NSA Unlawfully Surveiled Kim Dotcom in New Zealand(thehill.com) |
NSA Unlawfully Surveiled Kim Dotcom in New Zealand(thehill.com) |
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/index.cfm?objectid=11897719
> Dotcom, who should have been protected from GCSB surveillance as a New Zealand resident, said the GCSB did not know because its equipment was being used by the NSA, which was "directly involved".
> The GCSB documents do contain an admission of NSA involvement, although it was not made outright. In response to the accusation the GCSB had accessed NSA networks, the bureau refused to answer on national security grounds and acknowledged that under High Court rules that doing so would be seen by the court as an admission it had.
> Dotcom said the details showed some other party was using GCSB systems and he believed it would be the NSA."The US government has requested my extradition. The NSA is clearly the most interested party."
> "The NSA has unrestricted access to GCSB surveillance systems. In fact most of the technology the GCSB uses was supplied by the NSA."
If he told me the sky was blue, I'd go outside to check.
There are many examples of NSA and Five Eyes spying that have absolutely nothing to do with terrorism (though afaik none specific to copyright infringement). I linked to a handful in this other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14907667
All those cases fall within the domain of legitimate foreign intelligence targets of any organization.
Intelligence agencies perform political and economic intelligence all the time.
But Kim is just an irrelevant target he's way too of a small fish for them to bother.
That means he's entirely free to make up stuff like this knowing that anyone who attempts to call him on it will face the "well it could happen" argument.
Of course they do. Read the Wikileaks! The NSA has given itself provenance over the entire planets' worth of digital content. They hack the origin.
They go after literally everything. Do people not remember the snowden leaks?
So in this case, the NSA would have a perfectly good reason to have him under surveillance. Primarily, when you think about how Hollywood and the music industry was impacted economically (and culturally) by his company. The DOJ were justified in requesting technical help, and would expect get intel from the NSA (Who in turn would request assistance from the NZ Folks) to support their case.
For fun they could do a comparison of the number of copyright complaints both YouTube and Mega received and the number of those complaints they have acted on. Maybe for extra bonus we can also compare the number of counterfeit products on Amazon (violating copyright or trademark).
There is a reason that military agencies get to edit scripts before they allow the use of their resources in movies and it's not because they're stupid people.
If American made media is such a powerful tool you think American tax payer dollars would go to something like Mega maximizing distribution of American values through this media, rather than spending (tax payer) money to limit the distribution of said American values.
It's still much more shocking to me how NZ authorities de-facto renounced their sovereignty, by letting US agents free to walk all over their laws when they raided him. They did that with glee, with the happiness of a servant who knows he's making a great job for his master and rewards will ensue. It made a mockery of the NZ justice system, all involved police chiefs and politicians should have been thrown in jail for treason.
Piss off large conglomerates, and they'll in turn get the government to throw the book at you, even if they have to write a new book to get it done...
Yes, the NSA is a spy agency. It's their job to spy outside the country. And of course the spying is illegal outside of the country - no country endorses being spied on by foreign governments.
Isn't this exactly what the Five Eyes surveillance agreement is? It certainly seems extremely relevant and may also explain why the NSA's surveillance here was possible.
Kim's great at getting press and that's about all there is to see here.
-edit to correct autocorrect
But there is still something troubling here for Americans, because it means that there is an existing mechanism (and/or set of social relations) in place by which American copyright interests can turn the intelligence agencies into their servants. Once such machinery exists, it is at least as dangerous to Americans as it is to foreigners.
Except for, you know, treaty rights. Which there are a lot of.
Namely the RIAAA and MPAA in this particular case.
1. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/06/smile-youre-in-t... 2. ...I'll try to find the link but recently watched a YouTube video of a government hearing on this where the senator or congressman was very unhappy about this situation.
The bigger thing there is the fact that a kind of well orchestrated "operation" took place is now proven, disclosed, and fully admitted by NZ officials. The info disclosed gives a lot of background on how US NSA solicits "favors" from other states and on what pretexts
There should be by definition very little overlap between the two. Law enforcement works nationally, where law applies; intelligence agencies can not work where law applies, because they would be in flagrant violation of it.
See:
Spying on Petrobas, a a Brazilian oil company: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/09/nsa-spying-bra...
Spying on an EU Anti-trust official: https://www.cnet.com/news/nsa-spied-on-eu-antitrust-official...
And there are a number of cases where the NSA spied on payment processing companies. I haven't included those because you could argue that those may be related to tracking terrorism funding.
A fairer question might be, why is the mission of the NSA to enforce copyright law for media companies? Shouldn't they be busy trying to hunt down terrorists, prevent attacks against the USA and it's people abroad, things like that?
The GCSB was found to be illegally wiretapping him, sadly since that time the govt changed the law to make all that stuff legal. It's election year here in NZ if we want to change these laws we need to change the govt.
It's probable they do things that are illegal under US law, but I doubt this is one of them.
The government does lots of things that are probably illegal but there's no precedent set. That gives them the opportunity to argue in court why the specific instance in question is different.
Sadly the US Court Systems has stated it does not have the authority to apply the Constitution to the US Government when the US Government is acting outside US Soil, it is a ridiculous standard but....
That being said, this story is incredibly thin.
>It aimed to explain why Dotcom and others charged in the FBI's Megaupload investigation were spied on for two months longer than previously admitted.
There's no reason this would even be improper, if the FBI had gone through due process in the US, which it appears they had. This story appears to be entirely Kim Dotcom's lawyer trying to politicize his case in order to fight a lawful extradition.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Code_of_Military_Justi...
(One of the first times I realised that the web was going to be mis-used/abused by morons...)
Similar to how "The president can't have a conflict of interest", the three-letter agencies can basically do whatever they want and get away with it.
Who is "we" in this context? At least in the Germany I know most people actually call this "Gefahrenabwehr" (literally: danger prevention) or "Staatsschutz" and can't remember any historic event which has shown that this is a bad idea.
If right-wing terrorist join the party people call it "Nationalsozialistischer Untergrund" (National Socialist Underground) [0]
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Undergrou...
That's why drones and seal teams are transferred to those agencies for short periods of time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_war_crimes#Comma...
Though NSA's actions may or may not be illegal in the US, there are other standards used to judge or analyze military action in the global economic marketplace.
Perhaps the constitution allows the president to do whatever he or she wants with the military (as long as it is within the historic bounds of what militaries do) without triggering the need for congressional approval unless it reaches a "state of war" at which point people might actually start dying.
That would seem like the sort of practical level of discretion that a country would give its executive branch, but I can't help thinking that there could or should be some law somewhere that gave the president's actions against allies some type of legislative basis, so that voters had an idea of how the president would use these secretive powers, and could hold the executive to account at the ballot box.
This page seems to have more information about that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seizure_of_Megaupload#Indictme...
It's a bit like being homosexual in countries with harsh state-religions but tolerant attitudes: keep it quiet and nobody will bother you, but if you flaunt it then the law will crack down on you, because you're attacking the basis of the whole legal edifice.
Kinda like Uber? rim shot
But I'm still kinda serious. Your whole comment works if you swtich "pirated content" for "unlicensed, unregistered taxi service"
Owning a taxi medallion of declining value is a consequence of the market.
Having songs you have recorded, spent money marketing on be stolen? That causes financial harm to the artists.
Imagine spending 40 million to make a movie. Now have your work given away for free to anyone that wants it. That is theft.
An unlicensed “taxi” service isn’t harming the rights of innocent people. It isn’t stealing. Who are the actual victims of Uber (besides women employees?) Really nobody. If you own a taxi, nothing is stopping by you from driving with Uber. Uber isn’t stealing your car.
What happens in 40 years, when the US is on much less-firm footing as de facto World Cop?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Satanic_Verses_controver...
Didn't take any US precedent.
I think it is unrealistic to expect the US government to willingly give up one of their citizens to China or Russia over an issue of free speech anytime soon. And frankly I think it would be irrational for the average citizen to fear they would be involved in such an exchange.
"Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must."
Tying our hands today will do nothing to help us when we are the weak and someone else is the strong.
Economic security for the well-connected comes at the expense of economic security for the average citizen.
It gave economic security to Ford Motor Company when a law imposing 30% tariffs on all foreign trucks was passed. Did that give economic security to the average citizen though? They must now pay a massive tax every time they buy a foreign truck.
And even if we naively assume some economic gain to the US, isn't that outweighed by the cost of their own war on encryption and instence on backdoors and other meddling in the ordinary functiong of the US tech industry?
I don't think the US public really cares about the privacy of foreigners against US intelligence agencies. Further, it's not just some marginal benefit. If piracy became user friendly (think Netflix or better) and easy to do with impunity, it would be a massive threat to the entire American creative industry. No one is under the fantasy that we can root out piracy altogether.
That's laughable. The Russians and Chinese have made a gold mine out of ripping off America's military and commercial technology. The cold war would have been very different if the Russians/Soviets hadn't stolen the US (and allied) technology on the atomic bomb.
It's neither naive nor some economic gain to be had. It's blatantly obvious and it's vast. If - as one example - China is really going to be a serious long-term competitor to the US economy (and its technology interests) over time, and it certainly appears they are, then the US needs to be capable of advanced economic espionage, exactly the same as China has been doing to the US on their way up. If they come up with some new marvel of technology (it's bound to happen given their economic scale at this point), the US should plunder it exactly the same as China and Russia would happily do to the US.
No. There's no support for this view in constitutional law.
Otherwise, those people might as well wipe their backsides with their Form 2555s and mail them back without checks attached!
They just have a problem applying the law to the government when the actions are over seas..
Nice little loop hole they carved out for themselves...
And that's before you even consider the willingness of US courts to prosecute foreign nationals for breaking US laws on foreign territory, where one or more US citizens may have been tangentially affected by it.
Law enforcement cannot be above the law. It destroys the principles that make laws worth having and enforcing.
then there Article 2 Section 8 which does not grate the authority to create and agency such as the NSA or preform international Spying thus since the constitution does not expressly grant such authority the Federal Government is barred from such activity
As a matter of fact, those of us who were warning about the NSA et al before Snowden were heavily relying on these 90's revelations to extrapolate what they were doing given the same system and new technology in a super-connected world.
So, for all the people in this thread to act like it's absurd that NSA was spying on KDC is ridiculously intellectually dishonest. NSA might not care about KDC individually, because they are just backdooring all the equipment (core router/switch backdoors, fiber splitters, etc) at backbone node junctions and they are gobbling up as much as possible for sifting later. Hence the word games the NSA leaders were playing with congress about collection vs wiretaping etc.
It's the NSA sharing raw data with Israelis in reverse, and it's happening all over to the point that the data sharing agreements themselves seem to me to be more of a security risk than the individuals they might deem worthy of a selector.
What's even more amazing to me is that on hn in years past you would have already been called out on this. I think hn is quickly becoming a place for business-people pretending to be hackers instead of the other way around, and it's shameful, but a different discussion I suppose.
This is often repeated, but I don't believe any evidence has been published to indicate this is happening.
Look, as a fairly rational conspiracy theorist, I recognize the importance of evidence, but in cases like this, it's very unlikely unless a leak happens for you to ever get it, and hence instead of looking for deductive evidence you can never rely on getting, you have to use inductive logic instead, and the difference between the two logical methods (inductive/deductive) is an important distinction that isn't made enough.
Do we have hard evidence that KDC was spied on specifically? No. Do we have inductive reason to believe it's probable? Very much so.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/20/us-uk-secret-d...
Off the top of my head:
- NSA surveillance of the semi-public Brazilian oil company Petrobras: http://g1.globo.com/fantastico/noticia/2013/09/nsa-documents...
- NSA tapped the phone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel: http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/merkel-calls-obama...
- NSA spying of Indian diplomats to uncover details about their nuclear and space programs: http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/india-among-top-target...
This article is a decent compilation of Snowden-related stories from the first year after his leaks: http://www.businessinsider.com/snowden-leaks-timeline-2016-9
I'm not aware of any assistance rendered to piracy investigations, but there is ample evidence of them sharing intel for the purpose of domestic law enforcement - which is way worse. So the call for direct evidence is nice (and silly considering the nature of the evidence), but the logic of "our boys would never" is pretty soundly blown out of the water. They have every reason to - and no reason not to, as there is no punitive action even after being caught.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/08/dea-and-nsa-team-intel...
None of that matters.
What matters is just how little any of us give a fuck.
When Snowden hit the wires, it was a digital apocalypse for a lot of people. The GCHQ "catalog of intercepts", such as it was, just hurt like hell. The details about Keyscore and the technology that out-Google's Google: horrific. I can't explain how depressing it is to know that there are hardware y-combinators out there, in the oceans, providing an elite class with advantages none of us will ever see, in their effort to project power in the new, digital, order.
It was absolutely disturbing.
What made it hard to wake up from the hangover was the realisation: 99.95% of the digital-using world just don't give a fuck, because they don't understand.
We cannot trust our computers any more. We never could, really, but now: we just can't.
How do we back out of this situation? It has to start with a local revolution: roll your own. Grow your own. And, unfortunately, that isn't happening. Technological centralism has enslaved us all - and there are only a few, elite, who can escape these bonds.
Are you one of them, "citizen"?
Airbnb and Uber certainly broke some laws that were only put in place to protect monopolies. I think that is good for society. But they also broke plenty of laws that were legitimately for public health and safety. I don't think the former absolve the later and I don't think it is up to you, me, Airbnb, or Uber to decide which laws fall into which buckets. That is the job of our judicial system.
I disagree that it is not up to each citizen to decide which laws are just or unjust. In fact I feel it is the duty of each citizen to do so and to actively work for/against laws that one considers just/unjust.
Strongly disagree. The 4th branch of the government should be called "public outcry". If corrupt laws are on the books, trusting ivy league-trained judges to fix it is foolhardy.
Everyone in an Uber or AirBnB transaction is a willing participant. Huge difference.
The call for proof on individual cases is, of course, a valid one. But to overlook the fact that we have no way to put the genie back in the box - that, in fact, there are two computer worlds - one for us, and one for the elites - is to allow ourselves to be enslaved by secrets.
The secrets that Snowden gave us all have only really further served to enslave us all. We, the people, do not care. And now that we have demonstrated that we don't have the gumption to care about our own enslavement, the deal is sealed. Nobody is fighting back, because nobody is aware, because nobody wants to know the truth: the world has gone computer, and none of us have the keys. Only our masters do.
In this context though, it is because the headline indicates that it is a proven fact. However, it is not, it is an assumption directly from Dotcom. I think there would be no issue if it were more clearly stated as an allegation.
If there was evidence of such loopholes, people could demand change from their representatives. Without proof, I guess the only thing someone can do is repeat it in any IC-related thread on HN to get some easy karma points (Seens to work well!).