[jMyles]

Very nice. Nothing new here, but this is a great summary to share with people who are less familiar with internet architecture and want to get up to speed with this particular facet of (seemingly illegal) surveillance.

However, I want to quickly point out one omission in the discussion of the risks of allowing this kind of activity to continue:

If the NSA is effectively spying on everybody who communicates with a server outside the US, it is trivial for them (or another government agency) to fabricate traffic (presumably child pornography) in order to target someone.

The ACLU (and others similarly positioned to criticize this conduct) always rightly point to the risks to journalists and human rights activists of having their communications intercepted and accurately portrayed, but what about the ease of lying about it in order to target dissidents?

This seems like an obvious vector and deserves more attention and discussion.

[mixmastamyk]

> this is a great summary to share with people who are less familiar with

Unfortunately, the people I know who need to read this the most consider "aclu" is a dirty word.

[ch4s3]

Sadly many of the people protected by the ACLU have been convinced by marketing and propaganda that the ACLu wants to destroy America.

[tptacek]

Why does the USG need global surveillance capability to fabricate damning traffic?

[jMyles]

Hey buddy. You never responded to me in the other thread. :-)

Strictly speaking, it's not a requirement. But it gives incredible cover. It makes everyone think, "well, it's possible - they know everything that goes on."

In other words, absent this sort of mass vacuuming, the individual targeting of a dissident might seem much more suspicious.

[tedunangst]

Conversely, even the myth that the NSA reads all traffic also lends credibility to that theory. They don't need to read all traffic, they just need HN commenters to say they do.

[tptacek]

Don't normal people already sort of assume that? What's in doubt isn't the potential for the USG to learn these things, but the credibility of their unverified claims that they actually have learned them. I seriously don't see the connection between global surveillance and the USG's ability to lie convincingly: they can already lie convincingly.

Later

BTW: I felt like I responded to what you asked in other comments on the thread, and by the time I saw your comment, many other people had already responded. Nothing personal!

[devoply]

If it were legal you could call it unconstitutional. The point is do not want. But really Google is so much worse than the NSA. We can't do anything about Google though. He's like an uninvited guest to every party. And now we have Microsoft to contend with as well.

[Fnoord]

> We can't do anything about Google though.

Yes, we can! Don't use Google, or use certain settings in the applications which enhance your privacy. The default settings are not always the best settings for the user.

Don't use Google Search. Use a search engine which respects your privacy such as the scraper DuckDuckGo (DDG).

Don't use Gmail. Use an e-mail provider which doesn't scan through your e-mail. Where you got IMAP access. Use a device where you can use GPG. Or use alternative methods of communication.

Don't use Google Maps. Use a maps application which respects your privacy such as OpenStreetMap or (arguably) Apple Maps.

Don't use Google Fit. [...]

And so on, so forth. Ask yourself the following: do I really need this? The answer is often: "not really."

You have the option to use neither. If the choice is Android or iOS you pay more for iOS devices but your privacy generally suffers less. [Ignoring the option of dumbphones] there's a third option: don't take your phone with you. It is a choice to take your Android or iOS device with you. Among others, Bruce Schneier wrote about this in his book Data And Goliath.

[smokeyj]

But you can't avoid google analytics..

[chimeracoder]

> But you can't avoid google analytics..

That's the easiest to avoid. Ghostery, or a simple edit to your /etc/hosts file.

The problem is that tracking is much more pervasive, and there are many more ways you can be tracked that are much harder to block than Google Analytics.

[smokeyj]

What about for iOS? Sure there's more pervasive methods, but I doubt any are as ubiquitous as GA. My ghostery plugin shows GA for nearly every website I visit.

[detaro]

I thought iOS browsers' adblockers can at least do domain-based blocking, which is enough for the typcial GA case?

[Fnoord]

There are adblockers for iOS, but not for old versions of iOS and I think 32 bit versions of iOS don't work with it. IIRC Apple has allowed it since 9.0.

[cmdrfred]

Adblock works on Android.

[mastazi]

Try Privacy Badger, made by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. It protects you from many trackers, not only Google's, for example it disables the tracking capabilities of Facebook like buttons. https://www.eff.org/privacybadger

[Fnoord]

Why not? There's loads of options. Some examples include uBlock, NoScript, /etc/hosts

[JamieF1]

Doesn't ublock block requests to the likes of GA?

[ergot]

> But really Google is so much worse than the NSA

Google is one of the many tentacles of the NSA. Worth reading 'How the CIA made Google': https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-goo...

Also noteworthy: 'DARPA director Regina Dugan takes job as Google senior executive':

http://articles.latimes.com/2012/mar/13/business/la-fi-tn-fr...

[Esau]

Commercial surveillance is a problem, no doubt, but the problem isn't just Google - any held commercial data is susceptible to government snooping. Which is why people just blindly throwing their data into The Cloud annoys me.

[late2part]

We implicity permit Google to have our info. We have not given informed consent to allow our government to take this data. Therefore it is an unreasonable search and seizure of our property.

[newsat13]

This is incorrect. Most people don't realize this. Do you consent your car to store all your location information in the cloud? What if TV started storing all things you watch in the cloud? Tomorrow, if all the car/tv manufacturers started doing this, what choice do you have? No, the option is not "do not use cars/tv". And tbh, I don't even think 80% of the population is cognizant about what is being collected and what it's used for. This is the reality and they have "accepted" it as-is. This is the situation we find ourselves with email (all email providers mark any other email as spam).

[Fnoord]

> Tomorrow, if all the car/tv manufacturers started doing this, what choice do you have? No, the option is not "do not use cars/tv"

Supply & demand. If there is demand for dumb TVs and dumb cars, this supply will (eventually) be met. Vote with your wallet.

Also, do not forget the second hand market for cars. This one's huge. There's still TVs and cars available which are dumb. There's still laptops available without Intel ME.

> This is the situation we find ourselves with email (all email providers mark any other email as spam).

What are you on about?

[drinkjuice]

> If there is demand for dumb TVs and dumb cars, this supply will (eventually) be met.

I keep hearing that, I just never see it. There are a lot of things nobody wants which corporations push in unison because they want them. And that's not even accounting for the meddling of the marketing department, which does matter.

[Fnoord]

> I keep hearing that, I just never see it. There are a lot of things nobody wants which corporations push in unison because they want them. And that's not even accounting for the meddling of the marketing department, which does matter.

[In my reply I'll be mostly specific to TVs. Cars is -at least for me- a more complex topic due to AI which I don't want to argue against because I am reluctantly positive about this development (I do realise the privacy issues). Its also a lot higher in price than a TV, which makes the risk/reward higher.]

1) The smart TV is a relatively new phenomenon (to me, I'm in my 30s and I grew up with CRT monitors, I suppose for someone who's 15 it doesn't feel this way). I don't own a TV, but when I bought a TV for my mother back in 2010 it was a dumb TV. Its still being in use, and it was made smart via a Chromecast (but it can be made dumb). My point is: the old supply hasn't dried up yet. Dumb TVs are still in use.

2) Part of the supply is met via the second hand market. If you don't see that, you are not trying hard enough. Go to eBay, type in a brand of a car made in 90s or 00s or fill in ThinkPad T61 or fill in a type of an old TV and off you go.

3) We're also seeing a conversion from TV being less relevant, due to streaming and Internet. This is akin to radio replaced by audio streaming, or PC replaced by tablets and smartphones. It may very well be that people use a dedicated TV less. In other words, I argue that there's less demand for TVs. (Which is why TVs are made more 'useful' by making them smart.)

4) The dumb TV is already here. It has a better refresh rate, and low ms than a traditional dumb TV. This dumb TV is called a 'monitor'. This is what I actually use as my current TV (I lied when I said I didn't have a TV, but its technically an 7+ year old monitor with a TV module. Its 24", and we barely use it).

So in short conclusion, concerning the dumb TV:

1 & 2) The replacement is relatively new and the customer has to learn the + and - of the newer version. The old supply hasn't dried up.

3) Demand has shifted. Customer perceives a smart TV as more capable.

4) Other product -still being actively made- satisfies demand.

I have no reason to doubt that supply & demand doesn't work in this specific market. Furthermore, you might want to take a look at importing from Asia. There's a relatively new market with a large supply of options over there.

[hartz]

If you run your own mail server, it's hard to get email deliverability to the inboxes of people who use the Big 3 (Gmail, yahoo mail, Outlook.com). This makes using these privacy-invasive email services a much easier decision

[sliken]

Problems seem more to do with the age of the domain, rather than the size.

[Karunamon]

> If there is demand for dumb TVs and dumb cars, this supply will (eventually) be met.

Such demand will never rise to substantial levels. The moment your solution to a problem requires the general public to (change their behavior/become educated about something), your solution is unworkable.

If the general public regularly changed their habits out of principle, Windows would have been displaced by Linux in the 90s and the banana and diamond industries would be dead or dying.

It doesn't work that way, and it's unrealistic to assume it ever can.

[Fnoord]

> If the general public regularly changed their habits out of principle, Windows would have been displaced by Linux in the 90s and the banana and diamond industries would be dead or dying.

My argument has never been that the general public at a whole changes something out of principle. Some of us may, most will not. Sadly you're right on that account.

My argument was that if there is a demand for a product this will (eventually) be met by supply.

I don't know anything about the banana industry.

I do know that Windows is from the former monopolist Microsoft. I was there when the Halloween documents got released into the wild.

The diamond industry is a former monopoly as well (De Beers). The diamond industry furthermore has the advantage of tradition. However according to [1] "Synthetic diamonds sold as jewelry typically sell for 15-20% less than natural equivalents, but the relative price is expected decline further as production economics improve." A-ha we got incentive right there: a price of 15-20% of the natural counterpart which is going to drop further over time! What makes you believe this competitor is irrelevant, unable to compete with natural diamonds? I see the exact opposite. So we have two incentives now: the principal, ideologic one (sadly usually doesn't fly; we agree there) and a money one. Diamonds lose their value the moment they're bought. There's no second hand market for them. It is a stupid investment. If you can save 80-85% on a stupid investment that seems like a pretty good incentive to me.

> It doesn't work that way, and it's unrealistic to assume it ever can.

If we're talking about monopolies, no, but those monopolies stay monopolies due to lack of government intervention and because the wheels of justice grind slowly. Microsoft eventually got what they deserved by courts, and they failed to compete with the successors of the PC which ran the 'children' of Linux and macOS (Android and iOS). Microsoft even had to change their business model, giving away Windows 10 and focusing on advertising instead.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_diamond#Gemstones

[late2part]

It's in the EULA, hence the implicit permission.