from Hacker News

The NSA is turning the Internet into a total surveillance system

by northwest on 8/12/13, 6:13 AM with 114 comments

• by DanBC on 8/12/13, 8:22 AM

  They have huge amounts of data. This is good, because now people can analyse it and see how effective the measures are. Spending all that money must have some tangible, measurable, benefit, right? So, show us. Show us how many people have been caught as a result of all this monitoring.

  I don't think the results are going to be impressive. See, for another example, the fingerprint collection at US airports.

  > Collect it all

  I wonder how many Americans know about the scheme to collect at airports the fingerprints of visitors to the US?

  Here's an article from 2008 (http://www.reuters.com/article/2008/03/25/us-security-finger...), submitted to HN here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6196375)

  > The U.S. government has been collecting digital fingerprints and photographs of nearly all non-citizens aged 14 and up entering the country since 2004, officials said, in a Homeland Security program called US-VISIT, at a cost of $1.7 billion.

  > [...] On an average day, almost 14,400 international visitors undergo the fingerprinting process at Kennedy, officials said.

  > More than 2,000 criminal and visa fraud cases have been detected by the screening process, introduced in response to security concerns following the attacks of September 11, 2001, U.S. officials said.

  Roughly they've scanned fingerprints for 36,792,000 visitors (who may be repeat visitors), and caught more than 2,000 people. (Between 2001/9/11 and 2008/9/11.)

• by dubs99 on 8/12/13, 7:18 AM

  I wish the headlines of these articles would read "The American Government is turning the Internet into a total surveillance system".

  Although it seems the government has no control over the NSA or even know what they're up too, it would be good to see the focus of this problem turned to the policy makers.

• by ohwp on 8/12/13, 7:55 AM

  Don't get me wrong, but why is everybody so upset about the NSA when they post everything on Facebook and use Google/Apple/Microsoft?

  Are they upset because they lack the choice of who is tracking them? Because I don't think people should be upset about their privacy when they know a company like Facebook already knows everything about you.

• by mncolinlee on 8/12/13, 4:41 PM

  Well, there's only one response to those that would tag defenders of civil liberties as traitors.

  There was once a ragtag band of traitors who felt the same way. Their names included: Jefferson, Adams, Hancock, Franklin, and 52 other signers of the Declaration of Independence from England.

  One only needs to look at the influence of the British "Star Chamber" on the writing of our U.S. Constitution to understand exactly how our Founders would feel about a secret court with secret evidence chosen by only one man to decide which people get to violate their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination every single day... Or worse yet, to have a non-judicial secret court chosen by the executive that decides which American citizens to kill by drone strike.

  Regardless of what party or president runs our country, many things must change.

• by ForFreedom on 8/12/13, 9:01 AM

  The Person Of Interest (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1839578/) is coming true.

• by logn on 8/12/13, 9:27 AM

  This isn't really news at all. It's the guardian regurgitating prior news to make money and HN posting it to re-explain what we all already know and agree upon. I hope the next story on the NSA involves someone inventing something to fix our problems. The best news I read all day was: https://gnunet.org

• by john_b on 8/12/13, 2:20 PM

  Reading between the lines of various NSA statements, it seems like they interpret the relevant sections of the Patriot Act and FISA Amendments Act to only apply to "collected" data, and "collected" data they consider only that which a person looks at and stores. Apparently, they think that the restrictions imposed on them don't apply to automated machine reading of data, or any data that might possibly (51% or more) have a foreign source or destination.

  Since they define the criteria for what is "interesting", it gives them the ability to inspect essentially all of the data they collect, and there is at present no real check on the loosening of what constitutes "interesting" over time.

• by gulfie on 8/12/13, 7:40 AM

  Turning? I think the tense might be slightly wrong. Has turned.

• by miguelindurain on 8/12/13, 9:43 AM

  I wish there were more emphasis on human rights for worldwide citizens rather than on the 4th amendment. But maybe the goal is to target US public opinion so that they do something about this.

• by _yields on 8/12/13, 9:09 AM

  Americans control you're government, it is out of control.

  Regards, the rest of the world.

• by squozzer on 8/12/13, 1:56 PM

  Expect more revelations, as the "cross-border" criterion for information capture disappears from the debate.

  All communication will be captured all of the time.

  The upshot -- we have the best excuse in years to begin purging our ruling class. Does the NSA have dirt on them? Did Snowden manage to get some of that dirt and hand it over to Putin?

  Probably not, but as the mafiosi in Casino said, why take the chance?

• by djvu9 on 8/12/13, 3:30 PM

  Along with wearable and/or implanted devices and a little bit AI this could become the prototype of the Matrix...

• by jjguy on 8/12/13, 11:29 AM

  Looks like the Guardian got hacked. I clicked, saw the article header, but was then redirected to a NSFW ad for Teen Party Sluts.

• by walshemj on 8/12/13, 3:47 PM

  says the site with 17 sets of tracking code on the home page :-)

• by madaxe on 8/12/13, 9:09 AM

  What good is a panopticon if you can't make sense of what you're looking at?

• by icantthinkofone on 8/12/13, 10:29 AM

  I question why HNs sole source of information seems to only be The Guardian.