PRISM? Come to Israel to study our surveillance state

by yuvadam • 13 years ago

179 94 13 years ago

Valid points, but I don’t think it’s a comparable situation. Israel is constantly being attacked by people living on its own soil. It’s fairer to compare US intelligence gathering in Iraq with Israel’s intelligence gathering within Israel. If Arizonans were to start firing dozens of rockets a day at California, the US government would be way less civil than Israel has been to the Gazans. (And they have been, remember the detainment camps for Japanese Americans?)

NB: I count 3 instances of ‘abhor’ in the article, none of them used correctly. (The original Hebrew article speaks of נפעם, ‘excited’.)

znowi• 13 years ago

Exactly. Israel is in a unique situation and has been on high alert since the inception.

einhverfr8• 13 years ago

True. Of course if a large segment of those whose connection of birth and heritage to the territory that Israel effectively owned were denied citizenship in the US, we might have a similar situation. (We do have this situation with American Samoa which I think is a significant problem but it's only half a million residents so not comparable at all.)

I think going into a major back and forth though would be off-topic here. I do think the problem is not one side's fault but the fact that quite a number of sides (way more than two) want to see conflict continue because it is what they know best.

carlob4• 13 years ago

I understand the US media is heavily skewed in support of Israel, but your comparison is not fair at all.

Why is Israel being constantly attacked on its soil? First of all because it's been aggressively expanding its borders to the expense of the local Palestinian population for the past 65 years.

Secondly Israel is a theocratic state, where citizens of different religions have different sets of rights, where the situation has been described by Israeli commentator as bordering apartheid.

It's extremely misleading to say "If Arizonans were to start firing dozens of rockets a day at California…". The Palestinians have not started randomly bombing Israel out of the blue.

Also I wouldn't use the Israeli in Gaza as a paragon of virtue: I don't think that California would start using phosphorus bombs against Arizonan civilians, since it's explicitly forbidden by the Geneva convention. But since the US have actually used phosphorus against civilians in Fallujah in 2004, maybe you're right, they would be less civil.

cema4• 13 years ago

  I understand the US media is heavily skewed
  in support of Israel

My impression is the US media is heavily skewed regarding Israel, however some are skewed one way, others the other. To a smaller extent, the same is true about European media.

gadders5• 13 years ago

It's being attacked because the surrounding countries fundamentally object to the existence of an Jewish state and wish to destroy it.

To say "Israel has apartheid" really cheapens the struggle of Black South Africans.

//edit//Corrected glaring typo.

Samuel_Michon9• 13 years ago

[Israel has] been aggressively expanding its borders to the expense of the local Palestinian population for the past 65 years.

There are thirty times as many ‘Palestinians’ in Israel than there were 65 years a go. Meanwhile, Israel is now about half the size as it was in 1948. It’s tiny: the size of New Jersey.

Peaker3• 13 years ago

Israel is not a "theocratic" state.

Israel has laws to enable members of the Jewish nation (of any religion) to immigrate to Israel. Because the whole purpose of Israel was to combat the persecution of the Jewish nation (which includes the Jewish religion and ethnicity).

Also, Israel has some laws of religious nature (Relating mostly to discouraging work on Sabbath, marriage and burial). While the religious-based laws are a PITA in Israel (marriage is a real problem for many, burial of non-Jewish soldiers can be degrading, etc), it is far from a "theocracy".

ars2• 13 years ago

First of all because it's been aggressively expanding its borders to the expense of the local Palestinian population for the past 65 years.

Hu? Israel's borders have shrunk - it used to include parts of what is now called Jordan. History didn't start in 1948 you know.

Map: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Kingdom_of_Israel_1020_map...

In 635 CE the Arabs stole it, control jumped around to various nations ever since, till finally the descendent's of the original local population (who never left, and lived there the entire time) regained it.

Any claim the local Palestinian population has is superseded by the original population.

rimantas• 13 years ago

Does not UN consider some of that soil to be occupied land?

LekkoscPiwa• 13 years ago

Yes, but in the US saying anything that would even remotely criticize Israel is an automatic anti-semitism case. So, don't expect too many comments.

Ah, Land of the Free!

vixen99• 13 years ago

Especially since I guess the social network of HN users is pretty well mapped out.

einhverfr8• 13 years ago

The big thing about Israel is that they allow for administrative detention without trial. It's really hard to get worked up about surveillance when they don't even have to file charges to keep you in jail.

Samuel_Michon9• 13 years ago

How is that different from the US?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guantanamo_Bay_detention_camp#H...

einhverfr8• 13 years ago

The point is that Israeli citizens and nationals can be held without trial indefinitely in Israel. That is not something we have to worry about here to the same extent.

mickt2• 13 years ago

Or the UK:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_Act_2006#Extending_th...

Laws written originally to thwart the IRA were used to detain suspects and in many cases innocent people, who happened to be Irish, where convicted after confessions were cohered out of them. Can you imagine being jailed for 90 days and being interrogated for that length of time?

It seems plausible that the same thing will happen to innocent Arabs and Muslims whom are in the wrong place at the wrong time.

idoco3• 13 years ago

Ha? Administrative detention is legal in the states, under the USA PATRIOT Act - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Administrative_detention#United.... I think that invalidates your argument.

einhverfr8• 13 years ago

Yes, for seven days. My understanding from following Ha'aretz is that indefinite detention is allowed there.

Peaker3• 13 years ago

It requires a repeated, renewed court approval and I don't think it is indefinite. I do agree it is undemocratic and very problematic, though.

harel• 13 years ago

There's also the security card in Israel, which is pulled by the government every time people start to get excited about something. Economy problems? Security! Privacy concerns - shut up - Security! Administrative detention - Secu... you get the picture.

einhverfr8• 13 years ago

That's where we are going.

Now granted the US and Israel are products of very different histories. The Jews have been persecuted for centuries in Europe and to a somewhat lesser extent in the Middle East (the grass is always greener to some extent but the Muslims have been slightly better to religious minorities through most of history than the Christians were through the Middle Ages). The constant problems have lead to a very specific way of looking at things and I don't think one can have an historical perspective and say that the Jewish perspective is wrong in the Jewish context. The Jewish paranoia (and I mean paranoia in the security sense) is fully justified by the weight of history.

We in the US have extraordinary protections for free speech. You can stand up in a Neo-Nazi gathering and say that the time will come when people will have to finish what Hitler started and kill all Jews, and this is fully protected speech, but it is protected only because of what we went through in the US following WWII with the use of the Smith Act to prosecute people for sedition when all they did was distribute Marxist literature and try to spread Marxist ideas. So there is no such thing as a false or hateful idea before the law in the US because we don't trust the government or the courts to make that determination (interestingly if I mark bacon as kosher, the courts cannot interpret Jewish law to determine that in fact it can't be). An equal American paranoia --- where the government is the threat --- is also more than justified by the weight of history.

But what terrifies me is that since Oklahoma City, the US Government has been playing the security card all the time, and is taking more and more of our liberties. Freedom of association and the AEDPA? Security! Militarization of law enforcement? Security! Administrative detention? Security! Privacy concerns? Securi- you get the picture. And we are slowly forgetting why we have had our own different perspective.

oinksoft• 13 years ago

It's precisely where we're going. I thought I had to get my ears checked when I heard Obama talking about having 100% security at the expense of privacy and convenience. A nation demanding 100% security is a police state in the simplest sense.

devcpp5• 13 years ago

Agreed. And it goes like that with politics. No party even debates about economy, privacy and so on. That doesn't bring in votes. Security does. The entire concept of right/left wing in Israel is based on how nationalist a party is.

tudorconstantin• 13 years ago

I'd say the best places to learn about surveillance are China and North Korea.

I lived first 7 years of my life under the Romanian communism - they also could teach best practices in surveillance, since my parents were always careful what they said - in an era without too much electronics.

cema4• 13 years ago

I agree, but a pedantic point: North Korea is as different from China as China is from the Western world (in this respect). It is, frankly, different from any other place on earth.

thepumpkin1979• 13 years ago

I didn't knew this about Israel, although the fact that the situation is worse in other parts of the worlds doesn't justify this level of Surveillance in US.

mortov2• 13 years ago

Frankly the Israeli situation sounds more proportionate and reasonable than many - plus groups are challenging it in court which is always a Good Thing(tm).

If you want to see the REAL masters, look no further than the UK Regulation Of Investigative Powers Act.

That gives (for example) local garbage collectors the legal powers to obtain, say, your medical records - all they need to do is establish they are 'investigating' some garbage related offence and they have access to anything they want so by saying you have disposed of some 'unauthorized' medical waste they are allowed to obtain your medical records to see if you have a genuine medical condition justifying it. It is an offence for the medical staff to refuse or to inform you that they have been handed over.

Want to send your children to your local school ? Expect 24x7 surveillance of you and your children for 3 weeks: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/2248295/Second-counci... [edit: this is a different example of abuse, reply below has the correct link.]

The list is endless with over 500 different 'official' organizations entitled to mount total surveillance and the abuses of the legislation are so egregious that they read like a wild fantasy.

This is the "legal framework" which the UK PM David Cameron is assuring everyone keeps them safe from PRISM and the like.

Absolute power corrupts and this power has long ago corrupted absolutely in the UK.

[edit: originally said months and it is merely weeks, reply below has the link to the correct article. Thanks to Jabbles for pointing out the link was the wrong one.]

Jabbles2• 13 years ago

Your outrage is justified, but let's not just make up facts.

Your link says the surveillance lasted for 10 minutes. Not 3 months.

mortov2• 13 years ago

You're totally right, that was the wrong link, and the example I found is actually 3 weeks which is so much more reasonable for a serious crime like sending your child to the local school.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/dorset/8343865.stm

There are others and Wikipedia even has a special section on oppressive use : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_of_Investigatory_Pow...

[edit: to correct the time frame]

rmc• 13 years ago

Pedantically they UK also had a terrorist organisation that was setting bombs and almost killed the Prime Minister ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brighton_hotel_bombing )

Though they tried to crack down very hard on them, and it just made things worse. You'd think they'd learn from that.

mtgx• 13 years ago

Could this be the reason why you've had the same PM for so long? I mean who knows how he used that information on his competitors, or the campaign funders of the competitors.

Samuel_Michon9• 13 years ago

Benjamin Netanyahu has been PM for 7 years total (with 10 years in between the two terms) That’s shorter than George W. Bush was POTUS. David Ben-Gurion was PM for 13 years.

pliny• 13 years ago

This is almost certainly not the case, given that the Likud under-performed heavily in the last elections, and was outmaneuvered politically by it's three main coalition partners/rivals.

devcpp5• 13 years ago

He's the president of the main right-wing party. People like that often remain head of their state for very long once they're elected (first they're sworn in and then get more mandates to "finish their job"). Examples from my home country: Francois Mitterrand, Jacques Chirac. It may have something to do with this but you can get a way easier explanation.

nir2• 13 years ago

"The Israeli authorities took George Orwell’s book, Ninteen Eighty Four, and made it in to a master plan."

OMG! The author expands:

"Israeli nationals are always subjected to espionage and surveillance: employers read your email, the state sets up traffic cameras, parking cameras, security cameras and protection cameras"

This, my friends, is the level of hyperbole/ignorance we have to suffer from our media here in Israel.

I'm Israeli. Employers do not read my email. I have no information on whether traffic/security cameras are more prevalent than the average here (traffic, probably so), but I doubt that makes for a "1984" scenario. In fact I seriously doubt the author actually read "1984".

Unfortunately, clowns like him now learned that instead of being seen as a joke by people who actually live here, they can publish in English and get to the front page of news sites worldwide, where people don't know what's going on in Israel and are willing to believe anything.

yuvadam• 13 years ago

Your response reeks of privilege and ignorance.

If we put aside the ad-hominem attack on the author, which has a record that speaks for itself, you really should look up cases in the past that perfectly exemplify a surveillance society that is prevalent in Israel - most of you which you can find on said author's blog which you are attempting to discredit.

cema4• 13 years ago

Well, it looks to me as though internal Israeli politics has spilled out to the pages of Hacker News. It's okay, happens to internal American politics all the time.

herge• 13 years ago

the ad-hominem attack on the author

It's not an ad-hominem attack. He stated that the author is a clown because his article is a joke (which he argued for in the paragraph above it), and not that his article is a joke because he is a clown. The more correct term you should have used is 'rude'.

nir2• 13 years ago

If I'm ignorant, feel free to enlighten me.

"Clown" was not a good choice for word, but the author's claim that Israel is comparable to 1984 is a joke and his referrals to traffic cameras etc are ridiculous. I'm not trying to discredit him personally, his own writing does that.

What particularly irks me is that he took the opportunist route of posting it in English, knowing there's always an eager audience for any hyperbole on Israel.

(Edit: I can see why my original comment was taken as ad hominem, and apologize. Also I want to thank you for your post on setting up Heroku with Flask/pgSql which helped me a few months ago. It sucks that the first time we have any interaction is this argument. Sorry.)

pron• 13 years ago

I really think it's more of a problem of familiarity with foreign press (which is to be expected). Americans know how to read, say, a NY Post article, which is probably filled with exaggerations, as opposed to, say, a NYTimes article.

In Israel, as in all countries, different media outlets, and sometimes different sections, or even different authors within the same organization, speak in different registers. It's hard for a foreigner to fully grasp an article without prior familiarity with the writer, that provides the necessary context.

jbooth2• 13 years ago

You're aware that Shin Bet listens to a very significant % of phone calls originating in the West Bank, right? I've had friends who had access to intel and they described it as quote "just like 1984" (1984 reference unsolicited).

It turns out that you don't need advanced computer systems if you've got a lot of phone taps and an endless source of conscripted, arabic-conversational labor in the form of the IDF draft.

Why should they stop at Palestinian nationals? Meretz and B'Tselem are awfully anti-occupation, what if they're aiding terrorists? There's an easy way to find out..

mickt2• 13 years ago

Employers do not read my email.

In most jurisdictions your work e-mail belongs to the employer and not the employee and can be read and monitored by the employer. Is Israel an exception?

josh_fyi• 13 years ago

All these seem to be within the general level of intrusiveness seem in the US:

Easy access to metadata, security cameras, etc.

You haven't convinced me that the situation is much different in Israel as compared to the US (or the UK, for that matter).

MichaelAza• 13 years ago

The thing about Israel being a surveillance state? It doesn't feel like it. I, as an Israeli, don't feel that the government is going around reading my mail even though it can totally do that.

The thing about democracies isn't that they're less likely to violate your civil rights, it's that they seem like they're less likely to do that. That's a lot of power right there.

All forms of government exists to subjugate the populace and that's easier to do the less rights the population has. The only viable state is one that's afraid of its citizens. We have a lot of power but most people don't know it. We need to spread that knowledge.

cema4• 13 years ago

  The thing about democracies isn't that they're
  less likely to violate your civil rights, it's that
  they seem like they're less likely to do that.
  That's a lot of power right there.

Yes, yes! It is still important to use that power. But let's keep things in perspective, or else we end up, as in another comment to the OP, placing USA and China and Russia in the same basket.

fennecfoxen• 13 years ago

Replying to the article's illustration here...

1984 was not the instruction manual. It mostly deals with the ongoing operations and consequences of the police state and its surveillance. _That Hideous Strength_, its spiritual prequel (written by C. S. Lewis and published shortly before the atomic bomb, later reviewed and then ripped off by Orwell) is the instruction manual. :)

(In Orwell's defense, he did make improvements. The problem with a Lewis book, as Orwell observed, is that God exists and you know that the good guys win at the end, so the dystopian police state isn't scary enough... which is the major difference between the two in the plots.)

stplsd• 13 years ago

‘We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it ‘excludes’, it ‘represses’, it ‘censors’, it ‘abstracts’, it ‘masks’, it ‘conceals’. In fact power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production'

Michel Foucault

dclowd9901• 13 years ago

I fear that absolute surveillance is an inevitability, no matter where you live, or how "free" your country is.

It works like this: Best case scenario, you live in a country with a functioning republic, in which anyone is free to vote in anyway they choose.

A politician's worst nightmare is to be the one who was overseeing during an instance in which security disastrously failed (e.g. a terrorist attack).

The irony, of course, is that no matter how much security there is, a terrorist attack can always be successfully carried out in some manner or another.

Further, even if the government ran out of traditional hardened terrorists to oversee, they would start morphing dissidents into terrorists. So no way to stop terrorist attacks, and an ever-growing pool of terrorists. It bears repeating: you cannot stop security threats. Period.

That said, a politician's only recourse is to do something. That unfortunately means increasing security. No politician will ever stand in front of a camera and say, "You know what? I think we did everything we could, and these things are just going to happen from time to time. We'll learn from this and try to do better next time, but no guarantees. That's life." It's a truth, but we know that's not what politicians are here to tell us.

The other side of this tragic playing out of events is that, following a standard bell curve of distribution, most people are of mediocre intelligence, at best. That means they can't, for themselves, critically come to the understanding of the aforementioned maximum security problem. That means they're going to vote for the guy who promises to do more about security threats with straightforward security lockdown. They don't have the patience or intelligence to understand real policy reform that might actually lead to more security.

It's a feedback loop that will cause any bipartisan republic/democracy to inevitably succumb to a dictatorial-style surveillance state.

Do away with bipartisanship? There might be a way, but no elected leader in the US will ever implement the changes to make it happen, for the other evil politicians commit is to maintain the status quo at all costs.

iaskwhy• 13 years ago

Also: short term effect (arrest some people every now and then based on surveillance) vs really long term effect (slowly start to get your act together using foreign policy). Same with everything else, really.

alexqgb• 13 years ago

>"A politician's worst nightmare is to be the one who was overseeing during an instance in which security disastrously failed (e.g. a terrorist attack)."

And this is the weak link. Also, it is not necessarily the case. As we all know, everything from heart disease to auto wrecks are exponentially (almost infinitely) more likely than terrorism, and just as deadly. Nevertheless, we've accepted these possibilities as unavoidable aspects of existence, and ones we can manage without entering a state of hysterical, paralyzing fear combined with the surrender of all authority to concentrated, unassailable powers.

The thing that can break this loop is a cultural response that turns the person running on a "moar security" platform into an object of mockery. This is the flip side of the herd instinct: few people who want power can stand being laughed at.

jmilkbal• 13 years ago

It doesn't matter the level of invasive practices in other states. It's not a competition for the most or least practices, though policy and research are worth having dialog about. This combative attitude isn't useful, in English or Hebrew.

Edit: As the first commenter of the article suggests, companies are doing far more than the government in terms of intrusion just all the time. We need to strengthen the bill of rights to not just give procedural protection from the government, but real rights that protect us all from each other.

seclorum• 13 years ago

No need. Israel is already part of the US surveillance apparatus. Every single phone bill in the country gets shipped to an Israeli site for pre-processing..

drivingmenuts• 13 years ago

Was that supposed to make us feel better somehow? The "oh-you-think-you-got-it-bad" mentality disinclines me to any level of empathy or sympathy and more toward apathy.

ruv2• 13 years ago

I'm not sure what should be taken seriously if at all from it, either. But lets pretend for a moment that's irrelevant and the article does have a point:

During the last couple of days, we got to see this attitude you've demonstrated here, unfortunately, much too often - Not everybody here is from the US and it isn't all about you. Your surveillance is affecting us all but most of the discussion is about how it affects US citizens, since the rest of the world has no rights in the first place.

smsm42• 13 years ago

"The authorities could approach the telecommunication providers (ISPs, mobile operators and phone operators), pay a few Shekels, and obtain answers to queries, as long as such queries relate to specific crimes or investigations. "

NSA wins - they get all records without ever needing to allude to specific crime being committed.

"out of which, almost 2,000 were related to political activities such as public disturbances."

Political activities and public disturbances are very different things. You can make public disturbances while doing political activity, e.g. protesting, but you can also beat up a cop while protesting, that doesn't mean beating up a cop becomes example of political activities.

" Israel addressed Google for subscriber information (not by the Metadata act, as it does not apply to Google), about 350 times since 2009. Google responded to most of these requests; meaning that there are 350 people in Israel that the government obtained their correspondence,"

It actually does not. It means there were 350 requests, on which in about 2/3 of them Google disclosed some data. There's no indication which data was disclosed and whether such data was correspondence or not.

"Israeli nationals are always subjected to espionage and surveillance: employers read your email, the state sets up traffic cameras, parking cameras, security cameras and protection cameras."

Parking and traffic cameras have nothing to do with government surveillance and obviously are added just to sensationalize the article, as well as allegations about email snooping by employers, which again has absolutely nothing to do with government. Both are very common and nothing specially relating to Israel.

Summarily, though the article raises a very valid question of eroding judicial overview over state surveillance - which has, unsurprisingly, the same trend in Israel as it does in the US - overly sensational tone and bunching together legitimate privacy concerns and complaints about security cameras in private places. This detracts from the quality of complaints significantly. Main message of the article - that Israel is somehow an Orwellian total-surveillance state - is false, while Israel does have the same problem as US does, this claim is exaggerated.

PRISM? Come to Israel to study our surveillance state

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