Mega-CAAAAR!

(One of the first times I realised that the web was going to be mis-used/abused by morons...)

(Right after he gives Hannity his other scoop: https://twitter.com/seanhannity/status/866016183815942144)

And the artists that make the content. RIAAA doesn’t actually own copyrights – artists and labels do.

True, if America had the same propaganda goals but a much more socialist attitude. As it is, one of those values is that the people who own this media should be incredibly rich. And those rich people should have more of a say over what is allowed, and they love copyright - the longer the term and the more violent the enforcement the better.

Voice of America. See also military censorship of military resources used in movies.

Yes, thank you.

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.

> "In Germany, when intelligence agencies merge with ordinary law enforcement, we call it Gestapo."

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...

And it is indeed incorrect because the constitution and the bill of rights do apply to foreign citizens who are visiting the us. Of course there are laws which are designed to protect citizens but don't protect foreigners but they are not actually part of the constitution

Doesn't apply to the Intel agencies, at least not fully.

That's why drones and seal teams are transferred to those agencies for short periods of time.

Even then it doesn't really matter. I'm pretty sure it's now fact that the US broke the United Nations Convention against Torture during the war on terror. I seem to remember the USG even admitting this. Nothing was done. For now the US is powerful enough that it will do what it wants.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_war_crimes#Comma...

The concept of legality gets awkward when talking about the military force of a nation, but even in the United States there are limits to what the military (NSA, DOD, etc.) are authorized to do. Though the matter at hand could be framed as a matter of 'economic security' to the US, it is unclear that such an argument is sound. And if that argument is not sound, the consequences that stem from the US military being involved in the domestic law enforcement of another state against their will are not desirable to the US from a policy perspective.

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.

From what I recall, MegaUpload was accused of not only providing incentives for uploading files, but also ignoring the fact that some files were very obviously pirate content.

This page seems to have more information about that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seizure_of_Megaupload#Indictme...

I'm not sure they are, they're just not nearly as public. Kim Dotcom is / was notoriously boastful about his actions, and all the money he made off those actions. I've never heard similar things about the founders of any other file hosting service founder/owner that is well known for piracy. Makes him an incredibly appealing target I think.

I am not usually in the "if you have nothing to hide..." crowd, but this isn't some kid in Minnesota who downloaded a Metallica album. This is someone who created a business enterprise to circumvent US law. This is someone who pulled in tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars from this business. For a time this business was the single biggest source of pirated content in the world. All of this was done basically in the open. If this guy was an American citizen I doubt there would have been any resistance to getting warrants for this information. The slope would have to be very slippery for it to get to the level that the average American citizen would be the target of this type of investigation.

I thought this was common knowledge long before Snowden, it's been a core responsibility of intelligence gathering agencies from the very beginning.

Economic security is national security. You can't really separate them once you're thinking past the immediate short term. A richer enemy will have better weapons, better technology, better surveillance, and better leverage.

>It should be, the US Constitution should apply to government actions ANYWHERE not just actions on US Soil, the US Constitution was never designed to be geographically limited, it was designed to limit what the government was allowed to do, period, in all cases in all lands, everywhere

No. There's no support for this view in constitutional law.

If the IRS can collect taxes from expatriate US citizens living and working overseas, the federal courts can certainly prosecute US citizens for breaking other federal laws while abroad.

Otherwise, those people might as well wipe their backsides with their Form 2555s and mail them back without checks attached!

Of course, acting with moral authority extends the lifespan of leaders, because such leaders get more support than the nakedly self-interested. And thus tying your hands today does in fact put off the day when you're weak.

for starters 4th Amendment, and 10th amendment,

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

While I have had my tiffs with KDC (publicly on twitter usually), this entire thread that seems to ignore the five-eyes loopholes is extremely disingenuous. NSA wants everything, so that they or some other three letter can walk the cat back later from data in their massive data centers. Ever since the 90's and echelon days we knew the 47 UKUS core agreement of the "five-eyes" (which later expanded to more) was abused by letting foreign agencies surveil an allies citizens, bypassing their own domestic restrictions, and then when they handed the raw data over, since it came from another source, and they didn't do the "collection", it wasn't a violation.

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.

While I don't recall any leaks specific to piracy investigations, there were numerous leaks proving NSA involvement in cases which could in no way be described as relating to terrorism.

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

> Which Snowden leak showed that the NSA was being used to aid piracy investigations?

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...

The "spectacle of ignorance" on the part of the masses. The most horrific thing to come from all of this, is that we're all not at all interested in the knowledge that we have secret masters who have given themselves the right to inspect anything, alter anything - at all - in the digital world, and use that to maintain and continue to expand their power base.

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"?

That are a vast number of laws that are designed to enrich one party at the expense of another. They are nearly always portrayed by the captured regulators as being for the safety of the citizenry when actually they are primarily for the purpose of enriching themselves and their cronies. One could argue that it is every citizen's duty to circumvent or directly violate those laws in the interest of fairness to all citizens. One could go further and assert that supporting such laws is immoral since as a result many people lose freedom of choice, freedom of speech, freedom to associate or move about, have reduced access to knowledge and opportunities, and the list goes on.

You (and I) have been given very clear proof that the entirety of our digital technological world has been subverted by an ultra-elite class to serve their (secret) purposes.

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.

What is the goal in discussing something if there is no proof? I just don't quite understand.

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!).