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Innocent Or Not, the NSA Is Watching You
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Wired: "Under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world's communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails — parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital 'pocket litter.' It is, in some measure, the realization of the 'total information awareness' program created during the first term of the Bush administration — an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans' privacy."
It's time for the revolution. Kill the pigs in charge.
There are no innocent citizens in the modern police state.
Nobody's innocent anymore. There is too much information flowing about - we're all guilty of something. Even if you don't quite no what it is - it's not important. You're just guilty of something so it's important that somebody keep tags on you.
Just in case.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Privacy is evil, crypto is terrorism, stenography is child porn, and you are public enemy number 1.
The increase of backup capacity, and computing capacity makes the dream or nightmare of searching through the internet a reality.
Anybody being connected to anybody in a rather short chain of relations it's obvious that we are all at some level "persons of interest".
If you are a "bad guy" you are obviously "fair game", if you know the bad guy, you are reasonably suspect, if you know somebody who knows the bad guy, you might be needed to understand if you are not part of the support group of the bad guy.
Two level more of indirection and the whole humanity is in the dragnet.
No unfortunately there is not one unique "bad guy", so the probability of being more than N+2..N+3 of any bad guy is really low, even if you are a retired nun. (actually, in practice not such a good example).
So anybody can with some justification be "looked at", so it seems that the only way to alleviate the issue is to over broadcast everything, and hoping that the weighting algorithm finds you booring...
Guess it's too boring for me, I'll have to fish for friends in high places, ... so it's back to the "old regime" (as in before Louis Capet got his headache cured, actually not really fair for the guy, and the change where far from smooth, ... but somehow the end of privileges seemed a good idea, and now seems an idea whose time is past ....)
Sic transit gloria mundi...
What became of it? I mean, did it have any effect? Where is it now? Did anybody lose their job over this? Any elected officials lose their seats? So far the only ones that did were voted out. Bunch of hogwash! Most of the voters want this, and more.
In Soviet Amerika the fascist is YOU!
I love that the magazine cover says "Deep in the Utah desert." It isn't. It is literally in the middle of the city growth centers. I've been watching them build this since they broke ground. It is a mere 15 minute drive from my house and I live in suburbia. The center sits less than 1 mile off I-15 between Salt Lake City and Utah County. BYU is 30 minutes away from it. There is a water park 10 minutes up the road. They aren't hiding this thing at all. It is in plain sight. It sits up on the side of the hill across the Jordan river valley. And yes, it is freaking massive.
For those interested, here is a google map of the location they are building this. http://maps.google.com/maps?q=40.430485,-111.934547&num=1&t=h&z=14
At least I don't have to back up my data anymore. Restoring it might be a problem...
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
I fell so nice and fuzzy-warm and, and, yes LOVED to be so secure from the ravages of the those others that wish to do us harm.
Many of the same people who are most angered and most vocally oppose such blatant 1984 style mass surveillance are the same ones that consistently vote and rally for more and bigger government, and support the politicians who favor a bigger/more-powerful government.
Yet, they don't see a conflict. They don't seem to understand that when you make a government large and powerful enough to provide all these social programs, entitlements, and levels of regulation, this is what happens. Politicians, being the type of people that politicians typically are, will use every opportunity of increased government scope & power to increase their control over the citizens and reduce/eliminate citizen rights and protections.
You can have a government that provides a social "safety net" and major social services/entitlements, and that regulates everything down to kid's lemonade stands and have things like this domestic surveillance-data facility.
Or, you can decide to risk people having the ability to make bad choices and possibly failing and have freedom.
You cannot have both.
Choose.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
A young libertarian is brought into a command center....... As you can see, my young apprentice, your friends have failed. Now witness the listening power of this fully OPERATIONAL listening station!
Printed on the toilet paper in all of the restrooms.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
In these days of austerity - who approved the budget for this and prioritised it over building something more useful like a hospital ? Or is that classified information ?
Anyway: now that they have it - I propose that we give them something to put in it, how about we start mailing each other 1MB chunks from /dev/random as attachments named things like HowToMakeABomb and pgp encrypted ?
I've come across a frighteningly high number of individuals who have a "nothing to hide nothing to fear" mindset. They support things like the Patriot Act without even thinking about.
Very, very disturbing. I really hope they're the minority.
You will obey me while I lead you,
And eat the garbage that I feed you,
Until the day that we don't need you.
Don't call for help, no one will heed you.
Your mind is totally controlled,
It has been stuffed into our mold,
And you will Do As You Are Told,
Until the rights to you are sold.
- Frank Zappa
The US is building a vast system of paranoid security to protect... its vast security systems. Soon there will be nothing of much significance left but the military and its contractors. Then they might find out that they can't survive as a pure self-serving system. The shame is that they won't see until it's too late, stupid and arrogant as the military is (no matter which one), exercising their pompous and useless traditions, weaving flags and shooting in the air. Mankind should have known better since the first industrial war (WW1), but governments and systems have come and gone since then, the steel and cannon barons, however, have been staying in charge almost erverywhere...
Oh, the beautiful gloss of greality!
There are at least two sets of people in the world;
1. The "keep your hands off" people who want minimal regulations and want to rely on their own intelligence for survival.
2. The "you didn't tell me" people who will blame government for not properly regulating industry and all owing bad thing to happen. They are the one that say things like "It didn't say I couldn't use that cancer causing agricultural product so the company is a fault and I will sue the company and the regulators".
You seem to miss the big question; why is the agricultural product illegal? I just twigged to the idea that by agricultural product you may mean marijuana; if you meant that just say it. I do not agree with it being illegal and that is slowly changing. Just because a product is agricultural does not mean it is OK. A good example of that is the many food recalls due to salmonella contamination. Even vegetables are susceptible to this. Should we have no regulation on how our food is handled?
Ethics are not the only reason for laws; safety is also a major factor.
You can not please everyone and sometimes you can not please anyone.
The NRO (National Reconnaissance Office) an agency so far in the black the government did not admit it or any of its massive budget so much as existed until 1995 or so, has a massive campus on the main drag in Chantilly, VA and right there on the main gate and over the front door are big signs that say National Reconnaissance Office). Of course the forest of dish antennas on the roof should tell you something, but the fact is that the government really doesn't have play these black box spy games anymore. Because there's little anyone or any government can do about it, whatever it is. Often things are secret because they need to be secret. But often they're secret because that's just what the government does - labels things secret.
I am not condoning the what this project implies. Nor do I want to come across with a "nothing to hide, nothing to fear" mindset. If there was widespread action taken against the populace using data collected in a manner suggested by this facility, I have enough faith in the American people to at least take action then. Events of injustice will occur, much like the events already mentioned in previous posts. As disgusting as these are, they remain somewhat isolated events. Big business doesn't want you locked up in jail. They want you buying their products. Again, this does not make the Utah complex right by any means. Just that the doom and gloom found in reaction to articles like this is sometimes overblown.
OK, NSA. Which finger am I holding up?
Have gnu, will travel.
Surveillance of non-US Persons has never required a warrant, and never will. It has nothing to do with whether it's a group someone "hates" or "likes".
An intelligence service cannot be effective if its sources, methods, capabilities, and techniques are known to the adversary. Intelligence processes must be kept secret, even in an open society. This has been true for the history of our nation.
NSA is authorized to monitor foreign communications WITHIN THE US, and must be able to identify, discern, and target such communications within the sea of digital communications.
NSA lacks the authority to monitor American citizens without an individualized warrant. And the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 actually is more strict with respect to US Persons than previous law: a warrant is required to monitor the communications of a US Person anywhere on the globe. But what the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 also does is allow NSA to target and monitor FOREIGN communications within the US, without a warrant.
I know some people might be stunned to learn this, but the primary mission of the foreign intelligence agencies is FOREIGN intelligence. But what about "warrantless wiretapping", you ask?
In the immediate wake of 9/11, the administration claimed the the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) allowed them to target American citizens identified as having contact with the enemy and/or were active combatants. The current Attorney General also argues that the President has this intrinsic authority under Article II of the Constitution. This was the same justification used in the targeted killing of Anwar al-Awlaki.
Other examples are things like journalists embedded with military units having the communications allegedly monitored, which would happen under the guise of the Joint COMSEC Monitoring Activity. And then we have the court cases — all of which involved people or groups who were thought to be linked to terror groups, not just ordinary, everyday citizens.
Even the most egregious examples of "warrantless wiretapping" (as alleged in the leaks to the press, or documented in various court proceedings) in the wake of 9/11 targeted very specific people — and were justified by the Justice Department, secretly reported to Congress, and reauthorized every 45 days. And that program had long ended by the time the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 fixed the dismal state of foreign intelligence collection.
This excerpt (An 'Intel Gap': What We're Missing, Newsweek, Aug 6, 2007) sums up the issue:
Wow. That was my first thought too. I tell my son all the time that this is not the country I was born into. I was a child in the 1940s. We did have the most free country in the world then. Then again 100% of the problems of the United States and the world can be summed up in four words. The root cause of ALL the world's problems is... Too Damned Many People!
Since when is "public safety" the root password to the Constitution?
Why build a datacenter in a desert? (I know, pork...) the cooling bills will be much higher than if they built it in, say, Detroit, or some other northern city...
"Yeah. I didn't bother posting anonymously, because I doubt it makes a difference at this point."
We don't have much time before the internet could just be used as a tool for a widespread crackdown. As Bucky Fuller said, whether it will be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end.
As I suggest here, the most viable strategy at this point is probably just communicating in the clear about making this a better world for everyone with an intent to help these various agencies eavesdropping to transcend to a new paradigm of abundance thinking: ..."
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-dealing-with-social-hurricanes.html
"This approximately 60 page document is a ramble about ways to ensure the CIA (as well as other big organizations) remains (or becomes) accountable to human needs and the needs of healthy, prosperous, joyful, secure, educated communities. The primarily suggestion is to encourage a paradigm shift away from scarcity thinking & competition thinking towards abundance thinking & cooperation thinking within the CIA and other organizations. I suggest that shift could be encouraged in part by providing publicly accessible free "intelligence" tools and other publicly accessible free information that all people (including in the CIA and elsewhere) can, if they want, use to better connect the dots about global issues and see those issues from multiple perspectives, to provide a better context for providing broad policy advice. It links that effort to bigger efforts to transform our global society into a place that works well for (almost) everyone that millions of people are engaged in. A central Haudenosaunee story-related theme is the transformation of Tadodaho through the efforts of the Peacemaker from someone who was evil and hurtful to someone who was good and helpful.
To summarize why that is the case, consider, from this other essay I wrote: ...
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing.
There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all."
So, until the NSA transcends to this new abudance-oriented paradigm, this new Utah data center is just $2 billion dollars worth of irony.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Your statement is true only if you exchange keys offline. Does anyone still do that? For key exchange we mostly use public key cryptography, which is vulnerable to several different sorts of attacks (e.g. Shor's Alg. on a QC, non-random seeding, version-specific implementation flaws). If the key exchange is insecure, it matters not how many bits are in the key. The article's discussion of cryptography was partly true and partly disinformation being fed to the reporters.
I am conflicted in thought about this. My initial reaction is outrage. My second thought after reading the article is that I have done some nefarious things over the tubes. My third thought is that I dont think anybody really cares that I torrented some Justified episodes and streamed the first season of Game of Thrones. My fourth thought is that my IP is completly tied to the same IP I used in the late 90's when I discovered the nefarious side of the internet as a teenager. I sort of 'came to age' as the internet went from a mostly text environment to an environment where pictures and applications became viable. Video shortly after, and the bandwith to enable p2p on a massive scale. My fifth thought is about what is discussed in data analysis in the article. I think the NSA is reacting to the relatively recent abilities to utilize online data made mainstream by the likes of Google, then Facebook, then Twitter. The thing that scares me most is not the gov'ment keeping up to date with technology, but the lack of people fighting the use of technology by the gov'ment to exlude siezure from tech stuff. I wrote this post on a HP mini that had a failed hard drive, installed a linux distro on a 500 GB usb HD, and have been running it for about 6 Mo.s. I tried xubuntu, mint, debian, and ubuntu. Currently I'm xubuntu, and working fine. I can't take my netbook on a plane, however, because I have a external USB HD taped into the port so it won't fall out, and a HD case taped to the back of the screen so it won't fall off the case. I'm pretty sure if I tried to fly with that, it would be ID'd as something nefarious, examined, and trying to explain it to a TSA guy would get me nowhere. So I don't even try. I feel upset that I have lost so much control over my personal ability to know what I am doing. Skoal Bubbu Watson.
Koalas. They're telepathic. Plus, they control the weather. -Margaret
Well, lets fill their data center up.
If everyone uses their free allocated bandwidth to send 1000000000000 billion random bytes to the ISP, or ;yourself;, then they have to log those contents.
So...
Send 1 byte per TCP packet, 1 per 48 bytes.
Send it to .... out your adsl to the NSA gateway.
So even if your ISP sees you sent 100MEG, its 4800MEG wasted space on NSA.
And if its 100% pure random, ie /dev/random and xor it with some other random data, just mix 10 algos together.
Now X that by 100 m screen savers, and watch their datacenter go empty, or they have to filter out pure random crap.
We must look the evil monster in the eye, and say, Fuck you mother fucker, you might have the dollars and cia behind you, but we have 100x more humans that can go crazy wild on you.
There IS NO ENEMY, other than the govt itself.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
I so with McCain hadn't beaten Obama in the last election. I'm sure he would have stopped a project like this!
"Other examples are things like journalists embedded with military units having the communications allegedly monitored, which would happen under the guise of the Joint COMSEC Monitoring Activity."
Given that is is widely reported that US prisoners make 21% of all office furniture and 36% of all domestic appliance at labour rates between $0.5 and $1.25 per hour, I'd say that big business had a vested interest in getting people locked up. I'd also say that's an "event of injustice" which is widespread against the populace, given the American propensity for jailing such a large proportion of its citizens. I see no sign of the American people taking action, except to elect the politicians who promise to deliver more of it.
So, why should this be any different?
So what is the alternative? A privatized system will only increase the ruthless efficiency by which others can mine your life for personal gain, with no "checks and balances" at all.
Just why do you think "privatization" is always the preferred answer given by the GOP establishment. They want not only to govern you. They want to own you as well.
Just be thankful that democrats are so disorganized. In MIchigan the GOP now rules by fiat and where they have dispensed even with the charade of counting votes.
You're not making a logical argument. There has to be some legitimate scope for law enforcement. Saying that a distinction is specious does not make it so. Laws say that criminals can be locked up. If we assume that the distinction between ordinary citizens and criminals is specious then this seems like a scary thing. But the U.S. legal system actually works very hard to make that distinction as clear as possible. Obviously there are a lot of criminals running free and many innocent people who are falsely convicted, but that does not indicate that the entire effort to enforce laws is ill-conceived. Most of us would accept that, while it's not easy to distinguish between ordinary citizens and terrorists, a non-specious distinction exists.
Yes America has enemies. Bin Laden repeatedly called for the destruction of America and instructed his associates to kill as many Americans as possible. That seems like pretty much the definition of enemy. Yes, security agencies amass secret information, but how else can efforts to stop terrorists be conducted. If one of Bin Laden's minions contacts the CIA to warn them about a terrorist attack, is it not the CIA's obligation to keep the informant's identity secret? All large organization have moles and weak points, the identity of intelligence assets and information about the nature of other collection sources are the key resource in intelligence. Information has to be cordoned off. Intelligence is all about secrets. Given the nature of the game, I think that our oversight of U.S. intelligence agencies is pretty good.
Of course there's potential for abuse. Look at N. Korea, or China, or Iran, or Russia. In those places people have no real rights or freedom. The history of the formation of U.S. intelligence agencies though is largely reactive. That is, our capabilities have primarily grown up to defend against incoming threats. We do have accountability, oversight, and, in the long run, transparency. In the countries mentioned above there is not even a pretense of such controls. One of the main reasons our intelligence agencies are so invested in information gathering is that they actually do need to justify themselves and, in cases of domestic action, obtain warrants and present evidence in court. In countries where you can pick people up and interrogate them on vague suspicions, gathering information is less of a problem.
I would say that the more people actually understand about how intelligence functions, the less fearful they are about vague conspiracies. Go read books by ex-personnel. Read about historical actions where the secret documents are now public. Read about operations that have come to light due to public inquiries. Phobias of snakes are most common among people who live in areas where there are no snakes. The more you understand something, the less likely you are to form irrational fears about it. I'm saying ground your opinions in real info instead of YouTube conspiracy videos and Hollywood thrillers (CIA+War on Drugs+FBI= ???).
We should assume that, if given the opportunity, people with power will probably abuse it. But we should use that assumption as a basis for rationally designing institutions that minimize such opportunities. The worst regimes on Earth actually emerge from conspiracism. They believe that there are dark malignant forces conspiring to destroy them and then justify doing horrible things in self defense and thus themselves become the monsters they feared. The Germans who committed the holocaust genuinely believed that there was a Jewish conspiracy that was destroying Germany. In this sense the thing to fear is fear itself.