[Phantom Hoover]

they have even less resources to spy on people who don't use those things!

[Klaustrophobia]

The easiest and most reliable way of avoiding NSA knowing about stuff you don't want them to know about is not to put it on the internet in the first place. Meaning nothing private on Facebook (they'd actually be better off reading the "movies I like" list in my profile. There are some darn good movies in there ) and on the internet in general.

how many ****ing times to i have to say that THE NSA IS NOT READING YOUR ****ING FACEBOOK

how on earth can you possibly know this.  are you the director of the NSA?  they very well could be collecting facebook posts.  unless you're just playing the semantics game and mean they aren't actively reading vice collecting/storing data, you cannot definitively state that they aren't.

[Phantom Hoover]

well you know we have all those leaked NSA documents giving fairly broad coverage of their electronic surveillance efforts

but i guess we can ditch all that and basic common sense besides and pretend they're probably listening to everything ever, sure

[headdie]

The easiest and most reliable way of avoiding NSA knowing about stuff you don't want them to know about is not to put it on the internet in the first place. Meaning nothing private on Facebook (they'd actually be better off reading the "movies I like" list in my profile. There are some darn good movies in there ) and on the internet in general.

how many ****ing times to i have to say that THE NSA IS NOT READING YOUR ****ING FACEBOOK

contrary to my earlier stance

the NSA might not be but the Department for work and pensions is in the UK, especially if you are on disability or job seeker benefits

but then.... when i was on Job seekers i was above board so no need to worry there and I rarely actually post anything anyway so it made and makes no difference to me anyway, read about my non life as much as you want,

though again iirc it is run under of lets monitor this batch of people for a bit and then move onto the next batch

well you know we have all those leaked NSA documents giving fairly broad coverage of their electronic surveillance efforts

but i guess we can ditch all that and basic common sense besides and pretend they're probably listening to everything ever, sure

indeed the the money needed to actively monitor every citizen in a nation is basically not there in most societies, you have to actually do something to red flag yourself a few times to be worth a human even looking at your data and even then the first step is to look at it in terms of "are you a false positive?"

[Dragon]

The easiest and most reliable way of avoiding NSA knowing about stuff you don't want them to know about is not to put it on the internet in the first place. Meaning nothing private on Facebook (they'd actually be better off reading the "movies I like" list in my profile. There are some darn good movies in there ) and on the internet in general.

how many ****ing times to i have to say that THE NSA IS NOT READING YOUR ****ING FACEBOOK

Why not? It's the first place any self-respecting data mining company goes to. It'd be really foolish of them to ignore Facebook, so it's hard to believe they're not monitoring it in any way. Same with Google+. Why use elaborate programs, e-mail interception and the like when most people will flat out tell you everything via Facebook? Also, even if NSA isn't doing it (unlikely as it is), there are several more suspicious organizations (the aforementioned data mining companies, for example) who do it for a living.

[MP-Ryan]

You should be reading what I wrote as cynicism, not trust.  Frankly, most government programs aren't competent enough to mount a concerted conspiracy.  For anyone not doing anything nefarious, the chances of them ever catching the attention of the various international espionage programs are slim and none.

I don't think any conspiracy is required for programs like this to result in serious abuses of power. All you need is a nebulously defined global conflict, an institutional culture based around finding hidden enemies, and a lack of meaningful oversight. Bonus points if your country is willing to indefinitely detain and/or assassinate civilians. Major bonus points if you have convinced your populace that there's nothing they can do about it but they're safe as long as they keep their heads down.

This.  All of this.

I wish I was that articulate the last time someone accused me of being a "conspiracy theorist."  No conspiracy is required or even necessarily likely.  I wish to God that more people understood this.  This is a systemic problem, emergent in nature.  A conspiracy is something that can be defeated by exposure.  This is far more difficult to deal with.

I would love if someone could come up with an actual plausible scenario of an ordinary person being affected in any way by international espionage programs collecting their data and usage information.

It doesn't make the spying right, but the idea that any one individual who is NOT involved in some seriously nefarious goings-on will be specifically targeted by these programs and have the rather broad-strokes patterns used against them is absolutely laughable.

As is the idea that using VPNs or Tor somehow protects you.  The very notion of privacy on the Internet is a false premise from its start.

If the recent leaks - which are but a tiny fraction of the picture that is international signals intercept - are any indication, basically every scrap of information that is transmitted or received can be and is intercepted.  That's being used for pattern analysis, not pulling individual data.  Unless one of you has a secret and exotic criminal career going, it's pretty safe to say that all of our information is just noise.  No one and nothing has the capability to do a deep analysis of everything that's collected; it's being chosen by pattern analysis and then a tiny, tiny fraction is looked at by real people.

Seriously - if any of these NSA revelations actually trouble you and have you installing security measures to combat them, unplug your PC and take every Internet-connected and connectable device and burn them right now, because that is the ONLY way that your actions are not being monitored in some way... of course, your government still stores much of its information online anyway and all of the records OF you are stored that way as well, so you still have an online presence whether you control it or not.  Point is - the idea of trying to secure oneself against signals intercept is flawed from the outset - no one, and I do mean NO ONE, has the capability to do it even partially.  If you think using Tor/VPN/browser plugins, etc etc are going to protect you, I have some lovely oceanfront property for sale in Alberta for one hell of a deal that you might be interested in.

(Note:  the "you's" above are directed at a general audience and not the quoted posters.)

[666maslo666]

If you think using Tor/VPN/browser plugins, etc etc are going to protect you, I have some lovely oceanfront property for sale in Alberta for one hell of a deal that you might be interested in.

They actually do protect you well enough. Breaking through tor or VPN usualy requires some hardcore traffic analysis and data requests for other agencies all over the world, if it is even possible at all. NSA cannot just read everything you transmit through them like its an open book. More importantly, they also protect you from even being flagged in the first place, since all the NSA would get is encrypted data coming from anonymised source with no distinguishing attributes, and there is plenty of that all over the net. If you already are a high profile target then anything is possible, including real world interventions and the abovementioned, but otherwise they are enough to protect from spying for 99% of people.

[swashmebuckle]

I would love if someone could come up with an actual plausible scenario of an ordinary person being affected in any way by international espionage programs collecting their data and usage information.

I don't know what you mean by ordinary people but I'll assume it excludes all the ordinary people who are considered potential threats by the US government. Beyond them, the current way of doing business has certainly fostered an environment of distrust and paranoia given some of the reactions I've seen, and I can't say I'd be surprised if it contributed to a rise in our (the USA's) own domestic right wing terrorists activity, in which case certainly ordinary people would be affected because they or their loved ones would be dead. I can think up other scenarios of varying levels of plausibility later but my dog is being cute right now.

I agree that trying to evade government surveillance in one's day-to-day life is silly.

[headdie]

I would love if someone could come up with an actual plausible scenario of an ordinary person being affected in any way by international espionage programs collecting their data and usage information.

I don't know what you mean by ordinary people but I'll assume it excludes all the ordinary people who are considered potential threats by the US government. Beyond them, the current way of doing business has certainly fostered an environment of distrust and paranoia given some of the reactions I've seen, and I can't say I'd be surprised if it contributed to a rise in our (the USA's) own domestic right wing terrorists activity, in which case certainly ordinary people would be affected because they or their loved ones would be dead. I can think up other scenarios of varying levels of plausibility later but my dog is being cute right now.

I agree that trying to evade government surveillance in one's day-to-day life is silly.

even then you are still engaged in the kind of activity that the government needs to know about, thus the computers red flag you and you are then monitored actively by a person.

up to the point where you have done something to make you a person of interest all you are is a statistic on a computer, the raw data from which is one of millions/billions of similar data sets on said computers.  the shear amount of data that is national electronic communications let alone international sources means that you have to filter it through a computer just to find the stuff you are looking for, the rest is automatically cataloged and stored in case you become interesting at some point in the future.  Seriously unless you are a terrorist, freedom fighter, intelligence officer, traitor or international criminal, you are just not worth the attention of a human.

[Flak]

I think for the social media spying stuff, Edward Snowden already mentioned that part. I am not sure that made you worried or not. Obviously they didn't have the time to read everyone's facebook wall. Rather, it worked in reverse. They just plugged your wall to their monitoring equipments and generally don't bother to read it unless they are too bored. Only when certain topics or words comes up, then the machine gives them a ping, only then, they may start looking at your page.

[MP-Ryan]

I don't know what you mean by ordinary people but I'll assume it excludes all the ordinary people who are considered potential threats by the US government. Beyond them, the current way of doing business has certainly fostered an environment of distrust and paranoia given some of the reactions I've seen, and I can't say I'd be surprised if it contributed to a rise in our (the USA's) own domestic right wing terrorists activity, in which case certainly ordinary people would be affected because they or their loved ones would be dead. I can think up other scenarios of varying levels of plausibility later but my dog is being cute right now.

I agree that trying to evade government surveillance in one's day-to-day life is silly.

Ordinary people like whom?  I have yet to see a single example of a case where the collected data has been used improperly to affect people who were otherwise innocent of any wrongdoing.  And that is the point - with the exception of a very few types of activities and individuals, the simple truth is that no one in signals-intercept cares about what 99.999% of the population has posted on their Facebook wall, emailed to their friends, or chatted about online generally.  They don't even care what your banking information is, though no doubt a lot of that also gets captured in the intercepts.

[/quote]

If you think using Tor/VPN/browser plugins, etc etc are going to protect you, I have some lovely oceanfront property for sale in Alberta for one hell of a deal that you might be interested in.

They actually do protect you well enough. Breaking through tor or VPN usualy requires some hardcore traffic analysis and data requests for other agencies all over the world, if it is even possible at all. NSA cannot just read everything you transmit through them like its an open book. More importantly, they also protect you from even being flagged in the first place, since all the NSA would get is encrypted data coming from anonymised source with no distinguishing attributes, and there is plenty of that all over the net. If you already are a high profile target then anything is possible, including real world interventions and the abovementioned, but otherwise they are enough to protect from spying for 99% of people.

If the data coming from the anonymised source is high profile enough to warrant the attention of signals-intercept, then it will be read (also, neither Tor nor VPN encrypt outbound information, it's just encrypted between points on the network).  Multiple signals-intercept agencies have demonstrated surprising past capability for breaking encryption methods thought to be near-unbreakable.

If it's not then it won't.

No different than if you didn't bother using Tor or VPN in the first place!

In other words, though it is exceptionally cliche and goes against rights-based discussion, for all practical purposes the only people who should care about spying are the people who are targeted by it because they are up to no good and they know it.  The rest of us are collateral damage.

TL;DR - None of this is worth getting worked up about.

[Luis Dias]

"If you don't have nothing to hide, you should not fear anything. Now open up your dear privacy to us and let us work flawlessly for your own good. It won't hurt. Much"

[MP-Ryan]

"If you don't have nothing to hide, you should not fear anything. Now open up your dear privacy to us and let us work flawlessly for your own good. It won't hurt. Much"

You'd be wise to note that I have only commented about the practical reality of the situation, not its ethics or legitimacy.

[Luis Dias]

The ethics and legitimacy of it are so obvious to us because we do have fictional and non-fictional precedents for it and we *do* know that the practicalities of these situations often degenerate towards sistemic abuse against individuals, even if such abuse wasn't intended or planned.

The very fact that we do *know* of these watchmen who are increasingly more artificial than human is already making a toll on netizenship and the internet in general. It's making the world a worse place just because it exists.

And I'm really pessimistic over this issue. I think it will only get worse and worse and every single nation will have the ability to this kind of stuff to their populace in ways we don't yet imagine even possible today.

[MP-Ryan]

...which is why I've never said it is ethical, legitimate, or even necessary.

What I have said is that it's net effect on the average person is so negligible that it does not need any technological response from the average user, and that any response you can take is worthless in all practical respects.

[666maslo666]

If the data coming from the anonymised source is high profile enough to warrant the attention of signals-intercept, then it will be read (also, neither Tor nor VPN encrypt outbound information, it's just encrypted between points on the network).  Multiple signals-intercept agencies have demonstrated surprising past capability for breaking encryption methods thought to be near-unbreakable.

If it's not then it won't.

No different than if you didn't bother using Tor or VPN in the first place!

Outbound anonymised information is normally not encrypted and can be read, but that merely means that you should not transmit something that reveals your identity (your original ip adress, logging in to FB or any other accounts linked to you etc). Otherwise you should be safe. Every good encryption is unbreakable unless you somehow obtain the password, does not matter what computing power you throw at it.

It is quite different. Without tor or VPN, NSA can theoretically and often practically read your data like an open book. With tor or VPN, they cannot do this unless they get lucky, you do something dumb and reveal your identity or they throw large resources at the problem with results still not guaranteed (and I mean resources only big terrorists, other nations and such are worth, not your average cyber criminal). So for all practical purposes, it is an effective solution to prevent NSA spying for 99% of people wishing to do so.

[swashmebuckle]

I don't know what you mean by ordinary people but I'll assume it excludes all the ordinary people who are considered potential threats by the US government. Beyond them, the current way of doing business has certainly fostered an environment of distrust and paranoia given some of the reactions I've seen, and I can't say I'd be surprised if it contributed to a rise in our (the USA's) own domestic right wing terrorists activity, in which case certainly ordinary people would be affected because they or their loved ones would be dead. I can think up other scenarios of varying levels of plausibility later but my dog is being cute right now.

I agree that trying to evade government surveillance in one's day-to-day life is silly.

Ordinary people like whom?  I have yet to see a single example of a case where the collected data has been used improperly to affect people who were otherwise innocent of any wrongdoing.  And that is the point - with the exception of a very few types of activities and individuals, the simple truth is that no one in signals-intercept cares about what 99.999% of the population has posted on their Facebook wall, emailed to their friends, or chatted about online generally.  They don't even care what your banking information is, though no doubt a lot of that also gets captured in the intercepts.

I was thinking of ordinary people like people who might be related to a terror suspect or have gone to the same mosque or lived in the same town or whatever. Any number of totally innocent people who haven't done anything to warrant the NSA reading their mail.

In regards to your first point, none of us would have seen a case where the data was "used improperly" because our governments all lied about the existence of these programs prior to the leak. That doesn't mean it necessarily was misused, but they certainly didn't have any reason to let us know about it if it was.

It's entirely plausible that information gathered in this way was used to detain innocent people or put them on no-fly lists. It's also possible that it was used in the cases where the feds have duped young muslim men into carrying out elaborately staged fake bombings. Hell, it might also get used to help authorize missile strikes in which we outright murder whoever happens to be in the same place at the same time as the person we suspect of being a criminal. No way of knowing because they lied about the whole thing for years.

Sure, gathering the data doesn't harm anyone directly (we're just looking after all), but it enables and tempts governments to do things that can do great harm. I'm also concerned about the secondary danger that comes when the veil is lifted and people realize that they are being treated like the enemy. So while I don't feel like big brother is out to get us, I do think that his actions are making us less safe. In conclusion, I think it's fair to get worked up about this. So I will:

WAKKAWOOOOGAMBINDINGOLOOPERUUUUUUUNEY!!!!!!1

[Grizzly]

MP-Ryan, don't you work at US Air Force Intelligence?
Or there was some other member who does, can't recall.

[Phantom Hoover]

Well considering he's Canadian.......

[Mongoose]

Sleeper agent.