I think one of the more interesting tidbits of the investigation is how they managed to find the agents that were following him using black-market mobile phone records from corrupt policemen. These were only available due to a law allowing police to have access to private data, and apparently pretty commonly used by jealous spouses to spy on their SO.
A glimpse of the future for those supporting these kinds of laws because they have nothing to hide.
EDIT: After watching / reading the article and also the comments about parallel construction, there is indeed an inordinate amount of information being just there for the taking.
The BBC did a documentary on this intelligence black market some time ago[0], which shows the magnitude of it. I can't really imagine how it's like living over there, think 4-chan-on-steroids levels of doxxing that can be unleashed by anyone with some petty cash.
The people who promote anti-privacy will be stuck there I think. You know, until something awful happens to them. I think this has turned into a cultural issue unfortunately, and once it's culture all reason, sensibility, and middleground is lost.
I've seen a bunch of TV shows (police procedurals, etc.) in which the heroes matter-of-factly use surveillance infrastructure to fight bad guys. There are occasionally some in which the surveillance technology is used against the heroes, but even in some of those, the heroes tend to somehow get access to the infrastructure, and use it to turn the tables.
Before surveillance was a thing, a variation that was ordinary in TV shows was for the heroes to break very important rules/principles they were sworn to uphold. For example, roughing up suspect, or even expressly denying them some procedural right gratuitously, almost as if the show was trying to condition people that those rights aren't actually rights for some other kind of people.
The rules were in the way, and the heroes cared and were tough, and did what needed to be done, to fight the bad thing.
It seems a dangerous idea, in a society based on people buying into admirable rights and responsibilities, but from what I've seen even casually and anecdotally (as a techie, not a humanities researcher or social scientist), the idea seems to have been drip-fed for most/all of our lives. So long, I couldn't guess whether it was an idea that already resonated strongly with people, and media just pandered to that, or it was planted/nurtured by media.
There is a 1998 Will Smith movie, "Enemy of the State", which I love - it's somewhere between good and "so bad it's good".
It always seemed incredibly fanciful and far-fetched - and then Snowden and Trump happened. It turns out the movie was just slightly ahead of its time.
The technology was not very fanciful if at all. If you think that movie was ahead of its time in terms of exhibiting what was possible, then might I suggest Three Days of the Condor (1975), and of course the ever popular Sneakers (1992). The former is far more fascinating given its age, although I suspect less so for someone who was in the middle of their computer science/computer engineering/signals intelligence/cryptanalysis career during that era.
The things that governments are capable of doing are rarely secret. They leak out over time, and you'll see them portrayed in niche culture long before they become undeniable public knowledge. For example, off the top of my head, the satellite photos published amidst the 1998 missile strike of the Al Shifa pharmaceutical factory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Shifa_pharmaceutical_factor...) are the types of evidence that inform the private sector, including authors and screenwriters. I'm sure similar photos and descriptions were publicly available much earlier than that, so the generic ability to track people on rooftops via satellite (notwithstanding all the little gotchas that aren't fit for storytelling) was more than plausible at that point, especially considering that then as now the military doesn't typically release material that discloses their best capabilities.
I used to have a link to a pre-9/11, accidental admission in a magazine interview by a general about the Navy's ability to tap undersea fiber optic cables. Though at that point I think it was already assumed the U.S. performed such missions--certainly by Russia and China, but even among intelligence geeks--which is probably why he didn't think much of the comment. (IIRC, the topic was a submarine designed for tapping undersea cable, though at that time it was only "public knowledge" that it could tap traditional copper cables, not fiber optic. He impliedly--only barely shy of explicitly--admitted that it also tapped fiber optic cables.)
What's fanciful is the degree and extent of corruption assumed in these narratives. People seem to think it's more plausible simply because of the true-to-life character of the technological portrayals. But NEVER forget that the principal aim of movies is to elicit strong emotions by leveraging common fears[1] and desires, suspending disbelief by deftly mixing fiction with non-fiction. And I don't mean to preach; it's definitely a life-long struggle for everyone to differentiate culturally constructed narratives from reality.
[1] E.g. Big Brother, the particularized fear of powerlessness that comes when mixing it with political cynicism.
Corollary: When a suspect or defendant is freed because there is no actual proof (technical evidence), or above all when evidence is disallowed because their rights have been violated, that's called “a (mere) technicality”.
Intentional or not, very very likely to condition the audience into regarding civil rights and rules of evidence as “mere” anything. Goes back to at least _Hill Street Blues_ and _Baretta,_ probably _Kojak_ too. Likely much farther than that. (Though _Columbo_ didn't display this attitude, at least not as flagrantly, IIRC?)
Oh for sure. A modern story like this is The Boys where Butcher pursues his vision of justice to no end. To a man who seeks to right a deep wrong this seems prudent within the context of a fantasmal story about the plight of super heroes into super villains. I've debated with a number of people whether Butcher is an anti-hero and I've found most people don't think so. The jurisprudence of his actions largely boiled down to, "He was trying to do the right thing, right? Sometimes you must disregard the system to attain real justice. That doesn't bother me as much as it bothers you." My takeaway was that we no longer fear the King Henry archetype, whereby an individual dawns the mask of judge, jury, and executioner. As long as justice is perceivably served then the means may not be laudable but they are passable. I don't know if this translates into how people view the real world and interpret real life events, but if it does then it's quite curious.
"The Boys" is entertaining, but problematic in a number of respects. Somehow CIA are portrayed as opposed to capricious unaccountable extralegal domination of society by powerful cronyist authoritarians? Come again? In scores of nations, including USA, they have taken the opposite side. "The Boys" is more explicit than e.g. "Black Panther" in its CIA whitewashing, although that movie was probably more insulting to the memories of numerous dead Africans.
One salient difference between the characters of Butcher and "King Henry" (this is not specific) is that Henry is a king and Butcher is a somewhat violent homeless dude. One deeply suspects suggestions to see them as somehow the same.
I was talking less about the institution and more about the intersections of convictions and methods. Now take that and examine how that intersection influences whether we view Butcher as a hero or anti-hero.
That's a pretty fine line. Butcher isn't the protagonist anyway, which is good because he's the weakest aspect of the story. He hurtles from one situation to another, bringing no resources of his own other than a generalized ill humor. Some CIA bureaucrat bails him out today, a long-lost aunt cheerfully abides the total destruction of her neighborhood tomorrow, a rando schlub turns into the James Bond/MacGuyver hybrid he needs next week. Plot armor is not meant for deuteragonists; Butcher should definitely have been killed off sometime in second season.
Hughie is the protagonist. The viewer and nearly every other character relate to him and his actions. Butcher OTOH is a violent inconsiderate weirdo who is hated by everyone, including his parents. (He is barely tolerated by those he has dragooned onto his "team".) Butcher was convenient for getting the action started but after he transitioned from "mysterious stranger" to "surrogate father" to "everyone hates this asshole", his role would have been better filled by others on the team.
It would be a considerably more "experimental" program if a character like Butcher were the actual protagonist.
> So long, I couldn't guess whether it was an idea that already resonated strongly with people, and media just pandered to that, or it was planted/nurtured by media.
As evidence in favor of the latter possibility, note that we have long provided government/military funding and other resources for the production of media that gives the military and "intelligence services" editorial control:
I can totally see the argument that since the technology is set up to collect the data anyhow (at least for billing and troubleshooting) then better make use of them.
> A glimpse of the future for those supporting these kinds of laws because they have nothing to hide.
This has been the reality in China for a while now and the result has been... largely fine. eg: This Reuter's piece from 2018 where you could get a picture of anyone's face for $1USD and a copy of their phone records for 50c: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-dataprivacy/data-du...
Like, if you ask a representative sample of people living in China what they feel the top 10 pros and cons of living in China were, that all of their personal information is for sale for a few bucks would not make it onto many people's lists on either side, it doesn't really affect your day to day life.
There are a lot of theoretical privacy attacks that sound scarily creepy but privacy advocates tend to play up the hypothetical and not look at how empirically impactful such things end up being.
"There are a lot of theoretical privacy attacks that sound scarily creepy but privacy advocates tend to play up the hypothetical and not look at how empirically impactful such things end up being."
Tragically, given the mass atrocities perpetrated throughout human history, it's inevitable that records of who people are, their race, ethnicity, religion, political affiliation, sexual orientation, and/or other data about them (which is now collected and distributed at a larger scale than at any time in human history) will be used to commit more mass atrocities.
I think if you look at historical atrocities, most of them cracked ahead without needing records (eg Hutus vs Tutsis, Myanmar people vs Rohingya, US Settlers vs native Americans, whatever). Also in the last century governments have had records on almost everyone and for the majority they have not had atrocities. I think it's a mistake to blame one for the other. Even with the holocaust although IBM record keeping may have made things more efficient, anti Jewish pogroms had gone on for centuries before.
Technological advances and the normalization of surveillance state is just going to make such exterminations and atrocities more efficient.
Whereas before some people could escape detection or escape being rounded up, the next time the slaughter will be much more effective.
Also, in the past it was much harder to detect people who didn't stand out in some obvious way (through skin color, mode of dress, or obvious behavior), now there are records of people's interests and communications which make them much easier to target.
That did not exist before except through a relatively primitive network of informants, or unless the people outed themselves through publishing their writing.
Not to mention how much more advanced tracking technology is these days, and how much harder it is to hide.
All of this put together makes the current surveillance aparatus infinitely more sophisticated and powerful than it was throughout almost all of the 20th Century.
It really is just a matter of time until it gets used by people with an agenda and/or a grudge against some victim group(s). Saying it hasn't happened yet so it won't is just wishful thinking.
Well, tech advances have both upsides and downsides there. It's harder to get away with killing people when it gets videoed and uploaded to the world in minutes. I'm optimistic overall but we'll see.
Video evidence is of little use when the people in charge turn a blind eye to it, are culpable themselves, or denounce it as "fake news".
When the have the cooperation and participation of the military, the secret police, and the general population (as has often been the case in many atrocities, genocides, and pogroms in the past) it's even worse, and by the time the video evidence gets out (if it ever does) it's too late to save the victims, assuming there's even anyone in the position to do so.
>> they are responsible but the people in charge are the ones who ordered it.
So you are not responsbile for your actions because you're not at the top? So many great tragedies throughout history where this was the justification and we're still stuck with this mentality...
Your comment would have made sense if you were talking about some country that wasn't actually corrupt to the core of almost every government service and run as a disguised dictatorship. Who cares about human rights and moralistic laws in a country where every government service is for sale, except for those which are needed by one of Putin's friends, that being the only thing that trumps money?
What is 'morally right' is just not the issue there. Russia will need to go through some major development steps before moral issues can even be meaningfully talked about.
"Moot", not "mute". Moot means (in this context) irrelevant or not admissible in court. Mute means unable to speak. So, the argument is still presented, so it's not mute, but it is moot, because it's not going to fly in court.
The Nürnberg trials went after a few high ranking Nazis and the "Entnazifizierung" (removal of nazis from official offices) only went after the very hard cases.
There were still thousands of nazis everywhere in government institutions like courts and police. The German term "Altnazi" (old nazi) describes nazis that were able to fly under the radar and still do their jobs until retirement.
That doesn't work when everyone working for the government are corrupt. Do you think some boss of the guy who leak something don't know about it? Nah, he does and he get his share of profits; then pays share to his boss; etc.
The only way you can get to high position in police or special agency hierarchy is by corruption: either by family connections or just paying a lot of money.
> I think one of the more interesting tidbits of the investigation is how they managed to find the agents that were following him using black-market mobile phone records from corrupt policemen. These were only available due to a law allowing police to have access to private data, and apparently pretty commonly used by jealous spouses to spy on their SO.
> A glimpse of the future for those supporting these kinds of laws because they have nothing to hide.
I don't think that's necessarily true, because pervasive and tolerated corruption is required to get an end state like that. If a country has "[those] kinds of laws," but unlawful access is investigated and prosecuted, then the data will remain (more or less) restricted to police and government investigators.
So, even though you still have to worry about the police and government abusing the data, as well as certain powerful or connected people, you won't have to worry so much about stuff like your SO buying your phone records for $10.
The solution would then be to make all phone records public to avoid the black market issue, and I know that my parents wouldn't find anything wrong with that.
In such a world, not having a phone on you will be viewed with suspicion. When this fact is brought up in the court, it will be often enough to sway the jury to convict the accused.
Occam’s razor to you means that rather than the freely available and reproducible records they’ve found online and detailed how to recreate, there’s some NATO plot where intelligence agencies are laundering their intel through a blog with a small following?
Why so hard to believe? Bellingcat's investigations are near universally targeted at US rivals - most often Russia.
Furthermore the conclusions are always the ones they'd want (e.g. "Russia shot down an airliner").
If Bellingcat did the exact same thing in reverse and exclusively and regularly blew the lid on secretive NATO operations using morsels of information pieced together online the idea that it would be FSB backed would barely even be considered controversial. It would be assumed because... well, because Occam's razor.
Julian Assange leaked from everyone including Russia and he was designated a Russian spy because he didn't leak "enough" on Russia ffs.
Bellingcat has targeted enemies of the western world
and is run by a British guy. It's a classic dictatorial distraction tactic to point to the US and say they do bad things too. But this is hardly just against the US. They tried to murder two people in the UK and shot down a commercial airliner in Ukraine.
Russia seems to shamelessly go around assassinating people so they make easy pickings for him.
One of his latest investigations and podcasts was some random African country (Cameroon) based on video evidence online.
A better question to ask is why hasn’t Russia or China freaked out at NSA hacks? Like the west just did with SolarWinds (I’m sure the western media would eat it up and so would we here). We had to wait for a western (Snowden) to find our rights are being violated domestically. The answer is Russia and China are on their own spree and keep any of the failed NSA ops quiet (assuming they exist). So there’s not much to go on for some random open intelligence blog. Russia et al don’t care about defending rights or exposing evil.
But Russia and the other mafia states provide plenty of open source evil to sort through.
I also don’t see the US shooting down a plane with a hundred people and denying it or openly assassinating their enemies in ‘enemy’ territory.
>Russia seems to shamelessly go around assassinating people so they make easy pickings for him.
That's pretty much exactly what Christo Grozev said in one of the recent interviews. They investigate government wrongdoing, and russia has been doing a lot of shady things in the last few years. Plus he lived in Russia and speaks russian, so that coupled with the corruption and tons of available data makes Russia a good target for his investigations.
Unrelated: if there were there a chart that shows the number of people killed by each country per year in this millennia -- what countries do you think will "in the lead" by an order of magnitude at least from the rest?
That would be interesting, as long as you focus on civilian deaths and normalize for population. My guess would be iran due to their heavy involvement in both the iraqi and syrian civil war. The saudis are also contenders with their yemen war. Then I would guess the US, turkey and russia.
We are moving into a multipolar world and interesting times.
>> Unrelated: if there were there a chart that shows the number of people killed by each country per year in this millennia -- what countries do you think will "in the lead" by an order of magnitude at least from the rest?
> This millennium? Probably Syria.
How did you come to that conclusion? Though the question is far to ambiguous (what does "killed by" mean, exactly?), I'd assume Germany would be ahead of Syria, given that any reasonable count would include those killed in the Holocaust plus allied casualties from WWI and WWII (where all cases where there's clearly established intent to kill by the regime). The Syrian civil was was bad, but not that bad. I'm not aware of anything of similar magnitude there after 1900, and the numbers of anything before would be lessened by lower populations and less effective military technology.
Cameroon is the one example I was thinking of that actually isn't a US rival, yes. Nonetheless the US still used the conclusions to justify winding up support & funding to Cameroonian military.
> Furthermore the conclusions are always the ones they'd want (e.g. "Russia shot down an airliner").
I mean, it's pretty hard to dispute such a conclusion when you have social media posts tracking the movement from Russia of a Russian-made anti-aircraft missile launcher with identification markings to an area near where MH17 crashed, posts of rocket contrails at the time of the crash, then more posts tracing the same launcher leaving the area and traveling back to Russian territory, sans a missile.
isn’t that the opposite of Occam’s Razor? a theory that makes a journalist part of an geopolitical intelligence conspiracy seems much more complex than the reality that data is fairly easily accessible.
Well, the russians leaked data with 2016 Clintom e-mails. And journalists being fed data will probably still publish.
Honestly, I think neither Occam, nor Hanlon's razor really apply here.
What about Operation Mockingbird[1] and the Church Committee report?
In a 1977 Rolling Stone magazine article, "The CIA and the Media," reporter Carl Bernstein expanded upon the Church Committee's report and said that around 400 press members were considered assets by the CIA.
A western based organization going after enemies of NATO, and Russia specifically could just as easily be explained as "Those are who they perceive to be the issue, so that is why they target them".
A glimpse of the future for those supporting these kinds of laws because they have nothing to hide.
EDIT: After watching / reading the article and also the comments about parallel construction, there is indeed an inordinate amount of information being just there for the taking.
The BBC did a documentary on this intelligence black market some time ago[0], which shows the magnitude of it. I can't really imagine how it's like living over there, think 4-chan-on-steroids levels of doxxing that can be unleashed by anyone with some petty cash.
[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-48348307