My brother worked for years in the intelligence community. One of the common stereotypes within the IC regards the fact that Mormons are heavily overrepresented, for various reasons that involve foreign language skills from mission trips, a reputation for respecting authority, abstinence from drugs/alcohol, family connections, ease of gaining security clearances, etc. The stereotype in the IC regarding Mormons is they never "question." The dozens of friends I have that work in the IC say that the stereotype is accurate.
"
The apparent incorruptibility of Mormons' moral righteousness make them ideal candidates for the nation's law enforcement and intelligence agencies.
Mormons are disproportionately represented in the CIA. A recruiter told the Salt Lake Tribune that returned Mormon missionaries are valued for their foreign language skills, abstinence from drugs and alcohol, and respect for authority "
I wonder if this has bearings on constructing the new data center in Utah?
I'll go ahead and contribute to this discussion, since, well, I'm a Mormon. I was a little bit shocked to see this be the top comment.
I served a mission in eastern Ukraine (Донецк, Харьков) from 2008-2010 and there learned to speak Russian fluently. Since returning home I've had probably a half dozen offers to work for the FBI or other government offices. Every now and then the highest level Russian classes at BYU will get an announcement from some government agency trying to recruit us, and a lot of them are rumored to actually be the CIA.
It's more than just the language fluency (not all return missionaries speak the same level of Russian,) it's also having lived in the culture and living very conservative lifestyles (no smoking/drinking, emphasis on families, etc.) and fierce loyalty. It's the overall perfect stereotype for what government agencies want.
Combine that with how cheap everything is ($80K/year is a pretty solid job here and $500K bought my parents a 3-story 3,000 square foot house). That's the reason Adobe, Microsoft, Novell, eBay, Overstock.com, Goldman Sachs etc. have all started to put up shop in Utah - it's ideal if you want people who are content to do a good job with their 8-5 and go home to their families.
The new data center in utah is probably a mixture of all of these things; everything is uber-cheap including workforce, so why not put a data center there? (Bluehost is here as well).
Conversely a certain subset of Mormons are going to be very vulnerable to a certain type of attack that the regular (incl. more liberal subsets of) population would not be vulnerable to.
A gay mormon (which is just as common as a gay catholic, or a gay atheist) will be likely to be in the closet. They would probably be ostracised by family and friends if they were outed, lots of people in the general community would not be ostracised. Mormons are more vulnerable to that form of attack and compromise.
I'm glad someone posted this. My immediate thought after reading the breaking news about the massive phone surveillance was, "wait, did people not think this was happening?" I'm really not a conspiracy nut, but that Wired article and the NYTimes reporting made it pretty clear that the Gov't is pretty much collecting everything they can get their hands on.
Glad to finally see some outrage though.
Legitimate question: what's new about what is breaking in the news right now? Merely confirmation that the NSA is conducting indiscriminate phone-taps?
Journalist Glenn Greenwald obtained documents from a leak that confirm the NSA has secretly been requiring Verizon (and presumably the same for other networks) to provide the complete information (location, duration, id) of every single call, national or international, on an ongoing daily basis.
There is no discrimination - this is everybody, all the time.
That's kind of a big deal.
It's also pretty damn brave of whoever leaked the document.
There is a very interesting book called The Puzzle Palace, about the early history of the NSA and its forerunners. The telegraph system had ATT cooperating with the government to let them have a copy of everything. This is before telephones. I always assumed this never stopped.
This has been around for much longer than people realize. What does everyone think this is used for these days: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON All those intercept points didn't just go away.
Wasn't there a legal requirement that ISPs install some sort of box for law enforcement usage back in the early 2000s?
Also, I recall reading article from around the same time where a network operator noticed mysterious taps that appeared in his fiber rack over night. These were at a major peering point(lvl3 or att?). The taps went into the ceiling and over a wall. When he questioned their existence, he wasn't allowed to remove them or investigate further.
This has been going on ever since the internet and cell phones became popular. The difference now is that they are less secretive about it. See before, you had to have your ally(the UK, AUS, etc...) log communications for you and you'd log communications for them. Then there's no risk of federal or local laws getting in the way. It looks like just good old fashioned espionage. I guess after 9/11, the powers that be felt that wasn't good enough.
> what's new about what is breaking in the news right now?
That they no longer operate on a cloak-and-dagger basis, and that all three branches (judicial, executive, legislative) are demonstrating an unprecedented level of cooperation -- the "checks and balances" we so hold dear in democracy are now null and void.
Previously, plausible deniability and "neither confirm nor deny" public relations policies dominated the privacy debate arena, however now we can move forward beyond that and we can have a frank and honest discussion about it all.
The window of opportunity to debate these broad-sweeping and baseless violations of privacy is distinctly ajar, however it is closing quickly.
The various levels of government will soon rely quite heavily on this domestic surveillance network and implementing restrictions after the fact is almost always impossible.
It's useful when discussing this topic to break the word "spy" down into more discrete terms to understand exactly what we are discussing.
I found this article to be useful in differentiating the various terms:
On its face, the document suggests that the U.S. government regularly collects and stores all domestic telephone records. I use the caveat because there are several ways to interpret it, assuming it is real. (It looks real.)
A few definitions: to "collect" means to gather and store; to "analyze" means that a computer or human actually does something with the records; to "intercept" means that a computer or human actually listens to or records calls.
...
The NSA, under the FISA Amendments Act, is able to analyze metadata, like incoming and outgoing call records, so long as the Attorney General certifies that a particular set of information is useful for reasons of national security. Then, the NSA asks the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to order that a company comply. As that bill was being ironed out, this step was requested by private companies because they wanted protection from lawsuits in case innocents — or millions of innocents — found that the NSA had gathered their call information.
My own understanding is that the NSA routinely collects millions of domestic-to-domestic phone records. It does not do anything with them unless there is a need to search through them for lawful purposes. That is, an analyst at the NSA cannot legally simply perform random searches through the stored data. He or she needs to have a reason, usually some intelligence tip. That would allow him or her to segregate the part of the data that's necessary to analyze, and proceed from there.
In a way, it makes sense for the NSA to collect all telephone records because it can't know in advance what sections or slices it might need in the future. It does not follow that simply because the NSA collects data that it is legal for the NSA to use the data for foreign intelligence or counter-terrorism analysis.
This is written specifically about the telephone call metadata, but being able to differentiate exactly what is collected about Internet traffic would also aid this discussion. Unfortunately this would only be possible if the government was more transparent about what is being collected.
We know exactly what's being collected: all the Internet traffic they can get their hands on. They have installed beam splitters on Internet backbones at facilities around the country:
And are funneling all of the traffic to a datacenter in Utah with "yottabyte" scale capacity, with the goal of having enough capacity to archive the data for 100 years:
The NSA whistleblower who disclosed the project to the public was the person who wrote the backend of the system, which was originally designed for foreign data collection only. The NSA later repurposed the system for domestic data collection too. The goal, according to him, is to build models of every single person in the country, model the social graph, and be able to classify people as potential threats.
is the 'reason' even verified? is that not just a pretty way of saying "they can't browse through the data, unless they have a reason - any reason will do - feel secure:) "
Does anyone know how they do this, technically, and to what extent? Does Google just feed them billions of emails, or what? Do they type my name into a form on Amazon.com to get SSH access my EC2 server? And how the hell do they see my finances? Do all of those terms of service agreements say, "By the way, we give your private information to the government without question" ???
At first I thought it didn't matter that they can see what I do, because if I store a movie of my underground lair with nukes and a few F-22s in Google Drive, they can't use the evidence against me in court unless they get a warrant. But let's be real: if you've got a movie of yourself shooting some guy in the face in Google Drive, they're going to find a way to get that warrant before you delete the movie. And they'll have a copy of it to show the judge. You don't even know they've seen your not-so-secret stuff. The fact that they do this in a clandestine manner effectively makes it unconstitutional since the warrant protection is easy for them to circumvent.
The CIA doesn't ask for judicial warrants, and doesn't have to. Extrajudicial murder is legal.
Al-Awlaki was murdered on suspicion that there was an imminent threat to US persons. No warrant obtained. Al-Awlaki's son was murdered, again without warrant, because of complicated reasons that boil down to his last name being Awlaki.
Any of those videos by themselves would be enough for you to be included on the kill list, and executed. No court would have to be involved. You could also be executed by mistake, like Awlaki's son, or many Yemeni children that were so. Or being kidnapped in Italy by CIA agents into a plane, and imprisoned without trial. Or you could be an Al-Jazeera journalist, being arrested by the Pakistani army, then imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay for six years without any crime charged against you, like Sami al-Hajj. It's all fair game.
Oh, don't forget that you could lose your job as a politician because you hired a prostitute, and the Mormon CIA doesn't like that. Definitely fair.
Facebook has internal teams and tools used to do searches on activity of users, when law enforcement requests come in FB looks at the request and makes a judgement on whether to comply with it. They supply information such as when and from what IP a user logged in, and can provide user content - however I do not know to what extent they provide it.
Nothing gets deleted from FB. So the data is there for a long time - further, FB is careful about where they build datacenters and hold the data so as to ensure that FB is the owner of the data, and not subject to some foreign government claiming that they own the data of their national users.
Google surely has the same team, tools and procedures.
What about Dropbox? and Box? How do these companies deal with this whole situation? FB has an entire .gov policy/interfacing office in DC - do these other companies as well?
It is interesting what the media and public choose to be concerned by. 15 years ago I would've guessed that this sort of wide-spread operation would never have been tolerated by either. Post 9/11, it was surely scandalous when ATT got caught providing taps, but honestly, it didn't seem that anyone cared that much. Not enough to put strong pressure on the government to, you know, stop. At this point, I'm convinced that almost nobody actually cares. (I'm talking about practical concern, not just a vague sense of "I don't approve".)
Interestingly, this has roughly coincided with the growth of cloud services. When using a cloud service, there is some level of conscious acceptance that someone else is processing your data and can see what you're doing, and you're more-or-less OK with it. I wouldn't have guessed that people would be so eager to use cloud services whole-sale.
I think that at this point, people tend to assume that anything that leaves their computer will/can be inspected, and for the large part they're OK with it.
I don't know what could possibly done. If the legislature or courts got involved and told the NSA to stop, they'd just say "Ok, sure" and then continue on in secret.
There is a interesting talk on youtube [1] by William Binney (a former U.S. intelligence official turn whistle blower) [2], where he talks about the tech behind ThinThread [3]. He describes how ThinThread uses Latent semantic indexing [4] to pull together all this metadata into a type of fingerprint. There are various reports (see google) that Stellar Wind was based on a component of the ThinThread capability or that Stellar Wind was an off shoot of ThinThread.
Note that Binney resigned on October 31, 2001. While he may have been privy to planned initiatives, his knowledge is now 12 years old. We don't know what new tech has been developed since then.
What is truly a scary thought is if the vast, mindless mass of people easily swayed by consumerism, advertisement and buzz, talk about this for about two weeks and then forget the whole thing, screaming "We have NOTHING to hide!" as a logically flawed and incredibly poor excuse.
The entire premise that democracy would work is flawed. Take Turkey. A ravaged, torn, depressed state, brought back to life by a fucking dictator, Kemal Ataturk. And now? Riots and revolution are taking place on the streets of Istanbul.
I'm not saying dictatorship is the best idea, but a good, conservatively Green or Green Libertarian government is the only path to resolution. But since the United States mass public is uneducated and apathetic (unlike how it used to be 300 years ago, and also markedly unlike quite a few in Europe who actually give a fuck about their rights), don't expect it to happen any time soon.
And for those who think this is elitism:
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are,
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
- Tennyson
> What is truly a scary thought is if the vast, mindless mass of people...
This is why privacy advocates (and libertarians more generally), can't get more popular traction: the incredibly derisive and arrogant tone with which they address their fellow citizens, and their flippant, dismissive attitude towards democracy.
Why should I listen to the opinions of someone who calls my parents, most of my friends, my in-laws, my wife, etc, "mindless"? Just because they have different priorities and care about different issues, or (gasp!) have different ideas about the appropriate boundaries of police surveillance?
What is truly a scary thought is if the vast, mindless mass of people easily swayed by consumerism, advertisement and buzz, talk about this for about two weeks and then forget the whole thing, screaming "We have NOTHING to hide!" as a logically flawed and incredibly poor excuse.
It won't stay at the top of the news for even two weeks. Most people don't care because a) it doesn't actually affect their lives and b) they actually want government to monitor traffic patterns for potentially suspicious activity. As a society, some 25% of our labor force is engaged in some sort of security activity, not counting police and military. This is arguably a consequence of the fetishization of private property in the US compared to other countries: http://tuvalu.santafe.edu/~bowles/GarrisonAmerica2007.pdf
a good, conservatively Green or Green Libertarian government is the only path to resolution
Er...I think you're going to run into some consistency problems there.
United States mass public is uneducated and apathetic (unlike how it used to be 300 years ago
Highly questionable. Most people in 1713 were not educated at all and even if we look at the revolutionary period we should remember that wealthy landowners whose writings have come down to use were economically exceptional (eg John dickinson, the 'Penmnsylvanian farmer' who was chided by Alexander Hamilton for implicitly arguing for 'free as in beer - http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfi... and http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfi... ...please excuse my gross oversimplification, but it's a fact that many colonists saw revolution as a means to get out from under state and private debts owed in England).
"I've got nothing to hide" isn't the only argument that is used to counter privacy advocates, and I agree that this argument is wrong to some extent.
A more valid argument might be that when I think of government agencies looking at data from Google I know I'm just a number, unless they want to investigate, in which case they may look at my personal info. But I have to guess the number of investigated people is pretty low and there must be valid reasons to start an investigation, just like they need a warrant to get inside a house. It would simply be impossible to investigate every one of us in detail.
You're more of an optimist about the state than I am because I think the only POSSIBLE resolution long term is the dissolution of all state power and moving towards enclaved/anarchistic models. Basically I'm talking about the Diamond Age in real life here. Hell, we already have prototype matter compilers. When an enclave all has 3d manufacturing and scanning down and starts to build their own civilization kits, of what use is the state to anyone aside from starting wars?
Inevitably complete electronic surveillance of communications will be used for insider trading, implicating enemies/competitors in crimes, and suppression of journalists and politically unfavorable activists.
Giant corporations competing for market share need to consider the operational security implications of bribable government employees having access to their trade secrets and strategies.
The recent case of the NYC cop that was planning on kidnapping and eating women would be chilling enough, but becomes even more horrifying when you learn that he was using law enforcement databases to stalk potential victims.
No human or group of humans can be trusted with total information awareness.
Stuff like this does not surprise me. Well, actually it does. It makes me question my assumption that the U.S. government has been doing stuff like this all along. If this leak is legitimate, then one can reason that the NSA didn't just acquire all of this data by itself in the past, but that they asked permission for it in the present.
I've always wondered, as a Canadian whose communications are most assuredly intercepted by the US gov., why such spying is not considered an act of war?
If I go to the US and "physically" spy, I'll get prosecuted, won't I?
All international slights are weighed against the cost of losing the offending country as a trade partner. This is how most peace is maintained these days.
All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
"The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him." -- Nuremberg Principle IV
Those that perform traitorous deeds to prevent traitorous deeds are traitors to their nation and themselves. -- Me
The whole "pizza case" phenomenon is hilarious. ironic but hilarious.
I'm sure there are tons of ethical implications, and the NSA has its share of shady activities, but part of it seems to be akin to that final scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark when the government loses the powerful, dangerous artifact in some nameless Army warehouse filled with tons of beef jerky or whatever it was.
This is probably why US bandwidth hasn't increased in ten years. Telecoms didn't want it to, obviously, but more importantly, the US government didn't want it to either, because more bandwidth increases the amount of information they have to store to have a carbon copy of everything.
Individual connections haven't gotten a great deal faster, but more people have higher speed connections and they are using them more. Traffic has increased by some enormous factor in the last 10 years (picking conservatively from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_traffic easily gets a factor of 20 or 30).
I wonder if this means we'll see the rise of huge botnets and networks calling each other and using flagged words just to saturate the data the NSA is picking up.
[+] [-] JPKab|12 years ago|reply
Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/11-surprising-things-you-didn...
" The apparent incorruptibility of Mormons' moral righteousness make them ideal candidates for the nation's law enforcement and intelligence agencies.
Mormons are disproportionately represented in the CIA. A recruiter told the Salt Lake Tribune that returned Mormon missionaries are valued for their foreign language skills, abstinence from drugs and alcohol, and respect for authority "
I wonder if this has bearings on constructing the new data center in Utah?
[+] [-] austenallred|12 years ago|reply
I served a mission in eastern Ukraine (Донецк, Харьков) from 2008-2010 and there learned to speak Russian fluently. Since returning home I've had probably a half dozen offers to work for the FBI or other government offices. Every now and then the highest level Russian classes at BYU will get an announcement from some government agency trying to recruit us, and a lot of them are rumored to actually be the CIA.
It's more than just the language fluency (not all return missionaries speak the same level of Russian,) it's also having lived in the culture and living very conservative lifestyles (no smoking/drinking, emphasis on families, etc.) and fierce loyalty. It's the overall perfect stereotype for what government agencies want.
Combine that with how cheap everything is ($80K/year is a pretty solid job here and $500K bought my parents a 3-story 3,000 square foot house). That's the reason Adobe, Microsoft, Novell, eBay, Overstock.com, Goldman Sachs etc. have all started to put up shop in Utah - it's ideal if you want people who are content to do a good job with their 8-5 and go home to their families.
The new data center in utah is probably a mixture of all of these things; everything is uber-cheap including workforce, so why not put a data center there? (Bluehost is here as well).
[+] [-] rmc|12 years ago|reply
A gay mormon (which is just as common as a gay catholic, or a gay atheist) will be likely to be in the closet. They would probably be ostracised by family and friends if they were outed, lots of people in the general community would not be ostracised. Mormons are more vulnerable to that form of attack and compromise.
[+] [-] batbomb|12 years ago|reply
The data center in Utah has more to do with cheap land, low cost, and low likelihood of natural disaster.
[+] [-] mrchucklepants|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eli|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rollo_tommasi|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] voxmatt|12 years ago|reply
Glad to finally see some outrage though.
Legitimate question: what's new about what is breaking in the news right now? Merely confirmation that the NSA is conducting indiscriminate phone-taps?
[+] [-] tomchristie|12 years ago|reply
There is no discrimination - this is everybody, all the time.
That's kind of a big deal.
It's also pretty damn brave of whoever leaked the document.
His original article is here...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone-record...
[+] [-] leephillips|12 years ago|reply
There is a very interesting book called The Puzzle Palace, about the early history of the NSA and its forerunners. The telegraph system had ATT cooperating with the government to let them have a copy of everything. This is before telephones. I always assumed this never stopped.
[+] [-] deelowe|12 years ago|reply
Wasn't there a legal requirement that ISPs install some sort of box for law enforcement usage back in the early 2000s?
Also, I recall reading article from around the same time where a network operator noticed mysterious taps that appeared in his fiber rack over night. These were at a major peering point(lvl3 or att?). The taps went into the ceiling and over a wall. When he questioned their existence, he wasn't allowed to remove them or investigate further.
This has been going on ever since the internet and cell phones became popular. The difference now is that they are less secretive about it. See before, you had to have your ally(the UK, AUS, etc...) log communications for you and you'd log communications for them. Then there's no risk of federal or local laws getting in the way. It looks like just good old fashioned espionage. I guess after 9/11, the powers that be felt that wasn't good enough.
[+] [-] ihsw|12 years ago|reply
That they no longer operate on a cloak-and-dagger basis, and that all three branches (judicial, executive, legislative) are demonstrating an unprecedented level of cooperation -- the "checks and balances" we so hold dear in democracy are now null and void.
Previously, plausible deniability and "neither confirm nor deny" public relations policies dominated the privacy debate arena, however now we can move forward beyond that and we can have a frank and honest discussion about it all.
The window of opportunity to debate these broad-sweeping and baseless violations of privacy is distinctly ajar, however it is closing quickly.
The various levels of government will soon rely quite heavily on this domestic surveillance network and implementing restrictions after the fact is almost always impossible.
[+] [-] addflip|12 years ago|reply
Exactly! I was wondering the same thing.
[+] [-] TallGuyShort|12 years ago|reply
No, it's the 99% of cases that were completely unwarranted in the first place that we've actually got to be concerned about.
[+] [-] brown9-2|12 years ago|reply
I found this article to be useful in differentiating the various terms:
On its face, the document suggests that the U.S. government regularly collects and stores all domestic telephone records. I use the caveat because there are several ways to interpret it, assuming it is real. (It looks real.)
A few definitions: to "collect" means to gather and store; to "analyze" means that a computer or human actually does something with the records; to "intercept" means that a computer or human actually listens to or records calls.
... The NSA, under the FISA Amendments Act, is able to analyze metadata, like incoming and outgoing call records, so long as the Attorney General certifies that a particular set of information is useful for reasons of national security. Then, the NSA asks the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to order that a company comply. As that bill was being ironed out, this step was requested by private companies because they wanted protection from lawsuits in case innocents — or millions of innocents — found that the NSA had gathered their call information.
My own understanding is that the NSA routinely collects millions of domestic-to-domestic phone records. It does not do anything with them unless there is a need to search through them for lawful purposes. That is, an analyst at the NSA cannot legally simply perform random searches through the stored data. He or she needs to have a reason, usually some intelligence tip. That would allow him or her to segregate the part of the data that's necessary to analyze, and proceed from there.
In a way, it makes sense for the NSA to collect all telephone records because it can't know in advance what sections or slices it might need in the future. It does not follow that simply because the NSA collects data that it is legal for the NSA to use the data for foreign intelligence or counter-terrorism analysis.
http://theweek.com/article/index/245228/the-fbi-collects-all...
This is written specifically about the telephone call metadata, but being able to differentiate exactly what is collected about Internet traffic would also aid this discussion. Unfortunately this would only be possible if the government was more transparent about what is being collected.
[+] [-] bascule|12 years ago|reply
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
And are funneling all of the traffic to a datacenter in Utah with "yottabyte" scale capacity, with the goal of having enough capacity to archive the data for 100 years:
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/al...
The NSA whistleblower who disclosed the project to the public was the person who wrote the backend of the system, which was originally designed for foreign data collection only. The NSA later repurposed the system for domestic data collection too. The goal, according to him, is to build models of every single person in the country, model the social graph, and be able to classify people as potential threats.
[+] [-] nitrogen|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Ziomislaw|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alexvr|12 years ago|reply
At first I thought it didn't matter that they can see what I do, because if I store a movie of my underground lair with nukes and a few F-22s in Google Drive, they can't use the evidence against me in court unless they get a warrant. But let's be real: if you've got a movie of yourself shooting some guy in the face in Google Drive, they're going to find a way to get that warrant before you delete the movie. And they'll have a copy of it to show the judge. You don't even know they've seen your not-so-secret stuff. The fact that they do this in a clandestine manner effectively makes it unconstitutional since the warrant protection is easy for them to circumvent.
[+] [-] lolcraft|12 years ago|reply
Al-Awlaki was murdered on suspicion that there was an imminent threat to US persons. No warrant obtained. Al-Awlaki's son was murdered, again without warrant, because of complicated reasons that boil down to his last name being Awlaki.
Any of those videos by themselves would be enough for you to be included on the kill list, and executed. No court would have to be involved. You could also be executed by mistake, like Awlaki's son, or many Yemeni children that were so. Or being kidnapped in Italy by CIA agents into a plane, and imprisoned without trial. Or you could be an Al-Jazeera journalist, being arrested by the Pakistani army, then imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay for six years without any crime charged against you, like Sami al-Hajj. It's all fair game.
Oh, don't forget that you could lose your job as a politician because you hired a prostitute, and the Mormon CIA doesn't like that. Definitely fair.
[+] [-] samstave|12 years ago|reply
Nothing gets deleted from FB. So the data is there for a long time - further, FB is careful about where they build datacenters and hold the data so as to ensure that FB is the owner of the data, and not subject to some foreign government claiming that they own the data of their national users.
Google surely has the same team, tools and procedures.
What about Dropbox? and Box? How do these companies deal with this whole situation? FB has an entire .gov policy/interfacing office in DC - do these other companies as well?
[+] [-] _account|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] B-Con|12 years ago|reply
Interestingly, this has roughly coincided with the growth of cloud services. When using a cloud service, there is some level of conscious acceptance that someone else is processing your data and can see what you're doing, and you're more-or-less OK with it. I wouldn't have guessed that people would be so eager to use cloud services whole-sale.
I think that at this point, people tend to assume that anything that leaves their computer will/can be inspected, and for the large part they're OK with it.
[+] [-] nsxwolf|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WestCoastJustin|12 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxnp2Sz59p8
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Binney_%28U.S._intellig...
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThinThread
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_semantic_indexing
[+] [-] epoxyhockey|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kunai|12 years ago|reply
The entire premise that democracy would work is flawed. Take Turkey. A ravaged, torn, depressed state, brought back to life by a fucking dictator, Kemal Ataturk. And now? Riots and revolution are taking place on the streets of Istanbul.
I'm not saying dictatorship is the best idea, but a good, conservatively Green or Green Libertarian government is the only path to resolution. But since the United States mass public is uneducated and apathetic (unlike how it used to be 300 years ago, and also markedly unlike quite a few in Europe who actually give a fuck about their rights), don't expect it to happen any time soon.
And for those who think this is elitism:
[+] [-] rayiner|12 years ago|reply
This is why privacy advocates (and libertarians more generally), can't get more popular traction: the incredibly derisive and arrogant tone with which they address their fellow citizens, and their flippant, dismissive attitude towards democracy.
Why should I listen to the opinions of someone who calls my parents, most of my friends, my in-laws, my wife, etc, "mindless"? Just because they have different priorities and care about different issues, or (gasp!) have different ideas about the appropriate boundaries of police surveillance?
[+] [-] anigbrowl|12 years ago|reply
It won't stay at the top of the news for even two weeks. Most people don't care because a) it doesn't actually affect their lives and b) they actually want government to monitor traffic patterns for potentially suspicious activity. As a society, some 25% of our labor force is engaged in some sort of security activity, not counting police and military. This is arguably a consequence of the fetishization of private property in the US compared to other countries: http://tuvalu.santafe.edu/~bowles/GarrisonAmerica2007.pdf
a good, conservatively Green or Green Libertarian government is the only path to resolution
Er...I think you're going to run into some consistency problems there.
United States mass public is uneducated and apathetic (unlike how it used to be 300 years ago
Highly questionable. Most people in 1713 were not educated at all and even if we look at the revolutionary period we should remember that wealthy landowners whose writings have come down to use were economically exceptional (eg John dickinson, the 'Penmnsylvanian farmer' who was chided by Alexander Hamilton for implicitly arguing for 'free as in beer - http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfi... and http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfi... ...please excuse my gross oversimplification, but it's a fact that many colonists saw revolution as a means to get out from under state and private debts owed in England).
[+] [-] matteodepalo|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] homosaur|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] leephillips|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] willholloway|12 years ago|reply
Giant corporations competing for market share need to consider the operational security implications of bribable government employees having access to their trade secrets and strategies.
The recent case of the NYC cop that was planning on kidnapping and eating women would be chilling enough, but becomes even more horrifying when you learn that he was using law enforcement databases to stalk potential victims.
No human or group of humans can be trusted with total information awareness.
[+] [-] hanifvirani|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ck2|12 years ago|reply
Which he now supports in the fullest.
[+] [-] Swizec|12 years ago|reply
Then I remember I still want to visit the US some time. It pretty much kills all the best ideas.
[+] [-] roc|12 years ago|reply
"Free this week, for quick gossip/prep before I go and destroy America?"
[+] [-] pekk|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Casseres|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] js2|12 years ago|reply
http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Mai...
[+] [-] chm|12 years ago|reply
If I go to the US and "physically" spy, I'll get prosecuted, won't I?
To be clear: I don't want to go to war.
[+] [-] bgilroy26|12 years ago|reply
All international slights are weighed against the cost of losing the offending country as a trade partner. This is how most peace is maintained these days.
[+] [-] jackcviers3|12 years ago|reply
"The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him." -- Nuremberg Principle IV
Those that perform traitorous deeds to prevent traitorous deeds are traitors to their nation and themselves. -- Me
[+] [-] caycep|12 years ago|reply
I'm sure there are tons of ethical implications, and the NSA has its share of shady activities, but part of it seems to be akin to that final scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark when the government loses the powerful, dangerous artifact in some nameless Army warehouse filled with tons of beef jerky or whatever it was.
[+] [-] sharkweek|12 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsgOzLdWdgU
[+] [-] RoboTeddy|12 years ago|reply
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/opinion/the-national-secur...
It features William Binney, who apparently is one of the better mathematical minds the NSA has ever had. He quit over the NSA's actions in 2001.
[+] [-] daniel-cussen|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maxerickson|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] darxius|12 years ago|reply