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Comment by DigitalSea | Hacker News Reader

This is troubling on so many levels. Why did an FBI agent have a document of user and device info on his desktop and the real question is why are the FBI tracking this information in the first place? Surely this is illegal.

By the way, I think AntiSec needs to hire someone to write their releases for them. I struggled at times to make sense of the almost gibberish in their rant-filled sentences and at times some of the things they were saying read like the paranoid ramblings of a crystal meth addict. It wasn't until the end where everything they were saying was put into perspective and I understood what they were talking about.

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While yes, it was generally poor, I got a kick out of the following:

"a monthly fee, forever until you die. That's the future; nothing is really yours. LAAS - Life As A Service."

Not too poignant. When was living ever free?

The point isn't that life meant never having to work. To make a stylized sketch of it: life, or identity, is increasingly made more legible to the State. Legibility of information is the backbone of state power(1), moreso than even violence or popular support. Legibility of identity is therefore granting the state more power over the individual, which further undermines human autonomy by making the ability to live dependent on remaining in the good graces of the State, by paying our dues and contenting ourselves within the all-encompassing social system that develops.

(1)For instance, the first recorded use of writing is not typically for poems or liturgy but for tax documentation for imperial states.

I didn't enjoy it for its poignancy; I was simply delighted by the phrase "Life as a Service".

I was confused by the writing style as well. It seems to be almost intentional. I wonder if it's a way of avoiding any style or nuances that could be attributed to a single person. Almost like a cut and paste ransom note.

I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest. A lot of work has been done on adversarial stylometry recently, for precisely this reason.

ccc presentation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-b0Ta9h62_E

EDIT: also as grumpysimon says, it's a proud tradition going back decades.

It's elite (or 1337 if you will). It's supposed to sound cool. All the underground computer groups have talked like that since the early warez/cracking/phreaking scene.

Are you sure they're not just really bad at writing?

A lot of the "scene" traditions and symbols has a lineage back to adolescent boys in the early 80's as that's when many of the influential groups exploded onto the scene, so even if they're emulating a traditional style, they're emulating one that arose out of kids who wrote badly who tried to sound cool.

(I've some really horrible examples to my credit too, but thankfully I don't think any of it has survived)

It struck me as well-written but highly in-jokey, and targeted at a very specific audience. If they were writing for the general reader, this would be terrible. But I took it as addressing other members of the hacker scene, hoping to prompt them into similar politically-focused action.

I thought it was quite well written, also noticed the "Life as a Service" part. Maybe it only works on me because I thought about those things before, but it wouldn't be an effective propaganda piece.

> Surely this is illegal.

So? Pretty sure torture and car bombing innocent women and children is also illegal.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985_Beirut_car_bombing

We're talking about the FBI, not the CIA. You know, the same FBI that walked from Gitmo because detainee constitutional rights were being violated when they were being tortured.

I'd love to read the warrant that granted this disclosure. If one doesn't exist I'd love to hear Apple's reasoning for releasing a 12 million + user database to LE without being legally obliged to do so.

> We're talking about the FBI, not the CIA

They are both part of the government and the culture of 'laws for us vs laws for them (the regular people)' is present in both.

There's always one person in the comments section that leaves a comment that couldn't be any further disconnected from the discussion. As pointed out you're getting confused with the CIA, it even quite clearly says in the Wikipedia article you linked: "...a failed assassination attempt organized by the American CIA and British intelligence"

Lets not make this situation out to sound worse than it is. The FBI having access to 12 million UDID's and user information which apparently had holes in it anyway is nowhere near as bad as innocent civilians being killed and seriously injured. It's bad, but not that bad, calm down.

> you're getting confused with the CIA

No I am not. I was talking about the executive branch of the our government.

> Lets not make this situation out to sound worse than it is.

I was commenting on the assertion that this is 'illegal' and thus how could FBI possibly do this. And my response was that it seems illegality isn't exactly stopping anyone, be it FBI, CIA or other agency.

No need to go that far back - we can talk about the warrent-less wiretaps, or the pre-trial assassinations of US citizens.

...of course, the current administration insists that those are legal, but because they refuse to release a legal argument defending the practice, the best explanation they've given is 'Just trust us, okay?'. Not sure how that would hand up in a court of law.

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