Since the modus operandi seems to be for the NSA to suck up everything it can and decide later it seems (wild speculation follows) that the NSA might be sitting on audio recrodings of all your phone calls for the past several years.
Can you imagine the number of divorce cases that would impact? Civil lawsuits? Proof of innocence or guilt in a crime?
Hell, get a decade or two of this and historians alone would have a field day with such material.
Oh, and by the way, it's completely fucked.
Back in the day, the FBI recorded folks that they suspected were subversives and it caused a huge stink. People were rightly outraged. It was considered a blemish on the FBI. Now we do the same thing -- only with everybody. And still 45% or so of the population hasn't figured out what the problem is. Amazing.
Part of the book 1984 was the complacence of the lower class. I am not targeting any class here but pointing out that a culture of complacency by division was a large warning in that book that is often overlooked.
Having just watched yesterday's RealTime (Bill Maher's show) as well as the mainstream news coverage of the week, I have finally come to the conclusion that no significant number of Americans has a problem with living in a surveillance state, not even the host and guests on a faux liberal talk show.
Except when I'm on HN, everywhere I go there just are no people who see anything fundamentally wrong with the entire premise, so I think saying that only 45% don't care is a very low-ball estimate. From the look of things, it's more like 95%.
> the NSA might be sitting on audio recordings of all your phone calls for the past several years
I believe you would be interested in Laura Poitras (Snowden advisor and documentary filmmaker) and William Binney (NSA code breaker who designed some of this software and then got a friendly FBI raid-at-gunpoint and who spoke at the same DEFCON as General Alexander). Specifically, Snowden watched Poitras's documentary about Binney, The Program, before seeking her assistance in learning how to live the surveilled life:
I recall some months ago a seemingly fairly technical and generally informed commenter -- here on HN, I believe -- laying out their back of the envelop calculation of what it might take to archive all the U.S. voice traffic.
The resulting figures were currently readily achievable, and they became increasingly... "trivial" (my interpretation) with the already announced and in progress data center expansions.
And here, in this article, we have a description of Brewster Khale coming up with what is truly a trivial dollar amount to accomplish this.
It's increasingly apparent that there is probably no technical limitation to their accomplishing this.
The only question remains, is any other limitation stopping them?
It really is appalling that this isn't more rejected. A couple decades ago impeachment, resignations, firings would happen. Everyone thinks about how this affects us now, how will it affect everyone decades from now? Pretty soon warrants won't be needed at all because Executive Orders override them and are 'legal'. We may as well just remove the 4th amendment since everyone is so scared and complacent.
If they were obtained without a warrant, wouldn't they be inadmissible as evidence, especially if they were being used in an inculpatory rather than exculpatory manner?
Most American's don't care. They are too busy on Facebook or playing games on their iphone/android, taking pictures of themselves in the bathroom, etc.
The Native Americans gave their land away for beads. Modern Americans give their constitutional rights away for electronic gadgets that they can play with.
That 'might' seems much more like an 'is'. And they seem to be sharing that information with foreign governments as well.
As an aside, why is Silicon Valley not much more worked up about this versus say immigration acts? This seems to be more important than the immigration bills they are pushing. Talking about misplaced values... Thinking of more ways to make money while Rome burns.
There's something sick and wrong in the semantics of how the laws have been interpreted here.
The authorities seem to have decided that they can record anything they want, any time they want. The legal boundary is only crossed when somebody listens to the recording. So it is fine for them to slurp up every bit of data they can tap into and then retrospectively figure out which bits they were authorized to listen to (with almost no oversight, as indicated by this article).
But most normal people don't interpret privacy that way. They consider the act of recording without consent the violation of privacy. The listening afterwards compounds it, but the power of the third party comes from having the conversation recorded, not the listening.
This misinterpretation of privacy is a subtle but deliberate and totally corrupt act by the authorities.
It's not clear to me whether they were sworn in for this hearing or not, but if this new report is true, then this seems to be at least the second documented case of an exposed lie about the scope of surveillance during congressional testimony.
You can see how that could be happening; NSA has trunk-level access to telephony circuits. Telcos are engaged in a long-running game of footsie with the government that makes billion dollar Internet companies look like anarcho-capitalists.
But I'm not seeing how we get from there to the contents of email. To have the email of arbitrary Americans without a warrant, the NSA would need direct access to the servers that run Google Mail. They do not have that access; Google has categorically denied it, and the Guardian walked the claim back. The "optical splitters on the Internet backbone" thing doesn't hold water either; most people need to go through some effort not to use strong crypto when communicating with people using Google Mail.
"The Guardian has not revised any of our articles and, to my knowledge, has no intention to do so. That's because we did not claim that the NSA document alleging direct collection from the servers was true; we reported - accurately - that the NSA document claims that the program allows direct collection from the companies' servers. Before publishing, we went to the internet companies named in the documents and asked about these claims. When they denied it, we purposely presented the story as one of a major discrepancy between what the NSA document claims and what the internet companies claim, as the headline itself makes indisputably clear:"
Dude. They have the content of email too. I'm going to make a wild guess here and assume it falls under the "required by law" category of the denials. Well, too bad for them, too bad for us. Welcome to the future, and there's scant chance that any of this will ever get rolled back.
Meanwhile, its also fairly obvious that some security folks sympathetic to the NSA have your ear. You like them, you respect their skills, and social heuristics dictate that you give their opinions due weight. They haven't been overly impressed with the recent leaks and reportage, and why not--we always bristle when the media covers something near and dear, and bristle again when it is sympathetic to the wrong parties.
Back to the contents of email again. How, precisely, it is done is of course very interesting but also an implementation detail. The fact is this kind of content would have been considered very valuable, and therefore effort would have been expended to a) explore the options and b) make it happen.
If you go back over the past few years of leaks, a recurring theme is, it has happened, and it appears to have been achieved via legal compulsion plus some fairly vanilla engineering. However, we may also assume that any serious collection effort would necessarily include redundancy of methods, so if for some reason legal compulsion were to end, the collection could still continue. And this is were we find ourselves today: legal collection at nominal risk, but the program itself secure.
And we know we are here, not from any one specific claim (possibly garbled, possibly wrong), but from the pointillist painting rendered by years of such claims, where the negative space provides as much structure as the positive. So yeah, you don't like Greenwald et al on aesthetic grounds. But Greenwald is also irrelevant to the overall narrative here, which is "when we became cognizant of our pervasive surveillance." Why would they not have the contents of email?
So far fact is that the NSA denied listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants.
Now we know that the Obama administration and NSA intentionally lied and mislead the public. I am certain that with a little bit of luck we will find out how NSA email hacking works in practice. So far the smoke seems long from settling.
Based on how the Obama administration and NSA is handling this issue I see very little reason to expect anything else than the maximum level of intrusiveness possible.
> the NSA would need direct access to the servers that run Google Mail. They do not have that access; Google has categorically denied it, and the Guardian walked the claim back.
Also, I don't necessarily buy this. I don't think Google's denials are lies, as Google is not a single brain, but thousands of individuals. Hard to prove a negative.
Am I missing something? The telcos control many of the internet backbones, and Email isn't encrypted. If the telcos give you unrestricted access, it seems trivial to harvest the contents of email.
FWIR, Google enforcing HTTPS connections to gmail is pretty recent as well: since firesheep, so that's another vector for someone who can read data from the wires.
But I'd be very reluctant to conclude that the NSA doesn't have clear-text for the vast majority of email that gets sent.
Google and other email providers have denied giving the NSA access to their servers, but if you think about it, that would be a lousy way to share data with the NSA, from a purely technical point of view. A company like Google is going to be constantly evolving their infrastructure. Giving the NSA direct access to the servers hampers that, because they'd have to break compatibility with whatever client software the NSA is using. It'd be easier to just send copies of all email that moves in and out of their system to the NSA and let them sort out how to process it. That would be more convenient for the NSA too.
Beyond that, all the denials issued by Google, Facebook et al mention that they do provide the government with information as required by law. We know that there are secret laws at work here, and if the law requires companies hand over everything, then that's what they're doing. The may even be required to lie about it. They're definitely absolved of any legal liability for doing so. I don't doubt that internet companies try to protect their user' privacy as much as they can, but that may amount to "not at all" where the U.S government is concerned.
A copy of Google's SSL private keys, provided they don't use cipher modes that provide forward secrecy, would suffice if they'd already tapped all the transit fibers (though not gmail-to-gmail).
Is the relay of mail between, say, Yahoo and Gmail using strong crypto? (I'm curious; I thought not but I haven't been keeping up on bulk email interchange practices.)
tptacek why are you always defending ridiculous statements and behavior by the US administration and spy agencies? You seem willing to bend over backwards (or is it forwards) to justify any statement from the authorities but will attack the tiniest issue in a fellow HNers post.
Have you and/or your company ever worked for them? If so it would explain a lot.
I think that the (theoretical) MITM attack is played out not between the user and google, but google and the other email provider. For example, a person on gmail sending mail to a yahoo account could be comprimised when google talks to yahoo.
EDIT: Yahoo does NOT use TLS SMTP[1]. Also, Gmail fails Cert verification...[1]
If it's true, 'not good' is a very understated way of putting it. On the other hand, if there's anything this whole clusterfuck has reiterated is that it's best to be wary of uncorroborated, single-source statements. So far, the only source for this appears to be Congressman Jerrold Nadler.
> To have the email of arbitrary Americans without a warrant, the NSA would need direct access to the servers that run Google Mail.
Not really. They would only need to get every incoming and outgoing e-mail forwarded/copied to one of their servers. That's not strictly "direct access to Google's servers". At least for incoming e-mails, it would also simply suffice to listen in on some backbone node while having access to Google's private keys to circumvent the TLS encryption (let's ask Larry about those instead).
However, on the strict point of "metadata" (which would mean IP, time, and little more, but anyway, data), and only guessing, splitters would be useful, would they not? and at the same time make the "direct access" negation stand true, if I read correctly?
I know you are fighting a different battle (that Snowden does not mean this and he is wrong, on which I tend to agree more or less) but this idea would also be useful for the Gov't and not that much of a deal to implement.
Even more, come to think of it, this might be done at the Telcos level, might it not?
EDIT: Just realized this would only give one end of the communication, so not THAT useful, I guess. I see.
EDIT2: Well, with some analysis and some luck you might get the size of a mail, with care and timing and then with more statistics get an idea of who (IP) may have read it when (albeit just STATISTICALLY) but you may get lucky...
> I'm not seeing how we get from there to the contents of email. To have the email of arbitrary Americans without a warrant, the NSA would need direct access to the servers that run Google Mail.
Couldn't the NSA sniff packets the major internet hubs like MAE-West and MAE-East? I assume most email is sent as cleartext after it leaves Google's servers. Even if intermediate hops were encrypted, the NSA could easily man-in-the-middle any servers they wanted. I'm sure CAs like VeriSign would be happy to do their patriotic duty issuing forged certificates.
They can get all unencrypted SMTP messages which means they can get all messages between gmail and outside mail servers. They would only be missing internal gmail to gmail messages.
Gallup should do a new poll: "Do you support or oppose NSA analysts being able to decide, on their own suspicion, to listen to domestic calls, before any warrants for those specific calls are issued? Please state your answer slowly and clearly for the NSA recording devices."
So did Obama blatantly lie to us in his statement, or is he not aware what's going on? I have to think, if they admitted it to Congress, Obama had to know.
If you're going to make up a story - why would you come up with the whole 'two years ago' twist? It's a details that makes no sense to fabricate unless it actually happened.
This will play out exactly like the waterboarding thing:
1. The journalists probably already warned the administration about this stuff a couple of months ago.
2. In the near future, the wh press secretary releases a statement about how this is already old news and how the prez already put a halt to this back in February (or whatever) which explains how all the recent statements by wh and Google etc can be truthful.
3. NSA spooks spend the next 5 years whining internally how they can't do their jobs anymore because of all the bothersome warrants.
4. The next top secret program is started in 2018 that does away with all the "cumbersome" oversight.
Why are we only hearing about this now? From the House Judiciary Committee meeting on THURSDAY where Nadler questions FBI Director Mueller:
NADLER: You wanted to listen to the phone?
MUELLER: Then you have to get a special — a particularized order from...
NADLER: Particularized...
MUELLER: ... the FISA court directed at that particular phone of that particular individual.
NADLER: Now is the answer you just gave me classified...
MUELLER: Is what?
NADLER: The answer you just gave me classified in any way?
MUELLER: I don't think so.
NADLER: OK, then I can ask the — then I can say the following: We heard precisely the opposite at the briefing the other day. We heard precisely that you could get the specific information from that telephone simply based on an analyst deciding that, and you didn't need a new warrant. In other words, what you just said is incorrect. So there's a conflict...
MUELLER: I'm not certain that it's the same answer to the same question. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to...
NADLER: Well, I asked the question both times, and I think it's the same question. So maybe you'd better go back and check, because someone was incorrect.
So now we have a single node from which all electronic forms of human communication can be read, listened to and analyzed. The decisions of any and all businessmen in the running of their financial empires, the conversations of all persons as they speak to their stockbroker, their mistress or their business colleague. And I am told to believe that this situation is OK, is normal, and that nothing untoward will be done with all of this information.
Yet I know that if I had access to this information I could make billions of dollars (e.g., by shorting stocks or by buying businesses or commodities), alter the lives of people who I do not like (e.g., get them fired for their hidden or unhidden human weaknesses), destroy entire organizations by revealing the contents of their communications to a selective person or persons. The list of possibilities is almost infinite and I cannot, do not, will not believe that such actions not only are possible, but have already happened and indeed are happening at this very moment.
The Roman Terence said: "Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto", that is "I am a human being, I consider nothing that is human alien to me."
PRISM must be dismantled, it's backup volumes destroyed, it's creators punished. But we will never likely be able to put it back into Pandora's box: there will always be someone who saves a hard drive or a backup tape cartridge and who will sell it to the highest bidder. We will have to declare new laws rendering these acts illegal. We will have to hunt illegal data gatherers down and punish them the old-fashioned way using humans, knives, blood, sweat and tears.
"Nobody is listening to your phone calls." Oh, I presume that Obama was just addressing every American whose phone calls had not been listened to. This is outrageous, baffling. Somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but Obama did just outright lie about it, right?
>"That law says surveillance may be authorized by the attorney general and director of national intelligence without prior approval by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, as long as minimization requirements and general procedures blessed by the court are followed. "
So the numbers we recently got from Facebook and Microsoft don't mean anything.
Declan, there seems to be skepticism[0] about this story in some quarters. Could you address the concern that Jerry Nadler is simply confused about what he heard?
There is one huge reason why this isn't as scary as it could be:
Tabloids.
If you read through the Tabloids, there is no doubt that some of the stuff in there is slightly true. But you, as the reader, have really no way of knowing what is true or not. So just the fact you have all this information really puts you in the same position of not having any information--not knowing what to believe is almost as bad a problem as not knowing at all. So you are really forced to ignore most of it.
Now, the NSA can read everything you say/write/browse/whatever. Ok, well, what about the people who know that someone is listening so they intentionally create fake stories? Part of being a good criminal or anything is misdirection. Maybe you portray over email (for, get this, years) that you have hideouts at x, and you are good at y technology, and you associate with z people---but in reality you only ever say meaningful stuff in person. Anyone doing anything actually wrong is doing this anyways. That's why there are private code languages in the first place.
So, no, the power is not in the hands of who can listen, it's in the hands of who can deceive--which is you.
[+] [-] DanielBMarkham|12 years ago|reply
Can you imagine the number of divorce cases that would impact? Civil lawsuits? Proof of innocence or guilt in a crime?
Hell, get a decade or two of this and historians alone would have a field day with such material.
Oh, and by the way, it's completely fucked.
Back in the day, the FBI recorded folks that they suspected were subversives and it caused a huge stink. People were rightly outraged. It was considered a blemish on the FBI. Now we do the same thing -- only with everybody. And still 45% or so of the population hasn't figured out what the problem is. Amazing.
[+] [-] Lost_BiomedE|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Udo|12 years ago|reply
Except when I'm on HN, everywhere I go there just are no people who see anything fundamentally wrong with the entire premise, so I think saying that only 45% don't care is a very low-ball estimate. From the look of things, it's more like 95%.
[+] [-] niels_olson|12 years ago|reply
I believe you would be interested in Laura Poitras (Snowden advisor and documentary filmmaker) and William Binney (NSA code breaker who designed some of this software and then got a friendly FBI raid-at-gunpoint and who spoke at the same DEFCON as General Alexander). Specifically, Snowden watched Poitras's documentary about Binney, The Program, before seeking her assistance in learning how to live the surveilled life:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/opinion/the-national-secur...
[+] [-] pasbesoin|12 years ago|reply
The resulting figures were currently readily achievable, and they became increasingly... "trivial" (my interpretation) with the already announced and in progress data center expansions.
And here, in this article, we have a description of Brewster Khale coming up with what is truly a trivial dollar amount to accomplish this.
It's increasingly apparent that there is probably no technical limitation to their accomplishing this.
The only question remains, is any other limitation stopping them?
[+] [-] drawkbox|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dbbolton|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 16s|12 years ago|reply
The Native Americans gave their land away for beads. Modern Americans give their constitutional rights away for electronic gadgets that they can play with.
[+] [-] babesh|12 years ago|reply
As an aside, why is Silicon Valley not much more worked up about this versus say immigration acts? This seems to be more important than the immigration bills they are pushing. Talking about misplaced values... Thinking of more ways to make money while Rome burns.
[+] [-] cscurmudgeon|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zmmmmm|12 years ago|reply
The authorities seem to have decided that they can record anything they want, any time they want. The legal boundary is only crossed when somebody listens to the recording. So it is fine for them to slurp up every bit of data they can tap into and then retrospectively figure out which bits they were authorized to listen to (with almost no oversight, as indicated by this article).
But most normal people don't interpret privacy that way. They consider the act of recording without consent the violation of privacy. The listening afterwards compounds it, but the power of the third party comes from having the conversation recorded, not the listening.
This misinterpretation of privacy is a subtle but deliberate and totally corrupt act by the authorities.
[+] [-] moxie|12 years ago|reply
http://youtu.be/ZmBAxEWxDFs?t=1h29m50s
It's not clear to me whether they were sworn in for this hearing or not, but if this new report is true, then this seems to be at least the second documented case of an exposed lie about the scope of surveillance during congressional testimony.
The first, of course, being Clapper's "not wittingly:" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9ss2_0emOY
[+] [-] samstave|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tptacek|12 years ago|reply
You can see how that could be happening; NSA has trunk-level access to telephony circuits. Telcos are engaged in a long-running game of footsie with the government that makes billion dollar Internet companies look like anarcho-capitalists.
But I'm not seeing how we get from there to the contents of email. To have the email of arbitrary Americans without a warrant, the NSA would need direct access to the servers that run Google Mail. They do not have that access; Google has categorically denied it, and the Guardian walked the claim back. The "optical splitters on the Internet backbone" thing doesn't hold water either; most people need to go through some effort not to use strong crypto when communicating with people using Google Mail.
[+] [-] eightyone|12 years ago|reply
No they didn't.
"The Guardian has not revised any of our articles and, to my knowledge, has no intention to do so. That's because we did not claim that the NSA document alleging direct collection from the servers was true; we reported - accurately - that the NSA document claims that the program allows direct collection from the companies' servers. Before publishing, we went to the internet companies named in the documents and asked about these claims. When they denied it, we purposely presented the story as one of a major discrepancy between what the NSA document claims and what the internet companies claim, as the headline itself makes indisputably clear:"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jun/14/nsa-part...
[+] [-] pradocchia|12 years ago|reply
Meanwhile, its also fairly obvious that some security folks sympathetic to the NSA have your ear. You like them, you respect their skills, and social heuristics dictate that you give their opinions due weight. They haven't been overly impressed with the recent leaks and reportage, and why not--we always bristle when the media covers something near and dear, and bristle again when it is sympathetic to the wrong parties.
Back to the contents of email again. How, precisely, it is done is of course very interesting but also an implementation detail. The fact is this kind of content would have been considered very valuable, and therefore effort would have been expended to a) explore the options and b) make it happen.
If you go back over the past few years of leaks, a recurring theme is, it has happened, and it appears to have been achieved via legal compulsion plus some fairly vanilla engineering. However, we may also assume that any serious collection effort would necessarily include redundancy of methods, so if for some reason legal compulsion were to end, the collection could still continue. And this is were we find ourselves today: legal collection at nominal risk, but the program itself secure.
And we know we are here, not from any one specific claim (possibly garbled, possibly wrong), but from the pointillist painting rendered by years of such claims, where the negative space provides as much structure as the positive. So yeah, you don't like Greenwald et al on aesthetic grounds. But Greenwald is also irrelevant to the overall narrative here, which is "when we became cognizant of our pervasive surveillance." Why would they not have the contents of email?
[+] [-] stfu|12 years ago|reply
Now we know that the Obama administration and NSA intentionally lied and mislead the public. I am certain that with a little bit of luck we will find out how NSA email hacking works in practice. So far the smoke seems long from settling.
Based on how the Obama administration and NSA is handling this issue I see very little reason to expect anything else than the maximum level of intrusiveness possible.
[+] [-] waterlesscloud|12 years ago|reply
If the law is that the NSA just has to request it, no warrant necessary, there you go.
[+] [-] sneak|12 years ago|reply
Also, I don't necessarily buy this. I don't think Google's denials are lies, as Google is not a single brain, but thousands of individuals. Hard to prove a negative.
[+] [-] jordanb|12 years ago|reply
FWIR, Google enforcing HTTPS connections to gmail is pretty recent as well: since firesheep, so that's another vector for someone who can read data from the wires.
[+] [-] cwp|12 years ago|reply
But I'd be very reluctant to conclude that the NSA doesn't have clear-text for the vast majority of email that gets sent.
Google and other email providers have denied giving the NSA access to their servers, but if you think about it, that would be a lousy way to share data with the NSA, from a purely technical point of view. A company like Google is going to be constantly evolving their infrastructure. Giving the NSA direct access to the servers hampers that, because they'd have to break compatibility with whatever client software the NSA is using. It'd be easier to just send copies of all email that moves in and out of their system to the NSA and let them sort out how to process it. That would be more convenient for the NSA too.
Beyond that, all the denials issued by Google, Facebook et al mention that they do provide the government with information as required by law. We know that there are secret laws at work here, and if the law requires companies hand over everything, then that's what they're doing. The may even be required to lie about it. They're definitely absolved of any legal liability for doing so. I don't doubt that internet companies try to protect their user' privacy as much as they can, but that may amount to "not at all" where the U.S government is concerned.
[+] [-] sneak|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gojomo|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wallio|12 years ago|reply
Have you and/or your company ever worked for them? If so it would explain a lot.
[+] [-] chacham15|12 years ago|reply
EDIT: Yahoo does NOT use TLS SMTP[1]. Also, Gmail fails Cert verification...[1]
[1]http://www.checktls.com/perl/TestReceiver.pl
[+] [-] glurgh|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lazyjones|12 years ago|reply
Not really. They would only need to get every incoming and outgoing e-mail forwarded/copied to one of their servers. That's not strictly "direct access to Google's servers". At least for incoming e-mails, it would also simply suffice to listen in on some backbone node while having access to Google's private keys to circumvent the TLS encryption (let's ask Larry about those instead).
[+] [-] genwin|12 years ago|reply
Or Google could provide the NSA a copy of the data.
[+] [-] pfortuny|12 years ago|reply
However, on the strict point of "metadata" (which would mean IP, time, and little more, but anyway, data), and only guessing, splitters would be useful, would they not? and at the same time make the "direct access" negation stand true, if I read correctly?
I know you are fighting a different battle (that Snowden does not mean this and he is wrong, on which I tend to agree more or less) but this idea would also be useful for the Gov't and not that much of a deal to implement.
Even more, come to think of it, this might be done at the Telcos level, might it not?
EDIT: Just realized this would only give one end of the communication, so not THAT useful, I guess. I see.
EDIT2: Well, with some analysis and some luck you might get the size of a mail, with care and timing and then with more statistics get an idea of who (IP) may have read it when (albeit just STATISTICALLY) but you may get lucky...
[+] [-] cpeterso|12 years ago|reply
Couldn't the NSA sniff packets the major internet hubs like MAE-West and MAE-East? I assume most email is sent as cleartext after it leaves Google's servers. Even if intermediate hops were encrypted, the NSA could easily man-in-the-middle any servers they wanted. I'm sure CAs like VeriSign would be happy to do their patriotic duty issuing forged certificates.
[+] [-] MWil|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] guelo|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gojomo|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LoganCale|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] uptown|12 years ago|reply
Former FBI Agent Denies He Gave Shia LaBeouf a Recording of an Old Phone Call: http://www.breitbart.com/InstaBlog/2013/06/12/Former-FBI-Age...
If you're going to make up a story - why would you come up with the whole 'two years ago' twist? It's a details that makes no sense to fabricate unless it actually happened.
[+] [-] drcode|12 years ago|reply
1. The journalists probably already warned the administration about this stuff a couple of months ago.
2. In the near future, the wh press secretary releases a statement about how this is already old news and how the prez already put a halt to this back in February (or whatever) which explains how all the recent statements by wh and Google etc can be truthful.
3. NSA spooks spend the next 5 years whining internally how they can't do their jobs anymore because of all the bothersome warrants.
4. The next top secret program is started in 2018 that does away with all the "cumbersome" oversight.
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] spikels|12 years ago|reply
NADLER: You wanted to listen to the phone?
MUELLER: Then you have to get a special — a particularized order from...
NADLER: Particularized...
MUELLER: ... the FISA court directed at that particular phone of that particular individual.
NADLER: Now is the answer you just gave me classified...
MUELLER: Is what?
NADLER: The answer you just gave me classified in any way?
MUELLER: I don't think so.
NADLER: OK, then I can ask the — then I can say the following: We heard precisely the opposite at the briefing the other day. We heard precisely that you could get the specific information from that telephone simply based on an analyst deciding that, and you didn't need a new warrant. In other words, what you just said is incorrect. So there's a conflict...
MUELLER: I'm not certain that it's the same answer to the same question. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to...
NADLER: Well, I asked the question both times, and I think it's the same question. So maybe you'd better go back and check, because someone was incorrect.
http://www.c-spanvideo.org/clip/4456141
[+] [-] lessnonymous|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] landini|12 years ago|reply
Yet I know that if I had access to this information I could make billions of dollars (e.g., by shorting stocks or by buying businesses or commodities), alter the lives of people who I do not like (e.g., get them fired for their hidden or unhidden human weaknesses), destroy entire organizations by revealing the contents of their communications to a selective person or persons. The list of possibilities is almost infinite and I cannot, do not, will not believe that such actions not only are possible, but have already happened and indeed are happening at this very moment.
The Roman Terence said: "Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto", that is "I am a human being, I consider nothing that is human alien to me."
PRISM must be dismantled, it's backup volumes destroyed, it's creators punished. But we will never likely be able to put it back into Pandora's box: there will always be someone who saves a hard drive or a backup tape cartridge and who will sell it to the highest bidder. We will have to declare new laws rendering these acts illegal. We will have to hunt illegal data gatherers down and punish them the old-fashioned way using humans, knives, blood, sweat and tears.
[+] [-] MattyRad|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JulianMorrison|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coldtea|12 years ago|reply
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guatemala_syphilis_experiment
And, strange enough:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-w...
[+] [-] aspensmonster|12 years ago|reply
So the numbers we recently got from Facebook and Microsoft don't mean anything.
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] sneak|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marcamillion|12 years ago|reply
Who is disclosing it? CNET or Rep. Darrel?
If Rep. Darrel said it....y do they need comment? If he isn't disclosing it, how did CNET come by this statement?
This is quite confusing.
[+] [-] eli|12 years ago|reply
[0] https://twitter.com/AntDeRosa/status/346072065893355520 & https://twitter.com/BuzzFeedAndrew/status/346072058234540034 for example
[+] [-] larsonf|12 years ago|reply
Tabloids.
If you read through the Tabloids, there is no doubt that some of the stuff in there is slightly true. But you, as the reader, have really no way of knowing what is true or not. So just the fact you have all this information really puts you in the same position of not having any information--not knowing what to believe is almost as bad a problem as not knowing at all. So you are really forced to ignore most of it.
Now, the NSA can read everything you say/write/browse/whatever. Ok, well, what about the people who know that someone is listening so they intentionally create fake stories? Part of being a good criminal or anything is misdirection. Maybe you portray over email (for, get this, years) that you have hideouts at x, and you are good at y technology, and you associate with z people---but in reality you only ever say meaningful stuff in person. Anyone doing anything actually wrong is doing this anyways. That's why there are private code languages in the first place.
So, no, the power is not in the hands of who can listen, it's in the hands of who can deceive--which is you.