This is why the argument that lack of privacy is justified for good intentions is moot. Time moves on, ideals change and people in charge get replaced. There is no guarantee that principles held when collecting information will remain. Every single piece of information about you can and will be used against you by people in power if it hampers their agenda. The only reasonable thing to do when it comes to privacy is to share nothing, unless the situation absolutely needs it. Anonymous identity is very critical for the functioning of a healthy society and the biggest evil Google and Facebook have done was to really erase this off the internet.
This reminds me of the fate of Jews in occupied Holland in WW2. Prior to the war, religious affiliation was collected by the Dutch authorities for tax exemption purposes - perfectly benign and harmless. Those same records of course fell right into the hands of the Gestapo soon after the Nazis occupied the Netherlands, providing them with a convenient list of names to round up for deportation to the camps.
> It's easy to point fingers at large-scale evil-doers, but none of those exist in a vacuum, do they?
Thats the point potamic made the focus is on the evil large-scale doers do not the potential evil of their tech outside of their control, an argument large scale doers tend to hand wave as not going to happen.
Now that it has happened there is no point debating laws as evil doers are not controlled by laws.
This is the argument privacy advocates have made for years and now it has happened it's too late to protect people by changing laws.
Seeing a problem before it happens and presenting a solution to prevent that problem is not being hard to please, it's the exact opposite.
Wanting to weaken privacy so you can invade peoples privacy but not have other invade that persons privacy is being hard to please and its the attitude politicians take and its the root cause of this problem.
I want a government that is big enough to have laws. You know, the things that society operates on top of. Laws that protect the people from rogue government behavior.
How are laws related to privacy anything at all like a large DoD budget?
You seem to have some romantic notions about laws and government that are utterly divorced from reality. Not because reality is flawed, but because those ideals are flawed at their core.
Privacy is not necessarily anonymity and privacy and non-anonymity aren’t at odds.
I can be perfectly happy to publish public thoughts under my real name but take objection to large scale tracking, collection of data from private conversations, and back doors to my personal devices.
Its so true. People dont have ideas they want to fight for anymore. If its doing ok for them its cool. Thats also the large majority of chinese citizen is "cool" with their government
I can confirm the Afghans I worked with between 2012-2014 maintaining regular contact with using Facebook and FB Messenger have all shifted coms to WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram.
This all occurred rapidly in the last week due to fears stemming from rumours circulating about Pakistani ISI backed Taliban gaining technical intercept capability.
True or not, the rumours had a significant effect on many Afghans.
I would not put it past FB to cooperate with the Taliban to reveal private communication via Whatsapp to the Taliban. Then put forth some weak argument like: "Well, Taliban are now the new Afghan government and we respect wishes of governments around the world. We had no choice." when someone calls them out on it.
(Edit: As was revealed before, WA told the creator of the encryption protocol used in Signal to change things about it, when implementing the protocol for WA, which enable WA in theory to hold a third party decryption key.)
> In the ordinary course of providing our service, WhatsApp does not store messages once they are delivered or transaction logs of such delivered messages. Undelivered messages are deleted from our servers after 30 days. As stated in the WhatsApp Privacy Policy, we may collect, use, preserve, and share user information if we have a good-faith belief that it is reasonably necessary to (a) keep our users safe, (b) detect, investigate, and prevent illegal activity, (c) respond to legal process, or to government requests, (d) enforce our Terms and policies. This may include information about how some users interact with others on our service. We also offer end-to-end encryption for our services, which is always activated. End-to-end encryption means that messages are encrypted to protect against WhatsApp and third parties from reading them. Additional information about WhatsApp's security can be found here.
So only metadata and everything that's not e2e.
Certainly, if the demands were complied with, metadata alone would be sufficient to rebuild your communication network if the Taliban already know who you are and what are you talking about.
> So only metadata [can be shared] and everything that's not e2e.
This is probably the best info anyway. What you speak about with a suspected enemy of the state is a lot less important for oppressive regimes than the fact that you (regularly) do. The content can be obtained from in person ... discussion. When a service doesn't care about presumption of innocence or torturing a few extra citizens, meta is probably all they need.
Now I do not think Taliban itself would be able to pull it off, but if the ISI is involved it is another story.
Correction: Apparently I remembered wrongly and the issue with e2ee in WA is more complex. Apparently it is not directly about a simple third party key on the side of WA, but instead about key changes and automatic re-transmission of messages encrypted with replaced keys: https://www.enisa.europa.eu/publications/info-notes/about-th... I am sorry for any factually wrong implications my comment had. In effect however, if WA triggers a key change, WA might be able to create a third party key that matches the exchanged keys.
> “All messages on WhatsApp are encrypted, but Facebook can, voluntarily or at the request of a government, turn it off for certain users or certain areas. And we cannot know when it does, ”explains Jan Penfrat, political advisor to the activists network.
As to the trustworthiness of those sources, I do not have information.
The Taliban are still under US trade sanctions, and it would likely violate those sanctions were Facebook to cooperate with their requests. So, at least for now, your scenario is unlikely to happen.
(Even with e2e encryption, they still have clear text metadata which oppressive governments may find useful - if they know you talked to a known dissident, they may assume you are one too, even if they can’t see what you said.)
Why oh why didn't the military destroy equipment left behind in the wind-down? At least at the bases... where they keep heaps of explosives for the purpose of destroying things?
These devices, like most of the equipment the Taliban captured, was in the hands of ANA troops and was abandoned during their surrender/retreat[0].
This equipment was purchased by Afghanistan from the US (using US funds, obviously). So technically, it wasn't US property.. and they had no right to destroy it.
> This equipment was purchased by Afghanistan from the US (using US funds, obviously)
As someone with a slightly pacifist streak and a very strong dislike of the military industrial complex, this statement, as obvious as it is, somehow still makes me furious...
I often wonder how people working in these circles or supporting politics in this direction sleep at night. It's so obviously pointless, so obviously destructive, so obviously detrimental to humanity as a whole... I don't know. Maybe I'm just too naive, but I just can't decide if I should feel sad or angry about it.
If some one starts a fight with you, you need to defend yourself. If some one starts a fight with some one innocent you should probably help defend them.
> It's so obviously pointless, so obviously destructive, so obviously detrimental to humanity as a whole
Pacifism is a nice ideal and easy to defend when talking about an unjustified war like Iraq. But when I see Afghans so desperate to leave they are clinging onto airplanes I think it's obvious that pacifism is just as pointless and detrimental.
On the other hand, NATO etc. have been exercising the non-pacifist option in Afghanistan for the last 20 years or so, with very few results to show for it.
> Pacifism = "if you attack me, I will not stop you"
Yeah but the Taliban (or the the Afghanis in general, for that matter) didn't attack anyone.
A bunch of radicals made 9/11 happen, and as it happens, the main guy behind it happened to be in Afghanistan and on somewhat okay-ish terms with the Taliban, but the Taliban themselves were perfectly okay to negotiate his extradition if my understanding is correct. That is, they were, until the first bombs started to drop.
For all I care, Afghanistan was a bloody revenge war, nothing but catharsis for the bruised American soul. It was never about the women or democracy or the well-being of the Afghanis in general, because if that was the case, the US might as well have started with Saudi Arabia (which had probably more to do with al Qaeda than Afghanistan to begin with). In my opinion, it wasn't even about OBL, because otherwise the US would've taken the Pakistani coddling with extremists (and ultimately the sheltering thereof) more serious than they did.
Anyway, I'm already ranting again... I just sometimes wish everyone on this planet was a bit more naive, you know, and just believed in the general good of the people. Yes, there are always a few crazy outliers, yes, there are always those who try to gain advantage and power by manipulating the masses by abusing their fear and primal instincts, but in general, most human beings just want to live a peaceful live, not having to worry about drones and bombs and stray bullets and whatnot. And by believing all together in this common good, I think the world might just be a little bit a better place. At least in my pipe dreams...
Apparently the Taliban offered up Osama in 1996 after the Taliban had captured his territory, this isn't the same thing as the Taliban didn't attack anyone. Osama continued to attack the US and Afghanis with the protection of the Taliban after 1998.
This has been the ongoing incredible thing about all of this: the US just up and leaving fully functional equipment all over the place. I would've thought "slap some C4 to the engine block" would be standard procedure if you're abandoning a base?
Because they thought the ANA could potentially hold out for a while and maybe even arrive at a negotiated solution with the Taliban. If you stripped them of equipment, then the probability of that happening goes to 0%, instead of 25% (or 60%, or whatever the estimate was at the time).
US reportedly left some big bases like Bagram without telling ANA at all, leaving them to looters, or leaving equipment behind without keys, etc.
Sounds like passing useful equipment to ANA was not really a high priority while withdrawing. I wonder if they already reasoned it would not be of any help anyway.
Yeah, I'm thinking of how the German navy while in Scapa Flow, scuttled their fleet. It's the most obvious thing in the world for an army on the run to do. But then you have to have command and control in the first place to do that.
These social media companies have blood on their hands. It makes me all the more disgusted when I get emails, texts and phone calls from their recruiters and the “benefits” and amazing work perks and all the carrots they can dangle in my face.
The previous stance of some social media like FB was, that they do not need to delete all conversation, because they declare them as valuable content for other users, with whom a conversation was done, not as a content related to only one user, who sent a message.
I wonder how much more stays on FB and other social media, if Afghans request deletion of their account for FB and others. Is it an effective measure at all? How strong is the "right to be forgotten"?
Jon Maher comes off like a massive asshole in this article, saying basically "fingerprint tracking has been around for a hundred years, but there's nothing to worry about as the Taliban isn't 'sophisticated' enough to use it."
The further claim that it's not important as they'd just get Taliban biometric data is also ridiculous. None of our tracking has ever been that accurate, false positives in the data alone would be damming.
Everyone dismissing the Taliban as unsophisticated is in for a rude awakening. It's easy and self-affirming to say they're backwards mountain men. The hubris of the west is maybe its greatest weakness.
I remember hearing how the Chinese couldn’t innovate; only copy. It’s like… You do realize that the Chinese are humans, not Neanderthals, right? Humans are intelligent and innovative. Scrappy humans (which the Taliban are) frequently surprise with how much they can accomplish with so little.
Granted, the system and culture does make a massive difference in terms of the trajectory and compounding effects of a populace. But these remarks come off as thinly veiled racism, rather than a critique of the political systems involved— and I’m not someone who sees racism behind every blade of grass.
I don't think it's racism. I reject the premise that because we play ourselves up and them as under us that it's racism. We do that with everyone. Canadians and Australians are beneath Americans. We "know" this in our heart of hearts.
Somehow when it's people with a different skin shade these accusations of racism come up. Racism is a red herring. 99% of the time it turns out to be the case that racism is a lazy explanation for something more complicated or uncomfortable to explain.
I'm not saying all of anything is anything else. Maybe we'll have to agree to disagree.
The notion of "anti-Irish racism" in the UK or USA, or "anti-Polish racism" in Ireland, is widely accepted enough for me to believe that the definition I'm used to isn't unreasonable.
I don't think the Taliban are stupid but some articles "glorifying" them are. There was one talking about how drug trade and road tolls are going to turn Afghanistan into an economic power house...
I don't think it has anything to do with Racism. You'd be surprised if the Amish had a space program, but not because of racism. The Taliban wouldn't have high-tech capabilities (and probably wouldn't exist at all) if it wasn't for their support from Pakistan, Quatar & friends (ongoing) and the US (when they were fighting the Russians).
But they are. They don't look like they've ever seen a modern city before, they look like kids in a sweet shop. I think they were more surprised by anyone by the ease of their victory.
I don't think the seized US surveillance equipment is actually going to allow the Taleban to view the social media data of people anywhere.
Perhaps if a watchlist fell into the open, then you wouldn't want to be discoverable on social media via normal means. (ie, if someone finds me on a list in the US embassy, I'm safer if I'm a ghost on social media.)
The Epoch Times is a far-right newspaper and media company affiliated with the Falun Gong new religious movement. It promotes far-right politicians in Europe, and has backed President Donald Trump in the U.S. A 2019 report by NBC News showed it to be the second-largest funder of pro-Trump Facebook advertising after the Trump campaign. The Epoch Media Group's news sites and YouTube channels have spread conspiracy theories such as QAnon and anti-vaccine misinformation. In 2020, the New York Times called it a "global-scale misinformation machine".
> but frankly I'm surprised posts from this source are even allowed on HN.
Surely a venue such as this, with its careful moderation and strong commitment to civil discourse, would (should) be very tolerant of such content. The only risk to posting such material is the poster should expect a lot of well-researched and thoughtful opposition.
Personally I believe (but rarely practice, because I’m lazy) that reading content from sources you disagree with is useful. Occasionally you’ll spot that you agree with your “enemy”. That’s the gateway to reconciliation, tolerance. We all gotta live here.
Also, I hadn’t encountered The Epoch before. Thanks for the heads up.
I guess it's just which one has more people calling it...
Add a +1 from me that The Epoch Times is basically a hate group (known anti-homosexual agenda among other things), and the propaganda arm of a cult that literally believes aliens from outer space have infiltrated society to instill progressive values.
Yes, the Chinese communists have tried to eradicate them, but that doesn't mean that they are such a great group because of it.
If you've seen the Shen Yun ads across the US, that's also from them, and if you've ever actually gone then you'd get smacked in the face with heavy propaganda (just check the yelp reviews).
Their evil scheme currently seems to involve supporting better privacy and pointing out some fairly glaring flaws in the US Afghanistan strategy that really should have some repercussions. Perhaps you can find some common ground with them in that.
Bias or not (I briefly discussed that topic at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28168250), NYT and other more reputable publications are burdened by the reality, while ET/NTD/whatever else they operate simply aren’t. I prefer to get facts first (even if selected with bias) then work from there. But if you’re okay with op-eds dressed up as news reporting peppered with made-up events as needed as long as they validate your world view, go for it.
I'm curious now as to what benefit does the Falun Gong see in promoting the far right in Europe? I've never known them to be overly critical or discuss China much at all, some even seem to admire their tactics (Russia is mostly the focus of praise though).
Perhaps they might be racist to local Chinese, is it some type of doomsday, chaos thing?
We're not here to discuss this particular news outlet. If you have problems with their specific reporting of this story then post it, otherwise this is off topic.
Haha, you remind me of its Chinese name 大纪元. Then I think you are right. I had thought its mere reason of existence was to promote anti-CCP information. To my surprise, it also reports international news now. If you know Chinese and have lived in China for a few days, you will know how rediculous some of its news are.
> I'm not claiming this means the story here is false, but frankly I'm surprised posts from this source are even allowed on HN.
And? Is what they have posted about this story false then? So their sources are wrong and are spreading conspiracy theories about this story then?
Rather than bringing up the past behaviours of newspapers and creating associations can you just comment on whether if the article is true or not.
If this particular story that is posted is proven to be false THEN you would have a point. In this case it is true and it is widely reported and also has credible sources for this article. You are welcome to prove otherwise.
You have to admire the bravery of the Taliban using that surveillance equipment, fearlessly facing the likelihood it has been compromised by a retreating enemy...
COmpromised? The "retreating enemy" left behind actual weapons, cars and planes... and people... what do they have to be afraid of by using some surveillance equipment?
Yeah, if I had no appetite to go back and "deal" with an organization that provides safe harbour for terrorists from time to time, there's no chance I'd try to compromise them.
There are actually a lot of good and decent people there, including children. People that have hopes and dreams for a better life. People who, if given the chance, would love nothing more than to raise their children in a peaceful country with all of the things you take for granted in your industrialized country.
That isn't a naive and stupid question, it's a heartless and insensitive one. Just because they can't make you an iPhone doesn't mean they should be left for dead.
