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Comment by computerex | Hacker News Reader

What is your evidence? Even according to Snowden's leaks NSA only collected meta-data and not full on conversations and contents. Not cool at all and should have never happened, but it's a far cry from Chinese-style surveillance where there is absolutely no expectation of privacy at all.

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There are authorities that the NSA has used for voice transcriptions, and in the event they can't get it that way the 12333 Executive Order is waiting in the wings.

As far as "Chinese style" surveillance, I always note that it's always western or western-friendly information sources giving us the information on it. It's always filtered according to someone's interests, so when I subtract that from the issue I'm left with an estimation that it's probably not appreciably different than what we have in the US.

The bottom line is that these surveillance programs are lawful. We elected the officials that put these programs in place for the purposes of national security. If you think that the government is doing unlawful surveillance, you can take them to court. That's not a luxury you have in China.

You literally have NSA whistle-blowers stating, under oath, that these programs are not legal and the NSA is knowingly and purposefully violating the US constitution. [1] That testimony was part of Jewel v NSA [2] which emphasizes what happens when you take intelligence agencies to court. That case was filed more than a decade ago.

The government has already managed to get numerous key parts dismissed under state secrets privilege. [3] The government was also directed to preserve key data related to what remained of the case. In 2018 they informed the court they'd accidentally deleted it. Oops. [4] Oh yeah, in the same statement they also acknowledged they lied under oath when previously stating that they had preserved all relevant data on magnetic tapes and stored them with counsel. Oops again! Penalties.. consequences? You can guess.

And yes, you can also sue the government in China. Just don't expect to win.

[1] - https://publicintelligence.net/binney-nsa-declaration/

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewel_v._NSA

[3] - https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/02/jewel-v-nsa-making-sen...

[4] - https://www.lawfareblog.com/summary-jewel-v-nsa-and-accident...

The PRISM program was authorized by the congress and run under the supervision of the judiciary.

PRISM is selector-based (email, ph#), where is there anything to say that Chinese surveillance is more than that? I might just be ignorant of well-known facts, but there's nothing obvious to me so far with which to do a comparative analysis.

well, they tend to lock down things moreso than the US does (such as great firewall) at least currently, but I agree: it is mostly speculative as to what is there.

And China isn't going to downplay the speculation. Frankly, they want everyone to think they have the best, most thorough surveillance apparatus in the world. Even if it isn't stronger than what is done here, the perception is to their benefit.

And what do the Chinese hear about the world outside the GFW?

It sounds like you missed the show, because I don't know how anyone who watched it realtime could forget the comical cycle of Greenwald releasing enough to draw out Clapper for a denial, followed by another release proving Clapper a liar. This happened repeatedly, it was amazing how long it took for the USG to realize that their only option was to STFU, because they certainly were not going to stop doing what they wanted. I'm genuinely curious about how you came to the understanding that only meta-data was collected. The majority of my time is spent wading through bitrot and cataloging manipulated news stories, so I've seen a lot of concerted effort in rewriting history - but nothing on the scale of memoryholing Snowden's whistleblowing. Because the original lie was the meta-data misinformation you just unknowingly parroted, followed by a laughably stupid analogy wherein the NSA is running a public library and we are all books... with every revelation the analogy got more twisted. The moment they jumped the shark, signalling peak entertainment, was the director of the NSA showing up at Defcon in a black tshirt and jeans - trying to behave as if it wasn't the most cringe inducing "hello fellow kids" ever.

A quick skim of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program) reveals that "only collected meta-data and not full on conversations and contents" is false.

> Data, both content and metadata, that already have been collected under the PRISM program, may be searched for both US and non-US person identifiers.

There were many such programs that collected the data itself, as revealed by Snowden. PRISM is just the first that came to my mind.

Apologies on the formatting here. I think citing everything on this topic is absolutely critical since it's absolutely rife with misinformation. Dealing with formatting for extensive citations, alongside quotations of materials (for those who don't feel like perusing the first party sources) is tough in little more than ASCII and italics!

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The evidence is not too hard to find. This [1] site provides an extensive and ordered collection of most published Snowden related documents. It's also quite nice since it ties the documents to the first press coverage as well, if you'd rather peruse something other than the raw data. There seems to be a curiously large amount of misinformation on this topic, but when you actually look at the evidence - this situation is not in the least bit ambiguous.

These [2] slides give a broad overview of what PRISM is:

- Slide 3 describes PRISM: "PRISM -Collection directly from the servers of these U.S. Service Providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple".

- Slide 5 describes what is collected: "What will you receive in collection (surveillance and stored comms)?" - "in general" : "email, chat - video + voice, videos, photos, stored data, VoIP, file transfers, video conferencing, notifications of target activity - logins, etc, online social networking details, SPECIAL REQUESTS (caps added here to represent the bolding in the slide)".

This [3] is a document entitled "User's guide for Skype PRISM Collection". It gives some insight into how the program operates from an operative level including screenshots. It details surveillance of skype conversations, including conversations between skype and a landline connection. In skype-skype connections surveillance is available for audio, video, chat, and file transfers. It also mentions another program "DECODEORDAIN" which apparently maps different email addresses to a single person (used when engaging on surveillance on a target with skype registered under multiple email accounts).

That document also details that as data goes from Skype's servers, it also goes directly to the NSA. So this leads to situations where their agents can apparently become a bit confused about receiving multiple copies of the same chat log. That might happen, for instance, when a user logs onto a different device and his chat history is resyced so it goes from Skype to him as well as to the NSA. That's all made even more interesting by the fact that this was back from 2011 when Skype was still peer to peer. So while we get hints of how their process worked, the exact mechanisms are still a bit obscured.

There's a lot more really interesting stuff as well, but you could spend years going through all of it. Anyhow, suffice to say - no the government isn't just collecting just metadata. Anybody that says that is spreading misinformation either intentionally, or because they themselves have been misinformed and now think they're informing others.

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[1] - https://snowdenarchive.cjfe.org/greenstone/cgi-bin/library.c...

[2-article] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/us-intelligenc...

[2-slides] - https://snowdenarchive.cjfe.org/greenstone/collect/snowden1/...

[3-article] - https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/inside-the-nsa-...

[3-document] - https://snowdenarchive.cjfe.org/greenstone/collect/snowden1/...

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