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Assange: Facebook 'the Most Appalling Spy Machine' Ever
i4u points out an interview with Julian Assange in which the controversial WikiLeaks spokesman calls Facebook "the most appalling spy machine that has ever been invented." He continues,
"Here we have the world’s most comprehensive database about people, their relationships, their names, their addresses, their locations and the communications with each other, their relatives, all sitting within the United States, all accessible to US intelligence. Facebook, Google, Yahoo – all these major US organizations have built-in interfaces for US intelligence. It’s not a matter of serving a subpoena. They have an interface that they have developed for US intelligence to use. Now, is it the case that Facebook is actually run by US intelligence? No, it’s not like that. It’s simply that US intelligence is able to bring to bear legal and political pressure on them. And it’s costly for them to hand out records one by one, so they have automated the process. Everyone should understand that when they add their friends to Facebook, they are doing free work for United States intelligence agencies in building this database for them."
Where did he tell you to do anything but understand?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
He's not talking to you, you prick. He's raising public awareness. Get over yourself.
You need to stop putting words in other people's mouths.
Its funny but a device, the computer, that many clever people developed to free us and improve our lives is ruining our privacy and harming our freedoms. Even governments and their agencies are afraid, wikipedia allowed them to be spied on in an industrial scale, police are weary of cell phones with cameras etc.
The guy who wants all information to be accessible to everyone is complaining the biggest collections of information are too accessible?
No, you got it wrong. He stands for open governments, not people. That's a big difference.
Facebook is like a reverse Wikileaks, leaking the general public's personal information back to shady corporations and government organisations. They really do have a detailed map of your digital life, and they keep all of it - the record goes all the way back to when you joined. A database of the lives 640 million people worldwide... the fact this information is so poorly protected is deeply concerning. Once you put information up there you don't get it back. I've said it before: http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1946656&cid=34845420
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Ain't nothin' on my Facebook but my name, my friends, and my random attempts at being witty. I don't care if the gov't sees any of it. If I did, it wouldn't be on Facebook. The problem isn't Facebook, it's that people -- including Assange, actually -- have a binary idea of security and trust. They think something is either totally secret and revealing it would be a huge betrayal, or it's all out there in the wind open to everyone. If you think Facebook is a privacy threat, you don't have to stop using it: just stop posting private stuff to it.
Trust is multilayered. I have stuff I only tell my close friends. I have stuff I only tell my Warcraft guild. I have stuff I only tell my wife. I have stuff I keep entirely inside my head. And none of that stuff goes on Facebook. Facebook is fine for some sorts of privacy -- for instance, as a college professor, I don't Facebook friend my students, so I don't have to worry about saying something unbecoming of a professor. For other sorts of things, I use other sorts of communications.
But I've been living in this sort of multilayered online privacy world for two decades now. Hopefully someday soon the rest of the planet will figure out how it works, so I don't have to deal with Assange's paranoid ranting, or college students who can't get a job because they're naked and/or vomiting on their profile page.
That's philosophy of openness is fine, so long as you don't fall on the government's "undesirables" list. Like those folk who were blacklisted simply because they belonged to the communist party. Or had the unfortunate status of being japanese from 1942 to 46.
Or get "extra" attention by highway patrols because they are Harley riders, or DWB (driving while black). Or suspected downloaders of porn. "We don't know if he's a pedophile, but by god he's downloaded a lot of nude images. Surely one of those girls LOOKS underage, and we can frame him for it. Oh look - he's bought japanese comics of underage boys and girls from ebay. Book him."
Or posting a "sexual" photo to facebook when you're only 17 years and 11 months. Sexting is a favorite of overzealous prudes in prosecutors' offices. (Or horror - an 18 year old boy dating a 17 year old junior.)
Et cetera, et cetera.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
The point is not in "hiding from government", but not allowing your personal friendships into easy view of people with potentially dangerous agendas.
You may or may not know that your friend is now an activist for a political movement that government doesn't like for example. Before, there was no way for them to tell about your level of friendship, and they wouldn't have the man power to investigate every human contact he has. Now, they go to facebook, collect the information on friendships and have a nice list of additional suspects to fine comb through.
In this regard, it's the ease of availability that is dangerous to the user. This is a change on similar scale to telephones, and wiretapping that came with it. It allows for centralised data collection on a level that was impossible before.
>>>I kind of trust our intelligence community at the moment.
According to Assange, ~30 people are sitting in Guantanamo Prison and Obama's intelligence community KNOWS they are innocent, but refuses to release them. How can you sit there and say you "trust" these people??? You must be as naive as a virgin on prom night.
>>>if they lower constitutional rights in NY to allow cops to search bags for explosives, I don't think they should be able to arrest people if they find drugs
More naivete'. Drive to Texas or Maine sometime, to where random checkpoints are setup on interstates to stop cars. The checkpoints are staffed by Immigration, supposedly to look for illegal immigrants hiding in trunks, but the agents ALSO look for contraband and will happily arrest you for it. The evidence will not be thrown out, and you will spend years in jail.
Same goes for the SA at airports which is supposed to be looking for bombs, but have detained multiple people for "carrying thousands in cash". Last I checked carrying US legal tender on internal flights is not a crime, so why are they detaining innocent people? (Answer: For the same reason why SA guards happily executed members of the German Parliament in 1933 - because they are humans and humans can't be trusted with power. They enjoy smashing skulls too much.)
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
>>>alleged rapist
Only in Europe could 2 women voluntarily have sex with a single man, enjoy themselves, and then a week later say, "I was raped," and the police take her seriously. I thought Europe was more progressive than backwards USA, what with nude television and beaches and such, but I guess not.
Anybody with any intelligence (i.e. not you) realizes this was a FRAME job, because woman #1 learned about woman #2, got jealous, and they both decided to "get even" with the man. It's a classic case of buyer's remorse.
In the US this case would be laughed out of court.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
You see, I've never been able to understand this sort of thinking. Why, if ignorance is such an objective evil, are there people actively trying to promote it? If populations never willingly go into a war, then why do we ever go into wars? Is it the case that the situations which justify a war never exist, but are some kind of fantasy? If so, why do people who supposedly have access to the "genuine" information still insist on going to war? Is it merely because it is in their best interest? If so, why is it always in the best interest of those who can be well informed without media intervention and always in the worst interest of people who cannot? It seems to me that this philosophy explicitly posits a good guys vs. bad guys cosmology, and the idea that the soul of mankind would be pure and lily white if it were free of these unseen Illuminati who have apparently raided the secret stash of evil that God keeps in the back of the fridge, out of reach of everyone below a certain income bracket. That worldview smells too much like shit for me to believe, no matter how much hippie-charisma it has.
>>>If populations never willingly go into a war, then why do we ever go into wars?
Same reason Obama drug us into Libya (or Bush into Iraq).
Because he can.
And damn what the people think (most are against the war). Of course the real power to enter war is supposed to be with the People, as represented by their representatives in Congress. Unfortunately Congress is about as powerless today, as the Roman Senate was under the caesars. The Republic has fallen. The emperor has risen. (And I don't just mean this one example - the Executive has been ignoring congress a lot lately.)
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
That is, until your dirty secret becomes illegal. Poker anyone?
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I'm surprised no other people are talking about this aspect of Assange's remarks. Having a graph of the connections between (almost) everyone allows you a great level of control over how rumours and ideas spread in that graph, and as a result allows shady government agencies to socially engineer the public more effectively. I bet somebody somewhere must already have a computer model with all the connections in FB and is using basic epidemiology-style graph theory to calculate how to most effectively mind-control the dumb unwashed.
For instance, if they want to indirectly influence some official in a certain country, they could try influencing the friends of his son, who will in turn influence the son, who will then exert pressure on the official. Or, if they want to influence the largest number of people possible, they work to influence the people with the most connections. You get the idea - except on a much larger scale (think six degrees of separation).
I also have to wonder how HBGary's fake online persona "clone army" is related to this sort of thing.
I disagree. I think technological development is neutral, it can go either way. The real question is this: do the CS people who develop and refine surveillance methods outnumber and/or outperform the CS people who develop and refine ways to counter the surveillance?
A smart CS graduate could work on better privacy systems, or on better surveillance systems. It's not all one way. Both problems are equally interesting and equally challenging. It's a black hat/white hat kind of thing.
It's clear that there's a lot of money in surveillance, especially in the US which is so strongly controlled by the military industrial complex. So there are a lot of grants and projects to improve surveillance. But I think that's ultimately a social problem rather than a technical one. There needs to be a critical mass of people who are willing to fund and sell countermeasures, and create a self sustaining market available to all.
For example, we have encryption widely available in software today because people were willing to stand up to the US government when they were trying to ban the technology.
There are embryonic ways to sabotage data gathering efforts which everyone on slashdot has used before: filling out fake data in surveys and registration forms, etc. We need people to think up ways to refine these basic ideas into technologies that can reliably damage large scale surveillance efforts.
I choose what to release...
Suppose you attended a party and elected not to say a single word. How much do you think I could find out about you simply by listening in on all your friends?
Facebook doesn't need you to post. Other people can fill in the blanks for them. You don't decide what information they release about you.
in reality demons are rare.
The sort of people who will do the most horrific and soul chilling things can go home, hug their kids and go to the community picnic.
I have no doubt that you're sure the people you know in the intelligence community are good people and I'm sure they're sure they're good people as well.
but that doesn't really mean anything.
it's hard to imagine but the guards at concentration camps can have coffee mugs with "worlds best dad" just like anyone else.
a good man, just following orders, who believes he's doing what is right can be far more scary than any mere psychopath.
Eh. Perhaps Facebook doesn't decide, but my friends sure do. They post shit all the time that implicates me as participating in certain activities and being in certain places. And that's without me ever using Facebook myself.
That's a very common misconception: privacy is not about criminals with things to hide.
It's about not giving some centralized entity an enormous power because they know everything about everyone. Such a huge power will be misused, sooner or later.
That's why you still need privacy and secrecy even (especially!) if you've nothing to hide. And, BTW, everyone has something to hide to at least someone else.
There's a hidden treasure in Python 3.x: __prepare__()