NSA Spied On Human Rights Groups, Says Snowden

http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/08/snowden-council-of-europe-testimony/

by haile • 12 years ago

248 76 12 years ago

techcrunch.com

ForHackernews2• 12 years ago

Maybe at this point it would be simpler to just have a list of people the NSA isn't spying on.

toufka• 12 years ago

I've got it right here:

tomswartz07• 12 years ago

With the way things have been unfolding, perhaps that list only includes the NSA itself. Even that might be a stretch.

pvnick2• 12 years ago

Probably less of a stretch than you'd think, considering the lack of accountability. But that's a feature, not a bug.

ForHackernews2• 12 years ago

You think the NSA spies on the CIA and vice versa?

Torgo• 12 years ago

https://www.propublica.org/article/nsa-says-it-cant-search-o...

pvnick2• 12 years ago

Any kind of Internet traffic that passes before these mass surveillance sensors can be analyzed in a protocol-agnostic manner, meta-data and content both, and it can be today, right now, searched not only with very little effort, via a complex regular expression — which is a type of shorthand programming — but also via any algorithm an analyst can implement in popular high level programming

That's amazing. Imagine being able to construct a regular expression that get's applied on every single piece of communication in the world. Yes, it's far too much power to entrust to anyone, much less an unaccountable secretive organization, but I'll be damned if that's not an incredibly fascinating and attractive proposition. No wonder these bureaucrats are willing to so thoroughly overstep the law, that kind of power must be very tempting.

MrZongle2• 12 years ago

The movie "Sneakers" keeps coming to mind.

"Too many secrets" indeed.

id• 12 years ago

Yes, power can be amazing. But this is also very scary, especially because we know it has already been used repeatedly in a harmful way.

coldtea4• 12 years ago

Scary if you are on the receiving end, like most people. But they are on the power end.

swalsh• 12 years ago

There would actually be some really great opportunity for academic research in that data set too.

eli• 12 years ago

No doubt, but how would you get it approved by the university ethics board?

smokeyj• 12 years ago

Every comment, every upvote, every webpage you've ever viewed - parsed and mined for context specific metadata by some watson-like super-brain. And the interface isn't a regex, it's more minority-report style and lets you query people by political/economic/religious/etc affiliation. And you better believe there's a terminate button that disables your car brakes courtesy of on-star. (I keed I keed)

lukifer• 12 years ago

"In the case of Michael Hastings, what evidence is available publicly is consistent with a car cyber attack. And the problem with that is you can't prove it."

- Richard Clark, former Counter-Terrorism Czar

While evidence is insufficient to draw conclusions in that specific case, the fact that it is so plausible should be extremely worrying. (Hi, NSA spiders.)

roasty• 12 years ago

Every single communication? That would be impressive, if it were possible.

timdiggerm• 12 years ago

Can you imagine a way of constructing things such that, whether or not the NSA does this, no one could do that?

Theodores• 12 years ago

Gosh I am shocked. Of all the people they would spy on they target a human rights group. Who would have thought it?

We have heard a lot about how people don't want their cloud computing in the US any more, however, as of yet, there has not been a lot about how those that now know they are effectively being targeted have changed procedures.

Anyone in a 'save the world' group care to comment?

conkrete2• 12 years ago

I'm not in a "save the world" group but I do have friends that are in conservation groups. The common response was a sarcastic "who would have guessed?!?!" type of response.

These days everyone drinks at the NSA bar. where everything is on tap, all the time.

rhizome3• 12 years ago

That implies a benefit to the customer.

leviathant• 12 years ago

I'm not sure how exactly to quantify this, but I think it might be interesting to figure out what groups the NSA does NOT appear to report on.

ihsw• 12 years ago

The NSA's job is more than simply spying -- they also subvert security through intentionally and maliciously weakening it. I wouldn't be surprised if the NSA considers it an acceptable risk that sensitive government systems are allowed to continue remaining vulnerable regardless of the dangers because fixing those security vulnerabilities would alert their adversaries to such vulnerabilities.

Even furthermore, the various intelligence agencies also weaken systems for their own convenience, and yet there is nothing stopping anyone else from exploiting such weaknesses. Isn't this simply recklessness and negligence?

We keep hearing about hackers getting customer data over and over again, is that because of what our government has done?

It's not just spying.

bediger4000• 12 years ago

Agreed. I have a somewhat concrete example, the US credit card system. We know that GCHQ, and probably the NSA, knew about public-key encryption a long time before it was reinvented. Therefore, the US credit card system could have been made quite secure, instead of the amalgam of cheapest-to-implement patches that it is today. Very probably, the NSA could have prevented the largest part of "identity theft".

I guess we also have to ask ourselves if this was deliberate on their part, or did they just miss the emergence of the credit-card-as-electronic-money?

Ihmahr• 12 years ago

Remember that April fools joke by the pirate bay a few years ago..? They moved their hosting to the land of the free.

I am in two Dutch groups that are saving the world, both of them were not hosted there but definitively won't now. Also a company I work for was collecting client customer data, they moved storage from US to Netherlands.

secfirstmd5• 12 years ago

I think based on other Snowden revelations about non five-eye countries like Germany, Austria collaborating with the NSA and GCHQ - I think we all need to question whether any NATO country can be trusted for data privacy...

saraid2163• 12 years ago

Genuinely impressed a headline with "NSA" and "Snowden" made it onto the front page.

RexRollman• 12 years ago

What are you talking about? I've read lots of articles on HN with those items on the front page.

easong• 12 years ago

HN punishes (punished?) the ranking of articles with those keywords very heavily.

digitalengineer• 12 years ago

I think the treshold is about 40 comments before it gets pushed down on the frontpage.

dublinben• 12 years ago

If anyone could post a video link or download that doesn't require flash, it would be appreciated. There seems to be a MP4 file hidden somewhere in the layers of obfuscation in their streaming player.

ds9• 12 years ago

transcript: http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL1403/S00108/edward-snowdens... , http://www.independentsciencenews.org/science-media/edward-s...

happyscrappy3• 12 years ago

“I am proud of the fact that despite the dramatic protestations of intelligence chiefs, no evidence has been shown by any government that the revelations of the last year have caused any specific harm,” he added. “My motivation is to improve government, not to bring it down.”

I think this goes against the grain for a lot of HN.

dmix• 12 years ago

What? Even most hardcore libertarians don't want to bring down the government. And HN discussions rarely have anything more than moderate anti-government stances.

Despite common perception, almost all libertarians are "minarchists" not anarchists. They want to minimize government, not have no government.

An agency such as the NSA could actually fit into that model of governance if it had a defensive focus instead of an offensive one (ie. protecting citizens interests first instead of the state).

SoftwareMaven• 12 years ago

I disagree. I've seen very few arguments on HN for anarchy. I have seen many libertarian posts, but that is a very different thing. Anarchy is about removing the government; libertarianism is about keeping it tightly constrained. The NSA is a great example of government not kept constrained.

happyscrappy3• 12 years ago

Not anarchy, diminishing the power of the US.

w_t_payne4• 12 years ago

Personally, I just want effective government. I happen to believe that it will be more effective if it is smaller (in manpower terms, at least) ... but constraining & minimising government is a means to an end, not the end itself.

secfirstmd5• 12 years ago

As someone who has worked for a number of sensitive human rights groups over the years this sickens but doesn't surprise me. I would be very surprised if some of my operations haven't been targeted by this.

Many of the groups targeted are involved with actively investigating human rights abuses conducted by many countries in the world - including the USA in Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, drone strikes, secret prisons, etc. I fail to see exactly what the US National Security interest is in investigating these groups (Caveat: not all NGOs worldwide should be outside scrutiny, ie ones which funnel arms to Al Qaeda obviously but these ones certainly don't do that). The security community (as has happened in many countries over the years - the UK in Northern Ireland for example) has confused "National Security" with "embarrassment." I say "security community" as there are many fantastic people within US government and private institutions that are capable of looking at the long-term interest and are doing a good job of supporting human rights and freedom on the internet. For example, it is a credit that so much great work like The Guardian Project and Whisper Systems is underway to address such problems.

Human rights groups and journalists have been consistently the victim of high-level APT from China, Russia and elsewhere - there are many cases documented online. Many of these have been targeted through the exact same methods that large corporations like banks, defence companies, nuclear energy businesses. It's somehow morally wrong that organisations like GCHQ and the NSA actively thwart attacks (and share information) on such companies, while ignoring and obviously exploiting threats against human rights groups (which often end in the deaths of human rights defenders, aid workers and journalists).

The long-term national interest of the USA and other countries is the spread of our good values - freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, self determination, respect for international law etc. The "war on terror" has caused too many to lose sight of these soft-power instruments and that is a pity. Which does more long-term good for our way of life, values and foreign policy these days, Lockheed Martin or Amnesty International?

w_t_payne4• 12 years ago

Embarrassment, or is any form of political activism now seen as a threat?

secfirstmd5• 12 years ago

Agreed.

XorNot• 12 years ago

Yeah because political activism is never ever sponsored by foreign actors as a means of fomenting unrest. Just ignore what's happening in the Ukraine right now, it might be devastating to your indignation.

coldtea4• 12 years ago

The long-term national interest of the USA and other countries is the spread of our good values - freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, self determination, respect for international law etc.

That's not really an interest, short or long term. What are the various lobbies to gain from this? What is indeed an interest, and has been for over a century, is being the top dog, and taking advantage of that (using propaganda, lackeys and military power when needed) to get cheap resources, favorable trade deals and allies that ensure this goes on forever.

Playing on a level playing field has never been of interest.

w_t_payne4• 12 years ago

Yes, ... but why? And why specifically these groups? What's the agenda?

TeMPOraL• 12 years ago

(...) as part of its dragnet mass surveillance programs.

There is likely no agenda related to those groups in particular. They are spying on everyone.

coldtea4• 12 years ago

Those groups investigate and report things like the torture by those guards in Afghanistan, and other such abuses. But also abuses of local lackeys ("allies") worldwide. Including stuff done by corporations that have powerful lobbyists, in banana republics, the third world, etc.

The agenda one would guess is: get them to stop, intimidate people who follow a hot lead, know anything that's about to be reported in advance, etc.

It even happens for ecology groups. Here's a case from Britain -- see how far these things can go:

http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/jan/20/undercover-police-...

Guthur• 12 years ago

It's just a move covert intelligent gathering approach of using a vaccination program to obtain DNA samples of the local populace. It's exercise for the reader to work out when technique was apparently used.

Certain groups that the US deems contrary to their national interests may come to an aid agency for help.

NSA Spied On Human Rights Groups, Says Snowden

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