If we can't convince people with their ear to the ground, how does one convince the general public. Especially since it isn't intuitive how metadata is useful. Though the analogy I typically use is a private investigator following you around. Can't hear your conversations, but can see everyone you talk to, where, and for how long.

The comfortable upper middle-class are the most conservative elements of any society; they're providing the management and expertise to implement any dystopia that's coming. Beneath them are the tradespeople and unskilled laborers who choose between working or starving, and above them are morons.

Nobody who has spent more than a moment thinking about it fails to understand the dangers of metadata, they just don't think they it will be a problem for them. Hence the most common response is something about how their lives are boring, and how they have nothing to to hide. "Who cares if I'm at Starbucks at 2 o'clock?" Technologists know full well what they could do with that information, that's what they're paid to know, and they're who are going to be doing it, or they're going to have to find another job.

Exactly, some falsely assume all technologists somehow share an enthusiasm for morality. Many of the most successful technologists I know simply work for the highest pay from military/intelligence contracts.

> hacker: A person who delights in having an intimate understanding of the internal workings of a system, computers and computer networks in particular.

Using this definition, calling this site "Hacker News" is not exactly accurate, but also not too far-off. I think this website is 40% "Silicon Valley & Startup" News, 40% "Hacker" News, and 20% misc.

One of my favourite sites is the IKEAhackers.net (no affiliation). That site truly shows what a "hacker" does, in the furiture domain, but still, decomposing, redesigning, reusing.

Exactly like the RFC 1392 (aka "Internet Users' Glossary") as you mention. There is a distinction to the word "cracker" which shows malicious intent (what our dear friends on EF + NSA are doing).

This piece of news should also be a reminder to ALL, that these agencies that "protect" us (irrespective of flag) cannot and should not be trusted with/for anything. Especially not with the truth.

(I don't actually think this is what people should do, but I do think it might be a cool expirament.)

What you do with the guns is a different issue, but there's clearly many nations worldwide that focus on defense but not offense (maybe not US, but probably Switzerland).

Working in Silicon Valley, I would not agree with saying that engineers in general are involved in this for any immoral reasons. (One of the few exceptions is ad tracking experts, who dig like pigs for truffles through PII.) The reasons are not knowing history (ie. Crypto AG pwnage), and just a lack of intellectual curiosity.

I'd like to comment on the importance of metadata analysis.

This is not well-known, but before the British were able to decrypt German WW2 traffic, they used very detailed radio traffic metadata analysis to map everything they needed to know about ground troops. (The architect of that was given US citizenship after the war and built the US' system, but on a global scale.)

Details of that were classified long after the war in both countries. And it was just metadata.

This very clearly is not the case in the US.

> But among the 64% of American voters who earn more than $50,000 a year, 49% chose Trump, and 47% Clinton.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/09/white-voters...

All the political terms - left, right, conservative, progressive, liberal, etc have definitions which vary greatly from country-to-country, over time, and by which group is using them. Clinton and Biden are representatives from American's dominant liberal party and represent views which are left-of-center when you do the sane thing and define center as "median voter in the country being discussed" and not "my group of friends" or whatever time or place you're imagining.

You might as well say 'Bill Gates is very poor, by any reasonable standard' (because unlike the rich people of 2,000 years ago, he can't raise an army that rivals that of his home nation-state or the rich of the future who take vacations on the moon).

Liberal & Conservative in the US usually have to do with what changes a person wants to make but Clinton, Romney, Obama, Biden, hell Bush are all literally conservative in the scope and amount.

Yes, they wouldn't be conservative for Saudi Arabia, but they would both continue to closely ally us with the Saudis and aid them in murdering Yemenis.

> center as "median voter in the country being discussed

Both Biden and Clinton, issue by issue, are well to the right of the median US citizen. It's pretty dishonest to restrict the people allowed to have their opinions considered to the people who thought that the distinction between Republican and Democratic administrations was important, when the argument being made is about whether both candidates are conservative. The median eligible voter is barely more likely to vote than not.

I know typing this is a waste of time.

Additionally, everything you listed is just exposition on your initial claim. Saying that you will "End Welfare As We Know It" sounds like a potentially wildly liberal plan - perhaps UBI, government-guaranteed employment, housing and healthcare or some other fundamental shift. The victims of crime are disproportionately the poor, people of color and people who are structurally disadvantaged so removing the threat of violent crime from their lives falls well within the standard goals of liberals (even if the actual implementation of the bill you're referencing had more mixed results).

Look at this polling of support of Bush vs Kerry by income level[1], as income rises support for Bush almost always rises, and support for Kerry almost always decreases.

[1] https://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/results/states/US/P/...

(On a side note, there's some smaller skew between voting Republican and having conservative political leanings. I'm conservative in fiscal policy, foreign policy, and favoring action at a local and state level, but liberal regarding most social policies, criminal justice reform, and environmental regulation. I think government enforced price transparency plus a German-style universal healthcare system via private insurance decoupled from employment is preferable to either a US model or a Canadian/UK-style single payer system. I've always registered as a Democrat.)

If the machine says "dude is terrorist based on XYZ" and the human cannot realistically verify all of that is factually correct (perhaps the subject's phone was lost as the subject walked by a mosque?), then it is much easier for the human to say "Data says this dude is terrorist" than it is to say "Data says this dude is terrorist, but the data is probably wrong and we shouldn't..."

The existence of the data itself is a threat against every subject the data includes, at a minimum.

The issue today is that the leadership (in many areas of life from business to military to government), who make the decision to kill/censor/interrupt business/etc or not, are saying "we have to follow the data" without having any understanding of what that really means.

Ultimately, this creates false confidence both in the decision-maker and those that are following their lead. I find it unlikely that there would be anywhere near the same willingness if the 'intelligence' many of these decisions were based on didn't seem as rich and unmistakably correct as it often does.

Of course, the practical effect here is that leadership gets to blame the algorithm/model/data instead of having to accept the blame themselves. If only those pesky engineers and nerds in the lab were better at the job we'd bomb less foreigners.

I'll give you an analogy that might help. Let's say that a personal investigator is following you. They have a GPS tracker on you. They can see where you go, who you talk to, for how long, what you buy, etc. The only thing is that they don't know what you are talking to people about or exactly what you buy (but they know where you bought it from). Would you feel comfortable with this person following you around?

I'm assuming not, because I don't know anyone that has answered yes. It feels like an invasion of your personal space, right? They can still learn a lot about you and your habits by doing this, right? But all they've gathered is metadata on you. So why do you feel uncomfortable?

Goal of metadata investigation isn't to directly target you, most of the time. It's to put you in the bucket of interesting people, that government will pay attention to.

It's exactly the same as ads on the internet - they maybe classifying you as a person potentially interested in computer security because you're visiting tech crunch. Are all people visiting it interested in computer security? Of course not. But you're many orders of magnitude more likely to be interested in it, than a random person from the internet.

> Even by that account, the scale of collection brought to mind an evocative phrase from legal scholar Paul Ohm. Any information in sufficient volume, he wrote, amounted to a “database of ruin.” It held personal secrets that “if revealed, would cause more than embarrassment or shame; it would lead to serious, concrete, devastating harm.” Nearly anyone in the developed world, he wrote, “can be linked to at least one fact in a computer database that an adversary could use for blackmail, discrimination, harassment, or financial or identity theft.” Revelations of “past conduct, health, or family shame,” for example, could cost a person their marriage, career, legal residence, or physical safety.

> Mere creation of such a database, especially in secret, profoundly changed the balance of power between government and governed. This was the Dark Mirror embodied, one side of the glass transparent and the other blacked out. If the power implications do not seem convincing, try inverting the relationship in your mind: What if a small group of citizens had secret access to the telephone logs and social networks of government officials? How might that privileged knowledge affect their power to shape events? How might their interactions change if they possessed the means to humiliate and destroy the careers of the persons in power? Capability matters, always, regardless of whether it is used. An unfired gun is no less lethal before it is drawn. And in fact, in history, capabilities do not go unused in the long term. Chekhov’s famous admonition to playwrights is apt not only in drama, but in the lived experience of humankind. The gun on display in the first act—nuclear warheads, weaponized disease, Orwellian cameras tracking faces on every street—must be fired in the last. The latent power of new inventions, no matter how repellent at first, does not lie forever dormant in government armories.

take a look at the history of the behavior of intelligence services through the 20th century and ask yourself how comfortable you are with this power being wielded by anybody.

you may not feel threatened by this arrangement now, but how confident do you feel that these tools will always be controlled by people you trust?

A headless chrome makes measurements of timings even easier these days. The order of how files are loaded, which file size e.g. jquery.123.min.js has, and where and when exactly in which order it is loaded from is very unique among all pages of a website.

I think that's more complicated than you realize. That list would be impossibly large to scrape and search, not to mention collisions and dynamic content problems.

>The order of how files are loaded

It's a good idea, but you don't know what files I have in my cache and when they expire, or what files my extensions are blocking. This'd only work in an ideal-case scenario.

- "What if your call logs indicated a 45-minute call to a suicide hotline made from a bridge. Do they need to hear exactly what was said?"

- "What if your call logs showed you receiving a call from a sexual health clinic, and that you then called a bunch of people in rapid succession. Do they need to hear exactly what was said?"

Colbert's white house correspondent's address covered it. Politicians don't talk about super depressing stuff like guantonomo bay and journalists have the courtesy to not try and find out.. We don't talk about data collection in any serious manner.

I think the weakness of data collection is when it gets in the average joe's way and it hasn't done that yet in a big way. The more we hammer home that it must facilitate movement through life and not hinder it, the better the middle ground will be.. maybe.

There is a requirement that both sides get really good at eviscerating lies and liars. Neither side of the fence wants fake data or betrayal.

For me, the importance of metadata can be conveyed by comparing its usefulness to knowing the answers to the game of 20 Questions.

HN doesnt seem to be security oriented community.

But it's ok, security isn't as important as algos are during FAANG interviews, so who cares.

Convince them of what? Some of us don't believe the NSA are bad actors and and possibly we also believe they're doing their jobs and support them in that.

I mean, either you're saying "no one within the NSA has ever been a bad actor", or you're saying "the bad actions are acceptable collateral damage; no oversight needs to be applied to ensure the trade off between effectiveness and collateral damage is balanced", or you're saying "not ALL actors are bad" and leaving it at that.

And...none of those strikes me as a particular defensible position to take.

Also, how can you possibly believe that the NSA are not bad actors? Between trying to hobble encryption, spying on everything, and enabling bad individual actions, and having a horrible success rate [1], what is left to defend?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24962802

[1] https://www.newamerica.org/international-security/policy-pap...

One, handwaving institutional corrupt and violation of the constitution by claiming it's only a few "bad actors" ignores how high up that corruption emenates from. Two, it assumes that the violations are needed for national security, a claim which can easily be dissected by understanding what William Binney has told us about thinthread, just as an singular example in a vast sea of examples. Three, it's a strawman to jump to arguing that because other countries are doing this, we need the NSA too. Very few people are actually calling for the dismembership of the NSA, and in general want accountability and a return to constitutional surveillance. Four, implying the constitution is a "moral position that loses" is absolutely a machievellian, realpolitik, ends-justify-the-means policy position that we and the world have suffered enough consequences and blowback of.

Your entire argument revolves around using the safety as justification for violations of their mandate and oaths, when all the evidence points towards the truth being quite the opposite: the surveillance program has failed to be effective for safety, and not only that, that failure is largely due to this very kind of thinking in the first place! By being willing to undermine the constitution the NSA (et al intel agencies) inherently reduce long term security and safety in the US by allowing bad actors in all kinds of sectors the ability to abuse the data they get.

The totalitarian surveillance system is about control, not safety, always remember that!

"Go again and see not just the film and the play but read the text of Robert Bolt's wonderful play "Man For All Seasons", some of you must have seen it - where Sir Thomas Moore decides that he would rather die than lie or betray his faith and at one moment Moore is arguing with a particularly vicious witch-hunting prosecutor (a servant of the king and a hungry and ambitious man), and Moore says to this man "You'd break the law to punish the Devil, wouldn't you?" And the prosecutor, the witch hunter, says "Break it?" He said "I'd cut down every law in England if I could do that, if I could capture him." And Moore says "Yes you would wouldn't you? And then when you corner the Devil and the Devil turned round to meet you, where would you run for protection? All the laws of England having been cut down and flattened, who would protect you then?" - Christopher Hitchens

To keep it all-ages, let's stick with "far away from existence, and even further from OUR personal data and metadata".

This is why Signal hiding the graph as best they can, using SGX, is incredibly important work. Say what you want about Secure Enclaves, we know of no better way to conceal social graphs.

Yes there is still potentially some metadata analysis that can be done at the server to coordinate IP addresses but we know signal doesn’t keep those logs because of their response to the sealed subpoena (which they successfully sued with the ACLU to unseal):

https://signal.org/bigbrother/eastern-virginia-grand-jury/

We can only dream of a world where companies are held to this standard of transparency and user privacy.

That doesn't prove that. If Signal was, say, a NSA project they would have to respond to such things in that way to protect the signal intelligence value of the metadata they were collecting for their primary mission.

After Crypto AG we know it is a bad idea to trust any particular entity. Something like Signal can only be trusted as much as can verified.

I submit that there is no better option right now.

Not really. First of all, there is only one Signal client allowed to connect to Signal’s servers. And in the real world, the vast majority of Signal uses are getting their APK for that app from the Google Play store (the Signal team has said that they prefer you to use the Play store as well, instead of direct-downloading an APK from their website which they offer only grudgingly). That means that a state-level actor could possibly carry out a targeted attack to replace the Signal app on a given person's phone with a malicious build.

Also, Signal’s reproducible build system requires a specific version of the Android development kit. It has been pointed out that a state-level actor could be sitting on vulnerabilities in that, and not in the Signal source code itself.

If the attack is on the android dev kit, but not on signal, then.. the attack isn't on Signal, it's on the dev kit. Unless Signal's using an unusual version of the dev kit, your risk exposure to this attack is equal to any other app that you would use instead of Signal.

No, they couldn't. They would need the Signal developers' key. Android requires app updates to be signed with the same key as the original app.

That isn't to say "all crypto is hopeless", simply that you shouldn't consider Signal to be state-level actor proof.

That's all a smoke screen. Nobody is running an open client with a reproducible build, everybody is running whatever version is downloaded from their app store of choice.

It's not special, and I don't trust it a bit.

I'm not following. Secure Enclaves have nothing to do with protecting the social graph of Signal users. They're used to store the contact list (and other things) in the "cloud" in a safe way – things that weren't even shared / stored anywhere by Signal before Secure Value Recovery was introduced.

This is the relevant blog post.

Just adding an example for the people who don't see the value of metadata: WhatsApp is still a viable revenue source for Facebook even as they have no access to the text of the messages due to E2EE.

Knowing who talks to who, at what times, the type and approximate size of messages, the members of groups, and the contents of the phone book of every user gives enough information to keep their business model without exposing them to court orders asking for the plaintext (that's the reason they added E2EE to start with, there is no incentive to improve the service when they have a billion heads of cattle to milk).

[0] https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metad...

A friendly reminder to everyone that even if the encryption that is used to send the messages in WhatsApp seems to be solid they upload your entire chat history as unencrypted dumps to the cloud.

Even if you turn it off your chats will still end up there as long as whoever you are chatting with doesn't also disable this.

Can you provide more information?

For contrast, Signal does encrypt the local history and the backups (to the point that is a bit harder to backup the chat to outside in Android, you need to copy a randomly generate password manually to restore it. But it's a safe approach).

My point is mostly aimed at people claiming WhatsApp is somehow very safe just because of the end-to-end encryption.

I'm saying end-to-end encryption is a really great idea and everyone should do that and still encouraging people to look beyond that and think about the entire threat model when deciding what is important for them.

Correction: they might not have access to the message text. It's entirely possible (if not plausible: FB doesn't exactly have a good track record) for FB to just self-MitM the E2EE and see everything that passes through their servers.

From their site:

> The verification process is optional for end-to-end encrypted chats, and only used to confirm that the messages and calls you send are end-to-end encrypted.

Even this process--which I'm sure very few people do--is fallible given the lack of authenticity: there's no way to confirm that the given keys are what's actually used for encryption.

Yes, this may come across as very "tinfoil-hat-y," but do you really trust FB to not be exploring every possible avenue to increase their data streams?

Why would they even need to MitM in transit when they control the endpoints? They can just analyze the raw text locally (in the app) and extract valuable information.

And looking at what has unfolded in the last decade, chances are against the user and we must, for ours and our peers' safety, assume the worst.

Similarly Google runs 8.8.8.8 so they know what services you use that aren’t HTTP that they don’t have bugged already.

And that is only speaking of something within the Rule of Law (accessing metadata with a warrant)...

Outside of the Rule of Law, people have been killed for metadata.

Indeed:

https://theintercept.com/2014/02/10/the-nsas-secret-role/

> According to a former drone operator for the military’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) who also worked with the NSA, the agency often identifies targets based on controversial metadata analysis and cell-phone tracking technologies. Rather than confirming a target’s identity with operatives or informants on the ground, the CIA or the U.S. military then orders a strike based on the activity and location of the mobile phone a person is believed to be using.

Also, obviously, Mafias and the USSR, PRC...

> Ex-NSA Chief: 'We Kill People Based on Metadata'

https://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2014/05/ex-nsa-chief-...

So this situation can be considered a sort of a triumph. For most people metadata is no real threat to them. Generally it is already publicly known who your friends and family are and those are the people most interact with online. It is mostly valuable that no one else know what those interactions are even if they know when they occurred.

For the important instance of businesses the situation is much the same although sometimes there might be value in traffic analysis for larger businesses that have enough traffic to analyze.

"Law enforcement agencies have claimed that metadata helps to eliminate suspects by revealing their networks and contacts. But there is no information regarding the use of metadata by government bodies that are not officially enforcement agencies within the meaning of the data retention laws."

https://theconversation.com/think-your-metadata-is-only-visi...

“We kill people based on metadata.”

https://youtu.be/PxwEwwlDM8Q (39s clip)

I only see one