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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.
Obama. Obama says we should not be concerned that the NSA is collecting all our metadata.
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.
They also tracked people by smell: http://boingboing.net/2007/07/...
Current German government is doing the same thing: http://www.theguardian.com/bus...
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.
Airborne and hilltop listening was fun in the late 1940's-60's - after that both sides knew to be more careful or just understood what the other side could collect. ;)
"Computers, receivers, spectrum analysers" where bought in for unique operations but the ongoing hard currency would never cover massive US/UK style computer use or even a fraction of it - i.e. cheap domestic grade 1980's 'home' computers where found for domestic sorting experiments.
"extremely advanced" SIGINT/COMINT capabilities where static and well understood by NATO for looking in to the West - every skilled nation around that time in the region could do that via the tech help of Russia or the USA - shared facilities - with less of the shared part in many cases.. The spying on a total population was the interesting part.
East Germany had to ready computer files for Moscow on every new and ongoing case. The East German daily spy work was mostly paper with the exception of some 'home' computer databases efforts.
Why no no large scale computer use? They had an epic walk out of all their full West spy lists early on and decided never to place all the material in one paper/digital database for a long time.
So the factual information about their agents in the West was kept in a few different paper files in different locations - no one person could ever walk out again with anything connecting 'everything'. No options to try to connect name, address, ongoing details without top officials knowing in person.
Slow but it kept staff working on their projects with less insight into details they did not need to know per agent in the West.
This effort did fail at one time near the fall of East Germany. A computer database was constructed and stored in a bunker so in case of war the correct codes could be sent to all agents - fast and with new, updated war instructions. The CIA got the list and turned the East German agents as expected.
The rest was vast amounts paper files, audio tape and other physical material on its own population.
So 'acquire whatever they needed from the west" was also never a long term option for new hardware and ongoing spare parts - it exposed spies and cost too much. East Germany did not have endless amounts of cash to spend in the West or helpers to just go big iron "shopping". West Germany/CIA was always waiting for that attempted buy too
Also recall usefull computing power was not cheap in the 1970-80's and needed ongoing support over time.
Even Russian computer exports where expensive, limited, underpowered and hard to get.
The other option was a rapid industrial option to build electronics in East Germay - like Russia, East German found building their own useful computers expensive, limited, underpowered and hard scale into the 1980's.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
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.
"They made manufactured both VAX and S/360 copies" near the end and at great cost i.e. it was never enough for the needs of East German intelligence use, science and government. ... no East German cash to act or the ok from Moscow..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K... production in 1988 with work starting in 1985 - 4 years to ramp up for a VAX-11/780 clone.....
Others where prototype runs - huge costs, limited numbers of units after rushed efforts from the early/mid 1980's
As for tapping optical lines and other methods - they could get optical calls into Berlin and sort them... and then act on that flood of data how.....in time?
The tech to tap optical and not get caught was simple - how to act on the information and not get caught was complex and costly.
East Germany lived on Soviet cash flows i.e. it was always a question of funding and constant new tech needs...
East Germany could sort calls, watch the West but it was stuck as to getting spies into the West or shaping the West beyond useful people feeding information back.
The ability to act long term in the West on insider chatter via teleco taps was always just too risky.
East Germany had 2 main goals - get more spies into long term top/mid ranking West German positions over decades (20 something staff entering private sector) and spread revolution via expensive aid and support for various groups and methods.
Another option was to find well positioned West Germans with a ww2 past they had managed to hide and ask them to work for East Germany.
The rest was to watch for internal issues.
Your view of 'advanced' is given Soviet tech at the time and then missed the next step
i.e. East German could listen but not risk their own or endanger KGB/GRU efforts...
If East Germany had more cash they could have swayed West German politics more but everything was too late or could not be worked on.
The big iron computers, more computers for science, a new hi tech killer Berlin wall, waiting for their young staff to move up in West German firms, the nuclear power options, space, export deals to the West for hard currency.. - East Germany had big dreams but could not work well with what it could gather.
Think of East Germany as a Canada or New Zealand to the NSA now. Lots of amazing tech, loads of data sorting, great taps into many data steams but few options in the real world without the OK of the USA.
West Germany kew what they faced, the GCHQ and NSA understood all that Russia could do in East Germany... great tech up front but so much paperwork and audio tape at the backend.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
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".