Comment by runamok | Hacker News Reader

Comment by runamok | Hacker News Reader

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It took 7 years for the courts to finally figure that out even though it seemed like ridiculous overreach to everyone.

Off the top of my head I recollect they were intercepting hardware like switches and compromising it, inserting spying equipment in Google data centers forceing them to now to end to end encryption and many other shady things.

Not to mention the collection of zero days that almost certainly will get discovered by other nation states and bad actors and risk our security. They used parallel construction with other law enforcement orgs as they leaked run of the mill criminal behavior (not national security related) so as to not disclose the real way they got the info.

There are many more examples of overreaches he brought to light but I don't recall all of it. The core concern I have is all this apparatus are tools of fascism and control of any dissenting voices including the opposing political party. Where we are politically today I think would be hard to fathom back when Snowden leaked all this.

> It took 7 years for the courts to finally figure that out

It was ruled illegal in 2015 by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

> inserting spying equipment in Google data centers

There is no evidence of this in the Snowden leaks or anywhere. Google would know if it had unaccounted for hardware in its datacenters. They put network analyzers on international links that carried Google traffic.

> they were intercepting hardware like switches and compromising it

For hardware shipped to targeted foreigners. We should expect our spy agencies to do this if they are even moderately competent.

> They used parallel construction with other law enforcement orgs as they leaked run of the mill criminal behavior (not national security related) so as to not disclose the real way they got the info.

Where is the evidence for this claim?

> The core concern I have is all this apparatus are tools of fascism and control of any dissenting voices including the opposing political party.

That would be a valid concern for unchecked domestic surveillance but not for what Snowden leaked.

Frankly I read about all this years ago so I'd have to spend a lot of time looking all this up and that's unlikely at the moment.

I may very well have some details wrong.

Re: parallel construction reference here though clearly this is more recent: https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/28/hemisphere-phone-records/

At the bottom of this article it references the NSA and Snowden but says no explicit links was proven. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction

Your link shows parallel construction from Hemisphere, which is separate from the NSA phone metadata collection program.

You make it seem like they’re just hitting Googles hardware randomly. It’s been postulated publicly that spies have been found at Google that facilitate information to the CCP. If I were a defense organization this would concern me and I believe they have legal clout to act. Liberal does not mean lawless. You expect USA to do nothing but sit back and accept it’s just a part of doing business to get spied on and IP theft?

I was on mobile so difficult to give adequate sources at the moment.

My point was they were essentially MITM'ing all traffic in google data centers. I fail to see how that "makes the US more secure".

"The National Security Agency has secretly broken into the main communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers around the world, according to documents obtained from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and interviews with knowledgeable officials.

By tapping those links, the agency has positioned itself to collect at will from hundreds of millions of user accounts, many of them belonging to Americans. The NSA does not keep everything it collects, but it keeps a lot."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-i...

Hacking private companies and spying on Americans seems outside their charter IMO.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Agency

> Hacking private companies and spying on Americans seems outside their charter IMO.

Aside from phone metadata collection, they weren't spying on Americans. They could tap communications of non-Americans outside the US, and they could find those communications in Google WAN traffic crossing the US border. It's Google's fault for not encrypting it because any number of other countries with fewer laws against spying on their citizens could have done the same thing. It is good that Google and other Internet companies now use https everywhere and encrypt their WAN traffic, but the threat vector should have been well known at that point given what China had already been doing publicly for years.

Do you have a reference for actual detected spies at Google? Of course it would be valuable to have them there. Google has lots of systems to keep track of what information you access thought, from when I was there. IE if you say want to look at PII like real user names for some debugging reason, you had to go through a portal that was along the lines of declaring: "I need to access this internal system that has PII, here is my authenticated request with my name on it". And when I was there, they would follow up and ask me about it. This was on a database product.

On the other hand, there were multiple stories about the guy from Saudi Arabia who was at twitter and I think he got away back to S.A.

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