comment: >
  
  Even the Russians are not surprised.
context: It'd be a weird irony if the leader of the hacker group got asylum in the US for revealing this. >
  
  His name? Eduard Snegov >
  
  That's hilarious if you know a bit of Russian. Sneg means snow >
  
  Thanks for helping us non russian speakers to get into the joke. >
  
  It was funny without knowing Russian. Now that I know a little more, it's even funnier.  Like a joke onion. >
  
  Snowgres have layers. >
  
  Not everyone like snogres. Proletariat like suffering. Suffering have layers. >
  
  You know what everybody likes? Parfaits. >
  
  You ever meet anybody who said "Hey, I don't like no parfaits", parfaits are delicious! >
  
  “Parfaits may be the most delicious food on the WHOLE DAMN PLANET.” >
  
  The State Duma passes what ever needs to pass, so I doubt its "Illegal" >
  
  It's actually kind of amazing - they can make the law say whatever they want, but they don't even bother and still do illegal stuff left and right >
  
  That's pretty normal for such regimes.
  There is stuff which they can do openly, because it's supported or at least tolerated by many. Then there is stuff where they need some amount of plausible deniability, so their supporters can feign ignorance.  And finally things which has to be kept secret because it's just so obviously indefensible.
  To some extent this even applies to functioning democracies, but our grey areas and scope for actions "beyond the line" tend to be much narrower. The US have expended these with their secret court system past 9/11 (technically the systems existed since the 70s, but their use was much expanded in the War on Terror), but it's still much narrower than in a country like Russia. >
  
  It also makes it much easier to get rid of people you don't like anymore. 
  If everyone is guilty of something you can just throw them in prison if they don't behave like you want. >
  
  The true problem with a surveillance state, it makes it very easy to harass people. One minute apple and Google are leaving backdoors in their OS so the NSA can make sure you don't nuke NYC, the next minute some company in Israel is selling stingrays to police departments and selling software for them to image your phone. Maybe the CIA is sort of professional, only interested in bad guys, but then even if that is somehow possible, your local police officer who didn't finish high school uses one of the 15 billion laws and a loophole to get a warrant to harass people they don't like.
  To me, I hate mass surveillance of course, but I could almost stomach it if, it was exclusively within the domain of the military, with no jurisdiction over citizens, except for maybe a phone call when someone is hurting a child or kidnapped someone or something, not used for political reasons, which is almost impossible to imagine governments doing, as it's very easy to interpret things however you want and call someone a prototerrorist, and stalk and harass people until you catch them doing a crime.
  This is a very hard one, because in modern times you sort of need a secret service to kind of keep tabs on organized crime, foreign influence and stuff. Sometimes you need people to just be able to assassinate leaders of organized crime without it being public, so they don't have to endanger themselves. Yet somehow you have to keep politics out of this. You have to make sure someone has an actual legitimate reason to lay eyes on someone's personal information. I don't trust FISA courts, I don't trust the court system at all tbh, but definitely not secret courts. This is kind of one of the benefits of having a military that's seperate from the police. The military is easier to isolate from politics, and since they don't have power to act as law enforcement, they can kind of do the antiterrorism role better as long as they don't leak information, outside of protecting children or something, to the police. 
  In the future AI may be able to do it better, and have less fuck ups and leaks, and actually respect people's rights properly. Have a defanged police force that is concerned with protecting the community, and having a powerful military to protect the country as a whole, while still actually respecting people's rights and privacy, not storing data, etc. >
  
  Something adjacent to this domain was posted on HN just yesterday; it’s a pretty interesting read called ‘Disney without Data’. >
  
  Sorry, what’s HN? >
  
  Hacker News, ran by the YCombinator startup accelerator (they helped Reddit evolve into what it is today).   
  In format, it’s like Reddit but different in that the site isn’t gamified to increase engagement because it’s just an extension of the companies goals at launching startups and getting tech workers together to assist to that end. It’s not just aimed at tech workers - but there is a lot of content in that domain. The articles and discussion are usually more in-depth as well. Definitely recommend checking it out. >
  
  Do you have a link to it please? >
  
  A worldwide surveillance disclosure slapfight might actually do us some good. >
  
  It's all in the open already. Snowden proved people just don't seem to care. >
  
  The apathetic "I'm not doing anything wrong, why should I care?" mentality out in full force. >
  
  Isn't apathetic more like "I can't do anything anyway, why should I care" ? >
  
  It's both, apathy is the not caring part. >
  
  Teacher: I can't tell if you're ignorant or just apathetic.
  Student: I don't know, and I don't care. >
  
  "Giving up your right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is like giving up your freedom of speech because you have nothing to say." >
  
  It's Russia. They have no rights at all and are just serfs serving Tsar Vladimir and his genocidal war machine. >
  
  Technically they do have rights. Just when you have 1 man in charge with no opposition, he tells the judges what decisions to make regardless or has the people he does not like sent straight to jail or made to disappear.
  The strange thing about dictators, they don't usually want to be open about doing whatever the fuck they want. They need to feel respected as well as feared, and in their minds this means making laws that should help the people (and then disregarding the laws because they don't help you). >
  
  
  The strange thing about dictators, they don't usually want to be open about doing whatever the fuck they want.
  
  Yup. Just look at parts of the Chinese constitution.
  
  Article 35 
  Citizens of the People’s Republic of China enjoy freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession and of demonstration.
  
  I think we all know how true that is in reality, but they still try to pretend. >
  
  Dishonesty is inherent to such regimes >
  
  This is the best tl;dr I could make, original reduced by 72%. (I'm a bot)
  
  
  The hacker group claimed that the company launched a project called "Green Atom" that involves installing and maintaining surveillance equipment to monitor the online activity of Russian citizens and private corporations.
  This can be classified as espionage, unauthorized wiretapping, and surveillance of civilians without a warrant, which circumvents the laws of the Russian Federation and all public statements of the Russian authorities," the hacking group said in an email to the Kyiv Post.
  The data dump contained the information of thousands of Russian citizens who were clients of Russian corporations targeted by the surveillance program, which the group claimed to be operated by Russia's Federal Security Service.
  
  
  Extended Summary | FAQ | Feedback | Top keywords: Russian^#1 hacker^#2 citizens^#3 surveillance^#4 equipment^#5 >
  
  
  The act of snooping on citizens' phone records is allowed under Russian law. Changes to the legislation over the last decade have covered internet providers and web companies, requiring them to install SORM equipment. In fact, several companies were fined by Roskomnadzor, the state internet regular, for refusing to install SORM equipment.
  
  Probably the most important paragraph >
  
  I remember IT crowd on Habrahabr.ru ranting about SORM >
  
  Hehe, illegal... this article pretending russian citizens have rights and their government has some rules they should respect in the treatment of said citizens. >
  
  I'm glad Western governments hold their citizens in high regards and would never do something like this!
  /S >
  
  yeah but like, when we do it, we have the decency to pretend we're ashamed of it. >
  
  When? Where? I missed it!? >
  
  Yeah I remember prism being exposed and then... Nothing >
  
  Bush literally made it legal to spy on US citizens with the Patriot Act, which was an "emergency measure" to counter terrorism during the war in Iraq. Then they just "forgot" to repeal it, so it's still in force. >
  
  The Patriot Act expired in full in 2020 after none of its provisions were renewed, and some provisions expired much earlier. >
  
  Yeah but it was replaced by the USA freedom act. Supposedly better but I have my reserves on how much better. >
  
  We need a No Fake Act Names act. >
  
  The Legislative Appropriate Wording (LAW) Act actually makes it illegal to have an honest, straightforward title. It requires either a super neat acronym or an inspiring use of double speak, and gives bonus points for both. >
  
  Ed Snowden did the same thing for the US in 2013.  Our courts have found that the suveillance he revealed was illegal.  Nobody was sent to jail for it, but Snowden is an exile. >
  
  They framed it like Snowden is the bad guy.
  Edit: okay I get it, Snowden bad >
  
  To be fair, he leaked an absolutely massive amount of documents (they aren't even sure how many), many of which didn't relate to surveillance and all  ended up in Russian and Chinese hands.  The New York Times reported in 2015 that ISIS and other terrorist groups had used that information to help them evade monitoring using encrypted channels. Also, a lot of MI6 agents had to be moved out of hostile countries as well in response. >
  
  The ISIS and terrorist stuff was pretty basic though
  He showed gov is reading everyone’s emails. They stopped using emails 
  Can’t really avoid that without telling the world about the surveillance >
  
  If I remember correctly, there were specifically cellphone numbers being monitored and that list was leaked. Imagine the time it takes to trace back and hack hundreds of terrorists when they all go off the map suddenly at the same time. 
  I appreciate that he leaked things like illegal drone strike videos. And surveillance of their own citizens.
  But tracking foreign nationals is the primary mission of the NSA and it's useful as fuck for security. 
  In my opinion, it's more on the journalists than him. He leaked to journalists and they were self interested. Instead of taking a week to search through things and find some stories in there, they leaked everything. >
  
  They did search the stuff. I remember they were releasing it slowly so the government couldn't appropriately do damage control and spin a story ahead of time.
  The reality is that the same act can have both legal and illegal elements to it. The Government spying on its own citizens is illegal, the government spying on foreigners is not. Snowden was prosecuted for revealing classified information, the contents of that information is not necessarily what was illegal per se. >
  
  Just the tip >
  
  Cough Patriot Act cough >
  
  World Trade Center 7 fell from sadness >
  
  Hacker group releases 128GB of data showing sky is fucking blue. >
  
  The irony in all of this is that most civilized countries that promote freedom and liberty are engaging in the exact same practice of public surveillance.
  There was a time we would proudly hail that we are nothing like the Russian government. That time has long past. Today, both governments are practically indistinguishable. Let’s be honest, the fault lies within we the people. We don’t bother to educate ourselves or get involved in the function of our government That is supposed to be representative of us. We should be better than this. >
  
  Meta and Google shaking their heads.  Amateurs >
  
  128GB. Is that all? >
  
  Considering the entirety of Wikipedia fits into a 150Gb download (or 30Gb download without images)128Gb seems like quite a lot of documents. >
  
  I remember when it was like 90GB. Soon, it'll almost fill a quarter of my hard drive :( >
  
  Treat yourself and get an SSD >
  
  Oh, my 5 year old PC runs a M.2 NVMe ;) >
  
  Nice 👍
  Too many people feel the need to upgrade their whole system while often they are still on hdd only, switching that is 9/10 times more than enough.
  So just making sure! Too many people feel pressured now a days to upgrade to stuff they really don't need >
  
  I'm mostly still running old hardware. I can't be bothered to pay ridiculous prices for hardware I don't really need. NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, all can [redacted] my [redacted]. >
  
  
  all can [redacted] my [redacted].
  
  Butter my biscuit!? >
  
  I think you mean "Special Surveillance Operation", you seem unwell Comrade to get these things confused. Maybe you should go get help at hospital, big one, tall one at least 5 stories but preferably 8, talk it out with state licensed therapist. I'm sure problem will go away, like old Russian saying, "Where others see a wall stopping progress, the FSB opens window of possibility for you to step through." >
  
  TIL Russia has an NSA too. >
  
  Pretty much what they’ve funded as opposed to their conventional military. 
  Decent PsyOps with a decomposed army. >
  
  I am Jack's total lack of surprise >
  
  “The act of snooping on citizens' phone records is allowed under Russian law. Changes to the legislation over the last decade have covered internet providers and web companies, requiring them to install SORM equipment. In fact, several companies were fined by Roskomnadzor, the state internet regular, for refusing to install SORM equipment.”
  Seems like it’s legal to me >
  
  Stuff like this pisses me off extra bad because it's happened in the USA several times and nobody even really protested. >
  
  More like every day. NSA been doing this for ages now and American can't even elect ones who are against it. If anything it's unpatriotic. Going by the same thinking, Putin probably doing the right thing :facepalm: >
  
  
  American can't even elect ones who are against it.
  
  First Past The Post voting  am i right? >
  
  From the article: "The act of snooping on citizens' phone records is allowed under Russian law."
  When you don't read your own article. >
  
  Does this mean Edward Snowden needs to take a moral stand and move somewhere else? >
  
  I dont think he moved to Russia because he saw them being morally superior to the US >
  
  You mean a place he didn’t want to be more than jail… >
  
  I know that I often travel through China on the way to ecuador from the US >
  
  If you’re seeking asylum, you don’t usually have the luxury of going directly to where you want to end up. Going to a country like Russia where they won’t routinely share your flight manifest with the US just because they ask is an entirely reasonable strategy >
  
  It's like finding out Santa's not real, I'm devastated the magic is gone. If we can't trust the Kremlin who can we trust? >
  
  Can't believe anyone is downvoting this hilarious comment. >
  
  Surprising absolutely no one >
  
  I'd have been absolutely floored, were I to learn that Putin WASN'T spying extensively on his own people. >
  
  Snowden: wait what >
  
  I dont support russia but the us is guilty of the same thing... Remember the whole ed snowden thing? >
  
  This is no news the americans and chinese do this all over the world. >
  
  To be fair, it "IS" kinda what they're known for.
  The Soviet Union and KGB didn't die, just re-branded. >
  
  So, an iPhone worth of data…? >
  
  Remember, surveillance of citizens is only bad if another country does it >
  
  Putin: “and? …. >
  
  Russia is behind again. The UK and USA have been doing this for years >
  
  "Hello Mr. Snowden, pleasure to meet you, I am Colonel Ivanov. We're happy you can stay in our country, safe from the US oppression. Now, about that NSA surveillance system, can you describe, in as much detail as possible, how it all works?"
  The rest is history. >
  
  Huh? The first line of the article states the Russian surveillance program started in 1995, when Snowden was probably in preschool >
  
  I would imagine that Russia started surveilling its citizens when it was the Soviet Union.
  And definitely not illegal. >
  
  Quite a bit earlier than that. Russia is more of an empire than a country and it has always run on surveillance and subversion of minorities. Part of the reason they're so good with disinformation and propaganda is that they've been at it for centuries. >
  
  The article even says that current Russian law allows this surveillance so it’s not illegal in any legal sense in Russia 
  “The act of snooping on citizens' phone records is allowed under Russian law. Changes to the legislation over the last decade have covered internet providers and web companies, requiring them to install SORM equipment. In fact, several companies were fined by Roskomnadzor, the state internet regular, for refusing to install SORM equipment.” >
  
  Now do America >
  
  They do this in the UK >
  
  I can't think of a country that isn't doing it. Honestly with how few rights Russians have I'm surprised it's illegal there.
  Edit: read the article, doesn't seem illegal under their law. 
  
  The act of snooping on citizens' phone records is allowed under Russian law. Changes to the legislation over the last decade have covered internet providers and web companies, requiring them to install SORM equipment. In fact, several companies were fined by Roskomnadzor, the state internet regular, for refusing to install SORM equipment. >
  
  Out of interest, is there actually anyone delusional enough here to think there's a single country that doesn't do the same thing? >
  
  Do this for the US and you're a traitorous criminal >
  
  Im certain Putin will celebrate these people as heroes >
  
  I think the comparisons should be the how the Russian people feel about it, not Putin. >
  
  Welp if people suddenly die of radiation poisoning we’ll know who the hackers are >
  
  Only 128GB of data? That doesn't sound like much. I bet you can take 100 ordinary people, do a Google takeout, and get way more than 128GB of data they weren't aware was being collected. >
  
  Great work, hacker collective! >
  
  Illegal surveillance? Why is this surprising? >
  
  Illegal? That term has hardly any meaning over there. >
  
  Illegal ? It is illegal for you to say this is illegal. 
  If I say it is legal , it is.
  Would you like a nice vacation in gulag ? 
  You can join your homosexual friends there. >
  
  For me as russian it is not the problem. Problems begins then they send russians it to jails for their opinions against war. Yashin for example. >
  
  Russia: makes it legal
  Checkmate >
  
  Least surprising news of the day. So far… >
  
  ...to the surprise of no one. >
  
  Are we supposed to be surprised by this? It’s Russia. >
  
  I am sure that NOW the russian people will start to care. /s >
  
  Doesn’t matter.  They won’t believe it anyway. >
  
  The gulags better get ready for an influx of CISOs. >
  
  Only a 128GB? >
  
  Where can i download these illegally obtained 128gb of personal data about russian citizens.
  The hackers only make it worse. Now their data is accessible by everybody >
  
  It's supposed to get people mad. Hopefully they're smart enough to get mad they are being surveiled rather than that someone released the details. >
  
  The question is, is it illegal in Russia? >
  
  I mean, how is this illegal? The article literally says:
  
  The act of snooping on citizens' phone records is allowed under Russian law. Changes to the legislation over the last decade have covered internet providers and web companies, requiring them to install SORM equipment. In fact, several companies were fined by Roskomnadzor, the state internet regular, for refusing to install SORM equipment. >
  
  Putin’s regime is all corrupt and its about keeping control over everything and everyone. Putin’s power is corrupt absolutely and its hard to let go. >
  
  128GB can get you a LOT of recorded footage. Of course this depends on fps, bitrate, compression, etc. but I’ve seen MONTHS of footage on a 128GB RAID >
  
  "Illegal surveillance of citizens" it's not illegal in Russia, it's how things work. I'm not for it, I don't like it, but this headline is not correct. >
  
  They putin up a list and checking it twice 🎶 >
  
  Sadly, this doesn’t really mean anything. The world already knows what the Russian dictatorship is doing, the old people in Russia are too brainwashed by propaganda and the young people are too fearful to start any sort of uprising. >
  
  I wonder if this is making the FBI/NSA do a little nervous looking around the room. >
  
  So, where is download? I hoard stuff like this.
  Чтобы ссылка была у меня на столе >
  
  Every government is spying on their citizens period… this shouldn’t be news >
  
  It's only illegal when laws matter. In a autocracy like russia the autocrat decides what matters and what doesn't. Laws are irrelevant. Things are In place to control the Russian people, nothing is there to protect them. >
  
  Shocking, it always seemed like such a standup government of the people. >
  
  I thought having laws in Russia was illegal