[arca_vorago]

While I have had my tiffs with KDC (publicly on twitter usually), this entire thread that seems to ignore the five-eyes loopholes is extremely disingenuous. NSA wants everything, so that they or some other three letter can walk the cat back later from data in their massive data centers. Ever since the 90's and echelon days we knew the 47 UKUS core agreement of the "five-eyes" (which later expanded to more) was abused by letting foreign agencies surveil an allies citizens, bypassing their own domestic restrictions, and then when they handed the raw data over, since it came from another source, and they didn't do the "collection", it wasn't a violation.

As a matter of fact, those of us who were warning about the NSA et al before Snowden were heavily relying on these 90's revelations to extrapolate what they were doing given the same system and new technology in a super-connected world.

So, for all the people in this thread to act like it's absurd that NSA was spying on KDC is ridiculously intellectually dishonest. NSA might not care about KDC individually, because they are just backdooring all the equipment (core router/switch backdoors, fiber splitters, etc) at backbone node junctions and they are gobbling up as much as possible for sifting later. Hence the word games the NSA leaders were playing with congress about collection vs wiretaping etc.

It's the NSA sharing raw data with Israelis in reverse, and it's happening all over to the point that the data sharing agreements themselves seem to me to be more of a security risk than the individuals they might deem worthy of a selector.

What's even more amazing to me is that on hn in years past you would have already been called out on this. I think hn is quickly becoming a place for business-people pretending to be hackers instead of the other way around, and it's shameful, but a different discussion I suppose.

[willstrafach]

> bypassing their own domestic restrictions

This is often repeated, but I don't believe any evidence has been published to indicate this is happening.

[arca_vorago]

So in 7 years when a leaker finally leaks the documents that prove it ala Snowden, I wonder what thing we will be warning ya'll about that you will claim has "no evidence".

Look, as a fairly rational conspiracy theorist, I recognize the importance of evidence, but in cases like this, it's very unlikely unless a leak happens for you to ever get it, and hence instead of looking for deductive evidence you can never rely on getting, you have to use inductive logic instead, and the difference between the two logical methods (inductive/deductive) is an important distinction that isn't made enough.

Do we have hard evidence that KDC was spied on specifically? No. Do we have inductive reason to believe it's probable? Very much so.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/20/us-uk-secret-d...

[willstrafach]

What is the goal in discussing something if there is no proof? I just don't quite understand.

If there was evidence of such loopholes, people could demand change from their representatives. Without proof, I guess the only thing someone can do is repeat it in any IC-related thread on HN to get some easy karma points (Seens to work well!).

[tripzilch]

Don't care about the karma, what is the goal of defending those assholes from the NSA, there is loads of things being claimed about shit happening all over the world on HN that are pretty reasonable to discuss even without hard proof, but whenever it's something totally expected the NSA is obviously doing, there's always some patriot going "ah, but there's no proof". These bastards openly deny my right to privacy because I was born in the wrong country, I'm not forgetting that, they don't deserve a benefit of the doubt, nor have they ever shown to earn it. Where is the evidence of that?

[willstrafach]

Getting worked up about things which may not actually be true will waste necessary energy, so when actual proof arises of abuse, people would think nothing of it instead of being alarmed and demanding change.

[jonknee]

I think it is completely possible the NSA was snooping on a non-US citizen running a largely criminal enterprise (especially if you count incidental collection). My point was that despite the headline there is no evidence that they were. The only person saying so is the known liar who ran the scam.

[drunkenmonkey]

it's time for honest people like you to stop interacting with the plebs directly, and to start to educate them through mass-spectacle more. You're of a different breed; remember it.

[arca_vorago]

What kind of mass spectacle do you have in mind?

[mmjaa]

The "spectacle of ignorance" on the part of the masses. The most horrific thing to come from all of this, is that we're all not at all interested in the knowledge that we have secret masters who have given themselves the right to inspect anything, alter anything - at all - in the digital world, and use that to maintain and continue to expand their power base.

None of that matters.

What matters is just how little any of us give a fuck.

When Snowden hit the wires, it was a digital apocalypse for a lot of people. The GCHQ "catalog of intercepts", such as it was, just hurt like hell. The details about Keyscore and the technology that out-Google's Google: horrific. I can't explain how depressing it is to know that there are hardware y-combinators out there, in the oceans, providing an elite class with advantages none of us will ever see, in their effort to project power in the new, digital, order.

It was absolutely disturbing.

What made it hard to wake up from the hangover was the realisation: 99.95% of the digital-using world just don't give a fuck, because they don't understand.

We cannot trust our computers any more. We never could, really, but now: we just can't.

How do we back out of this situation? It has to start with a local revolution: roll your own. Grow your own. And, unfortunately, that isn't happening. Technological centralism has enslaved us all - and there are only a few, elite, who can escape these bonds.

Are you one of them, "citizen"?