Crashing the Wiretapper's Ball

An anonymous reader writes "Wired is running an article with some great investigative journalism. Writer Thomas Green snuck into the ISS World Conference, a trade show featuring communications-tapping equipment and normally a press-free event. There, he got some very interesting quotes from the attendees." From the article: "You really need to educate yourself ... Do you think this stuff doesn't happen in the West? Let me tell you something. I sell this equipment all over the world, especially in the Middle East. I deal with buyers from Qatar, and I get more concern about proper legal procedure from them than I get in the USA."

Comments

Telling Quote

[Crazy Man on Fire]

It's ironic that spooks so often remind us that we've got nothing to fear from their activities if we've got nothing nasty to hide, while they themselves are rarely comfortable without multiple layers of secrecy, anonymity and plausible deniability. While there was little or nothing at the conference worth keeping secret, the sense of paranoia was constant. The uniformed guard posted to the entrance was there to intimidate, not to protect.

This really sums it all up for me. The government should live in constant fear of the populace, not the other way around. The reaction of the government to this fear should not to hide its activities, but to increase transparency so that the populace will feel comfortable with what it is doing.

Re:Most Revealing Quote

[Crazy Man on Fire]

"Do you think for a minute that Bush would let legal issues stop him from doing surveillance? He's got to prevent a terrorist attack that everyone knows is coming. He'll do absolutely anything he thinks is going to work. And so would you."

And don't think for even one minute that whoever succeeds Bush will change anything about this.

I sure hope this changes. The problem isn't our lack of security. We've got too damn much of it already. The problem is our foreign policy. If we keep running around the world trying to tell everybody else how to live their lives while systematically destroying economies of the various contries that we don't get along with, people will continue to hate us. The more they hate us and the poorer they are, the more likely they are to use terrorism as a weapon against us. No matter how much security we have, a determined enemy will find a way to attack.

Not true! What about Brad and Jennifer???

[i am kman]

What?? Cutting edge investigative journalism is all around us.

How else would we have learned about that Angelina Jolie caused the breakup of Brad Pitt and Jennifer Anniston??? Or that Oprah just lost another 40 pounds (or it gained 60 back)??? What about those photos of Brittney Spears not buckling her baby???

Problem is most folks actually care more about these topics than WMD, intelligence manipulations, torture, political corruption/bribery, or sole source contracts. Seems like most folks pick one side of the fence and then anyone who questions ANY decision becomes an evil liberal or neo-con with some secret, political agenda.

I think the larger problem is that the public has stopped caring about trivial things like laws or ethics because truth bas become relative and the other party always lies. Dare to question Halliburton and it's because you're a liberal zealot who hates big business. Dare to question affirmative action's effectiveness and it's because you're an evil racist. It's hard to have a normal discussion anymore without huge political overtones.

Did anyone else...

[WATYF]

...find this article to be incredibly unimpressive and vacuous?

First off, there's nothing "dangerous" or "secretive" about this conference. If there was, this guy wouldn't have even known about it, let alone gotten into it. It's a marketing conference where manufacturers of this stuff try to pimp it off on anyone (from anywhere) who has an interest in surveillance. Even average cops can attend. Like someone else said, the most likely reason that they make it "closed" to the press is to give it a pompous air of secrecy that doesn't really exist. The reporter, once he gets his hands on one of the "secret" CDs, finds that there's nothing of any interest on it, and hastily concludes that it must be because of a "small-minded attitude of hostility toward the press"... but anyone with the slightest bit of business sense would also include that it may very well be because they're trying to hype up their conference and make it more attractive to wanna-be spooks so that they can sell more stuff, which is what all businesses are in business to do. (of course, that line of reasoning doesn't support his "they're all out to rob us of our civil liberties" bias, so I'm sure it never crossed his mind. :op)

Second... the quotes in this thing mean nothing. So he got a drunk, loudmouthed salesman to make (completely unsubstantiated) claims about what the US gov't does with this equipment, and how little concerned they are with the legalities of surveillance. Anyone here who's been to a tech conference knows that there are people who claim to know what's "really" going on, and everyone who's met those people knows that they're usually full of sh*t. Reporting a drunken rant as some kind of interesting "insight" is irresponsible at the least.

Then he talks to a Dutch cop, who (of course) says exactly what he wants to hear... "Secrecy is eeeevil... we're much better because we're open about how we catch criminals." (which, of course, allows them the information they need to avoid getting caught :op) Of course the guy's going to say that... everyone thinks that their way of doing things is better. But the most telling quote is, "Basically, we're three or four years ahead of all this", which just goes to show how irrelevant this show is. If the Dutch are four years ahead of it, it's a pretty safe bet that the Americans are five+ years ahead of it.

Throughout it all, he acts as if surveillance equipment (in and of itself) is some new threat, that's inherently evil, and which "poses a tremendous threat to human rights and dignity". Seriously... it's a product. There's a marker for it, so people make it and try to sell it. The one reasonable thing that the drunk guy did say was that he should stop harassing the people that make it. I don't think anyone would argue that surveillance equipment of all kinds should be banned, so basically, it's going to get made. Posing the "but it could get used for evil" argument is a waste of time, just like it is with every other man-made object that could get used improperly, but has a primary use that is beneficial.

Basically, this was a hyped-up opinion piece written by a journalist who's "trying to make a difference" by "informing" all the people who are already worked up about privacy issues about just how bad it "really" is. If there was some kind of substance to it, it might be remotely interesting, but at face value, it falls completely flat.


And before anyone goes on some presumptive tirade about how I'm a right-wing blah blah blah who's more concerned about your sex-life than I am about civil rights, save your breath. I'm not saying that unabashed gov't monitoring is good, or necessary or that I support it or any other nonsense like that... I'm only saying that this article is an insubstantial pile of dung written by someone with an obvious bias of the topic looking to paint himself as a champion of "truth".

WATYF