That's amazing. Imagine being able to construct a regular expression that get's applied on every single piece of communication in the world. Yes, it's far too much power to entrust to anyone, much less an unaccountable secretive organization, but I'll be damned if that's not an incredibly fascinating and attractive proposition. No wonder these bureaucrats are willing to so thoroughly overstep the law, that kind of power must be very tempting.
"Too many secrets" indeed.
- Richard Clark, former Counter-Terrorism Czar
While evidence is insufficient to draw conclusions in that specific case, the fact that it is so plausible should be extremely worrying. (Hi, NSA spiders.)
Many of the groups targeted are involved with actively investigating human rights abuses conducted by many countries in the world - including the USA in Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, drone strikes, secret prisons, etc. I fail to see exactly what the US National Security interest is in investigating these groups (Caveat: not all NGOs worldwide should be outside scrutiny, ie ones which funnel arms to Al Qaeda obviously but these ones certainly don't do that). The security community (as has happened in many countries over the years - the UK in Northern Ireland for example) has confused "National Security" with "embarrassment." I say "security community" as there are many fantastic people within US government and private institutions that are capable of looking at the long-term interest and are doing a good job of supporting human rights and freedom on the internet. For example, it is a credit that so much great work like The Guardian Project and Whisper Systems is underway to address such problems.
Human rights groups and journalists have been consistently the victim of high-level APT from China, Russia and elsewhere - there are many cases documented online. Many of these have been targeted through the exact same methods that large corporations like banks, defence companies, nuclear energy businesses. It's somehow morally wrong that organisations like GCHQ and the NSA actively thwart attacks (and share information) on such companies, while ignoring and obviously exploiting threats against human rights groups (which often end in the deaths of human rights defenders, aid workers and journalists).
The long-term national interest of the USA and other countries is the spread of our good values - freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, self determination, respect for international law etc. The "war on terror" has caused too many to lose sight of these soft-power instruments and that is a pity. Which does more long-term good for our way of life, values and foreign policy these days, Lockheed Martin or Amnesty International?
That's not really an interest, short or long term. What are the various lobbies to gain from this? What is indeed an interest, and has been for over a century, is being the top dog, and taking advantage of that (using propaganda, lackeys and military power when needed) to get cheap resources, favorable trade deals and allies that ensure this goes on forever.
Playing on a level playing field has never been of interest.
We have heard a lot about how people don't want their cloud computing in the US any more, however, as of yet, there has not been a lot about how those that now know they are effectively being targeted have changed procedures.
Anyone in a 'save the world' group care to comment?
Even furthermore, the various intelligence agencies also weaken systems for their own convenience, and yet there is nothing stopping anyone else from exploiting such weaknesses. Isn't this simply recklessness and negligence?
We keep hearing about hackers getting customer data over and over again, is that because of what our government has done?
It's not just spying.
I guess we also have to ask ourselves if this was deliberate on their part, or did they just miss the emergence of the credit-card-as-electronic-money?
These days everyone drinks at the NSA bar. where everything is on tap, all the time.
I am in two Dutch groups that are saving the world, both of them were not hosted there but definitively won't now. Also a company I work for was collecting client customer data, they moved storage from US to Netherlands.
There is likely no agenda related to those groups in particular. They are spying on everyone.
The agenda one would guess is: get them to stop, intimidate people who follow a hot lead, know anything that's about to be reported in advance, etc.
It even happens for ecology groups. Here's a case from Britain -- see how far these things can go:
http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/jan/20/undercover-police-...
Certain groups that the US deems contrary to their national interests may come to an aid agency for help.
I think this goes against the grain for a lot of HN.
Despite common perception, almost all libertarians are "minarchists" not anarchists. They want to minimize government, not have no government.
An agency such as the NSA could actually fit into that model of governance if it had a defensive focus instead of an offensive one (ie. protecting citizens interests first instead of the state).
