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Comment by p01926 | Hacker News Reader

p01926

How much longer can this continue? We have American agencies attacking American companies "because terrorism". It's been 13 years since our trauma, maybe now's the time to remove the razor blade from our wrists, look ourselves in the mirror and just carry on. Bad stuff is always going to be in our future — stuff that will increasingly appear preventable between the Internet and a lot of hindsight — but our current solution is only making things worse. The war on terror, like all the metaphorical wars, is really a civil war. It needs to stop now.

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Unofficially, politicians has surrendered the "because terrorism" excuse for a while now, as they simply want access to everyones private information in order to see where the problem are going to be. Having the data helps plan and run successful elections, makes it easier to plan ahead, and gives them power over any department which doesn't has similar access.

Imagine being in a political party while private intelligence contractor give you access to all the emails from the other side. You can know where all the activists are at any moment, and what the internal conflicts are, and what areas is focused. What would be your reaction if phones suddenly started to get encrypted?

I don't think they want that. They take this course because "this was preventable!" is very politically disruptive. None of them want to be the guy who voted against mandatory data retention only to play host to an attack on home soil months later. It's sad, but that's the reality.

The history of government spying, at least as far back as J Edgar Hoover, as been about spying on members of the opposition, not about ass-covering. ass-covering is just the current halfway-excuse.

You effectively had that during the latter Hoover years with the FBI. That the headquarters is still named after him is an indictment of the US approach to political corruption.

I'm actually somewhat torn on this.

While I'm against mass surveillance, I think that targeted surveillance can be a good thing. By nature of it being targeted, it is expensive to use on more people than necessary. The kind of spying the CIA would enable through compromising Apple secrets would be restricted to high-value targets if for no other reason than to ensure none of their targets knew they had that capability.

There are bad people out there, and we expect our government to stop them.

A universe neatly compartmentalized into good guys and bad guys. How wonderfully simplistic. Let's just hope the good guys always wear capes so the government knows who to hire.

There are lots of targeted surveillance techniques that don't involve massive federal agencies working to eliminate all possible privacy protections just in case they need to make it easy to spy on anyone, anytime.

> The kind of spying the CIA would enable through compromising Apple secrets would be restricted to high-value targets if for no other reason than to ensure none of their targets knew they had that capability.

Just like the intelligence gleaned from breaking German WWII encryption was limited?

If information can be non-invasively extracted, then there is only an operational limit on use. And isn't knowing mass information just as wrong as acting on mass information?

Unless it's a computationally-expensive attack (which are getting more infeasible now that key sizes aren't technically as limited), you run into the encryption problem: either everything being encrypted is okay, or nothing being encrypted is okay.

That's the nature of secrecy.

I'm strongly opposed to sweeping surveillance, but not even a little bit torn on this story. I'm glad it's now public knowledge, but this is exactly the sort of thing our intelligence agencies should be doing.

Edit to expand on "should be doing": at the very least, they ought to explore such vulnerabilities as a defensive measure since their counterparts in every other State are clearly doing the same thing whenever they have the capability.

I really don't think that "Well, Russia's Doing It!" is a very good justification for clearly unethical, and probably illegal, actions.

The reason for mass surveillance is control of the populace. Mass surveillance clearly doesn't prevent terrorism: most of this 4th-Amendment-violating dragnet surveillance was in place well before the Boston Bombing, and nobody caught the Tsarnaevs.

So, I'm not a little torn, either: the CIA shouldn't be looking to crack iPhones, they should be looking to beef up iPhone security to keep those other nations from doing unethical stuff. Exploiting vulnerabilities for surveillance purposes is a bad thing all around. Close them holes!

> well before the Boston Bombing, and nobody caught the Tsarnaevs.

They were on the radar but you really can't arrest someone until they do something.

That's not true in America anymore. The USG can detain anyone, for any period of time, for any reason without rights "because terrorism".

https://www.aclu.org/blog/tag/ndaa

Edit:: link for more info

Did you read your own link? That would not have applied to the Tsarnaevs.

Why would it not have applied to the Tsarnaevs?

I did read that link, along with many other linked pages from the original link.

See here: https://www.aclu.org/national-security/president-obama-signs...

And here: http://www.salon.com/2011/12/16/three_myths_about_the_detent...

There does seem to be a lot of debate on this topic regarding the wording of the bill and how it applies to US citizens. However, to me, the wording seems very vague and open to interpretation. Which was likely on purpose.

Do you think it is illegal or unethical for the CIA to just explore these capabilities, or to develop them and use them only in a targeted way, subject to appropriate oversight?

I'm not a Judge, I'm not even a lawyer (trained in the magical ways of USA law), but I doubt it's unethical for anyone to just explore the possible ways to subvert iOS or whatever. It might be illegal to explore those possibilities, if you're not one of the insiders (there's a difference in how David Petraeus was prosecuted, vs how Thomas Drake was prosecuted). Trying any particular method of subversion might end up unethical, or maybe even illegal, whether you're the CIA or Weev.

I do not believe that the CIA, as it seems to exist today, is capable of doing that manner of subversion in a targeted way, they have gone rogue. I do not think that the CIA allows itself to be overseen. That part of the question is just not possible to answer.

If I understand correctly, you believe that the entire CIA as it currently exists is unethical and illegal. That may be a defensible position but it's an obstacle to discussing any specific action: how could you then support any action by the CIA? If the CIA shouldn't do anything then of course they shouldn't do this.

you believe that the entire CIA as it currently exists is unethical and illegal.

The CIA, as it appears now, does a huge number of unethical and apparently illegal things. It appears to be beyond oversight or control. I do find it really hard to support any action by them, just as I would find it hard to support FSB or MI6 actions. The CIA appears to be a threat to civil liberties and representative democracy in the US itself right now.

But you're falling into a rhetorical trap: just because coffee is hot, you don't wait until the coffee is cold to drink it. You can judge relative degrees of hot, just as we can judge relative degrees of unethicality. It's pretty darn bad to assassinate US citizens without due process, and I'd say due process in public, whether the citizen is abroad or on homeland soil. It's pretty darn bad to torture anyone. It's less bad to attempt to crack iOS to spy on people, and it would be even less wrong to explore the exploitability of iOS. The latter may not be wrong at all. It's completely OK to analyze open source intelligence.

Using "appropriate" and "oversight" in the same sentence is exactly what a smear campaign would be about.

Sorry, I don't follow.

Targeted surveillance... like a search warrant?

Somehow we have been doing fine under the constitution for 200 years. Now a dozen men kamikaze a building, and we have to take away everyone's freedom in order to protect them?

F that. Police and the executive branch are just being lazy. Get off your ass, do some human intelligence, investigate leads, and get a warrant if you have probable cause. Otherwise, get the hell out of my email.

When the chances of being killed by police are 55x higher than being killed by a terrorist (or whatever the recent number was) and we want to give the State more power, we are fools.

I remember when they busted Ulbricht thinking, "if they were able to catch someone who seemed by most accounts to be fairly careful (used encryption, Tor, etc.), how come we need dragnet surveillance?" I'd be curious to hear if dragnetting is even effective and if so, what the cost/benefit analysis is when you factor in both financial and ethical costs.

The USA has never needed a search warrant to conduct foreign intelligence. A search warrant requirement is a 4th amendment protection afforded to US citizens. Foreign intelligence does not require courts unless you're trying to get foreign information from US companies (like the PRISM program and the FISA courts).

The FBI (who is responsible for all intelligence conducted in the USA, against foreigners or Americans) is absolutely required to get a search warrant.

The iPhone is one of the most popular phones in the world. Is it that crazy that the CIA is interested in them for intelligence gathering purposes?

I'm fine with the legality foreign intelligence (even if I'm not sure it's the best policy). But what does that have to do with anything? The Snowden disclosures show that they're doing far, far, more: essentially indiscriminant eavesdropping of every possible form of domestic communication.

My point is that you were arguing against targeted collection. Going after individual devices is a scoped and precision form of intelligence collection. You were saying that this type of intelligence isn't targeted and was instead insisting they should have to get a warrant.

The point the original commentor was trying to make is that this type of work is much more preferable to the mass collection that you're referring to from the Snowden documents.

I don't know if inserting backdoors on apps in the development process, before they go out to everyone, counts as targeted collection.

This doesn't sound targeted:

by manipulating Xcode, the spies could compromise the devices and private data of anyone with apps made by a poisoned developer — potentially millions of people ...

The focus of the security researchers, as described at the CIA conferences, was to target the GID key, which Apple implants on all devices that use the same processors. [...] So, if intelligence agencies extract the GID key, it means they have information useful to compromising any device containing that key.

There are bad people out there, and some of them work at government agencies.

I could have written that myself, but the problem is that we really have a shadow government, one that is not accountable, not responsible, not regulated, and not in any way representative. If we were really interested in fixing this, we would hold the heinous people of the Bush administration (and even some if not most of the Obama administration) who were responsible for aiding and abetting "terrorism" by playing right into their goals, accountable for their treason through incompetence and stupidity and greed. No other people in the history of our country has ever caused us more damage than the Bush administration.

> It's been 13 years since our trauma

13 years since the latest trauma. The federal government and its propaganda broadcasters have been dwelling on the specter of "terrorism" a lot longer than that. Watch media from before 11SEP2001 and you'll remember the same disproportionate focus and overreaction for many other events.

This machine is much more than a decade old. We're just starting to notice the bubbles at the bottom of the pot.

I never thought I'd say this, but...

Enough with the hand-wringing. Enough with the "somebody needs to do sooooomething!". Just stop. Staaaaahp.

How long has our industry been spying on users? How much money have we made aggressively mining their data? And now, now, "These People Have Gone Too Far!"?

Please.

Everyone's got the tools. Everyone's got the knowhow, either themselves or online. Write code or quit bitching.

EDIT:

To the slightly different point given by poster: we have the power to broadcast this message of fearlessness to the populace at large, because we own their media. How hard a social media campaign would it be to overcome the fear and paranoia the .gov and mainstream media use?

Also, note that that same fearless attitude is directly contradicted by very popular social movements right now in certain consumer gaming industries. You're liable to end up with very strange bedfellows and enemies.

>The war on terror, like all the metaphorical wars, is really a civil war. It needs to stop now.

There's too much money at stake for those at the top for this to be stopped. Lucrative contracts for all their buddies whether it's in consultancy or providing military hardware and software.

I mean the fact that congress keep ordering tanks the military themselves have proclaimed loudly that they neither want nor need should be setting off alarm bells everywhere, and yet it seems to just get brushed over.

I think you're missing the real motive for Congress ordering hardware that the military doesn't want.

It's what their constituents want.

They are (by and large) not doing that sort of thing out of some scheming to enrich themselves. They want to be reelected to their next term, and delivering some federal cash and contracts to your district is the perfect way to do that.

> We have American agencies attacking American companies "because terrorism"

Wrong, and selfish.

We have American agencies attacking innocent people everywhere in the world "because terrorism".

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