Government surveillance is as old as the telegraph | Hacker News Reader

Government surveillance is as old as the telegraph

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Horrible title. Government surveillance existed long before telecommunications. US governments have been spying on mail/letters since literally day one. I take that back. They were spying on letters BEFORE day one, before the US was actually a thing.

The OP article equates government surveillance with the modern phenomena whereby governments must enlist corporate actors to aid in surveillance: the tapping at the switchboard rather than secreting some device inside the handset. Plenty of government surveillance is possible without any corporate cooperation whatsoever.

Yes I agree. Even in Ancient Rome, Livy [0] actually wrote about this in one of the his books [1].

This is a good read if anyone is interested:

http://www.historynet.com/espionage-in-ancient-rome.htm

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[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livy

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ab_Urbe_Condita_Libri_%28Livy%...

Like, duh. Telecom has always been entwined with state security - they're essentially two halves of the same informational entity.

This is why the 90s were a watershed, when powerful encryption became accessible far and wide. Having state of the art defensive spycraft at the hands of anyone who casually cared is unprecedented throughout history.

But the tech community dropped the ball. In the rush to build our dream of what the Internet could enable, we failed to consider robustness in the face of hostile service providers, including ourselves.

Let us hope there isn't too much path dependence on this broken overcentralized architecture.

Like, duh. Telecom has always been entwined with state security - they're essentially two halves of the same informational entity.

It nominally should have been a "like, duh," but as it turns out, it was a great mystery to a many people, taking well until 2013 when Snowden finally made it stupidly obvious such that ignoring or denying it was simply rendered impossible.

I'm not sure how much of it was due to historical ignorance, faith in statism, or in the case of the United States - its history and culture generally being heavily enshrined in mythology.

Snowden wasn't the first whistleblower, so to me it's more of a sociological topic than anything else. While it's tough to get a man to understand something his salary depends on not understanding, that does not mean he should be free from judgment for doing so. So I still think "duh" is appropriate.

I see the same wishful denial as in eg second amendment "hopefuls" who think that having nerf guns is proof that the government is being kept at bay. The truth's implications are simply too difficult.

I think everyone knew (the NSA exists after all; wiretaps were a thing for beating mobsters). It's just the extent; we expect it to be more targeted than saving ALL the phone records.

I think "they" in your story are more responsible for building the Internet than "we" are.

Perhaps. On the other hand, consider the origins of the site this comment was posted on.

One could argue that there is a distinction to be made between people who "built the web" (which rightly include the original YC founders) and people who "built the Internet", roughly defined as network hardware standards + TCP/IP + DNS.

Significantly, high-level web technologies are arguably more privacy-aware than their underlying stack, supporting end-to-end encryption (although to be fair, centralisation is a significant problem at both levels, likely out of purely practical concerns). I don't think malice played any part in this development though -- it's just another accident of history: the network stack got "good enough" to ignite the ecosystem well before privacy implications became clear, such implications weren't so immediately dramatic to force a complete overhaul of the significant amount of deployed infrastructure, and here we are.

It's not the job of IP/layer2 or TCP/layer3 to provide privacy, and in fact they simply can't with regards to "metadata" analysis.

The End-to-End principle behind TCP/IP should be considered a must-study in anti-authoritarian thinking.

It's the job of all layers to preserve decentralization to the extent they can, and in this regard HTTP(S) fails miserably.

"preserve decentralization". "HTTP(S) fails". Bravo. Won't find too many willing to say this; it's the truth.

The decentralized architecture that was the original plan for the "internet" is a worthy goal, not simply for anti-authoritarian or privacy reasons. Or home shopping possibilities (Baran paper predicting this).

How about something more general, like resiliency? A network that is opportunistic and always "up".

Municipalities are building resilient local networks for disaster recovery purposes. We should be building them for all uses, and interconnecting them.

A true "internet" does not depend on nor is subject to centralized control. It only requires cooperation.

The hypothesis that the people who built the underlying stack (and the infrastructure outside our houses) are responsible for allowing the internet to blossom into what it is today is mistaken.

http://www.cluetrain.com/book/apocalypso.html

I don't care to debate the topic. Just quietly pointing out an alternative view.

Here's a brief proof. Assume that TCP was never conceived. Would most of what we have today still be around?

Comparing intelligence operations of the past - with or without the help of business - to the current situation is a false equivalence.

To quote Cybersecurity as Realpolitik[1] yet again:

    The central dynamic internal to government is, and always
    has been, that the only way for either the Executive or the Legislature
    to control the many sub-units of government is by way of how much
    money they can hand out. [...]

    Suppose, however, that surveillance becomes too cheap to meter,
    that is to say too cheap to limit through budgetary processes.  Does
    that lessen the power of the Legislature more, or the power of the
    Executive more?  I think that ever-cheaper surveillance substantially
    changes the balance of power in favor of the Executive and away
    from the Legislature.

In the past, there were always fundamental limitations of money or manpower or capability. It's expensive to run a stakeout, and it just wasn't technologically possible to build a database about everybody; even the relatively simple census took years of work before the invention of Hollerith's Tabulator[2].

Compare that to today, where XKEYSCORE can search most world communications in (approximately?) realtime. Compare the handful of bytes worth of personal information the Census Bureau was able to tabulate about everybody to the still-growing mountain of data (and metadata) that is gathered routinely that we call "analytics". Compare the difficulty of searching for some particular piece of data - even with a fancy electromechanical tabulator - to the powerful and widely available analysis tools we have today.

It is simply dishonest to say the surveillance capabilities of even a generation or two ago is even remotely comparable to the surveillance currently being done by both governments and private businesses.[3]

[1] http://geer.tinho.net/geer.blackhat.6viii14.txt https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nT-TGvYOBpI

[2] https://www.census.gov/history/www/innovations/technology/th...

[3] "It ain't the same league. It ain't even the same fucking sport."

There are some good descriptions of telegraph-era government surveillance arrangements in Bamford's The Puzzle Palace (1983). Also Carlisle's Encyclopedia of Intelligence and Counterintelligence (2015). And for fun, see Yardley's The American Black Chamber (1931).

Edit: And see http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/12/82-years... for more about Yardley.

Edit: Corrected publication date for The Puzzle Palace.

Along with his many other abuses of liberty, Lincoln monitored telegraph lines during the war, and jailed without trial many who criticized the war effort or argued in favor of the right of secession.

The book The Puzzle Palace by James Bamford, a history of the NSA and its precursors, describes in detail how the U.S. government set up shop in the early telegraph offices, copying everything. As this book came out in `83, I've been continuously amused at how Snowden's leaks have been greeted with so much surprise.

The inventor of the one-time pad was a telegraph man: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/26/science/26code.html?ref=sc...

It's much older. But that doesn't make the public obligated to make it easy.

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