Nooooooo! He was my next door neighbor a few years ago, and I knew him as a person before I realized that I knew him as a hero.
His dogs were fiercely protective of his house, which is perfectly understandable. One day I saw a "sewer cleaning" van behind his house, and I have a hard time believing that's what it really was: https://honeypot.net/2025/03/12/rip-mark-klein.html
That certainly is just a Sewer TV inspection van! I have a hand in writing some of the software that is run on these and processes the videos that come out of them. They all have rack mounted PCs and a monitor with a joystick to control the crawler that goes in the pipe.
> That certainly is just a Sewer TV inspection van!
Hee hee, I can hear the NSA now: "Dammit, who parked a sewer inspection van in the middle of our massive surveillance network?!?"
Back on the topic of indiscriminate wide-net surveillance (which I think was also the focus of the AT&T whistleblower), I quote Bruce Schneier on the Snowden leaks:
"I started this talk by naming three different programs that collect Google user data. Those programs work under different technical capabilities, different corporate alliances, and different legal authorities. You should expect the same thing to be true for cell phone data, for internet data, for everything else. When you have the budget of the NSA and you're given the choice, 'Should you do it this way or that way?' The correct answer is: both."
door bell rings .... five men in dark suits standing outside ... hair on the back of my neck stands on end. I open the door, hands shaking with that burning feeling in my guts "Yea, how can I help you gentlemen" The tallest one, intimidating, gruff, ex marine perhaps, shoves a badge in my face: "N S A, National Sewer Agency" they push me aside and push inside my hosue .. a violation but what do I say?!? They look around ... circling me like a pack of wolves .. then, another pulls a bag from under his arm and produces a plastic jar in a biohazard bag... looks like ice cream and garbage inside, then grufly states "Sir, do you recognize these napkins?" "napkins?" I squeak out ... it hit me.... FUCK! .... the other night .... I was drunk, out of TP, desperate... paper towels staring me in the face - dare I? It was a moment of weakness, desperation and drunkeness rolled into one ... and here I am, staring the consequences in the face.... "Sir, your going to have to come with us" And no one ever heard from me again. Please take heed, only flush TP!
This is fairly close to reality, if you think about it
Medicaid here in Arizona is called "AHCCCS" which is pronounced "access" so imagine the fun homophonic confusion in a conversation about "do you have access?" "well I got access but then I lost it..."
Many conservative Christians have termed homosexuality as "Same-Sex Attraction" or SSA, so they often speak of "suffering from SSA" or being afflicted with it. When I applied to the Social Security Administration for disability, I couldn't help but notice, and their disability program is called "SSDI" which has nothing to do with Reagan's "Star Wars/Strategic Defense Initiative"
Nor do my dealings with the F.A.A. in the past several years have anything to do with a pilot's license or flight clearances; the Family Assistance Administration here doles out funds for food stamps ("SNAP", another good homophone, lets you purchase plenty of alphabet soup for the fam) and other basic needs.
Generally these are done in coordination with a sewer cleaning truck at the next manhole in the pipe. Very common for them to stay on the phone with each other
I mean, if a sufficiently capable entity is interested in snooping on an individual like this, mimicking a sewer tv inspection van is a trivial endeavour. You don’t know at all what that van was doing.
Yes we do. It was a sewer inspection van. If it was the NSA, their van wouldn't look so goofy that people took one look at the photo and assumed it had to be an NSA van, which is what happened here. This is a bad movie plot trope: the bad guys can't simultaneously be omniscient and so dumb they're trivially outed like this, just like the real supervillain isn't going to monologue while you free yourself from the chains lowering you into the shark tank.
> the bad guys can't simultaneously be omniscient and so dumb they're trivially outed like this
This is a false dichotomy. Federal agencies prove themselves to be fallible (even incompetent) all the time, they just have far more resources available to make up for their mistakes.
Unmarked vans drive around all of the time and nobody bats an eye at them. There is no reason to even bother with a big elaborate company name that anyone could google and do further background checks on
Unmarked vans drive around all the time. They don't typically park out front of a whistleblower's house. There is more scrutiny there than driving down any random street. Therefore, a more sufficient cover would be required.
An unmarked white van (without windows) parked a house or two down the street hacking your wifi might not be that noticeable. One across the street with a radio dish spinning around and a parabolic mic sticking out the window and a few people entering and exiting it with donuts and coffee multiple times probably would be.
I mean, the real argument here is between "something interesting" and "something boring", and it's message board so "boring" is heavily disfavored. But, yeah, it's a sewer inspection van.
My comment did not express any opinion as to whether this was or was not a surveillance van, and this has no bearing on the proposed alternatives being a false dichotomy.
With GP's clarification, it's still shaped like a false dichotomy but I don't think it's one in spirit. It sounds more like reductio ad absurdum to me, with a sprinkling of hyperbole for effect.
Having said that, reading comments like this, I sometimes think it would actually be great cover. Because you have respected people, like yourself, unequivocally stating that it couldn't possibly be an NSA van.
But, to say it again, I agree that I don't think the NSA would need to do this. My above line of reasoning certainly doesn't hold too much water under serious scrutiny.
A significant multiplier of my certainty here comes from the fact that I was responding to a thread full of people who seemed certain that no sewer inspection van could look like that, which to me says "this van is not inconspicuous", which defeats the whole purpose of having a cover-story van.
You can second-guess that, but I think past this point, we're reenacting the duel between Vizzini and Westley.
> You can second-guess that, but I think past this point, we're reenacting the duel between Vizzini and Westley
So I guess the reveal is that it _is_ a real sewer inspection van, but the NSA has legitimately been inspecting sewers for years to innoculate themselves from suspicion?
I guess they must be down there looking for rodents of unusual size.
That's an odd take. There are numerous examples of people prosaicly defeating the purpose of something that has taken considerable resources to establish.
It's like the spies working in embassies that were easily detectable despite an elaborate cover because they used the car that the previous spy left behind when they went home.
From personal experience with police investigations... they aren't really all that inconspicuous when they come aspying. The van with tints several shades darker than the legal limit that sits outside and the trucks with dash-mount computers and racks of equipment visible through the windshield shadowing your every move aren't exactly hard to see if you're paying attention. When they've got telescopic lenses watching from an adjacent building, you can also see those with the naked eye if you look closely. Hopefully national spy agencies are better at it than small town drug task forces, but...
Perhaps they are optimizing for having plausible deniability/a fully fleshed out backstory in case they are questioned by eg. local cops or a security guard, moreso than inconspicuousness to a random passerby who is unlikely to pose any danger with their idle theorizing
I think NSA has hacked the van (without the van operators realizing) and so it’s both a sewer inspection van and an NSA surveillance van at the same time.
You can either disguise your operation as a goofy sewer inspection van and hope you trick every single person who notices it into second-guessing themselves along the lines of "surely the FBI would be more low-key than that..."
Or you can just be low-key in the first place, end of story. I assume the tech in the modern day (as compared to, like, the 80s when this trope was born) is advanced enough to facilitate this option.
I think I'd rather assume that I couldn't successfully pull off low key 100% of the time while actively monitoring someone from the street in front of their house, so instead I'd make sure that while 99% of the people will see a sewer inspection van and think nothing of it, the 1% who catches a look inside of the van and thinks it's suspicious will easily find a perfectly reasonable explanation for what they think they saw.
Regardless of what the real story is on this van, lookup the Bernie S. case if you want an easy case with proof of government surveillance incompetence. Under cover Secret Service agents were photographed surveilling a 2600 meeting in a mall court, then got embarrassed when the 2600 guys posted flyers with their photographs around. Most criminals are dumb which is a good thing as I like the bad guys getting caught, but unfortunately the smart ones graduate to become politicians.
haha well dont assume
spies are some godmode infallable people. spies also are humans and can have varying degrees of freedom to express their stupidity in their work..
in our country some spies got caught drivin around with wifi pineapple in plain sight circling govt and ngo sites.
in my mind thats next level dumb stuff, but maybe they arent really hackers and think its not conspicuous, or even the opposite, they know exactly what it is but think 'oh normal people wont stop to think about this, they dont recognise such equipment'.
if you werent there, didnt know the guys in the van etc. etc. - its all just guesswork.
even public record of a sewer inspection right then and there at that time (which i kinda doubt exists) wouldnt confirm or deny what that van was really doing there.
that being said, i would _assume_ its a sewer inspection van. but thats an assumption, not a known fact.
Reminds me of the joke where students prove by induction that the teacher is not actually planning a surprise test, and are surprised when there's a test the next day
Now I'm starting to wonder if that guy habitually leaves the door open because he got sick of people winking at him with a wry smile every time he had to go to a job.
I mean, why not both? If I was a shadowy agency I would start an actual legit sewer inspection company that does real sewer inspections. And then just collect and share a little extra data as needed. Nobody would be the wiser!
Sometime there’s vehicle from at least three businesses and two government agencies gathered round an inconspicuous looking civil infrastructure element, and I have to wonder who spying on who. And how much that’s costing.
You're thinking like a normal person. You need to think like an institution that has the entire weight of government behind them and who nobody wants to be on the wrong side of.
They either find someone who has suitable vans they can threaten with prosecution. That person then agrees to be an "informant" because that's better than losing your life to the feds and then their handler asks to borrow a van. They like this because no money needs to get spent specifically on it so it doesn't tend to get scrutinized. If they're going full above the table they register a business with the state complete with valid HVAC license or whatever and then rent a van from some company the FBI owns/runs that rents white vans and have some decals printed up. (For those inclined to do further reading, the OSINT hobbyists have done a lot to expose this workflow as it relates to aircraft so probably start there.)
Same. I can totally buy the joystick and the robot as I've seen this done in my area, but the rack mounted PCs and the headphones makes it seem awfully like he's telling Tom Cruise which wire to cut.
That's almost definitely just a sewer inspection van; I found videos that company has of "multi-sensor pipeline inspections" with the same van, open, with the same equipment visible, and a bunch of people following a bunch of equipment down into a manhole.
As an aside, if you are purchasing an older home make sure you pay for a sewer line inspection. I had no idea this was a thing until a few years later when I had to replace mine and it cost ~$25,000.
I also have an older home and we had to repair our sewer line. It was clay pipe which had broken in a few spots and had major root intrusion. Thankfully there's some newer technology that makes it significantly cheaper in the right circumstances -- instead of digging up your street connection and laying in new pipe they can blow an epoxy-soaked liner into your existing pipe, then run a curing light through it. It ended up being less than 40% of the cost of replacement and works just as well.
We had ours done when we moved in a couple years ago and it was a cool snakey camera thing; they only got us out to the service line; past that would have been a lot more elaborate. Also: that video feed? Pretty gross.
As an aside: I think a lot of people here would be surprised at the amount of technology (and surveillance) that goes into setting speed limits and placing stop signs in residential areas.
A lot of people might also be surprised how frequently traffic engineers will OK unnecessary and less safe four way stops in order to get the annoying citizen pestering them to just leave them alone.
The neighborhood that I have to drive through to get from where I live to where I work hates that their precious little neighborhood is used as a commuter route by a lot of people, so they stuck stop signs EVERY. SINGLE. BLOCK.
I make sure to come to a complete fucking stop at every one of those signs. Partially because I hate the feeling of rolling through stop signs, but partially out of spite lol.
how far is that sewer line run, 6 miles? they usually just bore it out and put a PVC sleeve inside. This is done with the cast iron sewer lines, because if they're not properly taken care of, they will rust into nothing and then you just have a suggestion of a hole through the dirt to the sewer line.
my lines are 4" PVC, if we somehow clog those, someone call me an ambulance.
The old shitty clay lines are what you find in most rentals in SoCal. Then one day none of your toilets flushes and the landlord says you flush too many wipes down the toilet. You argue and they make you pay for a plumber who's like "yea they all do that DONT USE WIPES!!!!!One!!!" And then finally after getting to know every other plumber in town, one offers to run a camera for free and shows you that the main line is fucking falling apart and that's why it keeps plugging up.
TBH sewer main inspections should be required any time someone wants to rent a house out.
I don't think it's very plausible. The subtext of the photo is "that looks comically unlike what you'd inspect from a sewer inspection van". Well, I can tell you pretty much for sure: thats' what the inside of a sewer inspection van from that company looks like.
It took just a couple minutes (less than 5) to go look this up and find the video, for what it's worth.
Maybe it's an NSA wet team! Wet, because they do sewer inspection work. :)
I think if they're buying a fake sewer inspection van they're probably smart enough to find one that doesn't look to people on the Internet like it's a prop out of the movie Enemy of the State.
I hope the owner of the company doesn't read this. They probably like their designs! :)
I just went to Google maps to the address written on the van's passenger door and lo and behold, Google did drive down the alley behind and while this is a larger vehicle and not just a van, that's their look (they also have black versions if you look around): https://www.google.com/maps/@33.7851188,-118.211276,3a,67.3y...
I found a video with an identical National Plant Services sewer inspection van, inspecting a large-diameter sewer line: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVXceJ3Yxnw
(The photo shows van TV-230 while the video shows van TV-217, so they are different instances of the van.)
That is a van built by Ares (I might have the spelling slightly wrong).
Funny enough I once bought a used one, stripped the sewer inspection equipment out, kept the Oman diesel generator and made it into an actual surveillance van.
The inspection robots that came with it were cool. I sold them and the other equipment I pulled out for a good chunk of cash.
I would think that anyone working in a sewer inspection van would keep the door open because it is highly likely that sewer inspection vans smell like, well, sewer.
If the van is loaded with equipment, or even if it isn’t, theft and robbery are common in most of the US. You can’t leave a van door open and not be extremely vigilant.
One thing for certain: that is absolutely NOT a sewer inspection van. Seriously, you ever worked trades? It is way too clean on the interior and not fitted for working dirty jobs, to say nothing of the visible surveillance workstation.
While I can honestly believe both (it was a surveillance van vs it was a sewer maintenance company), do you think that the intimidation and surveillance of Snowden or Assange won’t last until the end of their lives?
The money shot! I did not realize sewer cleaning required so much onsite IT. Are those rack units running computational fluid dynamics models to figure out how to unclog elaborate networks of pipes?
I wanted to point out that when visiting those sites from Germany (nationalplant.com and the specializedmaintenance.com website) it shows the same unavailable geoblocked message. I wouldn't have recognized it but after opening both links in new tabs on my phone I thought I forgot to open one of the links in this thread and I double-checked it.
Are those fake companies both hosted on wordfence or something? What are the odds, huh?
I am willing to believe it was innocuous. The guy already spilled the beans and has been blackballed from government access. Does he require clandestine surveillance any more? Easy enough to get “national security” reasons why all of his devices need to be tapped. More intimidating to have visible GMen watching him for life.
For some reason this reminded me of Ernest Hemingway. In the later parts of his life, he began to believe he was being followed and tracked by the FBI, and these delusions eventually gave way to various other issues. Or perhaps it could be the other way around, but there is a catch here.
In either case this led to him being somewhat brutally treated with electroconvulsive therapy, repeatedly, to little effect beyond damaging his mind. A quote from on that was, "What is the sense of ruining my head and erasing my memory, which is my capital, and putting me out of business? It was a brilliant cure, but we lost the patient." He would kill himself not long thereafter.
The interesting thing is that the FBI was following and tracking him, and simply stayed silent as this all played out.
That very well could be what it was. If it had been anything other than:
1. Spotless.
2. Parked right behind Klein's (and by extension, my) house.
3. Skittish, such that they closed the door right after I took the picture and drove off less than a minute later without pulling any gear up out of a manhole or something.
then that's probably what I'd chalk it up to. I am absolutely not 100% convinced it was, say, an undercover NSA van.
And yet, that's exactly what I thought it was from the moment I saw the gear racks and monitors inside.
Here's the thing, there's never going to be convincing evidence for you to decide that it wasn't what your hunch said it was. That's the nature of suspicion.
You could Google "national plant services van" on image search and find similar vans, and that the company is owned by is the Carylon Corporation, with revenue of $300m/year -- but that couldn't convince you that a government agency (it wouldn't be the NSA unless they're violating the law) didn't borrow it or copy it.
You could read that their services include "Digital CCTV inspection. Laser profiling. Sonar pipeline inspection." but that couldn't convince you that the monitor+joystick and other equipment is needed for sewer inspection, because you already believe it is for surveillance. (The irony being that the kind of mass surveillance Mark Klein exposed, or Snowden exposed, means there's absolutely no need to park a truck outside someone's house. You can track who they're communicating with already, and you can subvert their own devices to listen in, instead of parking a van out front for their neighbors to notice.)
You could look at who has the contract to inspect sewers in your town -- it's public record. But you could still choose to believe that the federal government did the same check, and went out and got an identical truck so as to be less suspicious (although in this thread half the people are saying "that's too clean/fancy/technological to be a sewer inspection van!" so if they did it would have backfired.)
Was he under surveillance? Who knows. Does this truck prove anything either way? No. Everybody is going to leave this thread with whatever hunch they came in with.
We have a manhole outside our house and it was inspected like this. I work with GIS for electric and gas companies. I used to keep small ear protectors in the Burley so me and the kids could go up and ask "diggermen" about holes in the road.
Xcel used directional drilling for a plastic gas main down our street and then did sewer intrusion inspections after. A neighbor had their sewer line pierced. It's a hazard because it isn't detectible until the sewer line blocks and then the blade thingy the plumber uses can sever the plastic gas service lateral in the sewer line.
There is a gas overflow valve (like a ball bearing that too much flow can push in to block the pipe) back at the service tee fitting on the main. If that doesn't work then you could have a gas explosion in the sewer or house. It happens and it is bad. Clients give presentations on these projects at conferences (e.g. use GIS to combine the sewer and gas topology to identify where the crossings are.)
That truck isn't for inspecting your sewer, it's for inspecting every junction on that sewer line, 8 hours per day, every day. They will have a map and linear reference showing where every other underground utility (fiber/gas/electricity) intersects it and be recording and cross referencing it in case it needs to be produced in court at a later date.
People are conflating do-you-need-a-$30k-sewer-line "plumber inspection" with this service. This kind of inspection is more like the "assuming tort liability" role that the companies like sitewise serve. Even with the robot done and packed, the operator in the truck was working for a bit, making copies of the videos and tagging them and stuff. If your gas main piercing a sewer causes explosions the settlements can be in the tens of millions.
BigUtility uses trenchless directional drilling to poke a drill horizontally down the street and then laterally to each house saving millions of dollars in open trench costs. The gotcha is that they can't see where they are digging and thus can burn, electrocute, explode or kill taxpayers. The inspections help with sewer maintenance / cleaning but the big money/concern is on the liability for cross bored gas lines.
The robot (the one I saw outside my house) was over $10k and kitting out the whole truck with a crane and the monitors and reels was $90k. They hosed the robot down completely with high pressure water from the truck once it came back out and checked it over for damage. That and the fact that the van guys typically don't go in the sewer is why the van is clean. It's an "expensive equipment" van, not a plumbers van. For comparison the fiber optic inspection a plumber might use is more like $2k and you can rent them.
Depending on the job they can inflate a balloon at the next manhole upstream or even pump/route the sewer through a temp pipe on the street surface (looks like a big fire hose) from the previous manhole to the one after where the van is. That needs 3 crews plus flaggers for traffic. They use a radio to coordinate with the other crews.
With the line blocked for inspection the robot typically just has a film of that nasty sewer grease on it.
They told me the door stays open even in winter because the crane operator / tether wrangler guy is right by an open sewer which is a fall and methane hazard.
The job isn't quick - there might be 300 feet / 100m of line to the robot near the next manhole. Unless they were just looking at one service main, if they were able to leave they must have been winding up already.
The more important question is: is there a sewer manhole where they parked?
If we can surveil people with drones from miles away, what technology are the FBI using that requires guys physically in a van outside a house? If you were going to park outside, why would you use a method that usually blocks the street?
I dug up a pic. If you look carefully you can see two tethers, one for the 4 wheel metal sled that moves it and a thicker one for the camera and lights on the "head" part. The crew used the controls to move the head around until it was looking at my kids and they could see themselves on the second screen (one screen faced out the door.) The kids thought it was cool: https://i.imgur.com/2ltz8bj.png
Story about a fatal explosion caused by horizontal directional drilling piercing a gas main:
I can't find any conference papers but the industry term to google is "crossbore" and this blog post has some pictures of gas service laterals piercing sewers:
This is crazy.. you guys are focused on vans and mini stories when all his sacrifice and that of thousand if not more americans was snuffed.
`Congress intervened by passing the FISA Amendments Act which, in part, granted “retroactive immunity” to the telecommunications carriers for their involvement in the NSA spying programs. This massive grant of immunity for past violations of multiple state and federal laws protecting communications privacy was unprecedented.`
Be the change you want to see. I mentioned the vans and his dogs because Mark wasn't some random picture on the Internet, but the nice guy a couple houses down who talked about the volunteer work he did for harbor seals[0]. He was a real person we liked a lot and I thought others might enjoy hearing about his noisy, overprotective golden retrievers.
But yes, he was also a personal hero to me before I met him in real life, and we should absolutely still be talking about the things he uncovered and what happened to them afterward. Please do tell those stories, too.
He risked everything, and in the end, the system closed ranks to protect itself. Retroactive immunity was basically a way of saying - "Yep, it was illegal, but it doesn't matter."
You have to remember that half, possibly more than half, of the country is more than okay with what the NSA was doing and is doing.
It's not at all surprising that Congress would indemnify people for, more or less, doing what Congress authorized them to do. If we don't like it, we could consider, maybe not voting the same people into that Congress. Over. And over. And over. And over. And over. And over.
A full 24 Senators and 63 Representatives have held their seats for over 36 years. That's not what you'd expect of a citizenship that was actually upset about being spied upon by their government.
It's obviously not a problem of electing the wrong people. There are enough checks and balances in the system to ensure that there is no change forthcoming.
The system is, indeed, set up to minimize revolutionary churn. The tilt that we're seeing right now towards fascism and white nationalism has been some 40 years in the making. It takes a lot of organization to tilt the whole thing.
This is a feature, not a bug. The system is architected, when something is controversial, default to no motion.
> You have to remember that half, possibly more than half, of the country is more than okay with what the NSA was doing and is doing.
I doubt this. I'd also be interested to see if those people actually know, on any real level, what the NSA was actually doing.
> If we don't like it, we could consider, maybe not voting the same people into that Congress. Over. And over. And over. And over. And over. And over.
They so reliably do the opposite of what people want and yet continue to win. You don't find this at all odd and you put it down to lack of consideration on the part of the electorate.
> That's not what you'd expect of a citizenship that was actually upset about being spied upon by their government.
The joys of being old enough to remember the Church Committee, The House Select Committee on Assassinations, The JFK Records Review Board. PEOPLE ARE CLEARLY NOT OKAY WITH THIS. Yet those who carry water for the deep state are unimpeded by this. Please see this, or at least, don't repeat simple falsehoods about the electorate.
It's like coming across a drowning man and laughing in his face about his predicament.
They aren't. Fewer than 3/4 of eligible voters voted in 2020. In general, somewhere around 10% to a third of eligible voters actually vote in primaries, which are the elections that actually have the most impact on office holding.
Nobody needs to fake election results when Americans just don't show up to vote. It's a disquietingly under-informed and apathetic electorate.
> It's a disquietingly under-informed and apathetic electorate.
The United States has elevated voter suppression to an art form. Last minute polling relocations, inadequate polling locations, unreasonable ID requirements, unreasonable registration requirements, “accidental” voter roll purges. It’s not easy to vote here. And it’s especially hard if you are in a group the incumbents don’t like.
While these things happen, they are not the bulk of the explanation for the lack of voters showing up.
The bulk of it is that voters don't show up. We had the most turnout for any Presidential election in 2020, when people were literally quarantining to escape a plague... Turnout was around 66%. Evidence suggests that (at least in modern times) the way to get Americans to vote is to so constrain them that they can't do anything else with their time on election day.
> Evidence suggests that (at least in modern times) the way to get Americans to vote is to so constrain them that they can't do anything else with their time on election day.
In 2020 voting by mail was widely expanded because of the pandemic. In 2024 it was rolled back. It was easier to vote in 2020 than it was in 2024.
I wouldn’t describe voting in 2020 as constrained. More like enabled. It’s the closest we’ve ever been to a voting holiday.
Oh, agreed---the voting wasn't constrained. The people were. You had to make the people so bored that they bothered to fill out the damn ballot and put a stamp on it.
Americans get distracted. That's the big secret. We're such a generally satisfied, busy, and entertained group of humans that we literally can't be arsed to go pull the one lever that is most politically powerful every time we get a chance to pull it. Some people are actively marginalized. Most of us just don't bother to read the one-pager on the county website and then show up in the fourteen-ish hours set aside to do the thing (let alone try to, say, actively study the candidates or the on-ballot issues).
I literally had a young man confide in me day of election in 2016 that he was voting for Trump because he liked him on the TV show. That's your American voter, when they show up at all.
> I literally had a young man confide in me day of election in 2016 that he was voting for Trump because he liked him on the TV show. That's your American voter, when they show up at all.
I don’t find extrapolating a single anecdote to the entire population a compelling argument.
One shouldn't, but it does fit a pattern for American voters; I more intended it as an exemplar of known behavior. Ronald Reagan was elected Governor of California on the back of his popularity as an actor, popularity which more-or-less carried him to the Presidency (he didn't have an outstanding record as California governor, unless you count "Passing the most restrictive gun control in history to curb the Black Panthers" as outstanding). Simple name recognition can be a shortcut to the Presidency in the US; Americans don't have a tradition of demanding demonstration of a long career of civil service of their Presidents (with the record, to my knowledge, being the most recent one's first election with "zero previous demonstration").
I'd love to give you some hard data on this in modern times, but AFAICT no polls are even asking questions as simple and obvious as "When did you first hear of Donald Trump?" or "Do you trust an actor more than a politician?"
Trump in 2016 was able to use his lack of political history as a selling point; with no history of service in office, he'd had no scandals in office. Clinton's long political career worked against her in public perception.
I personally believe that there's some benefit to political expertise and demonstrated history of good choices and good leadership; the American electorate doesn't seem to value these things when they reject a career politician for someone with no track record in the highest elected office... And then reelect him in similar circumstances.
> It's depressing
We're in the second term of President Trump with a Congress that has carried a sub-30% approval rate for decades. I'm not going to be able to offer many optimistic observations about America's Federal elected offices... Or the people who elect them. It is entirely possible the American Experiment ends in this generation with the conclusion that Americans had a good thing going until they lost the tools to successfully self-govern.
I would welcome counter-evidence that didn't fail the conspiracy theory test.
> Fewer than 3/4 of eligible voters voted in 2020.
This is not completely true[0]. I'd also give the advice that you shouldn't take a "nationwide" average to mean much of anything. The wikipedia article shows wide variation across the states which is true for almost any statistic you can think of.
> actually vote in primaries
Bernie voters might give you a hint as to why. I guess this is the problem Mayor Pete's "shadow" app was meant to solve. It honestly seems like parties don't genuinely like people voting in primaries. The person who's "turn" it is might lose.
> elections that actually have the most impact
Unfortunately we're talking about the legislature here because they write the laws in question and are the proper party to wage your grievances against. Have you ever looked into how competitive those primaries actually are? Anyways this is why I vote for Greens and Libertarians. Then they might stand a chance of cracking 5% and getting recognized fully by the Federal Election Commission.
> Americans just don't show up to vote.
All evidence to the contrary. What they don't do is vote in senate elections. There districts with as low as 25% voter turn out. Which means you only need 12% of the eligible population to turn out for you to secure your seat. So you're right. No need to cheat. Just be arbitrary and capricious to the point that busy and worried people no longer feel that using their time in the voting booth can actually change something.
> It's a disquietingly under-informed and apathetic electorate.
As always, back to where this conversation starts, who should bear the responsibility for this? I don't think blaming the electorate itself brings you anywhere other than helping to chase people further away from an important civil institution.
Yea, but I'm not a signatory to the constitution, the /states/ are. Which is why the document immediately tells you it is to "form a more perfect union." The union isn't between you and I nor does it grant either of us law enforcement powers.
Then _immediately_ after you get Section 1: "All legislative powers herin granted shall be vested in a congress of the United States." Which, by the way, prior to the 17th amendment, the Senate was selected directly by the states. Then again immediately after that you get a set of limitations as to who can be admitted to this congress. You'll also note that as citizens we have absolutely no voice in the operation of this congress, the selection of it's bills, nor in the voting on them.
No, in a representative /republican/ democracy, it's the representatives that are first and foremost responsible. The most I can do is offer my input on who those people should be every 2 years, so I certainly bear some, but it's inane to suggest that the current outcome is the fault of the electorate. In particular when billions of dollars are spent every year on campaigns and advertising.
Your idea is austere and unhelpful to a broken and corrupted system. I'd like to develop a notion of jurisprudence that helps the people out of their predicament, not points the finger blamefully at them.
You are right that Congress are the immediate legislative agents, but the Congressional responsibility is back-stopped by the people, because ultimately (with the exception of impeachment and removal from office, which is asking the legislature to police itself) only the people can decide to stop supporting them. And you're right about the 17th Amendment, but that's in the past; modern American voters have more power to choose their representatives than they have in most of American history, and they do not exercise it.
I don't know who else's fault it can be but the electorate when they saw how the current President operates and re-elected him. To say nothing of re-electing the same Congress over and over despite that body having a sub-30% approval rating.
... and if the people don't hold the responsibility, what would you recommend the people do? I'm not sure what "a notion of jurisprudence" means in this context: are you suggesting replacing he power-at-a-distance of an unpopular legislature with rule by nine unelectedlife-appointed officials and their underlings?
> While we were able to use his evidence to make some change, both EFF and Mark were ultimately let down by Congress and the Courts, which have refused to take the steps necessary to end the mass spying even after Edward Snowden provided even more evidence of it in 2013.
Do you have to be a cynic to pretty much have expected this?
It's also hard to make the case that it isn't, ultimately, what the people want, by "the standard you walk past is the standard you accept" principle.
It's been nearly twenty years. If Americans were deeply, deeply bothered by the government spying on them, they'd have burned down this government by now. At most charitable, this speaks to a deep ignorance or apathy in the American electorate and American citizenship. Or a general anxiety about what "the other people" are doing that exceeds their anxiety about what the government can do with panopticon surveillance.
I think, in general, hackers vastly overestimate the average human concern or sensitivity to this kind of thing.
The one that hasn't formed yet because the electorate has failed to recognize that parties only exist because they can consolidate mass political power. This is part of the "apathy" category. People don't care enough to meet up on this issue. They don't even care enough to be members of the existing parties or do more than show up to elections (and then, only between half and three-quarters for President, less for Congress, and hovering around 10-20% for primaries).
People care, but not enough to overcome institutional inertia.
> The one that hasn't formed yet because the electorate has failed to recognize that parties only exist because they can consolidate mass political power.
This is not the reason. The reason is the how the system was designed:
The Tea Party Republicans are a counter-example (or more accurately, a counterinsurgency). While there are still only two parties, one of them has become something that would be nearly unrecognizable to its members from the '70s.
It is possible to organize within the party to bend it. But in general, one side of the aisle tends to seem to have difficulty with finding enough common ground to actually work as a bloc, while the other side has managed, impressively, to unify Christian fundamentalists and ultra-rich billionaires.
> If Americans were deeply, deeply bothered by the government spying on them, they'd have burned down this government by now.
Right now stuff is happening that does deeply bothers Americans, and what do they do? They walk around with signs, they file legal papers, and maybe some other forms of peaceful, albeit useless, protest... a lot of other countries truly would be burning down the government right now if something like Elon happened there, but so far America has just been saying they don't want it, in as many ways as possible, but while still continuing to fully let it happen.
In the US it's looking like the main aggressors are Trump supporters and most of everyone else is not actually out for blood, just Peacefully Unhappy.
Elon is 100% out for blood, he's practically a modern-day Nazi.
On many social media platforms you can see a lot of people from the UK, EU, etc. being totally bewildered that all the US is doing right now is useless peaceful protests.
Maybe eventually something will happen that changes things, or maybe eventually things will reach a tipping point, but right now at least they are still stuck in some peaceful protest limbo.
How close are we to “bypassing” a lot of this spying when some of the most popular communications platforms (e.g. WhatsApp) are end to end encrypted? Will the tech eventually solve the problem in a convenient way, at least for those who care?
They have a nicely implemented E2E protocol. This is operationally convenient: Meta can accurately say that they don't store WhatsApp messages, so fewer access requests go to them. And I'm sure it's nice for engineer morale, too.
However, the app makes it semi-mandatory to turn on backups. If you say no, it keeps nagging you. If you always say no, you are in the 0.1% and everyone you talk to has backups enabled, so all of your conversations are helpfully backed up anyway, just not for you :)
These backups go to Google Drive or iCloud. You can draw your own conclusions about who has access and who handles the LE/IC requests.
No, you're not a cynic. The EFF takes exquisite pains to hide from you the fact that these programs spied on foreigners, which is the job of the NSA. Thus, they are necessary and proper, and perfectly legal.
The EFF is a propaganda platform. You shouldn't take its claims at face value.
Don't give us this "perfectly legal" crap. To remind you: the NSA killed off ThinThread (that explicitly took care to avoid wiretapping US citizens' data) in favour of Trailblazer, which grabs ALL data, ALL the time, including ALL US citizens' data.
Their explicit intent was to break the law. They broke the law. Then Congress retroactively let them get away with it. They're still breaking the law today.
> The "change in priority" consisted of the decision made by the director of NSA General Michael V. Hayden to go with a concept called Trailblazer, despite the fact that ThinThread was a working prototype that claimed to protect the privacy of U.S. citizens. ThinThread was dismissed and replaced by the Trailblazer Project, which lacked the privacy protections
Let’s not confuse the fact that they are only legally allowed to spy on foreigners, with what they actually do.
I have no idea how you effectively filter mass wiretaps in fibre raw data and exclude americans. It’s impossible to not catch some/lots of domestic data as well..
So what you're saying is that the NSA wiretapping is OK because they're not doing it to you? That's really dumb.
Currently, the US is in a number of intelligence sharing arrangements in which countries ask other countries to spy on their own citizens for them. e.g. if the NSA can't spy on someone because they know they're American, they ask GCHQ to do it for them. And vice versa. This is why human rights need to be as universal as possible, because otherwise you just ask your buddy to do what you can't legally do yourself.
"We only spy on foreigners" is a water sandwich.
Furthermore, it is NSA policy to treat all encrypted traffic as foreign, and to archive it forever until it can be decrypted and searched to determine if it was legal to decrypt and search it. In other words, "we only spy on foreigners" is a guilty until proven innocent policy.
"Necessary and proper" is decided by a security apparatus with a conflict of interest. Nobody voted for this, the executive branch just decided to do it. As for legality, well, I'll give you that Congress retroactively made the spying legal. On the other hand, the US Constitution has a pretty clear restriction on the use of state power in order to search and seize. Being a foreigner is not in and of itself necessary suspicion to justify searching through all their shit, because being from another country is not a crime.
Had the privilege of watching him receive an award from EFF years ago at ETech. Gave a brief speech. Struck me as a gentle man who really did what he thought was right and for no other purpose. It took moral strength to do what he did. I hope he rests easy.
I don't know if this started the whole movement or whatever you'd call it for this push towards privacy and the general public knowing about it, but it helped a lot. Before him releasing info about room 641A and whatever else, there really wasn't definitive evidence of any government spying and tampering, and either with the intention of starting this movement or simply letting people know, he was a big push in the right direction.
I wonder what percent of Americans would trade their privacy to bring their monthly cell phone bill from $100/mo to $0/mo in exchange for sharing texts and emails with a telecom company.
I suspect the percentage would be surprisingly high.
Unfortunately normal people don’t really care that much about privacy (even if we all think everyone should).
Because it’s a lot easier to compromise one email provider instead of a million. I’m surprised I have to explain the benefits of federated over centralized systems here.
It's also interesting to float the thought experiment of what Gen Z would say about this question because the online norms are so different.
"Hey, sometimes people try to send bombs through the mail. Would you be okay with the government opening 1% of packages, inspecting them, and re-sealing them to make sure they're safe?
... what if they threw in a coupon so the next package mailed is free?"
(... and suddenly I've discovered of my own psyche that if those "The TSA inspected this bag" slips included a coupon for a free coffee, the visceral response to their presence would do a 180. "Oh, sweet! Free coffee!").
not only was there not "definitive evidence"; if you said that the companies did that sort of thing you were called a conspiracy theorist whackaloon. oddly 85% of the general public suddenly was like "well of course they spy on email" after all this came out.
That's not the general sentiment I recall. There was a general sense of 'the government's probably watching' (along with who knows who else: early internet protocols like email really aren't resistant to snooping by more or less anyone), just no public info on specifically how (and you might get some disapproving looks if you claimed any specific approach without evidence).
It depends. If you were a hacker who'd read Bamford and the news from whistleblowers like Klein, talking with other hackers, that general sense was common knowledge. But if the topic came up in conversation with, like, the guy you're subletting a room from in NYC, you could get a very skeptical look.
(I wonder if these people remembered those conversations after Snowden.)
I'm sure it depended on the audience, but I and others [0] guessed at broad electronic surveillance well before the 641A revelations. I was never called a conspiracy theorist for it either. In the 1990s if you had read Bamford's The Puzzle Palace [1] (published in 1982) and observed the government's legal fight against Zimmermann's PGP encryption software [2], you could make an educated guess close to the truth. If you phrased it as "I'm sure that the government is spying on everything," that went beyond the realm of what could be proved then, but airing suspicions about broad government snooping never elicited strong denials in my experience.
[0] Like the people on the Cypherpunks mailing list
> [1] (published in 1982) and observed the government's legal fight against Zimmermann's PGP encryption software [2], you could make an educated guess close to the truth.
what percentage of the US population do you reckon could "make an educated guess" about the technological capabilities of the US government in 2002?
please remember this is a technology discussion forum, not a general public forum.
> Zimmermann's PGP encryption software
"PG what? Encryption? like the cryptkeeper? I like hans zimmer music"
People suspected there was funny business going on since the Patriot Act was passed in 2001. By 2003 gangs were aware government spied on phones at scale. NSA regularly came up in my high school tech class in 2004, in connection with War on Terror. By 2005, the program was confirmed.
Lots of people know lots of things. The problem is those things aren't always true. And until there is a defacto public acknowledgement of something many people defer to the 'official position.'
Here's a present time one for you - all US based cloud providers, including Apple, are providing full (and probably indirect) real time access to everything stored on those servers to various organizations including, but not limited to, the NSA. Lawsuits around this issue are motivated solely by an effort to do away with parallel construction [1] and enable the evidence obtained through such means to be able to be directly used.
Lots of people know this, lots of people also think this is crazy talk. And prior to Snowden, and to a lesser degree Klein, the overwhelming majority fell into the latter camp regarding anything even remotely close to the scope and scale of what the NSA was doing.
That's a really charitable way of framing the fact that a 15% minority screeching about "the government would never" and "but there's no proof" was able to control the narrative despite people generally having doubt or believing otherwise privately right up until the point that the proof was public record and so ironclad that even mainstream media had to report on it.
(I assume the 85% number is made up, but for whatever the number is the point stands)
The really odd thing is that 85% of the general public will say "well of course they spy on email" even today, after Snowden's leaks showed that the Obama administration had shut that down.
Setting aside the fact that the leaks you're referring to are over a decade old at this point, they also established that GCHQ buffered the entirety of the UK's internet traffic for 72 hours, bit for bit.
If you think there's no collection on e-mail, rather than just legal shell games being played with terminology and various compartments, then I've got a bridge to sell you.
In fact, the bridge is made of metadata and nothing else.
SMTP connections are wrapped in TLS these days, so even if you were to collect email transfers bit for bit, you wouldn't be able to read them, not even metadata.
IIRC there's been speculation that the NSA can/has brute forced TLS keys up through 4096 bit size. I read a paper once that crunched the numbers on energy cost and compute time and whatnot it comes out looking like a reasonable investment for them.
Obviously they'd have to keep such an exercise on the DL if they did do it because increasing key size is pretty trivial.
A 4096-bit RSA key is still well beyond the means of even a very capable state actor. The standard nowadays is 2048-bit RSA keys, cracking of which is also (probably) still beyond anyone's capabilities. Maybe a multi-year effort directed at a specific target might manage to crack a single key, but I wouldn't bet on it. RSA cracking efforts would almost certainly focus on smaller keys that are still being used despite the warnings.
However, even if they did crack a major infrastructure provider's RSA key, TLS nowadays uses ephemeral key exchange which provides forward secrecy. So it doesn't matter if an intelligence agency collected every packet, they could not decipher the contents after the fact. They would have to actively interdict every TLS handshake and perform a man-in-the-middle attack against both parties all the time.
It is extremely doubtful that this is happening en masse. Such a process would require an immense amount of online computing power directly in the path of all Internet traffic. Much of the compute available to intelligence agencies (and accounted for in back-of-the-envelope calculations by outside parties) is effectively offline due to airgaps. It's not like they want people doing to them what they're doing to others, after all.
It's much easier to send an NSL to Google to read your email than to try to intercept it over the wire. The latter capability would be reserved for high-value targets unreachable by the US legal system, not mass surveillance.
What? No it didn't, not at all. The leaks clearly showed email as being one of the many things being directly surveilled. Here is one of the many slides directly acknowledging as much. [1]
If you mean the rhetoric around it, then yeah - politicians lie, especially when engaging in what would be seen as deeply unpopular behavior. This isn't a shock. I assure you the admin that passed indefinite detention without charge or trial [2] wasn't some crusader for civil rights. Obama was just ridiculously charismatic and could sell a drowning man water, but he was no different than the rest in behavior.
I actually believed Obama when he spoke about ending the NSA's mass surveillance on the American people. He taught constitutional law. He knew exactly how wrong it was. I suspect that once he got into office he was either strong armed into changing his tune (and into ultimately giving the NSA more spying powers on the public) or he was shown enough secret evidence that it scared him into thinking it was necessary to violate the freedom of all Americans in order to keep us safe from terrorists. I'm not sure which scenario should worry me more, but at this point I don't think anyone in government has the ability to really stop the NSA.
The sayings about power corrupting date back to time immemorial. It's easy to say something is wrong (or right) when you are in no position to meaningfully impact, or be impacted, by what you're speaking of. It's another altogether different thing when you are in a situation to define the limits of your own powers, or that which even might affect you.
This, in many ways, is what made the Founding Fathers so unique. They were in a position to grant themselves effectively any and all powers they might ever desire. Yet instead, they sacrificed all of that in pursuit of a more free and just society, in many cases to their own detriment. In modern times I do not think there's any real comparable examples. Instead it's just endless power accumulation, tempered only by the oft liminal protest of the citizenry.
> In modern times I do not think there's any real comparable examples
There are real comparable examples, from South America and Africa, and America herself. You won't hear about them much, partly because they break important narratives and partly because often the US went to extraordinary lengths to smear, coup and/or murder those people.
> I actually believed Obama when he spoke about ending the NSA's mass surveillance on the American people
He did. Snowden's leaked documents showed that he has already ended mass email surveillance. He ended mass phone surveillance after the leaks. Do you have any evidence whatsoever that he didn't?
> I actually believed Obama when he spoke about ending the NSA's mass surveillance on the American people. He taught constitutional law. He knew exactly how wrong it was. I suspect that once he got into office he was either strong armed into changing his tune (and into ultimately giving the NSA more spying powers on the public) or he was shown enough secret evidence that it scared him into thinking it was necessary to violate the freedom of all Americans in order to keep us safe from terrorists.
Man... When a bombastic politician promises something but doesn't deliver, the common response is "Oh, well, of course he just made an empty promise. What can you expect?". When a more genial politician that affects a more-typical reserved public face promises something but doesn't deliver, they get the benefit of the doubt. "Surely that wasn't an empty promise just to get more power! Surely something happened that convinced them against their better judgement not to do it.".
Respectfully, these are a class of people who have no problems saying trivially-verifiable lies to the public at large (as time has proven that there are no lasting consequences for lying to the public), and little problem with lying to members of Congress or even the courts (again, because here "lately" there are no real consequences for the act).
Don't believe what they say, believe what they do... because you're not privy to the conversations that they have that actually matter, so you have no idea what they actually intend.
We were talking about mass surveillance. PRISM isn't that. They used to collect mass email metadata, using facilities like Room 641A. Snowden's leaks showed that they had already stopped. These days, it wouldn't even be technically possible, let alone legally possible, because pretty much all SMTP traffic is over TLS. Gmail won't even accept unencrypted SMTP connections.
> These days, it wouldn't even be technically possible, let alone legally possible, because pretty much all SMTP traffic is over TLS.
These days the government wouldn't need to decrypt email traffic going over the backbone. They'd march into the companies and ISPs who run the mail servers and monitor/collect everything from there directly, the same way they marched into AT&T and set up camp. The vast majority of the American's email can be obtained by controlling the servers of a very small number of corporations. We have Lavabit to thank for demonstrating that when the government comes knocking your only options are to comply or shut down (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavabit)
There's no reason to think that there isn't a Room 641A at Google, Apple, MS, etc.
> They'd march into the companies and ISPs who run the mail servers and monitor/collect everything from there directly, the same way they marched into AT&T and set up camp.
This is illegal. If it were possible, they wouldn't have bothered with taps.
What!?!? Yes PRISM is a mass surveillance program. And it's not metadata, it's piping entire content straight from the target to the NSA, in real time. This involves direct filtered data (such as Skype messages/videos) indirectly handed over by participating companies (which is probably all major tech companies in the US at this point), as well as raw upstream (essentially line tapping) data such as provided via STORMBREW. [1]
You're more than 11 years behind the news. Less than a week after Greenwald published his initial ridiculous description of PRISM, it was corrected by the people who actually built the systems at the tech companies. He stupidly thought that the DITU was a machine at the companies that could get any data, when anybody with half a clue could have told him that it's obviously https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Intercept_Technology_Unit. The Wikipedia PRISM article's description is very clear and well-cited, and it includes Snowden's slides there to cross reference the description with. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM#The_program
The FBI tells the companies to forward the communications of specific targets to the FBI. PRISM is a data integration system that ingests that data from the FBI into NSA systems.
This is overt misinformation. PRISM works directly with the companies (well, "indirectly" to offer plausible deniability). The section you're linking to entirely quotes some random government organization which is obviously an unreliable source on such topics. As is the writing, as opposed to sources, on Wiki.
This [1] is one of the more telling leaks. It's a technical users guide for NSA employees on using realtime Skype surveillance for all modes including video and landline on arbitrary targets. [1] It even includes debugging guides like why an agent might be getting multiple copies of the same message, as happens when somebody being spied on boots up a new device and all of their messages are sent from Microsoft to them (and the NSA) simultaneously, resulting a copy of older messages (from the snooper's perspective).
We could do it. We could fundraise to cast a bronze of him and put it anywhere we like. It wouldn't take that many people or that much time, in the grand scheme of things.
Actually, the world might be a nicer place with more statues and less goofy abstract modernist art in public for even more money than bronzes.
He revealed unlawful surveillance years prior to and of the same gravity as Snowden, but only one became a celebrity. I would love to know the reason for that.
I say this without intending to denigrate Snowden at all: Klein's situation was less messy. Snowden had a top secret clearance and vowed to safeguard all the secrets he came across. Klein was just a regular guy doing regular work for a regular company when he saw something strange. That doesn't mean I think Snowden was wrong, just that there's a ton of room for people to say "I agree with him but he shouldn't have done that because he swore not to". Klein didn't have those obligations.
Snowden explained it well. There were four other whistleblowers besides Snowden and Klein.
(1) Russ Tice: USAF intelligence analyst
(2) William Binney: NSA Technical Director.
(3) Thomas Tamm: DOJ lawyer
(4) Thomas A. Drake: senior executive at NSA
Each of them was a senior position relative to Snowden and Klein and all these cases were shut down. What change Snowden had to do traditionally by the book whistleblow or tiny traditional leak. He made the conscious decision to take the information so that they could not shut him down, and make a scene from outside the US (Hong Kong) so that there would be time to talk to the press.
Snowden made a political crime that was morally justified. It was not self serving. It turns out that Americans don't care but at least he made a splash.
Snowden also swore an oath to uphold the constitution, including the fourth amendment that the NSA was illegally violating (one NSA crime) and covering up (second NSA crime), including by lying to congress (third NSA crime), as well as to protect America from domestic enemies, like the kind of traitors who'd come up with a secret plan to violate the constitutional rights of the entire country and lie about it to congress.
Thank goodness he took his oath more seriously than the "I was just following orders" crowd. We know from WW2 that "I was just following orders" is not a legitimate excuse to help facilitate grave atrocities, like all of those other NSA employees did every single day, in violation of their own oaths that they each swore.
You won't get any argument from me. I agree. And even in agreement, I still say that there's a much larger grey area in Snowden's case. We can and should discuss whether his actions were justified. I think they are. But I can at least appreciate that people who disagree have legitimate reasons to see it otherwise.
Klein's case didn't come with all that other baggage.
The moment which struck me the most from all the recent confirmation hearings was the parade of senator after senator asking Tulsi Gabbard if Edward Snowden was a traitor. It was like the #1 priority for them that people believe that, and they would skip any relevant questions about the job only to pursue that one topic over and over.
No argument from me with what you wrote, either, I just wanted to make sure I was doing my interpretation justice by sharing it - there's certainly no shortage of posters parroting the other side's talking points.
It's interesting that Klein's tell-all didn't get as much attention despite being less legally fraught. It makes me wonder how much of the Snowden media frenzy was organic in the first place, and if not much, who was pulling the strings to draw attention to practices that our own government had an obvious interest in repressing and concealing discussion of.
Could be that Snowden took it to The Guardian, a foreign and international news outlet. The story how British intelligence folks showed up at the Guardian HQ and symbolically destroyed a hard drive, and the way Guardian management used their New York offices to work around restrictions in UK law to publish the story, that's quite a story itself, and of course journalists know how to get coverage and reach.
Mark targeted the EFF, not a news outlet, in contrast. The EFF probably first and foremost had the legal pursuit in mind, not making a story big.
The most shocking things of all for me was how ignorant ordinary people were and still are about both whistle blowers' disclosures and the subsequent pretend fixes by lawmakers. (Cynically, I'm inclined to add there might be more riots and demonstrations if you take Heinz ketchup away from people than theirlegitimate rights to privacy.)
> Mark targeted the EFF, not a news outlet, in contrast.
"Mark not only saw how it works, he had the documents to prove it.
He brought us over a hundred pages of authenticated AT&T schematic diagrams and tables.
Mark also shared this information with major media outlets, numerous Congressional staffers, and at least two senators personally."
I don't recall agreeing to any oath like that when I applied for a US clearance. I just recall the NDA.
I may have pledged allegiance to the US flag when I was a kid, but that wasn't the same as taking an oath of elected office to uphold the constitution.
It wasn't simply tapping phones, it is the warrantless collection of close to all global electronic communications.
And the immorality doesn't stop there, that's where it starts.
"We kill people based on metadata."
- General Michael Hayden, former Director of the NSA, former Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence, and former Director of the CIA.
This includes innocent people. Women, children, civilians. Deliberately. "Acceptable collateral damage" is the euphemism used to mask the moral evil of deliberately murdering women and children.
If you're in a war of attrition (like the the US was in Afghanistan), and the other side already has agreed it's okay to kill innocents (9/11), then you're not going to win by fighting an "ethical" war -- whatever that means.
I'm not going to defend the CIA/NSA for actions taken inside the country. On the other hand, I'm not going to second guess decisions happening on the ground in an active war zone.
It's working so far for Russia. It worked for Germany in WWII until the US stepped and fought our way through Europe.
If you see a certain group as your sworn enemy for life which should be destroyed at all means possible -- then you will never have peace. All you can have is war.
The long term result of justifying the mean is always the subordination of the individuals, you migrate from a democratic society to totalitarian state.
I feel it's safe to say that no society prefer dictatorship to democracy.
So you won (maybe), your life is worst, you have no freedom anymore.
Beside you say in some case war is inevitable because there is too much hate. I don't agree, people (individuals) can be so hateful that war is inevitable but populations always aspire to peace.
Even totalitarian state always have to justify the war by pretending they're the one merely defending, being attacked because this desire for peace is so powerful.
> ...you're not going to win by fighting an "ethical" war -- whatever that means.
By not fighting ethically abroad and by permitting our authoritarians largely free-rein both abroad and domestically, we gave the folks who planned and caused the destruction of the WTC towers nearly everything they were hoping for.
Overreacting and letting Bush II run his military campaigns in the Middle East was one of the greatest gifts we could have given Al Qaeda and those like them. Encouraging our populace to permit themselves to be (and continue to be) terrorized is a lesser but still significant gift to those same organizations.
Afghanistan had nothing to do with 9/11. Neither did Syria, or Iraq.
Vietnam wasn't self-defense. Korean war wasn't self-defense. CIA-instigated Color revolutions and Euromaidan weren't self-defense. Kosovo wasn't self-defense. Launching a cruise missile (a precision weapon that requires the operator to enter precise geographic coordinates prior to launch) at the Chinese embassy in Belgrade wasn't self-defense.
A vast and overwhelming majority of the military operations the post-WW2 USA conducts overseas are not acts of self-defense, they are acts of imperialism.
"I want to grow the imperial empire's influence and footprint" is not justification for murdering unarmed civilians. Never has been, never will be.
And now he's nice and cozy in a country that is busy invading its neighbor... But one that the US President has himself cozied up to the leadership of as of late.
It's an odd world that makes odd bedfellows. One wonders depending on how the next four years go if Snowden could even catch a pardon.
... or if he did, the Russians would even let him leave.
I’m watching Person of Interest for the first time. It’s interesting watching it today now that the premise, minus 100% accurate crime prediction, is largely a forgone conclusion. It was produced after Klein but before Snowden and does a good job exploring the expansion of surveillance and just how motivated the government is to have a system that tracks everyone. Of course it’s fiction but it’s a fun watch that asks a lot of good questions.
I really enjoyed that show. Such a shame it was cancelled! Despite critical acclaim (in later seasons, at least), it apparently wasn't profitable enough.
I actually tried to find a legal way to rewatch it the other day, but all of my current subscriptions list it with "rights expired" or some such.
I enjoyed that show enough that I was willing to put up with Amazon's "Freevee" ads because they would not just let me buy the show. I've never done that with any other shows.
Rest in peace sweet prince. I'll never forget this discovery, it was probably my first realization that whatever is possible technically is most likely being done somewhere to exert power over people.
And in this case most people in tech knew you could split a network backbone, and if you can do it then most likely someone is doing it. But Mark actually brought it into the light.
And that's what we can't forget in 2025, that whatever is possible technically is most likely being done by someone somewhere. Today it would be using AI to oppress people, track citizens, predict crimes, accuse people of crimes they might commit, or whatever your imagination anchored in technical reality can picture.
See my post below -- I have been tracking Eschelon since the early 90s...
Guess what NSA router backdoors have become (mobile phones with socialifelog media apps on them)
---
And like @tptacek said
>>If it was the NSA, their van wouldn't look so goofy that people took one look at the photo and assumed it had to be an NSA van, which is what happened here. This is a bad movie plot trope: the bad guys can't simultaneously be omniscient and so dumb they're trivially outed like this, just like the real supervillain isn't going to monologue while you free yourself from the chains lowering you into the shark tank.
---
Love that but, I do think that both is true...
Look incompetent so they don't think you're competent (Stuxnet/DUQU)
I mistook the building, but I do remember details that Twitter had a direct fiber connection to that room...
Also, we have a LOT of evidence of prior NSA backdoors and interceptions...
in 1998 I had to hire a CSIE (cisco expert) (like a 3 digit uuid) to help me recover a router password from infra I inherited... and during the password reset procedure on a 3640 - he was telling me how "the NSA requires Cisco to put in back doors into all the routers)
((The passwd BTW was Feet4Monkey))
--
Then recall Carnivore? (and its predecessor eschelon - and a whole bunch of reveals) -- what was interesting was that the only company to refuse to install Carnivor was Earthlink.net (ISP) -- and the reason they stated they wouldnt put in Carnivore, was because they stated they already had their user tracking system (They were owned by the Mormon Church) ((and for some reason Whoopi Goldberg was one of their large notable investors))
And recall how they stated that the NSA specifically likes to hire Mormons?
And recall North First Street DC that was purchased by Cerberus Group which was the ~Bush-Cabal hedgie, and the reason they bought it because it housed MAE WEST and they wanted to inject NBAR/Surveilling into it -- once they completed that, they sold it off again (To one of their subs, IIRC)
I hate that I am getting old and I start to forget a lot of the malfeasance I have witnessed in my ~30+ years in SV.
As willvarfar points out, there's a satellite system from the 1960s and quite a gap from there until Keyhole Inc.
Keyhole Inc. specialized in geospatial data visualization applications. The name "Keyhole" paid homage to the original KH reconnaissance satellites, also known as Corona satellites, which were operated by the U.S. between 1959 and 1972.
Many companies operated in the gap, one in public was ERMapper (Earth Resources Mapping) which had Google Map like displays in the early 1990s and was mainly focussed on geospatial computing - stitching and correcting air and sat images, multispectral data with nonstandard nonlinear geocords, magnetic and radiometric displays and corrections, etc. Other such suites existed at that time.
Keyhole|Google Earth was not the first, it was the one that went very widely public.
Side comment about suboptimal HN commenting or UI...
This post is about someone noteworthy dying, but the top relevant comment is followed by over a dozen screenfulls of text about a sewer inspection van, before you get to anything else.
If you start paging through it, do you close the browser tab in annoyance before you get to any further discussion of the person and why they're noteworthy?
> 4. Mark Klein, AT&T whistleblower who revealed NSA mass spying, has died (eff.org) 1404 points by leotravis10 20 hours ago | flag | hide | 306 comments
Yes, or go up and hit "next", but I don't normally have to on HN.
With the mouse-over-to-and-click-on-tiny-gray-link UI, it's usually faster to autoscroll/scrollwheel or hit PgDn.
So if you start doing the usual way, and it's not working, that's frustration with the post.
And is it worth your time to figure out where to prune/skip within the tree, when you have to go navigate to the tree links. And probably have hide/next/prev multiple times, to get past the entire tree from where you realize.
If people had more UI-efficient tree operations (like in past threading newsreaders), and knew how to use them, then it would be easier.
But with what we have, we can get important posts where important comments are effectively suppressed, for many readers, just by putting a dozen pages of frustrating distraction in front of them.
Mark Klein was just a guy doing his job... until he saw something he couldn't ignore. He didn't have to speak up. He could have walked away, lived his life, and let someone else deal with it. But he didn't. Rest in peace, Mark
I expect there were 10,000 who knew, and he’s the only one who spoke up. Now, the other 9,999 likely believed it was to thwart terrorism, as this was post 9/11. Maybe those who had visibility into who was being surveyed were checking to ensure the spying didn’t cross their ethical boundaries. Interesting to think of what each individual in the system was considering.
Oh, I think it's much simpler: the other 9,999 didn't care enough to risk continued employment. Security today was dearer to them than the hypothetical benefits to strangers.
(Perhaps worth noting: not to detract from what Mark did, but he was retired and therefore didn't have a job on the line. Credit to him for leveraging his position of privilege as a retiree to speak out about what he knew.)
Where's the best overview of this whole NSA mass spying story, starting from 9/11 era and the beginning of the dotcom boom? Any good books or documentaries?
A lot of influential people were quietly radicalized by Klein's disclosures and they took that forward in their ventures, careers, and lives. Change takes time, and almost two decades later, I think we are seeing the results of what those early voices in the wilderness were calling out.
I hope on the other side of current bureaucratic reforms we can make a monument that includes Klein and the other surveillance whistleblowers whose disclosures, and specifically whose courage, turned the popular tide against government overreach.
NSA and AT&T (telecom in general?) caught with their pants down not just once, but twice.
All of this heavily publicized yet here we are today with privacy being an afterthought in everyone’s mind.
I hate to say it but the private corporations and state have really made most of the population complacent with wide net surveillance — cameras everywhere, privacy non-existent, “kyc”, “selfies”, social media, big tech creating profiles of users, and data brokerages selling and buying “anonymized” profiles.
The NSA’s Upstream program primarily targeted foreign communications under the authority of Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act. However, it also incidentally collected data from U.S. citizens, particularly when their communications were intercepted while in contact with foreign targets.
The court cases were thrown out because of congressional action, as they should be, because the entire purpose of the NSA is to spy on foreigners. Thus these programs were legal and this whistleblowing was not, in fact, whistleblowing at all, just leaks of classified information.
The tolerance for the US mass spying efforts remains weird. It undermines the credibility of many US politicians around Trump - yes the US public appears to be set to vote in Hitler-equivalents for the forseeable future. No, dismantling the insane spying apparatus is not a major agenda point.
It's pretty much a forgone conclusion since they are putting AI into every intersection. How are you going to argue against the fact that government AI needs your data for training?
Vectors pointing in all directions can sum to zero. If people are generally dissatisfied, but can't find common ground to coalesce their dissatisfaction into action, movement, or party, the status quo vibrates but does not move.
Broadly speaking, on one side of the aisle in the US I see people who refuse to coalesce, spend more time tearing at each other than figuring out how to work together, and find the entire idea of touching the system, let alone changing it, distasteful...And, sadly, on the other side I see a very successful coalition of surface-incompatible causes who figured out how to work together anyway and got their men elected.
> It's crazy almost nothing changed after this revelation.
The "democracy" noted that when you bomb someone's brain with information and emotions (modern journalism), "he" will forget in 5 minutes what "he" was told.
Especially when "he" has to pay the rent and feed a family.
they have done heroes jobs, but unfortunely the effect was that now its all become normal. ppl dont give a toss..
if you mention beam splitters on fiber, tap rooms at telcos, the 'black boxes' at ISPs.. people just pretend thats normal. they think most othe ppl are pedophiles, rapists and murderes somehow and so think its fine for everything to be tapped and logged. crazy world.
these folks give up their remaining lives for the good of others, and the others just spit on it.
Such a different time. I got kind of anti-american after that but now with the world I am 100% pro USA/EU/Western world and Israel because the others are much worse. Much, much worse.
I find it odd how many people automatically assume that whatever the NSA is up to must be undesirable and therefore should be opposed.
I mean, where do you think analysis of plans by terrorists and nation state adversaries to attack our nation and its allies comes from? The raw intelligence data these are based on can only be gathered by surveillance of communications, both targeted and in bulk.
You should all be supporting this, as you benefit from it every day.
Well, the question at hand was, and is: what should we be supporting? I don't, in fact, assume that what the NSA is doing is bad, but in order for the public and the oversight systems the legislature put in place, someone has to know what's going on. The program Mark Klein revealed surprised legislators, including John Sensenbrenner, the author of the legislation that was used as a justification for the program: https://www.rstreet.org/commentary/patriot-act-author-introd...
Many people worried that the PATRIOT Act was overreach for surveillance, but the bill did pass. What happened with Mark's whistleblowing is that policymakers and the public found out that there were other programs, potentially illegal under even the PATRIOT Act (and, indeed the US Constitution), that had been hidden or obfuscated to their oversight bodies.
(Incidentally, the government's strategy in the cases against the NSA program was to say that even asking about legal authorisation and grounding of the program was in itself, a violation of national security. Many years after Mark's act, Ed Snowden's first published leak was this authorisation document, confirming that Mark was right, and that, had those cases been able to proceed, there would have been grounds for investigation.)
The point is that mass domestic surveillance of American nationals violates common understanding of the law. It makes no sense for the requirements to get a wiretap to be so stringent but the requirements to monitor someone's internet traffic to be nonexistent, just because it's laundered through "intelligence gathering" and you argue it's therefore not "law enforcement."
The point of bulk data collection is to be able to, in effect, take a wiretap in the past before you knew what you'd need to be wiretapping in the present, by querying the bulk datasets for communications between specific endpoints within specific points in time.
As time travel doesn't exist, this is the next best technology available.
Sadly, governments end up becoming corrupt. In one formerly free nation (or at least it was one that obnoxiously bragged about being one), data about women's periods became weaponized in a witchhunt against abortions.
You don't agree with monitoring the communications of adversaries at all, or you don't agree with doing the equivalent for communications made in the recent past?
When the country's own citizens are the "adversaries", that's a highly fucked up government and government agency. If the people are the enemy the country is dead.
> The point is that mass domestic surveillance of American nationals violates common understanding of the law.
It also violates the courts' understanding of the law. That's probably why one such program was shut down prior to the Snowden leaks and definitely why the other was shut down after.
Think of how safe we'd all be if we were on camera 24/7/365!
Let me put it this way: I don't do anything illegal in my bathroom, but damned if I want someone watching me in there. Everyone has their line they don't want crossed. Klein's - and the EFF's, and mine - is somewhere past the NSA monitoring every single communication in the entire country without a warrant. I have no objection with them monitoring specific suspects with a court order, but I don't want them listening to people who aren't being actively, personally investigated.
Just because your communications data or metadata exists in some bulk dataset somewhere doesn't mean that it's being actively and personally investigated by anyone.
As with the issuance of a warrant for wiretapping, there would need to be a proportionate and legitmate reason for your communications within a such a dataset to be looked at.
the problem is that this data exists somewhere where i have no control over it and was collected without my consent, in clear violation of my constitutional rights. perhaps you have perfect trust in the current and future good faith of the US federal government, but perhaps you can understand why others do not. i would not want the local police keeping copies of all of my emails "just in case", why would it be any better for unaccountable strangers to keep secret dossiers on me?
Why would an analyst at the NSA be looking at your communications data?
It's a bit like the police getting a search warrant to look around your home. If there's no legitimate reason to do it, like having reasonable suspicion of a crime that requires investigation, then they're not going to.
This is just a rewording of the "nothing to hide" argument.
And your edit seems to ignore that the analysts are humans. Police get caught abusing their access to data resources for personal gain frequently, why are NSA analysts different?
(Not even touching on the fact that mistakes happen, leaks happen, breaches happen, laws change, political winds change direction)
> It's a bit like the police getting a search warrant to look around your home. If there's no legitimate reason to do it, like having reasonable suspicion of a crime that requires investigation, then they're not going to.
Yes, it is a bit like this. Except in this case the police don't need a warrant, they can enter your home for any reason at their discretion. You're putting a lot of trust in a bunch of people you've (I'm assuming) never met working for an agency that has demonstrated a complete lack of regard for the constitution. Either that or you're a really terrible glowie: "How do you do, fellow tech enthusiasts??"
Maybe they want to look at the naked pics being sent between you and your sexual partners, as has happened many times. Maybe they want to spy on their own sexual partners or prospective partners, which has also happened many times. Maybe they want to blackmail people for their own gain, which has, once again, happened many times. There are innumerable reasons with plenty of precedent for each and every one.
Setting aside the legality/morality/whatever of the data collection itself, you seem to place a lot of faith in the NSA’s ability to keep that data private.
This is at best a strawman, and at worst blatant astroturfing. The benefit of the doubt is given to these organizations a priori. The idea that the average person should not be able to know about government intelligence programs is common sense - if the average person knows, so do our adversaries, defeating the purpose of the program.
But there have to be limits on this power, or you enable, and even empower, an Orwellian regime.
NSA has been caught, multiple times, flagrantly disregarding the law, violating privacy rights afforded to every citizen by the Constitution, and gathering an amount of data that could easily enable a hostile regime to enact vengeance on dissenters.
So imagine this hostile regime comes to power. Now everyone is forced to either support the regime, or face harsh consequences without recourse. Any plan you construct, or group of supporters you amass, will inevitably be compromised by this machine and eradicated, one way or another.
You have totalitarianism, and no means to resist it. ou've given up your immune system. You no longer have a democracy, even if you do on paper. And before you make the argument that "the ends justify the means" consider that this hostile regime might not share your ends. You may get wrapped up in "the means".
Is that a desirable outcome for you? If not, you should rethink your position. If that outcome seems desirable to you, there are a very limited number of reasons why that could be the case, and none of them are charitable.
To not be scrutinized for any and everything is vital. When all is accessible, actors playing the part of the good citizen are the prime. I would rather have pain than the pretense of good.
Nooooooo! He was my next door neighbor a few years ago, and I knew him as a person before I realized that I knew him as a hero.
His dogs were fiercely protective of his house, which is perfectly understandable. One day I saw a "sewer cleaning" van behind his house, and I have a hard time believing that's what it really was: https://honeypot.net/2025/03/12/rip-mark-klein.html
That certainly is just a Sewer TV inspection van! I have a hand in writing some of the software that is run on these and processes the videos that come out of them. They all have rack mounted PCs and a monitor with a joystick to control the crawler that goes in the pipe.
> That certainly is just a Sewer TV inspection van!
Hee hee, I can hear the NSA now: "Dammit, who parked a sewer inspection van in the middle of our massive surveillance network?!?"
Back on the topic of indiscriminate wide-net surveillance (which I think was also the focus of the AT&T whistleblower), I quote Bruce Schneier on the Snowden leaks:
"I started this talk by naming three different programs that collect Google user data. Those programs work under different technical capabilities, different corporate alliances, and different legal authorities. You should expect the same thing to be true for cell phone data, for internet data, for everything else. When you have the budget of the NSA and you're given the choice, 'Should you do it this way or that way?' The correct answer is: both."
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iMFPMqboZc
Gotta love this site.
Makes for a treasure trove of impromptu QA's in the comments
"Did you win the Putnam?"
Sorry u/sanj & hat-tip to u/cperciva ;)
Do you work for the National Sewerage Agency? :D
Flowers By Irene.
https://frinkiac.com/caption/S03E04/719740
it would be too funny if that was a re sewage company. black vans with small print n.s.a. on it haha xD
door bell rings .... five men in dark suits standing outside ... hair on the back of my neck stands on end. I open the door, hands shaking with that burning feeling in my guts "Yea, how can I help you gentlemen" The tallest one, intimidating, gruff, ex marine perhaps, shoves a badge in my face: "N S A, National Sewer Agency" they push me aside and push inside my hosue .. a violation but what do I say?!? They look around ... circling me like a pack of wolves .. then, another pulls a bag from under his arm and produces a plastic jar in a biohazard bag... looks like ice cream and garbage inside, then grufly states "Sir, do you recognize these napkins?" "napkins?" I squeak out ... it hit me.... FUCK! .... the other night .... I was drunk, out of TP, desperate... paper towels staring me in the face - dare I? It was a moment of weakness, desperation and drunkeness rolled into one ... and here I am, staring the consequences in the face.... "Sir, your going to have to come with us" And no one ever heard from me again. Please take heed, only flush TP!
This is fairly close to reality, if you think about it
Medicaid here in Arizona is called "AHCCCS" which is pronounced "access" so imagine the fun homophonic confusion in a conversation about "do you have access?" "well I got access but then I lost it..."
Many conservative Christians have termed homosexuality as "Same-Sex Attraction" or SSA, so they often speak of "suffering from SSA" or being afflicted with it. When I applied to the Social Security Administration for disability, I couldn't help but notice, and their disability program is called "SSDI" which has nothing to do with Reagan's "Star Wars/Strategic Defense Initiative"
Nor do my dealings with the F.A.A. in the past several years have anything to do with a pilot's license or flight clearances; the Family Assistance Administration here doles out funds for food stamps ("SNAP", another good homophone, lets you purchase plenty of alphabet soup for the fam) and other basic needs.
https://xkcd.com/932/
Fact: The "Obamaphone" program didn't begin or end with President Obama. Discuss!
I'm really curious then.
Why's the visible person holding the headphones tighter against his ear? What kind of sounds need to be processed by a human for sewer inspection?
To their benefit, if it was sus, they would have kept the door shut.
Generally these are done in coordination with a sewer cleaning truck at the next manhole in the pipe. Very common for them to stay on the phone with each other
That makes sense that they would use higher quality headphones on a radio to collaborate. Thanks for the insight!
Holding the headphones tighter is never suspicious
> Why's the visible person holding the headphones tighter against his ear?
“Hey boss, we just finished up the job. Everything is good here, what site do you want us to go to next?”
hangs up phone
I mean, if a sufficiently capable entity is interested in snooping on an individual like this, mimicking a sewer tv inspection van is a trivial endeavour. You don’t know at all what that van was doing.
Yes we do. It was a sewer inspection van. If it was the NSA, their van wouldn't look so goofy that people took one look at the photo and assumed it had to be an NSA van, which is what happened here. This is a bad movie plot trope: the bad guys can't simultaneously be omniscient and so dumb they're trivially outed like this, just like the real supervillain isn't going to monologue while you free yourself from the chains lowering you into the shark tank.
> the bad guys can't simultaneously be omniscient and so dumb they're trivially outed like this
This is a false dichotomy. Federal agencies prove themselves to be fallible (even incompetent) all the time, they just have far more resources available to make up for their mistakes.
Legacy of Ashes is a great book about the CIA on this, on how they basically stumbled into some of their biggest accomplishments.
In Russia people "fall out the window" all the time. It is intentional. We need to adjust.
Unmarked vans drive around all of the time and nobody bats an eye at them. There is no reason to even bother with a big elaborate company name that anyone could google and do further background checks on
Unmarked vans drive around all the time. They don't typically park out front of a whistleblower's house. There is more scrutiny there than driving down any random street. Therefore, a more sufficient cover would be required.
An unmarked white van (without windows) parked a house or two down the street hacking your wifi might not be that noticeable. One across the street with a radio dish spinning around and a parabolic mic sticking out the window and a few people entering and exiting it with donuts and coffee multiple times probably would be.
I mean, the real argument here is between "something interesting" and "something boring", and it's message board so "boring" is heavily disfavored. But, yeah, it's a sewer inspection van.
My comment did not express any opinion as to whether this was or was not a surveillance van, and this has no bearing on the proposed alternatives being a false dichotomy.
With GP's clarification, it's still shaped like a false dichotomy but I don't think it's one in spirit. It sounds more like reductio ad absurdum to me, with a sprinkling of hyperbole for effect.
I think it was a sewer inspection van.
Having said that, reading comments like this, I sometimes think it would actually be great cover. Because you have respected people, like yourself, unequivocally stating that it couldn't possibly be an NSA van.
But, to say it again, I agree that I don't think the NSA would need to do this. My above line of reasoning certainly doesn't hold too much water under serious scrutiny.
A significant multiplier of my certainty here comes from the fact that I was responding to a thread full of people who seemed certain that no sewer inspection van could look like that, which to me says "this van is not inconspicuous", which defeats the whole purpose of having a cover-story van.
You can second-guess that, but I think past this point, we're reenacting the duel between Vizzini and Westley.
> You can second-guess that, but I think past this point, we're reenacting the duel between Vizzini and Westley
So I guess the reveal is that it _is_ a real sewer inspection van, but the NSA has legitimately been inspecting sewers for years to innoculate themselves from suspicion?
I guess they must be down there looking for rodents of unusual size.
That's an odd take. There are numerous examples of people prosaicly defeating the purpose of something that has taken considerable resources to establish.
It's like the spies working in embassies that were easily detectable despite an elaborate cover because they used the car that the previous spy left behind when they went home.
From personal experience with police investigations... they aren't really all that inconspicuous when they come aspying. The van with tints several shades darker than the legal limit that sits outside and the trucks with dash-mount computers and racks of equipment visible through the windshield shadowing your every move aren't exactly hard to see if you're paying attention. When they've got telescopic lenses watching from an adjacent building, you can also see those with the naked eye if you look closely. Hopefully national spy agencies are better at it than small town drug task forces, but...
Perhaps they are optimizing for having plausible deniability/a fully fleshed out backstory in case they are questioned by eg. local cops or a security guard, moreso than inconspicuousness to a random passerby who is unlikely to pose any danger with their idle theorizing
Or, you know, they're inspecting the sewers.
I think NSA has hacked the van (without the van operators realizing) and so it’s both a sewer inspection van and an NSA surveillance van at the same time.
There is no hack. The system sends data to NSA by design.
I see it like this:
You can either disguise your operation as a goofy sewer inspection van and hope you trick every single person who notices it into second-guessing themselves along the lines of "surely the FBI would be more low-key than that..."
Or you can just be low-key in the first place, end of story. I assume the tech in the modern day (as compared to, like, the 80s when this trope was born) is advanced enough to facilitate this option.
I think I'd rather assume that I couldn't successfully pull off low key 100% of the time while actively monitoring someone from the street in front of their house, so instead I'd make sure that while 99% of the people will see a sewer inspection van and think nothing of it, the 1% who catches a look inside of the van and thinks it's suspicious will easily find a perfectly reasonable explanation for what they think they saw.
Regardless of what the real story is on this van, lookup the Bernie S. case if you want an easy case with proof of government surveillance incompetence. Under cover Secret Service agents were photographed surveilling a 2600 meeting in a mall court, then got embarrassed when the 2600 guys posted flyers with their photographs around. Most criminals are dumb which is a good thing as I like the bad guys getting caught, but unfortunately the smart ones graduate to become politicians.
It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.
Can I interest you in some fresh alien urine? Still plenty saturated with Zephyron. I'll give you Dale Gribble's price! :)
haha well dont assume spies are some godmode infallable people. spies also are humans and can have varying degrees of freedom to express their stupidity in their work..
in our country some spies got caught drivin around with wifi pineapple in plain sight circling govt and ngo sites.
in my mind thats next level dumb stuff, but maybe they arent really hackers and think its not conspicuous, or even the opposite, they know exactly what it is but think 'oh normal people wont stop to think about this, they dont recognise such equipment'.
if you werent there, didnt know the guys in the van etc. etc. - its all just guesswork.
even public record of a sewer inspection right then and there at that time (which i kinda doubt exists) wouldnt confirm or deny what that van was really doing there.
that being said, i would _assume_ its a sewer inspection van. but thats an assumption, not a known fact.
Reminds me of the joke where students prove by induction that the teacher is not actually planning a surprise test, and are surprised when there's a test the next day
Now I'm starting to wonder if that guy habitually leaves the door open because he got sick of people winking at him with a wry smile every time he had to go to a job.
I mean, why not both? If I was a shadowy agency I would start an actual legit sewer inspection company that does real sewer inspections. And then just collect and share a little extra data as needed. Nobody would be the wiser!
There’s an HVAC company like this also, I’ll bet.
Corporate ventilation. A wonderful thing. Everyone needs it. No one suspects it.
Or maybe it’s the aquarium guy.
No, those are the guys making meth.
Gotta love paranoia.
> There’s an HVAC company like this also, I’ll bet.
IIRC a hacked HVAC vendor was how credit card skimming software was infiltrated into Target and credit card data was exfiltrated a decade or so ago.
Edit, source: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2014/02/target-hackers-broke-in-...
Crypto AG confirmed this sort of thing to be possible.
> Or maybe it’s the aquarium guy.
Shhhhh!
Gotta be paranoid. :D
Wouldn't it be the perfect plot to LOOK like you are a goofy badly run agency to hide the reality?
That, and it would be an FBI van, not an NSA van. But the point holds.
Sometime there’s vehicle from at least three businesses and two government agencies gathered round an inconspicuous looking civil infrastructure element, and I have to wonder who spying on who. And how much that’s costing.
You're thinking like a normal person. You need to think like an institution that has the entire weight of government behind them and who nobody wants to be on the wrong side of.
They either find someone who has suitable vans they can threaten with prosecution. That person then agrees to be an "informant" because that's better than losing your life to the feds and then their handler asks to borrow a van. They like this because no money needs to get spent specifically on it so it doesn't tend to get scrutinized. If they're going full above the table they register a business with the state complete with valid HVAC license or whatever and then rent a van from some company the FBI owns/runs that rents white vans and have some decals printed up. (For those inclined to do further reading, the OSINT hobbyists have done a lot to expose this workflow as it relates to aircraft so probably start there.)
> mimicking a sewer tv inspection van is a trivial endeavour.
Why bother mimicking a sewer inspection van when you can just buy or commandeer an actual sewer inspection van?
https://youtu.be/HQY93oaaN6k
I can't tell if this is honest or sarcasm
Same. I can totally buy the joystick and the robot as I've seen this done in my area, but the rack mounted PCs and the headphones makes it seem awfully like he's telling Tom Cruise which wire to cut.
That's almost definitely just a sewer inspection van; I found videos that company has of "multi-sensor pipeline inspections" with the same van, open, with the same equipment visible, and a bunch of people following a bunch of equipment down into a manhole.
As an aside, if you are purchasing an older home make sure you pay for a sewer line inspection. I had no idea this was a thing until a few years later when I had to replace mine and it cost ~$25,000.
I also have an older home and we had to repair our sewer line. It was clay pipe which had broken in a few spots and had major root intrusion. Thankfully there's some newer technology that makes it significantly cheaper in the right circumstances -- instead of digging up your street connection and laying in new pipe they can blow an epoxy-soaked liner into your existing pipe, then run a curing light through it. It ended up being less than 40% of the cost of replacement and works just as well.
We had ours done when we moved in a couple years ago and it was a cool snakey camera thing; they only got us out to the service line; past that would have been a lot more elaborate. Also: that video feed? Pretty gross.
As an aside: I think a lot of people here would be surprised at the amount of technology (and surveillance) that goes into setting speed limits and placing stop signs in residential areas.
A lot of people might also be surprised how frequently traffic engineers will OK unnecessary and less safe four way stops in order to get the annoying citizen pestering them to just leave them alone.
The neighborhood that I have to drive through to get from where I live to where I work hates that their precious little neighborhood is used as a commuter route by a lot of people, so they stuck stop signs EVERY. SINGLE. BLOCK.
I make sure to come to a complete fucking stop at every one of those signs. Partially because I hate the feeling of rolling through stop signs, but partially out of spite lol.
I'm always amazed by regional differences in pricing.
I had a company(wrongly) tell me I needed a new septic tank and drainfield installed, and quoted me out at 7800.
Which is way, way more work and parts than a sewer line.
how far is that sewer line run, 6 miles? they usually just bore it out and put a PVC sleeve inside. This is done with the cast iron sewer lines, because if they're not properly taken care of, they will rust into nothing and then you just have a suggestion of a hole through the dirt to the sewer line.
my lines are 4" PVC, if we somehow clog those, someone call me an ambulance.
The old shitty clay lines are what you find in most rentals in SoCal. Then one day none of your toilets flushes and the landlord says you flush too many wipes down the toilet. You argue and they make you pay for a plumber who's like "yea they all do that DONT USE WIPES!!!!!One!!!" And then finally after getting to know every other plumber in town, one offers to run a camera for free and shows you that the main line is fucking falling apart and that's why it keeps plugging up.
TBH sewer main inspections should be required any time someone wants to rent a house out.
eh, clay, cast iron. I had to dig a few trenches of greasy earth in socal.
It probably was! But given the batch of circumstances, I think it's at least plausible that it was more than that.
I don't think it's very plausible. The subtext of the photo is "that looks comically unlike what you'd inspect from a sewer inspection van". Well, I can tell you pretty much for sure: thats' what the inside of a sewer inspection van from that company looks like.
It took just a couple minutes (less than 5) to go look this up and find the video, for what it's worth.
Maybe it's an NSA wet team! Wet, because they do sewer inspection work. :)
If we are going down the conspiracy rabbit hole, i assume spies can purchase real sewer vans with the logo of real sewer companies on it.
I agree though that it seems more plausible to just be a real sewer van.
I think if they're buying a fake sewer inspection van they're probably smart enough to find one that doesn't look to people on the Internet like it's a prop out of the movie Enemy of the State.
I hope the owner of the company doesn't read this. They probably like their designs! :)
I just went to Google maps to the address written on the van's passenger door and lo and behold, Google did drive down the alley behind and while this is a larger vehicle and not just a van, that's their look (they also have black versions if you look around): https://www.google.com/maps/@33.7851188,-118.211276,3a,67.3y...
Is no one cleaning the streets? Damn.
I found a video with an identical National Plant Services sewer inspection van, inspecting a large-diameter sewer line: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVXceJ3Yxnw (The photo shows van TV-230 while the video shows van TV-217, so they are different instances of the van.)
I went to the Carylon website to find a list of their companies and got
> Block Reason: Access from your area has been temporarily limited for security reasons.
My area is Australia.
https://caryloncorp.com/find-a-company/
It’s not uncommon for site firewalls to be configured this way for business that do not do work internationally.
Yes, but calling it „security“ is a bit of a stretch…
it is security... block most of the world is also block most attacks to your infra...
It's just one slice in the swiss cheese model.
Please obtain one of each, and do a teardown to confirm ;-)
That is a van built by Ares (I might have the spelling slightly wrong).
Funny enough I once bought a used one, stripped the sewer inspection equipment out, kept the Oman diesel generator and made it into an actual surveillance van.
The inspection robots that came with it were cool. I sold them and the other equipment I pulled out for a good chunk of cash.
This whole sewer inspection thing must be particularly hilarious to the people performing the inspection. "Yo dude, we're officially spies! hi5"
"sewer cleaning van"... This might be apt. The feds and their many tactics..... Flowers By Irene https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_HSNMLfhFM
That must have been surreal.. knowing him first as just a neighbor, then realizing the weight of what he did
I don't think I've ever seen the inside of an actual undercover van before. Crazy picture. Do we know anything else about them?
I would not jump to conclusions so soon.
A) I would question why they would do the effort of still doing surveillance on him
B) if they do, they are usually so smart to keep the door closed
C) like others have mentioned, sewer cleaning comes with a lot of tech (I assume remote controlled machines)
I would think that anyone working in a sewer inspection van would keep the door open because it is highly likely that sewer inspection vans smell like, well, sewer.
If the van is loaded with equipment, or even if it isn’t, theft and robbery are common in most of the US. You can’t leave a van door open and not be extremely vigilant.
One thing for certain: that is absolutely NOT a sewer inspection van. Seriously, you ever worked trades? It is way too clean on the interior and not fitted for working dirty jobs, to say nothing of the visible surveillance workstation.
yes, and that looks pretty much just like some of the vans I've been in the back of for CCTV sewer inspections.
While I can honestly believe both (it was a surveillance van vs it was a sewer maintenance company), do you think that the intimidation and surveillance of Snowden or Assange won’t last until the end of their lives?
I feel like a real undercover van would have a policy about not opening the side door during a mission too...
Flowers By Irene
The money shot! I did not realize sewer cleaning required so much onsite IT. Are those rack units running computational fluid dynamics models to figure out how to unclog elaborate networks of pipes?
Interestingly, it seems the 'real' sewer cleaning company uses a bunch of tech to do their inspections, etc.:
https://specializedmaintenance.com/services/digital-tv-inspe...
(Which would make it an excellent van for the 3-letter spooks to copy, so not really persuasive either way)
That’s just a display monitor and a small computer. Grandpaarent’s photo had two half racks of data center grade AV equipment.
I wanted to point out that when visiting those sites from Germany (nationalplant.com and the specializedmaintenance.com website) it shows the same unavailable geoblocked message. I wouldn't have recognized it but after opening both links in new tabs on my phone I thought I forgot to open one of the links in this thread and I double-checked it.
Are those fake companies both hosted on wordfence or something? What are the odds, huh?
Upon clicking the link above, I get:
Your access to this site has been limited by the site owner
Your access to this service has been limited. (HTTP response code 503)
I'd like to believe it was an inspection van: https://nationalplant.com/services/digital-tv-inspection/
I'd like to believe that, but I don't.
I am willing to believe it was innocuous. The guy already spilled the beans and has been blackballed from government access. Does he require clandestine surveillance any more? Easy enough to get “national security” reasons why all of his devices need to be tapped. More intimidating to have visible GMen watching him for life.
For some reason this reminded me of Ernest Hemingway. In the later parts of his life, he began to believe he was being followed and tracked by the FBI, and these delusions eventually gave way to various other issues. Or perhaps it could be the other way around, but there is a catch here.
In either case this led to him being somewhat brutally treated with electroconvulsive therapy, repeatedly, to little effect beyond damaging his mind. A quote from on that was, "What is the sense of ruining my head and erasing my memory, which is my capital, and putting me out of business? It was a brilliant cure, but we lost the patient." He would kill himself not long thereafter.
The interesting thing is that the FBI was following and tracking him, and simply stayed silent as this all played out.
That very well could be what it was. If it had been anything other than:
1. Spotless.
2. Parked right behind Klein's (and by extension, my) house.
3. Skittish, such that they closed the door right after I took the picture and drove off less than a minute later without pulling any gear up out of a manhole or something.
then that's probably what I'd chalk it up to. I am absolutely not 100% convinced it was, say, an undercover NSA van.
And yet, that's exactly what I thought it was from the moment I saw the gear racks and monitors inside.
Here's the thing, there's never going to be convincing evidence for you to decide that it wasn't what your hunch said it was. That's the nature of suspicion.
You could Google "national plant services van" on image search and find similar vans, and that the company is owned by is the Carylon Corporation, with revenue of $300m/year -- but that couldn't convince you that a government agency (it wouldn't be the NSA unless they're violating the law) didn't borrow it or copy it.
You could read that their services include "Digital CCTV inspection. Laser profiling. Sonar pipeline inspection." but that couldn't convince you that the monitor+joystick and other equipment is needed for sewer inspection, because you already believe it is for surveillance. (The irony being that the kind of mass surveillance Mark Klein exposed, or Snowden exposed, means there's absolutely no need to park a truck outside someone's house. You can track who they're communicating with already, and you can subvert their own devices to listen in, instead of parking a van out front for their neighbors to notice.)
You could look at who has the contract to inspect sewers in your town -- it's public record. But you could still choose to believe that the federal government did the same check, and went out and got an identical truck so as to be less suspicious (although in this thread half the people are saying "that's too clean/fancy/technological to be a sewer inspection van!" so if they did it would have backfired.)
Was he under surveillance? Who knows. Does this truck prove anything either way? No. Everybody is going to leave this thread with whatever hunch they came in with.
We have a manhole outside our house and it was inspected like this. I work with GIS for electric and gas companies. I used to keep small ear protectors in the Burley so me and the kids could go up and ask "diggermen" about holes in the road.
Xcel used directional drilling for a plastic gas main down our street and then did sewer intrusion inspections after. A neighbor had their sewer line pierced. It's a hazard because it isn't detectible until the sewer line blocks and then the blade thingy the plumber uses can sever the plastic gas service lateral in the sewer line.
There is a gas overflow valve (like a ball bearing that too much flow can push in to block the pipe) back at the service tee fitting on the main. If that doesn't work then you could have a gas explosion in the sewer or house. It happens and it is bad. Clients give presentations on these projects at conferences (e.g. use GIS to combine the sewer and gas topology to identify where the crossings are.)
That truck isn't for inspecting your sewer, it's for inspecting every junction on that sewer line, 8 hours per day, every day. They will have a map and linear reference showing where every other underground utility (fiber/gas/electricity) intersects it and be recording and cross referencing it in case it needs to be produced in court at a later date.
People are conflating do-you-need-a-$30k-sewer-line "plumber inspection" with this service. This kind of inspection is more like the "assuming tort liability" role that the companies like sitewise serve. Even with the robot done and packed, the operator in the truck was working for a bit, making copies of the videos and tagging them and stuff. If your gas main piercing a sewer causes explosions the settlements can be in the tens of millions.
BigUtility uses trenchless directional drilling to poke a drill horizontally down the street and then laterally to each house saving millions of dollars in open trench costs. The gotcha is that they can't see where they are digging and thus can burn, electrocute, explode or kill taxpayers. The inspections help with sewer maintenance / cleaning but the big money/concern is on the liability for cross bored gas lines.
The robot (the one I saw outside my house) was over $10k and kitting out the whole truck with a crane and the monitors and reels was $90k. They hosed the robot down completely with high pressure water from the truck once it came back out and checked it over for damage. That and the fact that the van guys typically don't go in the sewer is why the van is clean. It's an "expensive equipment" van, not a plumbers van. For comparison the fiber optic inspection a plumber might use is more like $2k and you can rent them.
Depending on the job they can inflate a balloon at the next manhole upstream or even pump/route the sewer through a temp pipe on the street surface (looks like a big fire hose) from the previous manhole to the one after where the van is. That needs 3 crews plus flaggers for traffic. They use a radio to coordinate with the other crews.
With the line blocked for inspection the robot typically just has a film of that nasty sewer grease on it.
They told me the door stays open even in winter because the crane operator / tether wrangler guy is right by an open sewer which is a fall and methane hazard.
The job isn't quick - there might be 300 feet / 100m of line to the robot near the next manhole. Unless they were just looking at one service main, if they were able to leave they must have been winding up already.
The more important question is: is there a sewer manhole where they parked?
If we can surveil people with drones from miles away, what technology are the FBI using that requires guys physically in a van outside a house? If you were going to park outside, why would you use a method that usually blocks the street?
I dug up a pic. If you look carefully you can see two tethers, one for the 4 wheel metal sled that moves it and a thicker one for the camera and lights on the "head" part. The crew used the controls to move the head around until it was looking at my kids and they could see themselves on the second screen (one screen faced out the door.) The kids thought it was cool: https://i.imgur.com/2ltz8bj.png
Story about a fatal explosion caused by horizontal directional drilling piercing a gas main:
https://www.cnn.com/2013/03/13/us/missouri-gas-explosion/ind...
I can't find any conference papers but the industry term to google is "crossbore" and this blog post has some pictures of gas service laterals piercing sewers:
https://blog.envirosight.com/sewer-school-preventing-cross-b...
ESRI page on using GIS to identify the potential crossbores and assign them 90 day inspection windows to try to detect it before the sewer backs up:
https://community.esri.com/t5/gas-and-pipeline-blog/arcgis-f...
Somebody give the number on the van a call and post results
I called and asked them if they were NSA. Very nice lady explained "No, trust me, we're definitely just NPS" (j/k).
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/national-plant-services-inc_e...
If it would be a spy van, it would be a real number (likely for the real company). Otherwise way too easy to spot.
Conversely, makes me think my IT truck with all its network cables and racks, needs a toilet.
This is crazy.. you guys are focused on vans and mini stories when all his sacrifice and that of thousand if not more americans was snuffed.
`Congress intervened by passing the FISA Amendments Act which, in part, granted “retroactive immunity” to the telecommunications carriers for their involvement in the NSA spying programs. This massive grant of immunity for past violations of multiple state and federal laws protecting communications privacy was unprecedented.`
Be the change you want to see. I mentioned the vans and his dogs because Mark wasn't some random picture on the Internet, but the nice guy a couple houses down who talked about the volunteer work he did for harbor seals[0]. He was a real person we liked a lot and I thought others might enjoy hearing about his noisy, overprotective golden retrievers.
But yes, he was also a personal hero to me before I met him in real life, and we should absolutely still be talking about the things he uncovered and what happened to them afterward. Please do tell those stories, too.
[0]https://goldengatebirdalliance.org/blog-posts/wild-ly-succes...
Where are today's technicians that are prostituting themselves for the communications companies around the world that this can still be happening?
Man up and remove those splitters, cables, show us the drawings, reports and PPT slides!
R.I.P. Mark
I guess not too many want to have to hide in russia.
Judging from the way things are going, what's the difference?
Mark Klein was not some mythical hero, but a real person who did heroic things. It's nice to be reminded of that. If anything, I find it inspiring.
That kind of courage is rare, and it makes his story even more powerful. Real people can make a difference
Indeed, something that we sadly lack today. We need people like Mark more than ever, not less.
He risked everything, and in the end, the system closed ranks to protect itself. Retroactive immunity was basically a way of saying - "Yep, it was illegal, but it doesn't matter."
You have to remember that half, possibly more than half, of the country is more than okay with what the NSA was doing and is doing.
It's not at all surprising that Congress would indemnify people for, more or less, doing what Congress authorized them to do. If we don't like it, we could consider, maybe not voting the same people into that Congress. Over. And over. And over. And over. And over. And over.
A full 24 Senators and 63 Representatives have held their seats for over 36 years. That's not what you'd expect of a citizenship that was actually upset about being spied upon by their government.
It's obviously not a problem of electing the wrong people. There are enough checks and balances in the system to ensure that there is no change forthcoming.
The system is, indeed, set up to minimize revolutionary churn. The tilt that we're seeing right now towards fascism and white nationalism has been some 40 years in the making. It takes a lot of organization to tilt the whole thing.
This is a feature, not a bug. The system is architected, when something is controversial, default to no motion.
> You have to remember that half, possibly more than half, of the country is more than okay with what the NSA was doing and is doing.
I doubt this. I'd also be interested to see if those people actually know, on any real level, what the NSA was actually doing.
> If we don't like it, we could consider, maybe not voting the same people into that Congress. Over. And over. And over. And over. And over. And over.
They so reliably do the opposite of what people want and yet continue to win. You don't find this at all odd and you put it down to lack of consideration on the part of the electorate.
> That's not what you'd expect of a citizenship that was actually upset about being spied upon by their government.
The joys of being old enough to remember the Church Committee, The House Select Committee on Assassinations, The JFK Records Review Board. PEOPLE ARE CLEARLY NOT OKAY WITH THIS. Yet those who carry water for the deep state are unimpeded by this. Please see this, or at least, don't repeat simple falsehoods about the electorate.
It's like coming across a drowning man and laughing in his face about his predicament.
Forgive me for being obtuse, but what exactly are you claiming here? Are election results being faked?
They aren't. Fewer than 3/4 of eligible voters voted in 2020. In general, somewhere around 10% to a third of eligible voters actually vote in primaries, which are the elections that actually have the most impact on office holding.
Nobody needs to fake election results when Americans just don't show up to vote. It's a disquietingly under-informed and apathetic electorate.
> It's a disquietingly under-informed and apathetic electorate.
The United States has elevated voter suppression to an art form. Last minute polling relocations, inadequate polling locations, unreasonable ID requirements, unreasonable registration requirements, “accidental” voter roll purges. It’s not easy to vote here. And it’s especially hard if you are in a group the incumbents don’t like.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_Rights_Act_of_1965.
If those in power cared about our opinions it would be a national holiday and we’d vote by mail.
While these things happen, they are not the bulk of the explanation for the lack of voters showing up.
The bulk of it is that voters don't show up. We had the most turnout for any Presidential election in 2020, when people were literally quarantining to escape a plague... Turnout was around 66%. Evidence suggests that (at least in modern times) the way to get Americans to vote is to so constrain them that they can't do anything else with their time on election day.
> Evidence suggests that (at least in modern times) the way to get Americans to vote is to so constrain them that they can't do anything else with their time on election day.
In 2020 voting by mail was widely expanded because of the pandemic. In 2024 it was rolled back. It was easier to vote in 2020 than it was in 2024.
I wouldn’t describe voting in 2020 as constrained. More like enabled. It’s the closest we’ve ever been to a voting holiday.
Oh, agreed---the voting wasn't constrained. The people were. You had to make the people so bored that they bothered to fill out the damn ballot and put a stamp on it.
Americans get distracted. That's the big secret. We're such a generally satisfied, busy, and entertained group of humans that we literally can't be arsed to go pull the one lever that is most politically powerful every time we get a chance to pull it. Some people are actively marginalized. Most of us just don't bother to read the one-pager on the county website and then show up in the fourteen-ish hours set aside to do the thing (let alone try to, say, actively study the candidates or the on-ballot issues).
I literally had a young man confide in me day of election in 2016 that he was voting for Trump because he liked him on the TV show. That's your American voter, when they show up at all.
> I literally had a young man confide in me day of election in 2016 that he was voting for Trump because he liked him on the TV show. That's your American voter, when they show up at all.
I don’t find extrapolating a single anecdote to the entire population a compelling argument.
One shouldn't, but it does fit a pattern for American voters; I more intended it as an exemplar of known behavior. Ronald Reagan was elected Governor of California on the back of his popularity as an actor, popularity which more-or-less carried him to the Presidency (he didn't have an outstanding record as California governor, unless you count "Passing the most restrictive gun control in history to curb the Black Panthers" as outstanding). Simple name recognition can be a shortcut to the Presidency in the US; Americans don't have a tradition of demanding demonstration of a long career of civil service of their Presidents (with the record, to my knowledge, being the most recent one's first election with "zero previous demonstration").
I'd love to give you some hard data on this in modern times, but AFAICT no polls are even asking questions as simple and obvious as "When did you first hear of Donald Trump?" or "Do you trust an actor more than a politician?"
I just don’t buy these unsubstantiated claims. If you can’t find evidence why do you believe it?
Why does it matter if people trust politicians who were actors more than politicians who weren’t actors? They’re all still politicians when they run.
You’re promoting an extremely negative, defeatist, unsubstantiated opinion and frankly it’s depressing.
> they're all still politicians when they run
Trump in 2016 was able to use his lack of political history as a selling point; with no history of service in office, he'd had no scandals in office. Clinton's long political career worked against her in public perception.
I personally believe that there's some benefit to political expertise and demonstrated history of good choices and good leadership; the American electorate doesn't seem to value these things when they reject a career politician for someone with no track record in the highest elected office... And then reelect him in similar circumstances.
> It's depressing
We're in the second term of President Trump with a Congress that has carried a sub-30% approval rate for decades. I'm not going to be able to offer many optimistic observations about America's Federal elected offices... Or the people who elect them. It is entirely possible the American Experiment ends in this generation with the conclusion that Americans had a good thing going until they lost the tools to successfully self-govern.
I would welcome counter-evidence that didn't fail the conspiracy theory test.
> Fewer than 3/4 of eligible voters voted in 2020.
This is not completely true[0]. I'd also give the advice that you shouldn't take a "nationwide" average to mean much of anything. The wikipedia article shows wide variation across the states which is true for almost any statistic you can think of.
> actually vote in primaries
Bernie voters might give you a hint as to why. I guess this is the problem Mayor Pete's "shadow" app was meant to solve. It honestly seems like parties don't genuinely like people voting in primaries. The person who's "turn" it is might lose.
> elections that actually have the most impact
Unfortunately we're talking about the legislature here because they write the laws in question and are the proper party to wage your grievances against. Have you ever looked into how competitive those primaries actually are? Anyways this is why I vote for Greens and Libertarians. Then they might stand a chance of cracking 5% and getting recognized fully by the Federal Election Commission.
> Americans just don't show up to vote.
All evidence to the contrary. What they don't do is vote in senate elections. There districts with as low as 25% voter turn out. Which means you only need 12% of the eligible population to turn out for you to secure your seat. So you're right. No need to cheat. Just be arbitrary and capricious to the point that busy and worried people no longer feel that using their time in the voting booth can actually change something.
> It's a disquietingly under-informed and apathetic electorate.
As always, back to where this conversation starts, who should bear the responsibility for this? I don't think blaming the electorate itself brings you anywhere other than helping to chase people further away from an important civil institution.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_United_States...
> who should bear the responsibility
Unfortunately, in a representative democracy, the people. It's right there in the Constitution, first three words.
Yea, but I'm not a signatory to the constitution, the /states/ are. Which is why the document immediately tells you it is to "form a more perfect union." The union isn't between you and I nor does it grant either of us law enforcement powers.
Then _immediately_ after you get Section 1: "All legislative powers herin granted shall be vested in a congress of the United States." Which, by the way, prior to the 17th amendment, the Senate was selected directly by the states. Then again immediately after that you get a set of limitations as to who can be admitted to this congress. You'll also note that as citizens we have absolutely no voice in the operation of this congress, the selection of it's bills, nor in the voting on them.
No, in a representative /republican/ democracy, it's the representatives that are first and foremost responsible. The most I can do is offer my input on who those people should be every 2 years, so I certainly bear some, but it's inane to suggest that the current outcome is the fault of the electorate. In particular when billions of dollars are spent every year on campaigns and advertising.
Your idea is austere and unhelpful to a broken and corrupted system. I'd like to develop a notion of jurisprudence that helps the people out of their predicament, not points the finger blamefully at them.
You are right that Congress are the immediate legislative agents, but the Congressional responsibility is back-stopped by the people, because ultimately (with the exception of impeachment and removal from office, which is asking the legislature to police itself) only the people can decide to stop supporting them. And you're right about the 17th Amendment, but that's in the past; modern American voters have more power to choose their representatives than they have in most of American history, and they do not exercise it.
I don't know who else's fault it can be but the electorate when they saw how the current President operates and re-elected him. To say nothing of re-electing the same Congress over and over despite that body having a sub-30% approval rating.
... and if the people don't hold the responsibility, what would you recommend the people do? I'm not sure what "a notion of jurisprudence" means in this context: are you suggesting replacing he power-at-a-distance of an unpopular legislature with rule by nine unelected life-appointed officials and their underlings?
So glad you pointed this out. people are numb to these sort of news now a days.
Reminds me of George Carlins words, “ It’s never gonna get any better. Don’t look for it. Be happy with what you got.”
This is the sentence I was looking for:
> While we were able to use his evidence to make some change, both EFF and Mark were ultimately let down by Congress and the Courts, which have refused to take the steps necessary to end the mass spying even after Edward Snowden provided even more evidence of it in 2013.
Do you have to be a cynic to pretty much have expected this?
Unfortunately this spying is exactly what all the government wants, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
It's also hard to make the case that it isn't, ultimately, what the people want, by "the standard you walk past is the standard you accept" principle.
It's been nearly twenty years. If Americans were deeply, deeply bothered by the government spying on them, they'd have burned down this government by now. At most charitable, this speaks to a deep ignorance or apathy in the American electorate and American citizenship. Or a general anxiety about what "the other people" are doing that exceeds their anxiety about what the government can do with panopticon surveillance.
I think, in general, hackers vastly overestimate the average human concern or sensitivity to this kind of thing.
> deep ignorance or apathy in the American electorate
Which party is against spying? The only possible action is probably protesting. This doesn't work well, e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_enforcement_and_the_Occupy.... And spying is used against the protestors, too: https://www.aclu.org/news/national-security/spying-occupy.
> Which party is against spying?
The one that hasn't formed yet because the electorate has failed to recognize that parties only exist because they can consolidate mass political power. This is part of the "apathy" category. People don't care enough to meet up on this issue. They don't even care enough to be members of the existing parties or do more than show up to elections (and then, only between half and three-quarters for President, less for Congress, and hovering around 10-20% for primaries).
People care, but not enough to overcome institutional inertia.
> The one that hasn't formed yet because the electorate has failed to recognize that parties only exist because they can consolidate mass political power.
This is not the reason. The reason is the how the system was designed:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger's_law
The Tea Party Republicans are a counter-example (or more accurately, a counterinsurgency). While there are still only two parties, one of them has become something that would be nearly unrecognizable to its members from the '70s.
It is possible to organize within the party to bend it. But in general, one side of the aisle tends to seem to have difficulty with finding enough common ground to actually work as a bloc, while the other side has managed, impressively, to unify Christian fundamentalists and ultra-rich billionaires.
> If Americans were deeply, deeply bothered by the government spying on them, they'd have burned down this government by now.
Right now stuff is happening that does deeply bothers Americans, and what do they do? They walk around with signs, they file legal papers, and maybe some other forms of peaceful, albeit useless, protest... a lot of other countries truly would be burning down the government right now if something like Elon happened there, but so far America has just been saying they don't want it, in as many ways as possible, but while still continuing to fully let it happen.
Can you give an example of a country where you think the population would do something violent or upending if they had an Elon?
There are quite a few countries out there that don't just do peaceful protest:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_coups_and_coup_attempt...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_riots#2020s
In the US it's looking like the main aggressors are Trump supporters and most of everyone else is not actually out for blood, just Peacefully Unhappy.
Elon is 100% out for blood, he's practically a modern-day Nazi.
On many social media platforms you can see a lot of people from the UK, EU, etc. being totally bewildered that all the US is doing right now is useless peaceful protests.
There are also a bunch of people potentially even from the US who post things like: https://old.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/1j822ah/cmv_m...
Maybe eventually something will happen that changes things, or maybe eventually things will reach a tipping point, but right now at least they are still stuck in some peaceful protest limbo.
Victim blaming. "How dare you get victimized and not do more to stop it?"
Victims have to be victimized first. Most surveilled Americans feel about as victimized as a well-kept dog.
How close are we to “bypassing” a lot of this spying when some of the most popular communications platforms (e.g. WhatsApp) are end to end encrypted? Will the tech eventually solve the problem in a convenient way, at least for those who care?
Really, the likelihood of all of them having backdoors is almost 100%.
WhatsApp is end-to-end-to-server encryption.
They have a nicely implemented E2E protocol. This is operationally convenient: Meta can accurately say that they don't store WhatsApp messages, so fewer access requests go to them. And I'm sure it's nice for engineer morale, too.
However, the app makes it semi-mandatory to turn on backups. If you say no, it keeps nagging you. If you always say no, you are in the 0.1% and everyone you talk to has backups enabled, so all of your conversations are helpfully backed up anyway, just not for you :)
These backups go to Google Drive or iCloud. You can draw your own conclusions about who has access and who handles the LE/IC requests.
Not at all. They are one bill away (look at the UK).
We cannot solve political problems by ignoring them and retreating into code.
Pegasus suggests no, and the UK already killed this with BlackBerry years ago.
No, you're not a cynic. The EFF takes exquisite pains to hide from you the fact that these programs spied on foreigners, which is the job of the NSA. Thus, they are necessary and proper, and perfectly legal.
The EFF is a propaganda platform. You shouldn't take its claims at face value.
Don't give us this "perfectly legal" crap. To remind you: the NSA killed off ThinThread (that explicitly took care to avoid wiretapping US citizens' data) in favour of Trailblazer, which grabs ALL data, ALL the time, including ALL US citizens' data.
Their explicit intent was to break the law. They broke the law. Then Congress retroactively let them get away with it. They're still breaking the law today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThinThread
> The "change in priority" consisted of the decision made by the director of NSA General Michael V. Hayden to go with a concept called Trailblazer, despite the fact that ThinThread was a working prototype that claimed to protect the privacy of U.S. citizens. ThinThread was dismissed and replaced by the Trailblazer Project, which lacked the privacy protections
Foriegners like the US citizen spouses and (ex)girlfriends of NSA employees?
https://www.reuters.com/article/world/uk/nsa-staff-used-spy-...
Let’s not confuse the fact that they are only legally allowed to spy on foreigners, with what they actually do.
I have no idea how you effectively filter mass wiretaps in fibre raw data and exclude americans. It’s impossible to not catch some/lots of domestic data as well..
So what you're saying is that the NSA wiretapping is OK because they're not doing it to you? That's really dumb.
Currently, the US is in a number of intelligence sharing arrangements in which countries ask other countries to spy on their own citizens for them. e.g. if the NSA can't spy on someone because they know they're American, they ask GCHQ to do it for them. And vice versa. This is why human rights need to be as universal as possible, because otherwise you just ask your buddy to do what you can't legally do yourself.
"We only spy on foreigners" is a water sandwich.
Furthermore, it is NSA policy to treat all encrypted traffic as foreign, and to archive it forever until it can be decrypted and searched to determine if it was legal to decrypt and search it. In other words, "we only spy on foreigners" is a guilty until proven innocent policy.
"Necessary and proper" is decided by a security apparatus with a conflict of interest. Nobody voted for this, the executive branch just decided to do it. As for legality, well, I'll give you that Congress retroactively made the spying legal. On the other hand, the US Constitution has a pretty clear restriction on the use of state power in order to search and seize. Being a foreigner is not in and of itself necessary suspicion to justify searching through all their shit, because being from another country is not a crime.
Had the privilege of watching him receive an award from EFF years ago at ETech. Gave a brief speech. Struck me as a gentle man who really did what he thought was right and for no other purpose. It took moral strength to do what he did. I hope he rests easy.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2007/02/t-whistleblower-wins-a...
Damn.
I don't know if this started the whole movement or whatever you'd call it for this push towards privacy and the general public knowing about it, but it helped a lot. Before him releasing info about room 641A and whatever else, there really wasn't definitive evidence of any government spying and tampering, and either with the intention of starting this movement or simply letting people know, he was a big push in the right direction.
tldr: he's a w
> started the whole movement or whatever you'd call it for this push towards privacy
I don't really like this framing because it makes it sound like if you care for privacy you are some form of fringe advocate.
We should always try to reframe:
Would you be ok with government employees or law enforcement indiscriminately opening your letters? Ask any senior and the answer is a clear no.
So why are we discussing this as if privacy is entirely optional as soon as you change medium from written letters to emails, sms, instant message?
You can make this work in the other direction:
"Would you be ok with government employees or law enforcement indiscriminately opening the letters of illegal immigrants?"
You'd immediately get the answer yes. Of course, in order to find the illegal immigrant letters they have to open _all_ of the letters.
People will give law enforcement huge amounts of power because they think it will be used against groups they don't like.
I wonder what percent of Americans would trade their privacy to bring their monthly cell phone bill from $100/mo to $0/mo in exchange for sharing texts and emails with a telecom company.
I suspect the percentage would be surprisingly high.
Unfortunately normal people don’t really care that much about privacy (even if we all think everyone should).
you mean, exactly like most the public on this site did when moving from Gmail and abandoning their isp provided email?
Why would ISP provided email be any more private than Gmail? If anything, I expect ISP provided email to be more compromised.
Because it’s a lot easier to compromise one email provider instead of a million. I’m surprised I have to explain the benefits of federated over centralized systems here.
It's also interesting to float the thought experiment of what Gen Z would say about this question because the online norms are so different.
"Hey, sometimes people try to send bombs through the mail. Would you be okay with the government opening 1% of packages, inspecting them, and re-sealing them to make sure they're safe?
... what if they threw in a coupon so the next package mailed is free?"
(... and suddenly I've discovered of my own psyche that if those "The TSA inspected this bag" slips included a coupon for a free coffee, the visceral response to their presence would do a 180. "Oh, sweet! Free coffee!").
not only was there not "definitive evidence"; if you said that the companies did that sort of thing you were called a conspiracy theorist whackaloon. oddly 85% of the general public suddenly was like "well of course they spy on email" after all this came out.
That's not the general sentiment I recall. There was a general sense of 'the government's probably watching' (along with who knows who else: early internet protocols like email really aren't resistant to snooping by more or less anyone), just no public info on specifically how (and you might get some disapproving looks if you claimed any specific approach without evidence).
It depends. If you were a hacker who'd read Bamford and the news from whistleblowers like Klein, talking with other hackers, that general sense was common knowledge. But if the topic came up in conversation with, like, the guy you're subletting a room from in NYC, you could get a very skeptical look.
(I wonder if these people remembered those conversations after Snowden.)
I'm sure it depended on the audience, but I and others [0] guessed at broad electronic surveillance well before the 641A revelations. I was never called a conspiracy theorist for it either. In the 1990s if you had read Bamford's The Puzzle Palace [1] (published in 1982) and observed the government's legal fight against Zimmermann's PGP encryption software [2], you could make an educated guess close to the truth. If you phrased it as "I'm sure that the government is spying on everything," that went beyond the realm of what could be proved then, but airing suspicions about broad government snooping never elicited strong denials in my experience.
[0] Like the people on the Cypherpunks mailing list
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Puzzle_Palace
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Zimmermann#Arms_Export_Co...
> [1] (published in 1982) and observed the government's legal fight against Zimmermann's PGP encryption software [2], you could make an educated guess close to the truth.
what percentage of the US population do you reckon could "make an educated guess" about the technological capabilities of the US government in 2002?
please remember this is a technology discussion forum, not a general public forum.
> Zimmermann's PGP encryption software
"PG what? Encryption? like the cryptkeeper? I like hans zimmer music"
People suspected there was funny business going on since the Patriot Act was passed in 2001. By 2003 gangs were aware government spied on phones at scale. NSA regularly came up in my high school tech class in 2004, in connection with War on Terror. By 2005, the program was confirmed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_warrantless_surveillance_(...
Lots of people knew that mass surveillance was likely with the advent of the internet, prior to 641A in 2006.
Lots of people know lots of things. The problem is those things aren't always true. And until there is a defacto public acknowledgement of something many people defer to the 'official position.'
Here's a present time one for you - all US based cloud providers, including Apple, are providing full (and probably indirect) real time access to everything stored on those servers to various organizations including, but not limited to, the NSA. Lawsuits around this issue are motivated solely by an effort to do away with parallel construction [1] and enable the evidence obtained through such means to be able to be directly used.
Lots of people know this, lots of people also think this is crazy talk. And prior to Snowden, and to a lesser degree Klein, the overwhelming majority fell into the latter camp regarding anything even remotely close to the scope and scale of what the NSA was doing.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction
Here's another official position relevant to current events but that is beginning to change.
"Electronic voting machines are 100% safe and as safe as paper ballots if not more".
"My dad owned a 1965 softtop stingray, it was awesome!"
It's pretty depressing how society went from "that would never happen" to general apathy.
That's a really charitable way of framing the fact that a 15% minority screeching about "the government would never" and "but there's no proof" was able to control the narrative despite people generally having doubt or believing otherwise privately right up until the point that the proof was public record and so ironclad that even mainstream media had to report on it.
(I assume the 85% number is made up, but for whatever the number is the point stands)
The really odd thing is that 85% of the general public will say "well of course they spy on email" even today, after Snowden's leaks showed that the Obama administration had shut that down.
It’s really odd, indeed, that people think some reorg and a smooth politician didn’t in fact change the very nature of the surveillance companies.
The leaks didn't talk about a reorg. They said the program had been shut down.
Setting aside the fact that the leaks you're referring to are over a decade old at this point, they also established that GCHQ buffered the entirety of the UK's internet traffic for 72 hours, bit for bit.
If you think there's no collection on e-mail, rather than just legal shell games being played with terminology and various compartments, then I've got a bridge to sell you.
In fact, the bridge is made of metadata and nothing else.
SMTP connections are wrapped in TLS these days, so even if you were to collect email transfers bit for bit, you wouldn't be able to read them, not even metadata.
IIRC there's been speculation that the NSA can/has brute forced TLS keys up through 4096 bit size. I read a paper once that crunched the numbers on energy cost and compute time and whatnot it comes out looking like a reasonable investment for them.
Obviously they'd have to keep such an exercise on the DL if they did do it because increasing key size is pretty trivial.
A 4096-bit RSA key is still well beyond the means of even a very capable state actor. The standard nowadays is 2048-bit RSA keys, cracking of which is also (probably) still beyond anyone's capabilities. Maybe a multi-year effort directed at a specific target might manage to crack a single key, but I wouldn't bet on it. RSA cracking efforts would almost certainly focus on smaller keys that are still being used despite the warnings.
However, even if they did crack a major infrastructure provider's RSA key, TLS nowadays uses ephemeral key exchange which provides forward secrecy. So it doesn't matter if an intelligence agency collected every packet, they could not decipher the contents after the fact. They would have to actively interdict every TLS handshake and perform a man-in-the-middle attack against both parties all the time.
It is extremely doubtful that this is happening en masse. Such a process would require an immense amount of online computing power directly in the path of all Internet traffic. Much of the compute available to intelligence agencies (and accounted for in back-of-the-envelope calculations by outside parties) is effectively offline due to airgaps. It's not like they want people doing to them what they're doing to others, after all.
It's much easier to send an NSL to Google to read your email than to try to intercept it over the wire. The latter capability would be reserved for high-value targets unreachable by the US legal system, not mass surveillance.
What? No it didn't, not at all. The leaks clearly showed email as being one of the many things being directly surveilled. Here is one of the many slides directly acknowledging as much. [1]
If you mean the rhetoric around it, then yeah - politicians lie, especially when engaging in what would be seen as deeply unpopular behavior. This isn't a shock. I assure you the admin that passed indefinite detention without charge or trial [2] wasn't some crusader for civil rights. Obama was just ridiculously charismatic and could sell a drowning man water, but he was no different than the rest in behavior.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM#/media/File:PRISM_Collec...
[2] - https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/president-obama-signs-in...
I actually believed Obama when he spoke about ending the NSA's mass surveillance on the American people. He taught constitutional law. He knew exactly how wrong it was. I suspect that once he got into office he was either strong armed into changing his tune (and into ultimately giving the NSA more spying powers on the public) or he was shown enough secret evidence that it scared him into thinking it was necessary to violate the freedom of all Americans in order to keep us safe from terrorists. I'm not sure which scenario should worry me more, but at this point I don't think anyone in government has the ability to really stop the NSA.
The sayings about power corrupting date back to time immemorial. It's easy to say something is wrong (or right) when you are in no position to meaningfully impact, or be impacted, by what you're speaking of. It's another altogether different thing when you are in a situation to define the limits of your own powers, or that which even might affect you.
This, in many ways, is what made the Founding Fathers so unique. They were in a position to grant themselves effectively any and all powers they might ever desire. Yet instead, they sacrificed all of that in pursuit of a more free and just society, in many cases to their own detriment. In modern times I do not think there's any real comparable examples. Instead it's just endless power accumulation, tempered only by the oft liminal protest of the citizenry.
> In modern times I do not think there's any real comparable examples
There are real comparable examples, from South America and Africa, and America herself. You won't hear about them much, partly because they break important narratives and partly because often the US went to extraordinary lengths to smear, coup and/or murder those people.
Examples:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvador_Allende
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrice_Lumumba
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hampton
> I actually believed Obama when he spoke about ending the NSA's mass surveillance on the American people
He did. Snowden's leaked documents showed that he has already ended mass email surveillance. He ended mass phone surveillance after the leaks. Do you have any evidence whatsoever that he didn't?
> I actually believed Obama when he spoke about ending the NSA's mass surveillance on the American people. He taught constitutional law. He knew exactly how wrong it was. I suspect that once he got into office he was either strong armed into changing his tune (and into ultimately giving the NSA more spying powers on the public) or he was shown enough secret evidence that it scared him into thinking it was necessary to violate the freedom of all Americans in order to keep us safe from terrorists.
Man... When a bombastic politician promises something but doesn't deliver, the common response is "Oh, well, of course he just made an empty promise. What can you expect?". When a more genial politician that affects a more-typical reserved public face promises something but doesn't deliver, they get the benefit of the doubt. "Surely that wasn't an empty promise just to get more power! Surely something happened that convinced them against their better judgement not to do it.".
Respectfully, these are a class of people who have no problems saying trivially-verifiable lies to the public at large (as time has proven that there are no lasting consequences for lying to the public), and little problem with lying to members of Congress or even the courts (again, because here "lately" there are no real consequences for the act).
Don't believe what they say, believe what they do... because you're not privy to the conversations that they have that actually matter, so you have no idea what they actually intend.
We were talking about mass surveillance. PRISM isn't that. They used to collect mass email metadata, using facilities like Room 641A. Snowden's leaks showed that they had already stopped. These days, it wouldn't even be technically possible, let alone legally possible, because pretty much all SMTP traffic is over TLS. Gmail won't even accept unencrypted SMTP connections.
> These days, it wouldn't even be technically possible, let alone legally possible, because pretty much all SMTP traffic is over TLS.
These days the government wouldn't need to decrypt email traffic going over the backbone. They'd march into the companies and ISPs who run the mail servers and monitor/collect everything from there directly, the same way they marched into AT&T and set up camp. The vast majority of the American's email can be obtained by controlling the servers of a very small number of corporations. We have Lavabit to thank for demonstrating that when the government comes knocking your only options are to comply or shut down (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavabit)
There's no reason to think that there isn't a Room 641A at Google, Apple, MS, etc.
> They'd march into the companies and ISPs who run the mail servers and monitor/collect everything from there directly, the same way they marched into AT&T and set up camp.
This is illegal. If it were possible, they wouldn't have bothered with taps.
Because a government has _never_ done anything illegal before(!)
What!?!? Yes PRISM is a mass surveillance program. And it's not metadata, it's piping entire content straight from the target to the NSA, in real time. This involves direct filtered data (such as Skype messages/videos) indirectly handed over by participating companies (which is probably all major tech companies in the US at this point), as well as raw upstream (essentially line tapping) data such as provided via STORMBREW. [1]
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STORMBREW
> Yes PRISM is a mass surveillance program
You're more than 11 years behind the news. Less than a week after Greenwald published his initial ridiculous description of PRISM, it was corrected by the people who actually built the systems at the tech companies. He stupidly thought that the DITU was a machine at the companies that could get any data, when anybody with half a clue could have told him that it's obviously https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Intercept_Technology_Unit. The Wikipedia PRISM article's description is very clear and well-cited, and it includes Snowden's slides there to cross reference the description with. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM#The_program
The FBI tells the companies to forward the communications of specific targets to the FBI. PRISM is a data integration system that ingests that data from the FBI into NSA systems.
This is overt misinformation. PRISM works directly with the companies (well, "indirectly" to offer plausible deniability). The section you're linking to entirely quotes some random government organization which is obviously an unreliable source on such topics. As is the writing, as opposed to sources, on Wiki.
This [1] is one of the more telling leaks. It's a technical users guide for NSA employees on using realtime Skype surveillance for all modes including video and landline on arbitrary targets. [1] It even includes debugging guides like why an agent might be getting multiple copies of the same message, as happens when somebody being spied on boots up a new device and all of their messages are sent from Microsoft to them (and the NSA) simultaneously, resulting a copy of older messages (from the snooper's perspective).
[1] - https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/field_document/Guid...
In what way do you think your document contradicts GP?
The Fourth Amendment seems like a more appropriate starting point. Most people call the “privacy movement” “the American revolution“.
> who risked civil liability and criminal prosecution to help expose a massive spying program that violated the rights of millions of Americans.
That's how corrupt the system is. You get punished for revealing crimes against everyone.
Who is going to erect statues for him and people like him?
We could do it. We could fundraise to cast a bronze of him and put it anywhere we like. It wouldn't take that many people or that much time, in the grand scheme of things.
Actually, the world might be a nicer place with more statues and less goofy abstract modernist art in public for even more money than bronzes.
Put it right in the middle of Trump's "National Garden of American Heroes"[1] He'd love that. Ha!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Garden_of_American_He...
> Who is going to erect statues for him and people like him?
Usually, one has to kill some people to have a statue erected for him. /s
R.I.P.
He was a true and brave whistleblower.
I had the luck of getting a hold of his docs when they were under court seal, and we published them at Wired.
Only met and interviewed him later. He was a gentle man with a moral compass. A rarity even among whistleblowers.
The world is poorer without him.
A gentle man with a strong moral compass
He revealed unlawful surveillance years prior to and of the same gravity as Snowden, but only one became a celebrity. I would love to know the reason for that.
I say this without intending to denigrate Snowden at all: Klein's situation was less messy. Snowden had a top secret clearance and vowed to safeguard all the secrets he came across. Klein was just a regular guy doing regular work for a regular company when he saw something strange. That doesn't mean I think Snowden was wrong, just that there's a ton of room for people to say "I agree with him but he shouldn't have done that because he swore not to". Klein didn't have those obligations.
Snowden explained it well. There were four other whistleblowers besides Snowden and Klein.
(1) Russ Tice: USAF intelligence analyst
(2) William Binney: NSA Technical Director.
(3) Thomas Tamm: DOJ lawyer
(4) Thomas A. Drake: senior executive at NSA
Each of them was a senior position relative to Snowden and Klein and all these cases were shut down. What change Snowden had to do traditionally by the book whistleblow or tiny traditional leak. He made the conscious decision to take the information so that they could not shut him down, and make a scene from outside the US (Hong Kong) so that there would be time to talk to the press.
Snowden made a political crime that was morally justified. It was not self serving. It turns out that Americans don't care but at least he made a splash.
Snowden also swore an oath to uphold the constitution, including the fourth amendment that the NSA was illegally violating (one NSA crime) and covering up (second NSA crime), including by lying to congress (third NSA crime), as well as to protect America from domestic enemies, like the kind of traitors who'd come up with a secret plan to violate the constitutional rights of the entire country and lie about it to congress.
Thank goodness he took his oath more seriously than the "I was just following orders" crowd. We know from WW2 that "I was just following orders" is not a legitimate excuse to help facilitate grave atrocities, like all of those other NSA employees did every single day, in violation of their own oaths that they each swore.
You won't get any argument from me. I agree. And even in agreement, I still say that there's a much larger grey area in Snowden's case. We can and should discuss whether his actions were justified. I think they are. But I can at least appreciate that people who disagree have legitimate reasons to see it otherwise.
Klein's case didn't come with all that other baggage.
The moment which struck me the most from all the recent confirmation hearings was the parade of senator after senator asking Tulsi Gabbard if Edward Snowden was a traitor. It was like the #1 priority for them that people believe that, and they would skip any relevant questions about the job only to pursue that one topic over and over.
A litmus test for uncompromising ideological loyalty to an obviously false but politically correct narrative among TPTB.
No argument from me with what you wrote, either, I just wanted to make sure I was doing my interpretation justice by sharing it - there's certainly no shortage of posters parroting the other side's talking points.
It's interesting that Klein's tell-all didn't get as much attention despite being less legally fraught. It makes me wonder how much of the Snowden media frenzy was organic in the first place, and if not much, who was pulling the strings to draw attention to practices that our own government had an obvious interest in repressing and concealing discussion of.
Could be that Snowden took it to The Guardian, a foreign and international news outlet. The story how British intelligence folks showed up at the Guardian HQ and symbolically destroyed a hard drive, and the way Guardian management used their New York offices to work around restrictions in UK law to publish the story, that's quite a story itself, and of course journalists know how to get coverage and reach.
Mark targeted the EFF, not a news outlet, in contrast. The EFF probably first and foremost had the legal pursuit in mind, not making a story big.
The most shocking things of all for me was how ignorant ordinary people were and still are about both whistle blowers' disclosures and the subsequent pretend fixes by lawmakers. (Cynically, I'm inclined to add there might be more riots and demonstrations if you take Heinz ketchup away from people than theirlegitimate rights to privacy.)
> Mark targeted the EFF, not a news outlet, in contrast.
"Mark not only saw how it works, he had the documents to prove it. He brought us over a hundred pages of authenticated AT&T schematic diagrams and tables. Mark also shared this information with major media outlets, numerous Congressional staffers, and at least two senators personally."
I don't recall agreeing to any oath like that when I applied for a US clearance. I just recall the NDA.
I may have pledged allegiance to the US flag when I was a kid, but that wasn't the same as taking an oath of elected office to uphold the constitution.
“I was just following orders” is only a bad excuse if your side loses.
> grave atrocities
Tapping phones is immoral and unethical, IMO.
But a long was from the "grave atrocities" that were uncovered at the end of WWII
It wasn't simply tapping phones, it is the warrantless collection of close to all global electronic communications.
And the immorality doesn't stop there, that's where it starts.
"We kill people based on metadata." - General Michael Hayden, former Director of the NSA, former Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence, and former Director of the CIA.
This includes innocent people. Women, children, civilians. Deliberately. "Acceptable collateral damage" is the euphemism used to mask the moral evil of deliberately murdering women and children.
If you're in a war of attrition (like the the US was in Afghanistan), and the other side already has agreed it's okay to kill innocents (9/11), then you're not going to win by fighting an "ethical" war -- whatever that means.
I'm not going to defend the CIA/NSA for actions taken inside the country. On the other hand, I'm not going to second guess decisions happening on the ground in an active war zone.
The end never justify the mean, that's how you end up with concentration camps, massive executions and other atrocities.
Beside, killing without distinction combattant and civilians didn't work, see the result of the American Afghanistan war.
Even during the war, 99% of the country was to the hand of war leaders and talibans because everyone hated Americans. Guess why.
It took only a handful of days for Talibans to defeat the American sponsored 'democratic' gouvernement.
> The end never justify the mean
It's working so far for Russia. It worked for Germany in WWII until the US stepped and fought our way through Europe.
If you see a certain group as your sworn enemy for life which should be destroyed at all means possible -- then you will never have peace. All you can have is war.
I believe it to be a bit shortsighted.
The long term result of justifying the mean is always the subordination of the individuals, you migrate from a democratic society to totalitarian state.
I feel it's safe to say that no society prefer dictatorship to democracy.
So you won (maybe), your life is worst, you have no freedom anymore.
Beside you say in some case war is inevitable because there is too much hate. I don't agree, people (individuals) can be so hateful that war is inevitable but populations always aspire to peace.
Even totalitarian state always have to justify the war by pretending they're the one merely defending, being attacked because this desire for peace is so powerful.
> It worked for Germany in WWII until...
they took on the Russians
> ...you're not going to win by fighting an "ethical" war -- whatever that means.
By not fighting ethically abroad and by permitting our authoritarians largely free-rein both abroad and domestically, we gave the folks who planned and caused the destruction of the WTC towers nearly everything they were hoping for.
Overreacting and letting Bush II run his military campaigns in the Middle East was one of the greatest gifts we could have given Al Qaeda and those like them. Encouraging our populace to permit themselves to be (and continue to be) terrorized is a lesser but still significant gift to those same organizations.
Afghanistan had nothing to do with 9/11. Neither did Syria, or Iraq.
Vietnam wasn't self-defense. Korean war wasn't self-defense. CIA-instigated Color revolutions and Euromaidan weren't self-defense. Kosovo wasn't self-defense. Launching a cruise missile (a precision weapon that requires the operator to enter precise geographic coordinates prior to launch) at the Chinese embassy in Belgrade wasn't self-defense.
A vast and overwhelming majority of the military operations the post-WW2 USA conducts overseas are not acts of self-defense, they are acts of imperialism.
"I want to grow the imperial empire's influence and footprint" is not justification for murdering unarmed civilians. Never has been, never will be.
And now he's nice and cozy in a country that is busy invading its neighbor... But one that the US President has himself cozied up to the leadership of as of late.
It's an odd world that makes odd bedfellows. One wonders depending on how the next four years go if Snowden could even catch a pardon.
... or if he did, the Russians would even let him leave.
Likewise, Manning got pardoned when her release was clearly messier and less targeted than Snowden’s. There isn’t much logic to these things.
To be clear, all 3 are personal heroes of mine.
Probably because one absconded half-successfully and became sort of stateless. That's a way more exciting story!
I’m watching Person of Interest for the first time. It’s interesting watching it today now that the premise, minus 100% accurate crime prediction, is largely a forgone conclusion. It was produced after Klein but before Snowden and does a good job exploring the expansion of surveillance and just how motivated the government is to have a system that tracks everyone. Of course it’s fiction but it’s a fun watch that asks a lot of good questions.
I really enjoyed that show. Such a shame it was cancelled! Despite critical acclaim (in later seasons, at least), it apparently wasn't profitable enough.
I actually tried to find a legal way to rewatch it the other day, but all of my current subscriptions list it with "rights expired" or some such.
It's weird how a lot of stuff in that show I dismissed as unrealistic techno-babble back then, now is very real.
I enjoyed that show enough that I was willing to put up with Amazon's "Freevee" ads because they would not just let me buy the show. I've never done that with any other shows.
Oh dear... You should hear some of the stories about Jim Caviezel[0]...
On second thought, maybe make up your own mind before you dip into that.
[0] https://open.spotify.com/episode/1euFlDCuryFSzMw6BjQCWA
Oh yea I always read about actors during commercial break. Was a bit startled when reading his Wikipedia.
Rest in peace sweet prince. I'll never forget this discovery, it was probably my first realization that whatever is possible technically is most likely being done somewhere to exert power over people.
And in this case most people in tech knew you could split a network backbone, and if you can do it then most likely someone is doing it. But Mark actually brought it into the light.
And that's what we can't forget in 2025, that whatever is possible technically is most likely being done by someone somewhere. Today it would be using AI to oppress people, track citizens, predict crimes, accuse people of crimes they might commit, or whatever your imagination anchored in technical reality can picture.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Klein
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/homefront/interview...
https://www.eff.org/document/public-unredacted-klein-declara...
https://medium.com/@illicitpopsicle/mark-klein-the-nsa-whist... | https://archive.today/LlZSs
https://medium.com/@chelsealynnqueen94/mark-klein-whistleblo... | https://archive.today/7RlfJ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44edsh6_LUc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqeMkv5FHfU
(Senator Chris Dodd interviewed Mark, but the video is currently private unfortunately: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9aeKF-rOGA)
Related. There were probably other relevant threads over the years—can anyone find some?
Room 641A - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41507188 - Sept 2024 (5 comments)
The secrets of Room 641A (2008) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38305501 - Nov 2023 (4 comments)
Room 641A - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32984515 - Sept 2022 (2 comments)
Room 641A - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23350120 - May 2020 (70 comments)
Room 641A - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12515724 - Sept 2016 (75 comments)
Room 641A - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5847166 - June 2013 (44 comments)
My top post ever on reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/6dwg/wired_unve...
and only 1 link still works. 19 years is a long time to the internet.
Wayback Machine has the rest (for as long as it lasts).
OP https://web.archive.org/web/20060615052051/https://www.wired...
https://web.archive.org/web/20051219151049/http://www.cnn.co...
https://web.archive.org/web/20000302002228/https://www.wired...
https://web.archive.org/web/20060904193022/http://blog.wired...
Remember to donate, folks.
Thats awesome.
See my post below -- I have been tracking Eschelon since the early 90s...
Guess what NSA router backdoors have become (mobile phones with socialifelog media apps on them)
---
And like @tptacek said
>>If it was the NSA, their van wouldn't look so goofy that people took one look at the photo and assumed it had to be an NSA van, which is what happened here. This is a bad movie plot trope: the bad guys can't simultaneously be omniscient and so dumb they're trivially outed like this, just like the real supervillain isn't going to monologue while you free yourself from the chains lowering you into the shark tank.
---
Love that but, I do think that both is true...
Look incompetent so they don't think you're competent (Stuxnet/DUQU)
The Onion was on this a looong time ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJ380SHZvYU
:-) thank you for that. DOPE
I knew I would be in that 2013 thread...
I mistook the building, but I do remember details that Twitter had a direct fiber connection to that room...
Also, we have a LOT of evidence of prior NSA backdoors and interceptions...
in 1998 I had to hire a CSIE (cisco expert) (like a 3 digit uuid) to help me recover a router password from infra I inherited... and during the password reset procedure on a 3640 - he was telling me how "the NSA requires Cisco to put in back doors into all the routers)
((The passwd BTW was Feet4Monkey))
--
Then recall Carnivore? (and its predecessor eschelon - and a whole bunch of reveals) -- what was interesting was that the only company to refuse to install Carnivor was Earthlink.net (ISP) -- and the reason they stated they wouldnt put in Carnivore, was because they stated they already had their user tracking system (They were owned by the Mormon Church) ((and for some reason Whoopi Goldberg was one of their large notable investors))
And recall how they stated that the NSA specifically likes to hire Mormons?
And recall North First Street DC that was purchased by Cerberus Group which was the ~Bush-Cabal hedgie, and the reason they bought it because it housed MAE WEST and they wanted to inject NBAR/Surveilling into it -- once they completed that, they sold it off again (To one of their subs, IIRC)
I hate that I am getting old and I start to forget a lot of the malfeasance I have witnessed in my ~30+ years in SV.
Related, I'm rewatching "Enemy of the State" a 1998 film about government surveillance and assassinations and the deep state.
Underrated in my opinion.
Has Gene Hackman (also topical, which is why I am rewatching) and Will Smith.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enemy_of_the_State_(film)
Pretty cool is that they mention Keyhole a few times. Keyhole (later Google Earth) was created a year later, in 1999.
The US camera surveillance satellites are called Key Hole.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_Hole
As willvarfar points out, there's a satellite system from the 1960s and quite a gap from there until Keyhole Inc.
~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Earth#HistoryMany companies operated in the gap, one in public was ERMapper (Earth Resources Mapping) which had Google Map like displays in the early 1990s and was mainly focussed on geospatial computing - stitching and correcting air and sat images, multispectral data with nonstandard nonlinear geocords, magnetic and radiometric displays and corrections, etc. Other such suites existed at that time.
Keyhole|Google Earth was not the first, it was the one that went very widely public.
Side comment about suboptimal HN commenting or UI...
This post is about someone noteworthy dying, but the top relevant comment is followed by over a dozen screenfulls of text about a sewer inspection van, before you get to anything else.
If you start paging through it, do you close the browser tab in annoyance before you get to any further discussion of the person and why they're noteworthy?
> 4. Mark Klein, AT&T whistleblower who revealed NSA mass spying, has died (eff.org) 1404 points by leotravis10 20 hours ago | flag | hide | 306 comments
Are you aware that you can collapse comments chains?
Yes, or go up and hit "next", but I don't normally have to on HN.
With the mouse-over-to-and-click-on-tiny-gray-link UI, it's usually faster to autoscroll/scrollwheel or hit PgDn.
So if you start doing the usual way, and it's not working, that's frustration with the post.
And is it worth your time to figure out where to prune/skip within the tree, when you have to go navigate to the tree links. And probably have hide/next/prev multiple times, to get past the entire tree from where you realize.
If people had more UI-efficient tree operations (like in past threading newsreaders), and knew how to use them, then it would be easier.
But with what we have, we can get important posts where important comments are effectively suppressed, for many readers, just by putting a dozen pages of frustrating distraction in front of them.
This is why I downvoted the first comment.
RIP - truly someone who tried to make the world better.
Mark Klein was just a guy doing his job... until he saw something he couldn't ignore. He didn't have to speak up. He could have walked away, lived his life, and let someone else deal with it. But he didn't. Rest in peace, Mark
I expect there were 10,000 who knew, and he’s the only one who spoke up. Now, the other 9,999 likely believed it was to thwart terrorism, as this was post 9/11. Maybe those who had visibility into who was being surveyed were checking to ensure the spying didn’t cross their ethical boundaries. Interesting to think of what each individual in the system was considering.
>he’s the only one who spoke up.
Not true.
(1) Russ Tice: USAF intelligence analyst
(2) William Binney: NSA Technical Director.
(3) Thomas Tamm: DOJ lawyer
(4) Thomas A. Drake: senior executive at NSA
Each of them had a senior position relative Klein and Snowden and all these cases were shut down and you seemingly never knew about them.
So what was different with Klein? He surfaced the information so widely that it couldn’t be contained by the “machine”?
He wasn’t bound by the same clearance/confidentiality.
Oh, I think it's much simpler: the other 9,999 didn't care enough to risk continued employment. Security today was dearer to them than the hypothetical benefits to strangers.
(Perhaps worth noting: not to detract from what Mark did, but he was retired and therefore didn't have a job on the line. Credit to him for leveraging his position of privilege as a retiree to speak out about what he knew.)
Where's the best overview of this whole NSA mass spying story, starting from 9/11 era and the beginning of the dotcom boom? Any good books or documentaries?
A lot of influential people were quietly radicalized by Klein's disclosures and they took that forward in their ventures, careers, and lives. Change takes time, and almost two decades later, I think we are seeing the results of what those early voices in the wilderness were calling out.
I hope on the other side of current bureaucratic reforms we can make a monument that includes Klein and the other surveillance whistleblowers whose disclosures, and specifically whose courage, turned the popular tide against government overreach.
NSA and AT&T (telecom in general?) caught with their pants down not just once, but twice.
All of this heavily publicized yet here we are today with privacy being an afterthought in everyone’s mind.
I hate to say it but the private corporations and state have really made most of the population complacent with wide net surveillance — cameras everywhere, privacy non-existent, “kyc”, “selfies”, social media, big tech creating profiles of users, and data brokerages selling and buying “anonymized” profiles.
Is his book "Wiring Up The Big Brother Machine...And Fighting It" worth a read?
I am thankful for what he did. We need more Mark Kleins.
Does this not count as a political post? It would have been flagged if the title had DOGE instead of NSA.
RIP to privacy too
I'm expecting nobody will do that anymore in the US.
First, those heroes were treated as enemies, then their revelations lead to nothing for the country, and great pain for them.
Finally, I doubt they would be proud of what their country is today and think it's worth the sacrifice.
Age 79/80 ?
RIP
Its not mass spying. The NSA is just making time capsule backups for everyone. Stop being so dramatic.
In a hundred years when it gets published its gonna be the bomb hilarious. Totes.
The NSA’s Upstream program primarily targeted foreign communications under the authority of Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act. However, it also incidentally collected data from U.S. citizens, particularly when their communications were intercepted while in contact with foreign targets.
The court cases were thrown out because of congressional action, as they should be, because the entire purpose of the NSA is to spy on foreigners. Thus these programs were legal and this whistleblowing was not, in fact, whistleblowing at all, just leaks of classified information.
The tolerance for the US mass spying efforts remains weird. It undermines the credibility of many US politicians around Trump - yes the US public appears to be set to vote in Hitler-equivalents for the forseeable future. No, dismantling the insane spying apparatus is not a major agenda point.
Marry those two ideas together.
It's pretty much a forgone conclusion since they are putting AI into every intersection. How are you going to argue against the fact that government AI needs your data for training?
Its fine, as long as they're spying on the radical woke leftists. They'd never spy on one of the good guys like me! /s
Needs black banner
It's crazy almost nothing changed after this revelation. What a fake democracy we live in.
Or a real democracy with voters either deeply apathetic about being watched or deeply anxious about what happens if nobody's watching.
Real but too constrained with two-party system.
this comment would make sense if this was the only issue where this was true instead of one amongst almost an uncountable number
Vectors pointing in all directions can sum to zero. If people are generally dissatisfied, but can't find common ground to coalesce their dissatisfaction into action, movement, or party, the status quo vibrates but does not move.
Broadly speaking, on one side of the aisle in the US I see people who refuse to coalesce, spend more time tearing at each other than figuring out how to work together, and find the entire idea of touching the system, let alone changing it, distasteful...And, sadly, on the other side I see a very successful coalition of surface-incompatible causes who figured out how to work together anyway and got their men elected.
> It's crazy almost nothing changed after this revelation.
The "democracy" noted that when you bomb someone's brain with information and emotions (modern journalism), "he" will forget in 5 minutes what "he" was told. Especially when "he" has to pay the rent and feed a family.
"he" here could be any person.
Tom Drake, John Kiriakou, Ed Snowden, Mark Klein.
These are people that have shown that parts of the intelligence community are guilty of crimes against humanity and the American people.
Yet every time more evidence comes out, people are so quick to dismiss it as "wacko conspiracy theories".
they have done heroes jobs, but unfortunely the effect was that now its all become normal. ppl dont give a toss..
if you mention beam splitters on fiber, tap rooms at telcos, the 'black boxes' at ISPs.. people just pretend thats normal. they think most othe ppl are pedophiles, rapists and murderes somehow and so think its fine for everything to be tapped and logged. crazy world.
these folks give up their remaining lives for the good of others, and the others just spit on it.
Such a different time. I got kind of anti-american after that but now with the world I am 100% pro USA/EU/Western world and Israel because the others are much worse. Much, much worse.
I find it odd how many people automatically assume that whatever the NSA is up to must be undesirable and therefore should be opposed.
I mean, where do you think analysis of plans by terrorists and nation state adversaries to attack our nation and its allies comes from? The raw intelligence data these are based on can only be gathered by surveillance of communications, both targeted and in bulk.
You should all be supporting this, as you benefit from it every day.
Well, the question at hand was, and is: what should we be supporting? I don't, in fact, assume that what the NSA is doing is bad, but in order for the public and the oversight systems the legislature put in place, someone has to know what's going on. The program Mark Klein revealed surprised legislators, including John Sensenbrenner, the author of the legislation that was used as a justification for the program: https://www.rstreet.org/commentary/patriot-act-author-introd...
Many people worried that the PATRIOT Act was overreach for surveillance, but the bill did pass. What happened with Mark's whistleblowing is that policymakers and the public found out that there were other programs, potentially illegal under even the PATRIOT Act (and, indeed the US Constitution), that had been hidden or obfuscated to their oversight bodies.
(Incidentally, the government's strategy in the cases against the NSA program was to say that even asking about legal authorisation and grounding of the program was in itself, a violation of national security. Many years after Mark's act, Ed Snowden's first published leak was this authorisation document, confirming that Mark was right, and that, had those cases been able to proceed, there would have been grounds for investigation.)
The point is that mass domestic surveillance of American nationals violates common understanding of the law. It makes no sense for the requirements to get a wiretap to be so stringent but the requirements to monitor someone's internet traffic to be nonexistent, just because it's laundered through "intelligence gathering" and you argue it's therefore not "law enforcement."
The point of bulk data collection is to be able to, in effect, take a wiretap in the past before you knew what you'd need to be wiretapping in the present, by querying the bulk datasets for communications between specific endpoints within specific points in time.
As time travel doesn't exist, this is the next best technology available.
Ah, the East German State Police mentality...
Sadly, governments end up becoming corrupt. In one formerly free nation (or at least it was one that obnoxiously bragged about being one), data about women's periods became weaponized in a witchhunt against abortions.
I think we all know that. We, or I at least, don't agree with it.
You don't agree with monitoring the communications of adversaries at all, or you don't agree with doing the equivalent for communications made in the recent past?
I don't agree with mass collection of data of non-guilty/non-suspected citizens for "just in case" situations in the future.
When the country's own citizens are the "adversaries", that's a highly fucked up government and government agency. If the people are the enemy the country is dead.
And the adversaries is the entire nation at this point.
If it's illegal then why aren't the courts stopping it? Has there been a court case? What did the ruling say? Details would be useful.
> The point is that mass domestic surveillance of American nationals violates common understanding of the law.
It also violates the courts' understanding of the law. That's probably why one such program was shut down prior to the Snowden leaks and definitely why the other was shut down after.
Think of how safe we'd all be if we were on camera 24/7/365!
Let me put it this way: I don't do anything illegal in my bathroom, but damned if I want someone watching me in there. Everyone has their line they don't want crossed. Klein's - and the EFF's, and mine - is somewhere past the NSA monitoring every single communication in the entire country without a warrant. I have no objection with them monitoring specific suspects with a court order, but I don't want them listening to people who aren't being actively, personally investigated.
Just because your communications data or metadata exists in some bulk dataset somewhere doesn't mean that it's being actively and personally investigated by anyone.
As with the issuance of a warrant for wiretapping, there would need to be a proportionate and legitmate reason for your communications within a such a dataset to be looked at.
the problem is that this data exists somewhere where i have no control over it and was collected without my consent, in clear violation of my constitutional rights. perhaps you have perfect trust in the current and future good faith of the US federal government, but perhaps you can understand why others do not. i would not want the local police keeping copies of all of my emails "just in case", why would it be any better for unaccountable strangers to keep secret dossiers on me?
I do not want my data included in the dataset. "We're not looking at it, pinky swear!" rings hollow.
Why would an analyst at the NSA be looking at your communications data?
It's a bit like the police getting a search warrant to look around your home. If there's no legitimate reason to do it, like having reasonable suspicion of a crime that requires investigation, then they're not going to.
This is just a rewording of the "nothing to hide" argument.
And your edit seems to ignore that the analysts are humans. Police get caught abusing their access to data resources for personal gain frequently, why are NSA analysts different?
(Not even touching on the fact that mistakes happen, leaks happen, breaches happen, laws change, political winds change direction)
> It's a bit like the police getting a search warrant to look around your home. If there's no legitimate reason to do it, like having reasonable suspicion of a crime that requires investigation, then they're not going to.
Yes, it is a bit like this. Except in this case the police don't need a warrant, they can enter your home for any reason at their discretion. You're putting a lot of trust in a bunch of people you've (I'm assuming) never met working for an agency that has demonstrated a complete lack of regard for the constitution. Either that or you're a really terrible glowie: "How do you do, fellow tech enthusiasts??"
Maybe they want to look at the naked pics being sent between you and your sexual partners, as has happened many times. Maybe they want to spy on their own sexual partners or prospective partners, which has also happened many times. Maybe they want to blackmail people for their own gain, which has, once again, happened many times. There are innumerable reasons with plenty of precedent for each and every one.
Setting aside the legality/morality/whatever of the data collection itself, you seem to place a lot of faith in the NSA’s ability to keep that data private.
How long until the new US administration starts using this data?
We benefit from drug dealers too. They bring extra money into the community and they give rappers something to rap about.
Yea, it's a good thing that since we live in a democracy we'd never elect anyone with bad intentions.
What a silly take.
This is at best a strawman, and at worst blatant astroturfing. The benefit of the doubt is given to these organizations a priori. The idea that the average person should not be able to know about government intelligence programs is common sense - if the average person knows, so do our adversaries, defeating the purpose of the program.
But there have to be limits on this power, or you enable, and even empower, an Orwellian regime.
NSA has been caught, multiple times, flagrantly disregarding the law, violating privacy rights afforded to every citizen by the Constitution, and gathering an amount of data that could easily enable a hostile regime to enact vengeance on dissenters.
So imagine this hostile regime comes to power. Now everyone is forced to either support the regime, or face harsh consequences without recourse. Any plan you construct, or group of supporters you amass, will inevitably be compromised by this machine and eradicated, one way or another.
You have totalitarianism, and no means to resist it. ou've given up your immune system. You no longer have a democracy, even if you do on paper. And before you make the argument that "the ends justify the means" consider that this hostile regime might not share your ends. You may get wrapped up in "the means".
Is that a desirable outcome for you? If not, you should rethink your position. If that outcome seems desirable to you, there are a very limited number of reasons why that could be the case, and none of them are charitable.
To not be scrutinized for any and everything is vital. When all is accessible, actors playing the part of the good citizen are the prime. I would rather have pain than the pretense of good.
The thing is, it no longer matters whether we support it. Nobody's asked for our permission and we have no power to stop it.