Ask HN: Spying in a time of spies

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7069940

by dmschulman • 13 years ago

6 9 13 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

As we all have seen in the last few months, the NSA leverages a great deal of technology and sneaky tricks for the purposes of gathering intelligence in the name of defending the United States of America.

There are moral and ethical arguments to be discussed with every facet of these discoveries, from the mass collection of metadata to spying on this country's closest allies to intercepting and modifying hardware for the purposes of espionage, but going beyond the tactics that implicate the average American citizen, I wonder about the competitive advantage we're putting in to jeopardy regarding the NSA's ability to carry out their mission.

Yes we've observed shocking and negligent behavior in many of these leaks, but I'm not interested in rehashing those emotional arguments. I'm interested in relating what the NSA has been doing (what they probably will have to stop doing, at least publicly) to the spying and espionage apparatuses of countries like China, Russia, India, Saudi Arabia, Iran and others and how those operations will continue undeterred while the NSA stays mired in controversy.

In terms of business, doesn't this put the NSA, and their parent company The United States of America, at a competitive disadvantage in a world where all major industrialized nations use dirty tricks to get an edge on the competition or to harvest something valuable? I completely acknowledge the outrage over domestic and international programs, but don't think for a minute the NSA is a unique case of abuse of power.

Do you predict the intelligence gathering capabilities of the NSA will now fall behind America's international competition or will these leaks and the president's announcement tomorrow do little to seriously deter the organization's mission?

onion2k• 13 years ago

"I'm not interested in rehashing those emotional arguments"

A nice attempt to inoculate your argument against reasons you don't like, but not relevant - the argument against what the NSA has done is emotional, specifically ethical, and you can't just dismiss that offhand by saying you're not interested.

Quite possibly limitations on further actions from the NSA, and GCHQ in my country, will put our respective nations at a disadvantage economically, strategically, and industrially, but that disadvantage is considerably less important than the freedom of citizens to live without oppression.

To wander freely down the argument ad absurdum road: should a government decide to enslave its entire population in forced labour camps so they could proudly say they're a global economic superpower, that would be wrong, even if other nations did it as well.

anigbrowl2• 13 years ago

Ethics are not a subset of emotions.

dmschulman2• 13 years ago

I think we'd all agree that the information we've learned since June is "upsetting". I make that distinction in my thread because I want to have a rational conversation about the NSA as a tool of the state and not devolve into the simplistic responses: "NSA bad!"

anigbrowl2• 13 years ago

parent company

ಠ_ರೃ

Business or no, I don't consider this a particular disadvantage for the US. Think of it as track II diplomacy; what looks like leaks to the general public are equally an advertisement for our capabilities and a warning to our enemies about the reach of our intelligence apparatus.

gmuslera• 13 years ago

Should we forgive the local thief because there are (maybe bigger, who knows) other thieves elsewhere?

Don't forget the leverage that the NSA have, forcing (in the case they aren't willing to) main operating systems manufacturers, core internet infrastructure and services, and even hardware makers (as several countries and major companies from elsewhere are in line with this) to give the information they want, or insert backdoors in their own products.

Whatever does china, russia, india, iran and so on is child's play compared with what US does, is just several orders below. And the damage of that on internet is also orders higher. There is no great difference between a russian hacker wanting to hack my servers and the russian country, but for US every chip, every router, every service I need to use can already have a backdoor for them, and usable not just by them.

w_t_payne2• 13 years ago

The events of the past year have resulted in political pressure to curtail the activities of GCHQ and the NSA.

I expect that this political pressure will be transient, and any legislative measures that are enacted will be either temporary or ineffective. The scope of their activities will probably expand rather than contract over the coming decade, even if this growth is driven by a further expansion in the reach of consumer technologies rather than legislative or procedural changes in the agencies themselves.

On the other hand, the media focus on the NSA and GCHQ has undermined the ability of the State department and the FCO to promote freedom and privacy around the world.

The impact of this can already be seen, as other nations (India, Russia, Nigeria) start to increase the aggressiveness with which they collect and monitor our personal data. This is a bad thing, and a genuine cause for sadness and concern - although it represents a mere acceleration in a race that was already heading towards tyranny, rather than a change in direction per se. The intelligence bonanza offered by the remarkable penetration of mobile and internet technologies into private life was always going to be a prize too juicy to resist; for state intelligence agencies and criminals alike.

In this sense, I expect to see the five-eyes alliance become less exceptional in it's exploitation of signals and electronically gathered intelligence more quickly than might otherwise have been the case, as other states as well as criminal organisations begin to realize the scope of the opportunities at hand. Again, this is the acceleration of an already existing trend, not a change in quality or direction.

If this were a matter of traditional "kinetic" military force, then this change in the nominal "balance-of-power" between states might be a particular cause for concern, but the analysis is inappropriate. The primary and most vulnerable target of mass surveillance is the private individual, not the nation-state. The balance of power we need to be concerned about is not between one state and another, but between states-in-general and individuals-in-general, a balance that was always one-sided and is growing more so at a rapidly increasing rate.

In addition to looking at this problem through the lens of military might, we might also worry about economic and industrial espionage. Again, the distinction between nation-states is a moot point, because any advantage provided by state-sponsored espionage is only ever offered to the largest "national champion" businesses, an activity that disadvantages the majority of individuals and smaller businesses, regardless of their country of origin. In this instance, the conflict is not between different nation states, but between a privileged state-industry compact and everybody else. What is good for Goldman Sachs is not necessarily good for Main Street. Dirty tricks are harmful to the free market, harmful to consumer choice, and bad news no matter which nation state is sponsoring the dirt.

It does not really matter if we blame Snowden for his revelations, or the overreach of the security services themselves, the events of the past year have accelerated some harmful trends that pose a grave threat to us all.

The only positive note to come out of this whole sorry situation is this: Over the coming two to three years, I expect to see an acceleration in the development of privacy-oriented technologies and in the adoption of practices which may eventually (somewhat) blunt the capabilities of GCHQ, the NSA, and other agencies, organisations and groups around the world with an interest in infiltration, surveillance, subversion, manipulation and tyranny.

It is clear that we cannot rely on our government(s) and institutions to protect us. The individuals making the decisions seem to be too far to the right of the APSD spectrum to fully understand the consequences of their actions.

We must, by necessity, defend ourselves.

dmschulman2• 13 years ago

Very well said.

I believe the bottom line for any nation regardless of their intelligence apparatus is to act on their own self interest in preserving the state. Every nation with a vested interest is involved in spying internationally, and although all these nations also have vast domestic intelligence operations, I believe that some nations are more actively focused on gathering information on their own citizens for specific purposes than others.

I can only speak from my opinions and what I've read, but it is my belief that the NSA is more of the former, interested more in international affairs while still maintaining a catch-all domestic program with the intention of gathering as many intelligence signals as possible, though not actively pursuing 98% of what's been gathered. Granted, if they wanted to take action against an individual they damn well have the capacity, but I don't think this is their primary objective. I do believe genuinely that "preventing terrorism" is one of their aims (or at least giving the state the resources to do so), but obviously the tools that are being used to fulfill these goal are taken to their logical extent and ping everyone instead of "the bad guys".

When I look at other nations and see very obvious programs of state-sponsored espionage (China's Unit 61398, for example) I wonder how far the United States would eventually fall behind in the game if they don't keep pace with other nations. The NSA's operations have less to do with corporate espionage (as far as anyone can tell) or political dissent (somewhat), but cyber warfare is a very real threat and having the capacity to monitor that threat and actively work against it is a power I hope the agency doesn't lose.

I hear and accept the argument of intelligence powers being used to ultimately instill tyranny, and I grapple with reasoning defense of the state's interests vs. living under tyranny (not to mention protecting my own self interests), but I don't know if we are realistically at that point yet and I still would argue that there is an importance to letting the state manage its own affairs. That is a flawed argument obviously but that is one of the reason I wanted to hash out the topics in my initial question.

I agree that the next few years will present a privacy arms race in the private sector and I hope those technologies would be able to combat the over-reach of any agency with intelligence gathering capabilities but I hesitate to believe it will hamper these agencies abilities to monitor and track individuals. I hope I'm wrong, but the cat and mouse game of technological advancement will continue unabated, and as long as the USA continues to spend more than half a trillion dollars annually on defense the resources will always be available to break or hinder those advancements. We can only hope the individuals at the helm of these new technologies can stand against encroaching influence and money.

w_t_payne2• 13 years ago

Don't confuse the nation with the state - the two are very different things.

The nation is a body of people bound together by tribalistic xenophobia. The state: a heap of parasitic machinery hitching a ride.

Nations seldom possess anything more consistent than a sort of diffuse Zeitgeist, and maybe (sometimes) something approaching a sense of shared interest.

States are bureaucratic machines, dedicated to self-preservation, operating under the pretence of service to the nation; in actuality extracting as great a toll in human blood, misery and suffering as the nation can bear without collapsing.

Both entities are evil, brutish and disorganised, but of the two only the state is capable of operating with a (distant) semblance of directed, intentional action, so if you must anthropomorphise, do it to the state, not to the nation.

mindslight• 13 years ago

You're a couple indirections from the reality. It seems that you've fallen for the democracy delusion, assuming that your individual opinion should be congruent to governmental framework while hoping for vice-versa.

1. The scope of the NSA is what it is because yes, every government spies to the extent they can fund and get away with it diplomatically.

2. The reason you're seeing this turn into such a publicized political issue is that the reality of the digital panopticon is a mortal threat to the business model of Google, Facebook, et al (aka the datamining companies). This business model would have never become popular if people exercised a modicum of forethought about which technologies to adopt, but knowledgeable techies ignored their reservations when they saw a chance for social acceptance by making software easy for "normal people". So the datamining companies really wish to promote the idea that the NSA has transgressed rather than let people realize their business foundations are fundamentally anti-user.

3. Governmentally, nothing is going to actually change. Perhaps we'll get some resignations, specific named-program decommissioning, more laws to be skirted by individual analysts, and other such feel-good surface changes. But the critters deciding anything know that this is just the ugly business of how spying has worked and will continue to work, and that the NSA was just unluckily exposed.

4. The only avenue of meaningful change is for people to take their electronic destiny into their own hands. If you aren't in control of the software running on your "computer", then it is no longer yours (I've elaborated here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6607303). Yes, many CPUs probably have bugs that lead to root exploits and crypto sidechannels. But how can there be any demand and focus for solutions to this when the tech zeitgeist is to freely give up control of your computational device by regressing it into a dumb terminal?

Ask HN: Spying in a time of spies

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