Massive New Surveillance Program Uncovered by Wall Street Journal • Hacker News Board

Re: Massive New Surveillance Program Uncovered by Wall Street Journal

#31

Post by Create » Sun, Dec 16, 2012, 10:11 AM UTC

barking wrote: post #25

buro9 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been happening in the other direction for a number of years now. My brother was turned back when he flew to Miami with his family to take his children to Disney World. It turned out that because he had been arrested aged 19 and failed to declare it that the border people felt that he had answered fraudulantly when challenged on "Have you ever been arrested?". My brother answered no because whilst he was arrested…

It turned out that because he had been arrested aged 19 and failed to declare it that the border people felt that he had answered fraudulantly when challenged on "Have you ever been arrested?". What interpretation should they have taken from it?

For example, that since Clinton also answered fraudulently when challenged, he shouldn't be allowed to fly either. Nixon got caught too -- I presume he also did fly afterwards. But obviously some are more equal; 1984 Was Not Supposed To Be An Instruction Manual.

Re: Massive New Surveillance Program Uncovered by Wall Street Journal

#32

Post by nikcub » Sun, Dec 16, 2012, 10:12 AM UTC

buro9 wrote: post #3

nnq wrote: post #2

> allow databases about U.S. civilians to be handed over to foreign governments for analysis, presumably so that they too can attempt to determine future criminal actions ...where on the line did these guys lost the "innocent until proven guilty" part?! (the possibility of your government handing personal data of innocent civilians to foreign governments sounds "out of your freakyn minds" even for a foreigner like me…

It's been happening in the other direction for a number of years now. My brother was turned back when he flew to Miami with his family to take his children to Disney World. It turned out that because he had been arrested aged 19 and failed to declare it that the border people felt that he had answered fraudulantly when challenged on "Have you ever been arrested?". My brother answered no because whilst he was arrested…

It sucks that this is how it works, but that is what the survey is for. They already know all the answers, they just want to see how you respond.

For eg. they already know the date, your flight number, your passport number, your history - it is all about getting you in a situation where you answer questions and can be analyzed.

The Isrealis are really good at it. They realized that security through innspecting every person and every square centimeter of luggage is too expensive and isn't as effective.

A lot of their security at airports depends on picking out people and just asking them a random question or two ('why are you here') and seeing the response. If you have ever been asked the time, or the directions to the mens room, or about a flight from a tourist looking person at an Israel airport, chances are that they may have been an agent. There is a front-line of plain clothed who look around on the ground and pass on potential targets to uniformed officers.

There was a paper I remember reading sub-titled "Can you really catch terrorist by asking them if they are terrorists" and the conclusion was that yes, you can - and you do - and not because you know they will answer 'no', but by how they answer and their body language, among other factors (much of which modern governments keep secret).

There was sometime in how your brother answered that steered them towards not allowing him in. There are a lot of people who also make similar mistakes on immigration forms and are still let in.

Re: Massive New Surveillance Program Uncovered by Wall Street Journal

#33

Post by Create » Sun, Dec 16, 2012, 10:23 AM UTC

standingstone wrote: post #16

Create wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect it only goes the other way mainly in such minor, insignificant cases to build up the stats to satisfy the bilateral agreements, which go back for a long time. This is what Churchill meant by "special relationship" and the agreement which Tony Benn oversaw when he was in office. The price set for the Polaris was Her Majesty's subjects' data. All of it. My brother answered no because whilst he was arrested he…

Tony Blair I'd say. Not Tony Benn's sort of thing at all!

Like most politicians, Tony Benn changed with time. Although in the unlikely way: the other way around.
Tony Blair wasn't around Nassau (Trident, the successor to Polaris, was signed off by Thatcher, and it also precedes Blair).

youtu.be/rokTiJfL4WY

Re: Massive New Surveillance Program Uncovered by Wall Street Journal

#34

Post by barking » Sun, Dec 16, 2012, 10:24 AM UTC

dirtyaura wrote: post #28

barking wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have a record then isn't it understandable that you might attract more attention than someone with a blameless past? It seems logical to me anyway. Obviously not to the extent that you'd be held but keeping an eye on you is fair enough imo.

Do you really think that a previous record and terrorist acts correlate significantly?

Yes. Membership of the domestic terrorist groups in my country correlates very strongly with a history of juvenile anti-social behaviour. These youngsters frequently come into contact with these groups either when subject to vigilante punishment or 'get taken under their wing'. Most terrorists aren't university graduates

Re: Massive New Surveillance Program Uncovered by Wall Street Journal

#35

Post by buro9 » Sun, Dec 16, 2012, 10:29 AM UTC

barking wrote: post #25

buro9 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been happening in the other direction for a number of years now. My brother was turned back when he flew to Miami with his family to take his children to Disney World. It turned out that because he had been arrested aged 19 and failed to declare it that the border people felt that he had answered fraudulantly when challenged on "Have you ever been arrested?". My brother answered no because whilst he was arrested…

It turned out that because he had been arrested aged 19 and failed to declare it that the border people felt that he had answered fraudulantly when challenged on "Have you ever been arrested?". What interpretation should they have taken from it?

The UK has a law called the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act, within that is the notion of classes of criminal record being spent.

I don't know the specifics, but you always have to declare the equivalent of felonies, but for misdemeanours you can lawfully not declare them after some period of time in which your debt is considered repaid and the record spent.

The whole of the EU has such laws. I think most people within the EU would regard this as just a part of living in the civilised west.

And the most simple part of that is that if you arrested and never charged, or even charged but acquitted during trial, or even arrested and cautioned... then you never need to declare it. You can quite literally forget about it after some relatively short period of time, I think it's a year or 3.

Going back to my brother. Never charged, never cautioned, never went to trial, released without any impact whatsoever... just a bad day, worth forgetting and after 20 years definitely forgotten.

I think almost everyone I know would've said no to the question quite honestly believing that it's a perfectly reasonable and honest answer.

Re: Massive New Surveillance Program Uncovered by Wall Street Journal

#36

Post by adventured » Sun, Dec 16, 2012, 10:30 AM UTC

Give a government trillions to spend in an era of massive government programs and vast new storage & surveillance technology, and it should be obvious what you're going to get.

The only possible way to stop it is to starve the beast of funds to spend. Cut the government in half, and let's see if they can still afford all the shiny new big brother toys.

Re: Massive New Surveillance Program Uncovered by Wall Street Journal

#37

Post by mcantelon » Sun, Dec 16, 2012, 10:31 AM UTC

WSJ didn't uncover it. It has been talked about since October in the context of the "disposition matrix", which is to be used to search out possible candidates for the extrajudicial "kill list".

>The central role played by the NCTC in determining who should be killed ... the NCTC operates a gigantic data-mining operation, in which all sorts of information about innocent Americans is systematically monitored, stored, and analyzed

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/24/obama-te...

Re: Massive New Surveillance Program Uncovered by Wall Street Journal

#38

Post by mcantelon » Sun, Dec 16, 2012, 10:37 AM UTC

barking wrote: post #20

mtgx wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I want to fly to Latin America from Europe, I'd rather make the stop for the second plane in Europe, and then go straight to Latin America, than make the stop in US. I just don't want to deal with TSA in any way, especially after stories that now they even have data on what you tweeted and stuff like that, and they can take you aside or even arrest you for a while because of that. Will TSA consider me "suspicious"…

OTOH they've been pretty successful at preventing attacks on America since 9/11.

And they likely could have prevented 9/11 as well, but then they wouldn't have been able to increase the state's power to "fix" things. There wasn't a lack of intelligence warning of 9/11: there was a lack of will to deal with the intelligence.

http://www.historycommons.org/timeline.jsp?timeline=complete...

Re: Massive New Surveillance Program Uncovered by Wall Street Journal

#39

Post by peterhost » Sun, Dec 16, 2012, 10:39 AM UTC

chmike wrote: post #17

I don't understand the critics. Do you think that terrorists or criminals are detected by oracles ? You ridiculed the security agencies after 911 for not beeing able to detect such a plot and now you are in shock because they do their job ? There is no way to detect a plot while staying eyes shut. There is a problem, more precisely a risk, but it is not in collecting the data and processing it to detect a plot. It is…

Ok, you're my target cause this comment is so obviously being uttered by someone who hasn't studied history in his/her whole life... Jeez ! (whom i don't believe in btw)

Hacker new indeed....

Has anyone's been following dunno, wikileaks or Appelbaum or... Hacker news that are not on hackernews (which usurpates its name because what it really is is startup news) ? Eagle, the Athen Affair (http://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/security/the-athens-affair/...), or more generally this : http://wikileaks.org/the-spyfiles.html ?

It's our liberty that's slipping out of the (gaping a..)hole of democracies, which is not democracies fault because they are by definition are "representative governements", based on election. Tocqueville knew that back in the XIXth, so did all theoreticians of "governance", and not a single one called a "representative government" a "democracy".

Anyway. What it boils down to is : if you're not strictly speaking living in a democracy (which i'm sorry, the US, UK, France,... Aren't by historical, philosophical, and semantic definition), the only thing that matters is keeping power at bay. Try and elect representatives who truly understand that too much power in to few hands always leads to disaster. Only. There are none. There haven't been for decades. The latest in france was General de Gaulle (though his ego was high, he was the sort able to step down from power after a people's vote) , and I guess, on the US side, Kennedy.

I wouldn't trust my shoes to the state. And to facebook ? (non existing) Jeez again ! This is so scary to realize nobody - at large - realizes...

WWII is far away, the days of the cold war too, and people become lazy. Even (so called) hackers.

Re: Massive New Surveillance Program Uncovered by Wall Street Journal

#40

Post by buro9 » Sun, Dec 16, 2012, 10:40 AM UTC

buro9 wrote: post #35

barking wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It turned out that because he had been arrested aged 19 and failed to declare it that the border people felt that he had answered fraudulantly when challenged on "Have you ever been arrested?". What interpretation should they have taken from it?

The UK has a law called the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act, within that is the notion of classes of criminal record being spent. I don't know the specifics, but you always have to declare the equivalent of felonies, but for misdemeanours you can lawfully not declare them after some period of time in which your debt is considered repaid and the record spent. The whole of the EU has such laws. I think most people with…

To reply to myself, the thing that I took away from his telling of this experience and watching his wife almost cry when they got to the part about boarding the plane back with the children... it's this:

Every thing that you ever do is recorded somewhere. Every person has a file whether they think they do or not. This file will only ever be used against you.

And Europe remembers such a thing... it was only 1990 that the Stasi was dissolved. Yet here we are constructing an even more powerful and permanent version of "a file on everyone".

My brother's demonstration was a worker's one, not political. But don't you see that if attending a political rally risks arrest and permanent repercussions, even if you were innocent of everything save for having an opinion... then are we not already at the point in which to hold an alternate political view is to risk inserting something into your file (it exists anyway) which could permanently affect your life.

Who knows what the future holds, but for my brother it's unlikely to involve working for a company that ever expects travel to the USA. Thus, one is forced to modify their behaviour to avoid being penalised by the current system.

Isn't that what the effect of the Stasi was?

I mean, being European, I find it hard to see how history isn't repeating itself on an ever grander scale now that there are tools that allow it to do so.