Caveat, I'm a European (well a Brit, so almost European) and I'm appalled by US and yes British violations of privacy and surveillance overreach. Things like the threats to cripple or ban private use of strong encryption are appallingly damaging and misguided.
However nations with an elected government accountable to the people doing this stuff is one thing. We still have the right and mechanisms to protest and these protests have frequently made a real difference. strong encryption of private communications is till legal and threats to it have gone nowhere. The fact that governments from multiple political groups, in multiple countries have looked at this and decided that the benefits to their electorate outweigh the dangers offers at least some comfort. It's at least possible that they are right, although I would prefer much stronger checks and balances.
Pervasive active harvesting, analysis, intervention, censorship and subsequent punishments of 'private' communication by a totalitarian state, with the open goal of enforcing ideological obedience is not the same thing, and it's not ok. At all.
If I'm developing some kind on tech, both have been caught using their state agencies to do industrial spying; if I'm active in some push for some non-mainstream activism (like, abolishing copyrights), both have done out of jurisdiction enforcement of their policies, and there isn't much difference on means either.
Personally, I'd imagine China spying on me is a smaller risk than the US, since my country is more under political influence of the US. But whatever you do, you will have to protect or subject yourself to government spying, thus there isn't any big difference.
That seems like an absolutely absurd comparison. The US government is elected, if enough of the population cared about the issue (and who knows, as it gets worse, they might) the government can be held accountable at the ballot box. The same is in no way true in China.
Going with the copyright theme: most American voters would have been happy with the copyright provisions of the trans-atlantic treaty since that increased "shareholder value" that would benefit their 401k's.
Even aside from that, China is actively exporting their political and economic model all over the world. They are using economic investments and financial grants to companies, institutions and cultural organisations as leverage to stifle criticism, and silence factual reporting of events in China all over the world, and almost certainly in your own country too.
Luckily, it has now expired and was not renewed. Some reading on this very controversial section:
https://www.csis.org/analysis/fact-sheet-section-215-usa-pat...
As if the three-letter agencies never tried to cripple encryption before September 11th, 2001...
https://weakdh.org/imperfect-forward-secrecy-ccs15.pdf
Basically, for about $100M per prime (probs cheaper now), you can pre compute a big table that you can use to decrypt the diffie hellman exchange. From there you have the negotiated private keys, and you're off to the races for a full, real time decrypt. Since before the Snowden leaks, there wasn't the public thought that the choice of primes for diffie hellman mattered really for it's security, most implementations hardcoded the prime. Something like 92% of the top 1 million https sites were using the same 2 primes, and similar numbers of VPN and SSH implementations were vulnerable too.
So for a one time cost of ~$200m the NSA was able to decrypt the vast majority of internet traffic as long as they caught the diffie hellman exchange at the beginning.
"An internal investigation by the C.I.A. has found that its officers penetrated a computer network used by the Senate Intelligence Committee in preparing its damning report on the C.I.A.’s detention and interrogation program. "
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/08/01/world/senate-intellige...
You do know they have the worst dirt on everyone right?
step1. public pressures on the electorate
step2. electorate pressures on spying agencies
... and step1 is impossible in China
I will add more:
- where is the pressure to close Guantanamo?
- where is the pressure to como clean with the lies leading to the Irak war?
There is a lot of it. However, it's countered by the pressure of, "Where do we send those people? My constituents don't want them in our district."
Wow, that Brexit is really taking a toll on your collective psyche, isn't it? :)
https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/isbritaineuropea...
Does the UK do mass-surveillance of it's own and foreign citizens, on UK soil and outside ? Yes [1]
Strong encryption of private communications is NOT legal in the UK. You have to give the police access when they request it and you cannot use the rights you have in the US to avoid giving this access [2]. (unless you consider strong encryption stuff where you have to make all keys available to the police, border guard, gchq, foreign intelligence services, and others still strong encryption. I don't)
The other huge difference is that the UK refuses to be accountable for their mass surveillance afterwards. In the US a big demand is that there is a paper trail for spying, to the person being spied upon. Granted, this may be buried in something like a phone contract for mass-targeting. When they target you specifically, however, you will be notified (afterwards, if the judge so decides, but can even be beforehand), and failure to do this makes the spying illegal. Furthermore, this gives private individuals and companies the option to sue to have the police/FBI/NSA/DEA/... explain themselves (and more generally the US state).
In the UK however:
1) No notification is given to the person being spied upon. The state just does it.
2) There is no recourse. If you were spied upon because a police officer wanted to be your boyfriend and needed to know where your actual boyfried was to beat him up, that's legal. [3] (yes, I realize these guys got fired, however, their actions were ruled legal)
3) If anyone in the UK takes the side of the person being spied upon, whether an internet provider, an application provider (ie. outlook.com/fb/gmail/...), they will be vigorously pursued and punished for that. This is highly illegal.
4) The UK has cooperation treaties (ie. EU treaties, and others) that let police officers in ~70 countries spy on British citizens (I heard that these treaties were used to install a phone tap, yes really, on Angela Merkel's phone. Yes, that Angela Merkel. The utter incompetence is baffling in it's scope. And yes, the guy (an officer) did this as a joke and got fired for it)
So to say I don't understand your criticism here massively understates the situation ... Obviously, as a UK citizen you've got some more local problems to sort out before you criticize the US.
In reality, the UK/EU is pushing these news articles and blowing up cooperation for EXACTLY the opposite reason : they don't want increased privacy for people, they want to further reduce it. They want the US to honor spying requests without respecting US law. They don't want Facebook to ask "can you explain why this is really necessary" when a police officer is asking for the exact location of EU citizens. They don't want to give reasons, and they certainly don't want the person to be told afterwards (and potentially sue them). They want full FB and instagram chat logs in every divorce case. They want ever single email a person ever sent in every commercial dispute. They want every police force and secret service in Europe to have access to every Europeans every mail, immediately, with zero oversight or tracking, and especially without any paper trail available to their victims. THAT's what Europe is fighting for.
THAT's what they're calling "US surveillance overreach".
Well, that, and the fact that the US successfully recorded some rather high level conversations between Merkel and Macron and managed to get caught doing it. In other words, they're incompetent, and angry. And of course, that's the US's fault (despite, of course, that Germany was also caught attempting to bug Obama, and caught having successfully bugged several high level officials before getting caught). And of course, they're angry for Trump getting elected (if you don't believe me, watch this [4], and listen to the questions).
That's why there is this campaign of "the US is horrible on privacy". There is "no cooperation". But, sadly, the US is the champion of privacy in this particular fight.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance_in_the_Unite...
[2] https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/25/traveler-who-refused-to-gi...
[3] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1371833/20-police-of...
I say that as someone with a UK passport.
I wonder why this is being downvoted so badly.
But the UK really stands out within the EU.
In isolation you're right. To expand it: "If you want to host an anti-{russia,putin,trump,jew,white,black,asian,democracy,kim} 'news' website" (as in against all or some of those) then the US would be the place to do it.
IOW: Good luck with anti-Putin in Russia or Nazi in Germany. The US is your best bet. The US didn't raid news papers forcing journalists to drill holes through their hard drives. The UK did.
> I'm a fan of free speech, but am generally against Nazis as a concept. We fought a war over this :)
We didn't fight a war over someone's right to be a Nazi. They really did start it. And the US didn't really join until it was actually attacked, if you're American. They also didn't fight a war about someone's right to be Japanese (or even their right to believe in the divinity of their emperor).
Chamberlain even thought Nazis could be part of the "peace for our time".
Please.
(and doxxing is not about expressing your thoughts and ideas)
Where on earth did I say that? You cannot deny, however, that it is far more prevalent.
And that doesn't stop people from crying "censorship" when people who dox get banned from Twitter.
> I'm fairly certain that in Voltaire's time, they didn't have coordinated harassment/doxxing campaigns on social media.
Harassment: Existed.
Doxxing: Off topic. Not thoughts and opinions. (Voltaire said "disagree". You don't agree or disagree about someone's home address or real name)
Social media: We live in a more connected world. In a less connected world the same effects would be had in your local community.
> And that doesn't stop people from crying "censorship" when people who dox get banned from Twitter.
Straw man. Also publishing other people's copyrighted works is not censorship.
You're changing the topic. doxxing (which you have now brought up TWICE) has nothing to do with it.
China routinely imprisons political subversives. It has among the lowest rates of voluntary organ donors in the world, yet it has one of the largest rates of organ transplants. Those organs come from prisoners, many of them political prisoners. They’re using that surveillance system to identify and incarcerate these people right now.
But hey. The NSA has files on people too so who cares? How many people, have been broken up for spare parts by the NSA or due to overreaching US and British Intelligence? In China it’s probably in the tens to hundreds of thousands. This isn’t ‘very concerning’. It’s horrifying.
EDIT: I think I misunderstood your point. In my post I did specifically call out British involvement in mass surveillance right alongside the US. Or maybe you think I should have called it out more? I’m a bit confused.
And the US and UK, the Netherlands, France and I believe Italy have all been caught protecting police officers that used surveillance powers for that purpose I alluded to (finding boyfriends of a girl a police officer likes and beating them up). Given that list, I feel like we can safely assume that all EU states in fact de-facto allow and protect police officers doing this. Likewise police officers have been caught sporadically using official "legal intercept" tools to "help" in divorce, finding children they abused, finding ex-lovers they had a quarrel with, and the like.
Note: I don't mean just that police officers did that, that's troubling enough by itself that those tools allow that. My main complaint is that the justice system protected those police officers from the consequences of those actions.
The only case where the police seems to find this behavior by their own officers unacceptable is when it's directly used to help a (non-police-officer) criminal. And this is very widespread behavior. It happens in the US (but of course, in the US the victims (eventually) get notified that an officer did that, so you can sue them), it happens in the EU, and in the EU it's completely unchecked and unchallengeable, and "surprisingly" this does not lead to them using it more responsibly.
I find things just baffling. FB/Google/MS/... are all begin vigorously pursued for essentially selling your contact list ... by people who used violence against ISPs/ASPs (like FB/Google/MS/... but not just them) to allow police officers to beat up love rivals and abuse children. And when they got caught doing that ... they immediately rallied behind the criminals (because yes, what those officers did was in fact criminal in almost all cases).
I feel like we've got much bigger problems here than Trump's campaign using contact lists from phones/FB to get more people to vote for him. And I feel like the EU should not be criticizing anyone for being weak on privacy.
People are being a little naive. The US gets its "grubby" hands on every little thing you do, as does China. The question is not, "Which 'grubby' hands do I wish to allow to do my deep body cavity search?" But rather, "Why, exactly, do I need to submit to deep body cavity searches by 'grubby' hands at all?"
two clains were made:
* that the NSA as compromised all major tech
* the us gets it's grubby hands on all your data
in support of which no evidence was presented. a user kindly linked me to a Wikipedia page on PRISM. However, that program is only ISP data, requires a warrant for domestic purposes.
Meanwhile, Qualcomm has several programs running below the OS level that track users "anonymously" in various ways. Such systems can much more easily be co-opted by other parties such as governments.
That's a very poor assumption. One very common method is to get some dirt on someone, then blackmail them into getting a job with access to data they want. That doesn't have to be classified data, they're also interested (probably more so) in corporate espionage so they can make products better and cheaper.
Then there's economic disruption. Where you're not a target as an individual, but as a group. E.g. everyone using their device with Verizon's service might have their service go funky, people think it's Verizon and switch. Or certain websites appear slow/unavailable so you buy something from a different one.
Of course there's lots of other ways they could use it to their advantage, but the point is, civilians are very likely to be targets too, for a multitude of reasons.
That's every engineer in the world.
US does not seem to steal for economic purposes at all.
Well at least not on the same scale.
Sorry but they use their intelligence for economic reasons e.g. Airbus contracts. And Snowden leaks also revealed that spying is not only limited to security or political targets...
And to be honest with the current American President who is "hugely" (so yuge you could not believe it) untrustworthy and is certainly not a friend of the other western countries, I can't honestly say that it's very difficult anno 2018 to determine who you can trust.
> The U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence said it does collect information about economic and financial matters, and terrorist financing. "What we do not do, as we have said many times, is use our foreign intelligence capabilities to steal the trade secrets of foreign companies on behalf of - or give intelligence we collect to - U.S. companies to enhance their international competitiveness or increase their bottom line," it said in a statement
http://money.cnn.com/2015/04/30/news/airbus-germany-nsa-spyi...
China has wide spread state sponsored stealing to help their companies. US does not seem to.
http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1996-11-01/news/1996306048_...
https://nypost.com/2000/07/10/giant-u-s-spy-vacuum-sparks-a-...
A lot of it happened in the Advocacy Center and/or Office of Executive Support. The European Parliament's report on Echelon talks about some of it:
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/EPRS/EPRS_STUDY_538877_Affaire...
Far as that last part, the U.S. does something quite different: a corrupt Congress makes patent and copyright laws so ridiculously strong that they make compatability/competition with big, U.S. companies anywhere from difficult to impossible. The best examples are in smartphone market where Apple tries to block Chinese and Korean products. Microsoft also pulled in about a billion in Android royalties despite not contributing anything to Android's success.
Also note that a lot of Silicon Valley heavyweights started out with big funding from the government, esp DARPA. Kind of similar to state-sponsoring of companies in China. From there, the U.S. companies legally rob or block competition via vaguely-worded, broad, long-lasting patents. Recently, competition blocking API rulings. The Chinese do it via spies and suppliers that iterate fast. I don't see one having moral high ground over the other if they're both doing things that harm the many to benefit a tiny, rich few legally backed with bribery or other corruption.
because, you know, the us does not steal trade secrets, which proves that trade secrets are not stolen, by the us.
Is that a joke? https://www.heise.de/tp/features/Former-CIA-Director-Says-US...
That is bad but different to stealing technology using hidden back doors which China reportedly does. I have no evidence either way.
But pressuring third world nations to do things not in their economic interests is not that different to what the One Belt One Road program is doing using loans on uneconomic projects.
Both are bad but US does not seem to steal technology through hacking like China does. I am not sure why
Maybe not through hacking but historical a lot of the industrial revolution that happened in the US was by means of "stealing" British technology, improving on it and don't have any regards for their patents at that time.
There is really some irony somewhere in there.
China does innovate. But it is a nation sponsoring technology stealing on a huge scale. I don't think USA ever did that. I am happy to be proved wrong.
The strong will always prefer to steal from the weak, those who cannot fight back. I'm not saying Chinese are good or they aren't doing the same or the potential horrendous impact them stealing some powerful technology. But one have to agree in most cases it's not preying upon the weak and defenseless.
Its just an interesting observation really.
Now nobody believes in anybody, because when it was needed, principles were traded for strategic advances.
Right now on HN two of the top five discussions have been derailed in this manner. Curious.
I'm a Chinese citizen, and ever since I started reading HN a few years ago, it feels like the media and comments in general are mostly negative towards China, or specifically to Chinese government. In rare occasions you have people trying to offer some different perspectives from someone who lived in China (like 1 out of 10 comments), but a large percentage of them get downvoted. This has not changed at all. So really, if there were a propaganda effort, it had failed miserably. The audience on HN just don't buy pro-China propaganda (for better or worse).
The ironic part about your argument is that whenever there is a positive news about China (like this one), it quickly derails into criticism of China.
Exactly. It's surprising that there's a big hue and cry over Chinese spyware (the Lenovo episode) while the US's NSA has been proven to possess know-how to even spy on leaders of other powerful developed nations, and destabilize a nation's nuclear program with just malware.
In China, as far as I can tell, anything goes. Corporations work hand in hand with the government, and control of the population through spying and "social scores" is a high and very open priority for the government.
So, overall, there's not that much of a difference for most of the world. One might even argue that for outsiders Chinese relatively stable direction and autocracy is marginally better than American flipping every 8 years, since it allows you to better assess threat profile.
Edit: added a bit about assessing threat.
Only a tiny percentage of non-Americans are within the jurisdiction of the US. This means that the vast majority of them are not protected by the constitution - which was the parent's point.
1. Preventing another 9/11
2. Selling advertising
Ehh... Isn't it both?
Let's not forget that the US has a history of things like, training, supporting ho chi Minh - only to end up fighting a war against him. Training, supporting Mujahideen - only to end up fighting a war. Supporting Saddam Hussein, only to fight a war. Training, supporting contras and similar forces in Latin America - and is now fighting a shooting war on drugs in these countries...
[ed: as mentioned in a sibling comment - China intervened with troops in Korea - my apologies - I'm afraid the Vietnam War and later conflicts are more fresh in my mind.
Due to internal strife and catastrophes China was not very active on the international floor in the last century but boy did they step in it when they did.
I call it a necessary evil.
Some believe in the West.
Some believe in China.
Some believe in neither.
Some believe in both.
Etc etc etc.
You'll be arguing back and forth forever if you're just arguing belief systems. It's not like math. You can't really ever "prove" one system is "right".
I'll be honest, I cannot think of a Western nation equivalent of the "great firewall" in China. I'm also not aware of a national campaign to block VPNs, as seems to be happening in China. I'm not aware of Western nations actively blocking access to foreign websites, either, as China seems to be.
Thus, based on this and other examples, I don't think it's unfair to think that the internet seems quite a bit more tightly controlled in China. This is not to excuse NSA style spying, but first impression is I might not even be allowed to openly talk about Chinese spying on Chinese social media to be honest.
From an outside perspective, America is a horrible country where the rich live in a world of their own and everyone else suffers.
You have the largest population percentage of jailed citizens of any country on earth. Yet one of the smallest percentages of rich people getting convicted for crimes they are indicted with - so there isn’t really justice or equality in your justice system.
Freedom for the most part is true, but you need wealth to utilize it.
Equality is a joke. You’re the only country in the world that has no maternity leave. You’re the only country in the west that has no workers rights on maximum hours, paid vacation or sick leave. You have one of the best healthcare systems in the world for the 1% who can afford it and one of the worst healthcare systems in the world for those who can’t. You have next to no social mobility, you have a terrible educational system and you truly punish unskilled langur. It’s ironic, but America isn’t even in the top 100 as far as the American dream goes because breaking out of the social casts you’re born into is so hard.
Don’t get me wrong, America is a symbol of freedom compared to China and it saddens me that you’re constantly falling behind, but the next 150 years of human history belong to China.
Freedom isn't the right to do what you want. It's the right to be left to your own devices, within the law. America is the most successful meritocracy in the world. Freedom of endevour, if you will.
Second, equality don't mean everybody is equal. It means given any two people with the same qualifications, experience, work ethic, etc and same risk via statistical analysis, they should have equal opportunity.
Third (and I don't even why you're arguing about employment opportunities), employment is a contract between two people. If somebody can't find a job paying 20 dollars an hour for their service, they should have the right to negotiate a lower wage to justify their employment. A minimum wage of above 20 dollars simply makes that person unemployable. Talking about paid vacation, it's the same thing. If you're worth it then your employer will provide it. If you are not worth it, and it is a right, then too bad you don't get a job. Some US engineers I know get insane amounts of paid leave that I could only dream of (coming from a country with mandated vacation).
America along with China are two of the very few countries left where people get compensated what they're worth. China not so much because of rampant socially accepted bribing, connections, etc.
The version that you're referencing would have most of the NSA up on the gallows. But it is obviously not the version running our society and being pushed onto the rest of the world.
America as it stands today, is the most free country in the world. It may sound grim, and that's because it is.
I don't indict NSA/USG because I want the US to collapse, but because their behaviors are setting up the collapse.
Not even sure they are very relevant to Americans either.
Why do we have to accept that American devices are rooted at all? To me, "American values" means that US citens' communication isn't tapped without a warrant obtained with probable cause of a crime.
Instead it sounds like I'm supposed to choose between a surveillance state.
The question is more about building in faults intentionally, versus exploiting accidental faults. The later is fair, but the former is very troublesome. I haven’t seen any evidence of the first one. In fact, when such attempts have been made — primarily in encryption — they’ve been routinely shutdown. See Clipper Chip, and most recently NIST coming out against against the very ecliptic curve coefficients it suggested, and then going on to say not to ever trust NIST coefficients in encryption.
Lately they have been coming out with really good things. The Matebook X Pro is amazing and can easily compete with Dells latest offerings, and Deepin Linux 15.6 has its own very modern user interface that makes it very enjoyable to use. Finally a linux distribution with a good sense of western style and performance, and it comes from China of all places.
Its important to be careful of spyware however, but that goes for American software as well. There is plenty of evidence that NSA is spying on everybody, and probably has access to most Americans emails and web habits already.