Slashdot Mirror
Mass Surveillance: Can We Blame It All On the Government?
Nicola Hahn writes Yet another news report has emerged detailing how the CIA is actively subverting low-level encryption features in mainstream hi-tech products. Responding to the story, an unnamed intelligence official essentially shrugged his shoulders and commented that "there's a whole world of devices out there, and that's what we're going to do." Perhaps this sort of cavalier dismissal isn't surprising given that leaked classified documents indicate that government intelligence officers view iPhone users as 'Zombies' who pay for their own surveillance.
The past year or so of revelations paints a pretty damning portrait of the NSA and CIA. But if you read the Intercept's coverage of the CIA's subversion projects carefully you'll notice mention of Lockheed Martin. And this raises a question that hasn't received much attention: what role does corporate America play in all of this? Are American companies simply hapless pawns of a runaway national security state? Ed Snowden has stated that mass surveillance is "about economic spying, social control, and diplomatic manipulation. They're about power." A sentiment which has been echoed by others. Who, then, stands to gain from mass surveillance?
The past year or so of revelations paints a pretty damning portrait of the NSA and CIA. But if you read the Intercept's coverage of the CIA's subversion projects carefully you'll notice mention of Lockheed Martin. And this raises a question that hasn't received much attention: what role does corporate America play in all of this? Are American companies simply hapless pawns of a runaway national security state? Ed Snowden has stated that mass surveillance is "about economic spying, social control, and diplomatic manipulation. They're about power." A sentiment which has been echoed by others. Who, then, stands to gain from mass surveillance?
It's depressing. As a privacy-aware and generally technologically literate but not super savvy about encryption protocols, etc, I don't know what to do. I want to have some measure of privacy, but I don't want to step out of the mainstream phone ecosystem. These days is it mandatory for me to put my tinfoil hat on to get a bit of space to myself?
Since we live in a paradise and don't want anything to change ever, universal surveillance is a great way to make sure that no bad actors mess things up. Duh. What's wrong with you? What are you, POOR?
Cloudiot: A person who does not see offsite storage as a way to lose control over access to his or her own data.
You want to give a government the resources and the power to "solve problems" and this is what you get.
Gee, power corrupts.
Imagine that.
In this oligarchy where does the corporation end and government begin anyway
Those with the money decide who we get to vote for, and what they do once they get into office.
Democrat or Republican, both wings of a single party: the corporate party.
Yes, we can blame it all on the government.
Process massive amounts of information to control dialogue.
you guys still don't get it. the point is the government is a place of power over the entire population. they control everything, each citizen and every business. the ones who control the government as the super rich and wealthy. so if you aren't one of those super rich and wealthy you are fucked, getting spied on.
and the spying is everywhere. locally, NSA gives access to local officials, and police officers to the system, where they go around committing local acts of crime and spying, they control citizens. they hide and cover up government crime. the system gives them the 'powers of god' so to say.
they have access because like in prisons and jails, all calls, and internet, and telecommunications are being saved at the upstream level through fiber splits and all that fun. then there's satellites with building penetrating body imaging technologies in use. the officials and police have access to that, and can use it to steal any information, spy on anybody, and even sabotage and target them.
there's surveillance crime going on. unfortunately the mass media is hiding that and the stories. you cannot get your story ran, then the public never hears about it.
This is confirmed by William Binney, and other whistleblowers. They also secretly have weapons systems to attack certain individuals, using directed energy from satellites and military radar. Fully patented and whistleblower backed stuff.
More info on my personal story of targeting, William Binney's video from Covert Harassment Conference is worth a view just a few scrolls down.. obamasweapon.com drrobertduncan.com myronmaysflashdrive.com
This piece of shit is the cover up, murder, rape, torture machine my friends.
While corporations will happily sell the government anything and everything, they usually do not care very much about whether it actually works. See, e.g., the "wonder scanners" for airports, multiple defense projects, and multiple public IT projects. My guess would be that unless doing surveillance (not selling tools for it) is your core business, like with Google, Facebook, etc., corporations care very little about establishing effective and efficient surveillance.
That said, of course come corporations are so deep in the governments backside that they effectively become an extension of it. Those may be different.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Well since I need to type here too maybe we can blame the people who think they have nothing to worry about; the very same people who didn't think through government blackmail of every single politician, CEO, and political activist by using said system.
What if this is as good as its gets?
you guys still don't get it. the point is the government is a place of power over the entire population. they control everything, each citizen and every business. the ones who control the government are the super rich and wealthy who install themselves into power. so if you aren't one of those super rich and wealthy you are fucked, getting spied on, and you are abuseable.
and the spying is everywhere. locally, NSA gives access to local officials, and police officers to the system, where they go around committing local acts of crime and spying, they control citizens. they hide and cover up government crime. the system gives them the 'powers of god' so to say.
they have access because like in prisons and jails, all calls, and internet, and telecommunications are being saved at the upstream level through fiber splits and all that fun. then there's satellites with building penetrating body imaging technologies in use. the officials and police have access to that, and can use it to steal any information, spy on anybody, and even sabotage and target them.
there's surveillance crime going on. unfortunately the mass media is hiding that and the stories. you cannot get your story ran, then the public never hears about it.
This is confirmed by William Binney, and other whistleblowers. They also secretly have weapons systems to attack certain individuals, using directed energy from satellites and military radar. Fully patented and whistleblower backed stuff.
More info on my personal story of targeting, William Binney's video from Covert Harassment Conference is worth a view just a few scrolls down.. obamasweapon.com drrobertduncan.com myronmaysflashdrive.com
actually here, direct link to info on how and why government is doing surveillance, to target people, abuse them: http://www.oregonstatehospital.net/video.php?id=XKjW2dUTMRI
This piece of shit is the death ray, cover up, murder, rape, torture machine my friends. There's hundreds of thousands of victims abused, dead, tortured, imprisoned, etc. 70+ years of shit.
it's not possible to put something out on a wire and expect it to be private
i don't walk down main street naked and expect privacy
same problem
passing some law insisting everyone look away is going to be effective you think? that's your protection?
if you want privacy, go walk with someone on the beach next to the crashing surf (to drown out the telescopic mics)
otherwise, if you or what you are saying is interesting, someone can eavesdrop. that's not a new problem. it's always been that way
what is new is this bizarre psychological trick we play on ourselves that sitting in front of our computer connected to a network is magically somehow an intimate private experience. how? why does anyone expect that? it never was, and it never will be
never mind the government. you have snooping family members or friends who swipe your credentials. you have your internet provider, and every company who owns every node from here to your destination: they all can snoop. if the info you share is innocuous, who cares. that's the extent of my realistic expectations. if the info is important to you: why are you amazed and aggrieved that nodes on a public network is not magically private? the only problem is people's inability to look at the reality of the communication conduit and make peace with it's unavoidably public nature
why did we ever expect privacy on the internet? how did that trick of the mind ever come to be?
if you want privacy:
1. get off the Internet, or
2. invest in serious encryption. oh, it's a hassle? you want privacy on a public network and you expect it to be hassle free? what is wrong with you?
those are your only two choices
because just expecting government, corporations, or interested people not to snoop is just never going to happen, ever. disrespect is the norm. are you some sort of naive inexperienced fool to the pitfalls of basic human nature?
the problem is expecting no one to spy, or that you can enforce that, and expecting that something goes out on a public wire and is magically private. it's thinking about the nature of the problem all wrong. you think some law somewhere is going to give you protection?
now mod me a troll and continue the indignant outrage about a problem you can't solve and no one ever will
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
They are active participants, and are salivating at the chance for its expansion.
The simple heuristic is: unless they are explicitly against surveillance and government intrusion, they are for it.
It's a new, untapped growth industry. One in which the customer has literally infinitely deep pockets, and wields the power of the law.
Is this a real question? Seriously?
re: the corporate world is sucking us hard
it's true. they're all about the money. and money talks and on top is a big set of lips sucking away...
graphic? well so is IBM creating the worlds first human database system to catalog all of the Jews for propagation to concentration camps during WWII.
And guess what? Many Americans in the corporate world were invested then... Germany did not act alone; obviously...So, now we have mass surveillance of generally speaking the entire world... and of course greed is at the center. Gov is in cahoots with corp, and vice versa.
aka lobbyists... that's just scratching the surface.
now give me a moment to vomit. we all should vomit but we'll continue to receive the aforementioned service and turn the other cheek.
where i grok and empathize with all the complaints about government surveillance, i am just left wondering how if they can spy on us so easily, why can they not provide us with better regulations for life. i mean with all the data analytics and voice/video/txt information, you think they would at least provide us with better standardized living.
What a load of crap
Any oversight that exists in the government surveillance biz was enacted after Obama got into office.
If you want to bother looking into it, you will find that most of the gross misuses occurred during Bush's tenure
fwiw, conservapedia is about as reliable as a John Birch pamphlet back when they were trying to scare everybody that Carter was going to invite Russian tanks to attack America
If I could have the data of just the blood pressure and/or body temperature of all living things in an area, I could get a pretty good idea of who's scared, who's calm, real-time. The entirety of data Google owns is enough to replay a collective personality just by the relation of data structures. Training unique characteristics of images with associated words for example gives way to Google image recognition. What does it take to transcribe audio? We already have that in just about every car now. Information + Processing + Communication = Profit.
TL;DR Everyone who conducts mass surveillance, profits. It's Facebook when Zuckerberg does it, Google when Schmidt, I suppose mass surveillance when the goverment does it. Price ranges, required consent, justification and equipment vary.
Because it's factually incorrect, but extreme left/right groups cannot be bothered with facts. This surveillance state began years before Obama entered office. His fault lies in failing to curtail it.
Might add to that: anyone using Facebook either doesn't understand privacy/technology, or doesn't want privacy for that corner of their life.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Like the ones working on this site to better "target" the end user. Sadly, a good portion of developers are also to blame seeking the good graces of even small employers looking for that extra edge.
It sort of is a chicken and egg problem. On one hand the data is there to make the user experience "better" and easier, on the other it creates monsters like the NSA surveillance. The kicker is the REAL bad guys are going to be the good people in the health insurance industry and other services that would rather stay insure the people who they don't have to pay for. The people with the lowest probability of having an accident or health problem. ....get ready for your piss to be analyzed for any "irregularities" under the lie of "promoting better health awareness"....and no services rendered due to living high risk like a normal person living outside a bubble.
about economic spying, social control, and diplomatic manipulation. They're about power.
These sort of culture-attached power games lead to suboptimal solutions in a complex world. Social control in particularly, is best done with the full cooperation of the people unless the only goal is to gain a short term victory while marching towards a collapse. The same pattern has already emerged with the diplomatic manipulation. "People" should know better by now, but since everybody wants to live forever, the cycle continues.
"never mind the government".
What? I do mind the government. Right now it seems like it is my enemy. Are you arguing that is the case?
Just make sure to keep the dream alive and blame it on anything and everything but ourselves. No no no... We play no part. We are just helpless passengers.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
It's not our fault people have computers with webcams and microphones that we can easily hack into and install monitoring software to record everything they say and do, because we're involved with the encryption and security standards and can design-in backdoors that we can access easily.
That's not our fault at all. Stupid citizens.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
re wire: false.
Your first sentence contradicts your point 2.
also,
> i don't walk down main street naked and expect privacy
Correct, but if you walk down the street fully clothed, you dont expect people to be able to view your genitals.
The only way to avoid technical surveillance is to keep everything sensitive away from email or phone calls or instant messages. There is no way to avoid being the target of the NSA and CIA if they really want to get your data. None at all. The NSA and CIA are creating these techniques against countries such as Russia, China, and Iran with devastating success. (Look at the Iranian nuclear weapons program getting hacked by Stuxnet.) You have no way to avoid the hacking of your data if they are really set in doing it.
Pretty much this. Ergo, if you are intent on inviolable secrecy, you wouldn't be posting on ye olde green line site... nor any other. Who then, is willing to give up the internet and the freedom of speech to ensure no measure of antiestablishmentarianism viewpoint is uttered and recorded?
That I can still post my POV freely from the south side of somewhere without being erased by a midnight death squad is proof enough that the battle for your freedoms is not yet lost.
Vote for candidates, serve on juries, impress the importance of participation on your sports-distracted friends... do what can as one of the minority who can still afford to pay attention
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Those with the money decide who we get to vote for, and what they do once they get into office.
Democrat or Republican, both wings of a single party: the corporate party.
The entire reason anyone with any money tries to buy off politicians is because the government is powerful and that's the best way to invest money to get a good result.
If the government weren't powerful enough to bend entire markets and industries for the personal gains of individuals like Tom Steyer no one would bother to buy off politicians. (Like Tom Steyer - billionaire who made his fortune off coal and now owns a large stake in a pipeline that competes with the Keystone, and who suddenly had this strange "epiphany" about being an environmentalist who then spent millions of dollars buying politicians - mostly Democrats - in order to kill the Keystone and make his stake in the competing pipeline worth billions more. Helluva a good investment that - who can blame him?)
And with such incentives in place, there's no way for "clean" politicians to stay in power.
Or do you really think the invective hurled at each other between politicians of different parties is actually believed by those hurling it? Hell, after they server they all go work together for the same lobbying firms with the same clients trying to curry favor with the government.
What a load of crap
Any oversight that exists in the government surveillance biz was enacted after Obama got into office.
If you want to bother looking into it, you will find that most of the gross misuses occurred during Bush's tenure
fwiw, conservapedia is about as reliable as a John Birch pamphlet back when they were trying to scare everybody that Carter was going to invite Russian tanks to attack America
Bullshit.
Extrajudicial killings of US citizens are an Obama feature.
And at least Bush never lied about being against such surveillance.
There are many long time computer users who have felt that Apple products were for the less than able who wasted money on expensive software as they were on the helpless side with computers. And yes the corporations are probably even more guilty than our government of spying or contributing to spying on US citizens. As far as who will benefit from all the spying and snooping and analyzing well all of us will. We will gain and lose as well. Safety, convenience and financial opportunities may be created from data mining and analyzes. Loss of privacy and an inability to get away with crimes will punish most people a bit. Those under the table jobs and cash flows will soon be next to impossible to get away with. Even crimes like prostitution will become next to impossible as financial records are compiled and things like hotel records are traced to individuals. A car thief better have one heck of an explanation as to how he pays his rent, pays his bills, and pays for his food. A person can be held to account for every penny that passes through their hands as this technology becomes ever more present. So we all win and we all lose.
> or doesn't want privacy for that corner of their life.
It isn't black and white like that.
They do want privacy and they do want facebook's functionality.
There just aren't any better options available so they make the entirely rational decision that the value of facebook's services are greater than the price.
Now, they probably don't understand the full extent of the price, hardly anyone does - even the people like facebook who are collecting it don't have a good handle on it. But given the information currently available the decision to pay facebook's toll is about maximizing available options rather than not wanting privacy.
You are mixing random concepts here, applying the same label to them, and concluding that there is no privacy. Sounds like a straw man argument to me. But let's dissect it.
The first problem is comparing privacy from your family members to society as a whole. Sorry, but there is little power to be gained from peeking through the window of your older brother. And it will definitely not affect anybody else on your block. Now, if somebody were to drive down the street with a camera, film everybody and everything and put it on the Internet, that would be a whole different story. Google tried, and they had to blur faces, lower their cameras or stop altogether in different countries. The key difference is the scale of the operation, and number of people affected.
The second problem with your argument, is comparing police, state and government surveillance with private data collection. You might think Google, Microsoft, Facebook are evil, and should not hold your private data. You're probably right. However, none of these companies will kick down your door and shoot your dog. The very purpose of government surveillance is to retain power and control. That has always been the case, and the Internet and computers didn't change it. It has just made the rulers' job so much easier.
The beauty of total government surveillance is that it doesn't have to be total in order to achieve its goal. It is enough if most people merely believe they are watched most of the time, just like you describe. We start to self-censor. We'll be more careful about what we write, what we criticize, who we associate with. It fences our thoughts and ideas, and limits our ability to seek alternatives, which is precisely its purpose. The opposite is not privacy, it is freedom and liberty.
Those with the money decide who we get to vote for...
That is such bullshit. The idiots who believe their propaganda and expect them to bring back some juicy contracts decide who you get to vote for. The entire blame for all of it falls squarely on the voters' laps. They sell their votes to the bling.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
you have secret piece of info {X}
you are going to put it on a public wire, and expect that secret piece of info {X} to magically stay secret
where exactly does that erroneous perception come from?
i don't have a problem with laws against government surveillance invading your privacy: going into your house and rifling through your stuff, for example
but i also don't have a magic expectation that if i leave my secret stuff in the middle of main street, that no one is going to see it, never mind the government
to put something on a public wire, to let it go through a number of nodes you don't control, you don't know who controls them, and you don't even know what nodes those are... and then be amazed, shocked and flabbergasted that someone saw it?
where the hell did this disconnect with reality come from?
i'm not talking about the law or government conduct. i'm talking about basic perception of the problem. whether you live in a state that gives you full freedoms it respects or you live under a repressive regime, the problem stays the same: you don't get privacy when you put something on a public wire, ever. and you never will. not because of government. because of your conduct: "here's my secrets world, i'm putting them on public wires, but they will stay secret because magic"
if something is secret and important to you, you PROTECT it by not putting it in PUBLIC. you don't put it in public and then act amazed and devastated when someone, anyone, individual, corporation, or government, invariably snoops
but there is this common, weird perception that something on a public wire magically has the same tactical standing as a locked box in your basement. it's fucking insane this attitude. i said *tactical* standing. forget legal! the legal standing doesn't mean a fucking thing: if the law said "people walking down naked in the middle of main street cannot be looked at" do you magically expect that law to making a fucking difference?
then why is everyone so up in arms about the law? individual, corporate and government conduct about their secrets in *public* places doesn't mean a fucking thing because YOU put the info on a public wire you do not control
dear world:
if it's secret, don't fucking put it in public
signed,
common sense
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Privacy will be an excellent discussion to have later at tea time, as a secondary, also relevant issue.
As a non-US national, my understanding of the situation is somewhat more somber.
> Yet another news report has emerged detailing how the CIA is actively subverting low-level encryption features in mainstream hi-tech products. Responding to the story, an unnamed intelligence official essentially shrugged his shoulders and commented that "there's a whole world of devices out there, and that's what we're going to do."
There seems no point anymore in denying it. At least, we're spared from the hypocrisy of "this is not what it seems"...
> Perhaps this sort of cavalier dismissal isn't surprising given that leaked classified documents indicate that government intelligence officers view iPhone users as 'Zombies' who pay for their own surveillance.
You know, I have a lot of discussions with a friend of mine. I would raise the issue of morality and he would go like; "there goes you and your morality". After a while, people start to abide by the law and forget:
a) it was based on what was once considered "moral";
b) it's a tool to serve society, itself a tool to serve mankind... not the other way around;
c) pretend b) is not valid and watch pressure get higher until you see things go awry, like the Bastille or Ferguson.
Karma will come back at you; or "you reap what you sow".
> The past year or so of revelations paints a pretty damning portrait of the NSA and CIA. But if you read the Intercept's coverage of the CIA's subversion projects carefully you'll notice mention of Lockheed Martin. And this raises a question that hasn't received much attention: what role does corporate America play in all of this? Are American companies simply hapless pawns of a runaway national security state? Ed Snowden has stated that mass surveillance is "about economic spying, social control, and diplomatic manipulation. They're about power." A sentiment which has been echoed by others. Who, then, stands to gain from mass surveillance?
As a citizen from a country supposedly friendly to the US, I'd like to state my opinion -- 100% personal, since I don't even represent my family.
1. The Americans as a whole gain something from mass surveillance, as that can prevent acts of violence;
2. Even other countries gain something, since there is some degree of cooperation between the US and other nations;
3. The world gains also, even nations opposed to the US, because nobody really likes terrorism -- even prior safe harbors for these extremists now see them as uncontrollable threats.
The problem is greed. Past the point of self-defense, surveillance becomes itself a weapon to win in diplomacy, to interfere with other populations, to ensure an advantage in business etc. It's a temptation too great for some to resist. And thus starts spying of things which are unrelated to defense.
When one considers his/her own country friend of the US, the feeling is of sadness and one searches for what errors might have been made to create such a situation; alas, there were not any mistake or offense which could produce such retaliation.
You get to think then about re-evaluating the friendship as a whole; what if you're invited to dinner at the house of a guy who called the Police on you, and they came and tried to find things in your house while you were absent?
I'd probably excuse myself and use the dinner's occasion to wash my dog.
Forget about fixing that, it's like selling rotten food, people will remember and eat at other places. Or maybe not, people these days have the memory of a mouse. A non-GM one, that is.
Oh, yeah, privacy would be nice, too...
You're a self important prick. I feel sorry for you.
A discussion about surveillance and no one has said "Sousveillance"? Or mentioned David Brin?
As a purchaser of surveillance data, I can tell you that the answer to the question of the original post is a resounding: No.
A previous poster mentioned his license plate being tracked by the civil authorities. Well, I can tell you that corporations do that too. Tow trucks now come with cameras to read your plate to see if there is a repossession order out for your car. And when they OCR your car, they dump it into a database with a geotag, and then they SELL that data. To people like me. I won't tell you what I do with it, but it's to your economic detriment.
So, yes, people with power, the government, the corporations, the wealthy, are all going to use information to try to rule you. What are you going to do about it? Complain about tech un-savvy idiots? Hide like discrete rams among the sheep? Or are you going to stand up and look back?!
There's a lot of smug above this in the comments, so if you are really so much better than everyone else: Prove It. If you've got the Talent, pick up the tools and fight for what you think is right.
what does "shooting the messenger" mean to you?
i am merely describing reality. i'm not making reality
you don't like reality. that's fine
but you respond by attacking the guy who tells you what reality is? what kind of person does that make you?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Those who don't worry about anything have a more happy life. That's just a fact. If you worry too much about all things that you have no control over is not good for your health.
Those who don't worry, might even think that mass surveillance is a bad thing, but they prefer not to worry about it since they can't change it anyway. And maybe they are just right? What's the change of being falsely accused by the 'government'? Maybe it's just as high as being in a plane crash? Do you worry about planes, and avoid them at all costs?
I personally worry about things too much that it causes a lot of stress. I'm probably working with a burn out, since I can't get any programming work done anymore and just help with the installation of hardware (some brainless stick juggling and clicking through assistant programs) at my work. They are still ok with this, especially when I talked about this 'phase in my life', but how long will they cope with me? Indeed, again something to worry about, causing more stress.
Those who don't worry about anything, have climbed up in the hierarchy and earn probably twice as much as me because they are more satisfied.
To first answer TFA's question, the answer is "yes" and "no". It really depends on the context. Has the NSA, CIA, DHS, FBI, ATF, and just about every other 3 letter acronym caused problems? Yes! Have they extended problems or made them worse? Yes! Are they the only actors when it comes to stealing data and unauthorized access? No, but they are the only agency immune to prosecution and punishment for those actions.
Now to your point. Sure, what I post on Slashdot or Facebook is considered public and I should not expect privacy on that data. That is only a portion, and not even the largest portion of what is being captured and placed under surveillance. What I store on my laptop, PC, or private device and do not share is definitely not public domain. If I turn on location detection on my phone I am asking to be tracked, when an operator uses access point triangulation from the device it's out of my control. The latter is due mostly to the Government mandating that this device information is available.
If you wish to claim that a person has no expectation of privacy I'll ask why that is? Because manufacturers knowingly reduced security to allow Government access, or because they are just idiots that don't care about consumers. The former is the answer, the latter is delusion.
If anyone was to mod you a troll, it should be for requesting it and not using punctuation. Perhaps because the opinion you provide is the same exact talking point that the politicians pushing for the back doors uses to justify it and never considers the actual problem or even hints at solving it. "If you have nothing to hide", "it's all connected anyway", and "too late to change things now" are all just excuses to maintain a status quo which harms individual liberty. Oh, and I have heard all about the founding fathers of the country being "terrorists" too so you can save that rhetoric.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
No body cares about your arse face or what you do with it unless you really get into some nasty stuff or there is a unlikely particular reason they need to fix their attention in your miserable existence
What is valuable is the seamless useless amount of data collected about you and millions other people, what they buy, their favourite food, their opinions on climate change, religious affiliation, what kind of schools they like for their children....anything and everything
the idea is to be able to get the big picture from large groups of the society, trends opinions...so that the whole population can be manipulated, herded, monetized
do you think you have choice? what and how much? do you think you vote is an act of free will? your and whom else?
People is not born with a vital necessity for freedom, is a choice, some people prefer to be told what to do and let others to think for them, some people prefer not to care about this things believing that it doesn't affect them, just like the middle classes in Nazi Germany didn't want to see what was going on
Sadly your attitude affects the amount of freedom I have and erodes my right to live in a fair and just society
So please keep on it feel all smug about your stance to privacy, keep being a moron
the 1% at the top of the social scale thank you for it with the promise that they will do anything in their power to stay at the top and to prevent you and anybody else to get there
Hook up a machine learning algorithm to internal company communications and watch it beat the index at predicting share price movements.
Your analogies are all wrong. Imagine you're parked in a public street holding a conversation with somebody in the passenger seat. Then imagine an agent of the government comes along and drills a hole in your car so he can listen in. Is that acceptable? No, of course it isn't. The fact that you're on a public street doesn't mean the government should be attacking your car to hear what you're saying. Likewise, just because you're on a public network it doesn't make it okay for the government to crack your hardware or software encryption so they can listen in.
You make it sound like the government just happens to be overhearing these communications over public networks. It's not! It's actively and aggressively attacking you and robbing you of your privacy. If you don't see a problem with this then you're part of the problem.
Cant be a coincidence that you cant see the global hook stack
the saddest thing is that there is nothing wrong per se with a fully open society with none or very little privacy and a lot to gain from it, but in order for it to work it must apply to everybody, including those at the top, no secret agencies no dirty tricks and with everybody having access to whatever information they wish using it in a fair manner
In today world and as long as some people prefer to play nasty and gain from it is just a pipe dream
This is the same government that can barely pass a budget, dissolve bypartisan bickering, handle voting rights laws, take care of veterans, fix corporate tax loopholes, and much much more....
Do you people honestly think they are capable of spying on you? Give up on trying to get your 15sec of fame and go back to society.
I'm appauled at how many people forget that their friends and neighbors are possibly government employees and they will sit here and trash it.
Of course it could be the alternative and foreign nation states are posting inciteful information here in retaliation for us protecting our interests, trying to subvert readers against the country that defends their freedom to eat cheetos at 3am while playing minecraft.
Snowden talked about social control, economic espionage, etc etc... There are a lot of things that those could mean. Economic espionage could range from the somewhat innocent, possible necessary, such as monitoring potential dual application industry to ensure that weapons are not being made. But it could also mean that agencies are stealing incomplete intellectual property from citizens and giving it to huge businesses that can afford to complete and right protect it faster. Social control could mean that angry citizens are talked away from extremist groups that might operate among us, or it could mean that random agents choose people they personally dislike and harass them.
The important issues related to this topic have nothing to do with blame. People can't just drop their smart phones today any more than their cars. That's standard equipment, and one can get by without it, but only with hardship.
I'm worried primarily about two kinds of abuse: political capture of our nation (a coup through intelligence services) and theft from motivated American minds working to accomplish things that could benefit us all. The overarching problem is that there is absolutely no way for the average citizen to know these abuses are not happening.
I can blame all government spying on the government just like I blame all hacker related spying on hackers.
I'm not in the habit of blaming victims even when I view their actions as stupid.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Ed Snowden has stated that mass surveillance is "about economic spying, social control, and diplomatic manipulation. They're about power." A sentiment which has been echoed by others. Who, then, stands to gain from mass surveillance?
Whoever has the best combination of intel and computer aided psychological operations tools. We The People can win, because we have the numbers on our side by an enormous margin. We just have to recognize that we're in a war and beat our plowshares into swords.
Learn big data. Learn information security. Learn hacking. Learn mesh networking and darknets. Learn cryptography and steganography. Build a client for your favorite communications platform and start spidering the new commons. Whatever tickles your fancy, or all of the above. Network with others with those skills. Get your friends to register and start aging off multiple social network personas, each with credible histories. Develop a following, or multiple followings with different personas, on new media.
Best case, none of the things that look like they are already happening actually come to pass, and you'll have a valuable career skill set. Worst case, you'll have the tools you need to defend the nation from a bloodless coup built on next generation propaganda.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Its also the governments job to regulate industry, so if the corporate world is acting badly, yes we totally should blame the government for that too.
Be surprised that thoroughly bribeable politicians have jumped into bed with their corporate partners instead of slapping down bad behavior? No, not so much.
But my cynicism about the integrity of the Legislative branch doesn't stop it from still being their fault.
External military threats could harm rich people just as easily as poor people. The 9-11 attack killed quite a lot of rich shadow-government members.
So, you bet the spying is about protecting us from foreign threats. Absolutely.
It is also about gaining a superior knowledge of the current state of the market, trade secrets, not-yet-announced products, and so on. This allows those in power to practice stock market manipulation to their extreme profit. This seems blatantly obvious to me. I am surprised that it isn't equally obvious to everyone.
There is also the side benefit of being able to apply leverage against any social threats, as was demonstrated in the decisive dismantling of the Occupy movement.
I post as A/C. It doesn't matter. The intelligence agencies all know I am posting this. Or rather, they could know, if I was worth monitoring, which I am not.
Google and Dice, Yahoo, and the 70 billion homeland security interests as well as advertising and corporate interests that have it all the way they want it.
"because just expecting government, corporations, or interested people not to snoop is just never going to happen, ever. disrespect is the norm. are you some sort of naive inexperienced fool to the pitfalls of basic human nature?"
What this is really about is the internet was not built with encryption built into it's native systems like email, etc. Also there is no freedom, the human mind didn't evolve to "make decisions", human beings are automated biological processes.
You lowlifers are really annoying, you know? Always ranting about your need for "privacy" and how you're being "controlled". You know what? You NEED control. You WANT control. You have never wanted to take responsability for your lives, you have never addressed one issue, you cannot make up your mind about ANYTHING without some personality telling you what's the right way to think. Privacy? Now that's droll: you're obsessed about the latest celebrity-related gossip and you want PRIVACY? You're too funny. The fact is that without something watching over you and telling you all the time what to do, say and think you're lost. And you want to know something? We the Ruling Elite are fed up with you. We put up with you peons until now because unfortunately we needed your (mostly surplus) hands to do menial work and generate wealth for us, the deserving ones. No more. Automation has made you not only redundant and useless, but pernicious as well. You're wasting resources that should be reserved for the One Percenters. We're well on the way to create the Leisure Society, a true paradise on Earth, but only for a selected, deserving few. You're not among those. Now we can settle this thing in two generations as planned, the peaceful way, if you just embrace the reality of your extinction and fade away through decreasing birth rates (the undeveloped world will unfortunately require "special" measures) although this irks my generation no end because we will not reap the fruits of our work, or you can make my day and rebel, and we can wipe you out in a week. Your choice. Now be bold, revolt. I want my paradise on Earth now.
Ok, so our eyes are now opened to the realities of communicating over channels that have third parties involved, and we've 'made peace' with these fundamental concepts of information theory.
Now, how do we confront the fact that your 2 solutions (getting off 'the internet' or using secure channels) get more limited and unrealistic by the year, due to a combination of apathy, coordinated legislation creep, increasing authoritariaism, and the pervasiveness of oppressive technology.
i'm not talking about the law or government conduct. i'm talking about basic perception of the problem. whether you live in a state that gives you full freedoms it respects or you live under a repressive regime, the problem stays the same: you don't get privacy when you put something on a public wire, ever. and you never will. not because of government. because of your conduct: "here's my secrets world, i'm putting them on public wires, but they will stay secret because magic"
No because of encryption, should I expect mechanisms to keep secrets to be deliberately subverted as well? It's your interpretation of the basic perception of the problem. If my freedom was being respected then my communications wouldn't be accessible regardless if it was or wasn't encrypted. Some might think, even though I see what you are saying, that because it is illegal to tap telephone conversations and open snail mail and parcels in transit that they have an expectation to privacy on the internet, even though they are wrong.
Of course it is a matter of just reading the appropriate legizlation to understand what the limitations of the powers and understand that most people consider their phone to be a private device for communication not used by the government to track them or listen to what they are saying even when it is not being used as a phone. Worse still, they consider their home computer to be private but when a TLA can break into it and steal your encryption keys from ram, secrets become very expensive things.
Most technologists I know who have performed admin aspects of looking after users data is that we treat it with almost reverence and I don't go poking around for user data even though I know I can. I suppose it's naive, but I call it ethical after all they pay me so it's in my interests that they are looked after.
I think the point you miss is the elephant in the room isn't surveilance but fraud as a result of mass surveilance. I bet blackhats and criminal organizations every where are rubbing their hands and licking their lips at the prospect of fat meta data silos to be pillaged full of noobs, peon and zombie data - thanks Three Letter Agency.
These are TAXPAYER FUNDED agencies accessing CITIZEN data, I don't think it's unreasonable to treat them with a little respect even in their clueless ignorant apathy.
dear world:
if it's secret, don't fucking put it in public
signed, common sense
You fall into the trap of thinking everyone's common sense is the same - it isn't. In reality they are interconnected private systems being utilised to collect "the public's" data. I think you would be hard pressed arguing with any CEO for access to that data, unless you are an intelligence agency.
So, yeah, the data may be accessible, but that doesn't mean it is public any more than mass surveilance is freedom.
People do stuff. People watch other people do stuff. People write down what people are doing. People sell the information about what people are doing to other people. People build a business out of using lists of what people do. Someone notices. That someone has imagination, paranoia, a bit of delusion, a computer, the internet, access to an online discussion board, and marginal social skills. That person begins to write on blogs, forums and discussion boards using terms like privacy, government, big-brother, 1984, intrusion, surveillance, spying, and hackers. Other people respond making predictions, drawing ill-conceived conclusions, extrapolating wildly and exaggerating, trolling, and flame-baiting. And, nothing changes and none of the predictions come to pass. And, people do stuff ...
You Are (The Government)
Hey, sit down and listen and they'll tell you when you're wrong
Eradicate but vindicate as progress creeps along
Puritan work ethic maintains it's subconscious edge
As old glory maintains your consciousness
There's a loser in my house and a puppet on a stool
And a crowded way of life and a black reflecting pool
And as the people bend, the moral fabric dies
Then country can't pretend to ignore it's people's cries
'Cause you are the government
You are jurisprudence
You are the volition
You are jurisdiction and I make a difference too
(Bad Religion)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Comment removed based on user account deletion
i don't walk down main street naked and expect privacy
In all likelihood you will, however, on occasion, step behind a tree, while hiking in a national forest, and do what people usually do in such situations.
National forests are, by definition, public places. And yet, we find an expectation of privacy does exist in public places.
You would not expect to find, for example, hidden cameras on all the trees in the national forest, put there by the government so they can collect any data (they'll call it "metadata") they find convenient, when you do your business.
Please use your brain.
This may or may not be a bit off-topic, but deals a bit with planting the seeds of making it somewhat harder to monitor/decrypt your computer communications stuff.
The issue here is not that someone is watching you now because you are doing Something AntiGovernment (synonym for "Evil"), but that someone is vacuuming up everything you do, and then later when you decide to do something Evil, they will go back to their massive records and check out what you previously did.
It would be nice to have a scheme to:
1. interfere with your ability to record and decrypt everything
2. have an unbreakable code for communicating with other people
Since they vacuum up everything, let's give them stuff to vacuum up. I think I'm going to post a lot of stuff in my gmail account or hosted filespace, big gobs of files that are just random data. Ha! Let them decrypt that! I might create a TrueCrypt volume or two, and then stick that on the web. If everyone did that, the TLA agencies might drive themselves nuts trying to figure out if those files meant anything or not. I might even name the files "LatestPopularHits.mp3" or "PiratedPornVideo.mov" and dangle it in front of the latest MAFIAA antipiracy dogs.
One nice thing about having files of random gibberish on the web is that they make great one-time pads for encrypting. It's already out there, so you and I can just agree on a certain file that's on Rapidshare or something, and we can use that to encrypt; concepturally, it could be as simple as a bitwise XOR with the random file. To guard against the NSA just trying every single file on the planet for a key (I wouldn't put it past them), we could even say, "Our one-time pad is the first 123kb of File A, plus the second 456kb of file B."
So, start dumping those gobs of random data onto the web! You could even email large amounts of random garbage to a dummy email account, and then deleting it, thus costing you no more than negligible bandwidth, while the GMails and NSA's out there try to record an accumulating pile of useless garbage that no longer exists anywhere except in their own archives.
Screw all this surveillance. Screw Big Brother.
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
No, thanks to the GOP and the idiot Tea Party, the government is the hapless pawn of corporate America!
No, you are describing reality as you perceive it.
Your confidence in your ability to accurately and completely perceive reality is colored by your personality.
That's why that AC called you a self-important prick.
Are you as worried about the first two? Does free expression only pertain to only what not where? Does shall not infringe only to apply active militia members?