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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.
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
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.....
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?
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.
How did that 'voting for different people' work out for you guys in the US? There was Obama saying that he wouldn't allow illegal spying, and now where are you?
Last night we had politicians talking about what they would do, but what you didn't hear was rousing speeches from them (or at least not from David Shearer) defending the principles of freedom. There was a narrow focus on the one piece of legislation while at the same time other legislation threatens to allow the Government to install spying equipment directly into ISPs so they don't have to ask these ISPs for cooperation. Yeah - direct feeds that they can examine without restriction.
Voting is a blunt instrument that is virtually no use at all. In a single party system like you have in New Zealand and the US, where the same party has two faces and simply takes turns while maintaining overall control, there is no functional way for people to make a change unless we vote for REALLY different people.