Doesn't necessarily mean custom crypto, just "own version of encrypting files"; which could mean custom code using well known open source encryption libraries on files
You wouldn't say this about the US : we're not talking about a single individual here but a nation state. They can put a lot of people on this crypto and make it reasonably secure imo.
All that doesn't count because the government doesn't physically attack your house with with black helicopters if you make a freedom blog (that nobody reads).
Often I feel that we in the west have our own "whatabout-ism" when it comes to these issues. To those, I want to ask, if you wanted to enact fascistic surveillance and control over western society, how would you go about it differently from what we have today?
Would you really want to bring attention to yourself by being loud and violent, like we seem to expect "real" evil governments are? Or would you just do it secretly, mix it up with other issues like child pornography, terrorism and piracy, and just paint the alarmists as overreacting?
Because Julian Assange is free to come and go as he pleases. And of course Edward Snowden is happily drinking cocktails in Hawaii. And Glenn Greenwald's partner David Miranda was never detained at freedom-loving Heathrow airport. Chelsea Manning posts freely and regularly on her blog. See also Jeremy Hammond. Also Aaron Swartz. Also Daniel Elsberg. Also Lavabit. Also...
Ok, sorry for the sarcasm.
Maybe literally they don't physically attack your house with black helicopters. But they will bring the full force of the legal system on top of you backed up by threat and/or use of physical force.
And the tendency you describe is I think more properly denoted "whataboutery"?
David Miranda is alive and free. I won't defend what was done to him, but if that's on your list as among the worst anti-freedom things the government does to its enemies, we're doing great.
An honest debater attacks the strongest points, not the weakest ones. All you've done is given the parent comment the experience to make all examples in a list roughly equally bad.
While I agree with the general sentiment here, I fail to see the relevance of the last three names.
Even though I'm infinitely appreciative of his work with RECAP, in the end Swartz was just some guy that killed himself because he was too scared to go to court.
Ellsberg had his charges dropped and is a free man.
Levinson just broke the law for no apparent reason. (Snowden absolutely expected that email to be compromised)
You seem to suggest that a government which doesn't behave in accord with your wishes is illegitimate thereby. It's hardly unique these days, but one might hope nonetheless to see you stop short of treating it as something to be proud of.
The biggest obstacle to enacting fascist surveillance and control over western society is getting the relevant laws through the legislature. And I don't mean laws like "all communication must be monitored, but rather "criticism of the Supreme Leader is punishable by death." Without that, none of the rest gets you to fascism. With that, all of the rest could be built in short order.
I think the paranoia over potential tyrannical uses of this stuff to be misplaced. If you want to avoid tyranny, you need to prevent your leadership from being taken over by a tyrant. That's not to say that ubiquitous surveillance and such is not a worry, just that the worry isn't that it will turn our countries into Nazi Germany 2.0.
It doesn't jump straight to that. The intermediate steps usually involve one or more of:
1) A political ideology (Nazism, Communism, Islamism)
2) A real external threat (Communism, Capitalism, Islamism)
3) Sanctions or economic depression (Weimar Germany, Russia today)
The real external threat is essentially a sociopolitical system that propagates itself inside the turf of another sociopolitical system. This leads to far-right war hawks, and then center-right, issuing xenophobic statements. The step before "supporting supreme leaders" is usually "suppressing enemy ideologies". Like McCarthyism in USA or anti Muslim sentiment today. Or Iran's hatred of the USA and the Shah prior to their revolution. Or Soviet hatred of capitalist bourgeouis. Or Ukraine's hatred of communists. And so forth and so on.
Once "the enemy" is identified, the crackdown begins, which leads to more clamps on civil liberties. Then you might want to read the poem attributed to Martin Niemoller:
I think this all agrees with what I'm saying. It's not the NSA that's the tyrannical worry, it's the crazy politicians saying that we should only accept Christian refugees.
Regarding your poem, it's the "coming for" people that's the big problem, not merely the ability. If you don't want the government to "come for" people, you need to make sure the people in charge won't do that. It's not very useful to try to make it so they can't
You need to make sure the people in charge won't do that indefinitely. Even one particularly bad politician can cause some serious harm. If you limit their ability to monitor everyone, it limits their ability to round up dissenters. Given that surveillance doesn't seem to have much other use, it's reasonable to oppose it.
If you discuss and regulate the privacy issues in times of peace it limits, or at least hinders, their ability to cause harm when they can take advantage of fear or rage.
Really? Weimar's human rights laws were second to none in the world for their time, and are considered exemplary even now. If what you say is true, how did the Nazi abuses occur?
I agree, but only when somewhat reasonable leaders get caught up in fear and rage. The issue of being or becoming a fascist state is rather different. I think there are excellent reasons to curb the surveillance state, I just don't see one of them being the avoidance of a totalitarian government.
actually, it is the other way around. first, you must build the surveillance capabilities and make people accept it as inevitable. you also maintain certain level of paranoia in population to keep that fear simmering. the last piece, "criticism of supreme leader is punishable by death" can be quickly added at any time. in the meanwhile we have to live with second best thing: "telling the truth about government affairs, be it surveillance programs or shooting unarmed iraqis from apache helicopters, is punishable by life in prison or exile".
Did Weimar Germany have a surveillance state and concentration camps and secret police? I don't think so. All of that can be built on more or less a moment's notice once you get the "right" leadership, though.
Except it was not built overnight - it began with the Enablig act granting extraordinary power to the government, which then extended their power gradually over the late 30s leading to the war.
If you read primary sources it is obvious that many people are aware of what is happening but none felt powerful to act, a situation not that dissimilar to our present.
a) It is irrelevant what you "think so", that is not an argument. Weimar Republic indeed did have a secret police, Gestapo was modelled from that.
b) You are probably referring to the subsequent Holocaust and World War 2. If so, argumenting with Weimar Republic and drawing a quick installment of aforementioned practices from it is a straw man argument. You create a notion of how Weimar Republic immediately, "on a moment notice", preceded WW2 etc. (which is incorrect) and then beat that notion (incorrectly) into dust. All of that was built gradually from 1933, which is 6 years before WW2 and 9 years before Wannsee Conference.
a) Of course it's not an argument. Why do you take a clear admission of ignorance, like "I don't think so," and use that as the basis of an attack? That's just bizarre.
North Korea doesn't need any of this, because they just send you and your entire family off to a labor slash death camp if you so much as look at them sideways.
Given that context, listing stuff like "data stored and processed in the cloud" is asinine.
Yep, given the context of something absurd that you just made up, the mildest thing on his list, edited by you to nothing at all, is asinine. Well argued.
The USA will murder you in a death camp for looking at them sideways. Given that context, the difficulty North Koreans have in watching cat videos on Youtube is nothing.
Edit: Downvoters what are you objecting to?
Do you think people in "black sites", like Gitmo, are guilty of something?
Do you believe former staff at Gitmo who say "suicides" were murders are lying?
Do you think NKs can access the internet easily?
Or do just not understand that the ridiculous comparison/exaggeration/simplification in my post is exactly the same as mikeash makes, except he makes it apparently sincerely?
The issue of how each country portrays itself is valid, but to be fair, he's doing it because he's replying to someone doing the same.
The problem is he simply built a straw man to argue with; a comparison between an imaginary NK "evil" (there is no evidence they run a "death camp") with something he deliberately misquoted from the parent post.
>The USA sees itself as the shining beacon of freedom and democracy. North Korea doesn't.
I disagree.
Here's what Article 67 of the 2013 revision of the DPRK constitution has to say about freedom of speech:
>Citizens are guaranteed freedom of speech, the press,
assembly, demonstration and association. The State shall guarantee the conditions for the free activities of democratic political parties and social organizations.
Here's what Article 66 has to say about democracy:
>All citizens who have reached the age of 17 have the right
to elect and to be elected, irrespective of sex, race, occupation, length of residence, property status, education, party affiliation, political views or religious belief.
I'm a bit late by now, but I'd still consider it the primary source because reuters must have gotten the information from them. These guys did the research. I'm not sure I agree that the primary source necessarily equals to the first publication.
I didn't see any computers running this OS during my trip to Pyongyang. I saw a few machines running Win2k and one that ran a bowling alley ran Win3.1. Comical stuff..
I saw multiple machines running RedStar OS, even took photos of me interacting with one of them, on my 2-week trip a couple of years ago.
I commented on another North Korea post here on Hacker News a while ago, where I also posted the URL to the photos, if anyone are curious. It even had IP addresses set and some sort of network (not Internet) access.
Also, the government occasionally allows a radio amateur to operate. Just this month, North Korea was active on HF (last time was 2002). They'll be active again in Feb 2016:
At risk of repeating other respondents, you can just go. You can find a tour organiser and simply book onto one of their tours, or you can organise your own through the DPRK state tourism companies. Going with an established tour organiser is by far the easier way to do it. I went with Koryo Tours in 2012 and it couldn't have been easier; filled in the form, emailed my details, paid a deposit and the rest at the start of the tour.
But to reiterate, you can just book on a tour. There's no problem or difficulty doing it.
Not technical, but I thought it was interesting that it tags files with a record of every computer they have been on, even if it was not accessed. Or that privileged access is only really available to the government, and the operating system guards against many kinds of customizations that we think of as legitimate user actions.
It means that they didn't find the technological prowess exhibited in the various cyber attacks that the DPRK has been accused of reflected in the OS. The key word in the sentence quoted is "capability."
71 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 117 ms ] threadBut I think they want weak crypto that gives the NK government backdoor access.
We have mass surveillance of virtually all private and public digital communications.
Backdoored hardware (UEFI, SMM, et al.) and software.
Fingerprinting of multimedia through DRM.
Fingerprinting embedded as "a feature" in the MS Word.
Fingerprinting embedded in printers and copy machines.
Operating systems (OSX and Windows) calling back to the HQ all the time.
Data stored and processed in the cloud for the government to check.
Gag orders to keep the people from speaking out.
Secret courts for those who do speak out.
Torture prisons in Europe for those who might do something against the government.
Often I feel that we in the west have our own "whatabout-ism" when it comes to these issues. To those, I want to ask, if you wanted to enact fascistic surveillance and control over western society, how would you go about it differently from what we have today?
Would you really want to bring attention to yourself by being loud and violent, like we seem to expect "real" evil governments are? Or would you just do it secretly, mix it up with other issues like child pornography, terrorism and piracy, and just paint the alarmists as overreacting?
Because Julian Assange is free to come and go as he pleases. And of course Edward Snowden is happily drinking cocktails in Hawaii. And Glenn Greenwald's partner David Miranda was never detained at freedom-loving Heathrow airport. Chelsea Manning posts freely and regularly on her blog. See also Jeremy Hammond. Also Aaron Swartz. Also Daniel Elsberg. Also Lavabit. Also...
Ok, sorry for the sarcasm.
Maybe literally they don't physically attack your house with black helicopters. But they will bring the full force of the legal system on top of you backed up by threat and/or use of physical force.
And the tendency you describe is I think more properly denoted "whataboutery"?
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/whataboutery
Maybe you should apply it yourself and respond to my strongest points instead of my weakest ones.
2) You only made one point, and that was the only one responded to.
2) My one point wasn't responded to at all.
Even though I'm infinitely appreciative of his work with RECAP, in the end Swartz was just some guy that killed himself because he was too scared to go to court.
Ellsberg had his charges dropped and is a free man.
Levinson just broke the law for no apparent reason. (Snowden absolutely expected that email to be compromised)
I think the paranoia over potential tyrannical uses of this stuff to be misplaced. If you want to avoid tyranny, you need to prevent your leadership from being taken over by a tyrant. That's not to say that ubiquitous surveillance and such is not a worry, just that the worry isn't that it will turn our countries into Nazi Germany 2.0.
1) A political ideology (Nazism, Communism, Islamism)
2) A real external threat (Communism, Capitalism, Islamism)
3) Sanctions or economic depression (Weimar Germany, Russia today)
The real external threat is essentially a sociopolitical system that propagates itself inside the turf of another sociopolitical system. This leads to far-right war hawks, and then center-right, issuing xenophobic statements. The step before "supporting supreme leaders" is usually "suppressing enemy ideologies". Like McCarthyism in USA or anti Muslim sentiment today. Or Iran's hatred of the USA and the Shah prior to their revolution. Or Soviet hatred of capitalist bourgeouis. Or Ukraine's hatred of communists. And so forth and so on.
Once "the enemy" is identified, the crackdown begins, which leads to more clamps on civil liberties. Then you might want to read the poem attributed to Martin Niemoller:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_...
Regarding your poem, it's the "coming for" people that's the big problem, not merely the ability. If you don't want the government to "come for" people, you need to make sure the people in charge won't do that. It's not very useful to try to make it so they can't
If you read primary sources it is obvious that many people are aware of what is happening but none felt powerful to act, a situation not that dissimilar to our present.
a) It is irrelevant what you "think so", that is not an argument. Weimar Republic indeed did have a secret police, Gestapo was modelled from that.
b) You are probably referring to the subsequent Holocaust and World War 2. If so, argumenting with Weimar Republic and drawing a quick installment of aforementioned practices from it is a straw man argument. You create a notion of how Weimar Republic immediately, "on a moment notice", preceded WW2 etc. (which is incorrect) and then beat that notion (incorrectly) into dust. All of that was built gradually from 1933, which is 6 years before WW2 and 9 years before Wannsee Conference.
Given that context, listing stuff like "data stored and processed in the cloud" is asinine.
Edit: Downvoters what are you objecting to?
Do you think people in "black sites", like Gitmo, are guilty of something?
Do you believe former staff at Gitmo who say "suicides" were murders are lying?
Do you think NKs can access the internet easily?
Or do just not understand that the ridiculous comparison/exaggeration/simplification in my post is exactly the same as mikeash makes, except he makes it apparently sincerely?
The USA sees itself as the shining beacon of freedom and democracy. North Korea doesn't.
The problem is he simply built a straw man to argue with; a comparison between an imaginary NK "evil" (there is no evidence they run a "death camp") with something he deliberately misquoted from the parent post.
Because people brought up the US government in a thread about North Korea?
I disagree.
Here's what Article 67 of the 2013 revision of the DPRK constitution has to say about freedom of speech:
>Citizens are guaranteed freedom of speech, the press, assembly, demonstration and association. The State shall guarantee the conditions for the free activities of democratic political parties and social organizations.
Here's what Article 66 has to say about democracy:
>All citizens who have reached the age of 17 have the right to elect and to be elected, irrespective of sex, race, occupation, length of residence, property status, education, party affiliation, political views or religious belief.
It may also be intended for external propaganda, but is definitely used internally.
The US has the biggest prison population, which is used for a slave labour. In Europe US operated torture prisons.
>Teen just spent three years in a New York prison without ever been convicted of a crime. (2013) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pClI66cd-T4
>Is Slave Labor Still Legal In America? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlCXjcQgNJg
>Globalizing Torture: CIA Secret Detention and Extraordinary Rendition https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/reports/globalizing-t...
>Wesley Clark reveals on MSNBC : TPTB want to put you in a KZ internment camp https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eaPwqokBn9M
US operates much more complex prison camp than the NK could ever dream of.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/dec/27/north-koreas-co... with the discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10797927 and here: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/3yeuqy/north_koreas_...
http://europe.newsweek.com/north-korea-politics-computer-ope... with the discussion on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/3ygd3l/north_koreas_...
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/inside-north-koreas-totalit...
and one more http://recode.net/2015/12/27/north-koreas-version-of-linux-s...
I commented on another North Korea post here on Hacker News a while ago, where I also posted the URL to the photos, if anyone are curious. It even had IP addresses set and some sort of network (not Internet) access.
Koryo Tours is one that I took a few years ago.
http://www.arrl.org/news/p5-3z9dx-concludes-demonstration-op...
http://www.eham.net/articles/35853
But to reiterate, you can just book on a tour. There's no problem or difficulty doing it.
What were you expecting to find? A text file named sonyhack.txt?