German TV: Snowden Says NSA Also Spies on Industry

[MADem]

73. They won't, unfortunately, stop because we say so. Not even if we ask nicely.

PLA Unit 61398 doesn't just spy, for example, they HACK. They'll use deceptive practices to get people to click on links, they'll do the whole malware game, anything they can to get advantage. And the better one is at a foreign language, the more likely one is to get a job in that unit, assuming some computer skills as well.

Pootie's FSB does the same thing. The only difference is, they recruit cyberwhizkids of the Snowden stripe to do their hacking for them, rather than put them through boot camp and in uniform. The result is the same.

It could be because I've lived in countries where spying was part of the landscape, but I've never felt that I had any "guarantee" of privacy on the telephone (you could hear the idiots from SAVAK breathing on the phone in Iran--they'd tap the frigging line with one of those hand held phone thingys that linemen use to check a line and the morons wouldn't take out the little disk from the part where one spoke into the handset). That low expectation translated to the internet for me--I assume some asshole is looking, and for this reason, I keep a low profile in terms of my personal details.

When we go outside our homes (either physically, or virtually) we expose ourselves to surveillance--you can't walk ten steps in downtown NYC without having your picture taken; and nearly as much in any major city. In London, it's more onerous than NYC.

I don't see this reducing, in fact, I see it going the other way as more and more people sign up for "personal surveillance" at the bargain price of twenty nine bucks a month!

It's not just video surveillance (and we all know about face recognition software), we "consent to be tracked" by carrying a cellphone with us. Is this good or bad? If someone is killing their spouse and trying to establish an alibi, those tower pings can "out" a liar. If someone has gone off the road and they're upside-down in a ditch in the freezing cold, those tower pings can save a life. If someone doesn't want the "government" to know what they're up to, they'd better put their cellphone in a lead lined box, or something!

And, if you're the "wrong" nationality in some parts of the world, you'll keep running into the same cab driver or street sweeper, no matter what part of town you find yourself in. Funny how that works! Some people who do that work are better than others--if you can't see your tail, that doesn't necessarily mean you're not being watched! No doubt we put our own HUMINT (hopefully they've gotten a little better than the clodhoppers from the FBI stumbling around mosques trying to sniff out the "suspicious characters" and not blending in at all) on people we have an interest in, as well. It's really not news, it's just that we haven't talked much about this shit (aside from a sustained but --slowly-- lessening indictment of all Muslims in the post-Nahn Wun Wun age) since, ostensibly, the Cold War was declared "Over." I've gotta say, I think we probably need to back that assertion up...it's not "over"--it's just shifted from a military to an economic sphere. He (or she) with the most "customer consumers" wins!


I think people can try to "fight back," I just don't know how much success they'll have, realistically. The willy-nilly collection of data might stop by USA, but the mantle will only be taken up by Russia or China--and if we think they wouldn't have any use for our "domestic" information, I rather doubt that they'd turn it down if they could get at it. Perhaps the solution is a different kind of internet--I've seen some discussions of that here; going the peer-to-peer route, for example, but I'm not tech-savvy enough to jump on any bandwagons that offer that as a solution.

We're living in different times, it's as profound as the period between, say 1910 and 1950, with all the changes those decades brought. The person who was born into a home without central heat, with gas lights if they were lucky, but no electricity, with no radio or telephone, by the time they were forty had all those things, and a motor car and easy access to air travel, to boot. It was a cornucopia of progress that seemed never ending--the sky was the limit. We're living in different (the Chinese would say "interesting" I suspect) times now, and I suspect that our future will be very different from the past. Will this be for better or worse? Hard to know. Time, as it always does, will tell!

Let me apologize for going on and on like this...I don't have any answers (as you can tell by my comments) but I think the discussion is interesting. There will always be a tension between freedom and security, one that is far more complex than old Ben Franklin, who didn't have a laptop or a cellphone, could have ever envisioned.