[HN Gopher] Mark Klein, AT&T whistleblower who revealed NSA mass...
___________________________________________________________________
Mark Klein, AT&T whistleblower who revealed NSA mass spying, has
died
Author : leotravis10
Score : 1492 points
Date : 2025-03-12 21:05 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.eff.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.eff.org)
| aio2 wrote:
| Damn.
|
| I don't know if this started the whole movement or whatever you'd
| call it for this push towards privacy and the general public
| knowing about it, but it helped a lot. Before him releasing info
| about room 641A and whatever else, there really wasn't definitive
| evidence of any government spying and tampering, and either with
| the intention of starting this movement or simply letting people
| know, he was a big push in the right direction.
|
| tldr: he's a w
| genewitch wrote:
| not only was there not "definitive evidence"; if you said that
| the companies did that sort of thing you were called a
| conspiracy theorist whackaloon. oddly 85% of the general public
| suddenly was like "well of course they spy on email" after all
| this came out.
| philipkglass wrote:
| I'm sure it depended on the audience, but I and others [0]
| guessed at broad electronic surveillance well before the 641A
| revelations. I was never called a conspiracy theorist for it
| either. In the 1990s if you had read Bamford's _The Puzzle
| Palace_ [1] (published in 1982) and observed the government
| 's legal fight against Zimmermann's PGP encryption software
| [2], you could make an educated guess close to the truth. If
| you phrased it as "I'm _sure_ that the government is spying
| on everything, " that went beyond the realm of what could be
| proved then, but airing _suspicions_ about broad government
| snooping never elicited strong denials in my experience.
|
| [0] Like the people on the Cypherpunks mailing list
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Puzzle_Palace
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Zimmermann#Arms_Export
| _Co...
| genewitch wrote:
| > [1] (published in 1982) and observed the government's
| legal fight against Zimmermann's PGP encryption software
| [2], you could make an educated guess close to the truth.
|
| what percentage of the US population do you reckon could
| "make an educated guess" about the technological
| capabilities of the US government in 2002?
|
| please remember this is a technology discussion forum, not
| a general public forum.
|
| > Zimmermann's PGP encryption software
|
| "PG what? Encryption? like the cryptkeeper? I like hans
| zimmer music"
| zmgsabst wrote:
| People suspected there was funny business going on since
| the Patriot Act was passed in 2001. By 2003 gangs were
| aware government spied on phones at scale. NSA regularly
| came up in my high school tech class in 2004, in
| connection with War on Terror. By 2005, the program was
| confirmed.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_warrantless_surveillanc
| e_(...
|
| Lots of people knew that mass surveillance was likely
| with the advent of the internet, prior to 641A in 2006.
| somenameforme wrote:
| Lots of people know lots of things. The problem is those
| things aren't always true. And until there is a defacto
| public acknowledgement of something many people defer to
| the 'official position.'
|
| Here's a present time one for you - all US based cloud
| providers, including Apple, are providing full (and
| probably indirect) real time access to everything stored
| on those servers to various organizations including, but
| not limited to, the NSA. Lawsuits around this issue are
| motivated solely by an effort to do away with parallel
| construction [1] and enable the evidence obtained through
| such means to be able to be directly used.
|
| Lots of people know this, lots of people also think this
| is crazy talk. And prior to Snowden, and to a lesser
| degree Klein, the _overwhelming_ majority fell into the
| latter camp regarding anything even remotely close to the
| scope and scale of what the NSA was doing.
|
| [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction
| genewitch wrote:
| "My dad owned a 1965 softtop stingray, it was awesome!"
| floweronthehill wrote:
| Here's another official position relevant to current
| events but that is beginning to change.
|
| "Electronic voting machines are 100% safe and as safe as
| paper ballots if not more".
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| The really odd thing is that 85% of the general public will
| say "well of course they spy on email" even today, after
| Snowden's leaks showed that the Obama administration had shut
| that down.
| rl3 wrote:
| Setting aside the fact that the leaks you're referring to
| are over a decade old at this point, they also established
| that GCHQ buffered the entirety of the UK's internet
| traffic for 72 hours, bit for bit.
|
| If you think there's no collection on e-mail, rather than
| just legal shell games being played with terminology and
| various compartments, then I've got a bridge to sell you.
|
| In fact, the bridge is made of metadata and nothing else.
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| SMTP connections are wrapped in TLS these days, so even
| if you were to collect email transfers bit for bit, you
| wouldn't be able to read them, not even metadata.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| IIRC there's been speculation that the NSA can/has brute
| forced TLS keys up through 4096 bit size. I read a paper
| once that crunched the numbers on energy cost and compute
| time and whatnot it comes out looking like a reasonable
| investment for them.
|
| Obviously they'd have to keep such an exercise on the DL
| if they did do it because increasing key size is pretty
| trivial.
| kbolino wrote:
| A 4096-bit RSA key is still well beyond the means of even
| a very capable state actor. The standard nowadays is
| 2048-bit RSA keys, cracking of which is also (probably)
| still beyond anyone's capabilities. Maybe a multi-year
| effort directed at a specific target might manage to
| crack a single key, but I wouldn't bet on it. RSA
| cracking efforts would almost certainly focus on smaller
| keys that are still being used despite the warnings.
|
| However, even if they did crack a major infrastructure
| provider's RSA key, TLS nowadays uses ephemeral key
| exchange which provides forward secrecy. So it doesn't
| matter if an intelligence agency collected every packet,
| they could not decipher the contents after the fact. They
| would have to actively interdict _every_ TLS handshake
| and perform a man-in-the-middle attack against both
| parties _all the time_.
|
| It is extremely doubtful that this is happening _en
| masse_. Such a process would require an immense amount of
| online computing power directly in the path of all
| Internet traffic. Much of the compute available to
| intelligence agencies (and accounted for in back-of-the-
| envelope calculations by outside parties) is effectively
| offline due to airgaps. It 's not like they want people
| doing to them what they're doing to others, after all.
|
| It's much easier to send an NSL to Google to read your
| email than to try to intercept it over the wire. The
| latter capability would be reserved for high-value
| targets unreachable by the US legal system, not mass
| surveillance.
| somenameforme wrote:
| What? No it didn't, not at all. The leaks clearly showed
| email as being one of the many things being directly
| surveilled. Here is one of the many slides directly
| acknowledging as much. [1]
|
| If you mean the rhetoric around it, then yeah - politicians
| lie, especially when engaging in what would be seen as
| deeply unpopular behavior. This isn't a shock. I assure you
| the admin that passed indefinite detention without charge
| or trial [2] wasn't some crusader for civil rights. Obama
| was just ridiculously charismatic and could sell a drowning
| man water, but he was no different than the rest in
| behavior.
|
| [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM#/media/File:PRISM
| _Collec...
|
| [2] - https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/president-obama-
| signs-in...
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| We were talking about mass surveillance. PRISM isn't
| that. They used to collect mass email metadata, using
| facilities like Room 641A. Snowden's leaks showed that
| they had already stopped. These days, it wouldn't even be
| technically possible, let alone legally possible, because
| pretty much all SMTP traffic is over TLS. Gmail won't
| even accept unencrypted SMTP connections.
| somenameforme wrote:
| What!?!? Yes PRISM is a mass surveillance program. And
| it's not metadata, it's piping entire content straight
| from the target to the NSA, in real time. This involves
| direct filtered data (such as Skype messages/videos)
| indirectly handed over by participating companies (which
| is probably _all_ major tech companies in the US at this
| point), as well as raw upstream (essentially line
| tapping) data such as provided via STORMBREW. [1]
|
| [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STORMBREW
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| > Yes PRISM is a mass surveillance program
|
| You're more than 11 years behind the news. Less than a
| week after Greenwald published his initial ridiculous
| description of PRISM, it was corrected by the people who
| actually built the systems at the tech companies. He
| stupidly thought that the DITU was a machine at the
| companies that could get any data, when anybody with half
| a clue could have told him that it's obviously https://en
| .wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Intercept_Technology_Unit. The
| Wikipedia PRISM article's description is very clear and
| well-cited, and it includes Snowden's slides there to
| cross reference the description with.
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM#The_program
|
| The FBI tells the companies to forward the communications
| of specific targets to the FBI. PRISM is a data
| integration system that ingests that data from the FBI
| into NSA systems.
| somenameforme wrote:
| This is overt misinformation. PRISM works directly with
| the companies (well, "indirectly" to offer plausible
| deniability). The section you're linking to entirely
| quotes some random government organization which is
| obviously an unreliable source on such topics. As is the
| writing, as opposed to sources, on Wiki.
|
| This [1] is one of the more telling leaks. It's a
| technical users guide for NSA employees on using realtime
| Skype surveillance for all modes including video and
| landline on arbitrary targets. [1] It even includes
| debugging guides like why an agent might be getting
| multiple copies of the same message, as happens when
| somebody being spied on boots up a new device and all of
| their messages are sent from Microsoft to them (and the
| NSA) simultaneously, resulting a copy of older messages
| (from the snooper's perspective).
|
| [1] - https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/field_docu
| ment/Guid...
| ChrisKnott wrote:
| In what way do you think your document contradicts GP?
| autoexec wrote:
| > These days, it wouldn't even be technically possible,
| let alone legally possible, because pretty much all SMTP
| traffic is over TLS.
|
| These days the government wouldn't need to decrypt email
| traffic going over the backbone. They'd march into the
| companies and ISPs who run the mail servers and
| monitor/collect everything from there directly, the same
| way they marched into AT&T and set up camp. The vast
| majority of the American's email can be obtained by
| controlling the servers of a very small number of
| corporations. We have Lavabit to thank for demonstrating
| that when the government comes knocking your only options
| are to comply or shut down
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavabit)
|
| There's no reason to think that there isn't a Room 641A
| at Google, Apple, MS, etc.
| autoexec wrote:
| I actually believed Obama when he spoke about ending the
| NSA's mass surveillance on the American people. He taught
| constitutional law. He knew exactly how wrong it was. I
| suspect that once he got into office he was either strong
| armed into changing his tune (and into ultimately giving
| the NSA more spying powers on the public) or he was shown
| enough secret evidence that it scared him into thinking
| it was necessary to violate the freedom of all Americans
| in order to keep us safe from terrorists. I'm not sure
| which scenario should worry me more, but at this point I
| don't think anyone in government has the ability to
| really stop the NSA.
| somenameforme wrote:
| The sayings about power corrupting date back to time
| immemorial. It's easy to say something is wrong (or
| right) when you are in no position to meaningfully
| impact, or be impacted, by what you're speaking of. It's
| another altogether different thing when you are in a
| situation to define the limits of your own powers, or
| that which even _might_ affect you.
|
| This, in many ways, is what made the Founding Fathers so
| unique. They were in a position to grant themselves
| effectively any and all powers they might ever desire.
| Yet instead, they sacrificed all of that in pursuit of a
| more free and just society, in many cases to their own
| detriment. In modern times I do not think there's any
| real comparable examples. Instead it's just endless power
| accumulation, tempered only by the oft liminal protest of
| the citizenry.
| mandmandam wrote:
| > In modern times I do not think there's any real
| comparable examples
|
| There are real comparable examples, from South America
| and Africa, and America herself. You won't hear about
| them much, partly because they break important narratives
| and partly because often the US went to extraordinary
| lengths to smear, coup and/or murder those people.
|
| Examples:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvador_Allende
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrice_Lumumba
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hampton
| simoncion wrote:
| > I actually believed Obama when he spoke about ending
| the NSA's mass surveillance on the American people. He
| taught constitutional law. He knew exactly how wrong it
| was. I suspect that once he got into office he was either
| strong armed into changing his tune (and into ultimately
| giving the NSA more spying powers on the public) or he
| was shown enough secret evidence that it scared him into
| thinking it was necessary to violate the freedom of all
| Americans in order to keep us safe from terrorists.
|
| Man... When a bombastic politician promises something but
| doesn't deliver, the common response is "Oh, well, of
| course he just made an empty promise. What can you
| expect?". When a more genial politician that affects a
| more-typical reserved public face promises something but
| doesn't deliver, they get the benefit of the doubt.
| "Surely that wasn't an empty promise just to get more
| power! Surely _something happened_ that convinced them
| against their better judgement not to do it. ".
|
| Respectfully, these are a class of people who have no
| problems saying trivially-verifiable lies to the public
| at large (as time has proven that there are no lasting
| consequences for lying to the public), and little problem
| with lying to members of Congress or even the courts
| (again, because here "lately" there are no real
| consequences for the act).
|
| Don't believe what they say, believe what they _do_...
| because you 're not privy to the conversations that they
| have that actually matter, so you have no idea what they
| actually intend.
| serial_dev wrote:
| It's really odd, indeed, that people think some reorg and a
| smooth politician didn't in fact change the very nature of
| the surveillance companies.
| nvarsj wrote:
| It's pretty depressing how society went from "that would
| never happen" to general apathy.
| rcxdude wrote:
| That's not the general sentiment I recall. There was a
| general sense of 'the government's probably watching' (along
| with who knows who else: early internet protocols like email
| really aren't resistant to snooping by more or less anyone),
| just no public info on specifically how (and you might get
| some disapproving looks if you claimed any specific approach
| without evidence).
| potato3732842 wrote:
| That's a really charitable way of framing the fact that a 15%
| minority screeching about "the government would never" and
| "but there's no proof" was able to control the narrative
| despite people generally having doubt or believing otherwise
| privately right up until the point that the proof was public
| record and so ironclad that even mainstream media had to
| report on it.
|
| (I assume the 85% number is made up, but for whatever the
| number is the point stands)
| DoingIsLearning wrote:
| > started the whole movement or whatever you'd call it for this
| push towards privacy
|
| I don't really like this framing because it makes it sound like
| if you care for privacy you are some form of fringe advocate.
|
| We should always try to reframe:
|
| Would you be ok with government employees or law enforcement
| indiscriminately opening your letters? Ask any senior and the
| answer is a clear no.
|
| So why are we discussing this as if privacy is entirely
| optional as soon as you change medium from written letters to
| emails, sms, instant message?
| cj wrote:
| I wonder what percent of Americans would trade their privacy
| to bring their monthly cell phone bill from $100/mo to $0/mo
| in exchange for sharing texts and emails with a telecom
| company.
|
| I suspect the percentage would be surprisingly high.
|
| Unfortunately normal people don't really care that much about
| privacy (even if we all think everyone should).
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| you mean, exactly like most the public on this site did
| when moving from Gmail and abandoning their isp provided
| email?
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Why would ISP provided email be any more private than
| Gmail? If anything, I expect ISP provided email to be
| more compromised.
| mulmen wrote:
| Because it's a lot easier to compromise one email
| provider instead of a million. I'm surprised I have to
| explain the benefits of federated over centralized
| systems here.
| pjc50 wrote:
| You can make this work in the other direction:
|
| "Would you be ok with government employees or law enforcement
| indiscriminately opening the letters of illegal immigrants?"
|
| You'd immediately get the answer yes. Of course, in order to
| find the illegal immigrant letters they have to open _all_ of
| the letters.
|
| People will give law enforcement huge amounts of power
| because they think it will be used against groups they don't
| like.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| It's also interesting to float the thought experiment of what
| Gen Z would say about this question because the online norms
| are so different.
|
| "Hey, sometimes people try to send bombs through the mail.
| Would you be okay with the government opening 1% of packages,
| inspecting them, and re-sealing them to make sure they're
| safe?
|
| ... what if they threw in a coupon so the next package mailed
| is free?"
|
| (... and suddenly I've discovered of my own psyche that if
| those "The TSA inspected this bag" slips included a coupon
| for a free coffee, the visceral response to their presence
| would do a 180. "Oh, sweet! Free coffee!").
| mulmen wrote:
| The Fourth Amendment seems like a more appropriate starting
| point. Most people call the "privacy movement" "the American
| revolution".
| DannyBee wrote:
| RIP - truly someone who tried to make the world better.
| madrox wrote:
| Had the privilege of watching him receive an award from EFF years
| ago at ETech. Gave a brief speech. Struck me as a gentle man who
| really did what he thought was right and for no other purpose. It
| took moral strength to do what he did. I hope he rests easy.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2007/02/t-whistleblower-wins-a...
| kstrauser wrote:
| Nooooooo! He was my next door neighbor a few years ago, and I
| knew him as a person before I realized that I knew him as a hero.
|
| His dogs were fiercely protective of his house, which is
| perfectly understandable. One day I saw a "sewer cleaning" van
| behind his house, and I have a hard time believing that's what it
| really was: https://honeypot.net/2025/03/12/rip-mark-klein.html
| itisit wrote:
| The money shot! I did not realize sewer cleaning required so
| much onsite IT. Are those rack units running computational
| fluid dynamics models to figure out how to unclog elaborate
| networks of pipes?
| spaceribs wrote:
| I'd like to believe it was an inspection van:
| https://nationalplant.com/services/digital-tv-inspection/
|
| I'd like to believe that, but I don't.
| kstrauser wrote:
| That very well could be what it was. If it had been
| anything other than:
|
| 1. Spotless.
|
| 2. Parked right behind Klein's (and by extension, my)
| house.
|
| 3. Skittish, such that they closed the door right after I
| took the picture and drove off less than a minute later
| without pulling any gear up out of a manhole or something.
|
| then that's probably what I'd chalk it up to. I am
| absolutely not 100% convinced it was, say, an undercover
| NSA van.
|
| And yet, that's exactly what I thought it was from the
| moment I saw the gear racks and monitors inside.
| Boogie_Man wrote:
| Somebody give the number on the van a call and post
| results
| lukan wrote:
| If it would be a spy van, it would be a real number
| (likely for the real company). Otherwise way too easy to
| spot.
| rkagerer wrote:
| I called and asked them if they were NSA. Very nice lady
| explained "No, trust me, we're definitely just NPS"
| (j/k).
|
| https://www.linkedin.com/posts/national-plant-services-
| inc_e...
| bunabhucan wrote:
| We have a manhole outside our house and it was inspected
| like this. I work with GIS for electric and gas
| companies. I used to keep small ear protectors in the
| Burley so me and the kids could go up and ask "diggermen"
| about holes in the road.
|
| Xcel used directional drilling for a plastic gas main
| down our street and then did sewer intrusion inspections
| after. A neighbor had their sewer line pierced. It's a
| hazard because it isn't detectible until the sewer line
| blocks and then the blade thingy the plumber uses can
| sever the plastic gas service lateral in the sewer line.
|
| There is a gas overflow valve (like a ball bearing that
| too much flow can push in to block the pipe) back at the
| service tee fitting on the main. If that doesn't work
| then you could have a gas explosion in the sewer or
| house. It happens and it is bad. Clients give
| presentations on these projects at conferences (e.g. use
| GIS to combine the sewer and gas topology to identify
| where the crossings are.)
|
| That truck isn't for inspecting _your_ sewer, it 's for
| inspecting every junction on that sewer line, 8 hours per
| day, every day. They will have a map and linear reference
| showing where every other underground utility
| (fiber/gas/electricity) intersects it and be recording
| and cross referencing it in case it needs to be produced
| in court at a later date.
|
| People are conflating do-you-need-a-$30k-sewer-line
| "plumber inspection" with this service. This kind of
| inspection is more like the "assuming tort liability"
| role that the companies like sitewise serve. Even with
| the robot done and packed, the operator in the truck was
| working for a bit, making copies of the videos and
| tagging them and stuff. If your gas main piercing a sewer
| causes explosions the settlements can be in the tens of
| millions.
|
| BigUtility uses trenchless directional drilling to poke a
| drill horizontally down the street and then laterally to
| each house saving millions of dollars in open trench
| costs. The gotcha is that they can't see where they are
| digging and thus can burn, electrocute, explode or kill
| taxpayers. The inspections help with sewer maintenance /
| cleaning but the big money/concern is on the liability
| for cross bored gas lines.
|
| The robot (the one I saw outside my house) was over $10k
| and kitting out the whole truck with a crane and the
| monitors and reels was $90k. They hosed the robot down
| completely with high pressure water from the truck once
| it came back out and checked it over for damage. That and
| the fact that the van guys typically don't go in the
| sewer is why the van is clean. It's an "expensive
| equipment" van, not a plumbers van. For comparison the
| fiber optic inspection a plumber might use is more like
| $2k and you can rent them.
|
| Depending on the job they can inflate a balloon at the
| next manhole upstream or even pump/route the sewer
| through a temp pipe on the street surface (looks like a
| big fire hose) from the previous manhole to the one after
| where the van is. That needs 3 crews plus flaggers for
| traffic. They use a radio to coordinate with the other
| crews.
|
| With the line blocked for inspection the robot typically
| just has a film of that nasty sewer grease on it.
|
| They told me the door stays open even in winter because
| the crane operator / tether wrangler guy is right by an
| open sewer which is a fall and methane hazard.
|
| The job isn't quick - there might be 300 feet / 100m of
| line to the robot near the next manhole. Unless they were
| just looking at one service main, if they were able to
| leave they must have been winding up already.
|
| The more important question is: is there a sewer manhole
| where they parked?
|
| If we can surveil people with drones from miles away,
| what technology are the FBI using that requires guys
| physically in a van outside a house? If you were going to
| park outside, why would you use a method that usually
| blocks the street?
|
| I dug up a pic. If you look carefully you can see two
| tethers, one for the 4 wheel metal sled that moves it and
| a thicker one for the camera and lights on the "head"
| part. The crew used the controls to move the head around
| until it was looking at my kids and they could see
| themselves on the second screen (one screen faced out the
| door.) The kids thought it was cool:
| https://i.imgur.com/2ltz8bj.png
|
| Story about a fatal explosion caused by horizontal
| directional drilling piercing a gas main:
|
| https://www.cnn.com/2013/03/13/us/missouri-gas-
| explosion/ind...
|
| I can't find any conference papers but the industry term
| to google is "crossbore" and this blog post has some
| pictures of gas service laterals piercing sewers:
|
| https://blog.envirosight.com/sewer-school-preventing-
| cross-b...
|
| ESRI page on using GIS to identify the potential
| crossbores and assign them 90 day inspection windows to
| try to detect it before the sewer backs up:
|
| https://community.esri.com/t5/gas-and-pipeline-
| blog/arcgis-f...
| therealcamino wrote:
| Here's the thing, there's never going to be convincing
| evidence for you to decide that it wasn't what your hunch
| said it was. That's the nature of suspicion.
|
| You could Google "national plant services van" on image
| search and find similar vans, and that the company is
| owned by is the Carylon Corporation, with revenue of
| $300m/year -- but that couldn't convince you that a
| government agency (it wouldn't be the NSA unless they're
| violating the law) didn't borrow it or copy it.
|
| You could read that their services include "Digital CCTV
| inspection. Laser profiling. Sonar pipeline inspection."
| but that couldn't convince you that the monitor+joystick
| and other equipment is needed for sewer inspection,
| because you already believe it is for surveillance. (The
| irony being that the kind of mass surveillance Mark Klein
| exposed, or Snowden exposed, means there's absolutely no
| need to park a truck outside someone's house. You can
| track who they're communicating with already, and you can
| subvert their own devices to listen in, instead of
| parking a van out front for their neighbors to notice.)
|
| You could look at who has the contract to inspect sewers
| in your town -- it's public record. But you could still
| choose to believe that the federal government did the
| same check, and went out and got an identical truck so as
| to be less suspicious (although in this thread half the
| people are saying "that's too clean/fancy/technological
| to be a sewer inspection van!" so if they did it would
| have backfired.)
|
| Was he under surveillance? Who knows. Does this truck
| prove anything either way? No. Everybody is going to
| leave this thread with whatever hunch they came in with.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| I am willing to believe it was innocuous. The guy already
| spilled the beans and has been blackballed from government
| access. Does he require clandestine surveillance any more?
| Easy enough to get "national security" reasons why all of
| his devices need to be tapped. More intimidating to have
| visible GMen watching him for life.
| somenameforme wrote:
| For some reason this reminded me of Ernest Hemingway. In
| the later parts of his life, he began to believe he was
| being followed and tracked by the FBI, and these
| delusions eventually gave way to various other issues. Or
| perhaps it could be the other way around, but there is a
| catch here.
|
| In either case this led to him being somewhat brutally
| treated with electroconvulsive therapy, repeatedly, to
| little effect beyond damaging his mind. A quote from on
| that was, "What is the sense of ruining my head and
| erasing my memory, which is my capital, and putting me
| out of business? It was a brilliant cure, but we lost the
| patient." He would kill himself not long thereafter.
|
| The interesting thing is that the FBI _was_ following and
| tracking him, and simply stayed silent as this all played
| out.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| Interestingly, it seems the 'real' sewer cleaning company
| uses a bunch of tech to do their inspections, etc.:
|
| https://specializedmaintenance.com/services/digital-tv-
| inspe...
|
| (Which would make it an excellent van for the 3-letter spooks
| to copy, so not really persuasive either way)
| cookiengineer wrote:
| I wanted to point out that when visiting those sites from
| Germany (nationalplant.com and the
| specializedmaintenance.com website) it shows the same
| unavailable geoblocked message. I wouldn't have recognized
| it but after opening both links in new tabs on my phone I
| thought I forgot to open one of the links in this thread
| and I double-checked it.
|
| Are those fake companies both hosted on wordfence or
| something? What are the odds, huh?
| johnisgood wrote:
| Upon clicking the link above, I get:
|
| Your access to this site has been limited by the site
| owner
|
| Your access to this service has been limited. (HTTP
| response code 503)
| adastra22 wrote:
| That's just a display monitor and a small computer.
| Grandpaarent's photo had two half racks of data center
| grade AV equipment.
| rkagerer wrote:
| Conversely, makes me think my IT truck with all its network
| cables and racks, needs a toilet.
| nabakin wrote:
| I don't think I've ever seen the inside of an actual undercover
| van before. Crazy picture. Do we know anything else about them?
| lukan wrote:
| I would not jump to conclusions so soon.
|
| A) I would question why they would do the effort of still
| doing surveillance on him
|
| B) if they do, they are usually so smart to keep the door
| closed
|
| C) like others have mentioned, sewer cleaning comes with a
| lot of tech (I assume remote controlled machines)
| adastra22 wrote:
| One thing for certain: that is absolutely NOT a sewer
| inspection van. Seriously, you ever worked trades? It is
| way too clean on the interior and not fitted for working
| dirty jobs, to say nothing of the visible surveillance
| workstation.
| Velofellow wrote:
| yes, and that looks pretty much just like some of the
| vans I've been in the back of for CCTV sewer inspections.
| throwaway201606 wrote:
| I would think that anyone working in a sewer inspection van
| would keep the door open because it is highly likely that
| sewer inspection vans smell like, well, sewer.
| geraldwhen wrote:
| If the van is loaded with equipment, or even if it isn't,
| theft and robbery are common in most of the US. You can't
| leave a van door open and not be extremely vigilant.
| serial_dev wrote:
| While I can honestly believe both (it was a surveillance
| van vs it was a sewer maintenance company), do you think
| that the intimidation and surveillance of Snowden or
| Assange won't last until the end of their lives?
| londons_explore wrote:
| I feel like a real undercover van would have a policy about
| not opening the side door during a mission too...
| tptacek wrote:
| That's almost definitely just a sewer inspection van; I found
| videos that company has of "multi-sensor pipeline inspections"
| with the same van, open, with the same equipment visible, and a
| bunch of people following a bunch of equipment down into a
| manhole.
| kstrauser wrote:
| It probably was! But given the batch of circumstances, I
| think it's at least plausible that it was more than that.
| tptacek wrote:
| I don't think it's very plausible. The subtext of the photo
| is "that looks comically unlike what you'd inspect from a
| sewer inspection van". Well, I can tell you pretty much for
| sure: thats' what the inside of a sewer inspection van from
| that company looks like.
|
| It took just a couple minutes (less than 5) to go look this
| up and find the video, for what it's worth.
|
| Maybe it's an NSA wet team! Wet, because they do sewer
| inspection work. :)
| bawolff wrote:
| If we are going down the conspiracy rabbit hole, i assume
| spies can purchase real sewer vans with the logo of real
| sewer companies on it.
|
| I agree though that it seems more plausible to just be a
| real sewer van.
| tptacek wrote:
| I think if they're buying a fake sewer inspection van
| they're probably smart enough to find one that doesn't
| look to people on the Internet like it's a prop out of
| the movie Enemy of the State.
| tharkun__ wrote:
| I hope the owner of the company doesn't read this. They
| probably like their designs! :)
|
| I just went to Google maps to the address written on the
| van's passenger door and lo and behold, Google did drive
| down the alley behind and while this is a larger vehicle
| and not just a van, that's their look (they also have
| black versions if you look around): https://www.google.co
| m/maps/@33.7851188,-118.211276,3a,67.3y...
| johnisgood wrote:
| Is no one cleaning the streets? Damn.
| Bluecobra wrote:
| As an aside, if you are purchasing an older home make sure
| you pay for a sewer line inspection. I had no idea this was a
| thing until a few years later when I had to replace mine and
| it cost ~$25,000.
| tptacek wrote:
| We had ours done when we moved in a couple years ago and it
| was a cool snakey camera thing; they only got us out to the
| service line; past that would have been a lot more
| elaborate. Also: that video feed? Pretty gross.
|
| As an aside: I think a lot of people here would be
| surprised at the amount of technology (and surveillance)
| that goes into setting speed limits and placing stop signs
| in residential areas.
| mhb wrote:
| A lot of people might also be surprised how frequently
| traffic engineers will OK unnecessary and less safe four
| way stops in order to get the annoying citizen pestering
| them to just leave them alone.
| WWLink wrote:
| The neighborhood that I have to drive through to get from
| where I live to where I work hates that their precious
| little neighborhood is used as a commuter route by a lot
| of people, so they stuck stop signs EVERY. SINGLE. BLOCK.
|
| I make sure to come to a complete fucking stop at every
| one of those signs. Partially because I hate the feeling
| of rolling through stop signs, but partially out of spite
| lol.
| edaemon wrote:
| I also have an older home and we had to repair our sewer
| line. It was clay pipe which had broken in a few spots and
| had major root intrusion. Thankfully there's some newer
| technology that makes it significantly cheaper in the right
| circumstances -- instead of digging up your street
| connection and laying in new pipe they can blow an epoxy-
| soaked liner into your existing pipe, then run a curing
| light through it. It ended up being less than 40% of the
| cost of replacement and works just as well.
| genewitch wrote:
| how far is that sewer line run, 6 miles? they usually just
| bore it out and put a PVC sleeve inside. This is done with
| the cast iron sewer lines, because if they're not properly
| taken care of, they will rust into nothing and then you
| just have a suggestion of a hole through the dirt to the
| sewer line.
|
| my lines are 4" PVC, if we somehow clog those, someone call
| me an ambulance.
| WWLink wrote:
| The old shitty clay lines are what you find in most
| rentals in SoCal. Then one day none of your toilets
| flushes and the landlord says you flush too many wipes
| down the toilet. You argue and they make you pay for a
| plumber who's like "yea they all do that DONT USE
| WIPES!!!!!One!!!" And then finally after getting to know
| every other plumber in town, one offers to run a camera
| for free and shows you that the main line is fucking
| falling apart and that's why it keeps plugging up.
|
| TBH sewer main inspections should be required any time
| someone wants to rent a house out.
| genewitch wrote:
| eh, clay, cast iron. I had to dig a few trenches of
| greasy earth in socal.
| silisili wrote:
| I'm always amazed by regional differences in pricing.
|
| I had a company(wrongly) tell me I needed a new septic tank
| and drainfield installed, and quoted me out at 7800.
|
| Which is way, way more work and parts than a sewer line.
| taosx wrote:
| This is crazy.. you guys are focused on vans and mini stories
| when all his sacrifice and that of thousand if not more
| americans was snuffed.
|
| `Congress intervened by passing the FISA Amendments Act which,
| in part, granted "retroactive immunity" to the
| telecommunications carriers for their involvement in the NSA
| spying programs. This massive grant of immunity for past
| violations of multiple state and federal laws protecting
| communications privacy was unprecedented.`
| kstrauser wrote:
| Be the change you want to see. I mentioned the vans and his
| dogs because Mark wasn't some random picture on the Internet,
| but the nice guy a couple houses down who talked about the
| volunteer work he did for harbor seals[0]. He was a real
| person we liked a lot and I thought others might enjoy
| hearing about his noisy, overprotective golden retrievers.
|
| But yes, he was also a personal hero to me before I met him
| in real life, and we should absolutely still be talking about
| the things he uncovered and what happened to them afterward.
| Please do tell those stories, too.
|
| [0]https://goldengatebirdalliance.org/blog-posts/wild-ly-
| succes...
| jll29 wrote:
| Where are today's technicians that are prostituting
| themselves for the communications companies around the
| world that this can still be happening?
|
| Man up and remove those splitters, cables, show us the
| drawings, reports and PPT slides!
|
| R.I.P. Mark
| lukan wrote:
| I guess not too many want to have to hide in russia.
| firen777 wrote:
| Judging from the way things are going, what's the
| difference?
| ziddoap wrote:
| Mark Klein was not some mythical hero, but a _real person_
| who did heroic things. It 's nice to be reminded of that. If
| anything, I find it inspiring.
| HexPhantom wrote:
| That kind of courage is rare, and it makes his story even
| more powerful. Real people can make a difference
| leotravis10 wrote:
| Indeed, something that we sadly lack today. We need people
| like Mark more than ever, not less.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| You have to remember that half, possibly more than half, of
| the country is more than okay with what the NSA was doing and
| is doing.
|
| It's not at all surprising that Congress would indemnify
| people for, more or less, doing what Congress authorized them
| to do. If we don't like it, we could consider, maybe not
| voting the same people into that Congress. Over. And over.
| And over. And over. And over. And over.
|
| A full 24 Senators and 63 Representatives have held their
| seats for _over 36 years_. That 's not what you'd expect of a
| citizenship that was actually upset about being spied upon by
| their government.
| llmthrow103 wrote:
| It's obviously not a problem of electing the wrong people.
| There are enough checks and balances in the system to
| ensure that there is no change forthcoming.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| The system is, indeed, set up to minimize revolutionary
| churn. The tilt that we're seeing right now towards
| fascism and white nationalism has been some 40 years in
| the making. It takes a lot of organization to tilt the
| whole thing.
|
| This is a feature, not a bug. The system is architected,
| when something is controversial, default to no motion.
| timewizard wrote:
| > You have to remember that half, possibly more than half,
| of the country is more than okay with what the NSA was
| doing and is doing.
|
| I doubt this. I'd also be interested to see if those people
| actually know, on any real level, what the NSA was actually
| doing.
|
| > If we don't like it, we could consider, maybe not voting
| the same people into that Congress. Over. And over. And
| over. And over. And over. And over.
|
| They so reliably do the opposite of what people want and
| yet continue to win. You don't find this at all odd and you
| put it down to lack of consideration on the part of the
| electorate.
|
| > That's not what you'd expect of a citizenship that was
| actually upset about being spied upon by their government.
|
| The joys of being old enough to remember the Church
| Committee, The House Select Committee on Assassinations,
| The JFK Records Review Board. PEOPLE ARE CLEARLY NOT OKAY
| WITH THIS. Yet those who carry water for the deep state are
| unimpeded by this. Please see this, or at least, don't
| repeat simple falsehoods about the electorate.
|
| It's like coming across a drowning man and laughing in his
| face about his predicament.
| sethaurus wrote:
| Forgive me for being obtuse, but what exactly are you
| claiming here? Are election results being faked?
| shadowgovt wrote:
| They aren't. Fewer than 3/4 of eligible voters voted in
| 2020. In general, somewhere around 10% to a third of
| eligible voters actually vote in primaries, which are the
| elections that actually have the most impact on office
| holding.
|
| Nobody needs to fake election results when Americans just
| don't show up to vote. It's a disquietingly under-
| informed and apathetic electorate.
| timewizard wrote:
| > Fewer than 3/4 of eligible voters voted in 2020.
|
| This is not completely true[0]. I'd also give the advice
| that you shouldn't take a "nationwide" average to mean
| much of anything. The wikipedia article shows wide
| variation across the states which is true for almost any
| statistic you can think of.
|
| > actually vote in primaries
|
| Bernie voters might give you a hint as to why. I guess
| this is the problem Mayor Pete's "shadow" app was meant
| to solve. It honestly seems like parties don't genuinely
| like people voting in primaries. The person who's "turn"
| it is might lose.
|
| > elections that actually have the most impact
|
| Unfortunately we're talking about the legislature here
| because they write the laws in question and are the
| proper party to wage your grievances against. Have you
| ever looked into how competitive those primaries actually
| are? Anyways this is why I vote for Greens and
| Libertarians. Then they might stand a chance of cracking
| 5% and getting recognized fully by the Federal Election
| Commission.
|
| > Americans just don't show up to vote.
|
| All evidence to the contrary. What they don't do is vote
| in senate elections. There districts with as low as 25%
| voter turn out. Which means you only need 12% of the
| eligible population to turn out for you to secure your
| seat. So you're right. No need to cheat. Just be
| arbitrary and capricious to the point that busy and
| worried people no longer feel that using their time in
| the voting booth can actually change something.
|
| > It's a disquietingly under-informed and apathetic
| electorate.
|
| As always, back to where this conversation starts, who
| should bear the responsibility for this? I don't think
| blaming the electorate itself brings you anywhere other
| than helping to chase people further away from an
| important civil institution.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_Unite
| d_States...
| shadowgovt wrote:
| > who should bear the responsibility
|
| Unfortunately, in a representative democracy, the people.
| It's right there in the Constitution, first three words.
| timewizard wrote:
| Yea, but I'm not a signatory to the constitution, the
| /states/ are. Which is why the document immediately tells
| you it is to "form a more perfect union." The union isn't
| between you and I nor does it grant either of us law
| enforcement powers.
|
| Then _immediately_ after you get Section 1: "All
| legislative powers herin granted shall be vested in a
| congress of the United States." Which, by the way, prior
| to the 17th amendment, the Senate was selected directly
| by the states. Then again immediately after that you get
| a set of limitations as to who can be admitted to this
| congress. You'll also note that as citizens we have
| absolutely no voice in the operation of this congress,
| the selection of it's bills, nor in the voting on them.
|
| No, in a representative /republican/ democracy, it's the
| representatives that are first and foremost responsible.
| The most I can do is offer my input on who those people
| should be every 2 years, so I certainly bear some, but
| it's inane to suggest that the current outcome is the
| fault of the electorate. In particular when billions of
| dollars are spent every year on campaigns and
| advertising.
|
| Your idea is austere and unhelpful to a broken and
| corrupted system. I'd like to develop a notion of
| jurisprudence that helps the people out of their
| predicament, not points the finger blamefully at them.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| You are right that Congress are the immediate legislative
| agents, but the Congressional responsibility is back-
| stopped by the people, because ultimately (with the
| exception of impeachment and removal from office, which
| is asking the legislature to police itself) only the
| people can decide to stop supporting them. And you're
| right about the 17th Amendment, but that's in the past;
| modern American voters have more power to choose their
| representatives than they have in most of American
| history, and they do not exercise it.
|
| I don't know who else's fault it can be _but_ the
| electorate when they saw how the current President
| operates and re-elected him. To say nothing of re-
| electing the same Congress over and over despite that
| body having a sub-30% approval rating.
|
| ... and if the people don 't hold the responsibility,
| what would you recommend the people do? I'm not sure what
| "a notion of jurisprudence" means in this context: are
| you suggesting replacing he power-at-a-distance of an
| unpopular legislature with rule by nine _unelected_
| _life-appointed_ officials and their underlings?
| mulmen wrote:
| > It's a disquietingly under-informed and apathetic
| electorate.
|
| The United States has elevated voter suppression to an
| art form. Last minute polling relocations, inadequate
| polling locations, unreasonable ID requirements,
| unreasonable registration requirements, "accidental"
| voter roll purges. It's not easy to vote here. And it's
| especially hard if you are in a group the incumbents
| don't like.
|
| See
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_Rights_Act_of_1965.
|
| If those in power cared about our opinions it would be a
| national holiday and we'd vote by mail.
| georgeplusplus wrote:
| So glad you pointed this out. people are numb to these sort
| of news now a days.
|
| Reminds me of George Carlins words, " It's never gonna get
| any better. Don't look for it. Be happy with what you got."
| HexPhantom wrote:
| He risked everything, and in the end, the system closed ranks
| to protect itself. Retroactive immunity was basically a way
| of saying - "Yep, it was illegal, but it doesn't matter."
| orblivion wrote:
| Flowers By Irene
| themcaffee wrote:
| That certainly is just a Sewer TV inspection van! I have a hand
| in writing some of the software that is run on these and
| processes the videos that come out of them. They all have rack
| mounted PCs and a monitor with a joystick to control the
| crawler that goes in the pipe.
| tptacek wrote:
| Gotta love this site.
| burnished wrote:
| Makes for a treasure trove of impromptu QA's in the
| comments
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| "Did you win the Putnam?"
|
| Sorry u/sanj & hat-tip to u/cperciva ;)
| ryanisnan wrote:
| I mean, if a sufficiently capable entity is interested in
| snooping on an individual like this, mimicking a sewer tv
| inspection van is a trivial endeavour. You don't know at all
| what that van was doing.
| tptacek wrote:
| Yes we do. It was a sewer inspection van. If it was the
| NSA, their van wouldn't look so goofy that people took one
| look at the photo and assumed it _had to be_ an NSA van,
| which is what happened here. This is a bad movie plot
| trope: the bad guys can 't simultaneously be omniscient and
| so dumb they're trivially outed like this, just like the
| real supervillain isn't going to monologue while you free
| yourself from the chains lowering you into the shark tank.
| ryanisnan wrote:
| It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble.
| It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.
| tptacek wrote:
| Can I interest you in some fresh alien urine? Still
| plenty saturated with Zephyron. I'll give you Dale
| Gribble's price! :)
| ziddoap wrote:
| I think it was a sewer inspection van.
|
| Having said that, reading comments like this, I sometimes
| think it would actually be great cover. Because you have
| respected people, like yourself, unequivocally stating
| that it couldn't possibly be an NSA van.
|
| But, to say it again, I agree that I don't think the NSA
| would need to do this. My above line of reasoning
| certainly doesn't hold too much water under serious
| scrutiny.
| tptacek wrote:
| A significant multiplier of my certainty here comes from
| the fact that I was responding to a thread full of people
| who seemed certain that no sewer inspection van could
| look like that, which to me says "this van is not
| inconspicuous", which defeats the whole purpose of having
| a cover-story van.
|
| You can second-guess that, but I think past this point,
| we're reenacting the duel between Vizzini and Westley.
| t-3 wrote:
| From personal experience with police investigations...
| they aren't really all that inconspicuous when they come
| aspying. The van with tints several shades darker than
| the legal limit that sits outside and the trucks with
| dash-mount computers and racks of equipment visible
| through the windshield shadowing your every move aren't
| exactly hard to see if you're paying attention. When
| they've got telescopic lenses watching from an adjacent
| building, you can also see those with the naked eye if
| you look closely. Hopefully national spy agencies are
| better at it than small town drug task forces, but...
| Lerc wrote:
| That's an odd take. There are numerous examples of people
| prosaicly defeating the purpose of something that has
| taken considerable resources to establish.
|
| It's like the spies working in embassies that were easily
| detectable despite an elaborate cover because they used
| the car that the previous spy left behind when they went
| home.
| dandelany wrote:
| Perhaps they are optimizing for having plausible
| deniability/a fully fleshed out backstory in case they
| are questioned by eg. local cops or a security guard,
| moreso than inconspicuousness to a random passerby who is
| unlikely to pose any danger with their idle theorizing
| tptacek wrote:
| Or, you know, they're inspecting the sewers.
| juliusdavies wrote:
| I think NSA has hacked the van (without the van operators
| realizing) and so it's both a sewer inspection van and an
| NSA surveillance van at the same time.
| d0mine wrote:
| There is no hack. The system sends data to NSA by design.
| saghm wrote:
| > You can second-guess that, but I think past this point,
| we're reenacting the duel between Vizzini and Westley
|
| So I guess the reveal is that it _is_ a real sewer
| inspection van, but the NSA has legitimately been
| inspecting sewers for years to innoculate themselves from
| suspicion?
|
| I guess they must be down there looking for rodents of
| unusual size.
| Paracompact wrote:
| I see it like this:
|
| You can either disguise your operation as a goofy sewer
| inspection van and hope you trick every single person who
| notices it into second-guessing themselves along the
| lines of "surely the FBI would be more low-key than
| that..."
|
| Or you can just be low-key in the first place, end of
| story. I assume the tech in the modern day (as compared
| to, like, the 80s when this trope was born) is advanced
| enough to facilitate this option.
| autoexec wrote:
| I think I'd rather assume that I couldn't successfully
| pull off low key 100% of the time while actively
| monitoring someone from the street in front of their
| house, so instead I'd make sure that while 99% of the
| people will see a sewer inspection van and think nothing
| of it, the 1% who catches a look inside of the van and
| thinks it's suspicious will easily find a perfectly
| reasonable explanation for what they think they saw.
| hox wrote:
| That, and it would be an FBI van, not an NSA van. But the
| point holds.
| TheSpiceIsLife wrote:
| Sometime there's vehicle from at least three businesses
| and two government agencies gathered round an
| inconspicuous looking civil infrastructure element, and I
| have to wonder who spying on who. And how much that's
| costing.
| foobarian wrote:
| I mean, why not both? If I was a shadowy agency I would
| start an actual legit sewer inspection company that does
| real sewer inspections. And then just collect and share a
| little extra data as needed. Nobody would be the wiser!
| waterlu wrote:
| There's an HVAC company like this also, I'll bet.
|
| Corporate ventilation. A wonderful thing. Everyone needs
| it. No one suspects it.
|
| Or maybe it's the aquarium guy.
|
| No, those are the guys making meth.
|
| Gotta love paranoia.
| chelmzy wrote:
| Crypto AG confirmed this sort of thing to be possible.
| johnisgood wrote:
| Gotta be paranoid. :D
| eitland wrote:
| > There's an HVAC company like this also, I'll bet.
|
| IIRC a hacked HVAC vendor was how credit card skimming
| software was infiltrated into Target and credit card data
| was exfiltrated a decade or so ago.
|
| Edit, source: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2014/02/target-
| hackers-broke-in-...
| speckx wrote:
| > Or maybe it's the aquarium guy.
|
| Shhhhh!
| lurk2 wrote:
| > the bad guys can't simultaneously be omniscient and so
| dumb they're trivially outed like this
|
| This is a false dichotomy. Federal agencies prove
| themselves to be fallible (even incompetent) all the
| time, they just have far more resources available to make
| up for their mistakes.
| tptacek wrote:
| I mean, the real argument here is between "something
| interesting" and "something boring", and it's message
| board so "boring" is heavily disfavored. But, yeah, it's
| a sewer inspection van.
| lurk2 wrote:
| My comment did not express any opinion as to whether this
| was or was not a surveillance van, and this has no
| bearing on the proposed alternatives being a false
| dichotomy.
| freedomben wrote:
| With GP's clarification, it's still shaped like a false
| dichotomy but I don't think it's one in spirit. It sounds
| more like reductio ad absurdum to me, with a sprinkling
| of hyperbole for effect.
| kortilla wrote:
| Unmarked vans drive around all of the time and nobody
| bats an eye at them. There is no reason to even bother
| with a big elaborate company name that anyone could
| google and do further background checks on
| seanw444 wrote:
| Unmarked vans _drive around_ all the time. They don 't
| typically park out front of a whistleblower's house.
| There is more scrutiny there than driving down any random
| street. Therefore, a more sufficient cover would be
| required.
| godshatter wrote:
| An unmarked white van (without windows) parked a house or
| two down the street hacking your wifi might not be that
| noticeable. One across the street with a radio dish
| spinning around and a parabolic mic sticking out the
| window and a few people entering and exiting it with
| donuts and coffee multiple times probably would be.
| jghn wrote:
| In Russia people "fall out the window" all the time. It
| is intentional. We need to adjust.
| jorvi wrote:
| Legacy of Ashes is a great book about the CIA on this, on
| how they basically stumbled into some of their biggest
| accomplishments.
| rsoto2 wrote:
| Wouldn't it be the perfect plot to LOOK like you are a
| goofy badly run agency to hide the reality?
| highwaylights wrote:
| Now I'm starting to wonder if that guy habitually leaves
| the door open because he got sick of people winking at
| him with a wry smile every time he had to go to a job.
| Kinrany wrote:
| Reminds me of the joke where students prove by induction
| that the teacher is not actually planning a surprise
| test, and are surprised when there's a test the next day
| sim7c00 wrote:
| haha well dont assume spies are some godmode infallable
| people. spies also are humans and can have varying
| degrees of freedom to express their stupidity in their
| work..
|
| in our country some spies got caught drivin around with
| wifi pineapple in plain sight circling govt and ngo
| sites.
|
| in my mind thats next level dumb stuff, but maybe they
| arent really hackers and think its not conspicuous, or
| even the opposite, they know exactly what it is but think
| 'oh normal people wont stop to think about this, they
| dont recognise such equipment'.
|
| if you werent there, didnt know the guys in the van etc.
| etc. - its all just guesswork.
|
| even public record of a sewer inspection right then and
| there at that time (which i kinda doubt exists) wouldnt
| confirm or deny what that van was really doing there.
|
| that being said, i would _assume_ its a sewer inspection
| van. but thats an assumption, not a known fact.
| dosman33 wrote:
| Regardless of what the real story is on this van, lookup
| the Bernie S. case if you want an easy case with proof of
| government surveillance incompetence. Under cover Secret
| Service agents were photographed surveilling a 2600
| meeting in a mall court, then got embarrassed when the
| 2600 guys posted flyers with their photographs around.
| Most criminals are dumb which is a good thing as I like
| the bad guys getting caught, but unfortunately the smart
| ones graduate to become politicians.
| autoexec wrote:
| > mimicking a sewer tv inspection van is a trivial
| endeavour.
|
| Why bother mimicking a sewer inspection van when you can
| just buy or commandeer an actual sewer inspection van?
| potato3732842 wrote:
| You're thinking like a normal person. You need to think
| like an institution that has the entire weight of
| government behind them and who nobody wants to be on the
| wrong side of.
|
| They either find someone who has suitable vans they can
| threaten with prosecution. That person then agrees to be an
| "informant" because that's better than losing your life to
| the feds and then their handler asks to borrow a van. They
| like this because no money needs to get spent specifically
| on it so it doesn't tend to get scrutinized. If they're
| going full above the table they register a business with
| the state complete with valid HVAC license or whatever and
| then rent a van from some company the FBI owns/runs that
| rents white vans and have some decals printed up. (For
| those inclined to do further reading, the OSINT hobbyists
| have done a lot to expose this workflow as it relates to
| aircraft so probably start there.)
| dgrin91 wrote:
| I can't tell if this is honest or sarcasm
| highwaylights wrote:
| Same. I can totally buy the joystick and the robot as I've
| seen this done in my area, but the rack mounted PCs and the
| headphones makes it seem awfully like he's telling Tom
| Cruise which wire to cut.
| frugalmail wrote:
| I'm really curious then.
|
| Why's the visible person holding the headphones tighter
| against his ear? What kind of sounds need to be processed by
| a human for sewer inspection?
|
| To their benefit, if it was sus, they would have kept the
| door shut.
| themcaffee wrote:
| Generally these are done in coordination with a sewer
| cleaning truck at the next manhole in the pipe. Very common
| for them to stay on the phone with each other
| frugalmail wrote:
| That makes sense that they would use higher quality
| headphones on a radio to collaborate. Thanks for the
| insight!
| kortilla wrote:
| > Why's the visible person holding the headphones tighter
| against his ear?
|
| "Hey boss, we just finished up the job. Everything is good
| here, what site do you want us to go to next?"
|
| _hangs up phone_
| Kinrany wrote:
| Holding the headphones tighter is never suspicious
| waste_monk wrote:
| Do you work for the National Sewerage Agency? :D
| acomjean wrote:
| Flowers By Irene.
|
| https://frinkiac.com/caption/S03E04/719740
| sim7c00 wrote:
| it would be too funny if that was a re sewage company.
| black vans with small print n.s.a. on it haha xD
| MisterTea wrote:
| door bell rings .... five men in dark suits standing
| outside ... hair on the back of my neck stands on end. I
| open the door, hands shaking with that burning feeling in
| my guts "Yea, how can I help you gentlemen" The tallest
| one, intimidating, gruff, ex marine perhaps, shoves a
| badge in my face: "N S A, National Sewer Agency" they
| push me aside and push inside my hosue .. a violation but
| what do I say?!? They look around ... circling me like a
| pack of wolves .. then, another pulls a bag from under
| his arm and produces a plastic jar in a biohazard bag...
| looks like ice cream and garbage inside, then grufly
| states "Sir, do you recognize these napkins?" "napkins?"
| I squeak out ... it hit me.... FUCK! .... the other night
| .... I was drunk, out of TP, desperate... paper towels
| staring me in the face - dare I? It was a moment of
| weakness, desperation and drunkeness rolled into one ...
| and here I am, staring the consequences in the face....
| "Sir, your going to have to come with us" And no one ever
| heard from me again. Please take heed, only flush TP!
| AStonesThrow wrote:
| This is fairly close to reality, if you think about it
|
| Medicaid here in Arizona is called "AHCCCS" which is
| pronounced "access" so imagine the fun homophonic
| confusion in a conversation about "do you have access?"
| "well I got access but then I lost it..."
|
| Many conservative Christians have termed homosexuality as
| "Same-Sex Attraction" or SSA, so they often speak of
| "suffering from SSA" or being afflicted with it. When I
| applied to the Social Security Administration for
| disability, I couldn't help but notice, and their
| disability program is called "SSDI" which has nothing to
| do with Reagan's "Star Wars/Strategic Defense Initiative"
|
| Nor do my dealings with the F.A.A. in the past several
| years have anything to do with a pilot's license or
| flight clearances; the Family Assistance Administration
| here doles out funds for food stamps ("SNAP", another
| good homophone, lets you purchase plenty of alphabet soup
| for the fam) and other basic needs.
|
| https://xkcd.com/932/
|
| Fact: The "Obamaphone" program didn't begin or end with
| President Obama. Discuss!
| jancsika wrote:
| > That certainly is just a Sewer TV inspection van!
|
| Hee hee, I can hear the NSA now: "Dammit, who parked a sewer
| inspection van in the middle of our massive surveillance
| network?!?"
|
| Back on the topic of indiscriminate wide-net surveillance
| (which I think was also the focus of the AT&T whistleblower),
| I quote Bruce Schneier on the Snowden leaks:
|
| "I started this talk by naming three different programs that
| collect Google user data. Those programs work under different
| technical capabilities, different corporate alliances, and
| different legal authorities. You should expect the same thing
| to be true for cell phone data, for internet data, for
| everything else. When you have the budget of the NSA and
| you're given the choice, 'Should you do it this way or that
| way?' The correct answer is: both."
|
| 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iMFPMqboZc
| belter wrote:
| https://youtu.be/HQY93oaaN6k
| kens wrote:
| I found a video with an identical National Plant Services sewer
| inspection van, inspecting a large-diameter sewer line:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVXceJ3Yxnw (The photo shows
| van TV-230 while the video shows van TV-217, so they are
| different instances of the van.)
| emmelaich wrote:
| I went to the Carylon website to find a list of their
| companies and got
|
| > _Block Reason: Access from your area has been temporarily
| limited for security reasons._
|
| My area is Australia.
|
| https://caryloncorp.com/find-a-company/
| kube-system wrote:
| It's not uncommon for site firewalls to be configured this
| way for business that do not do work internationally.
| dkga wrote:
| Yes, but calling it ,,security" is a bit of a stretch...
| sim7c00 wrote:
| it is security... block most of the world is also block
| most attacks to your infra...
| kube-system wrote:
| It's just one slice in the swiss cheese model.
| rkagerer wrote:
| Please obtain one of each, and do a teardown to confirm ;-)
| brk wrote:
| That is a van built by Ares (I might have the spelling slightly
| wrong).
|
| Funny enough I once bought a used one, stripped the sewer
| inspection equipment out, kept the Oman diesel generator and
| made it into an actual surveillance van.
|
| The inspection robots that came with it were cool. I sold them
| and the other equipment I pulled out for a good chunk of cash.
| nzeid wrote:
| This whole sewer inspection thing must be particularly
| hilarious to the people performing the inspection. "Yo dude,
| we're officially spies! _hi5_ "
| southernplaces7 wrote:
| "sewer cleaning van"... This might be apt. The feds and their
| many tactics..... Flowers By Irene
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_HSNMLfhFM
| HexPhantom wrote:
| That must have been surreal.. knowing him first as just a
| neighbor, then realizing the weight of what he did
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Klein
|
| https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/homefront/interview...
|
| https://www.eff.org/document/public-unredacted-klein-declara...
|
| https://medium.com/@illicitpopsicle/mark-klein-the-nsa-whist... |
| https://archive.today/LlZSs
|
| https://medium.com/@chelsealynnqueen94/mark-klein-whistleblo... |
| https://archive.today/7RlfJ
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44edsh6_LUc
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqeMkv5FHfU
|
| (Senator Chris Dodd interviewed Mark, but the video is currently
| private unfortunately: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9aeKF-
| rOGA)
| roenxi wrote:
| The tolerance for the US mass spying efforts remains weird. It
| undermines the credibility of many US politicians around Trump -
| yes the US public appears to be set to vote in Hitler-equivalents
| for the forseeable future. No, dismantling the insane spying
| apparatus is not a major agenda point.
|
| Marry those two ideas together.
| bloomingkales wrote:
| It's pretty much a forgone conclusion since they are putting AI
| into every intersection. How are you going to argue against the
| fact that government AI needs your data for training?
| psadauskas wrote:
| Its fine, as long as they're spying on the radical woke
| leftists. They'd never spy on one of the good guys like me! /s
| dang wrote:
| Related. There were probably other relevant threads over the
| years--can anyone find some?
|
| _Room 641A_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41507188 -
| Sept 2024 (5 comments)
|
| _The secrets of Room 641A (2008)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38305501 - Nov 2023 (4
| comments)
|
| _Room 641A_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32984515 -
| Sept 2022 (2 comments)
|
| _Room 641A_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23350120 -
| May 2020 (70 comments)
|
| _Room 641A_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12515724 -
| Sept 2016 (75 comments)
|
| _Room 641A_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5847166 -
| June 2013 (44 comments)
| samstave wrote:
| I _knew_ I would be in that 2013 thread...
|
| I mistook the building, but I do remember details that Twitter
| had a direct fiber connection to that room...
|
| Also, we have a LOT of evidence of prior NSA backdoors and
| interceptions...
|
| in 1998 I had to hire a CSIE (cisco expert) (like a 3 digit
| uuid) to help me recover a router password from infra I
| inherited... and during the password reset procedure on a 3640
| - he was telling me how "the NSA requires Cisco to put in back
| doors into all the routers)
|
| ((The passwd BTW was Feet4Monkey))
|
| --
|
| Then recall Carnivore? (and its predecessor eschelon - and a
| whole bunch of reveals) -- what was interesting was that the
| only company to refuse to install Carnivor was Earthlink.net
| (ISP) -- and the reason they stated they wouldnt put in
| Carnivore, was because they stated they already had their user
| tracking system (They were owned by the Mormon Church) ((and
| for some reason Whoopi Goldberg was one of their large notable
| investors))
|
| And recall how they stated that the NSA specifically likes to
| hire Mormons?
|
| And recall North First Street DC that was purchased by Cerberus
| Group which was the ~Bush-Cabal hedgie, and the reason they
| bought it because it housed MAE WEST and they wanted to inject
| NBAR/Surveilling into it -- once they completed that, they sold
| it off again (To one of their subs, IIRC)
|
| I hate that I am getting old and I start to forget a lot of the
| malfeasance I have witnessed in my ~30+ years in SV.
| rogerallen wrote:
| My top post ever on reddit:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/6dwg/wired_unve...
| rogerallen wrote:
| and only 1 link still works. 19 years is a long time to the
| internet.
| schiffern wrote:
| Wayback Machine has the rest (for as long as it lasts).
|
| OP https://web.archive.org/web/20060615052051/https://www.w
| ired...
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20051219151049/http://www.cnn.c
| o...
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20000302002228/https://www.wire
| d...
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20060904193022/http://blog.wire
| d...
|
| Remember to donate, folks.
| samstave wrote:
| Thats awesome.
|
| See my post below -- I have been tracking Eschelon since the
| early 90s...
|
| Guess what NSA router backdoors have become (mobile phones
| with socialifelog media apps on them)
|
| ---
|
| And like @tptacek said
|
| >> _If it was the NSA, their van wouldn 't look so goofy that
| people took one look at the photo and assumed it had to be an
| NSA van, which is what happened here. This is a bad movie
| plot trope: the bad guys can't simultaneously be omniscient
| and so dumb they're trivially outed like this, just like the
| real supervillain isn't going to monologue while you free
| yourself from the chains lowering you into the shark tank._
|
| ---
|
| Love that but, I do think that both is true...
|
| Look incompetent so they don't think you're competent
| (Stuxnet/DUQU)
| Scoundreller wrote:
| The Onion was on this a looong time ago:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJ380SHZvYU
| samstave wrote:
| :-) thank you for that. DOPE
| neil_s_anderson wrote:
| I find it odd how many people automatically assume that whatever
| the NSA is up to must be undesirable and therefore should be
| opposed.
|
| I mean, where do you think analysis of plans by terrorists and
| nation state adversaries to attack our nation and its allies
| comes from? The raw intelligence data these are based on can only
| be gathered by surveillance of communications, both targeted and
| in bulk.
|
| You should all be supporting this, as you benefit from it every
| day.
| rozap wrote:
| Yea, it's a good thing that since we live in a democracy we'd
| never elect anyone with bad intentions.
|
| What a silly take.
| skoopie wrote:
| We benefit from drug dealers too. They bring extra money into
| the community and they give rappers something to rap about.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| The point is that mass domestic surveillance of American
| nationals violates common understanding of the law. It makes no
| sense for the requirements to get a wiretap to be so stringent
| but the requirements to monitor someone's internet traffic to
| be nonexistent, just because it's laundered through
| "intelligence gathering" and you argue it's therefore not "law
| enforcement."
| neil_s_anderson wrote:
| The point of bulk data collection is to be able to, in
| effect, take a wiretap in the past before you knew what you'd
| need to be wiretapping in the present, by querying the bulk
| datasets for communications between specific endpoints within
| specific points in time.
|
| As time travel doesn't exist, this is the next best
| technology available.
| ziddoap wrote:
| I think we all know that. We, or I at least, don't agree
| with it.
| neil_s_anderson wrote:
| You don't agree with monitoring the communications of
| adversaries at all, or you don't agree with doing the
| equivalent for communications made in the recent past?
| ziddoap wrote:
| I don't agree with mass collection of data of non-
| guilty/non-suspected citizens for "just in case"
| situations in the future.
| t-3 wrote:
| When the country's own citizens are the "adversaries",
| that's a highly fucked up government and government
| agency. If the people are the enemy the country is dead.
| akomtu wrote:
| And the adversaries is the entire nation at this point.
| netsharc wrote:
| Ah, the East German State Police mentality...
|
| Sadly, governments end up becoming corrupt. In one formerly
| free nation (or at least it was one that obnoxiously
| bragged about being one), data about women's periods became
| weaponized in a witchhunt against abortions.
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| > The point is that mass domestic surveillance of American
| nationals violates common understanding of the law.
|
| It also violates the courts' understanding of the law. That's
| probably why one such program was shut down prior to the
| Snowden leaks and definitely why the other was shut down
| after.
| energy123 wrote:
| If it's illegal then why aren't the courts stopping it? Has
| there been a court case? What did the ruling say? Details
| would be useful.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Think of how safe we'd all be if we were on camera 24/7/365!
|
| Let me put it this way: I don't do anything illegal in my
| bathroom, but damned if I want someone watching me in there.
| Everyone has their line they don't want crossed. Klein's - and
| the EFF's, and mine - is somewhere past the NSA monitoring
| every single communication in the entire country without a
| warrant. I have no objection with them monitoring specific
| suspects with a court order, but I don't want them listening to
| people who aren't being actively, personally investigated.
| neil_s_anderson wrote:
| Just because your communications data or metadata exists in
| some bulk dataset somewhere doesn't mean that it's being
| actively and personally investigated by anyone.
|
| As with the issuance of a warrant for wiretapping, there
| would need to be a proportionate and legitmate reason for
| your communications within a such a dataset to be looked at.
| kstrauser wrote:
| I do not want my data included in the dataset. "We're not
| looking at it, pinky swear!" rings hollow.
| neil_s_anderson wrote:
| Why would an analyst at the NSA be looking at your
| communications data?
|
| It's a bit like the police getting a search warrant to
| look around your home. If there's no legitimate reason to
| do it, like having reasonable suspicion of a crime that
| requires investigation, then they're not going to.
| ziddoap wrote:
| This is just a rewording of the "nothing to hide"
| argument.
|
| And your edit seems to ignore that the analysts are
| humans. Police get caught abusing their access to data
| resources for personal gain frequently, why are NSA
| analysts different?
|
| (Not even touching on the fact that mistakes happen,
| leaks happen, breaches happen, laws change, political
| winds change direction)
| t-3 wrote:
| Maybe they want to look at the naked pics being sent
| between you and your sexual partners, as has happened
| many times. Maybe they want to spy on their own sexual
| partners or prospective partners, which has also happened
| many times. Maybe they want to blackmail people for their
| own gain, which has, once again, happened many times.
| There are innumerable reasons with plenty of precedent
| for each and every one.
| orthecreedence wrote:
| > It's a bit like the police getting a search warrant to
| look around your home. If there's no legitimate reason to
| do it, like having reasonable suspicion of a crime that
| requires investigation, then they're not going to.
|
| Yes, it is a bit like this. Except in this case the
| police don't need a warrant, they can enter your home for
| any reason at their discretion. You're putting a lot of
| trust in a bunch of people you've (I'm assuming) never
| met working for an agency that has demonstrated a
| complete lack of regard for the constitution. Either that
| or you're a really terrible glowie: "How do you do,
| fellow tech enthusiasts??"
| Hikikomori wrote:
| How long until the new US administration starts using
| this data?
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| Setting aside the legality/morality/whatever of the data
| collection itself, you seem to place a lot of faith in
| the NSA's ability to keep that data private.
| nyolfen wrote:
| the problem is that this data exists somewhere where i have
| no control over it and was collected without my consent, in
| clear violation of my constitutional rights. perhaps you
| have perfect trust in the current and future good faith of
| the US federal government, but perhaps you can understand
| why others do not. i would not want the local police
| keeping copies of all of my emails "just in case", why
| would it be any better for unaccountable strangers to keep
| secret dossiers on me?
| dannyobrien wrote:
| Well, the question at hand was, and is: _what_ should we be
| supporting? I don 't, in fact, assume that what the NSA is
| doing is bad, but in order for the public and the oversight
| systems the legislature put in place, _someone_ has to know
| what 's going on. The program Mark Klein revealed surprised
| legislators, including John Sensenbrenner, the author of the
| legislation that was used as a justification for the program:
| https://www.rstreet.org/commentary/patriot-act-author-introd...
|
| Many people worried that the PATRIOT Act was overreach for
| surveillance, but the bill did pass. What happened with Mark's
| whistleblowing is that policymakers and the public found out
| that there were other programs, potentially illegal under even
| the PATRIOT Act (and, indeed the US Constitution), that had
| been hidden or obfuscated to their oversight bodies.
|
| (Incidentally, the government's strategy in the cases against
| the NSA program was to say that even asking about legal
| authorisation and grounding of the program was in itself, a
| violation of national security. Many years after Mark's act, Ed
| Snowden's first published leak was this authorisation document,
| confirming that Mark was right, and that, had those cases been
| able to proceed, there would have been grounds for
| investigation.)
| f4 wrote:
| To not be scrutinized for any and everything is vital. When all
| is accessible, actors playing the part of the good citizen are
| the prime. I would rather have pain than the pretense of good.
| akomtu wrote:
| The thing is, it no longer matters whether we support it.
| Nobody's asked for our permission and we have no power to stop
| it.
| Atreiden wrote:
| This is at best a strawman, and at worst blatant astroturfing.
| The benefit of the doubt is given to these organizations a
| priori. The idea that the average person should not be able to
| know about government intelligence programs is common sense -
| if the average person knows, so do our adversaries, defeating
| the purpose of the program.
|
| But there have to be limits on this power, or you enable, and
| even empower, an Orwellian regime.
|
| NSA has been caught, multiple times, flagrantly disregarding
| the law, violating privacy rights afforded to every citizen by
| the Constitution, and gathering an amount of data that could
| easily enable a hostile regime to enact vengeance on
| dissenters.
|
| So imagine this hostile regime comes to power. Now everyone is
| forced to either support the regime, or face harsh consequences
| without recourse. Any plan you construct, or group of
| supporters you amass, will inevitably be compromised by this
| machine and eradicated, one way or another.
|
| You have totalitarianism, and no means to resist it. ou've
| given up your immune system. You no longer have a democracy,
| even if you do on paper. And before you make the argument that
| "the ends justify the means" consider that this hostile regime
| might not share your ends. You may get wrapped up in "the
| means".
|
| Is that a desirable outcome for you? If not, you should rethink
| your position. If that outcome seems desirable to you, there
| are a very limited number of reasons why that could be the
| case, and none of them are charitable.
| AtomBalm wrote:
| He revealed unlawful surveillance years prior to and of the same
| gravity as Snowden, but only one became a celebrity. I would love
| to know the reason for that.
| kstrauser wrote:
| I say this without intending to denigrate Snowden at all:
| Klein's situation was less messy. Snowden had a top secret
| clearance and vowed to safeguard all the secrets he came
| across. Klein was just a regular guy doing regular work for a
| regular company when he saw something strange. That doesn't
| mean I think Snowden was wrong, just that there's a ton of room
| for people to say "I agree with him but he shouldn't have done
| that because he swore not to". Klein didn't have those
| obligations.
| marxisttemp wrote:
| Likewise, Manning got pardoned when her release was clearly
| messier and less targeted than Snowden's. There isn't much
| logic to these things.
|
| To be clear, all 3 are personal heroes of mine.
| anonym29 wrote:
| Snowden also swore an oath to uphold the constitution,
| including the fourth amendment that the NSA was illegally
| violating (one NSA crime) and covering up (second NSA crime),
| including by lying to congress (third NSA crime), as well as
| to protect America from domestic enemies, like the kind of
| traitors who'd come up with a secret plan to violate the
| constitutional rights of the entire country and lie about it
| to congress.
|
| Thank goodness he took his oath more seriously than the "I
| was just following orders" crowd. We know from WW2 that "I
| was just following orders" is not a legitimate excuse to help
| facilitate grave atrocities, like all of those other NSA
| employees did every single day, in violation of their own
| oaths that they each swore.
| kstrauser wrote:
| You won't get any argument from me. I agree. And even in
| agreement, I still say that there's a much larger grey area
| in Snowden's case. We can and should discuss whether his
| actions were justified. I think they are. But I can at
| least appreciate that people who disagree have legitimate
| reasons to see it otherwise.
|
| Klein's case didn't come with all that other baggage.
| anonym29 wrote:
| No argument from me with what you wrote, either, I just
| wanted to make sure I was doing my interpretation justice
| by sharing it - there's certainly no shortage of posters
| parroting the other side's talking points.
|
| It's interesting that Klein's tell-all didn't get as much
| attention despite being less legally fraught. It makes me
| wonder how much of the Snowden media frenzy was organic
| in the first place, and if not much, who was pulling the
| strings to draw attention to practices that our own
| government had an obvious interest in repressing and
| concealing discussion of.
| jll29 wrote:
| Could be that Snowden took it to The Guardian, a foreign
| and international news outlet. The story how British
| intelligence folks showed up at the Guardian HQ and
| symbolically destroyed a hard drive, and the way Guardian
| management used their New York offices to work around
| restrictions in UK law to publish the story, that's quite
| a story itself, and of course journalists know how to get
| coverage and reach.
|
| Mark targeted the EFF, not a news outlet, in contrast.
| The EFF probably first and foremost had the legal pursuit
| in mind, not making a story big.
|
| The most shocking things of all for me was how ignorant
| ordinary people were and still are about both whistle
| blowers' disclosures and the subsequent pretend fixes by
| lawmakers. (Cynically, I'm inclined to add there might be
| more riots and demonstrations if you take Heinz ketchup
| away from people than theirlegitimate rights to privacy.)
| Tepix wrote:
| > Mark targeted the EFF, not a news outlet, in contrast.
|
| "Mark not only saw how it works, he had the documents to
| prove it. He brought us over a hundred pages of
| authenticated AT&T schematic diagrams and tables. _Mark
| also shared this information with major media outlets,
| numerous Congressional staffers, and at least two
| senators personally_. "
| axus wrote:
| The moment which struck me the most from all the recent
| confirmation hearings was the parade of senator after
| senator asking Tulsi Gabbard if Edward Snowden was a
| traitor. It was like the #1 priority for them that people
| believe that, and they would skip any relevant questions
| about the job only to pursue that one topic over and
| over.
| anonym29 wrote:
| A litmus test for uncompromising ideological loyalty to
| an obviously false but politically correct narrative
| among TPTB.
| worik wrote:
| > grave atrocities
|
| Tapping phones is immoral and unethical, IMO.
|
| But a long was from the "grave atrocities" that were
| uncovered at the end of WWII
| anonym29 wrote:
| It wasn't simply tapping phones, it is the warrantless
| collection of close to all global electronic
| communications.
|
| And the immorality doesn't stop there, that's where it
| starts.
|
| "We kill people based on metadata." - General Michael
| Hayden, former Director of the NSA, former Principal
| Deputy Director of National Intelligence, and former
| Director of the CIA.
|
| This includes innocent people. Women, children,
| civilians. Deliberately. "Acceptable collateral damage"
| is the euphemism used to mask the moral evil of
| deliberately murdering women and children.
| bb88 wrote:
| If you're in a war of attrition (like the the US was in
| Afghanistan), and the other side already has agreed it's
| okay to kill innocents (9/11), then you're not going to
| win by fighting an "ethical" war -- whatever that means.
|
| I'm not going to defend the CIA/NSA for actions taken
| inside the country. On the other hand, I'm not going to
| second guess decisions happening on the ground in an
| active war zone.
| aucisson_masque wrote:
| The end never justify the mean, that's how you end up
| with concentration camps, massive executions and other
| atrocities.
|
| Beside, killing without distinction combattant and
| civilians didn't work, see the result of the American
| Afghanistan war.
|
| Even during the war, 99% of the country was to the hand
| of war leaders and talibans because everyone hated
| Americans. Guess why.
|
| It took only a handful of days for Talibans to defeat the
| American sponsored 'democratic' gouvernement.
| bb88 wrote:
| > The end never justify the mean
|
| It's working so far for Russia. It worked for Germany in
| WWII until the US stepped and fought our way through
| Europe.
|
| If you see a certain group as your sworn enemy for life
| which should be destroyed at all means possible -- then
| you will never have peace. All you can have is war.
| worik wrote:
| > It worked for Germany in WWII until...
|
| they took on the Russians
| simoncion wrote:
| > ...you're not going to win by fighting an "ethical" war
| -- whatever that means.
|
| By not fighting ethically abroad and by permitting our
| authoritarians largely free-rein both abroad and
| domestically, we gave the folks who planned and caused
| the destruction of the WTC towers nearly everything they
| were hoping for.
|
| Overreacting and letting Bush II run his military
| campaigns in the Middle East was one of the greatest
| gifts we could have given Al Qaeda and those like them.
| Encouraging our populace to permit themselves to _be_
| (and continue to be) terrorized is a lesser but still
| significant gift to those same organizations.
| anonym29 wrote:
| Afghanistan had nothing to do with 9/11. Neither did
| Syria, or Iraq.
|
| Vietnam wasn't self-defense. Korean war wasn't self-
| defense. CIA-instigated Color revolutions and Euromaidan
| weren't self-defense. Kosovo wasn't self-defense.
| Launching a cruise missile (a precision weapon that
| requires the operator to enter precise geographic
| coordinates prior to launch) at the Chinese embassy in
| Belgrade wasn't self-defense.
|
| A vast and overwhelming majority of the military
| operations the post-WW2 USA conducts overseas are not
| acts of self-defense, they are acts of imperialism.
|
| "I want to grow the imperial empire's influence and
| footprint" is not justification for murdering unarmed
| civilians. Never has been, never will be.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| And now he's nice and cozy in a country that is busy
| invading its neighbor... But one that the US President has
| himself cozied up to the leadership of as of late.
|
| It's an odd world that makes odd bedfellows. One wonders
| depending on how the next four years go if Snowden could
| even catch a pardon.
|
| ... or if he did, the Russians would even let him leave.
| serial_dev wrote:
| "I was just following orders" is only a bad excuse if your
| side loses.
| bb88 wrote:
| I don't recall agreeing to any oath like that when I
| applied for a US clearance. I just recall the NDA.
|
| I may have pledged allegiance to the US flag when I was a
| kid, but that wasn't the same as taking an oath of elected
| office to uphold the constitution.
| nabla9 wrote:
| Snowden explained it well. There were four other
| whistleblowers besides Snowden and Klein.
|
| (1) Russ Tice: USAF intelligence analyst
|
| (2) William Binney: NSA Technical Director.
|
| (3) Thomas Tamm: DOJ lawyer
|
| (4) Thomas A. Drake: senior executive at NSA
|
| Each of them was a senior position relative to Snowden and
| Klein and all these cases were shut down. What change Snowden
| had to do traditionally by the book whistleblow or tiny
| traditional leak. He made the conscious decision to take the
| information so that they could not shut him down, and make a
| scene from outside the US (Hong Kong) so that there would be
| time to talk to the press.
|
| Snowden made a political crime that was morally justified. It
| was not self serving. It turns out that Americans don't care
| but at least he made a splash.
| tehwebguy wrote:
| Probably because one absconded half-successfully and became
| sort of stateless. That's a way more exciting story!
| jmpman wrote:
| I expect there were 10,000 who knew, and he's the only one who
| spoke up. Now, the other 9,999 likely believed it was to thwart
| terrorism, as this was post 9/11. Maybe those who had visibility
| into who was being surveyed were checking to ensure the spying
| didn't cross their ethical boundaries. Interesting to think of
| what each individual in the system was considering.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Oh, I think it's much simpler: the other 9,999 didn't care
| enough to risk continued employment. Security today was dearer
| to them than the hypothetical benefits to strangers.
|
| (Perhaps worth noting: not to detract from what Mark did, but
| he was retired and therefore didn't have a job on the line.
| Credit to him for leveraging his position of privilege as a
| retiree to speak out about what he knew.)
| nabla9 wrote:
| >he's the only one who spoke up.
|
| Not true.
|
| (1) Russ Tice: USAF intelligence analyst
|
| (2) William Binney: NSA Technical Director.
|
| (3) Thomas Tamm: DOJ lawyer
|
| (4) Thomas A. Drake: senior executive at NSA
|
| Each of them had a senior position relative Klein and Snowden
| and all these cases were shut down and you seemingly never knew
| about them.
| jypepin wrote:
| Is his book "Wiring Up The Big Brother Machine...And Fighting It"
| worth a read?
| xyst wrote:
| NSA and AT&T (telecom in general?) caught with their pants down
| not just once, but twice.
|
| All of this heavily publicized yet here we are today with privacy
| being an afterthought in everyone's mind.
|
| I hate to say it but the private corporations and state have
| really made most of the population complacent with wide net
| surveillance -- cameras everywhere, privacy non-existent, "kyc",
| "selfies", social media, big tech creating profiles of users, and
| data brokerages selling and buying "anonymized" profiles.
| djmips wrote:
| Age 79/80 ?
| trescenzi wrote:
| I'm watching Person of Interest for the first time. It's
| interesting watching it today now that the premise, minus 100%
| accurate crime prediction, is largely a forgone conclusion. It
| was produced after Klein but before Snowden and does a good job
| exploring the expansion of surveillance and just how motivated
| the government is to have a system that tracks everyone. Of
| course it's fiction but it's a fun watch that asks a lot of good
| questions.
| ziddoap wrote:
| I really enjoyed that show. Such a shame it was cancelled!
| Despite critical acclaim (in later seasons, at least), it
| apparently wasn't profitable enough.
|
| I actually tried to find a legal way to rewatch it the other
| day, but all of my current subscriptions list it with "rights
| expired" or some such.
| LinuxBender wrote:
| I enjoyed that show enough that I was willing to put up with
| Amazon's "Freevee" ads because they would not just let me buy
| the show. I've never done that with any other shows.
| choult wrote:
| Oh dear... You should hear some of the stories about Jim
| Caviezel[0]...
|
| On second thought, maybe make up your own mind before you dip
| into that.
|
| [0] https://open.spotify.com/episode/1euFlDCuryFSzMw6BjQCWA
| trescenzi wrote:
| Oh yea I always read about actors during commercial break.
| Was a bit startled when reading his Wikipedia.
| michh wrote:
| It's weird how a lot of stuff in that show I dismissed as
| unrealistic techno-babble back then, now is very real.
| rsingel wrote:
| R.I.P.
|
| He was a true and brave whistleblower.
|
| I had the luck of getting a hold of his docs when they were under
| court seal, and we published them at Wired.
|
| Only met and interviewed him later. He was a gentle man with a
| moral compass. A rarity even among whistleblowers.
|
| The world is poorer without him.
| HexPhantom wrote:
| A gentle man with a strong moral compass
| tehjoker wrote:
| It's crazy almost nothing changed after this revelation. What a
| fake democracy we live in.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Or a real democracy with voters either deeply apathetic about
| being watched or deeply anxious about what happens if nobody's
| watching.
| timeon wrote:
| Real but too constrained with two-party system.
| motohagiography wrote:
| A lot of influential people were quietly radicalized by Klein's
| disclosures and they took that forward in their ventures,
| careers, and lives. Change takes time, and almost two decades
| later, I think we are seeing the results of what those early
| voices in the wilderness were calling out.
|
| I hope on the other side of current bureaucratic reforms we can
| make a monument that includes Klein and the other surveillance
| whistleblowers whose disclosures, and specifically whose courage,
| turned the popular tide against government overreach.
| cynicalpeace wrote:
| Tom Drake, John Kiriakou, Ed Snowden, Mark Klein.
|
| These are people that have shown that parts of the intelligence
| community are guilty of crimes against humanity and the American
| people.
|
| Yet every time more evidence comes out, people are so quick to
| dismiss it as "wacko conspiracy theories".
| sim7c00 wrote:
| they have done heroes jobs, but unfortunely the effect was that
| now its all become normal. ppl dont give a toss..
|
| if you mention beam splitters on fiber, tap rooms at telcos,
| the 'black boxes' at ISPs.. people just pretend thats normal.
| they think most othe ppl are pedophiles, rapists and murderes
| somehow and so think its fine for everything to be tapped and
| logged. crazy world.
|
| these folks give up their remaining lives for the good of
| others, and the others just spit on it.
| samstave wrote:
| Needs black banner
| CaffeineLD50 wrote:
| Its not mass spying. The NSA is just making time capsule backups
| for everyone. Stop being so dramatic.
|
| In a hundred years when it gets published its gonna be the bomb
| hilarious. Totes.
| emmelaich wrote:
| Related, I'm rewatching "Enemy of the State" a 1998 film about
| government surveillance and assassinations and the deep state.
|
| Underrated in my opinion.
|
| Has Gene Hackman (also topical, which is why I am rewatching) and
| Will Smith.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enemy_of_the_State_(film)
| emmelaich wrote:
| Pretty cool is that they mention Keyhole a few times. Keyhole
| (later Google Earth) was created a year later, in 1999.
| willvarfar wrote:
| The US camera surveillance satellites are called Key Hole.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_Hole
| defrost wrote:
| As willvarfar points out, there's a satellite system from the
| 1960s and quite a gap from there until Keyhole Inc.
| Keyhole Inc. specialized in geospatial data visualization
| applications. The name "Keyhole" paid homage to the original
| KH reconnaissance satellites, also known as Corona
| satellites, which were operated by the U.S. between 1959 and
| 1972.
|
| ~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Earth#History
|
| Many companies operated in the gap, one in public was
| ERMapper (Earth Resources Mapping) which had Google Map like
| displays in the early 1990s and was mainly focussed on
| geospatial computing - stitching and correcting air and sat
| images, multispectral data with nonstandard nonlinear
| geocords, magnetic and radiometric displays and corrections,
| etc. Other such suites existed at that time.
|
| Keyhole|Google Earth was not the first, it was the one that
| went very widely public.
| artursapek wrote:
| RIP
| zombot wrote:
| > who risked civil liability and criminal prosecution to help
| expose a massive spying program that violated the rights of
| millions of Americans.
|
| That's how corrupt the system is. You get punished for revealing
| crimes against everyone.
|
| Who is going to erect statues for him and people like him?
| PostOnce wrote:
| We could do it. We could fundraise to cast a bronze of him and
| put it anywhere we like. It wouldn't take that many people or
| that much time, in the grand scheme of things.
|
| Actually, the world might be a nicer place with more statues
| and less goofy abstract modernist art in public for even more
| money than bronzes.
| krunck wrote:
| Put it right in the middle of Trump's "National Garden of
| American Heroes"[1] He'd love that. Ha!
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Garden_of_American
| _He...
| kleiba wrote:
| This is the sentence I was looking for:
|
| _> While we were able to use his evidence to make some change,
| both EFF and Mark were ultimately let down by Congress and the
| Courts, which have refused to take the steps necessary to end the
| mass spying even after Edward Snowden provided even more evidence
| of it in 2013._
|
| Do you have to be a cynic to pretty much have expected this?
| fsflover wrote:
| Unfortunately this spying is exactly what all the government
| wants,
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
| shadowgovt wrote:
| It's also hard to make the case that it isn't, ultimately,
| what the people want, by "the standard you walk past is the
| standard you accept" principle.
|
| It's been nearly twenty years. If Americans were deeply,
| deeply bothered by the government spying on them, they'd have
| burned down this government by now. At most charitable, this
| speaks to a _deep_ ignorance or apathy in the American
| electorate and American citizenship. Or a general anxiety
| about what "the other people" are doing that exceeds their
| anxiety about what the government can do with panopticon
| surveillance.
|
| I think, in general, hackers vastly overestimate the average
| human concern or sensitivity to this kind of thing.
| fsflover wrote:
| > _deep_ ignorance or apathy in the American electorate
|
| Which party is against spying? The only possible action is
| probably protesting. This doesn't work well, e.g.: https://
| en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_enforcement_and_the_Occupy....
| And spying is used against the protestors, too:
| https://www.aclu.org/news/national-security/spying-occupy.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| > Which party is against spying?
|
| The one that hasn't formed yet because the electorate has
| failed to recognize that parties only exist because they
| can consolidate mass political power. This is part of the
| "apathy" category. People don't care enough to meet up on
| this issue. They don't even care enough to be members of
| the existing parties or do more than show up to elections
| (and then, only between half and three-quarters for
| President, less for Congress, and hovering around 10-20%
| for primaries).
|
| People care, but not enough to overcome institutional
| inertia.
| fsflover wrote:
| > The one that hasn't formed yet because the electorate
| has failed to recognize that parties only exist because
| they can consolidate mass political power.
|
| This is not the reason. The reason is the how the system
| was designed:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger's_law
| LoganDark wrote:
| > If Americans were deeply, deeply bothered by the
| government spying on them, they'd have burned down this
| government by now.
|
| Right now stuff is happening that does deeply bothers
| Americans, and what do they do? They walk around with
| signs, they file legal papers, and maybe some other forms
| of peaceful, albeit useless, protest... a lot of other
| countries truly would be burning down the government right
| now if something like Elon happened there, but so far
| America has just been saying they don't want it, in as many
| ways as possible, but while still continuing to fully let
| it happen.
| fshr wrote:
| Can you give an example of a country where you think the
| population would do something violent or upending if they
| had an Elon?
| gosub100 wrote:
| Victim blaming. "How dare you get victimized and not do
| more to stop it?"
| 7e wrote:
| No, you're not a cynic. The EFF takes exquisite pains to hide
| from you the fact that these programs spied on foreigners,
| which is the job of the NSA. Thus, they are necessary and
| proper, and perfectly legal.
|
| The EFF is a propaganda platform. You shouldn't take its claims
| at face value.
| showerst wrote:
| Foriegners like the US citizen spouses and (ex)girlfriends of
| NSA employees?
|
| https://www.reuters.com/article/world/uk/nsa-staff-used-
| spy-...
| throw-qqqqq wrote:
| Let's not confuse the fact that they are only legally allowed
| to spy on foreigners, with what they actually do.
|
| I have no idea how you effectively filter mass wiretaps in
| fibre raw data and exclude americans. It's impossible to not
| catch some/lots of domestic data as well..
| amiga386 wrote:
| Don't give us this "perfectly legal" crap. To remind you: the
| NSA killed off ThinThread (that explicitly took care to avoid
| wiretapping US citizens' data) in favour of Trailblazer,
| which grabs ALL data, ALL the time, including ALL US
| citizens' data.
|
| Their explicit intent was to break the law. They broke the
| law. Then Congress retroactively let them get away with it.
| They're still breaking the law today.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThinThread
|
| > The "change in priority" consisted of the decision made by
| the director of NSA General Michael V. Hayden to go with a
| concept called Trailblazer, despite the fact that ThinThread
| was a working prototype that claimed to protect the privacy
| of U.S. citizens. ThinThread was dismissed and replaced by
| the Trailblazer Project, which lacked the privacy protections
| kmeisthax wrote:
| So what you're saying is that the NSA wiretapping is OK
| because they're not doing it to you? That's really dumb.
|
| Currently, the US is in a number of intelligence sharing
| arrangements in which countries ask other countries to spy on
| their own citizens for them. e.g. if the NSA can't spy on
| someone because they know they're American, they ask GCHQ to
| do it for them. And vice versa. This is why human rights need
| to be as universal as possible, because otherwise you just
| ask your buddy to do what you can't legally do yourself.
|
| "We only spy on foreigners" is a water sandwich.
|
| Furthermore, it is NSA policy to treat all encrypted traffic
| as foreign, and to archive it forever until it can be
| decrypted and searched to determine if it was legal to
| decrypt and search it. In other words, "we only spy on
| foreigners" is a guilty until proven innocent policy.
|
| "Necessary and proper" is decided by a security apparatus
| with a conflict of interest. Nobody voted for this, the
| executive branch just decided to do it. As for legality,
| well, I'll give you that Congress _retroactively made the
| spying legal_. On the other hand, the US Constitution has a
| pretty clear restriction on the use of state power in order
| to search and seize. Being a foreigner is not in and of
| itself necessary suspicion to justify searching through all
| their shit, _because being from another country is not a
| crime_.
| basisword wrote:
| How close are we to "bypassing" a lot of this spying when some
| of the most popular communications platforms (e.g. WhatsApp)
| are end to end encrypted? Will the tech eventually solve the
| problem in a convenient way, at least for those who care?
| kelipso wrote:
| Really, the likelihood of all of them having backdoors is
| almost 100%.
| HexPhantom wrote:
| Mark Klein was just a guy doing his job... until he saw something
| he couldn't ignore. He didn't have to speak up. He could have
| walked away, lived his life, and let someone else deal with it.
| But he didn't. Rest in peace, Mark
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| I'm expecting nobody will do that anymore in the US.
|
| First, those heroes were treated as enemies, then their
| revelations lead to nothing for the country, and great pain for
| them.
|
| Finally, I doubt they would be proud of what their country is
| today and think it's worth the sacrifice.
| INTPenis wrote:
| Rest in peace sweet prince. I'll never forget this discovery, it
| was probably my first realization that whatever is possible
| technically is most likely being done somewhere to exert power
| over people.
|
| And in this case most people in tech knew you could split a
| network backbone, and if you can do it then most likely someone
| is doing it. But Mark actually brought it into the light.
|
| And that's what we can't forget in 2025, that whatever is
| possible technically is most likely being done by someone
| somewhere. Today it would be using AI to oppress people, track
| citizens, predict crimes, accuse people of crimes they might
| commit, or whatever your imagination anchored in technical
| reality can picture.
| user99999999 wrote:
| RIP to privacy too
| heraldgeezer wrote:
| Such a different time. I got kind of anti-american after that but
| now with the world I am 100% pro USA/EU/Western world and Israel
| because the others are much worse. Much, much worse.
| krunck wrote:
| I am thankful for what he did. We need more Mark Kleins.
| 7e wrote:
| The NSA's Upstream program primarily targeted foreign
| communications under the authority of Section 702 of the FISA
| Amendments Act. However, it also incidentally collected data from
| U.S. citizens, particularly when their communications were
| intercepted while in contact with foreign targets.
|
| The court cases were thrown out because of congressional action,
| as they should be, because the entire purpose of the NSA is to
| spy on foreigners. Thus these programs were legal and this
| whistleblowing was not, in fact, whistleblowing at all, just
| leaks of classified information.
| Integrape wrote:
| Does this not count as a political post? It would have been
| flagged if the title had DOGE instead of NSA.
| neilv wrote:
| Side comment about suboptimal HN commenting or UI...
|
| This post is about someone noteworthy dying, but the top relevant
| comment is followed by _over a dozen screenfulls_ of text about a
| sewer inspection van, before you get to anything else.
|
| If you start paging through it, do you close the browser tab in
| annoyance before you get to any further discussion of the person
| and why they're noteworthy?
|
| > _4. Mark Klein, AT &T whistleblower who revealed NSA mass
| spying, has died (eff.org) 1404 points by leotravis10 20 hours
| ago | flag | hide | 306 comments_
| 0xffff2 wrote:
| Are you aware that you can collapse comments chains?
| neilv wrote:
| Yes, or go up and hit "next", but I don't normally have to on
| HN.
|
| With the mouse-over-to-and-click-on-tiny-gray-link UI, it's
| usually faster to autoscroll/scrollwheel or hit PgDn.
|
| So if you start doing the usual way, and it's not working,
| that's frustration with the post.
|
| And is it worth your time to figure out where to prune/skip
| within the tree, when you have to go navigate to the tree
| links. And probably have hide/next/prev multiple times, to
| get past the entire tree from where you realize.
|
| If people had more UI-efficient tree operations (like in past
| threading newsreaders), and knew how to use them, then it
| would be easier.
|
| But with what we have, we can get important posts where
| important comments are effectively suppressed, for many
| readers, just by putting a dozen pages of frustrating
| distraction in front of them.
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