[OT] It's clearly a slow news day today but what's with almost all the submissions today being very content-lite?

Very little actual news or explanation, just links to wikis or other content without any context.

Perhaps it's often like this but there is fewer people to shape the front-page today.

Perhaps submitter could explain the submission?

It's often like this. As an example, Wikipedia links[0] get posted frequently and, to me, it seems completely random when they will get a lot of votes. The pages that get votes don't seem to be any less interesting than the ones that do.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=wikipedia.org

I didn't submit it to HN, but I saw this link on the last page of Andy Müller-Maguhns talk [0] at 36C3 - this years chaos commication congress in Leipzig, Germany.

[0] Technical aspects of the surveillance in and around the Ecuadorian embassy in London - Details about the man hunt for Julian Assange and Wikileaks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoT4lPV96uw

Why should submitter explain the submission?

There's plenty of content in the link, and afaik we are all still being spied on by utterly unaccountable forces.

I don't think it's unreasonable to ask the author what they meant to convey with a random link.

the method of improving user submitted content that i prefer to use ends up being more enjoyable than asking for explanations when the material doesn't grab me.

As interesting as this wiki is, it doesn't appear to be actively maintained for a long time.

A wiki is a wiki: Content is maintained by all its users! Seeing an older longer history makes me confident that it will be around for longer, and that potential additions by readers won't go to waste.

You mean since the 8th of March?

I've helped architect the LI/Lawful Interception solution/integration aspect on a product that's not listed. I don't feel bad about this.

Should I? It's what's being used to catch murderers, kidnappers and terrorists. Its use is being controlled by very serious judges/courts.

> Its use is being controlled by very serious judges/courts.

'Controlled' is an overstatement: https://www.popehat.com/2014/07/15/warrants-bulwark-of-liber...

Not every country in the west is like the US.

Do we know how much tougher the warrant requirement is in other countries?

Australia is expanding anti-protest laws [1,2], the UK police is helping blacklist union organizers [3], and sharing information on disabled people and activist with private companies [4,5]. And as China's influence on Australia and New Zealand expands, there's a very real risk surveillance abuse will get even worse. And of course if you dare turn surveillance around on those with power, you can expect consequences [6]. There are precious few countries where surveillance is only used to catch murderers and kidnappers. And even in those, you're helping set up suppression infrastructure that a malicious government can use if they ever gain power in the future.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/aug/20/queen...

[2] https://www.smh.com.au/opinion/nsw-antiprotest-laws-are-part...

[3] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-43507728

[4] https://www.themeteor.org/2019/07/27/gmp-shares-disabled-pro...

[5] https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2009/apr/20/police-intelligen...

[6] https://www.businessinsider.com/tweets-that-got-people-arres... - 10th tweet

> There are precious few countries where surveillance is only used to catch murderers and kidnappers.

I think that number is down to ~0 after 9/11. The more relevant distiction nowadays is between countries that are performing mass surveillance and those that are not.

How could you ever know that a country is not performing mass surveillance?

It just takes one leak to show that one does, but confirming the opposite seems impossible to me. You'd have to know everything about every detail of the whole government.

The technically competent countries are (probably) doing it. That's the best I can say, honestly.

What's your argument against adding it then?

(I see what you're doing.)

This was about a decade ago. Not sure if it's still being used, but I think it may be, at least in one country.

Obviously, what I worried about was: The same technical solution could then be sold by less scrupulous sales people to less democratic countries and then misused badly.

I made sure there were a number of undocumented steps involved in setting up LI that couldn't be done without involving me or one trusted developer directly.

It was also purposefully architected to handle a scale of wiretapping of about 1 in 10000 people nationwide.

That 1:10000 ratio was the the ratio I got "off-the-record" from someone in the first western customer country. I was okay with that ratio, given that the country was democratic.

To clarify: I took pains to make sure that the mechanism could only be used to extract a fraction of the traffic flowing through our hardware, and that the selectors had to be preselected in a pretty meticulous way.

Basically I spent a bunch of time to make sure to deliver the exact minimum of that what the country's government requested. There was never any pushback. I think our counterpart in this case was legimitely just trying to solve crime, as opposed to performing passive mass surveillance/recording.

My main point here is that LI can make sense, if it is done done at small scale. Manual work needs to be involved. It needs to be a little cumbersome.

Western democratic countries use this for unscrupulous purposes too, just look at the many documented instances in the USA for example.

Anyway the end result is everything will be encrypted. The real battle is forcing ISPs and governments to not log device locations and giving real teeth to it. Something that is fairly doubtful.

I think the US is really a special case here. Also: We never deployed this LI solution in the US.

You're right - because of Google's efforts nowadays everything is going to be encrypted when it comes to web traffic. That's both good and bad.

Are you able to advise privacy advocate organizations about how systems like yours work?

I think they're probably aware of the general technical issues/limitations/possibilities these days.

It's more political than technical. It matters a lot who is telling the same truth, e.g. for the minutiae of a formal meeting.

To clarify: No, I'm not willing to become a "whistleblower" for simply following a long-time law in a stable western-european country. I chose to trust the existing legal systems in this case.

And to clarify: I actually do trust the legal systems, in this unnamed country.

Whistleblowing implies something is wrong... Let me change the angle: Do you believe it is important for democracy to have solid information to base votes on? Would you be legally able to share this information if you wanted to?

That isnt what the parent comment asked though.