Fwd: GNU hackers discover HACIENDA government surveillance and give us a way to fight back

Aaron Toponce aaron.toponce at gmail.com
Fri Aug 22 02:05:41 CEST 2014


On Fri, Aug 22, 2014 at 12:46:38AM +0200, Gabriel Niebler wrote:
> On the contrary, IMO this sort of thing is fully encompassed by the
> word surveillance, at least as far as I have always understood it.
> Otherwise any surveillance camera installed in a public or publicly
> accessible place would not be one, by definition, since it is only
> gathering publicly available information.

Just to get pedantic, according to Wikipedia [1]:

    Surveillance is the monitoring of the behavior, activities, or other
    changing information, usually of people for the purpose of influencing,
    managing, directing or protecting them. This can include observation from a
    distance by means of electronic equipment (such as CCTV cameras), or
    interception of electronically transmitted information (such as Internet
    traffic or phone calls); and it can include simple, relatively no- or
    low-technology methods such as human intelligence agents and postal
    interception. The word surveillance comes from a French phrase for
    "watching over" ("sur" means "from above" and "veiller" means "to watch"),
    and is in contrast to more recent developments such as sousveillance. 

    1- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance

From that, I gather that surveillance is to gather information with the intent
of "influencing, managing, directing, or protecting [people]". HACIENDA is
gathering public information, with the intent to "plan intrusions into the
servers".

That seems pretty clear to me that HACIENDA is indeed a surveillance program.

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