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Metadata and the Intrusive State
An anonymous reader writes with an excerpt from an intriguing article at TechDirt about the sometimes very low-tech methods of the East German Stasi. They may have been using more pencils than computers, but they were gathering information on their targets using the same kind of metadata whose significance the U.S. government has lately been downplaying: "They amassed dossiers on about one quarter of the population of the country during the Communist regime. But their spycraft — while incredibly invasive — was also technologically primitive by today's standards. While researching my book Dragnet Nation, I obtained the above hand drawn social network graph and other files from the Stasi Archive in Berlin, where German citizens can see files kept about them and media can access some files, with the names of the people who were monitored removed. The graphic shows forty-six connections, linking a target to various people (an 'aunt,' 'Operational Case Jentzsch,' presumably Bernd Jentzsch, an East German poet who defected to the West in 1976), places ('church'), and meetings ('by post, by phone, meeting in Hungary')."
Guilt by association was one of their primary tools.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
At least it's not another slashvertisement, then.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
There is a great movie that came out in 2006 called "The Lives of Others" that provides an account of the practices of the Stasi. It may not have been completely accurate, but its nevertheless a good insight into what it was like and a great movie overall.
Assuming we even believe it's just metadata being gathered - what informed citizen actually believes it's a non-concern?
They had directed all that human effort towards making a better country for their citizens .. and making better cars ..
They had directed all that human effort towards making a better country for their citizens .. and making better cars ..
They had not much of a choice. Remember, this was a puppet regime, closely controlled and directed by their Soviet Russian masters. In 1953, the GDR was the first of several Soviet-bloc countries to rebel (after that, in 1956 Hungary and in 1968 the Czech Republic went similarly "astray"), so control and supervision was doubled for the next decades. Only under Gorbatchev things lightened up, but by then the (by then really old) old guard was too much set in their ways to relax or reform anything.
You know it's time for the next revolution when your rulers' names end with roman numerals.
http://www.google.com/dashboar... draws a much more accurate depiction of every espect of my life, and it's just one piece of paper away from the government. Today the stasi espions would be unemployed.
No more words could describe the utter nonsense of it all. And not just Google, but it's the one in the poster.
Obama. Obama says we should not be concerned that the NSA is collecting all our metadata.
With the loss of the Malaysian airliner DHS has given authorization for TSA to ramp up terrorism against their old hated enemy, the USA citizen, at airport across the USA in the coming hours.
TSA will demand eight pieces of "evidence" before a USA citizen is allowed to board an aircraft. The "evidence" will include bank records, court records, credit card records, dental records, divorce/marriage records, education records, employment records, hospital records, membership to club records, subscriptions to magazines records, social security records and voting records. Failure to provide any one will result in termination of the boarding pass and initiate deportation actions with Immigration and Naturalization.
Isn't the USA wonderful ! We get attacked by homeless Egyptian and Saudi men then the US Congress invents the TSA to blame and terrorize us.
Brazil
Merry Old England would have rounded up the Founding Fathers using "just metadata" (who called whom, and when) and therefore they would have forbidden its collection to government without a proper warrant.
The US concept of The People forming a government inherently distrusts those in power, so specifically grants limited powers. It's not a case of "well, WE will use it right!". The power itself is what's wrong.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Posting this from an Android device, so have to abuse the above comment for my posting. The MfS actually had (for that time) extremely advanced SIGINT/COMINT capabilities. They did use airborne and hilltop listening posts very much like NSA-GCHQ, the French and the west Germans did.
MfS had all the stuff they needed to perform this and if east block equipment did not fit the bill, they were able to acquire whatever they needed from the west: computers, receivers, spectrum analyzers, you name it.
From a military and intelligence POV, east Germany was a top-notch power and what did them and the general eastern bloc was the inefficiency of their economy; certainly not the inefficiency of their intelligence and military apparatus.
Sources: Manfred Bischoff's SIGINT website; various public CIA and NSA reports; NSA history of Vietnam SIGINT.
They also tracked people by smell: http://boingboing.net/2007/07/...
Current German government is doing the same thing: http://www.theguardian.com/bus...
METADATA has a meaning. It defines the column characteristics and use help text associated. Think as "standing" on a row, in a column, what is the definition of that spot.
DATA defines the other items on that same "row".
Someone started to talk about a picture, that date, time and location of that picture is the METADATA. It is not, is the DATA on the same row storing the blob called picture. NSA is using this same misinformation to minimize the from number, to number, start time and duration of the call.
invoke Godwin's Law, right on the TFS.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
While I don't align with the politics, I occasionally dip into Charles Johnson's blog Little Green Footballs because in its 12-year history it has had an interesting dramatic arc (highly influential right-wing site in the wake of 9/11, then massively dropping in importance after Johnson turned his back on the right and presumably most of his readers as well). One thing that surprised me is how quick Johnson has been to excuse the NSA's activity, saying it is just "metadata", and collecting just "metadata" harms no one; in fact, revealing the collection of "metadata" has harmed our national security. Johnson processes news all day long and posts his own thoughts on the issues of the day as a profession, and here he is being adamant that it is a non-issue. There must be more news junkies out there who don't feel it's something to protest.
http://kieranhealy.org/blog/ar...
That analogy might have swayed people decades ago when Americans all had rosy views of the benevolence of the Founding Fathers, but from the better informed perspective of Americans today, maybe it would have been better had the British authorities been able to nip the Revolution in the bud. The Commonwealth countries show that staying a colony for another century would not have been a bad thing at all, and stopping the Revolutionaries would have saved America's Tories from having their houses burned down by self-appointed "guardians of liberty", being looted of their possessions and driven off to Canada just for wanting to stay with the mother country.
"That analogy might have swayed people decades ago when Americans all had rosy views of the benevolence of the Founding Fathers, but from the better informed perspective of Americans today, maybe it would have been better had the British authorities been able to nip the Revolution in the bud. The Commonwealth countries show that staying a colony for another century would not have been a bad thing at all, and stopping the Revolutionaries would have saved America's Tories from having their houses burned down by self-appointed "guardians of liberty", being looted of their possessions and driven off to Canada just for wanting to stay with the mother country."
Right on, Piers Morgan!
Its power without accountability is wrong. The NSA wasn't reporting to anyone or getting court orders to obtain this info.
Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely!
Clearly fingerprints shall forevermore be banned as evidence in Court trials. We have a moral duty to free all prisoners convicted by fingerprint evidence. There is clearly no difference between gathering fingerprints to having 3% of the population employed as informers, and sending anyone who questions the great leader to a re-education camp.
I'm not saying what the NSA does is acceptable, or that it shouldn't be stopped. I am saying that if you seriously think this post will convince anybody to stop the damn NSA snooping you are a fucking moron. The logic simply doesn't follow. An Agency that employs a guy like Snowden isn't a very good tool of mass repression, so implying it is only makes you look crazy.
This appeals to the miniscule minority that honestly thinks government databases are evil. And it's clearly a tiny minority because I can name three Federal agencies that know more about me then the NSA, and quite a few state and local agencies are even worse.
I took a class on the Soviets once, and a little anecdote about the Eastern Bloc was quite illuminating.
The Soviet Union actually had three votes in the UN. Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus all had seats, and all were constituent Soviet Republics. Sometimes the Russians would change their vote at the last minute, and not everybody would get the memo in time. In the first few years of the UN the Bulgarians voted against Russia less often then Ukraine. Kruschev loosened things up a bit, which was one reason the Communist Party fired him.
The Russians wanted obedient little puppets, which meant they wanted no street demonstrations, which in turn meant that all Eastern Bloc leaders needed something very much like the Stasi or they'd be replaced.
Here's a simple walkthrough of how easy social graph analysis is which demonstrates how invasive metadata is.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
www.manfred-bischoff.de/DISKANT.htm#01
http://www.manfred-bischoff.de/ha_iii.htm#HA%20III
Yawn, next shill please. That one was maybe a 2 out of 10 troll.
captcha: rancid
I think this completely nails the real agenda with the NSA.
The status quo abuse by Multinationals to reduce labor costs and resource expenditures requires a guarantee that "we the people" don't get in the way of their agenda.
The NSA is designed so that "no Founding Fathers" can ever spring up again in the USA.
I'm waiting for some genetic engineering to make a more complacent America. Likely it won't be all bad -- your "calm genes" will also help you be "Roundup Ready". The poisons that take out trouble-making Americans and weeds won't be hurting you as much.
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
America did two great things; Drove out the royals and wrote the Constitution -- a model for real liberty the world over that was adopted and expanded by many other nations. And the other would be; the New Deal where Socialism made America the "Capitalist haven" from 1940 - 1980 that idiots say was entirely the result of the "free market."
So now you want to bring back the Tories who promoted class privilege? .. well I suppose it was only a matter of time. Can I hear a "whoop whoop" for Toxic waste? Someone around here has to be a fan of that.
"from the better informed perspective of Americans today"
Better informed has to be another word for "reads propaganda from Think Tanks." And Slashdot needs a "Scary comment we all hope is parody" tag.
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
I think by that logic, you could also argue that the Magna Carta was bad.
It's quite possible that the more enlightened practices employed on the later colonial separations were influenced by both the example of what could happen when their separation was forbidden and by the model documents that the American revolution brought into being.
If metadata is so unimportant, why have I been seeing ads for metadata specialists on the job boards lately?
I took a class on the Soviets once, and a little anecdote about the Eastern Bloc was quite illuminating.
The Soviet Union actually had three votes in the UN. Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus all had seats, and all were constituent Soviet Republics. Sometimes the Russians would change their vote at the last minute, and not everybody would get the memo in time. In the first few years of the UN the Bulgarians voted against Russia less often then Ukraine. Kruschev loosened things up a bit, which was one reason the Communist Party fired him.
The Russians wanted obedient little puppets, which meant they wanted no street demonstrations, which in turn meant that all Eastern Bloc leaders needed something very much like the Stasi or they'd be replaced.
Street demonstrations were just fine as long as they were approved demonstrations - for example, anti-US rallies. It's where the term "rent-a-crowd" gained parlance.
The flip side of that will be . . . Reavers.
Merry Contemporary England still has a system in which the power of the government is theoretically delegated from the Sovereign whose authority is established by divine right.
The Founding Fathers' descendants still have a system based on the quasi-divine right of the constitution.
One has GCHQ, the other has the NSA.
Using only one side of the paper, explain how the "US Concept" to which you refer makes a material difference to "The People".