Slashdot Mirror
Tunisian Gov't Spies On Facebook; Does the US?
jfruhlinger writes "Tunisians logging into Facebook encountered extra JavaScript, probably a sign of their repressive government's attempt to spy on them. The question is: does the US government do the same thing, just more subtly? We're not talking about agents friending you on Facebook to get more information about you; we're talking monitoring your supposedly private information behind the scenes."
Amendment IV - The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Are they? Who knows?
Can they? No doubt.
Clue:
If it were private, your information wouldn't be on facebook in the first place.
Have you been off planet for the last year or two?
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength - yeah that sounds about right.
Any reason why the secure site wouldn't work for this?
It should be assumed that any information you post on a system that doesn't belong to you (and even some that do...) is being peered at by someone that wants to put their nose where it doesn't belong.
We used to live in a society where a comment like 'Oh, but why would they look at you if you're unimportant?' would have been valid, but with the ever-encroaching nemesis of data mining and algorithmic analysis making itself part of our daily lives you have to assume that, at any moment, every transaction you make is being scrutinized.
>implying they don't already have a RAT on your computer.
What do you think the warrentless NSA spying is for?
It captures all traffic that flows to facebook's servers...and more.
Your Rights Online: Tunisian Gov't Spies On Facebook; Does the US?
Silly submitter, the government doesn't spy on Facebook, the government uses Facebook to spy on you. Now that the typical Slashdot pedantry is outta the way, isn't the whole point of Facebook to spy on people anyway?
I'm not sure whether any Government, or perhaps every Government, is monitoring or "spying", if you will, on citizens and non-citizens alike. But I am sure that you are a fool if you think they cannot, or if not them, then someone. Aggregation of personal information is the real purpose of the internet, just because it took 20 years for everyone to figure that out doesn't make it any less real, or inevitable. Take care of what you post, and where, and assume it can all be on CNN tomorrow morning. it's that simple.
Alternate Headline: Tunisian Gov't Spies on Facebook; Does Spain?
Sigh...
Duh?
They probably are, however, I doubt it's as invasive as we think it is. The amount of staff that would be needed to sift through the volumes of data collected by traffic monitoring is massive. They probably look for certain keywords or phrases and follow the patterns of "hits" generated by those phrases to see what kinds of things are trending. Sort of like listening to radio chatter. Does it suck? Yes. Is there anything we can reasonably do about it? No. Does it bother me? Yes. Am I going to stop using the Internet? Fat chance.
Should we really be surprised? I think its better to just consider everything on facebook public from the get-go.
And slashdot bought it, hook, line, and sinker.
I had a position that may have involved technology that was a little sensitive for several years. At one point a disgruntled employee burglarized the personnel files and spread information around about various people. As it turned out the investigation of employees went back quite a few years and some of the compiled information had to be garnered from neighbors long since passed away. I know that postal employees are sometimes asked about people on their route but apparently at least in some cases there are very large sums of data that go back for several decades kept and available. I can only imagine our government having the time or interest to do such a search of people's backgrounds. I have never had even a misdemeanor and can not fathom why such files were kept on me. I was not in the military at any time. Apparently some employers must feed the government information about their employees or perhaps even their customers.
As I had nothing in particular to hide I found the incident upsetting but not to the degree that I sought to file suit against the firm involved. But I'm not so sure how free people are when the government can compile information to that degree upon its citizens. I am also assuming it was the government that did the leg work. It is quite possible that other entities do the compilations. In some areas the police kept or keep "yellow sheets". They do it indirectly through a benevolent fund or some other straw man so that they can deny in court that they have such information. Often when a crime takes place they seem to know exactly where to go to snag the culprits. They also really do know about certain machinists that would have special abilities useful in committing certain crimes such as machining a weapon from scratch or the ability to cut through safes due to work in armaments. These days certain areas of electronics might draw a great deal of governmental attention.
Do mammals of the family Ursidae deposit fecal matter in areas of arboreal vegitation?
There's a reason that almost all browsers have controls to enable/disable java and/or javascript. Programmers who have used these languages normally understand why you don't want your browser to automatically execute code downloaded from strangers, and browse with "scripting" disabled. Maybe we can teach others to do the same. If you tell us here which browser(s) you use, we can probably tell you where the controls are to turn off the execution of outside code. If you browser doesn't allow this, you should probably use a different browser.
Some browsers, such as firefox, have the ability to enable/disable scripting selectively for specific sites. Those browsers are much safer than the others.
(And to the geeks here: Yes, I know you know all that. I'm talking to the large part of the population who don't seem to know it. This obviously includes whoever wrote TFA. ;-)
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
I mean. C'mon, do you need to ask? Really? .. really?
"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
the US is the biggest spy in this age and has been for since wo2. Off course they fuck us. This question is truly naive. Hell, this one would be the one question that proofs that: 'there are no dumb questions' is just wrong. There are dumb questions. This is one.
Most countries more-or-less run a certificate authority that every browser is willing to trust. Look at the list some time, bearing in mind that businesses and universities often do government work. Worse yet, some that you see in the list have delegated their authority. China has at least **two** that they can use. (see previous Slashdot story, including comments)
Ok just google "facebook intelQ" or "google intelQ" for that matter and be prepared to concider moving to Montana to can your own food. If you think you have anonimity on the dubsubsub your a fool. And if you think you have it on facebook you were droped on you head... twice.
Both sides (intelligence community and big technology companies) have too much to gain from one another that they would be stupid not to. Considering that both sectors employee some of the more intelligent people in the country I would say: "Hells yeah, they do".
If I didn't want the government to know it, I sure as hell would not post it on facebook. It would probably be more secure if I posted a notice on my front door with the information.
No, they don't, because I don't use that steaming pile of shit facebook, or any other social media sites. I'm not that narcissistic.
um, like, duh. Or said another way, the various covert agencies would be criminally negligent not to be indexing and using social media as resources. The only real question is weather or not they can non public face book data and being a tad paranoid I assume they can.
I try to post non-anonymously using my real name whatever possible, partly because ultimately I want the problems fixed. (Look at the polls I submitted for example) But I know in the real world that isn't always possible.
then i can spy
We're talking monitoring your supposedly private information behind the scenes
Well, here's the thing about US law (for better or worse, I'm just explaining it as I understand how it actually operates) is that there is no constitutional reasonable expectation of privacy in Facebook stuff, since my assumption you have already shared it with others (if only Facebook Inc). This is called "the third party doctrine", since it covers only information that an individual has voluntarily disclosed some third (non-government) entity. See, e.g. United States v. Miller (1976):
The Fourth Amendment does not prohibit the obtaining of information
revealed to a third party and conveyed by him to Government authorities,
even if the information is revealed on the assumption that it will be used
only for a limited purpose and the confidence placed in the third party will
not be betrayed.
The long and short of this is that the act of transmitting to Facebook establishes that you have no REP in whatever you transmit. A lot of ink has been spilled in debating the doctrine, both legally and normatively but that's past the scope of this post so I'll just point you to an article criticizing the doctrine and one defending it. Both contain excellent overviews of the law and the surrounding doctrinal argument.
More interestingly, however, Congress stepped in to provide even more protection than the Court when it passed the Stored Communications Act that provides an intermediate level of scrutiny past the normal scrutiny that attaches to any criminal subpoena[1]. In the SCA, Congress requires the government to prove "specific and articulable facts" that the information is relevant and material to a criminal investigation. That would be the standard applicable to a subpoena to Facebook.
Of course, if Facebook wanted to disclose information voluntarily, that would be well covered by the Third Party Doctrine (as it exists) except to the extent prohibited by the Facebook TOS.
[1] That would be, approximately, 'reasonable possibility that the materials sought will produce information relevant to the investigation'. See, e.g. United States v. R. Enterprises (1991) and FRCP 17.
[2] 18 U.S.C. 2703(d).
http://cryptome.org/isp-spy/facebook-spy.pdf
Though DHS probably has embedded assets.
my javascript penis fits nicely in the java vagina
Why is the question specifically "Does the US?" instead of, do other governments?
I hear if you put tin foil over the top of your monitor, they can't spy on you any more...the intertoobs come through there and the spy satelites can't see through the tin foil.
K.
...whether by use of page scripts or by data mining: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/technology/news/article.cfm?c_id=5&objectid=10456534&pnum=0
If the link is right, then the CIA probably has direct access to the Facebook database.
If worked for the CIA and had direct access to the Facebook database, then I would prefer to mine the database, because page scripts can be found by users and can fail for a variety of reasons.
I didn't know the definition of "private" has changed to "something you posted on a remote web site you do not control that exists for the specific purpose of sharing information with friends and strangers". That's some wicked "private".
In other news - slashdot trolling hits a new low.
Tell that to the guy who has his cell phone rummaged through without a warrant. And tell it to the the guy who has a GPS tracker attached to his car without a warrant. Tell it to the guy who has his computer searched, with anything found being prosecutable, whether it was what the warrant specified or not. Tell it to the people whose cars (and possibly even persons) have been subjected to airport "naked body" scanners from vans on the street without--you guessed it--a warrant. Tell it to the people whose Internet information is handed over to the government willy-nilly without any kind of warrant. Tell it to the guy whose cell phone signal is geo-located without a warrant. Tell it to 94 baseball players whose drug results that were obtained without a warrant.
The list goes on and on. The Fourth Amendment is a joke today. I know it, the government knows it, and apparently you didn't get the memo. It's at the point where we need to pass a new amendment that basically says, "Goddammit, we mean it." Realistically, it's probably never going to change because too many people stupidly think that 1) if you're innocent you shouldn't have anything to hide, and 2) it could never happen to them.
In Soviet Russia, Facebook spies on you!
Wait a minute, that didn't come out right...
Of course not. The US government isn't going to go through the trouble of having ISPs insert malicious Javascript, when they can just send a few agents over to Facebook (and/or the ISPs) and set up a tap sending all data directly to the NSA instead. A lot more reliable and less detectable by the victim.
The Yakima NSA listening post has been under expansion for years. Google hid work on the center by removing the huge dirt piles from their history in ~2005 A fire inspector leaked that the center was over 40 stories underground, this is before the expansion. The complaint from the Yakima tribe about dirt dumped on their land has also been deleted,
I had a daydream a few weeks ago about ok..what would someone like ..ohh I dunno.. Nazi Germany do if they had the info that FB has.. then I looked at our govt lately and realized it was time to quit.
Another reason sites should enable HTTPS by default everywhere.
Seriously, you didn't know that?
I consider Facebook to be an open book. Whatever you put there (public or otherwise), I consider it to be public domain. Anyone who thinks otherwise is delusional! They call it a "wall" for a reason. Whatever goes there, may as well be written on a wall out on Times Square, in neon lights!
Sometimes, real fast is almost as good as real-time.
There is no privacy on Facebook. For that matter, there is no privacy on the internet. This is not because anyone is violating our rights. It is because the internet is a public space, just like the mall and Main Street.
Nothing new except that they are more obvious these days. It is real obvious if you use an older slower computer.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
There are rumblings from multiple sources a coup is underway in Tunisia.
It could be a misinformation campaign but I suspect the facebook thing is not a coincidence.
You are posting to a public gateway and then are afraid that someone is treating that data as public - how dare they!
Really, it isn't private communications and, as such, there is no need for a warrant or anything for anyone to get at it. This is data mining, not spying, and is done all the time. I bet there is a web crawler somewhere on this planet that is "spying" on this post on slashdot too - there is no fourth amendment rights to information you broadcast to everyone on the planet, indeed I do not even see how there could be.
------- Sorry about the spelling, I suffer from two problems. Dyslexia makes it difficult to spell well, lazy makes it
Tunisia is a bit of an odd one.
They encourage tourism (and they're doing pretty well at that - it's a lot more built up than it was ten years ago - though perhaps at the expense of their own culture. It's rapidly becoming the sort of place Brits who want sun and sea but don't want to be exposed to any foreign food or culture might go. Think Gran Canaria but not quite as bad yet), it's much more progressive than most arabic nations and the official line is essentially that they're dragging themselves out of the mud by their own bootstraps.
Yet everywhere you go you see photos of a (now-dead) president, it's nominally democratic yet the same party wins every time with an 80something% majority and while the locals are generally very chatty, very friendly - if you ask what they think of their government they suddenly go very quiet. While hard information for outsiders is tricky to find (Wikipedia and the CIA world factbook simply say it's a democratic republic where the same government keeps getting in with a huge margin) I suspect it's a half-crazed banana republic with rather better PR.
My tag here "cyclomedia" is related to my domain and programming activities but increasingly of late i've just been using a contraction of my real name "richardacre". I am happy to bang on about my political views and don't try to hide them, but I still think twice before retweeting something. I also hardly post any info or photos involving my kids online, even on facebook where I have things mostly locked down to Friends Only.
Trying to control your privacy on the internet is just another way of trying to stop information being free: If you don't want it public don't publish it on the internet.
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
Well, if there is extra Javascript or even HTML added into pages on the fly, doesn't it clearly demonstrate that ALL web pages should be HTTPS, which would also have the benefit of screwing over companies that inject adverts into pages on the fly WITHOUT your or the originating website permission.
I have played with HTTPS when coding a web page, and the only problem I see is having mixed content from HTTP and HTTPS. You will code the entire page for HTTPS, but as soon as you add an element from a HTTP site like an image, it breaks the security icon in the browser, and the end user doesn't trust a mixed content page. Skype's "I'm online" icon and Javascript is a major culprit of this breakage problem.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
While I agree with most of your points, I take exception to the blanket statement "Aggregation of personal information is the real purpose of the internet". You make it sound as if the Internet was "invented" or evolved in order to facilitate data mining. I think the aggregation of data is more of a side effect. For most people, the Internet is either a communication tool (e.g. IM or Facebook) or an infotainment medium (e.g. browsing for pr0n or the latest celebrity rumor). Advertising, rather than the collection, analysis, and sale of information (data mining), is still the evil that powers the Internet. Or how do you explain the continued prevalence of Spam, the very anti-thesis of targeted marketing?
of Facebook. I would never create a Facebook profile except possibly a completely sterile profile, devoid of any personal details or geotagged photos, to promote a business venture. Gotta love these idiots who upload geotagged photos of their house from their smart phone. Hello stalker heaven!
Let me tell you for a FACT that it's being done via 3rd parties, as there may be 'issues' with the government doing it, so it supplies 3rd party companies (hello!) with all the data to collate.
And yes, you are being watched for known criminal associations, along with illegal activities. And the data is then sold to your companies HR department for further review.
In the old days, spies had to do the work, but now you idiots willingly tell them.
For the love of god, stop using facebook/myspace/Wow.
Yes they are ALL mined.
I've successfully logged into Facebook using https://.../ and requested pages like that, but invariably, I am redirected back to the plaintext URL. I guess I could be truly paranoid and say it's the US gov't doing this, but I don't think so.
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell
... I use Slashdot with JavaScript turned off.
I mean really. CmdrTaco isn't a real person. Its a code word for some NSA/CIA intelligence gathering initiative.
Have gnu, will travel.
If it exists, both the CIA and the NSA have each figured out independent ways to spy on it.
They usually try to limit the scope of anything that can be detected, to reduce the risk of people getting spooked and switching to new things that they have to do more work to figure out how to spy on. For passive attacks, they're only limited by what they can blackmail, err... convince the Justice Department not to prosecute them for.
There's no failure quite as dissatisfying as a complete and total solution to the wrong problem.
If you're one of those people who are still in the 'Oh, come on! Why would they do that?" stage of your thinking, take a few hours and dig into Facebook's public financials. Sure, they are a private company and thus their entire financials aren't available but enough information is available online for those who want to research. Ask yourself why are there so many investors with ties to places like CIA, In-Q-Tel (a CIA funded venture capital firm), and even the DoD. Coincidence?
There is a SLIGHT difference between the freedom to express one's opinions and ideas, and possession of tools intended for murder.
And don't even try to make that a "defense" issue.
You want defense - get a flak jacket. Come on - everyone knows weapons don't increase you armor class - armor does.
And believe it or not - no, amendments (just like all other laws) DO NOT have the same value. To citizens, to their freedoms, to their quality of life etc.
You know... kinda like those other laws and the penalties you face if you break them.
I.e. Stealing an apple and killing a man carries HUGELY different penalties.
Also, rights (like... to own guns etc.) are based on existence of freedoms. Not the other way around.
People who are not free have no rights.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I don't have a problem with the right to bear arms, as long as 1) some kind of training is required in order to get licensed to do so, and 2) said firearms are registered and licensed.
It seems pretty damn silly that you have to be licensed to drive and register your car--primarily intended as a means of transportation--with your proof of registration (your license plate) in clear view, yet the NRA and gun nuts out there think you should be able to own an arsenal of guns--primarily intended to kill things--with zero accountability.
Quick anecdote. My grandmother, I hate to say because it was quite embarrassing, was a raving racist. I remember once when there was a "scary black man" segment on the news, she said, "They should just line them all up against a wall and shoot them!" She owned a gun. She once recounted to me about how a black man once followed her out of the local mall to her car, and he meant to "do something" to her. Knowing how paranoid my grandmother is when it came to black people, I'm almost certain it was just some average Joe walking to his car, especially since she said he kept going past her when she got into the car. Nevertheless, she told us about how she got her gun out, because if he came too close to her or the car, she was going to shoot him.
She used to sleep with the gun under the pillow. Not her pillow, mind you, but the pillow on the other side of the bed. That's all fine and good, except that at the time, she was living with my aunt and uncle, and my four-year-old cousin frequently slept in that bed. Of course it was loaded with safety off, with a four-year-old's head resting on top of the pillow it was under.
Funny enough, I'm not so afraid of someone breaking into my house looking to do me harm. I don't own a gun, nor will I ever. It's not the big, bad boogeymen that I'm afraid of. It's people like my grandmother.
Want your guns? Then just like you have to with a car, you must prove that you can use them responsibly. Just like you have to with a car, you should register them. Not so that the government can invade your house (you really think them knowing how many guns you have will stop them?), but so that when your gun is used to murder someone, the police can track you down and find out what the hell happened.
You bring up limitations on the Fourth Amendment, and in spite of your facetiousness, there are limitations on it. Hell, there are even limitations on arguably the most cherished of the Bill of Rights, freedom of speech. (Yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater, and all that.) Likewise, I think it's pretty damn stupid to expect there not to be reasonable limitations on the Second Amendment.
You're an idiot and a coward.
Coming from a coward.
Whatever you may mean by "value", yes, they do all have the same weight and authority.
To citizens, to their freedoms, to their quality of life etc.
Or if that clarification is too complicated for you...
You have two hands. Which one would you miss more should you lose it for any reason?
Or if you want something that is important but fulfills a different function - would you rather be bald or toothless?
How about blind or deaf?
We put value to unquantifiable or even priceless things all the time.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
There are people of other than white race who have the exact same racist tendencies. There are neighborhoods where people get shot for being white.