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Ex AT&T Tech Says NSA Monitors All Web Traffic
Sir Tandeth writes "A former technician at AT&T, who alleges that the telecom giant forwards virtually all of its internet traffic into a 'secret room' to facilitate government spying, says the whole operation reminds him of something out of Orwell's 1984. Appearing on MSNBC's Countdown program, whistleblower Mark Klein told Keith Olbermann that all Internet traffic passing over AT&T lines was copied into a locked room at the company's San Francisco office — to which only employees with National Security Agency clearance had access. 'Klein was on Capitol Hill Wednesday attempting to convince lawmakers not to give a blanket, retroactive immunity to telecom companies for their secret cooperation with the government. He said that as an AT&T technician overseeing Internet operations in San Francisco, he helped maintain optical splitters that diverted data en route to and from AT&T customers. '"
You can read Klein's April 2006 statement in his own words here and there are pictures of the secret room at AT&T here.
Very scary stuff.
My blog
Come take a drink from the firehose!
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
The future of internet is encrypted internet.
Well, I guess we know where all that traffic got diverted to, then.
Thats a LOT of porn!
- Aetheral Research -
I am somehow not convinced... how many TB of data would a major provider like that move in a day? Those would have to be some moby servers...
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you!
I mean, really.....
A goal is a dream with a deadline
It won't belong before the RIAA wants the NSA's records for sueing file sharers. And sadly as much help as the FBI gives the RIAA, it might happen without a fight. :-)
Think Deeply.
Not like spying on everything is new to them..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON
As they stand back to back, sports center anchors are whispering into their mics, telling the audience the voting history of each combatant, theorizing what a loss on either side would mean to upcoming votes on legislation...
I only wonder how long before we are truly living in a fascist state where such monitoring is not questioned? I am going to begin using encryption for everything.. like the rest of this message for instance...
qproiavpofi qeproi n qwcrpfouih np vf qroipasodv nc 4nqa 4p9iva 4padn a p0 oit adpoi
And I mean it!!
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
You know, those little pamphlets full of fine print that get shoved in your bill and promptly thrown away because they're purposely made to be obscure and hard to read?
If there's no "we allow an obscure government agency look at everything you read, write, say and listen to without court order or accountability" clause, can we sue the fuckers?
The fact that a thing cannot be done well in a reasonable amount of time within a predetermined budget has never gotten in the way of our government trying to do it anyway.
Dare to Hope. Prepare to be Disappointed.
...I was expecting crazy conspiracy-theory fiction, not reality.
An optical splitter is like a piece of wire; in order to intercept any traffic off a fiber cable, you need to look at the information carried by all the photons.
What hasn't (and never will) been established is to what extent the boxen in the s00per-s33kr1t room dumped petabytes the domestic-origin-to-domestic-endpoint packets on the floor before logging the terabytes of foreign-to-domestic (or domestic-to-foreign) traffic to storage, or if No Such Agency is filling up yottabytes of storage somewhere.
Not that it matters; there is no "case". The precendent for anything illegal over the past decade has been that anything illegal and not plausibly deniable will be retroactively legalized, rendering the legal question moot.
But it's an interesting philosophical question, and for organizations and people who are subject to laws, it's also an interesting legal one: If a thousand gallons of water runs down the drain while you're drinking from a firehose, did you really drink it all?
Just because they dont have the space to store all the data doesn't mean the data isn't being re-directed. They could be sifting through the data for specific ip address's and activity types, and selectivly backing what they want from the whole pile.
..but with extra "bad" and no "joke".
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
They've never come after me for my [NO CARRIER]
This being slashdot, that should be ok with most folks here.
Come on, that Countdown program is just about as biased left as you can get. I guess bias for the liberal side is called news, and bias for conservatives is an outrage, requiring an attack dog like Media Matters. It's a good thing that Fox News exists, or there would be no conservative voices in the media at all.
No weapon in the arsenals of the world is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men.-Ronald Reagan
A Sony representative on hand indicated that they will also use the system in the war on HD formats and watch for keywords such as (BLUE-RAY, HD-DVD, CIRCUMVENTION, MAGIC NUMBER and 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0).
Homo homini lupus
They're monitoring everything that goes over their wires, even if the data is being sent to/from people who aren't AT&T customers, so many people wouldn't even receive that pamphlet. Heck, a lot of stuff probably goes over their wires that belongs to people who aren't even Americans (which, sadly, is often the justification used by the gov't for the surveillance in the first place).
A post a day keeps productivity at bay.
The NSA are the good guys, therefore, any traffic monitoring they do will be used to catch the bad guys. Since we are good guys*, we have nothing to fear.
NOTHING!
*Unless you smoke weed, use p2p or jaywalk, in which case you're a bad guy and you deserve to go to jail.
This reminds me of that anecdote from years back about a question asked by a clueless user on how he can "download all of the Internet" at once and take it with him...
Seriously, are we supposed to believe, that "virtually all" of AT&T Internet traffic passes through one facility in San Francisco? It is likely, they have the same rooms in all major nodes, though...
Which brings us back to those earlier laws obliging phone companies to maintain equipment in all central offices, which would allow the government to eavesdrop on anybody's phone calls. Sure, the police needed a warrant to actually perform the eavesdropping. But the equipment and the facilities ("secret rooms") are always there.
What they most likely don't need a warrant for is the statistics — did the number of calls to so-and-so suddenly increase? Did he call such-and-such after this-and-this called him?..
Most likely, NSA is looking for similar things on the Internet — there is a lot of insight to be gained from simply knowing, which sites get more traffic in (possible) correllation with certain events... And then, again, there is a need for the equipment to always be there, so that warranted intercepts of the datastreams can be performed too.
Yes, this is prone to abuse. No, it can not be effectively audited by the public without "compromising" (or even "jeopardizing") "the mission". The only relief comes from the knowledge, that any evidence illegally collected still can not be used against anyone in the court of law...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Slowly the United States is putting in place the same measures that already exist in China. Probably they hope that once they, the US Government, have finally made the conversion the US population, like that of China, will not care so long as they get their cheep goods and junk TV.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
We already have.
Or grandson of carnivore. My guess: Log all traffic and then they have a record when someone becomes "interesting."
Then read the article. AT&T used optical splitters which means that the NSA got a copy of everything that crossed AT&T.
Oops, I just noticed you were modded flamebait, and rightfully so. FUD applies more to your post than the article.
After all the bills and executive orders they put through to increase the authority of the president and his office, unwarranted wiretapping stuff, 'enemy combatant' joke, guantanamo, no-fly lists and such, you thought they would leave internet alone ?
Thats bush & co for you. No surprise at&t is the name that comes up with them. after all, its 'for the boyZ', right ?
Read radical news here
There are two independent clauses in the Fourth Ammendment:
1) The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated,
and;
2) no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Neither clause contains your rule that "No warrant, no searches or seizures". Instead Rule 1 states that "no searches unless they are reasonable" and Rule 2 states "No warrants without probable cause."
The Fourth Amendment does not say "No searches without a warrant." If the drafters meant that, they could have said it, and we are free to amend it at any time, but we haven't.
The Fourth Amendment merely requires that searches be reasonable.
Moreover, in a situation where the information is publicly disseminated, e.g when you transmit data across the world, over the internet, to be handled by countless companies you don't know, no search occurs and therefore the Fourth Amendment doesn't even apply.
That's fine, until they ship you to Guantanamo. They don't need a reason for that, nor is there any trial preceding your imprisonment.
This is just one piece of a very scary puzzle. Whether they were all designed to fit together, or just happen to fit together, it's all very scary.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Your world. Wiretapped.
Makes you wish Dueling politicians were a more common day occurrence, doesn't it?
Who'd watch? The bad guy would always win.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
I'm not going to claim it's not happening, but this is not the guy to listen to. I don't want to be a dick about this, but he's not a network engineer, he's not a network admin, he's not a data specialist...he's a cable splicer. He does VDV work for AT&T. Is it possible, if not likely, that he maybe doesn't have a complete understanding of how all the tubes work past Layer 1? (And just to really be a dick about it, every VDV person I've met claims to be a data network expert because they lay the wires. Ask one why Ethernet is limited to 100M by spec and watch the fun.)
With only 20 of those facilities, and just in AT&T locations, the fibertaps wouldn't even have a significant percentage of traffic going through them. Do some traceroutes; do some ping tests; Try it from different providers. They would have to be routing all traffic through those points. Your ping times would know, and the global BGP tables would know.
I have a comfortable tinfoil hat. What I *could* be easily convinced of is that the NSA has taps on all oceanic fiber. That's much easier to do, since there's not all that many. And...frankly, they should be. We pay them a lot of money to keep us safe. A *lot* of money. But I don't think this is the guy to listen to regarding something this big and damning.
She already said she would. Not that I like her, but Bush's encroachment on civil liberties in unprecedented in it's scope.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
You are changing the subject, but I'll bite. Only once, though — don't expect more responses on this.
"They" do — they need to catch me fighting America without uniform of any other country...
All armies used to execute such people on the spot — they are not prisoners of war and Geneva conventions do not apply to them. America chose to imprison and try them instead, and is now in boiling water over it...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
You can certainly accuse them of misusing information that has been made available to them. But let's not pretend they stole it. Have they entered houses and raided computers? Have they forced people at gunpoint to tell them how to decrypt files? No, they simply made a deal with networks that were handed information freely by thousands of people.
We have a right to be angry at the misuse. But there are ways to avoid it, including not putting stuff on the Internet in the first place, encrypting it strongly, and snail-mailing decryption information to trusted eyes.
You can't hand your phone number to a business and then be annoyed because a telemarketer calls.
"Microsoft killed my company, I hold a personal grudge. I don't use Microsoft products and neither should you."-JWZ
No it wouldn't. It's called sampling. Red flags and segmenting certain layers and patterns. You don't have to store a fraction of the traffic data to analyze it and store what you need.
I won't say what I do, but I do it for a fortune 50 company, and I personally analyze an obscene amount of internet traffic. I do all this with a few servers and a workstation. Now I can honestly I say I have probably analyzed .5% of the internet's traffic (doesn't sound like much, but it is). With the differnet software we use and the relatively small amounts of hardware we use, I can easily imagine scaling that to 100% without too much problems. You'd need a lot more people, better alogorithms, and much more processing and storage space. But it's definitely possible.
And you don't even need to do 100%. As I pointed out before, you can segment your data and sample it for what you are looking for. Or data mine samples if you don't know what you are looking for. Find the flags you want, and apply that accross the whole traffic spectrum.
Pretty scary. Allthough my first thought is that this is used for counter-terrorism activities, I can't help but think that's instead used for political purposes as well. Who knows. Big brother indeed.
No warrant, no searches or seizures of my stuff.
The data moving on AT&T's cables, and through their routers belongs to them, and if they want to share it with the NSA, that is their right.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
--Yeah, or a story to make sure that Bush knows who owns the media and that it can turn on him the instant he stops playing ball in Israel.
Anybody not wearing that metaphoric tin foil is part of the problem.
-FL
Yeah, and I'm just shocked that no one (or very few people) are questioning what type of computer power and storage and retrieval systems the government must have to copy the entirety of the Internet. Now THAT'S a Slashdot story.
Instead all you get a delusional rants about violations of rights (most of which were never rights to begin with as they usually pertain to foreigners on foreign soil, or have been previously been ruled within the governments authority, pre-Bush) based on yet another hearsay story.
Though if this program is in place they do help the NSA refine their search and targeting criteria. That will probably keep a few truthers up at night wishing that they never wrote that comment.
Of course that's just my opinion...... you could be wrong!
See, this is something that bugs me. It seems that "real conservatives" get upset about political correctness (which was embraced by the left about as well as "abstinance only" is embraced by the right-- that is, by a very vocal minority), and label the whole "left" ideology as somehow bad.
This is neglecting that it is the ultra-right in this country that are also after prohibition of various things, such as sex, drugs, and privacy. ("Same sex marriage" should also be on that list, but it didn't flow as well.)
It's extremists from *both* sides that are destroying the Constitution. As a "left-leaning" person, I am 100% behind the Constitution, and believe the federal government should be stripped down to the bone and get back to its original charter-- the oversight and regulation of interstate trade.
Otherwise, I'm socially liberal. Go figure.
I imagine if we had a conversation, you'd find we agreed on almost all goals. We'd just differ in our approaches. Me, I don't trust any group bigger than about 5 people-- that especially includes government at all levels, and corporations.
But that's just me.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commerce_Clause
"Article I, Section 8, Clause 3 of the United States Constitution, known as the Commerce Clause, states that Congress has the exclusive authority to manage trade activities between the states"
Declarations such as yours saying "In other words, if the Constitution is unclear and there is no relevant law then the Federal Govt. has no power whatsoever" ignore the reality that it is the job of the courts to interpret what is unclear and apply it, as in the case of the Commerce Clause.
Saying they have "no power whatsoever" is simply wrong, again, as demonstrated by the rampant use/abuse of the commerce clause.
Idealism is nice, but reality bends it over ever single time.
They are being sued; that's why this is news.
OTOH, Congress is already discussing a law which would provide them retroactive immunity from such suits.
"The Bush camp has done this kind of thing before"
It seems upon first reading that you're claiming the Bush camp faked the documents that Rather lost his career over.
Did I misread you?
And if not,could you please source that? Your link doesn't address it at all. I haven't heard that accusation before, and would like to see something to support it.
Absolutely.
To paraphrase Carl Sagan/Contact:
Why build one device, when you can build two for twice the cost?
I am not in the U.S, so there isn't a lot I can do to help people over there. But it is my official policy not to travel over to the U.S until Bush and Chaney are gone from the White House, hopefully spending there time in jail. I am thankfully in Europe where spying is done but not on this scale and is subject to laws and rules. I hope Europe doesn't go the route of the U.S on people rights, with the exception of the U.K. But that country is similar to the U.S in many ways, but they have cameras everywhere and other surveillance stuff already in place.
Must of you guys are making too much noise for something not worthy. If NSA or another agency is able to track some important information on the traffic, they will. By the way, that's why they exist.
The question about if they 'grep' all the information or part of it is not the main thing; in the end that's just curiosity from our geek side. The real guess is if they use whatever information they catch in a noble way or not - for the sake of the country or to keep the VIP's in the top of the food chain.
Am I eval()? - http://www.monst3r.com.br
As a resident of the gorge, I have visual (in my paranoid opinion) evidence that something funny seems to be going on. Previously, I mentioned the mysterious fiber branching from the Fed BPA web in the gorge. It runs across wheat fields and mountains while not suppling anyone with the promised broadband. Google's The Dalles datacenter feeds from this BPA pipe. If you look at the NSA "COWBOY" site with google earth, The 1000+ piles of earth to the north west have been removed. Must have been a hell of an expansion. The NSA owns their own FAB.
The NSA does not care about monitoring geeks in their Mom's basement.
Except maybe on breaks, when they need a good laugh..."Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." -- Eric Hoffer
It's called 'Trireme' owning from the fact it use to be a 3-process system (1 on windows, 2 on Linux). Now it's a single app called Argus. It runs on Linux only platforms including Itanium and accepts multiple fiber optic input feeds per box. Each box has about 16gb of ram since the whole design is based on a finite state machine -- that's how it achieves speed. By law they have to filter out US specific IP addresses. In reality what they do is route certain traffic to a foreign ISP (in particular one in France) that then routes it back to the US so it becomes "foreign" traffic and thus "legally" eligible for intercept. A session is stored in a directory in a memfs until such time as a threshold is met. At which point it's tarballed and written to disk. The amount of data passing through requires large single writes to the disk.
It's design is a series of plugin "states" if you will based upon IP address. Each plugin registers what port/protocol it's interested in and decodes the data to a workable format. In the case of IM the HTML is stripped out that usually appears in IM data these days. It even captures file transfers you make. All the standard protocols are implemented, all the well known IM protocols have been reverse engineered and implemented (thanks to the Open Source code on gaim it was trivial). The last bastions were VoIP, and in-game communications too (think WoW chats and WoW voice). Skype was the running problem since it's all encrypted. But, now that eBay owns Skype, subpoenas are no problem. And since Skype trunked phone calls do not have an origin associated with them, they are immediately subject to intercept (and all of them are). Skype-to-Skype was the best bet.
Finally, it's a companion application for low-lvl filtering. It looks for general targets and then forwards them on to another system for more specific targeting. The room this guy refers is filled with Raptor boxes that send copies of traffic to the Argus system.
Everyone is up in arms because a PRIVATE company is allowing the government to examine traffic passing over its PRIVATE data network.
Similar to a mall/store owner asking the police to come in during a busy holiday shopping weekend to watch for shoplifters.
Don't like that concept? Don't shop at the mall/store. Don't like what AT&T is doing? Don't buy their products, and convince your providers not to buy their products.
The point is that you don't have to look at everything - just enough to get the info that you're looking for. Things that trip certain flags probably get saved to be analysed in more detail. Hell - I think I could construct the logic and match the hardware for this kind of job, and there's a ton of people out there who know a lot more about these things than I do. Most of them are probably much cleverer too.
lemonade was a popular drink and it still is
We can still sue the fuckers, if they are found to be in violation of the Constitution.
The Constitution trumps contract law. They can put in as many clauses as they like, including "we reserve the right to come to your house uninvited, rifle through your things, drink all the beer in your fridge, and kill your dog, and in the event that we do, you immediately owe us $600 in Dog Killing Fees," but that clause would immediately be struck down by the courts if they ever exercised it.
Contracts are only enforcable if they are legal.
For security, the MD5 hash of this message and sig is 09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0.
Only 2 pictures, and both depict only closed doors leading to Mark Klein's secret room, # 641A.
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/multimedia/2006/05/70944
No racks filled with boxes labeled "Carnivore," no spooks in button-down shirts dashing about, no nothing. Could just as well be a closet, albeit one that requires heavy-duty ramp access on one door. Massive, cast iron, diesel-powered brooms, I'll bet.
The American public and media will react to the lack of sexiness in this story with the kind of outrage you might express when you see a long line at the grocery store checkout. Americans will sit on their increasing asses and watch it all happen, and unlike the frog in the beaker, American will turn up the heat all on their own. You only need to utter the nine from 9/11 and they scream "How much can I give you to feel safe again!?" (I borrowed that from Family Guy)
In any case, stop you damned moaning?! This story is false because it fails to ask you what the f**k you are going to do about it? If nothing you are the problem! I'm going to do the norm. Write a litter. How that hell is this the "Home of the free?" Were monitored more than a Jewish school in Germany in the 1930's. Okay, Hitler was bad, and he was worse than this, but he sure would have thought it a damned nice item.
I'm not even going to insult you by listing all we've lost in freedoms. That would be whining. Lost. That sure as hell is the wrong word. we gave away freedoms like offerings to a pagan god(and not one of the cool ones). We burned them by the bushel. Can you buy a house without showing ID? How easy is it to wire funds. Oh, we'll catch a few, but we'll have to except being tracked watched and ID'ed any time we want to do something.
All that, rather than solving the problem. All the fuss. All the paranoia. All the tracking, monitoring, and so on. It's got the be the biggest sexual fetish for the inner fascist bubbling to the surface of America.
Do something to stop it, or I'm pointing at you and saying "You are all for it. You are fascism's little cheerleader, By saying nothing. You did this."
-- Prepared at the direction of, or to be sent to Legal Counsel, in anticipation of litigation. Attorney Client Pri
A music or movie is widely broadcast, that is the point of it, to tell a story. If an artist wants to let no one hear his song, locks it in a vault, and it gets shared, then thats wrong. But if an artist is producing music to be heard, then they have no right to privacy in regards to that song now do they?
You are somehow confusing the right to privacy with disseminating other peoples already released intelectual property. The issues are not even remotely similar. Of course this being slashdot, you have been wildly and incorrectly modded up.
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
But alas, they don't hate us for our freedom and never have. So we're very busily and efficiently solving the wrong problem.
So true!
They hate us because we've been meddling in their governments,...
So wrong!
They hate us because we don't subscribe to Islam, and are not busy stoning homosexuals and covering our women. How do you wish to "solve" for that problem?
The solution is to support people of religion who are not fundamentalists, and then let them sort things out with the more extreme elements to keep them on the fringe. Not to pretend we can avoid angering people who chafe at our very existence. I am not willing to terminate my own person just because someone else dislikes the lifestyle I have chosen.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
NSA measures their computer capacity by the acre. Trust me. They can do it. I remember during some of my 'travels' seeing a doc that mentioned they were gearing up for 500 exabytes of storage by the early part of the 2000's (this was back in 1998).
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
What an appropriate sig. "I hurt people for fun." Charming. You may be a psychopath, but at least you're honest about it. As reprehensible as "Turn their [terrorists] country of origin into a smoking wasteland" is, the more important point is that it just won't accomplish what you think it will. What it would accomplish is to unite the entire world against us. We would be the ones obliterated. But, as you hurt people for fun, I'm sure you'd find any outcome featuring enough hurt people enjoyable.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Most of it's due to this guy.
Sadly most of his ideas are closely mirrored by the apocalyptic christian evangelicals (misnomer admitted)
Crap. As it turns out I haven't read the moderator guidelines well enough as posting anon while logged in is enough to undo moderation.
Yes, this is OT, but a good reminder to other mods. Feel free to mod down if you must, -1 offtopic would be appropriate.
"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." - Every fascist, ever
Everyone is up in arms because a PRIVATE shipping company is opening and xeroxing every document that passes through it's PRIVATE distribution network and forwarding the xerox to the government.
I mean, so what that it's basically impossible to avoid either using Bizzaro-FedEx or have them handle your document at some point, they're a MONOPOLY CORPORATION and not the government, so that magically makes it moral and legal *coughfruit of a poisoned treecough* for them to help the government spy on you by proxy.
Can I have some of the peyote they're putting in your koolaid?
There are religious maniacs out there that hate our culture...
What, like this one?
Name: Mr. Anon E Mouse; SSN: 555-55-5555
Killing mod points. Modded "Troll" on accident.... I swear I don't represent the gov't agenda.
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
Particularly in it's Latin formulation, which translates as "entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity.
The US free market: two halves of a government-granted duopoly are free to set the market price.
Your words are, frankly, insulting to the millions of individuals who lost their liberty, lives, property, and loved ones in REAL totalitarian states. Read the Gulag Archipelago sometime and get informed. The problem is, that the REAL totalitarian states never just appear fully formed. They go through stages. Germany before WWI had a constitution and elected its leaders in a democratic (or at least Republican, to be more correct) fashion. There were no gas chambers then.
Another example is that the Jews were forced to wear the yellow "star of david" on their clothes in 1938. If they were to complain about the regulations and say that they were living in a "police state", then by your logic they could easily be ridiculed because the concentration camps such as Auschwitz had not been built yet -- construction on those started in 1940. By your logic the star of david is just a patch on a coat, nothing to be worried about, right? So by your words and logic they would be "frankly, insulting" their future selves who would be dying in the gas chambers two years later.
The problem with your logic is that you are saying that a person cannot complain about the totalitarian nature of his country until he can be killed for just complaining about the totalitarian nature of his country -- a "catch 22".
America is definitely becoming less and less free every day and more authoritarian -- that is very easy to see. The right of privacy is guaranteed by our constitution, and when it is public knowledge that our government is publicly ignoring that constitution that is definitely the time to complain. Our constitution was created to protect us from our government and when our government starts treating it like toilet paper it is time definitely time to do something. I honestly think you feel good about yourself through pretending you live in a totalitarian state for the same reason that Christians enjoy hearing stories about "persecuted Christians" in third-world hell holes. It is illegal for the government to do domestic warrantless wiretapping, yet they admit that they are doing it. It is illegal for the government to torture people, yet they admit they are doing it. It is illegal for the government to deny people their judicial due process by taking people to secret prisons in foreign countries, but they admit they are doing it. Anyone who does not understand that American rights and freedoms, like the right to privacy and t are disappearing has their head in the sand.
America is no longer the "land of the free and home of the brave" and it is very much high time for everyone to start recognizing that fact and start speaking up. Trying to say that our government is not repressive enough or authoritarian enough to speak up about it is ridiculous. The people who were tortured and killed at Abu Ghraib and other places at the hands of our government would not find those words "frankly, insulting". They would say that those words are an understatement.
When people in America joke on a regular basis that if you say anything against the government that you might be sent to Guantanamo, and when our elected officials argue about whether or not repeatedly drowning someone and reviving them is torture, you can be pretty sure that we have crossed the line that divides a free state and an authoritarian state.
I am SO never getting a job with those guys...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
NSA monitors internet in America? In New Soviet America, internet monitors YOU.
Sorry, couldn't resist.
Really, I wasn't trolling.
It's honestly what I think of the article.
If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
Duh.
Y'all just didn't assume this?
Hey NSA. Can I get a job? I'm a complete misanthrope so I'd have no problem. I have a security clearance already, and I'm thinking about a career change. I have golden programming and engineering skills, and absolutely no shame. I'm serious.
This is part of the total awareness information project. I just wrote about it for the "FBI data-mining grocery card purchases" submission today, so here is a link.
Shortly after 9/11, Admiral Poindexter announced a plan to gather *all* electronic data ( phone calls, internet traffic, email, credit card purchases, bank records, court records, everything ) into a gigantic database. There was some public outcry, so the project was nixed, but the wikipedia article shows that many of the functions were farmed out to smaller projects and agencies. Earlier the former Quest CEO said that they were approached by the government to do blanket wire-taps for *all* of their phone traffic months before 9/11.
It's no longer paranoia to say that they are watching us. They are tracking absolutely everything we do.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
In Soviet Amerika is all phone calls and Internets being listened to.
Even printer paper is having of watermark.
Only way to avoid NSA is to write in coded messages in text on paper reused from old books.
All hail Glorious Leader!
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seriously, when I was in the Army, I was in the Yakima shack that all long-distance (and I do mean all) telephone calls that went out were routed thru - this started years ago and only expanded its already intrusive scope since 2000.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
And therefore no conviction either.
I meant "no new problems" in the 6 years, not "no new courts".
The military commissions — America's implementation of the "competent tribunals" mandated by the Geneva conventions — apply to people suspected of being unlawful combatants.
Exactly. So, I don't understand, why you keep bringing this up in connection with electronic surveilance. Can we, please, get back on topic?
But, please, don't respond, until the Cool-Aid wears off. Thank you.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I've dubbed it Rag Tag Rebel Syndrome. It's similar Munchausen Syndrome. It's people who deeply want to be some sort of subversive rebel fighting the Empire. I figure it's a direct result of a childhood in a *relatively* trouble free and lackadasial part of the world. There's nothing really to fight against in the West. Oh, there's plenty of issues and controversies and politics, but nothing really meaty anymore like civil rights or sufferage or slavery or other "E" Ticket struggles of the past.
:-)
I may seek a grant to study it. Maybe the NSA will give me one.
There are endless metaphoric parallels to be found in the relationship between the names of people and entities and their various true intentions.
In this case, the AT&T logo looks like a freakin' Death Star. This has been pointed out before, and I'm going to point it out again. Intentions are often announced right there in full view for any who wish to look. It can be seen in almost any name in the media, and the ratio of 'obvious' to 'imporant' seems to increase proportionately.
The President and his Veep can be well described by their own names which in sophomoric slang refer to reproductive organs. (And which also indicate who wears the pants in that relationship).
And another of my favorites. . .
Compare, Bill Gates with Mark Shuttle-Worth. (A gate being a deliberate limiting force, versus worthiness being shuttled back and forth between points.) Neat, huh?
-FL
Suppose there is a warranted internet espionage activity that is good for America that complies with FISA and the Constitution. In order to not compromise this activity, you would need the filter that finds what you're allowed to look at to be safe, wouldn't you? So everything that goes in SHOULD be unfiltered if this is in compliance with the law.
Innocent until proven guilty.
http://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
am sure the NSA personnel have PTSD from that image alone.
And, if you believe that she will not stop the monitoring,
how do you feel about Bush setting the precedent that allows
Clinton to use it?
emt 377 emt 4
This is also why I use sites like: http://www.cryptboards.com/
Keeps them guessing.
www.slightlycrewed.com - Because aren't we all?
So AT&T is essentially halving their bandwidth by sending a double of the data to one spot in SF. Then they are somehow storing and processing it. We're talking potentially about petabytes/sec here. This sounds like it would just plain not be technically possible on several fronts. (acquisition, storage, processing, mining for value)
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
OK fine. This is a Bad Thing(TM)
What can an individual do to make it more difficult/impossible for NSA or another like entity to do this?
Encryption? Few people I know use it. Using it probably just makes them more interested in you.
Also, you should get the book Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson, and also learn about one-time pads and stuff. Because public key is not infallible. Regardless of the bits, if you are using the same keys repeatedly you can do frequency analysis and tons of other tricks we've probably never heard about. Obviously you have no expectation of privacy on the INTERNET (duh), so you shouldn't act like you didn't see this coming. If you had secret conversations or data to exchange, you would have already assumed that before you sent the message.
Of course, we all use our online banking, purchase items online, etc. and all of that is insecure as hell. But I trust my bank to back me (the customer up) if they screw up and let my information get out. Unfortunately, we have no idea what the government is doing because they are doing this illegally (according to the FISA act), they refuse to divulge information about what they've collected and what they're doing with it, and therefore we conscious Americans are asking because we know that this is one of those steps towards a police state, just like what happened in Nazi Germany. Plus, they could totally fabricate evidence coming from this input but the judicial system doesn't fully understand the internet because it's a bunch of 80 year old people with roots in the deep deep past. So they could screw anyone they want to, and they judge will give you a blank stare when you try to say they fabricated it.
They could screw you, if they decided they didn't like you for some reason. And of course they are storing all this information so LATER ON, if they decide they don't like you (say if you were Jewish and they decided they didn't like Jewish people) they could use this information to screw you.
The thing I'm searching for here is the right statement to answer those people who will say, "if you have nothing to hide, then why hide it?" The answer is simple. We don't know what to hide, because we don't know what asshole might get this data someday, and we don't know what he'll do. This point is UNARGUABLE. And to say it will never happen here is, well, it has happened here before.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
Who the hell is going to read all that shit?
We had an issue recently in my own data center where we were trying to trace a probable network issue with our backups. However, we couldn't find a sniffer that had the capacity to capture the entire session. We had to go buy an 8-terabyte device to allow us to capture one night's worth of activity.
So it's funny if we have 210 million Internet users, how many NSA employees does it take to read all of our traffic every day, and if some of them call in sick how far behind do they get?
One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel / the next it's rolling over me / I can get back on / I can get back on
Reversibility is a key component of efficient slogans.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
come on, you can't be
almost all of the executive crap that is removing personal freedoms unconstitutionally belong to w. bush adm era.
Read radical news here
Yeah, but luckily for us, our government is completely incompetent. So go ahead and do illegal activities over the internet. They are too stupid to catch you. If they've been tapping the internet traffic, and cell phone traffic, and everything else - they whey couldn't they do something about 9/11?
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
The innocent have nothing to fear from the law! So you better hope you're innocent, by NSA standards
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Some people also don't believe that the Constitution is a suicide pact.
Have you ever noticed how people who say that the Constitution is not a suicide pact always really mean "the Constitution is a suicide pact, so let's not follow it."
Well, I think that the Constitution really isn't a suicide pact. Following it won't be the end of the Western world. On the contrary, it is the great accomplishment of the Western world, and far from being a vulnerability, it contains the very values that allowed us to prosper, and which will deliver us from this current evil, just as it has delivered us from others.
Abondoning the most fundamental and tested rules of our society for the sake of expedience is the real suicide pact.
omnia tua castra sunt nobis
If the NSA-enabled forces of tyranny and mind control are so powerful in the USA, why did this story get out? I'm sure the NSA saw this guys' e-mail and could have sent FBI agents to put him on a plane to Guantanamo. All the pieces are in place. Why aren't they using them to keep us safe from people like this AT&T technician and his alarming thoughts?
That you don't see the cameras don't mean they aren't there. Most of the cameras out there are hidden, they have many visible cameras. But that is just as reminder for the public.
Exactly. Why build one when you can build two for twice the price? ;P
~X~
~X~
Encryption = power in the online world. Power to keep everyone from seeing what you are doing.
In the real world, people use guns and deception to achieve this.
Deception (spoofing) is pretty much out on the Internet. For a variety of technical reasons. Therefore, encryption = guns in the digital world. Arm yourself and you will likely keep the privacy you deserve. If they can't see what is being transmitted, it is of little value to them.
Right now it's just too easy. No guns (encryption) means no resistance.
5th: No *PERSON* shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any *PERSON* be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
I see references to persons and the accused not to citizens. So the protections within "the bill of rights" arguably applies to whomever we excercise governmental powers towards.6th: In *all* criminal prosecutions, the *ACCUSED* shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.
8th: Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.
Seems to me that the logistics of this would negate it being true. Can yuou imagine the facilities just to store the volume of data. Then just imagine how you would go about analyzing that much traffic. How many people would it take to do anything with it even to segregate out what you would want to follow up on. Just does not ring true to me at all.
I could see something like this on lines that pass data from certain countries and that pass through the US but that is already approved by congress. Anything more than that just does not seem feasible. Sounds like somebody wanting his 15 minutes of fame and now that he is ex-AT&T he thinks this will get it for him.
For several centuries, Islamic civilization hosted Jews and Christians without incident, allowing them to participate in the highest levels of society, while Christendom was engaged in Inquisitions. Extremist Islam is a recent interpretation of Islam: Wahhabism was reactionary response to what was widely seen as cultural as well as political colonialism and imperialism, and is very much connect to the history of European intervention particularly in the post 140 years or so.
Hear hear! Well said, my friend.
-kgj
-kgj
Enemies of democracy:
- Nazis/neo-Nazis/Nationalists
- Hackers
- Islamists
- Drug users
Who they're not looking for:
- Anti-racists
- Leftist activists
- Corrupt businessmen
- Multinational corporate whores
Interesting.
Anti-Globalism
Gigascope Project by AT&T Labs.
Disagreeing with me does not mean you get to mod me troll.
I would just like to thank you for this succinct elucidation of what's really going on in this country. We have to stand up help enlighten other people on why this is such a problem and why they need to care. It can be done but it's an uphill battle that must be fought in the near term or we will end up just like Germany in the 1930's and 40's. /Friended
We have four boxes with which to defend our freedom: the soap box, the ballot box, the jury box, and the cartridge box.
While I'm sure they would live to have that kind of storage (probably what you read). They don't need anything near that to record damn near everything every produced during all of human history. The number that I saw a few years ago (about 5) was 5 exabytes for everything. Now I'm sure that number is ever increasing at even exponential rates considering how much and how fast everyone with a computer can create new information but I doubt we've come anywhere close to 500 exabytes.
We have four boxes with which to defend our freedom: the soap box, the ballot box, the jury box, and the cartridge box.