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Protests Mount In New Zealand Against New Surveillance Laws
An anonymous reader writes "New revelations about Ministerial orders requiring backdoors into online services in New Zealand are fueling nationwide protests against new surveillance powers to be granted to the Government Communications Services Bureau. Speaking at one large protest meeting, Kim Dotcom described the 'Five Eyes' X-Keyscore surveillance system as 'Google for spies'. He told protesters he first noticed he was being spied on when his internet speed slowed by '20 to 30 milliseconds'. 'As a gamer, I noticed,' he said."
And being a paranoid loon doesn't mean you're wrong either -- sadly, it's gotten to the point where you could assume if there's no bloody toilet paper it's due to a spy agency.
Because every single one of them is ramping up towards the full surveillance society with every step.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
As someone who knows top tier FPS players, 20-30 ms difference in ping is noticable. It was amusing to watch frag counts increase when one of them switched to a high grade 120hz panel from his much older lcd with a high response time. Do they assume someone is spying on them when they lag? No. Does it actually affect them when it happens. YES.
This was also in the news: Prime minister walks out after being questioned by reporters
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
20-30ms would only be noticeable if you already had either borderline-high or high latency in system already. 20-30ms is well below the average human's reaction time for by visual or auditory stimulus. Kim Lardass is full of shit.
Regardless of whether human response time is 10ms, 100ms or 1000ms, if you're able to respond to events on average 30ms faster than your competitor, you're going to beat them by an average of 30ms every time.
Just because you were right doesn't make you not a paranoid loon if that's the first assumption you came up with.
Funny, you must be reading a different summary; the one I see says nothing about it being "the first assumption [he] came up with," but rather that he noticed a slowdown. How do we know that he didn't subsequently verify his suspicion w/ a packet capture and trace? TFA doesn't bother to clarify the statement.
But hey, don't let that keep you from attacking a guy because of what you perceive he meant.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
But unless you vote for different people, and vote them out when they screw up, you will accomplish nothing. They won't be spoon fed to you by mass media. You have to seek them out, and vote them in. There is no other peaceful alternative. They will have you shooting at each other while they laugh all the way to the bank. That's your global, gangster run politics in a nutshell.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
are you perhaps retarded?
not only is that kind of delay noticeable by anyone with a bit of experience with networks, Kim Dotcom had FIBER OPTIC CABLE INSTALLED WITH 1-HOP ACCESS TO SUBSEA CABLES.
A 20ms increase in latency would be a WTF is wrong with our hundred-million dollar infrastructure, not just a gamer who felt he had too high latency as an excuse for bad KDR.
Bollocks... If there is no toilet paper you can just assume that the toilet cam is not being monitored.....
It's almost as if this new level of citizen surveillance has been coordinated globally. But, how could this be? What international organization would want to do such a thing? #thingsthatmakeyougohmmmmmm
I understand the point you are making, but it's not just one instant that is 20-30ms off, it's everything. You get used to the latency in gaming, and a change is enough to be noticed. Also, if you had a 50ms ping to something, that might be considered OK, where as 80ms might be considered slow. It's enough be a threshold.
Dotcom's claims of noticing an extra 20ms 'as a gamer' rather than 'as somebody looking at the ping displayed next to various multiplayer serves' are somewhat dubious; but there are a few additional details to his story.
Apparently, as a major Modern Warfare 3 enthusiast, and living at more or less the far end of the earth, Dotcom took his ping pretty seriously and had a dedicated line installed from his house to the peering exchange in Auckland's Sky Tower. When his ping increased, he pulled customer support in to sort it out and they determined that his connection had picked up a few extra hops within NZ.
If you're a 9-5er, your phone records, internet metadata, and search records are in a database, waiting for the day you become "elevated."
I don't know if he noticed it, or the system measured and displayed it(which is common enough for multiplayer matchmaking software to do, and requires no special skills); but if you live in New Zealand your ping to just about anything other than Middle Earth is going to suck.
Eighty Nine Percent of New Zealanders oppose new legislation to broaden the powers of the GCSB, the New Zealand Signals Intelligence agency that has tradisionally been used to spy on other countries. It is now being turned on those who fund it. However, it must be understood in the context of the countries which are working together. New Zealand is probably spying on citizens of the United States - and that information is being passed back. In fact there are no New Zealanders in the loop - the US gets direct feeds from its spy base here.
It is clear from how Assange, Snowden, KimDotcom, Swartz, Manning, David Miranda and many others have been treated that current administrations are the enemies of freedom. They are supporting a state of affairs more rrepressive and functionally more effective than George Orwells 1984. That a New Zealand Government has been complicit with this pains me.
Let us not forget that the instant that Islamic fundamentalist 'terrorists' once more become useful the US has been willing to arm them. The Syrian rebels are fundamentalists that will no doubt implement strict religious law like the Taliban should the be victorious in Syria. Is this the kind of "Freedom" the US want? The US at one point at least made a good showing of standing for something. It now makes no effort to even disguise its true position, with its clients such as the UK doing its bidding by harassing people like David Miranda in relation to the Snowden leaks. Far from protecting us from terrorists they are once more funding them.
Who will stand for freedom?
What I suspect actually occurred was this: Almost all games report latency as an averaged value over n period of time. It's entirely possible that Dotcom's *average* latency went up 20-30ms because the network grabbing introduced substantially higher spikes. If a game takes one measure a second and reports the averaged value over 10 seconds, you can end up with a series like this:
100
100
180
100
150
100
100
180
100
100
Average Latency = 121ms.
So if his old latency was "100ms" and now it's "121ms" then Dotcom says "I immediately noticed a 20ms difference. But he didn't. What he actually noticed were the spikes up to 150 - 180ms that were then averaged out to produce a 20ms reported difference.
You are right. He would really need to use some sort of computer to be able to measure whether his Internet speed had changed by that amount. How unlikely is that?
Seriously, we can't know what he meant by noticing the speed change. It may just be that as a gamer, he keeps an eye on his ping times regularly and noticed the numbers change. Frankly, that is not the important part of the article so it isn't worth worrying about that quote.
We aren't all equally likely to be surveilled. I guess if you're a 9-5er who only goes to work and the grocery store, has a wife and kids, and watches the game on sunday, you don't have much to worry about. I'll bet 15% of the people who post here are or were on some kind of elevated watchlist at some point. A little paranoia is justified. Now someone like kim dotcom is definitely justified.
I take it you've been living in a cave for the last 6 months.
If you live in or have any contact with the USA, you're 100% likely to be surveilled. They've admitted as much thanks to Snowden.
The only question is what depth the surveillance goes to. Whether it's just basic Metadata collection ("just in case") or being fed to the intelligence woodchipper. And, since so much of the mechanisms are statistically-driven, it has less to do with your innocence as it does with how well you shake out from the statistical analysis. For all you know, you're dropping off your laundry next door to an Arab charity and your GPS data triggers a flag.
He runs servers. People who run servers often have some idea of the ping time to them. I know the ping time to my servers from home even though I can't react at super-human speeds, catch bullets in my teeth, fire lasers from my eyes, or anything of that nature.
sadly, it's gotten to the point where you could assume if there's no bloody toilet paper it's due to a spy agency.
I can't tell if you are trying to reference when this actually happened in the Cold War or not, but figured either way I should include a link for people who didn't know that toilet paper theft was really a thing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Tamarisk.
Just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get me.
The NSA screwed it up for everyone. Now no countries will be able to illegally spy on their citizens..
or it is, and it's someones having fun at your expense
Or you have a friend who is googling pressure cookers. Or a friend of a friend, because they go "3 deep". Besides, the claim is that they are collecting and storing the information on absolutely everybody. But they don't actually "look" at it unless they "suspect" something.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Yes, and the idea that they "don't look at it" is not really true either. Every piece of collected data is sifted by computer algorithms that look for key words, etc. If any are found, a flag is set. That qualifies as "looking at it" IMO. Now, the system probably produces so many flags that they still can't actually read all of them. If I had that problem, I would sort the flagged data into arrays so I could look for patterns. If the same person gets flagged a set number of times, or the flags show something like keyword X and keyword Y, then his stuff gets read by a real person. The problem with that is that the message content would have to be kept so it could be examined if needed. Simply stated, I do not believe only metadata is kept. It would be useless if it couldn't be put into context when something odd is detected.
The world is my oyster. That's why it's always in a stew.
"If everyone united and attached bogus terroristic jargon to all their emails...."
You first.
Yeah, I know, I know. It's Monday, close of biz, and I'm retired anyway. I couldn't resist.
In the U.S. marching around and yelling with signs (is that large print? [ducks]) is not allowed; we're now constrained to pre-approved and designated free-speech zones. Any yelling or marching within the zone is classified as a riot and subject to violent dismissal. Oh, and three or more people gathered can be labeled a mob, thus riot. Be seeing you.
Average ping to the US would be about 150ms-200ms.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
sorry Izal the medicated toilet paper that given the choice of using it or a bit of newspaper the newspaper is preferable. Usually only ever found (and not in recent years) in public toilet facilities maintained by the local council. practically guaranteed not to be swiped from the facilities, it was that bad. If you took a sheet of grease proof paper and sprinkled detol or jeyes fluid on it, that would be close to Izal
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
Of course they are keeping content as well as metadata. Several documents leaked by Snowden are quite specific about it. As is the empirical evidence - man tweets a joke about having a blast in LA, is stopped at the border the next day and sent back home because of it. Within 24 hours they had identified him, tracked him down to a certain flight schedule and flagged him. Or the pressure cooker/backpack incident, which I think the story about his work "reporting him" being some BS damage control. Hey when you can murder people around the world with drones with impunity, who's going to stop you snooping around in their IP packets?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
So, basically you're saying "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear". If so, you're an idiot.
I'd like to tell you that you deserve to live in that world. But that means the rest of us would have to as well.
Think of the McCarthy Era, or the worst stories about the Soviets -- and that's the kind of world you live in if you accede to constant state surveillance.
Because, if you ever decide to have an affair, or run against an incumbent, or try to prove government wrong-doing, or follow a religion the state disapproves of, or organize a gathering of an unpopular political party, discuss something controversial, or seriously ponder taking action against an unjust government ... you're totally screwed.
Think China and trying to talk about Tiananmen Square. Think the Soviet Gulags. Think of some of the nastier dictators who just drag people off in the night and shoot them.
If someone can dredge through your entire private life and discredit, inconvenience, arrest, or otherwise intimidate you or fuck with your life -- you cease to live in a free society. Because they will either police the crap out of everyone, and make it into a really nasty place to live -- or they will selectively police the crap out of everyone, and make it into a really nasty place to live.
So, you're saying that if you're generic enough looking, smart enough to outsmart the security people, you deserve privacy, but everyone else should do without?
I'm sorry, but you sound like you haven't got the barest clue about why people object to the spying in the first place, let alone the problems that come along with the widespread surveillance of a society. When your government knows everything you do, your options are far more circumscribed.
If you think people should be giving up rights so that governments can prop up the illusion of security -- well, you deserve neither, to paraphrase.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.