Slashdot Mirror
Under the Hood of AT&T's Monitoring System
pkbarbiedoll writes "The recent discovery of AT&T's monitoring program has raised more than a few eyebrows. While the class action suit filed by EFF is pending (as well as a seperate suit filed against the NSA filed by the ACLU), interested parties are taking the time to learn more about the scope of this massive invasion of privacy. Bewert examines the Narus architecture used by AT&T in their previously shadowed (and ongoing) collaboration with the NSA."
Is anyone surprised?
And we know we've never heard of engineers wearing tinfoil hats and talking to aliens. Especially not here on Slashdot where anything that attacks the Bush administration is taken as gospel handed down from on high.
Gawd, linking to Daily Kos as if that's an authoritative site. Why not link to Free Republic or the Flat Earth Society?
And not just for those people who dislike the current administartion. As has been said before, even if you approve of Bush, how will you like President (Clinton, Kerry, Gore, etc) having this same technology at their disposal. It is dangerous for any government to be able to monitor its citizens this thoroughly, no matter what the original intent might be.
This monitoring system does 10 gigabit a second? Wonder how much that set them back...
The above is most likely humour. Slashdot foot icon goes here.
All your base really do belong to them.
wow, and I mean just fucking WOW at the processing power alone.
This thing makes echelon look like a toy.
Since I live in the UK, this kind of technology is likely to be used here as well (since we have mandated supreme data retention laws)
This is truly scary
liqbase
We've all heard the saying: "Two wrongs don't make a right". Hasn't the Bush adminstration?
The United States is a nation of LAWS...So many of you constantly remind us of that fact whenever p2p is mentioned here...yet many of these same people believe that our President has the right to IGNORE laws he doesn't want to follow.Why
Why are people so consistently surprised by this kind of news. I've come to simply expect that corporations are in full swing of subjugating the general public.
The latest generation is called NarusInsight, capable of monitoring 10 billion bits of data per second.
That's 1192MB/s, not exactly what I'd call enough to monitor the entire innurnet in real time, which means somewhere along the way, AT+T must be doing some filtering, which is even sadder.
On the other hand, that's roughly 2 CD-sized full-length movies a second, so that's about 2 hours worth of pr0n per second, which means that it takes a stadium packed with 7200 naked NSA agents and a truck full of Kleenex tissues to check out all the videos in real-time...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
I couldn't find this software on sourceforge or freshmeat. It really troubles me that the US government is using proprietary software to violate our constitutional rights.
There's no failure quite as dissatisfying as a complete and total solution to the wrong problem.
Actually, even NSA agents don't work round the clock, so given a 8 hour workday, you need 21600 NSA agents.
'Absolute power'.
A democratic government is supposed to have limited power by design. However, as they grow, they tend to cut themselves free of the shackles that their founders placed on them.
If you're going to be suprised about anything, be suprised that it didn't happen sooner.
Seriously. The ISP I work for buys it's bandwidth from AT&T, but this week I'm talking to the boss about dumping them. The whole "we're going to charge Google to send data to our customers" thing was bad enough, and now we find out they're collaborating with the fucking NSA? Monitorying OUR traffic without telling us?
Screw AT&T. They aren't going to get my companies money, and I expect that I'm not the only one who is going to ditch them.
They should be sued into oblivion.
Already done for us. Thankfully it's no longer under copyright, so I can post it. The Hollow Men - T. S. Eliot (1925)
I
We are the hollow men/ We are the stuffed men/ Leaning together/ Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!/ Our dried voices, when/ We whisper together/ Are quiet and meaningless/ As wind in dry grass/ Or rats' feet over broken glass/ In our dry cellar/
[Slashdot complained about too few characters to per line so some is reformatted]
Shape without form, shade without colour,/ Paralysed force, gesture without motion;/
Those who have crossed/ With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom/ Remember us -- if at all -- not as lost/ Violent souls, but only/ As the hollow men/ The stuffed men./
II
Eyes I dare not meet in dreams/ In death's dream kingdom/ These do not appear:/ There, the eyes are/> Sunlight on a broken column/ There, is a tree swinging/ And voices are/ In the wind's singing/ More distant and more solemn/ Than a fading star./
Let me be no nearer/ In death's dream kingdom/ Let me also wear/ Such deliberate disguises/ Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves/ In a field/ Behaving as the wind behaves/ No nearer --/
Not that final meeting/ In the twilight kingdom/
III
This is the dead land/ This is cactus land/ Here the stone images/ Are raised, here they receive/ The supplication of a dead man's hand/ Under the twinkle of a fading star./
Is it like this/ In death's other kingdom/ Waking alone/ At the hour when we are/ Trembling with tenderness/ Lips that would kiss/ Form prayers to broken stone./
IV
The eyes are not here/ There are no eyes here/ In this valley of dying stars/ In this hollow valley/ This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms/
In this last of meeting places/ We grope together/ And avoid speech/ Gathered on this beach of the tumid river/
Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death's twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.
V
Here we go round the prickly pear/ Prickly pear prickly pear/ Here we go round the prickly pear/ At five o'clock in the morning./
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long
Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
I would assume that any business would set up a encrypted VPN tunnel as soon as their network was to enter the telco. So assumming that this was the case, how would this device (sitting inside the telco cloud) Monitor any of this traffic. Furthermore, I dont see how the device would be able to construct "a total network view" from within the telco even without encryption. (The firewall would block ping sweeps or other reconnasance based attacks) Joe consumer on the other hand, would not have a encrypted connection, so I think its safe to say that the sole purpose of this technology is to spy on citizens. Tor routing would provide the citizen/terrorist with encryption that would circumvent the monitoring device. So in the end, it sounds like this device is a hugely expensive monitoring device that would only catch the dumbest of dumb.
Yes spying and everything is wrong. But with the NSA having more power than ever and needing to acquire/sift through more and more information all the time, wouldn't it be a very cool place to work.
http://www.nsa.gov/careers/ has links to all the areas. The only thing I found extraordinarily interesting is that computer programming type skills (ie Software Engineering) is more under the Computer Engineering/Electrical engineering career track than the computer science one.
The only question is that if you should decide to leave the NSA or are fired, does termination extend to more than your employment? Although seriously it does seem like a very geek friendly place to work.
Tor (http://tor.eff.org/) is a good way to prevent the government (or anyone else) from watching what sites you go to.
It can be a little slow at times, but you do not need to use it all the time (unless you are very paranoid).
That's 1192MB/s, not exactly what I'd call enough to monitor the entire innurnet in real time, which means somewhere along the way, AT+T must be doing some filtering, which is even sadder.
From what I have read in other articles, there are rooms at other sites that also do this monitoring. So even though the single installation isn't fast enough to monitor in real-time, collectively it would certainly be powerful to monitor AT&T's part of it in real time.
You were assigned to the wrong crowd. We're the folks who actually get Dilbert.
[Translation for any partisan astroturfers paid to post here: slashdotters know that engineers often understand reality on the ground much better than the suits.]
http://narus.com/
Assuming you're a US based ISP, what makes you think that you'll find a carrier without CALEA equipment? For that matter, what is your employer doing to implement the CALEA requirements?
Has anyone else been looking for the next frontier of freedom. What I mean is that for the longest time, the USA was the last frontier in freedom. If people in the world wanted to be free, they would find their way to the United States. While the USA is still more free than most places, the deterioration over the last 80 years has been notable.
Since most of the land in the world is claimed by less than free governments, I'm wondering if the next frontier in freedom needs to be sea based. I suppose for the next few decades people can probably use technologies to secure their freedoms, crypto, open source, etc..., but that won't get arround the physical controll problem. Eventually people will need to physically secure their freedoms.
Maybe the solution is for a bunch of liberty minded people to collaberate together to take controll of a small despot country, but that still would make it very vulnerable to larger military powers. Moving to more free states, juridistictions, and countries would probably help, but doen't seem like a permanent solution. Maybe it would be possible to convince all the freedom hating overloards to go somewhere else, but that seems unlikely too.
Look carefully at Carnivore and Calea. It was a ruse even back then. We have had the capability for quite some time to examine all the cell calls, telephone calls, and e-mails. In real-time. Undetected.
Now, think in terms of who this stuff was sold as being meant for: Al Qaeda. Do you honestly think that Al Qaeda does not have a clue about what capabilities we have? They have not trusted their regular comms for quite sometime. They go to great lengths to use either human carriers and some other very clever approachs to hiding their comms.
So then, who is this being used on? Read the so called USA PATRIOT act. It allows the passing of information from the NSA/CIA to the DOJ, that was obtained in the persuit of terrorist. That is, it allows ALL of comms that we have in country to go do the DOJ, if it was meant for find terrorists. So now, the NSA simply says that all of their information was obtianed in the persuit of terrorism, and it can be passed to the DOJ.
Great. We are busy catching bad guys. Of course, people like GWB and Karl Rove would never have access to the Democrats or Libertarians information since it is all encrypted on secure systems such as Windows. Right? We would neve expect that our current or future republicans to use it to illegally futher their own goals, right? APCA
Yeah, I agree. I was a bit underwhelmed at the specs they gave of the machine. I assume it's actually quite a bit faster than what they're telling us in the article. For example, my company uses Sniffers. We have a few of their high end infinistream platforms which are gigabit speed and basically write directly to the harddrive with a couple terabyte disk array. I'm positive they are working on 10Gb devices already, and probably have a functional test unit already built as the 10G platforms have been around for 3-4 years. I'm sure they have a competitor that already has one on the market, just so they can say that they are on step ahead of sniffer. So basically take an off the shelf infinistream, attach it to a much larger backend diskarray which would be incredibly easy as it uses SATA drives, and then use some other off the shelf but highly customizable database and db management software to create fast searchable databases with everything linked together. We use a product from a company called NCR/Teradata that can do this. It is extremely fast, and we currently have close to 50TB of online storage fully backed up on raid5. We are also in the process of putting in an OC-192 sonet ring between our main site and our datacenter. So if a single company can have a network running at OC-192, I'm sure that this device that they're using for monitoring is not dedicated to a single sonet ring, so it must be much faster than what is actually being reported. Otherwise they would have to have literally thousands in various places all over the country (just think of the bandwidth flowing in and out of mae east and west alone!) Combine the off the shelf hardware with the governments budget, and it would be very easy to build something that would equal this devices processing power with pretty much off the shelf components - nothing secretive about it. The existence of this device doesn't surprise me one bit. What does surprise me is that AT&T was able to keep it secret for five years.
There are serious issues at hand and this post gets modded as insightful. Doh'.
2006.04.05 Narus gains entry into coveted Chinese carrier market with Shanghai Telecom as first regional customer
It fits the picture quite nicely...
Doolittle :
Bomb no.20 : To explode of course.
More people are starting to use the internet for their personal correspondence and business.
There are strict laws governing snail mail to protect against this very abuse we're seeing, among others. Imagine if companies, and the government, were able to know every bit of content in your snail mail? Would you be comfortable with that? What if every bit of your communication is available to the highest bidder? (a possible outcome of all this if something isn't done now)
Change the laws! Why is this information not as important as the stuff that goes on paper? Apply the same mindset that we have with the mail system towards internet traffic. I'd be fine if they recorded traffic's origin and destination, but they shouldn't lawfully have access to the *content* of my correspondence.
Technology is only going to make this oversight easier and easier. We have to educate people and change attitudes starting now.
From http://www.narus.com/customers/index.html:
AT&T, Brasil Telecom, KDDI, KT, KPN, Saudi Telecom, Telecom Egypt, T-Mobile, US Cellular
I must say that the Saudis using narus stuff amuses me greatly, but the rest of the list scares me. I mean, they've even got parts of Japan (KDDI) and South Korea (KT).
Ten gigs a second is peanuts, but obviously there's more than one of these things ... and presumably the next generation will be even faster.
which means that it takes a stadium packed with 7200 naked NSA agents and a truck full of Kleenex tissues to check out all the videos in real-time...
Thanks for the image.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Well, it seems Ol'Nixon wasn't so bad after all...
Oh well, what the hell...
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70621-0.htm l (Wired). An interview of a guy that works (ed?) for ATT that the EFF has subpoenaed as a witness. Talks about the physical connection made and how/when they did it.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B - D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Jackass. J-a-c-k-a-s-s.
To 1984.
Seriously though, when a country has no real threats to look at on the outside, (at least no nations as a whole), it turns it's eyes inward.
The next couple of decades are going to be interesting, as technology makes it easier and easier to spy. When and where are the lines going to be drawn in the sand?
Go ahead and call me unreliable; reliable is just a synonym for predictable.
Has anyone commented on the new CDMA cell phones? With their built-in GPS they can automagically adjust your phone's clock to display local time or alert 911 operators to your location. Oh wait, that means any time you use your phone, you can be tracked. Oh wait... my wireless provider says that a new law REQUIRES I get one of these new phones. It was free, but hmmmmmm..... This is a great way to track terrorists. They have to communicate somehow. Or if you are in a high-speed chase in LA, just filter out the driver going 100mph from the other drivers and wait at his house.
I think a better career would be setting up a decentralized non-governmental spy agency. Basically a clearing (non)house for whistleblowers or even people who set out to infiltrate various governmental spy agencies around the world and then dump their dirty secrets out into public view.
There would have to be some sort of code of ethics regarding active operations, like notifying the agencies involved ahead of time that a specific operation/s will be compromised. Even then, I could see situations where agencies wouldn't be notified, because they have a nasty tendency for destroying evidence when it exposes crimes they themselves have comitted.
One thing that amazes me repeatedly is the sheer idiocy that gov. intel agencies get away with. Also, before you think I'm U.S. bashing, the most ludicrous example that immediately came to mind is French (Rainbow Warrior bombing and the subsequent manipulation of EU trade policy in order to retrieve operatives from NZ prison). The only thing the French could have done that would have been less 'tough' is if they bombed a pastry factory while wearing cross-dress disguises: "Sacre-bleau, Agente Jon Pierre, tu 'es plus sexi dans cette jupe. Cherche la vache!"
"Separate. S-e-p-a-r-a-t-e. Separate."
... I pledge for many -1 flaimbaits to mod this dude down to oblivion.
How the heck this post is insightfull. Spelling nazism is tolerable only if the word is rather difficult and rare
and has been spelled incorrectly due to ignorance of the submitter. In this case it is obviously just a typo. Typo. T-y-p-o. Typo. Don't distract the readers with this guy's karma whoring. On top of that he wasted a good first post
Back then they were talking about how wonderful it was to spy on everyone so some internet traffic could be charged a higher rate to be passed along.
Nearer the top of the page it mentions that previous to September 11, 2001 they wanted to analyze everything to prevent "revenue leakage", which I take to be the industry term of art meaning "a failure to exploit loopholes and monopolies to screw everyone out of every last penny".
Now they can be greedy and "patriotic".
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Glad their monitoring terrorists
Previous presidents abused the freedoms our country offers so they could make money and deals
Woo Woooo! Here comes the clue train, last stop is you. Terrorists do not exist on the scale you believe they do. This whole war on terror is the way the government is taking away your freedom and abusing its power so they can make money and deals...
When a country is unassailable from the outside, then its enemies can only attack from the inside.
(Score:-1, Offtopic)
Shouldn't the editors be able to fix this typo? The article is only a paragraph and might take an editor 5 seconds.
Stupidity is like nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. And you don't want to get any on you.
"And what does it monitor while looking at this 10 billion bits of IP data per second? First lets take a look at what the network model is, the OSI model of seven layers. NarusInsight focuses on two layers: number four, the transport layer, built on standards like TCP and UDP, the physical building blocks of internet data traffic, and number seven, the application layer, built on standards like HTTP and FTP, which are dependent on the application using them, i.e. Internet Explorer, Kazaa, Skype, etc."
This is where I stopped reading. Most knowledgible IT guys know that although the internet is inspired by OSI it follows a slightly different layering architecture which places the application layer in level 5. I would use TCP/UDP transport layer and application layer instead of mentioning OSI.
Tell your politicans that 1984 is NOT a howto!
Grundgesetz * 23. Mai 1949 - 30. November 2007 - http://www.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/
Besserwisser. B-e-s-s-e-r-w-i-s-s-e-r. Besserwisser.
What I'd be interested in is if this device does real-time packet reassembly and flow recovery. If not, what's to keep a terrorist from putting "BO" in one packet and "MB" in a following one? Or doing nasty stuff with fragmented IP packets?
Running a packet-oriented grep on a large datastream is not that hard (ie. easily solvable if you throw enough processing power at it). If the government's sniffers can reassemble packets and recover flows real-time, *then* worry.
Error: password can't contain reverse spelling of ancient Chinese emperor
I would be very surprised if the NSA did not usurp some software companies (**cough** Symantec **cough**) to help on the client side for this monitoring system. To do small things like flag words, reformat packets etc. Could be done. and most likely is ocnsidering its easier to do than corrupt an entire telecoms company and install massive hardware.
There was not much on the mainstream news sites other than the initial news story last week so I googled ["electronic frontier foundation" narus]. The first link was to a no longer available article at siliconvalley.com. The good news is that the google cache was still there.
w ww.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/business/sp ecial_packages/security/2579675.htm+electronic+fro ntier+foundation%22+narus&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=1 "
http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:nc4cgqbKTjoJ:
The article appears to be a lead in for a round table discussion where both the EFF and Narus participated but I can not find the details of the conversation. Anyone else able to get their hand on it? Please post it to slashdot.
At one time I lived in an alternate universe in which there were two words seperate and separate. One was a verb, and the other was an adjective.
Then what is there to fear? Why would you be worried?
Check out seasteading. It's pretty much what you're talking about, a bunch of deep sea floating colonies. Of course, your internet traffic would likely still be monitored. The best way to deal with this is A two fold strategy:
One. Encryption, lots of it, with lots of people using it.
Two. Build a wireless network that never touches wire, a separate internet, if you will.
A blog about stuff.
I'm not sure, but what we do know is that he liked to keep secret files on anybody who was anybody. Such files having been obtained through generally illegal eavesdropping and spying on citizens. The law specifically forbids the CIA from operating within the US and so he turned the FBI on us. Now it's the NSA. Welcome to the new age, same as the old age. This was what FISA was specifically meant to protect against. I guess our leaker-in-chief really is just Judge Dredd in disguise..."I AM the law!!!" Grr. Argh.
That's 1192MB/s, not exactly what I'd call enough to monitor the entire innurnet in real time
Yes, but imagine a Beowulf cluster of these.
Thank you, I'll be here all week!
Let me bounce this off the Slashdot crowd. So far we've talked about Tor and some other programs for securing privacy. The main problem with most is that they run slow and put big demands on the machine they run on. How about we put those GPU's to work in lightening the load? Now you all will really have a good excuse for buying that SLI rig.
First let me say that I have no doubt that the gov't is doing everything they can think of to try to monitor communications with or without the required warrants.
But it strikes me that a lot of what was quoted here is marketing material. How often do products actually deliver on the marketing hype?
"I know the marketing slick says 10Gb/s, but that won't happen until you upgrade to V4.1. And the reports that you're asking about won't really be complete until all the other carriers upgrade to blah blah blah..."
I wonder if the money the gov't is spending on these monitoring efforts is being spent as wisely as oh, say, Iraqi reconstruction. Is Narus Corp in anyway related to Haliburton?
Like I said, I'm sure they're trying. We should be worried. But at the same time, what makes anyone think this administration is any less inept at this effort than EVERY SINGLE OTHER THING THEY'VE PUT THEIR MIND TO?
Moron. Embracing the degradation of standards and tolerating ignorance and stupidity is one of the best indicators of a truly fucked up, retrograde mentality. You're a fine one to talk about modding someone down into oblivion -- you're already there, shithead.
"The White House is not an intelligence-gathering agency," -- Scott McClellan, Whitehouse spokesman.
OSI and TCP/IP are entirely different protocol suites. TO my knowledge, no complete OSI stack has ever been implimented. Yet there are plenty of OSI protocols, like T.120 and H.323....
TCP/IP operates on a 4-layer model, while the OSI protocols operate on a 7-layer model. As the OSI model started loosing brainshare, people tried to market it as a teaching tool (or vice versa).
OSI protocols seem really weird and complicated when implimented on TCP/IP. You have all sorts of things that have to be emulated, such as separate channels, which means you often have a very large number of sockets used and many of these are dynamically allocated. H.323 is a very good example of this.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
This page has dissapeared from the server and it can't be found in google cache. Does anyone know much about this model? What sort of processing power is behind it and what are it's capabilities? It looks to have the ability to sniff through 600 mbps each up and downstream from the snippet above, but little else is known.
Also, only this first google result seems to have relevant info on this device. If anyone here has more info, please post. A lot of us are curious, especially considering that the administration has been saying they only sniffed suspicious communications.
As the Democratic and Republican party intracollude, they tend to adopt policy that is different to the lay populace, but superficial to any informed observer. The answer is not simply 'vote for tweedledee or tweedledum', both of whom are an equally wrong answer to the situation. When registered voters abstain from voting, it indicates that the voters feel neither party is worthwhile.
This coming election, I will not vote; I will not legimize a system that I disagree with and I encourage others to do the same. The most effective message the People can send Capital Hill is that they are not perceived as our emissaries. It will also increase awareness of the fact that our American 'democracy' is less reliant on the opinion of the People than we delude ourselves into believing.
by means of beating the current residents thereof in the next election?
And I dont want them to know what my plans are?
Th epower to monito citizens come with massive potential for abuse. And we all know how good our government is at avoiding temptation.
No news here. Just a long, opportunistic and empty article. You can learn a lot more reading Mark Klein's full statement. He is the retired AT&T employee is colaborating with EFF in the lawsuit.
s _NSA_spy_room.asp/
http://www.spamdailynews.com/publish/ATT_tech_out
it takes a stadium packed with 7200 naked NSA agents and a truck full of Kleenex tissues to check out all the videos in real-time
I take it that this is implying that the fine folks at the NSA are mostly a bunch of wankers and voyeurs?
So you don't mind the NSA noting your particular favorite form of porn?
"Moron. Embracing the degradation of standards and tolerating ignorance and stupidity is one of the best indicators of a truly fucked up, retrograde mentality"
....
Talk about Nazis
Oh, yes, so the Clinton Administration was just purchasing some vast computer system, capable of datamining gobs of internet traffic ... and you don't think they were planning on using it as a wide net?
Wake up -- blaming this on anyone one administration, and certainly on any one person, is ridiculously shortsighted. Go ahead and blame it on Bush; the people that actually engineered this sort of policy, wherever they are in the NSA or various other government offices, will probably sell him down the river easily enough. Executives come and go every four or eight years, the attitudes that enable a project like this, even the raw technology itself, takes longer than that to put together.
If you give in to the temptation to blame Bush, along with all the other sheeple over at Daily Kos, you're really ignoring the majority of the problem. It's akin to seeing an iceberg in front of your ship, and sawing off the part you can see above the water and then saying the problem is gone. No it's not, all you did was get rid of the very thing that allowed you to see the problem. The thing that's going to kill you is still lurking below the water. (Ignoring the rather obvious fact that a proportionally equal amount of the iceberg would come back up out of the water as soon as you cut the top off.)
If you build a system that's capable of monitoring everyone's email, it's naive to think that it'll never be used. So the real problem here is that this system was constructed in such a way that it could be used indiscriminately, and to find an answer to why that happened, people have to be willing to look further back into the past than just G.W. Bush, something I'm not sure they're prepared to do. It's too easy and too satisfying to use something like this as political hay, rather than as the wake-up call it ought to be of how systemically out-of-control the government is, and has been for some time.
The behavior of our current and less-than-beloved President is a symptom of a problem, not its root cause.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
A lot of conservatives feel let down by Bush, for any number of reasons - ...Homeland Security, the Patriot Act...
The conservatives practically authored Patriot Act - at least the Christian right. Pat Robertson brags about this all the time.
The embrace and the tolerance are two indicators, not one.
You would improve the legibility of the sentence by delimiting the participle clauses with commas, particularly with regard to the repetition of the word "and".
Embracing the degradation of standards, and tolerating ignorance and stupidity, are two of the best... etc.
- Sig files: contemptibly familiar the second time around.
At some point the goal was to have a government of "laws, not of men" but somewhere along the way this seems to have mutated. Bush has claimed numerous times that he has the right to abrogate any law he wants to do what he wants (and he has the right to do whatever he wants). So we now have a government of "men, not of laws".
I agree that the potential for abuse is there, but if there is abuse then the solution to the problem is to punish the abusers, not remove the power.
From writer Umbertbo Eco:t ml
http://www.themodernword.com/eco/eco_blackshirt.h
From the partisan but informed Dr. Lawrence Britt:
http://www.rense.com/general37/char.htm
Actually I think the reason why we go to war every decade or so has a lot more to do with the American public's desire for it than any demand by the defense contractors. True, they get some benefit from it, but the last few wars that the U.S. has entered into have been done with widespread public support.
I would argue that at the core of the American body politic's psyche there is a core of subconscious uneasiness and malaise, which is fed by the deep-rooted fear that as a nation we are becoming powerless, or at least less powerful. Therefore, every few years it becomes necessary to demonstrate -- less to the rest of the world than to ourselves -- that we are still the Alpha Country. And we do this, in the tradition of any insecure adolescent, by finding someone who is generally disliked and kicking the living shit out of them. It is preferable if the people getting the shit kicked out of them are non-white and non-Christian, since a very large percentage of America, although they may read the NY Times and listen to NPR on the drive in to work, value such lives much less than they do blonde-haired and blue-eyed European derivatives. (Because as diverse as we like to think we are as a country, the US is somewhere between 75-80% white, depending on whose statistics you believe, and people dislike seeing people who look like themselves getting killed on TV.)
In other posts I have said that I think that the closest historical parallel to the current war is the Spanish-American war of 1898. I will not rehash my entire argument here, but suffice it to say that the root causes of both conflicts lie outside the traditional domain of geopolitics: both were heavily dependent on public opinion, which was brilliantly used by a great number of independent actors working for their own gain. But at the heart of it all you have the American public, who as a group are not nearly as adverse to the idea of employing violence for its own sake than many individuals would claim they themselves believe.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Why am I not surprised? Plus his company is invested in by Walden Israel, a VC division of Walden International. Walden Israel is headed by a guy who spent five years with a company developing optics for the ISRAELI MILITARY.
Why am I not surprised?
First, an Israeli company in charge of Federal wiretapping gets caught selling wiretapping info to drug dealers in LA and the FBI gets upset over their access to Federal wiretaps.
Now this - an NSA guy and an Israeli running the company sucking data into the NSA - and the Mossad?
As I've said before, Israel has figured out that the best way to spy on people is to be the country making all the telecommo hardware and software all the other countries use to spy on people. Brilliant strategy - and it's working.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Should I be? What do you think they're planning to do, bribe me into spying on my neighbors using offers of free "girls gone wild" (actual reference to my favorite type of porn replaced by more harmless stuff to avoid mockery) DVDs?
...it's really a sad day for America when we require a goddamn ACT OF CONGRESS to make our DVD players work properly. ~
[wetfeetl33t@localhost ~]$ traceroute www.slashdot.org | grep att.net
traceroute to www.slashdot.org (66.35.250.151), 30 hops max, 38 byte packets
[wetfeetl33t@localhost ~]$
looks like I'm OK!
Register the editry.
Unlike the government, I feel I have an actual duty to keep my behavior within the bounds of the U.S. Constitution.
You know something's wrong when the president, sworn to uphold the constitution, refers to it as "just a damned piece of paper." It's rather comedic (in a very sad way) that people can make such a fuss about whether or not an individual citizen has the right to burn the American flag (as an expression of protest), but nary a word is said when the commander-in-chief openly demonstrates willful contempt for the very foundation of our government.
NSA focus on emails (smtp, pop and imap) and whom is visiting very specific websites, that's it. They store all this information for future investigation and they DO have some tools to drill down for specific email patterns and do fuzzy logic, just like spamassassin would do. If they find an email that reaches a certain threshold, then it's going to be reviewed by an operator (as well as most of the emails from this specific email address).
AT&T is not in fault here, they are following a governmental top-secret anti-terrorist request, the NSA doesn't care about you unless you're a fucking terrorist, so cool down there's nothing really illegal going on, they're protecting US interests, not spying on you, all these agents have a top-secret clearance, they're professionals.
"(I)have this unfortunate condition that causes me not to believe a single thing any politician says when a mic's on. It's a very rare condition, apparently, and (the) only known cure is execution."
I hope you don't mind but that's signature material right there...
Splatter
"(I) have this unfortunate condition that causes me not to believe a single thing any politician says when a mic's on.
And trying to dumb it down enough to non-geeks to understand it.
Sorry...
and put detonators in the hands of cops.
Potential for abuse? jsut punish abusive cops.
Yeah, I'm being hyperbolic, but jsut barely. Teh power of the governmetn to abuse this kind of thing, and to do it ietly so they get away with it, is huge. Putting into the government's hands the power ot monitor our everyday communications is way, way too dangerous to our fredoms.
Okay. So how does one determine if there is any abuse going on? This monitoring is being done without any judicial oversight by a secret federal police agency. In other words, who, exactly, is policing the the secret federal police?
Answer: Nobody is. Therein lies the problem with your logic.
Another way to look at this would be to apply the same principle to the NSA that you have applied to the citizenry. If the NSA has demonstrable probable cause for all their surveillance, why not simply obtain a warrant as the constitution dictates? I mean, heck, if they are not doing anything illegal, they have nothing to worry about, right?
What's good for the goose is good for the gander, right?
I agree with you in theory, but anyone who has worked for government can tell you exactly how accountable a beaurocracy tends to be. Even many layers down, scandalous actions are covered by Official Secrets Acts and a general apathy, both of which combine to maintain the status quo.
I would agree with you in practice if, say, there was a real likelihood of 'punishment' ever landing anywhere near the 'abuser'. But more often the 'abuse' is to negate the 'punishment' in the first place.
I wanted to comment on the AT&T Thing. Narus is company that was started in America by some ex-Israeli Defense Forces people (unit 8200 alumni) who wanted to bring their Semantic monitoring software to America to sell to big telecom. This was always security software and Israel has always been very very far ahead in that realm (because of the "realities" there. There are a lot of these companies that were formed by ex-Defense people, specificially unit 8200. Checkpoint systems is another fine example.
From this article (direct link:
Anyway, the original goal was to make a bundle of money selling this stuff. Why? Well, it's useful for a number of reasons. Because the internet has been "redesigned" around business and commerce (and the needs of the consumer), the nature of the network has changed. From the original decentralized network (which did use leased phone lines from Ma Bell, so it's not really decentralized from THEM), now there are huge "tier 1" trunks that carry the majority of the transcontenental data. The idea in the late ninties of "IP Network Convergence" or Voice Data Video etc. all coming out of one pipe was the big hot one. Of course, how do you make money when people are only paying for their ISP connection. Enter "usage-based billing".
The idea behind the Narus system was to create a system to track IP traffic and transactions semantically (because you still didn't know where the traffic might be coming from) and create a sort of database of records like they talked about in TFA. Like the old fashioned telcom "call records", these would record a source and target and the data transmitted. The data would only be stored if "relevant", ie: part of a usage-based service or today, "interesting" ie having actionable words or phrases, etc. Of course, then the thing in New York happened and all of a sudden there was a LOT of funding available for people who had the stuff in place or ready to go and a lot of the old red tape was struck down. Remember "karnivore?" Cohen and his more spooky cohorts made a few calls to 8200 friends (IDF and M*s*ad were working "closely" with the administration) and due to the no-bid process (not unlike that of the Iraq contractors and the Katrina and new york ground zero cleanup operations) they got the job in a sec.
Of course, AT&T is going along because they need support for the big merger with SBC (putting most of the baby bells back together. AT&T was once the largest company on earth and they are set to do it again. Guess what, voice calls are still big business and how do you think your cell phone calls go from tower to tower. You guessed it, land lines..............AT&T has always been an evil company.
Anyway, Narus is the key to everything now. The company was the one pushing for convergence from the beginning and now it's possible to monitor all traffic because it's all on IP. How convenient. Even an anonymizing proxy such as ToR cannot provide the protection you need if one of your packets happens to stray across one or more Narus points. It's a simple matter to monitor the packets and put together not only
Cool! Amazing Toys.
Ten gigs a second is peanuts, but obviously there's more than one of these things ... and presumably the next generation will be even faster.
;)
That also isn't taking into account the obvious: they have more than one of these boxes..
Cool! Amazing Toys.
Easy for you to say. Your favorite type of porn isn't fat pregnant amputee midgets dressed in bondage outfits with animals. From behind. Now that is sexy.
Seriously, though, you've got it backwards. It's much more likely to be used for blackmail. "It'd be a real shame if your wife/kids/neighbors/boss/co-workers/pastor found out you liked ..., so why don't you save us some time and confess."
If you want your life to be different, live it differently.
The fact that we have far superios military power and we are totally willing to use it is a very effective defense in itself.
AT&T's cooperation with the government in this matter is required by current FCC regulations. The FCC's authority over this derives from CALEA, the Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act, a law enacted in October 1994.
The NSA *may* not be doing anything illegal - we have no way of knowing what traffic they are intercepting from the information we have available. All we know is they have the capability to intercept a broad variety of a traffic, a developement which is not particularly surprising. The rule that expanded the scope of CALEA from traditional telecom operators to Internet service providers was published by the FCC last August.
Very well said. If you ever feel like running for office, I'd probably vote for you. (Assuming that you were running on the sort of platform that you just outlined.) I would rather elect someone who promised to do virtually nothing that wasn't exhaustively researched and debated, than someone with any sort of "just do something" mentality.
In my opinion, it is this sort of mindset -- "I don't know what to do, but I'm sure as hell going to do something!" -- that has led to some of the worst of our laws, and also feeds into the public's perception that the solution to every problem is legislative.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
> Ten gigs a second is peanuts
You're the first person I've seen refer to OC-192 as "peanuts".
while I would, under normal circumstances agree with your assesment, not so sure it holds true with the religious fanatics we currently have in the white house. Aren't we supposed to be living in the 'end times' or some such silliness? and don't these same zealots/fanatics believe something about a war involving israel which will be the final step before the mesiah returns to reclaim his world? So for sane men, yes, a war with iran would be mere fancy, but with religion in play, it is always a possibility, especially when the men with their fingers on the button have grand delusions about it being the path to salvation. Yes, if we attack iran the middle east will errupt, and the 130,000 men and women we have there will be lucky to get out, but that would seem to not matter, after all the fanatics in charge are safely here and out of harms way, awaiting their chariots to heaven.
That's the problem. You're thinking that "The Christian right' has fsckall to do with "Conservatives."
Keep in mind what the terms meant before the current crop of asshats decided to use them to mean "our guys" and "the other guys" and you'll find precious little overlap.
> i have to agree that america needs war, but look at how the economy changes for the better everytime there is a war.
...ISN'T to defend our country, ISN'T to protect our liberty, and ISN'T to promote democracy ...it's to MAKE SOME MONEY?!?"
:-D
Reminds me of a debate I got into with one of those neo-con pro-biz warhawks just a few years ago about the (yet to occur) effects of the US war on Iraq. Mr. Warhawk was practically beaming about how occupying and rebuilding Iraq would pay for itself, how the US would reap enormous wealth from the influx of Iraqi oil, and that military spending would actually *strengthen* the American economy -- like the massive military expenditures during the Reagan Years! (Can you say "trickle-down theory"?)
I let him finish gushing about Ronnie Raygun, paused, then said, "Okay, sooooo.... war is the answer."
That kind of took the wind out of his sails. What I didn't say (but in retrospect really wish I had) was, "Therefore, the most important reason to wage a war in which hundreds to thousands of our American troops will be sent to a foreign land to fight and die
Alright, so let's accept the capitalist-pig view that war is all about feeding the money machine. How close (or how far) are we to breaking even on money spent on Iraq? How much is the federal deficit now? How much have gasoline prices changed, *and in what direction*? How much has consumer confidence and employee satisfaction improved (or worsened)?
Also, what of non-economic matters? How much safer (or more frightened) do we Americans feel about another attempted terrorist attack on US soil? How (un)successful have we been in establishing peace and starting a new democracy in Iraq? How much (or how little) respect do we have from the other nations of the world?
What of the veterans who return home (if they ever do -- for many US troops, tours of duty keep getting extended indefinitely)? If you develop PTSD and have screaming nightmares whenever you try to sleep, how much money is that worth? Or if you jump whenever a car backfires or a kid sets off a firecracker within earshot? Or if your mind keeps replaying the memory of a fellow soldier -- maybe a close buddy -- being shot in the head or blown to bloody bits? What amount of value, what price tag, can you possibly assign to that?
Btw, my closest friend is a retired Army master drill sergeant who served in Korea *and* Vietnam. I've seen him wake up in cold sweats during the middle of the night, and he keeps a bowie knife next to his pillow "just in case." Oh, and he despises Dubya.
"All hands, BRACE FOR IMPACT!"
Editors? You must be new here.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
When reading the article linked to please double check the writers math. While the numbers given for the capture rate are large the example seems to state that 10,000 million DSL links at a speed of 256K would be captured @ layer 4 on the 10Gbps links. My math suggests that there are aprox. 3900 DSL links @ 256Kbps each in 1Gbps,a nd therefore approx 39K @ 10Gbps. What is really missing here for me is details about the 'flow', ala Cisco NetFlow, rate per second which would effect the layer 4 processing rate. As we 'converse', i.e. traverse the tier1 transits, we send many frames in a single flow which could occur over several seconds. In a NetFlow like consideration all of such frames would comprise a single flow accounting and thus the 'data rate' to the probe, narus or otherwise, would be considerably smaller. Those tier1 transits probably do have 1000's, even 10's of 1000's of concurrent flows per second. that number is still not overwhelming as I myself have coded and operated NetFlow processing systems that process normalized records into an RDBMS at the rate of 1G records per day which is a per-second rate of under 12000 flows per second on 6x 450mhz SUN system. And I don't find Sparc to be the most powerful or processing environments! Surely the full 10Gbps per second full capture and storage of such feeds IS impressive and any such solution would have to have massive storage capacity on many storage channels opperating concurrently in order to just capture the data for later analysis. But those solutions can be purchased, just think EMC and a bunch of fiber channels. You could even experiment with this on your own DSL, or cable, by loading up ethereal and storing everything to your ata just to see that it is feasible. From there you could bypass all the cannd solution by going straight to libpcap and your homegrown code, Perl being my preference, and readily include your own indexing/tagging scheme to the data being grabbed by libpcap. So, certainly there is great issue here, however i is not one about the amount of hardware needed. I suggest a 'wire speed' collector writing to a large high speed storage with backend systems having read access to that storage for subsequent processing is rather straight forward for the 'average' homebrew.
Ok, but isn't it true that the "conservatives" are always trying to placate the Christian right in order to get their vote come election time?
No, that would be the "politicians."
While he'd probably support the +5, I'd like to think the parent poster finds the 'informative' tag just as silly as I do.
...it's really a sad day for America when we require a goddamn ACT OF CONGRESS to make our DVD players work properly. ~
Its the same thing over again through out history.
100 Revolution
200 Citizens get peacetime
300 Citizens get stupid and complacent
400 Givernment Goons get the upper hand
500 People die, people get upset
600 Government gets out of control
700 goto 100
-Hackus
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
Interesting you should use that bit of nonsense. Someone pointed out the fallacy in that excuse rather well:
2 0323
http://www.workingforchange.com/comic.cfm?itemid=
After all, if the Dubya camp are innocent, WHAT ARE THEY HIDING?
"All hands, BRACE FOR IMPACT!"
"As surveillance expands, people become free from danger, free to walk alone at night,..."
We are not any safer now than we were 20 years ago, we are far more in danger. Instead of successfully tracking, capturing, and curing criminals, the government is letting them go in ever-increasing numbers from the over-crowded criminal meeting grounds and training camps commonly referred to as prisons and jails.
Instead of winning wars, the government just makes new laws, making more of us criminals. Remember the war on crime, the war on organized crime, the war on alcohol (prohibition), the war on smuggling, the war on street gangs, the war on gambling, the war on cigarettes, the war on guns, the war on drugs, the war on illegal aliens, the war on pron, the war on child pron, the war on internet pron, etc.
The only wars we "win" are the military wars, and some of them we do not win. Remember Korea, Viet Nam? Wars are now run by the politicians, who are influenced by their particular version of political correctness for that particular war, and controlled by big business, instead of being run by those who know how to win them, the generals.
The other wars the government does not even figure out how to fight, much less win.
Making more things illegal makes more money for lawyers, while winning wars against
crimes would cut income for the lawyers. How many politicians are lawyers? Yes, the government puts departments in place to fight these things, but did you ever notice how ineffective they are? Is the stream of illegal aliens slowing down? No. Is the stream of illegal drugs slowing down? No. Is any crime rate slowing down? No, except for murder rates, and I suspect that is only because more people are illegal, and afraid to report crimes.
Why do they want to legalize illegal aliens right now? Because most of them would vote republican, thanking those who made them legal?
How much of a war are we fighting in Columbia, Venezuela, etc against cocaine? In Afghanistan, Turkey, Mexico, etc against opium, heroin? We appear to have given up?
"When one maniac can wipe out a city of twenty million with a microbe developed in his basement..."
Maniacs do not have to develop diseases to destroy a city. All they have to do is blow up a couple of chemical plants. And the plants are not beefing up their security, nor are they required to.
Maniacs can destroy the economy by blowing up a single building, like the New York Stock Exchange.
They do not have to make a nuclear bomb. How big a building did that one idiot blow up by himself with a truckload of fertilizer? It is a little harder to buy that much fertilizer, but there are plenty of farms, fertilizer stores and factories with many times that much fertilizer laying around, and absolutely no security at all. All you have to do is get a job there, or get a trucking job, and you have your truck bomb(s).
It is just as easy today to shoot down an airplane.
Maniacs could steal missiles from the Army, Air Force, or National Guard, or (easier and safer) buy them on the black market. It happens all the time.
Or they could use missiles to blow up the White House. Not that we would loose any good people in that case. That would shut down the country for quite a while.
Or they could blow up the main concourse of a major airport.
The only ones who are happy about the increasing threats to our safety and security are the major corporations who stand to make more and more money for their top people and owners. And that is all that is important today. Can you say military-industrial complex? Because if you can, you are wrong. It is the military-industrial-big government complex, and nobody is going to rock that boat.
And we are loosing whatever freedoms we thought we had to make sure that complex stays in power, and grows. We do not have to wait for intelligent computers to destroy mankind, we can depend on our government to do that for us sooner.
I for one welcome our new Cyberdyne Skynet overlords.
wake up and hold your nose
I have, and continue to do so! I agree that right now, they seem to be the only party willing to take a stand that flies in the face of "bigger, more controlling government". Unfortunately, the L.P. really does need to "get their shit together". Right now, I generally find that when I explain their angle to people, they're intrigued by the ideas themselves - but ultimately hang onto their Republican or Democratic-voting ways.
In other words, the L.P. still feels too much like a "radical fringe" group, vs. a potentially viable presidential party. If you read up on them, you feel like all they're doing is desperately trying to get you to buy a few political books, a couple T-shirts that kick some funds back to the Cato Institute, and showing you a few links to news articles showing their last candidate getting forcibly kicked out of a presidential debate he wasn't ever invited to speak in, and hauled off in a police car.
I think quite a few intelligent voters are willing to listen to Libertarian-leaning ideas, and even to incorporate them into their thinking.... but that's a far cry from convincing them that casting a vote for a 3rd. party is the way to achieve them.
There's still a stongly ingrained mentality that voting for anything other than the "big 2" parties is simply throwing away your vote, since the others don't have the financial backing or level of organization and respect needed to come close to winning an election.
Give me clinton back anyday. A dicksucking is nothing compared to the assraping we're getting now.
I patented screwing your mom. But it got revoked for "prior art."
I think you (or the author, rather) meant "safe", not "free". And it wouldn't last, of course, because the potential gain from cracking the system would be too great. Should I bring up that old quote from Ben Franklin about essential liberty and temporary safety?
Anyone who uses the word "sheeple" has succumbed to outrage and can no longer be taken seriously. It's a sign of intellectual drunkenness.
indeed: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-349898043 8587461603
I did a little poking around, and Bloomberg is the only mainstream news service/news website with any stories about the EFF lawsuit or the Mark Klein statement. How come the general media hasn't picked up this story? Isn't it newsworthy that Ma Bell is being sued for colluding with an illegal government domestic spying dragnet?
They say they're spying on us to defend us from terrorists. If terrorists can still attack, then who were they watching in the first place? Probably not the terrorists.
I like their use of the word "uninhabited" instead of unmanned or remote-controlled. It implies these things are designed to hang around out of view and surveillance a very long time, just waiting to be called in [or maybe make the decisions themselves?]. There is the nighttime silence, except for electronics signals, the sinister background music, and the final precision-targeted explosions.
And it certainly seems they conceptually borrowed from those Shadow-named "living" space-travel warships featured on a TV sci-fi series that aired a few years back. This little animation comes across as downright creepy. And even worse, they may well be overhead right now -- just waiting.
/.'s Psychic-in-Residence: Psychic to the Geeks
Huh? I don't know every detail of Clinton's administration, but I believe there was a good bit of Repub effort thrown into making people believe that he was some sort of underworld figure. They even started a rumor that he had murdered a former employee. So when I hear things like your IRS claim, my bullshit alarm goes off. Got any quotes to back that up?
Of course the people that criticize Bush now will be the first to criticise him if there's another attack. Why do you think they'd do anything different?
A strain of paranoid prevention can be worse than the disease, whate'er the intention.
Damn, you are right, there is a word seperate ... although I am sure in this case it was a typo.
Funny? The truth is "funny"? Shouldn't parent (and grandparent, perhaps) be modded insightful? :P
Seriously, I consider Deus Ex to be one of those "must play" games for people with more than twitch-skill neurons. (Deus Ex: Invisible War... Not really the same...)
The game just makes you think so damn much. Or at least, it lets you think you're being deep. What other game has two characters in a bar that have a conversation over the meaning of human life due to the rise of industrialization as you walk by?
I've had a similar bullshit alarm... I heard someone at work refer to Clinton ransacking the Whitehouse and Air Force One before he left. I decided to research it and it turned out to be a huge misrepresentation that lingers to this day. The Fox news stories which blew up the issue were factually true but they were very sneaky with the numbers and presentation to make it seem like it was saying something different. Go have a look and truly try to view from either viewpoint. Fun to try with many Fox news stories that have "that smell".
Glad their monitoring terrorists
You seem to have a problem with the English language. Are you an illegal alien by any chance? Anyone monitoring your communications would probably assume that you are.
Personally I suspect that you are an Al Quaeda operative encoding secret messages in your spelling & grammar errors.
I think you should be shot just to be on the safe side. Actually I think you should be shot for the entertainment value.
In the big picture, an individual's personal porn preferences is not the problem.
The problem is that all legitimate American governmental power flows directly from the Constitution, and all elected Federal Politicians, as well as all appointed Federal judges have solemnly sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution.
Amendments to the Constitution:
Do you need any help understanding the original intent of the following phrases?
Have Americans' ability to understand simple English degraded to the point that nine old verbose fetishises for black satin moo moos must augur the Constitution's entrails to divine what was meant?
The government was precluded from equivocating on sworn warrants; Jury trials; public - a)presentment of prosecutorial charges, and b)trial; right to challenge witnesses and evidence; right to competent and dedicated representative to aid in defense, and lastly, most importantly, habeas corpus. This is what has been lost. This is why you should care.
There is no "terror" exception. These rights are universal, and bar the government's actions against citizen and non-citizen alike. They were explicitly placed in the possession of humans, not the state. Any governmental representative who takes these rights is participating in an illegitimate tyranny. The abject owardice and lack of faith in the American system is implicit in persons advocating acts which degrade these rights.
A president, "whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free People".
This is what matters. The Dreamtime America is fading away.
Rush Limbaugh is a perfect real world example of an oxycontinmoron
With hardware becomming cheap It would not surprise me if EVERYTHING becomes wrapped in SSL or something like SSL within 5 (or possibly 10) years.
You can still look at traffic analysis and build models of behaviour based on throughput and other indirect data, but as long as keys remain safe and nobody manages to "hack" block ciphers with large keys I doubt anybody will be able to look inside encrypted packets (Tin Foil Hat exception: Unless the CIA/NSA/Men in Black know how!)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narus
I just thought of an amusing possibility: use pr0n as a host for steganography.
I'm sure the NSA has looked into the possibility.
Come to think of it, it could explain alot about the nature of traffic on the net.
"However, the fact remains that corporations have unprecedented control of our society, and our government"
Reference the period around 1900 then apologize for your vast ignorance.
You know, that period when 1 out of 5 children worked in a factory or mine.
"I understand those of you who are in denial, however."
Well, I don't understand those of you who have to resort to overstatement and hyperbole to demonstrate their point.
I'd listen to you, but you destroyed your credibility.
"The government grants you rights, not the other way around."-- beav007. Yes, these people really exist...
My company's web filter, http://www.websense.com/global/en/WebSense ("Securing Productivy"), blocks the site as a proxy filter.
Happy goldfish bowl to you.
Why is everyone so offended? There is no news here. The NSA has had this sort of arrangement with the telco's since its inception. The data has been passing in or out through the NSA allowing them to intercept on an "as needed basis" for decades.
The real detail here is to ask your representative, is it legal for the government to perform unwarranted searches during a time of crisis or not? There is plenty of precedent supporting the president in his decision to do so yet I don't see the legislature overruling him.
My opinion, those of you falling for the melodrama are only being used as pawns by the sorts of politicians and media you so dearly shout out opposition.
In a way, I like this ironic justice. You deserve the government you so sorely desire give to these amoral opportunistic people of avarice.
I don't like them, either. I qualify for MENSA, I'm not an idiot.
I'll fix the math, I was doing it in my head late at night...
The Narus website describes NarusInsight(TM) Discover Suite as follows:
"NDS supports detection of the following services and protocols for the purposes of billing, quality of service (QoS), planning, reporting, provisioning as well as blocking:
* VoIP (SIP, H.323, MGCP)
* Skype
* Streaming media (RTP, RTCP, RTSP)
* Peer-to-peer (Gnutella, BitTorrent, KaZaa, eDonkey, etc.)
* Web browsing
* e-Mail (SMTP, POP3, IMAP)
* Messaging (IM, MMS)
* Push to talk"
In other words the system can be used to block content/services. If you don't want VoIP users eating your bandwidth, you install one of these magic boxes and hey presto no more VoIP traffic... Or you can charge VoIP users differently.
Which means the important question is: Who controls the boxes? If they're entirely AT&T controlled, then they might be benign. If they're owned and operated by the NSA, then clearly all your data are belong to US...
You're right. I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and decided it's time to take my party back. However, as petty as it seems on the surface, I think an important part is giving a movement a good name. What do you call a group of Republicans that really, truly is for limited government, less spending, an end to the War On Drugs, energy independence, and the rule of law?
"Neo"-anything is right out. "Free Republican" and "New Republican" are probably trademarks. "Classic Republican" would probably get transliterated to "Classist" at the first opportunity. I'm serious about this and ready to start moving forward, but I really want to come up with something snappy that's immediately recognizable.
Note: don't bother answering "libertarian", even if there's a lot of truth to it. Many of my friends and I have no intention of leaving our party if there's a chance we can take it back.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
THANK YOU! Seriously, I learned that in elementary school and only came around to "separate-only" in the last few years. Do you have a citation for "seperate" being a real word, or is that only from your memory?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I worked for a (not AT&T) datacenter in 2000 and we were approached by Narus. They wanted to sell us their solution for traffic collection, categorization, archival, monitoring... whatever, for the purposes of customer billing and security monitoring. They likened it to phone system call records.
Anyhow, at that time their platform consisted of three loaded Sun E10000 boxes. I never got to see the software or anything, we passed on the business.
Don't think AT&T are the only ones that have Narus systems, or that they're the only ones giving the NSA access to the collected data.
AT&T is going to pay the proper price for this. How is the proper price measured? In courts where judges with certain biases decide what's right for all of us? Perhaps in some peoples' minds but not mine. The way AT&T will pay the price is by experiencing a consumer backlash that is proportional to the number of poeple outraged by this incident. Their punishment will be decided by how many people are willing to boycott their services. This is a self-regulating and just punishment. Money is all they care about, hit them where it hurts. If in the long run the company's stocks take a negligible hit then that is all that they deserve because if the average American is disinterested in his/her privacy then perhaps he or she does not deserve it.
Today we have a similar debate over this. Anyone know what this is? Class? Anyone? Anyone? Anyone seen this before? The Laffer Curve. Anyone know what this says? It says that at this point on the revenue curve, you will get exactly the same amount of revenue as at this point. This is very controversial. Does anyone know what Vice President Bush called this in 1980? Anyone? Something-d-o-o economics. "Voodoo" economics.
Whenever I hear of supply side or trickle down economics I think of that. =P
Chicken fried butter sticks? Do
No government ever GIVES human rights, they only take them away, just like they do with your money.
Sure they do, that's how you got that somewhat beaten piece of paper that the current government is currently treating like toilet paper (and many governments before, but moreso recently).
The problem is, that such sweeping pushes for citizens' rights usually come at the foot of a revolution, and today's citizens are much too happy with their poofy couches, SUV's, and TV remotes to bother with that. That and others are just too afraid of ending up at gitmo...
So you don't worry about being mugged by a guy in the alley, or targetted with bio-weapons. Instead you get to worry about being picked up by guys in dark coats and shipped off somewhat to 'discuss' those disparaging remarks about government you posted yesterday.
Yeah... that's sure an improvement.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
The South changed about 25 or so years ago and went Republican when the Northeast really took over the Dem party. Now the Reps are going off the wire and who knows what the South will do in the next election. If I were a Republication, I would be looking for another job.
Maybe Ross Perot had the right idea: Throw them all out and get back to the Constitution.
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://narus.com
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
or do you have to install/uninstall it? Would like to try it, but want to know how easy it is to turn it on/off and whether/how much resources it uses on/off. Thanks much for any information provided.
Happy goldfish bowl to you.
I'm probably going to get modded troll/flamebait - but it needs to be said.
While I am not in any shape form or fashion for big brother and fascist governments, what a lot of people fail to realize is; is that the world is not really a nice place. There are a terrible lot of people with their fingers on big bombs. As much as we all would like to believe that in a totally free society we would be safe, the truth is we would not.
Things like these NSA projects save millions of lives every year. There would be no less than 12 9/11 size disasters a year in the US if it wasn't for these types of projects. Are the projects evil? It depends on your point of view. You can say that they are wrong all you want - but look at the facts - several large scale attacks have occurred even with these types of projects in place - do you really think there would be the same or less number of attacks without spying projects? Obviously there would be more - now you choose - more personal privacy AND more terrorist attacks - is that what you really want?
slashdot troll = you make a compelling argument I do not like the implications of.
I've understood your POV for a long time, but you're giving the impression that the main purpose for US involvement in Iraq (as you witnessed) is to 'train' troops. That cannot be.
Apparently Grenada and Panama (citing your examples) were enough at the time. How many possible troops could have been 'trained' there? Dozens? Hundreds? And that was enough.
As for Iraq, the US was already in Afghanistan. If the purpose of these exercises is to 'train' soldiers, was Afghanistan not a big enough arena?
There's more to it than you let on. I'm not saying that they weren't interested in 'training' troops, I'm saying that they already had a place to do so.