'Sending a message': what the US and UK are attempting to do

Folks, take a step back and take a look what is going on here. When you were a child, would any of you have believed that one day in the early 21st century, you would wake up in a world where your own government spies on each and every single citizen, plus whoever is connected to them in another country, where they send agents to newspapers to oppress the freedom of the press?<p>I mean, isn&#x27;t this almost surreal? Like a cheap sci-fi novel has become reality?<p>Who&#x27;s the real terrorists in 2013? I for one am more scared, appaled by what has been bubbling to the surface every week, almost every day since Snowden.

When articles like this are submitted to HN, can we have a discussion on what us as individuals can actually do (if anything)?<p>I&#x27;d rather drop 100 comments on general FEELING towards the news, for 1 or 2 comments suggesting &#x27;Let&#x27;s create a campaign site&#x27; or &#x27;There is nothing we can do, lets just sit here in silence&#x27;<p>Edit: For what it&#x27;s worth my ONLY suggestion is that a campaign site similar to that for SOPA, etc. is put together - ideally on GitHub or similar so it can be rapidly put together.

This is taking quite a scary turn, but not, I think, in the direction that the governments are intending. Rather than intimidate people into silence they are actively creating a movement of people who are abhorred and appalled by these tactics. Kick that dog enough times and you&#x27;re going to create an organized movement that can fight back. This is how unrest happens.<p>What I don&#x27;t think they realize is that the dog they&#x27;re kicking is also the most technically capable one on the planet. They&#x27;re not poking Al Qaeda with a stick, they&#x27;re poking every programmer and hacker who cares about privacy with a stick. While they may have unlimited financial resources, I would pit unlimited technical resources and creativity against that any day of the week. If they manage to create an organized group of highly technical opposition I think they&#x27;re going to be very surprised by how capable it is.

&quot;Here is David Miranda explaining to BBC what it&#x27;s like to be forced to turn over your passwords to security agents who have detained you under a terrorism law, so they can troll through your emails and Facebook account and Skype program while you are detained. Just watch that short video and judge for yourself.&quot;<p>As I read this I tried to imagine how to reset my digital life, now that all my passwords are exposed. You just about have to become a brand new person, and abandon every account you currently have. Any change to a current account would be observed by the NSA and GCHQ. To the extent that this guy had any privacy or security at all, he&#x27;s screwed for the rest of his life.

There are people who&#x27;ve been planning these things all along, just to give you a hint:<p>“The technotronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society.<p>Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values.<p>Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen.<p>These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities.”<p>Author: Zbigniew Brzezinski, United States National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter from 1977 to 1981.<p>You can find this at: <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/162691-the-technotronic-era-involves-the-gradual-appearance-of-a-more" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.goodreads.com&#x2F;quotes&#x2F;162691-the-technotronic-era-...</a>

If you think there is nothing that can be done you should take a look at Gene Sharp&#x27;s theory of nonviolent resistance: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_Sharp" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Gene_Sharp</a>

I love his coining of the term &quot;state-loyal journalists.&quot; Greenwald, Snowden, et al deserve Nobel Peace Prizes...

The policy of intimidation is working - it doesn&#x27;t matter if the NSA&#x2F;GCHQ really do have the technology which is actually capable of performing this scale of surveillance - something which I&#x27;m entirely unconvinced of, incidentally - they are spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) and being quite successful at it too. Are they capable of trawling so much data to the depth that is claimed? Probably not. Are they capable of intimidating individuals with wide reaching knock-on effects including among the general public? Absolutely. So which method is having the most impact? The threat is far more effective than the reality. Make people scared - it saves you having to actually do anything.

Lets condemn places like China, Russia, and Syria for they way they limit or monitor electronic communications but when the US and &quot;Friends&quot; do it its for mumble mumble TERRORISTS mumble mumble....<p>If the laws don&#x27;t allow us to monitor our citizens lets just change the laws or interpret the words differently.

Just pay attention to the messaging coming from some of these media sources. The gov&#x27;t propaganda is growing less subtle; making it easier to identify who is working for whom.

Government is us, when stomach tries to fight with brain over trivial details like food you or giving, amount, quality and so on. One day brain will kill stomach with all the control mechanisms, it dies too.<p>&quot;For the benefit of all&quot;.<p>We already live in virtual reality where most of the things we do is just to numb our perception. Nothing to do with advancements in energy, space travel, consciousness. Going where no man has gone before.<p>And we lough and down talk anyone daring to, so we create spying&#x2F;regulatory system, government that picks oddities and puts them in place. It works well, very well, so well that now we are stuck in place where we want to be, beer Fridays, pizza Saturday, sunny ice cream Sundays, something to look forward after week long slavery you hate so much.<p>It is so complicated and weaved trough all of us and all out needs&#x2F;wishes&#x2F;predicaments. To long and want something, you create opposite situation that makes that &quot;something&quot; so amazing.<p>Sometimes I wonder, what would take this organism(humanity) to evolve&#x2F;change. Searching for health(happiness) in cancer(fear)? Or total annihilation for something else to come in play.

Almost anything can be crowdsourced nowadays. 237 years ago, the founders of the US tried to crowdsource power. I don&#x27;t see why we can&#x27;t reboot that whole idea.<p>Political candidates, lobbying initiatives and legislation can all be directly impacted, in the current framework they exist under, by crowdsourcing. While Kickstarter and Indiegogo have shown us it&#x27;s possible with art and industrial design and dozens of other media, there&#x27;s not a go-to place to do it for politics.<p>So if this community really wants to change our dystopian future, then that&#x27;s the answer. We could have the NSA completely defunded in a year if we wanted.

Presumably, the Snowden leak files are distributed among Guardian employees. In order to insure against the destruction of all copies of these files due to a worst-case scenario, wouldn&#x27;t it be a good idea to distribute the files globally? If the Guardian wants to maintain control of the divulgence of leaks, they could encrypt the leaks as a series of files in a bundle and distribute it over, say, BitTorrent. They could then release the key to decrypt each leak file as they see fit.

The British government looks like a farcical bully in this. A playground bruiser that intimidates his way down the hall before promptly slipping over.<p>Destroying the hard drives was an exercise in dominance, &#x27;do as we say or face the consequences&#x27; which had no impact (aside from inconvenience and the cost of a couple of Macbook Pros) to The Guardian but has made the UK .gov look foolish.<p>Pulling Miranda, abusing the terrorism laws, sending a message is another dominance play but it&#x27;s back fired awfully. Brazil is annoyed, GG is annoyed, America has calmly washed it&#x27;s hands and said &quot;leave us out of it&quot;. In terms of strategic decisions it can&#x27;t be described as an excellent one. What&#x27;s the UK .gov gotten out of it? Some encrypted data and social network passwords, it&#x27;s not a win.<p>If you&#x27;re in the UK and you think this is unacceptable for our government to be trying to intimidate the journalists who&#x27;re revealing the uncomfortable level of surveillance we now live under, and what the security apparatus has become, then write to your MP. That&#x27;s what they&#x27;re there for. We can&#x27;t just hope that it&#x27;ll surge through the halls of Parliament, we need to be heard that we think it&#x27;s not acceptable and not representative of what we want Britain to be.

I can almost picture NSA analysts vulturing all over the private data collected of these enemies of the state.<p>How soon utnil they send out the drones into the foreign lands where they have not so great a political strongarm?<p>&quot;Drone bombing in brazilian airport kills dozens&quot;<p>&quot;Sadly it was necessary as one of the passangers carried terrorist intel that would put our free world at risk&quot;

Of course, remember that the Guardian was perfectly fine with the government harassing journalists as long as it was not them: <a href="http://reason.com/blog/2013/08/20/despite-its-battle-with-the-surveillance" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;reason.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2013&#x2F;08&#x2F;20&#x2F;despite-its-battle-with-th...</a>

The US government spying on citizens is not new at all. It has happened for as long as our nation has been one.<p>It may be more insidious now because the technology to aggregate spying on &quot;we the people&quot; is available. Welcome to the truly post-privacy era.<p>Furthermore, the average person is not outraged by this. Cue the shock and awe for one to ten minutes after the biggest breaking stories about it and after that, for the common (wo)man, its all yawns.<p>Plus, it is quite a dilemma. How does the government protect against terrorism while trying to protect the citizens&#x27; privacy when a citizen, or anyone moving among us citizens, could be a terrorist or sympathizer?<p>The intent is not bad but what could come of this kind of stealthy access is bad if it falls into the wrong hands or becomes guided by ill-intent.

&quot;sending a message&quot; == getting you to doubt, think twice == instilling fear == creating terror == being a terrorist<p>Fighting terror with terror. How can it be that no one in the UK government agencies responsible for this can see the irony? How can it be that they don&#x27;t understand their actions are degrading society just as much as those of the terrorists?

If they do succeed in &quot;shutting the leaks down&quot;, I wonder if that would be enough for supporters to finally release all the docs publicly. Or for Assange to give out the key to one of his insurance files.<p>I wouldn&#x27;t get my hopes up though, these so called leakers seem more stringently against full pubic disclosure than the people they are leaking against.

I could sense anger wash all over Mr.Greenwald again, as he typed that one out (which might have resulted in the typo I noticed &quot;...They threatened the Guardian with prior restrained(t?) and then forced the paper to physically smash their hard drives in a basement...&quot;). Heck, I was upset just reading it.

&gt;the remains of the hard disc and Macbook<p>Yet the picture shows a (PCIe?) extension card, which can not be found in Macbooks. The green PCB isn&#x27;t a Macbook part either. And no part of a HDD is shown at all.

The one good thing I see is that cross-party-lines anger by some politicians is actually happening. The party leaderships are fighting it but for once they might be powerless to stop it.

Oh they&#x27;re sending a message alright. I&#x27;m just not sure it&#x27;s the message they want to send.

Controversial article that made me think:<p><a href="http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/danhodges/100231711/why-does-being-a-relative-of-glenn-greenwald-place-you-above-the-law/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blogs.telegraph.co.uk&#x2F;news&#x2F;danhodges&#x2F;100231711&#x2F;why-do...</a>

fuck the NSA