Comment by r0h1n | Hacker News Reader

Comment by r0h1n | Hacker News Reader

> One classified document shows that GCHQ used its surveillance system to secretly monitor visitors to a WikiLeaks site. By exploiting its ability to tap into the fiber-optic cables that make up the backbone of the Internet, the agency confided to allies in 2012, it was able to collect the IP addresses of visitors in real time, as well as the search terms that visitors used to reach the site from search engines like Google.

This is real-time surveillance of website visitors & search terms to websites that governments don't like. I'm guessing it wouldn't take much for them to correlate those visitors to IP addresses, cookies, device IDs and cell tower signals to pinpoint people in real time too?

Knock knock

Who is it?

It's the police. We know you're browsing Wikileaks right now.

Edit: Looks like GCHQ's "ANTICRISIS GIRL" [0], the tool used to monitor Wikileaks visitors in real time, was based on Piwik [1]

[0] https://prod01-cdn01.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-uploads/2014/02/pi...

[1] http://piwik.org/

Ok. The GCHQ affair is making me go crazy, since as soon as i read

>ANTICRISIS GIRL

my brain came to a screeching halt, because I GET THE REFERENCE!

I am possibly the only person on HN go get it, because it is unlikely that anybody else here is a fanatic adherent of the Eurovision Song Contest.

The 2009 entry of Ukraine by Svetlana Loboda is called "Be My Valentine! (Anti-crisis Girl)" and here is a link[1].

WARNING: While not strictly NSFW, that video has a half-naked woman yelling "you are sexy bum", background dancers that can only be described as sex-legionaries and a catchy tune. She starts repeatedly screaming "anti-crisis girl" at about 2:30.

Now back to meaningful discussion about total global surveillance.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iA-HL-EfUbI

Your observation is spot on. The people doing the work for GCHQ and the NSA are just like us. They are geeks and technologists. They are probably members of hacker news.

This is the most believable part of the fantastic film Enemy of the State - the geeks in the van doing the work.

>The people doing the work for GCHQ and the NSA are just like us.

That's the scariest part: it's the banality of evil, updated for the XXI century. Would you turn down a safe and well-paid government job? Would you be a contractor building the Death Star?

(for the record, this is not a new question: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=iQd... )

You could always take the job and then build a tiny vulnerability into the exhaust ports. It'd be incredibly difficult for anybody to take advantage of such a vulnerability, so you'd probably get away with it.

Alternatively, you perform the task faithfully and are unfairly blamed when said feature is exploited by a family cabal :

http://www.dorkly.com/article/59234/an-open-letter-from-a-de...

The Death Star job would be almost impossible to turn down; space, lasers and stuff... but nope, working conditions suck, especially the boss who's a SERIOUS asshole.

Lord Vader simply has high standards.

A boss that kills of incompetent middle management and leaves the rank and file alone would be an improvement to some places I've worked. ;-)

Demolishing entire planets... not so much an improvement.

I turn them down in the sense that I have ruled out ever applying for those jobs. I've had enough angst when I thought my guild leadership in WoW was making unfair decisions, there is no way I could live with myself if I worked for one of these agencies.

>The people doing the work for GCHQ and the NSA are just like us. They are geeks and technologists.

Of course they are. What else would they be? And some might even frequent HN -- including certain apologists.

That doesn't make what they do any less disturbing or any less tied to interests against the general population and freedom.

So, the "Banality of Evil" reference below is spot on.

Good catch. I feel slightly uncomfortable when individuals engage in too much superhero / I'm the One fantasy. Just a wee bit too much adrenaline and dopamine sometimes.

I sincerely hope GCHQ don't have superhero costume parties. Even if they think they're something like The Justice League.

It's "funny" how our western system hypocritically decries censorship in China, North Korea et al. when we do the exact same thing, just in a little bit more hidden/less detectable way.

Comparing the UK to North Korea is fucking ridiculous.

http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/world-26223040

http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-26223180

Not if you make the comparison repeatedly over time and graph the results.

Parent comment wasn't comparing UK to NK. Just pointing out that my Prime Minister has spoken in a luke warm sort of way about human rights in China and in a slightly more vigourous way about human rights in NK while knowing all the time that GCHQ were carrying out very detailed observation of oppositional Web sites. My perception was that the parent post was more about the hypocrisy of our political leaders than the UK being a totalitarian country.

I agree that any suggestion that the UK is similar to NK is absurd. However, George Orwell did once point out that a revolution and the subsequent imposition of terror in the UK would actually be very easy to do within our legal system...

He is talking solely about how the governments treat internet users, so your comment makes as little sense as me mentioning that the British empire killed far more innocent people than NK ever did.

Most NK residents don't have any access. The ones that do have very heavily filtered Internet access. North Koreans who watch a prohibited tv show are executed or repeatedly raped while in prison or starved while in prison.

Comparin the treatment of North Korean Internet users to the treatment of UK Internet users is obscene.

It dilutes the actual point: UK government should not monitor the activities of its citizens without judicial oversight and very narrow reasons. That is an abuse of human rights and it is justifiably something to get angry about. But comparing "monitoring what people send to a website that distributes state secrets" with "forcing a woman to drown her new born baby in a bucket because she read the wrong book" is sub-optimal.

Well spotted. To be honest, I'd be pissed off if I found out GCHQ had repurposed my project for this sort of thing.

Not really possible to fix this situation either as "do no evil" license clauses are pointless.

If it was GPL you might be able to argue that they violated the derivatives clause. I doubt it would help since this is top secret intel work and I'm sure they have legal loop holes that essentially allow them to ignore things as trivial as copyright when it suits them.

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLRequireSourcePo...

s/GPL/AGPL/

Which raises the question of whether or not a program that passively wiretaps you falls under the provision of network services clause in that :)

Seeing as they talk about the pirate bay as an example of a target I would suspect they care A LOT about copyright issues and would do anything in their power to distribute their source code for the greater good.

This blanket surveillance reminds me of this interview with Pete Seeger:

RetroBites: Pete Seeger - Black List

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0_IME9WsHQ

A less paranoid interpretation is to recognise that governments think that releasing secret documents poses a risk to the security of the country and so the government security agencies will want to know who is providing information to, not consuming information from, Wikileaks.

This doesn't make it acceptable.

Why do they target Assange then?

So that he will tell them who is providing the source material...

I'm sure this rationale could be used to justify targeting the Pirate Bay, too. And dropbox/file sharing services. And webmail services. Google docs and similar services. Blogs. (...)

So I AM on a list! I feel so warm and fuzzy inside all of a sudden :)

I wonder what Merkel and Hollande's new "European Internet" will do to stop GCHQ from tapping the cables like they do now and then just hand over the info to US.

I'm not sure, but the fact that they want to 'do something' indicates a reaction to the status quo.

In the UK, we have a sort of passive acceptance of high levels of surveillance of the home population going back to the Northern Ireland Emergency starting 1968. It will need a lot to move the politicians away from that.

A suspicious man might notice a recent correlating resurgence in IRA bomb threats being bandied all over the news.

Their problem is that they want to tap the cables too.

How infiltrated is reddit. I'll wager on a scale from zero to one: 1.

How infiltrated is HackerNews? I'll wager on a scale from zero to one: 1.

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