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How Tech Vendors Help Governments Spy On Their Citizens
jfruhlinger writes "Most Slashdotters — even those living in democratic countries — would probably be unsurprised to know that their governments are spying on them. But most people are not aware of how complicit security vendors, who publicly work to protect the public from such electronic eavesdropping, are complicit in such monitoring. All this and more is revealed in the latest Wikieaks document dump, the Spy Files."
Can you come up and say that wikileaks hasnt done anything useful now ?
Read radical news here
Initiate several processes on your desktop to just go about the web looking at random sites, following links, etc. You don't even need to load all content from pages, just do it like Lynx would and scan for HREF tags. Enough people do this and the government's storage will become overbudened. Probably could do this with a minimal effort to code.
Now, doesn't that just sound like all kinds of fun?!?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Most people are not aware of how complicit security vendors, who publicly work to protect the public from such electronic eavesdropping, are complicit in such monitoring.
Really? I'd be more surprised to learn that complicit security vendors were not, in fact, complicit in this or similar activities.
The president of the tautology club is not the president of the tautology club.
Is it too much to ask to present the information within one neatly compressed archive? Or do they crave the hits from clicking all over the page while you scroll up and down through the links?
Every government, including the American one, has limited resources. Every government, especially the American one, has bureaucratic constraints. Think of the slowest, dumbest Fortune 500 company you can, and then think of the slowest, dumbest PHB within that corporation, and then multiply that by 1000. That's the caliber of people who work for governments. It's the nature of the beast: create a system where ass-kissing, not merit, determine career progress, and then divorce that entirely from a mitigating profit motive, and you have government.
These are the people who are buying the services/products of these surveillance companies. These are the people who don't read the user manuals of the products/services that these companies sell. These are the people who boss around the "technical" staff who are tasked with reading the user manuals but who frankly don't get paid enough to put up with this shit.
That is the reality of the surveillance net.
Now, consider that these days you, me, and every Tom, Dick, and Harry out there has access to virtually the same tech the governments and their corporate enablers do. Consider that even the cost factor for said tech is racing to zero. That is, the governments and companies are not using some secretly acquired alien technology that uses physics that the rest of the world doesn't grasp yet. You and I can understand the same physical laws and technology that the governments and the corporations in their employ do. And we do.
So why don't we turn it all around and crowd-source surveillance of them? Why not minutely track the exact location of every Congressman sneaking off to boink a 20 year old intern? Why not put Jamie Dimon's cell phone conversations on a streaming service, available to anyone in the world to listen to? Why not put them under the same microscope that they want to put us under?
After all, if the technological balance of power is at or near parity, then the deciding factor becomes how many people can you get to make sense of the data; and there are vastly more of us than there are of them to do that.
Let's once and for all shatter this venomous illusion of authority and competence that governments and corporations have cultivated and exploited for millenia. Let's excise the incalculable damage they have done to human advancement and win a better world for ourselves.
I for one am so very tired of the stunted one they have forced on us.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
Why does every release decline inside Whores?
...and in other news the earth is not flat.
Assume everything you do is tracked/available, because it is. Someone once told me "If they want to fire you, they can always find something" and i've seen it happen to people. Just dont do anything to make them wanna fire/investigate you and you will be fine. Lets just review one case in the news currently. PSU. If the feds didnt catch Sandusky (cause you know there had to be phone calls with the boys, emails, and im sure his "history" trail on his computer wasnt just "boys life" magazine) then u know they dont actually pay attention to 99% of the stuff being watched, unless u stick your head to high and get them to look. OTOH, if you want to be completely safe then move to a cave, dont use fire (smoke will give you away) and for chris sake dont ever go outside.
-KI
#include bier;
dont you find it weird that governments are spying on their own citizens MORE than they spy on the enemy ? and even do it more effectively ?
Read radical news here
Oh! Oh! People doing things without permission!
What the hell do you think that "regulation" of the security industry is going to do except guarantee that the only companies allowed into it are ones that are willing to cooperate with the intelligence agencies of the goverments doing the regulating?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I think it takes a certain amount of confidence in one's own point of view to go blowing whistles.
To do what Assange has done takes quite a bit more of it.
Ego is not the primary problem, even if the people who think they have something to hide want to distract us by pointing at the ego.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Initiate several processes on your desktop to just go about the web looking at random sites, following links, etc.
I have thought for some time that polluting surveillance data to the point of it being pure noise was the best solution (granted, until today I was mostly thinking about cookies/web bugs and ISP surveillance). However, a technique that just randomly generated ip's, for example, could stumble across some very bad places/things and invite unwanted attention, rather than thwart profiling.
Bear in mind also that Internet surveillance is only a small subset of what TFA is talking about.
Why is parent modded funny?
I don't get the joke.
At least, I don't want to get the joke.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Or, are those bots with really stupid sounding names leaving their calling cards on my personal web server logs and accessing stuff in contradiction to my bots tags the work of these "spy" companies?
Incompetence all around.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
At least one company that was many times told that they were leaving back door vulnerabilities through buffer overflows open still did nothing to stop them years after they were known back in the mid to late 1990s [Macromedia] But can't link for sure that they were openly acting for any government.
This is why it keeps getting worse.
None of want to get our own hands dirty trying to fix it.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Have gnu, will travel.
those living in the so called democratic countries will be surprised but none else.
I think that one day a year we should all append 'alarming' text to our emails and see if smoke comes out of the overlord's monitoring network.
I've been called a "tinfoil hatter" for describing government snooping setups I've seen with my own eyes I've even been called crazy for claiming that the US government is spying even though it's been covered extensively in the New York Times.
Seriously, did anyone read the effin' "files"?
Wikileaks has released 287 "files" so far. Of those, 286 are marketing material. They call the other one a "contract", but it looks like marketing material as well (marketing material specially targeted to Libya, which is maybe not so awesome, so score 1 point to wikileaks there). The wikileaks description of the documents contains a lot of sensationalist comments, as does the itworld article, but for some reason they don't actually link to any of the documents in their commentary. (The itworld article _looks_ like it has a lot of links, but they all go to the same wikileaks overview.)
We can try to look at a few of the claims the the wikileaks commentary makes, and see if there is something there. Examples:
- "companies such as VASTech secretly sell equipment to permanently record the phone calls of entire nations." --- (Hey guys, we found this brochure that says some company wants to sell us a tape recorder!)
- "Trovicor, previously a subsidiary of Nokia Siemens Networks, supplied the Bahraini government with interception technologies that tracked human rights activist Abdul Ghani Al Khanjar." --- Maybe that is true, but, oh wait, there are no documents related to Trovicor. (There is one pdf of a powerpoint presentation which looks like it describes Nokia Siemens Networks' strategy for handling legal wiretaps.)
From the itworld article: "Cisco Systems, for example, is listed as helping with both computer and cell-phone monitoring. Nuance Technology – maker of Dragon Naturally Speaking speech recognition software – is listed as helping with cell-phone and speech analysis." Evidence? wikileaks put their name on a map. (Nope, no files for either one. But really, I wouldn't be very surprised to learn that a company which makes voice recognition software is selling, well, voice recognition software, or that a company which makes networking equipment is selling ... wait for it ... networking equipment.)
Back to wikileaks: "In January 2011, the National Security Agency broke ground on a $1.5 billion facility in the Utah desert that is designed to store terabytes of domestic and foreign intelligence data forever and process it for years to come." --- OMG, they are going to buy, like, 2 disk drives! (Those must be expensive disks.)
Ok, I'm just having a little fun with that last one. But seriously, I'm pretty sure that there isn't much more than a bunch of FUD here, and Wikileaks is upset that everyone has forgotten about them. I suppose that if there is a real story there, we'll see more from the Washington Post, a supposed partner in this.
...you have just described what Wikileaks is trying to do. Yes, it'd be cool if it were a crowd effort.
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