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Comment by wtvanhest | Hacker News Reader

I think it is reasonable to assume that if the US can do it, at least one other country is actively doing it and that many governments of reasonable wealth are actively trying to gain that capability.

I'd be shocked if there are not 10+ countries actively trying to gain technology advantages for spying.

If you are going to ask this question, ask "Should any country be involved in spying". Then, if your answer is no, you have the obvious problem of trying to stop them, which is basically impossible. If the answer is yes, where do you draw the line?

I would guess that most people (especially US citizens) would be comfortable with the US recording a dictator's phone calls about genocides he is trying to commit but become very uncomfortable when they find out the US government is listening to their phone calls.

A lot of people both in the US and globally will draw that line in different places.

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Shouldn't the leaders of the free world set the best example for free countries to aspire to?

No one begrudges the US, UK, or any other country having spies and what not. They are essential to peace. Remember the point of spying is to understand your opponents real intentions. Imagine how vital it was to know that the USSR was NOT going to start WW3. Its all about how you use them.

I think part of problem here is the West using cold war apparatus to fight what is essentially civilian crime, which is what both drugs and terrorism are, after they lost "work" because of the fall of the USSR.

> No one begrudges the US, UK, or any other country having spies and what not. They are essential to peace.

Perhaps, but it has certainly not helped that the diplomatic traffic that formerly would have been carried on essentially separate channels is now carried on the Internet with the traffic of normal citizens. Even if we said it was OK for the NSA to peep on dictators and diplomats they'd still be tapping the same channels, but instead would be 'minimizing' a lot more.

> I think part of problem here is the West using cold war apparatus to fight what is essentially civilian crime, which is what both drugs and terrorism are, after they lost "work" because of the fall of the USSR.

Well, you're right, but the reason is because only the Cold War apparatus (and especially expertise) could realistically handle the demands the U.S. government is trying to put on itself to handle the work of counter-terrorism. The NSA isn't doing the work because they are the NSA and they felt like it, they're doing it because the FBI couldn't hack it even if they tried. Note that even now FBI is the agency that handles the NSLs and warrants and other legal niceties to/from the companies associated with PRISM.

The FBI is certainly not completely innocent in this type of stuff. They have COINTELPRO and Carnivore to their credit already, and also CALEA-associated types of technological wiretaps they can employ domestically any time they want (with appropriate documentation, of course)...

> "I'd be shocked if there are not 10+ countries actively trying to gain technology advantages for spying."

Yes, and US has spying "partnerships" to spy on each other's citizens, with all of them. If US really wanted to do something about stopping it, they could do it, at least for 80% of the "Internet".

Of course, in the end it's up to all of us to demand that. The US government will never do it on its own. Just like it sees an advantage in having the strongest military power over others, it sees in advantage in being able to spy on every citizen on this planet, and having a large arsenal of viruses and hacked systems in other countries.

It's up to us to tell it that's wrong, at least if we still care about quaint things such as democracy, freedoms and human rights..

If your goal is to unilaterally disarm the West in the info wars while China, Russia etc. go unchecked, which of course they would because there is absolutely no chance of accountable governance, then count me out. I want the West to win the info wars, we just need to make sure there is proper oversight.

I would much rather the west create an infrastructure that minimizes any destruction from an infowar entirely. As much of all infrastructure in every country and all endpoints sold (phones, tablets, computers) should have end-to-end encryption.

If the USG wants to protect us from any country they consider an aggressor in the info wars, then they need to equip every one of us (its citizens) with the tools to protect ourselves.

The US does not know which of the kids today will grow up to be a Senator, Congressman, President, NSA agent, CIA agent, etc. If one of the infowar aggressors had the kind of information on every US citizen that we suspect the NSA to have, then that means that they could have enough information to blackmail many of this nation's future leaders, with many of us being none the wiser.

Take David Patraeus for example. What if a foreign intelligence agency knew about his extramarital affair, but no one else did. That's a perfect circumstance for that agency to coerce him.

Add to that fact that the NSA and CIA recruits heavily from the Mormon community. Imagine if one of those people was a gay and still had not come out about that fact. Such a person may be extremely worried about being outed to their friends and family in their religious community. Imagine if a foreign intelligence agency knew everyone who was was still in the closet. They would all be blackmailable. [0]

[0] One of my very close friends is bisexual and was raised as a very devout Mormon (but left the Church years ago) and she completely agrees that this could be a reality for a Mormon who has not yet come out of the closet, because of how much that community chastises people who are gay. Most of the people she knew growing up completely disowned her since coming out of the closet and leaving the Church.

> If the USG wants to protect us from any country they consider an aggressor in the info wars, then they need to equip every one of us (its citizens) with the tools to protect ourselves.

Well the USG has given us SHA-1, NSA Suite B collection of Cryptographic standards, NIST-organized crypto standards, and have funded the development and most of the ongoing maintainence of Tor.

So they're trying to be helpful in that regards, which is why you can't just talk about USG as if it was a single-headed monster.

I'm saying that they should further promote the usage of everyone of those technologies everywhere, all the time, by all the people of these United States.

Protecting us from enemies that could coerce future leaders has the great benefit of also protecting us from the NSA.

>Well the USG has given us SHA-1, NSA Suite B collection of Cryptographic standards, NIST-organized crypto standards, and have funded the development and most of the ongoing maintainence of Tor.

Certainly. But they've also given us CALEA-mandated backdoors into telecommunications equipment and a regulatory environment that encourages wanton third party custody over sensitive information.

Obviously some of this is subtle and unintended. For example, allowing government-issued spectrum monopolies to be leveraged into walled garden mobile devices is seriously bad for security because it excludes anyone from improving the security of the device's OS or system components other than the manufacturers/carriers who coincidentally have the incentive to deny anything that would reduce user dependence on cloud-based data storage.

The point being, even if we're not doing nothing, we could be doing more.

> The point being, even if we're not doing nothing, we could be doing more.

Fully agreed on that!

The info wars will not have a winner, any more than warfare with black powder, warfare with motorized artillery, or warfare with airplanes produced clear winners. The best possible outcome is to survive until the next kind of war makes the current one obsolete.

> Then, if your answer is no, you have the obvious problem of trying to stop them, which is basically impossible.

Are you sure about that?

My takeaway from all of this is that we, as a population, need to invest heavily in counter-surveillance technology and employ it everywhere. Even if we were to succeed in legislatively prohibiting the NSA from conducting widespread surveillance, what about other countries? It would be at least as dangerous for China to have the information the NSA is gathering as it is for the NSA to have it. This is a wake up call that something needs to be done in the way of making mass surveillance as difficult as technologically possible. The vulnerability in our infrastructure that the NSA is currently exploiting is one that needs to be patched.

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