN doesnt seem to be security oriented community.

But it's ok, security isn't as important as algos are during FAANG interviews, so who cares.

Re: Danish military intelligence uses XKEYSCORE to tap cables in co-op with the NSA

#210

Post by aliceryhl »

colordrops wrote: post #29
aliceryhl wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure? I find it very convincing that NSA would not betray the trust, as it also says in the article. > "I can not at all imagine in my imagination that the NSA would betray that trust. I consider it completely and utterly unlikely. If the NSA had a desire to obtain information about Danish citizens or companies, the United States would simply turn to [the domestic security service] PET, which would then provi…

A statement is not a scientific fact. The head of the NSA lied to the American public about their extra-legal monitoring. What has changed since the Snowden revelations? Why would Danes be more respected by the NSA than US citizens themselves? This makes absolutely no logical sense.

This has nothing to do with scientific fact? It's about risk/reward for NSA. If Denmark finds out that they were deliberately using the system on Danish citizens, the NSA risks losing access to the system. Not taking that risk in exchange for having to use other methods to investigate Danes sounds like a perfectly reasonable risk/reward calculation from the NSA's point of view, especially considering how small Denmark is.

I mean, sure, they can lie about it, but that always carries a risk of being found out. Especially considering it sounds like from the article that FE can see who the NSA is searching for (and even has to approve the search queries).

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