Leaked data reveals Israeli govt campaign to remove pro-Palestine posts on Meta

Chris Krebs just yesterday had his security clearance revoked solely for saying the 2020 election was fair and not rigged.

His coworkers at SentinelOne (almost certainly most of who are citizens) also had their clearances revoked, despite never speaking out on the topic, purely as a North Korea style "punish the whole family" approach to strike fear into people of guilt by association, so that those who have spoken out in any shape or form become social pariahs.

Citizens having their career taken away for saying an election wasn't rigged, or for happening to work at the same place as someone who said this.

If you think the status quo hasn't yet changed to "In countries like China, Russia and the US, speaking out against the government puts both your livelihood and that of those in your vicinity at serious risk", you're dead wrong.

In case anyone is curious about this (as I was) here's an article: https://www.csoonline.com/article/3958808/trump-revokes-secu...

Maybe it's time to rethink the visibility and permanence of HN discussions.

That would be great, but I don't see it. HN has already been obviously violating GDPR and all other right-to-forget laws since forever by not allowong for account deletion, and everytime this has been brought up, dang has pretty much confirmed they don't care ("it would look bad if there were deleted comments [and that's more important than these laws]").

huge shock that y combinator doesn’t give a shit about legal risk considering the huge chunk of its successful startups were just law-breaking mobile apps.

Move fast and break democracy.

For a supposedly intellectual site that I clearly am at best in the middle tier of intellectual ability, this place is shockingly passive and accepting of the converging futures of authoritarian AI and the marked collapse of political discourse, if not rule of law.

Maybe I'm just a dumb one that speaks up, everyone else has gone dark forest.

To be fair...the other side was just as ferocious when someone postulated that the election was rigged, or that COVID couldn't be stopped by masks. You're essentially asking for conservatives to be the bigger person and stop the blood feud.

IMO both approaches should have been more measured, but who do you think will propose the ceasefire agreement?

This is not true. People who claimed the election was rigged were asked to back up their claims with evidence. Typically they never did, although a smaller number made an effort...but the profferred evidence was nonsensical. I am not just talking about talking heads widely quoted on TV or social media posts, I read a lot of election litigation.

I think the anti-mask people had some valid points, but they sank their own boat by ranting about 'masktards' and 'face diapers' while also demonstrating callous indifference to the large number of deaths.

It turns out that in real life you don’t have any right to be forgotten, and trying to legally manufacture one is not only nonsensical, it’s impossible.

HN is a public forum, if you don’t want your statements here being public, don’t post.

Can you give some examples of things related to those topics you think are equivalent to what is happening right now? Are you referring to facebook and twitter censorship of those topics?

Dave Lobue and Justin Mealey should be forever shamed for the farce they put up during the hearings in Georgia.

https://www.charliekirk.com/news/georgia-data-scientist-prov...

If you check their work based on the publicly available data, you find that based on their logic there was a clear case for Trump cheating. Right wing media reporting the story, of course, did not.

Nobody was made that people thought the election was rigged. They were frustrated with their lack of evidence, and then mad at their attempt at an insurrection. And then really pissed off at their complete lack of accountability afterwards.

Same thing with Covid. Nobody was mad if you thought masks were stupid. They were mad if you didn’t wear your mask, putting immunocompromised people at risk for your own selfish reasons.

There’s a difference between speech and actions. Doing things that actually, literally, kill people is a problem.

I highly doubt it was for that only.

To that end, I am quoting a portion of the text on the WH at the end of my comment here.

Anyone would be right to question CISA’s misallocation of resources to narrative control, and little emphasis on actual cyber security work. That CISA was getting in bed with former IC folks doing Censorship Ops, not computer security, is a very bad look.

There is a reason CISA is viewed as a joke with the federal space and it has everything to do with the lack of performance for a 2-3B dollar agency.

“ Christopher Krebs, the former head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), is a significant bad-faith actor who weaponized and abused his Government authority. Krebs’ misconduct involved the censorship of disfavored speech implicating the 2020 election and COVID-19 pandemic. CISA, under Krebs’ leadership, suppressed conservative viewpoints under the guise of combatting supposed disinformation, and recruited and coerced major social media platforms to further its partisan mission. CISA covertly worked to blind the American public to the controversy surrounding Hunter Biden’s laptop. Krebs, through CISA, promoted the censorship of election information, including known risks associated with certain voting practices. Similarly, Krebs, through CISA, falsely and baselessly denied that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen, including by inappropriately and categorically dismissing widespread election malfeasance and serious vulnerabilities with voting machines. Krebs skewed the bona fide debate about COVID-19 by attempting to discredit widely shared views that ran contrary to CISA’s favored perspective.”

There are many reasons to question Krebs’ tenure and not all of them have to do with ignoring the state of election security, The Disinformation regime, viewpoint discrimination, or election interference.

There is a list of things

> To be fair...the other side was just as ferocious when someone postulated that the election was rigged, or that COVID couldn't be stopped by masks. You're essentially asking for conservatives to be the bigger person and stop the blood feud.

Did anyone have their, and their coworkers', security clearance revoked just for saying either of those? (There are other activities that could have been taken by people saying the election was rigged that could have led to a loss of security clearance, but I don't think that just the statement did it.)

I have a hypothetical. Let's say you attend a rally and give a hate speech and the entire event is live-streamed / recorded for posterity. Can you use "right to forget" laws to impel all sites hosting that video record to blur out your face in the original videos?

What's the functional difference to writing a bunch of hate speech with your username and wanting it scrubbed from the "public record" (which I would argue a popular forum such as HN would be classified) using RTBF?

Same thing if you wrote a "Letter to the Editor" to the New York Times expressing something distasteful. I don't see how anyone should be allowed to wield RTBF as a tool for suppressing information.

So people in government claiming it was rigged should probably lose their jobs, as they were advancing harmful narratives related to their jobs. Journalists were (rightly) ridiculed, but there is a significant difference. I might not use a mechanic who is antivax; I would advocate a doctor be fired.

>Chris Krebs just yesterday had his security clearance revoked solely for saying the 2020 election was fair and not rigged

Considering how Republicans control all three branches (to an extent), the "2020 election fraud" was a key talking point of Trump, and how stealing an election would be a historic crime in American history....the justice department has done nothing so far.

The Republican House spent a year or so investigating Hunter Biden to obtain a gun plus tax charge (also with the hopes of tying Biden to a crime) but not trying to find who stole the 2020 election?

Does it really matter if your name isn't connected to your real life identity?

Never stop speaking out, and if they come for you do not go peacefully. That's about all an individual in an authoritarian society can control.

The whole idea behind right to forget is that people don't live their entire lives under condemnation for something they stopped doing. You can debate whether or not permanent ostracism is effective as a deterrent, but let's not ban the removal of gang tattoos.

And what are they? Because unlike you, Chris has a very well known, positive, respected reputation in the industry.

Instead of just making accusations, back them up.

Fuck Donald Trump and his gross, weird, pathetic mafia.

This regime is a rogue autocracy strangling anything good about this once great country.

I hope every single person responsible for the many crimes they have committed (and they have committed crimes) faces justice, if not in this life, then the next one.

Oh, that feels good to get off my chest.

The right to be forgotten is a natural consequence of reality - nothing is by default permanent. It's digital systems that have perverted reality by persisting information beyond its normal short lifetime.

If there's one law of the universe it's that nothing is permanent.

Dictatorships tend to do worse economically, the biggest example was the Soviet bloc which fell for economic reasons mostly.

You can accelerate this effect by doing sabotage. The WW2 CIA sabotage manual contains a lot of ideas that have pretty good ratio of problems created to personal risk.

That’s the truth, if we remain silent we will be targeted eventually. I am extremely disappointed by the lack of tech colleagues calling this out. I took an oath of ethics to do no harm and I see many people willing to use technology to find and silence critics of the government.

That has been the case for years:

IME the authoritarian politics had much more support here; I'd say it was the majority of voices heard. It diminished considerably when Trump was elected and then took office.

But the silence has been a long-standing problem: HN has long been largely silent on the social and political dangers of IT - really an outrage; here are the people most responsible, and the outcomes are predictable. That would include especially disinformation and misinformation, and propaganda more generally; and also the power of social media. Those are what makes it impossible to do anything.

When things became so polarized, years ago, shutting down discourse everywhere, HN didn't work to solve the problem - they stopped talking too. Again, a big failure of the people with the knowledge, skill, and power. But shutting down discourse is not politically neutral - it's a great help to the corrupt and evil to hide what they do and prevent people from responding to it. Democracy dies in darkness, I've heard.

Will that matter in a world of AI? Can't the connection be made - for example based on writing style, political opinions, time of day you post, networks you use, etc etc.

There's a difference between truth and lies - an actual, material, essential difference. It's not politics, it's truth.

People can take any relativistic position they want, but that difference is essential to anything and everything: The truth about database i/o performance is essential to your project; the truth about climate change is essential to preventing catastrophe; the truth about Covid was essential to saving millions of lives - and many died and much blood is on the hands of the liars.

But the liars were not, and shouldn't have been, arrested, deported, extorted, threatened, etc.

You could be indoctrinated or paid to give the speech. You might regret it or change your mind. The video doesn't have to be real, it could be generated, it could be someone with the same name who looks like you.

Maybe you got drunk and climbed on stage naked 10 years ago. Should you be that guy forever?

When I asked dang about GDPR this is how he explained HN’s stance on not allowing broad comment and account deletion

> Re GDPR: our understanding based on the analysis done by YC's legal team is that HN does not fall under the GDPR, so for the time being we're sticking with the approach of not deleting account histories wholesale but helping with privacy concerns in more precise ways.

> Re "aren’t these comments owned by the person who wrote them"? That's a complicated legal question, no doubt, and also philosophically. From my perspective, two other factors are that (1) the threads are co-creations (see pg on that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6813226) and (2) posting to an internet forum is publishing something, not dissimilar to sending a letter to the editor of a newspaper.

> Obviously there are many reasonable takes on this. Ours is that we're trying to balance the community interests of a public forum (mainly the interest of commenters not to have their comments deprived of context, and the interest of the community in preserving its archive) with the need to protect individuals. That's a lot of work—we end up taking care of requests manually for people every day—but we're committed to both sides of it because it seems like the only way to do justice to both sides.

I'm sure it could be figurded out but not easily?

What if I did something and it was written down in a book?

>To be fair...the other side was just as ferocious when someone postulated that the election was rigged,

No they weren't

Not in the amount of court cases, elected politicans stating the view, and January 6th

When a few Democrats starting objecting to the 2016 results. Joe Biden, in congress during the certification, slammed the gavel down and said "it's over"

https://www.npr.org/2017/01/06/508562183/biden-to-democrats-...

To even compare the two situations it's insane.

There is no next life. This is all we got. Let’s make the most of it.

There's this macrocycle of fatigue related to Godwins law for, what, 30 years of online discourse.

The undeniable long term trend during this period has been increasing surveillance, control, centralization of power in the executive, weakening of rights, due process, legal authority, politicization of the judiciary, and majority minority slowly building a core base of manipulatable populism.

Maybe I'm naive about the past, even the last 75 years of what was really going on in Washington, but a Seig heil on national television with no pushback or consequences beyond grassroot pushback (and it has been ALL grassroot) was a crystallizing moment.

This isn't stuff to roll your eyes over as just Godwins law style hyperbole.

The only in the I mean only saving grace, is that the stock market exists for immediate political blowback. But the fact that the only functional political bulwark against trump is the second by second ticker of financial health of the oligarchs is really depressing.

Books have limited print runs. Many books in libraries are only borrowed and perhaps read a few times. Niche titles more so. Books go out of print and are hard to search for arbitrary text.

There are many cases where laws that are made for humans before certain tech are not sufficient once certain tech arrives.

You don’t need the right to be forgotten outside of specific tech because human brain forgets by default, paper rots, and all of the above is restricted geographically and does not scale.

Lets say that a ton of us got a leaky look at what the likes of thiel datamimed from the humanity dataset. The last mile of the enlightenment wrecks all those romantic ideas of eternal progress by technology, self actualizationa and retardation repair by education pretty thoroughly. Those that are not in the know mimic those that are or just develop a amoral stance to whether and survive the times which are a changing. It turns out the civil liberty lessons do not survive the contact with the lovecraftian reality beneath. This whole 10 year ride since 2016 was not foreseen, predicted, effectively countered and not even mitigated by protecting cultural artifacts and institutions against the decay. The science whose prediction power is zero, who has no eclipse to show, is not one.

Ending the statement with 'There is a list of things' and not providing it strongly suggests that you don't actually have any data or hard facts to back up your claims.

You are a random person on an internet forum, the onus is in you to provide data to back up incredible claims.

I'd say it goes beyond silence. Anything political used to be flagged and pushed of the front page in minutes till about a couple of weeks ago.

Not very surprising given the current political environment.

We can "what if" ourselves into any position we want. The fact is that digital surveillance is here and does collect information about people in a scope that is qualitatively different than putting information in books.

Ok

The censorship & viewpoint discrimination pressure CISA was bringing to bear has been over the top.

At the same time Krebs was talking about how secure our election infrastructure was, prominent professors such as Matt Blaze & J Halderman that have researched election security said the opposite.

This historically has been a bipartisan& Aceademic issue with more Dems & Repubs & Academia supporting claims of insecurity.

Those of us in security are convinced that all this unpatched windows7 usage is crazy and Chris Krebs lying about election security isn’t being open and truthful with the American people.

https://judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/republicans-j...

- The Associated Press reported in 2019 on the use of vulnerable Windows 7 software in election systems, highlighting risks in swing states. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/new-election-systems-u...

- NBC News revealed in 2020 that ES&S installed modems in voting machines, making them susceptible to hacking. [Note: The exact NBC News article from January 2020 titled "Voting Machines Vulnerable to Hacking Due to Modems" is not directly linked in the web results, but this matches the description in the thread. The full URL is not available in the provided web results, and I cannot search for it in real-time. You may need to look up the NBC News article from January 2020 for the precise link.]

- The Guardian exposed in 2015 that WinVote machines used weak passwords like "abcde," easily hackable from a distance. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/apr/15/virginia-vot...

- The New York Times reported in 2015 on a leaked database of 191 million voter records, raising concerns about phishing and identity theft. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/31/us/politics/voting-record...

- Wired noted in 2016 that many voting machines ran on outdated Windows XP, lacking security patches since 2014. https://www.wired.com/2016/08/americas-voting-machines-arent...

- Politico detailed in 2016 how a voting machine was hacked in minutes by replacing ROM chips with malicious firmware. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/08/2016-electio...

- CBS reported in 2016 that hackers demonstrated voting machine vulnerabilities, showing a $15 hack could alter votes. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hacker-demonstrates-how-voting-...

- ABC News confirmed in 2016 that voting machines can be hacked, especially in close elections, with malware erasing itself post-attack. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/hack-election-experts-russia...

- The Atlantic warned in 2016 about electronic voting risks, citing a case where a machine was turned into a Pac-Man console. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/08/elect...

- FOX News covered a 2016 demonstration by a Princeton professor hacking a voting machine to shift votes undetected. https://www.foxnews.com/video/5126932108001

- Fortune reported in 2016 that Cylance researchers hacked a Sequoia AVC Edge machine, altering vote counts via a memory card. https://fortune.com/2016/11/04/voting-machine-hack-demonstra...

- Vox highlighted in 2016 that voting machines on Windows XP and voter databases online were vulnerable to hacking. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/11/7/134 educed/hackers-election-day-voting-machines

- PBS noted in 2016 that five states used digital voting systems without paper trails, increasing hacking risks. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/heres-how-hackers-migh...

- Slate reported in 2016 that 42 states used decade-old voting machines, prone to hacking and lacking paper trails. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2016/11/our-decrepit-vot...

- PBS revealed in 2016 that Pennsylvania's paperless machines made it impossible to verify vote tampering. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/recounts-no-u-s-electi...

- Politico warned in 2016 that 15 states, including Pennsylvania, used electronic voting machines without paper trails. https://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/us-elections-hacking-...

- Scientific American stated in 2017 that voting systems could be hacked by foreign powers, advocating for paper ballots. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/our-voting-system...

- Politico reported in 2017 on a Georgia election center's server misconfiguration, exposing voter data and passwords. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/06/14/will-the-...

- NPR cited a 2017 NSA report on Russian attempts to hack election systems, potentially targeting ballot programming. https://www.npr.org/2017/06/14/532824838/if-voting-machines-...

- HuffPost noted in 2017 that 15 states used hackable touch-screen voting machines without paper trails.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/voting-machines-hackable_n_59...

- Senator Elizabeth Warren's 2019 article highlighted vulnerabilities like outdated voter databases and paperless machines. https://elizabethwarren.com/plans/strengthening-our-democrac...

- Senators Warren, Klobuchar, Wyden, and Pocan sent letters in 2019 to voting machine companies about security concerns. [Note: The direct link to the letters is not provided in the web results. These letters were sent to the private equity firms owning voting machine companies, as noted in the thread. You may need to search for "Warren Klobuchar Wyden Pocan voting machine letters 2019" to find the original source, possibly on a government or senator's website.]

- A 2019 compilation of media articles detailed election system vulnerabilities over four years post-2016 election.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/politics/new-election-syste...

I’m not doxxing myself.

However many of my issues with CISA are based on my own professional work in security, and that of accomplished professors like J Halderman & M Blaze saying our election infrastructure is insecure.

We’ve been saying the same thing in hackerdom for 30 years!

If my career has been completely about the security of federal & military systems, then some lawyer like Krebs saying our infrastructure is secure when it’s running Windows 7 is a giant slap in the face, particularly given all of the censorship.

You wanted evidence. Here goes:

The censorship & viewpoint discrimination pressure CISA was bringing to bear has been over the top.

At the same time Krebs was talking about how secure our election infrastructure was, prominent professors such as Matt Blaze & J Halderman that have researched election security said the opposite.

This historically has been a bipartisan& Aceademic issue with more Dems & Repubs & Academia supporting claims of insecurity.

Those of us in security are convinced that all this unpatched windows7 usage is crazy and Chris Krebs lying about election security isn’t being open and truthful with the American people.

https://judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/republicans-j...

- The Associated Press reported in 2019 on the use of vulnerable Windows 7 software in election systems, highlighting risks in swing states. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/new-election-systems-u...

- NBC News revealed in 2020 that ES&S installed modems in voting machines, making them susceptible to hacking. [Note: The exact NBC News article from January 2020 titled "Voting Machines Vulnerable to Hacking Due to Modems" is not directly linked in the web results, but this matches the description in the thread. The full URL is not available in the provided web results, and I cannot search for it in real-time. You may need to look up the NBC News article from January 2020 for the precise link.]

- The Guardian exposed in 2015 that WinVote machines used weak passwords like "abcde," easily hackable from a distance. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/apr/15/virginia-vot...

- The New York Times reported in 2015 on a leaked database of 191 million voter records, raising concerns about phishing and identity theft. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/31/us/politics/voting-record...

- Wired noted in 2016 that many voting machines ran on outdated Windows XP, lacking security patches since 2014. https://www.wired.com/2016/08/americas-voting-machines-arent...

- Politico detailed in 2016 how a voting machine was hacked in minutes by replacing ROM chips with malicious firmware. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/08/2016-electio...

- CBS reported in 2016 that hackers demonstrated voting machine vulnerabilities, showing a $15 hack could alter votes. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hacker-demonstrates-how-voting-...

- ABC News confirmed in 2016 that voting machines can be hacked, especially in close elections, with malware erasing itself post-attack. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/hack-election-experts-russia...

- The Atlantic warned in 2016 about electronic voting risks, citing a case where a machine was turned into a Pac-Man console. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/08/elect...

- FOX News covered a 2016 demonstration by a Princeton professor hacking a voting machine to shift votes undetected. https://www.foxnews.com/video/5126932108001

- Fortune reported in 2016 that Cylance researchers hacked a Sequoia AVC Edge machine, altering vote counts via a memory card. https://fortune.com/2016/11/04/voting-machine-hack-demonstra...

- Vox highlighted in 2016 that voting machines on Windows XP and voter databases online were vulnerable to hacking. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/11/7/134 educed/hackers-election-day-voting-machines

- PBS noted in 2016 that five states used digital voting systems without paper trails, increasing hacking risks. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/heres-how-hackers-migh...

- Slate reported in 2016 that 42 states used decade-old voting machines, prone to hacking and lacking paper trails. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2016/11/our-decrepit-vot...

- PBS revealed in 2016 that Pennsylvania's paperless machines made it impossible to verify vote tampering. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/recounts-no-u-s-electi...

- Politico warned in 2016 that 15 states, including Pennsylvania, used electronic voting machines without paper trails. https://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/us-elections-hacking-...

- Scientific American stated in 2017 that voting systems could be hacked by foreign powers, advocating for paper ballots. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/our-voting-system...

- Politico reported in 2017 on a Georgia election center's server misconfiguration, exposing voter data and passwords. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/06/14/will-the-...

- NPR cited a 2017 NSA report on Russian attempts to hack election systems, potentially targeting ballot programming. https://www.npr.org/2017/06/14/532824838/if-voting-machines-...

- HuffPost noted in 2017 that 15 states used hackable touch-screen voting machines without paper trails.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/voting-machines-hackable_n_59...

- Senator Elizabeth Warren's 2019 article highlighted vulnerabilities like outdated voter databases and paperless machines. https://elizabethwarren.com/plans/strengthening-our-democrac...

- Senators Warren, Klobuchar, Wyden, and Pocan sent letters in 2019 to voting machine companies about security concerns. [Note: The direct link to the letters is not provided in the web results. These letters were sent to the private equity firms owning voting machine companies, as noted in the thread. You may need to search for "Warren Klobuchar Wyden Pocan voting machine letters 2019" to find the original source, possibly on a government or senator's website.]

- A 2019 compilation of media articles detailed election system vulnerabilities over four years post-2016 election.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/politics/new-election-syste...

But digital can also be lost. I think my point is that digital isn't a clear line in this situation

The ease of making copies of digital data, the ease of indexing them is totally different from books, just as writing, clay tablets, scrolls and books were from a purely oral society.

The saving grace is you, and what you do. It's each person here.

Yes, lots of people got fired for claiming those in the Covid days. The selective memory of the majority opinion here on HN is deeply distressing, but understandable due to blind tribal support for the democratic party.

Large swathes of people were first identified for being antivax when they self-registered under the religious exemption scheme and then were harassed and fired. It was cunningly done with the media paying no attention.