The thing that bothers me most about this as a European is; I have zero say in this, in the US you can strike out against surveillance, you can write to senators, protest against terrible legislation. Actually have a voice, however faint it is. Whereas I don't get a say but the exact same treatment from your country. The Five Eyes have made me paranoid and the only escape seems to be downgrading your phone to a brick and carrying it in a Faraday cage. We may as well just go back to plain old telephones.
I was happy to see the disgust people had for the CIA black sites operated in other countries when that came to light during the Bush presidency. Not because of the torture, but because people here expected alleged terrorists to have the same rights as detained American citizens. I feel this is important to note, because we have a large population of young voters who I feel have concern for everyone - not just the US. This is very different from how my grandparents vote and I do think it's split along generational lines. In regards to overreaching surveillance: It's not ideal, but we over here do think of you when we vote.. I do.
>Whereas I don't get a say but the exact same treatment from your country.
The NSA works with the 5 eyes to gather data on you. If you want to stop the NSA from spying on you, vote in your democratic country to remove yourselves from our intelligence agreements.
It doesn't necessarily mean the NSA won't spy on you, but it does mean it will be technically illegal for them to do so, so they probably won't do it unless they actually care about you.
Reminds me of a humorous saying I read somewhere. Roughly: Move to the U.S., because the only thing worse than living there is being subjected to its foreign policy.
Is there any reason to believe that no European countries do this kind of thing? Relative to national budgets, this kind of stuff can't cost that much. Dunno where the EU is on their EU-level army right now, but it'd stand to reason that a EU-security org would do exactly this kind of stuff. The UK certainly has no qualms about it.
Even the US's allies will try stunts as bad as false flag bombings[1]. So it's not like they can only monitor non-allies. So they can't shut down spying, and perhaps it just becomes a never-ending escalation of power then. Might as well grab all data. I don't like it, but I can understand how they might arrive at that position.
Probably the only hope is to outlaw this worldwide, perhaps in some human rights kind of thing, then actually apply punishment for those caught. That seems unlikely to really work though. Even now, we have countries that steal nuclear tech and don't get punished - few will view spying as worse than that.
Partly true. Europeans have fairly good opportunities to influence domestic and regional issues. Probably better than the in the US. For instance look at how the data retention directive was invalidated [0]. That said, support for US misconduct in Europe is still surprisingly strong. From US companies paying less tax than European counterparts to blatant spying or kidnapping. I'm not sure what the answer here is other than being more aware of our own interests as persons, nations and regions.
You can try to get your domestic spooks gang up with other EU spooks to stop colluding with the NSA. The agencies use intelligence as currency and you can apply sanctions this way.
Carrying this info in cleartext across tappable international cables is pretty close to giving a free pass to spooks. Telecom regulators are enabling this because they're against/indifferent about strong encryption.
Actually Congress already made laws bounding NSA behavior and mission but they are operating outside the law. They are a self serving criminal enterprise at this point.
Time-proven way of influencing decisions made by other countries is having a strong army. Recently it has gone slightly out of fashion, but the general principle still holds. Those without power are not reckoned with.
Your government is free to negotiate whatever treaties are acceptable under its laws and the U.S. Constitution; you have whatever voice in your own government that your laws give you.
It makes literally no sense to me that a government would have any more concern for another government's citizen than that other government has incentivised it to.
You can write to your MEP and ask for clarification on what are they doing in order to protect you from, what essentially amounts to, a hostile act from foreign power. Twist is they are working with them.
Man I will forever be grateful for the eye opening insights Snowden has provided to us. I now check for https and use tor and always block cookies. How is there not a monument in every city dedicated to this hero?
How would America respond if it found out that say the UK is tracking cellphones worldwide, except for British subjects of course, but including all Americans on American soil?
Apart from the political conversation I've always tried to encourage a technical conversation about how our mobile phone infrastructure is really terrible for privacy on many levels.
CCC events have had many presentations about this in the last few years, about IMSI catchers and mobile crypto attacks and abusing roaming mechanisms and databases. And it seems there's more where that came from; the system is wide open in many respects to exploitation by a sophisticated attacker, governmental or not. (I read somewhere that people in China are buying and deploying IMSI catchers in order to send SMS spam to passersby.)
Some of the privacy problems are a result of economic factors including backwards compatibility and international compatibility goals. Some of the bad decisions for privacy were made by or at the behest of intelligence agencies, and some of those decisions are continuing to be made in standards bodies that deal with mobile communications security. Ross Anderson described some spy agency influence in early GSM crypto conversations (which is one reason A5/1 is so weak), and it's still happening at ETSI now.
I support political criticism of surveillance activities, but at moments when people feel overwhelmed and powerless, there is another front, which is trying to clean up the security posture of mobile communications infrastructure, or provide better alternatives to it.
We can find lots of reasons why this is hard ("Bellhead" communities are much less ideologically committed to privacy and opposed to surveillance; communications infrastructure is highly regulated in many places, and it's hard to get access to radiofrequency spectrum; people want worldwide compatibility; there's a huge installed base on both the client and server sides; many of the infrastructure providers around the world are directly beneficially owned by governments; spy agencies do actively try to influence standards-setting in this area, plus sabotaging implementations and stealing private key material) and it's probably going to stay hard. But maybe some of the people reading this are going to some day be tech billionaires or working in or running companies that have significant influence in the telecommunications space, and be in a position to personally make future generations of communication technology take privacy and security seriously.
> The NSA cannot know in advance which tiny fraction of 1 percent of the records it may need, so it collects and keeps as many as it can — 27 terabytes [...] The location programs have brought in such volumes of information, according to a May 2012 internal NSA briefing, that they are “outpacing our ability to ingest, process and store” data
27TB doesn't sound much, even by 2012 standards. The article doesn't specify if this is the total size, just the delta over some period of time, or something entirely different? Certainly not something NSA would "struggle to ingest"?
Well if each (lat,lon,cell#,imei) record takes, say, 500 bytes and they take a measurement every minute, 27TB is enough to record every American for 4 months. That's pretty hefty surveillance even if the raw size doesn't impress.
I'm on mobile and don't have any links handy, but it's fairly well known that you can ostensibly track every. single. handset. in the world if you can gain access to any one carrier's infrastructure. You can bet every spy agency from every country is doing this.
To get a feeling for the size of the problem, the carrier logs all handset accesses on all transceivers. To do location tracking you have to get the carrier to give you access to those logs and you have to have the storage and processing to get finer-grained location based on overlapping transceiver accesses and precise times. It's a bit more than the carrier themselves would do for network quality monitoring, but not even 10X more. With this data your daily routine and divergence from that routine can be learned and detected. With this plus payment information, you've got enough to tell who is doing something interesting in real time.
If Americans (of which I am one) and the US government believe that it is self-evident that all men are created equal, then surely they should apply the principles that they have enshrined in their constitution to all equals when dealing with them, regardless of whether or not they are a US Citizen or where on earth they are.
Not long ago you could buy SIM cards from kioskos, corner stores, etc. This is becoming increasingly rare, even in places with otherwise poor infrastructure. The shift was rapid but noticeable.
Because terrorists establish normal-seeming patterns of movement that do not diverge from that pattern until it is too late.
Whereas if you take some time off from work to attend a protest, the FBI knows to come knocking on your door to ask pointed questions about your friends.
That's what's pernicious about these programs. They're not good enough to focus on terrorists, but there is plenty of fodder for harassment of protesters.
they are tracking our every single movement, and aspire to track our every single thought
we have a duty to resist this totalitarianism by any means possible or necessary; fascism is here, and free men can't delude themselves with hoping for gradual change to the contrary any further.
It's only going to get worse. At the moment it's "only" creepy but is already leading to self censorship. I'm not sure what the solution is, but any country with human rights as a true goal should be pushing encryption like there is no tomorrow.
So now they can detect the location of the "target" and send a drone to kill them from the convenience of their office, before going on lunch break.
This really sickens me. They are inferring so much and therefore many innocent people are and will suffer.
To me this system is pure evil however much the nsa try to sugar coat or spin it. Who gave them the right to do this, to track people around the world and in many cases perform extra judicial assassinations.
I am really amazed that more people are not outraged at this. When things like the Pentagon Papers came out or when Watergate hit the news, people reacted and change happened.
Today everything gets buried in a sea of noise and entertainment. Long term this cannot be good for the general health and welfare of society to not ponder on and discuss.
I wonder if they manage to track my cell phone more accurately than my cell phone manages to track itself.
My phone rarely seems to be sure what country it is in, let alone which town.
Simply lost count of the number of times I've been like, "yeah, I'm sure the weather is lovely where I was a week ago, but I'm more interested in where I am now".
Must be quite depressing for the NSA analysts stuck in their cubical watching people run around the world having fun while they stuff another donut down their fat american face.
[+] [-] datamoshr|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coroutines|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jklinger410|9 years ago|reply
The NSA works with the 5 eyes to gather data on you. If you want to stop the NSA from spying on you, vote in your democratic country to remove yourselves from our intelligence agreements.
It doesn't necessarily mean the NSA won't spy on you, but it does mean it will be technically illegal for them to do so, so they probably won't do it unless they actually care about you.
[+] [-] avar|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MichaelGG|9 years ago|reply
Even the US's allies will try stunts as bad as false flag bombings[1]. So it's not like they can only monitor non-allies. So they can't shut down spying, and perhaps it just becomes a never-ending escalation of power then. Might as well grab all data. I don't like it, but I can understand how they might arrive at that position.
Probably the only hope is to outlaw this worldwide, perhaps in some human rights kind of thing, then actually apply punishment for those caught. That seems unlikely to really work though. Even now, we have countries that steal nuclear tech and don't get punished - few will view spying as worse than that.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavon_Affair
[+] [-] dandelion_lover|9 years ago|reply
[0] https://supporters.eff.org/donate
[+] [-] uola|9 years ago|reply
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Retention_Directive
[+] [-] fulafel|9 years ago|reply
Carrying this info in cleartext across tappable international cables is pretty close to giving a free pass to spooks. Telecom regulators are enabling this because they're against/indifferent about strong encryption.
[+] [-] imglorp|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dunkelheit|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] d33|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] peteretep|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wtbob|9 years ago|reply
It makes literally no sense to me that a government would have any more concern for another government's citizen than that other government has incentivised it to.
[+] [-] vmateixeira|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Keyframe|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] awqrre|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tdhz77|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toomanythings2|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] cdevs|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] uptown|9 years ago|reply
http://gothamist.com/2015/04/06/snowden_bust_fort_greene.php
http://gothamist.com/2015/04/07/edward_snowden_hologram.php#...
[+] [-] toomanythings2|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacquesm|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] schoen|9 years ago|reply
CCC events have had many presentations about this in the last few years, about IMSI catchers and mobile crypto attacks and abusing roaming mechanisms and databases. And it seems there's more where that came from; the system is wide open in many respects to exploitation by a sophisticated attacker, governmental or not. (I read somewhere that people in China are buying and deploying IMSI catchers in order to send SMS spam to passersby.)
Some of the privacy problems are a result of economic factors including backwards compatibility and international compatibility goals. Some of the bad decisions for privacy were made by or at the behest of intelligence agencies, and some of those decisions are continuing to be made in standards bodies that deal with mobile communications security. Ross Anderson described some spy agency influence in early GSM crypto conversations (which is one reason A5/1 is so weak), and it's still happening at ETSI now.
I support political criticism of surveillance activities, but at moments when people feel overwhelmed and powerless, there is another front, which is trying to clean up the security posture of mobile communications infrastructure, or provide better alternatives to it.
We can find lots of reasons why this is hard ("Bellhead" communities are much less ideologically committed to privacy and opposed to surveillance; communications infrastructure is highly regulated in many places, and it's hard to get access to radiofrequency spectrum; people want worldwide compatibility; there's a huge installed base on both the client and server sides; many of the infrastructure providers around the world are directly beneficially owned by governments; spy agencies do actively try to influence standards-setting in this area, plus sabotaging implementations and stealing private key material) and it's probably going to stay hard. But maybe some of the people reading this are going to some day be tech billionaires or working in or running companies that have significant influence in the telecommunications space, and be in a position to personally make future generations of communication technology take privacy and security seriously.
[+] [-] bnastic|9 years ago|reply
27TB doesn't sound much, even by 2012 standards. The article doesn't specify if this is the total size, just the delta over some period of time, or something entirely different? Certainly not something NSA would "struggle to ingest"?
[+] [-] advisedwang|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] exabrial|9 years ago|reply
The NSA hasn't done anything groundbreaking here, except maybe a Google search.
[+] [-] ffggvv|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] meric|9 years ago|reply
The "free country" has total electronic surveillance.
The "federation" is run like an empire in a dictator-like fashion.
And north korea, the "democratic republic", is the most oppressive regime in the world.
What a world we live in.
[+] [-] jdimov10|9 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] bicubic|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Zigurd|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] furyg3|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jefe_|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tonylemesmer|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TACIXAT|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] progx|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Zigurd|9 years ago|reply
Whereas if you take some time off from work to attend a protest, the FBI knows to come knocking on your door to ask pointed questions about your friends.
That's what's pernicious about these programs. They're not good enough to focus on terrorists, but there is plenty of fodder for harassment of protesters.
[+] [-] dunkelheit|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cryoshon|9 years ago|reply
we have a duty to resist this totalitarianism by any means possible or necessary; fascism is here, and free men can't delude themselves with hoping for gradual change to the contrary any further.
[+] [-] ctack|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toomanythings2|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mouzogu|9 years ago|reply
This really sickens me. They are inferring so much and therefore many innocent people are and will suffer.
To me this system is pure evil however much the nsa try to sugar coat or spin it. Who gave them the right to do this, to track people around the world and in many cases perform extra judicial assassinations.
[+] [-] tmaly|9 years ago|reply
Today everything gets buried in a sea of noise and entertainment. Long term this cannot be good for the general health and welfare of society to not ponder on and discuss.
[+] [-] mSparks|9 years ago|reply
My phone rarely seems to be sure what country it is in, let alone which town.
Simply lost count of the number of times I've been like, "yeah, I'm sure the weather is lovely where I was a week ago, but I'm more interested in where I am now".
Must be quite depressing for the NSA analysts stuck in their cubical watching people run around the world having fun while they stuff another donut down their fat american face.
[+] [-] anonbanker|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kseistrup|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] l3m0ndr0p|9 years ago|reply
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