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I was personally in Western Tunisia (on the Algerian border) as the Tunisian uprising, the first of the Arab Spring, began. I was there a month. The protests were in full swing for weeks in every village in the west before anything hit western media. No travel warnings or any of that backdated pretend bureaucracy. I very much doubt the CIA had much of an idea what was going on outside the capital. The only western presence I saw during the whole period was a German diplomat taking his friends to see some ruins further east, which I doubt he would have been doing if he knew there was serious unrest. Internet is barely utilized there - how are they going to gather intelligence? It really gives you food for thought. Stay off the wires (including finance), and it's very hard for them to see much of anything.

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And the other way round. I lived in Beijing at the time when Americans bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade (May 1999). CNN and other Western news channels were showing films of furious Chinese protesters shouting and throwing things at the U.S. embassy buildings in Beijing. This went on for days.

When I actually went to the Sanlitun embassy area, the closest thing to a riot was a stout Western woman walking her poodle outside the German embassy. Otherwise, it was too hot for anyone to bother go outside and everything was sleepy. The week's worth of rioting on CNN was shot during one day in a well-organized riot properly supervised by the local security officials.

There is no doubt the Chinese were genuinely offended, officials and public alike, but they wouldn't let such a thing cause disorder even though CNN etc. needed the drama.

The Chinese were far from being genuinely offended, they were more than happy with the parts of the spontaneously disassembled F-117A. Probably they even helped to make the new artificial lake afterwards.

What on earth are you talking about?

The Chinese got a complete crashed F117 during the NATO bombing.

So are you saying that the embassy was bombed to stop the transfer of F117 parts? Because that will need a source

There were various related rumors circulating at the time. You can draw your own conclusions but please allow others to share what is only available as oral history.

My personal favorite (heard in Beijing in the early 2000s) was the story that the Chinese military were monitoring the newly deployed American stealth fighters during the Belgrade bombing and had managed to get radar lock on one (or more) of the F-117As from their embassy. The Americans, the story goes, wanted no more of this and bombed the Chinese embassy.

According to The Font of all Knowledge [0] three Chinese "reporters" were killed in what the CIA admitted was its own bombing operation. It has long been common knowledge that the Chinese government uses the Xinhua news agency as a cover for clandestine operatives [1].

True or false, it'still an inventive rumor.

[0] (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_bombing_of_the...) [1] (http://www.nytimes.com/2000/02/20/world/in-watching-hong-kon...)

A more effective strategy to constant surveillance is to simply raise the background level to just below actionable threshold, so that way their intelligence is effectively useless. That is, really, you should just sit around all day and talk about how you dislike what they're doing, think they're career criminals betraying the nation, that you want to actively do something about it, etc. Bonus points for mixing that conversation with discussion about how you'd like to tour DC and see the various monuments, including the Washington monument, Lincoln memorial, and WWII memorial.

If the background unhappy chatter is close to actionable (or is in the mind of the classifying algorithms), then actionable chatter (eg, actually planning an attack) can only be distinguished from background chatter near when the plans become "active" in some sense, and likely too late to meaningfully respond to. (To use a physics analogy: if you try to predict cavitation in flowing water really close to boiling, it's harder.)

In many senses, simply embracing openly that we're very angry as a society, even in the face of constant scrutiny, prevents that same constant scrutiny from determining when we're planning something. It can only really tell that we're pissed off, in general.

Maybe you could create AI agents to flood the Internet with seditious chatter.

Amongst many, IBM has done something that does this and the opposite. It was funded by public money (DoD).

That sounds pretty interesting. Where could I learn more on this?

And then start an actual riot by mistake?

I mean, the whole point of that strategy is to provide statistical cover to prevent the detection of forming riots (or attacks) ahead of their actual nucleation and rioting (or attack). Effectively, you give the appearance of spontaneous formation of riots out of a near-rioting background, even though the actual formation still takes coordination ahead of time, by simply having a lot of times you don't actually plan a riot, you just say all the words to (preferably to random people).

So I wouldn't call it 'by mistake', more like 'by design'.

Of course a social uprising in Tunisia is very unlikely to spread to the USA. Movements in the UK, Australia and Canada however...

As for staying off the wires. Thanks to the network effect you need to have a large portion of your network do the same.

How is a social uprising in Tunisia more likely to spread to the UK or Canada than the USA?

They're saying that Tunisian movements are unlikely to spread to the US, but movements in the UK/Canada can spread to the US.

Thanks, that makes more sense.

The protesters didn't have cell phones? Just correlating their locations would tell you something was up.

I would say CIA likes to organize those, so maybe they can use those pretend 'Siren Servers' to claim they can sense unrest.

Probably they can detect uprising in Germany...

most certainly.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/04/us-nsa-gerhard...

It's interesting given that many citizens have predicted that things are about to collapse.

The difference was in the number of police man in the coastal cjties. They were non existant which suggests that the regime was fighting in the unrest locations at full capacity. It never happened before.

> Stay off the wires (including finance), and it's very hard for them to see much of anything.

NGOs. [yet again with silent (dumb?) downvotes in the same comment chain that mentions "network effects".]

I don't think I've ever seen a one-word comment make it on HN...

Maybe elaborate on what you mean? The single acronym in your reply doesn't actually expound a point of view.

NGO is very commonly understood to mean Non-Govermental Organizations.

OP proposes that staying "off wires" is a remedy. Simple point made is that intelligence agencies have recourse to wide ranging sensory networks, including NGOs (whether complicit or simply surveilled.)

Except that pointing out that an agency can, with investment, have limited, targeted active surveillance isn't really saying anything about what's effective from stopping that same agency from wide-scale, passive surveillance.

NGOs (even in the case where you're having their help by carrying scanners around for you) aren't within orders of magnitude of the information collected by the average person carrying a cell-phone and tapping the network. You would have to install expensive and complex monitoring equipment over the entire city and install the backend to process it to get even close -- a capability that the US government doesn't have to do everywhere. Which is why they made use of already deployed networks in the first place.

Stopping their passive surveillance strips them of 90% of their power, and NGOs (or other organizations) don't put even a tiny dent in that change.

Which is why many of us were looking for a little more argument than what was given: it's not clear, at all, why either you or the original person thought that NGOs have anywhere near the penetration in to everyday life or surveillance capability that cellphones have.

NGOs aren't used by intelligence agencies as a means of boosting signal intelligence, they're used as a means of boosting human intelligence.

NGOs tend to have overlapping members and social circles as grassroots organizations. They don't need to gather cell phone signal intelligence, they can just ask their staffers "what do you think of these protests?"

Different threat vector entirely.

> Different threat vector entirely.

My point was exactly that it's a different threat to have them have to collect human intelligence from NGOs rather than have every text message, phone call, email, etc from and up-to-the-minute location data on every person they're looking for intel on.

I don't care if the CIA can call up every NGO on the globe and talk to 50 different people there to get 50,000 reports on the current civil unrest across the globe, collate them down in to usable intelligence, and present that to our leaders. That's literally their job. They should do that. Lots of that. All of it they can. (I would be shocked if the CIA didn't already heavily extract intelligence from NGOs.)

It's just a completely different scale from being about to know where every person is minute-by-minute, and everything they say, text, email, read online, etc. forever, to be looked up and cross-referenced whenever you need. Particularly because the conversations with NGOs have to focus on targets of interest, while they can literally just watch every phone and digital transaction. All of them. All the time.

So I'll be blunt: you guys are just wrong that them being able to get any kind of intelligence from NGOs, be it sigint or humint, that would make up for the firehose of digital exchanges being shut down or rendered useless.

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