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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   26880 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 4, 2023

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what makes you think "deserve" has anything to do with it?

Did you just come out of suspended animation after being put into cryogenic storage in the year 2012?

Yes, the feds are reading and listening to all of this shit. Yes, they are practically omnipresent on the internet. There's no controversy, there's no disputing it - details of the classified programs which are responsible for this surveillance have been leaked and you can just go read the training slides put together by the NSA to train their contractors on how to use these systems. The individual venue of discussion doesn't matter - when those topics are brought up in the clearnet, it gets government attention. Even me, some random person on the internet, knows enough about the NSA surveillance system that it'd take me less than a day to craft a query which returns every single place on the internet where certain problematic ideas are discussed. I'm legitimately interested in how you can actually think this given the extensive public disclosures that have already been made, because the only alternative I can think of is that you just haven't ready any news or current events for over a decade - in which case why are you posting about something you know nothing about?

I didn't get to read your opprobrium, which makes me slightly disappointed because it is obvious that you don't actually know the nature of the threat or how their surveillance works and I really like reading mistaken insults coming from people who don't understand my point or what they're talking about. Though if you are actually a security state employee with access to these programs I will fully accept that I deserve said invective and instead be overjoyed that you have become the next Ed Snowden and leaked the details of how the modern surveillance state works in order to win an argument. But I don't think you are, and while I would love to be proved wrong by some leaked and authenticated strategy documents I don't think you actually have any evidence to back up what you're saying.

If you were the Blob, and your capacity to actually capture, let alone process, petabytes of information is diminishing both by volume and you have a hangout of your actual capabilities, what would your transition strategy be?

Your strategy would be to just build a gigantic new data storage warehouse to hold all this communication, which they did in...2013 of all years. The NSA has an effectively unlimited budget and they can just store everything because the ability to retroactively summon up all this data and information is that important. Not for dealing with actual terror threats, because you're totally right that sucking up everything fills your servers with noise and junk. But if you're dealing with domestic political opposition, the ability to find every single communication or message someone made in the past is extremely useful.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/14/nsa-utah-data-facility

William Binney, a mathematician who worked at the NSA for almost 40 years and helped automate its worldwide eavesdropping, said Utah's computers could store data at the rate of 20 terabytes – the equivalent of the Library of Congress – per minute. "Technically it's not that complicated. You just need to work out an indexing scheme to order it."

Binney, who left the agency in 2001 and blew the whistle on its domestic spying, said the centre could absorb and store data for "hundreds of years" and allow agencies such as the FBI to retroactively use the information.

He said the centre will likely have spare capacity for "brute force attacks" – using speed and data hoards to detect patterns and break encrypted messages in the so-called deep web where governments, corporations and other organisations keep secrets. There would be no distinction between domestic and foreign targets. "It makes no difference anymore to them."

I'm guessing you don't know who William Binney is, but I highly recommend looking him up - you'd probably get along with him, because he was advocating for a program called "ThinThread" that would essentially do what you were describing as their optimal strategy, i.e. only focusing on important threats due to the NSA databases being clogged up with too much extraneous information. The reason we know about this is because he became a whistleblower, partially due to the NSA deciding to go with the approach you said was stupid instead. This is why I assumed you just didn't know what you're talking about - the decision you're claiming the NSA made was actually made over a decade ago, and they picked the option you said they would not. While if the NSA was actually trying to protect Americans against terror threats they should have gone with what you suggested, we know what their targets are like thanks to several whistleblowers. Russ Tice has pointed out that the NSA targets people like FISA court judges, members of the intelligence committee who are meant to have oversight over them, Senator Barack Obama and even after his time we know that they haven't changed their priorities, given that they were also tracking President Elect Donald Trump and his campaign (anyone within three hops of Carter Page).

In a resource constrained environment where onboarding new surveillance operators requires either outsourcing labor to cube-monkies poorly following contractor guidelines, or drawing from a limited pool of intelligent, underpaid white collar workers, both of which require onerous security clearances, it makes more sense to focus efforts on actual threats than attempting to monitor everything.

The point isn't to "monitor everything" per se but to have the ability to retroactively call up all the information and messages posted by a given individual or their various connections, which helps to assist with parallel construction and damaging leaks of private messages/information. While I don't have any proof, I think that one of the potential targets of this kind of monitoring would be Blake Neff, a writer for Tucker Carlson who had his identity on a pseudonymous messageboard leaked to CNN.

That's the reason why the Blob would be looking at forums like this - not because they think someone's going to read one too many articles on HBD and decide to go murdering black people, but because someone who reads or posts here might eventually become a person of interest. At that point, their connections to a forum where holocaust denial gets posted (shoutouts to SS!) and people talk openly about wrongthink like the heritability of IQ becomes a weapon that can be used to discredit, defame or 'cancel' them. Someone at CNN gets an email from an "anonymous tipster" who lets them know that some inconvenient political figure had a pseudonymous account on the motte where they implied that they believed in HBD, and then that person gets to be removed from public discourse.

Utilizing misinformation tactics to create a fog of uncertainty around what can be known and by whom, effectively camouflaging the actual extent of surveillance capabilities is a logical strategy in this environment.

There is no fog of uncertainty. If your communications are in cleartext, they have them. If you use non-serious encryption, they have them. Even if you are using serious encryption, if there is an informant or someone targeted for tailored access operations in the group with access to those communications they have them too. Even if we just ignore all the leaks and whistleblowers, the Motte would be targeted anyway - more limited surveillance operations tend to go by the "three hops" limit. If a single poster on here has a connection to someone with a connection to a dissident right group (and we have enough people posting holocaust denial and white nationalist adjacent talking points that this is almost certainly true) then we are all included in the dragnet anyway. As an aside, I've personally known someone in real life who received a visit from a government agent about their online shitposting, so congratulations - by virtue of talking to me you are within three hops of a confirmed surveillance target.

So is prioritizing surveillance on well-defined, high-risk areas and individuals rather than the broad net-casting strategy. The Motte is thoroughly not populated by a well-defined, high-risk population, and the hand-wavy paranoia about monitoring here is narcissistic and delusional.

You are just flat out wrong. They went with the broad net-casting strategy, and the threat is not that they are monitoring this site personally but that they are archiving the communications here along with the metadata behind them, so they can retroactively discredit people they do not like. I'm not concerned for myself personally because I know that I'm never going to become a mainstream politician, but pretending that communications on the clearnet aren't being logged and stored by the NSA is dumb enough that you should just imagine I put that opprobrium you deleted here instead.

your evidence that NSA continued to solely use a broad-net casting strategy for the post-2013 period is William Binney who stopped working for NSA in 2001.

The point of bringing up Binney is that the discussion about whether to go for everything or just a more limited program was made back then, and he was on the losing side. Serious leaks from within the NSA don't happen that often, but the last one that I saw (which was the Snowden leaks in 2013) implied that absolutely nothing had changed. The various revelations regarding the abuse of NSA database access for political opposition research during the Trump campaign seemed like more evidence that they hadn't actually changed anything since - but I'm more than happy to read if you've got a really good source for the NSA changing strategy.

You've shifted the goalposts from "Yes, the feds are reading and listening to all of this shit."

I'm afraid this comes down to an issue of unclear language - when I said that they are reading and listening to all of this shit I was referring to the broad sweeping and data archiving. Maybe I'm just being persnickety, but I think that those automated sweeping and archiving systems, with particularly "interesting" topics and ideas getting the attention of actual humans, absolutely do constitute listening. As I said, I've seen someone get a visit, in person, from a member of a FVEYS intelligence organisation to ask them about posts made in a small forum not unlike the motte, so it isn't like this is some bizarre hypothetical or paranoid fantasy. Saying that because actual human eyes only look at the posts their filtering systems flag means they aren't reading or listening just seems inaccurate and unclear to me - if someone I knew in person said they weren't listening to my phonecalls using the same reasoning I would very quickly stop being their friend.

What did I say?

I actually have no idea - I have not read whatever post contained that quote. It wasn't in any of your replies to me, nor was it in any of the replies I saw in the thread. This is my first time reading it and I had to click onto your profile in order to look through your other replies in order to see it (I hate doing this because it reminds me too much of reddit users trying to avoid dealing with someone's actual point). I actually totally agree with you that they aren't combing through Motte posts to find inclinational wrongthink, I just don't see how I was meant to glean that from the posts of yours that I actually interacted with.

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