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Whistleblower: NSA Has All of Your Email
mspohr writes with this excerpt from Democracy Now!: "National Security Agency whistleblower William Binney reveals he believes domestic surveillance has become more expansive under President Obama than President George W. Bush. He estimates the NSA has assembled 20 trillion 'transactions' — phone calls, emails and other forms of data — from Americans. This likely includes copies of almost all of the emails sent and received from most people living in the United States. Binney talks about Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act and challenges NSA Director Keith Alexander's assertion that the NSA is not intercepting information about U.S. citizens." The parts about National Security Letters in particular are chilling, even though the issue is not new.
if someone is - that would be shocking.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
I'm mostly not a big fan of Ron Paul, but I would love to put him in charge of eliminating this kind of crap.
What's wrong with you, huh? Why do you hate FREEDUMB?? Binney is obviously giving away National Security secrets to the terr'rists, and should be Gitmo'd right away. Didn't he read the name of the Act? It's the USA PATRIOT Act. If he hates the US America so much, maybe he should move back to Sharia Kenya, or wherever all these freedom-haters come from.
Poe's Law is a fickle mistress =/
... they got all the spam as well.
This is a problem whose solution has been known and available for over two decades, yet deployment is stagnant.
Palm trees and 8
Then they should have all those missing White House emails. ...oh, wait...
Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.
has 18 acres of mainframe computers underground. You're talking to your wife on the phone and you use the word "bomb", "president", "Allah", any of a hundred keywords, the computer recognizes it, automatically records it, red-flags it for analysis. That was 20 years ago.
Save the taxpayers' money.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
send an email between two accounts only you use with fake plans for a terrorist attack...if you get arrested then we'll know they were reading it. (tell somebody you're going to do it just in case you disappear in the night).
Still sometimes I think the government puts out these rumors on purpose to make everyone scared and think they are more powerful than they really are. I mean if the government "knows all" they when did Sept. 11th happen? Why do Mexican drug cartels ship billions of dollars of Cocaine across the border every year? I think they float these rumors on purpose to keep us scared.
I'm emailing all my friends goatse pictures. Just imagine the face on the clueless NSA agent when he sees THAT!
Protest like they did in Canada. Send the Ministers and your government representatives including the White House everything. For days they CCed them on every email, posted what they are doing to their members twitter accounts. After several days of having the Parliamentary mail and web servers taken to their knees the bill they were trying to introduce was 'sent to committee' (killed). People can make a difference
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
They're just doing backups for us, that's all...
$#!^ happens, but why does it always have to happen to me???
While this is certainly rather awesome, as a non-US citizen I think they should be open about it. Even if everyone else already assumed that they monitored everything they possibly could. Also, how did they ever think they where going to keep a domestic operation of that scale secret?
Besides, how could they monitor foreign computer/internet-based espionage and other such things without actually monitoring the entire domestic network? If they where more open about this they could perhaps release information about botnet activity or similar useful data.
Emotions! In your brain!
Geeks created the internet, starting with Alpha Geek Vinton Cerf back in the 60's. But since then it has been taken over by the politicians, big business, and big government.
Is there any chance for geeks to take it back, or is it too late, forever?
Can we design our way around these things? Create the next generations of software to avoid these attacks, and censorships, and so on?
..That they're building that huge Federal data center in Colorado just to store party photos from the GSA conferences or the Secret Service whore-a-thons, did you?
That's why I've always kept my plans to overthrow the government using my backdoors into the NSA's and White House's computer systems completely off the grid...
Oops!
Hi boys! :)
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Might as well add some scripting to the email client to add cc:jerkoff@nsa.gov automatic like.
Is there a script that I could reroute all my spam to them as well? If they want the goods on me, they gotta support some sponsors too.
When it's all done and the investigators know me inside and out and see what I see and read what I read, I'll hire them to work in my luthiery. Cause if they study me that closely they'll be able to build instruments the way I DAMN WANT IT DONE. Could there be any more perfect employees? They could spy/intimidate my competitors! Patent licensing fees would melt away like vapor. Soon I could have a factory of super spy ninja luthiers. I could branch into percussion and pipe organs and eventually Pro sound. I would absorb companies like Fender and Gibson like a fat lady sitting on a cupcake. Then would come weapons research and government contracts. International intrigue. I would slay Cort/ Cor-tek . Then the Chinese instruments will fall and my research will branch into medicine and IT. Man will interface with guitars for all his needs and there will be tube amps in every living room. Rock on Garth.
I only see upsides to this story so far...
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
All your email are belong to us.
Seriously are they saving all that crap?
Because of the disc's failure I've lost a lot of my data (yes, I know, I should have made backups) including a lot of e-mail. Do you guys think that I can ask NSA to send me my stuff which they intercepted? That would be really helpful right now... They can even keep the copies, I just want my data back...
Consider the criticism on government for having failed to head off 9/11. Next consider the fact that the younger government employees will want to operate it in a 21st century way. Then, I think the logical extrapolation is to expect NSA to introduce the requirement that they can track communications retroactively.
Suppose some person X becomes suspicious. Then there will be an instant demand to examine all X's communications in recent years, together with those of X's contacts, and their contacts, N levels deep. NSA can't know in advance who X is, so they only way to meet that requirement is to intercept and archive everyone's communications all the time.
Consider the alternative. If they don't archive that stuff, and they could have, and if another 9/11 occurs, then the criticism will be wilting. They will be blamed for not doing everything possible to prevent it, They must do it as a matter of political self defense.
I posted something similar once before. Another slashdotter thought I was writing science fiction. I don't think so. I calculate that it could be done for 300 million Americans with only a dozen or so exabytes. Heck, pull out your Visa card and order an exabyte server from Oracle today. It is hardly beyond the capability of NSA.
I also believe that we privacy advocates also have to get our heads into the 21st century. It is time to shift focus from restricting government gathering of information to restricting government use of information already in their possession.
Does anyone send anything sensitive in email that isn't strongly encrypted? Maybe terrorists are that dumb.
So if those of us who live outside the U.S. use an American service - any American service - like Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, Windows Messenger or perhaps mobile kit like an iPhone, are our messages thrown into the NSA Ueber-Surveillance-Database as well? If this is the case, the U.S. is breaking dozens and dozens of national/regional laws. Let me get this straight... You advertise a "free", supposedly "reliable" and also supposedly "private" service like say Gmail, and when I use it to communicate with my friends, acquaintances or business clients, all of my confidential messages get intercepted and funnelled into some huge NSA datacenter in Utah, or wherever it is that these spooks keep their pile of intercept-data. How can this be legal under any definition of any law? If my emails include confidential business documents - like confidential business strategy documents lets say - then "intercepting" and "evaluating" these messages is nothing short of "illicit industrial espionage". That's a serious crime that carries a prison-sentence in many countries. ------- More brave people need to come forward with what they know about clandestine "surveillance centers" being built by various governments, because if they don't, there will be no public outcry, and all these "regional efforts" will eventually be combined into one huge, powerful, global "surveillance grid" that nobody can escape from anymore.----- There is also International Law to consider. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, quoted in my signature, makes it very clear that it is illegal to arbitrarily invade someone's privacy. So these large-scale efforts to gather as many emails or phone conversations as possible, are actually a super-violation not just of regional or country laws, but of human rights treaties most countries signed years ago, and with that, a serious and eggregious violation of internation law. ----- Somebody needs to put a stop to all this nonsense. Not only do these snooping systems not contribute to a safer world in any serious capactiy, but they also threaten to create a future where everyone is watching by someone or some system in everything they do. What precisely are we supposed to tell future generations about this, for example? Are we supposed to tell them "We are sorry, but you will have to grow up and live in a world where everything you do is being watched and evaluated. We could have protested against this stuff when it first appeared on the world scene, but we were daft enough not to do that. Again, sorry for having to live in a f_cked future! Have a nice life..."
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
At what point will psychiatrists have to stop classifying people as paranoid simply because they believe the government is tracking them?
Why can't you give me someone I can vote for? I won't pull the lever for Batshit Crazy Reactionary (e.g. Palin, Santorum) or for Big Business Uber Alles (Romney) or for Naive Solutions to Real Problems (Paul), but I'm really disappointed in Obama.
Give me a sane candidate, please.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
They want to know who to target when the inevitable national revolution breaks out.
they're being given to us instead...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
1. set up several email accounts
2.email goats.cx and tubgirl pics with keywords like "Da Bomb" & "explosive"
3.make the government spys so disgusted with their jobs that they quit
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Isn't most communication between mail servers encrypted these days? If so, there's no way NSA could get copies of most emails through snooping on the routers. Does this mean that Google, Microsoft, Yahoo et al are routinely transferring all of their users' email to the NSA in bulk?
The EU has a law from (2005-ish?) that requires all email headers for inbound/outbound users located in the EU be sent to EU-based law enforcement. I'd be shocked if the NSA didn't get at least this much data. I worked a project for an extremely large USA-based ISP that had clients overseas and some perl was written to grab all the headers and transmit them to servers in Europe. I didn't see the code, but I can't imagine any useful way to differentiate between EU and USA email senders or receivers. It is just easier to send them all.
If the NSA didn't get a feed from this - and I don't think they did - they probably have access to the EU database.
I doubt they can store all the content inside emails for much time and since more and more people are using gpg (2048 and larger keys) to encrypt their messages, that is less useful for the NSA.
The use of SMTPS between servers probably puts a wrinkle in the NSA listening too, provided both ends are configured to support it. Dropping back to non-SSL encrypted email is still all too common.
The world-wide amount of email traffic is extremely high and storing it is tough enough for many ISPs. OTOH, storing selected messages is not that hard, provided your selection criteria is reasonably limited.
Normally, I'd add links to the EU law that requires the email headers be provided, but the last time I looked, it was non-trivial to fine. I know that we wouldn't have deployed those 4 servers and setup DMZ jump boxes to stream the data to other servers in our EU data centers without a good reason. I did find this from 2009 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/5105519/Internet-records-to-be-stored-for-a-year.html
Part 1 seems readily available but how can we load parts 2, 3, and 4? The links seem to go only to part 1 again.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Who is behind all of this? Why, our 'masters' the Jews... the 'unseen hand' behind our governments, the scum who send OUR people to fight THEIR wars for them, the scum who run the international banks, who issue money from nothing, lend it to us, and then expect us to pay it back with REAL labour and REAL goods and assets. The scum who run almost the entire media, and decide what you see and hear about the world around you. Or at least they did - until the internet came along...
Hence their desire to snoop into our private lives in case we 'dissent' from their political doctrines...
What do you know about Judaism? Why are Jews allowed to sexually torture their own babies? What is shechitah? What is kapparot? These people are sick, just look at what they get off on.
Paranoid conspiracy nuts have another blog.
I'm not sure what utopia you people seem to think we live in, but in my reality, there's terrorists, criminals and other unsavory individuals who would be happy to end your life tomorrow if it meant an advancement of their agenda.
I, for one, am glad that there are people looking out for these sorts of things. Until I see some actual evidence, beyond the rantings of paranoid nutters, of these people abusing this information in some way I have no problems with any of this.
Are they going to open it up as a cloud service so we can get our lost emails and data when our hard drives crashed?
Let's be clear that this guy doesn't have access to any secret information. He's analyzing publicly available information and coming up with his own conclusions about the probable extent of the surveillance. He may well be right, but the summary makes it sound like he's the new Bradley Manning. Quoting:
Vote for a third party only if you see it as helping that third party toward a particular objective. Otherwise, campaign for a third party (promote it, whatever), but vote for the lesser of the two big evils. Because third parties are not going to win anytime soon, and if you vote for the third party, you take a vote away from the lesser evil, which makes the greater evil more likely to win.
It would be great if voting for a third party meant they could win. And it would be great if saying nobody who works hard should go bankrupt made it happen. Sadly, life doesn't work that way, and we have to make strategic choices.
Sometimes you partner with a lesser evil to defeat a greater one, or partner with a greater good even though it costs you the ability to make a lesser good manifest.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
The following is a formal FOIA request.
My current employer sent me an email a few years ago detailing the terms of my employment. This would have been about two weeks before my hire date.
I've lost the email, and frankly get along well with the guy so it doesn't matter all that much.
Since you've spent my money to get all this stuff on some big honkin' server farm (geez, I'd sure like a new HDD; I damned sure paid for a few for you!), I'd like you to retrieve a copy of it.
Also, can you please put all my stuff on this "cloud" thingy?
Just give me access to email sent to or from me; also, please all the phone calls etc.
Since you've got security procedures in place to keep bad guys from seeing my stuff, this will be easy, too.
The above is sufficient for you to locate the email.
Please send it and my id/pw for access to the data I've already paid you to collect to my current work or home email address, which you already have.
Failure to comply with this FOIA request in a timely manner will be grounds for legal action.
Thank you
(you know who I am)
The trouble — the fact that no one making these claims actually knows what capabilities may or may not exist — is that many jump to the conclusion that "technically possible" == "must be doing".
In order to fulfill the mission of performing foreign signals intelligence, NSA MUST be able to discern, identify, and target communications of non-US Persons within the United States.
Examining the metadata — the "envelope" — of communications, such as source and destination IPs, email addresses, DNS names, and similar, is allowable without a warrant, and has long been understood to be fair game. The content of the communications of US Persons anywhere on the globe is off limits without a properly adjudicated warrant. The only reason that the "warrantless wiretapping" controversy even existed was because there was a rush to do everything possible to prevent another domestic attack after 9/11. The legislative landscape caught up with reality with the FISA Amendments Act of 2008.
This excerpt (An 'Intel Gap': What We're Missing, Newsweek, Aug 6, 2007) sums up the issue:
So we got the stopgap Protect America Act of 2007, and the ultimate changes in the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, along with the August 2008 FISC ruling.
A lot of things were done immediately after 9/11 which were justified — whether rightly or not — by the AUMF. It took several years for the law to catch up to the urgency of what was happening aft
The president has the power to veto any law congress has passed to limit his ability to deal with prisoners in Guantanamo. And he doesn't need congress' approval to move the 150+ detainees from Guantanamo to another facility - say Bagram, something he has already done to circumvent habeas - or give them due process or just *let them go*. The excuse, apparently, is that congress wont authorise special funds to deal with the prison and prisoners in the exact manner the president would like. But that is a far ways from keeping him from closing the camp. He could do so today.
46 & 2
I don't think much of the guy - but I don't think that when he literally said it that he literally meant it.
The assertion wasn't whether McCain meant what he said while campaigning but whether, once elected, he would actually do it like Obama said he would move the detainees out of Gitmo.
And if you don't think McCain literally meant we might have troops deployed in Iraq for 100 years then maybe you didn't understand that he was coming from the perspective of someone who knows how long we have had troops in Japan post-WW2.
Where did they get the computational power to recognize voice on phone in real time, for all phone calls – even today, not just twenty years ago?
http://www.research.ibm.com/hlt/html/body_history.html
thats where they got it
If it can be done, then someone will do it. If not the Republicans, then the Democrats. If neither, then the Russians, Chinese, Israelis, Brazilians, Germans, Iranians, or Japanese. The point is that when opportunity knocks, someone will answer. Usually, that someone will then have the advantage. Case in point, we got the nuke first, and we used it. As soon as someone else had it, we started talking about nuclear disarmament. There you go.
On good thing about the NSA collecting all the emails, phone calls, SMS, etc -- the best place to hide is in the largest crowd.
I suspect The Hard Drive Shortage(tm) of a few seasons ago wasn't due to weather at the factories. That was just a cover story. They probably all went to the NSA, so don’t think we'll be able to ddos them with attachments ;)
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
Palantir.
Are we still really naive enough to believe anything that we do an the internet is private in any way unless precautions are take to encypt?
The naivete implicit in this being a story worth discussing is amazing.
They must be a hit at Fort Meade.
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
Nature doesn't make things invisible, it evolves camouflage - extra data points to confuse. People should tell more lies via email. Oh, wait..
Gently reply
Something that can handle trillions of emails surely would make quick, efficient work of a mere million. How do they summarize, rank and present the search results?
Is there a whitepaper or a PDF? Or can I just download the source?
Is there a tour of the computer room? A youtube link? A picture of it from space? Does the computer have a name? How many acres does it cover? What OS does it run? How does it manage the disk? How about fault tolerance? Backup?
This part of your comment amazed me: "It is possible that the NSA has some proof that P=NP.."
I'm not up on my crypto-game these days (i'm in entrepreneur mode not scientist mode), but that's the right way to think...however, with actual code-breaking, there is ALWAYS a situation and context for the communication to be decoded that puts a 'spin' on the 'universe' of the message
My dad was a cryptographer in the US Navy during the 70s. He taught me cryptography from a wireline, communications engineer perspective. In other words, based on the Shannon-Weaver model: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon%E2%80%93Weaver_model
I LOVE the P=NP problem but its weird/fascinating that the state of the art in crypto is talking about P=NP as a matter of course on slashdot...
Thank you Dave Raggett
I accidentally deleted a bunch of email I really needed; I'm glad there's a backup.
What if you want to sue NSA based on what Binney is saying. What makes it reasonable to believe Binney's claim of a continuation and expansion of the terrorist surveillance program? There are probably a few ways to analyze this, but here's one line of questioning that looks only at the reasonableness angle: Hoovering up "trillions" of transactions has to be feasible technology-wise and budget-wise, right? NSA probably spends a chunk of its resources and budget analyzing the transactions because throwing the stuff away like unread junkmail makes no sense. Who would care if Binney's claim amounts to "NSA fondles Americans' emails and then throws them away". So is it reasonable to believe that NSA has the tech and budget capacity to do what Binney claims, while at the same time, they're supposed to be collecting foreign intelligence in support of the US military in Afghanistan, Iraq and across the world, and also the State Department, the DNI, etc.? It doesn't seem reasonable that the NSA would collect nothing other than Binneys' "Trillions" of American "transactions". That's because the information gathered probably won't do much of a job helping track domestic threats AND helping answer foreign intelligence questions such as: when is the taliban is going to attack a US military post in Afghanistan, or when and how is Kim Jong Un is going to act like a douche. So NSA probably has to split its attention to do the domestic and foreign collection. Also, NSA probably can't get away with shortchanging the parts of the government that rely on the foreign information. Judging by the scale of global US military and foreign affairs work, gathering foreign intelligence information is probably not a small job--lots of languages and lots of places. So NSA is probably using a lot of resources and money for foreign intelligence military, because otherwise it would really tick off the military, the DNI, the State Department, and also the Congressional committees that need foreign intelligence. So why is it reasonable to think that NSA has the capacity to do what Binney claims? Is it so cheap and easy to get and analyze Binney's American "transactions" that NSA hardly needs to use any effort? Maybe this is his argument, because if this is such a shameful or illegal effort, there's a chance that it wouldn't attract a lot of scrutiny. But otherwise, it's probably a substantial effort that requires significant money, time and people to run, and that means if Congress doesn't already know about it, they've caught wind of it. In that case, why isn't Congress making a big public effort to investigate claims by Binney and others? Even if Congress can't prove the thing is illegal, they money alone would probably lead some members of Congress to ask questions about a potentially embarrassing, illegal or wasteful program. Senators and congressmen doesn't usually get reelected because of how nice they are to the federal government. Senators and congressmen have an interest in showing the public that their oversight protects citizens' rights, and protects taxpayer dollars by doing something about illegal and wasteful government efforts. Certainly Senators Wyden has expressed concerns (http://www.wyden.senate.gov/news/press-releases/wyden-and-udall-call-for-informed-debate-of-domestic-surveillance-law) but so far it seems like more smoke than fire. Also, this is a national election year. Those who want a different President probably aren't interested in protecting the incumbent from a budget or civil liberties scandal. There are a lot of incentives for a lot of legislators to take a public oversight interest in a valid claim, and at least some of them would probably welcome whistleblowers. So isn't it odd that not much is happening? What about Binney himself? His credibility would certainly be made an issue in any lawsuit. Why should he be believed? He retired 11 years ago in 2001 according to the www.democracynow.org article. But he's making claims about a secret program that he hasn't had access to since 2001. Th
The problem is that the GOP has become quite intrusive, and Obama had to move to the right on the issue so as not to be called a weak traitor. It used to be that the GOP was the party of civil liberties (heck, Bush campaigned against Clinton's "secret evidence" laws), but under Bush it all fell apart post-9/11.
Today the Republicans practice a shell of their civil liberties campaign; Ashcroft made sure that the mandatory background checks to buy guns were shredded (to protect the privacy of gun-owners), but insisted on collecting every other form of data. Obama is just following along, since he doesn't want to be blamed if a terrorist attack happens on his watch.
The only thing that would shake things up would be if Romney decides to campaign on actual civil liberties (and not this phony "war on Christmas" or "war on Christians" crap). Obama has boxed himself in, let's see if Romney uses the opening and campaigns for an end to warrantless espionage.
This pro-Obama enthusiast, who skillfully distorts the truth, and uses press releases and official dodges adroitly, smells like a sock puppet. I don't care which candidate the poster is currently supporting, the METHOD smells like sock puppet.
This is why people should maintain their own mail servers (for private communication between family members) and use encrypted mail for anything else that's even remotely sensitive in nature.
What happened to encrypted e-mail anyway? It seemed to be on the rise until about 5 years ago, with facilities for easing its use becoming more prevalent. But lately it's like nobody cares about e-mail privacy anymore and some of those resources are now gone (e.g. thawte's free certificates).
Don't like it?
Fuck all yall, complain to your congress varmint. Mine is one of the few who has been voting against this shit.
Paul had the most conservative voting record of any member of Congress from 1937 to 2002.
Want to go back to the 1880s, Ron Paul is your man.
Ru-Paul is against the US Membership in the UN, and for Free trade; as opposed to Fair Trade.
If you really want to fuck the economy over, keep advocating Ru-Paul; it will be the 1880+ the Great Depression.
This article is about an example of an organization that can collect, index, and try to make sense of 20 trillion transactions from around the globe, but they not the only one (Google is another example). At some point, quantitative differences become qualitative differences. As our society deals in all sorts of abundances, we are moving into mostly uncharted waters (even as some people like James P. Hogan in "Voyage from Yesteryear" tried to paint us a possible picture of the difference between scarcity thinking and abundance thinking). We need to think about what that "societal phase change" means (to use JP Hogan's phrasing). But very few people are doing that, and the discussion to this article is just one more example of missing the forest for the trees. Whether or not encryption makes sense in any context is completely tangential to this much deeper and broader issue of abundance vs. scarcity thinking.
See also my essays on this: ... 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."
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
Or:
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."
Or:
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/-The-need-for-FOSS-intelligence-tools-for-sens
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
This is correct. Very few companies control all news. Thinking otherwise is simply ignorance.
The NSA now has the world largest collection of Nigerian, Hong Kong, XXX email collection ever !!!
Why wasn't this discussed in the House of Representatives and put to a vote?
As long as they are collecting my data, can I use them as an online backup service? If my hard drive goes up in smoke, will they restore my emails? As a taxpayer, I want access to this government resource that I paid for.
Every bit of data gets multiplied at least X3, and not just duplicated but also encrypted 3 times over. :^)
In addition to the valid points you raise, there's also the problem that the NSA has had, since about 1996, the ability to crack public key cryptography via quantum computation. The evidence is not public, and I'm sure the NSA will continue to obfuscate for decades to come, but this skeptical author is now completely convinced that Five Eyes (AU CA NZ US UK) got production QC capability circa 1996. This author knows the technical and scientific details of how this was done, the implementation approach, and quite a bit about how the system works. It was done by first generating a topological quantum neural network (see my previous posts), then training the NN to implement Shor's algorithm. Frankly, the crypto-cracking Shor's algorithm system was a bit of a hack and, once understood, is not really very interesting. The juicy bits are the more recent use of this TQNN, via AQC, for other AI-related applications. This author, who is a security professional and software engineer, got hold of this info through a combination of fortuitous leaks and years of painstaking research, starting with a solid background in quantum Physics. Given how many times I've repeated this information on Slashdot, I'm a bit surprised no one has yet asked any smart questions.
Encrypt as much as possible.
Use HTTPS Everywhere.
Have your mail use opportunistic SSL.
Make privacy the norm.
The government knows it has foreign moles, but continues to concentrate information where other powers can access it.
When you know that you've been infiltrated, you should stop concentrating information.
Everything should be on a need to know basis.
It's not just about liberty, it's about good game theory.
Idiot Obama voters.
End of story.
Manning is no more than a criminal, who knew the risks when he signed on the dotted line when he got his clearance.
I'm still sad that his boss who knew he had the iPod hooked up to classified computers isn't in jail with him for security violations as well.
If he only released evidence for wrong doings he would have a moral ground to stand on, but instead he released everything he could download.
n/t
the Jane Mayer article in the New York about the Thomas Drake case lays out the history. Binney and his crew were working on inventing the ThinThread program back in the late 1990s. He is not some anonymous talking head, he was one of their expert people actively involved in development. ThinThread got cancelled, but a bunch of stuff from it went into production. minus any sort of privacy controls that he and his associates had designed into the program.
That is when Binney, Loomis, Weibe, and a congressperson's assistant named Roark, along with NSA senior official Thomas Drake, submitted the paperwork to have the Inspector General of the Department of Defense look into what NSA was doing in the early 2000s - and the result it wasn't pretty. Congress lambasted the NSA for wasting money on boondoggles that were not apparently accomplishing the NSA's stated goals of stopping terrorists. There is also a huge question of the relationship between the top NSA people and the companies that were profiting hugely off of the NSAs programs, like Trailblazer and Turbulence.
He 'hasnt been in the agency in 11 years'. But look at why he and his colleagues left. They threw their careers at NSA away, along with the nice pensions and potential gold mines of potential contracting employment, because they thought their managers were committing illegal activities against the American people.
the NSA had already stored communications of the hijackers and al-qaeda before 9/11.
The CIA had as well.
There were two FBI agents working inside the CIA's Bin Ladin group who tried to tell FBI headquarters that al-Hazmi and al-Midhar were headed to the US with visas. The CIA told them not to talk to the FBI headquarters.
This is all documented, "The Shadow Factory" by James Bamford, who has studied the NSA for 30+ years.
It had nothing to do with 'whether they had the data'. They had the data. They didn't communicate it to each other. And nobody knows why, because its all still secret. It was only in 2011 that we learned the name of the CIA agent who blocked the FBI agents from passing the information along.
in the latter 20th century. Without the NSA, the corporation named Cray Supercomputer would have literally gone bankrupt. Th development of IBMs supercomputers was to support the NSA.
The NSA had its own chip fab. The NSA hires the best and brightest directly out of the finest schools to work in secret forever.
These things are all documented in James Bamford's books (and other authors too).
If someone at the NSA is actually *reading* all the emails between me and my wife, I hope their office is right by a bathroom.
this means they have the largest collection of viagra spam emails in existence. I am guessing they collect this information for the secret service
when I was at a startup, we hired a guy who used to work at the NSA. He would not answer any questions about it, and when I tried to get him to talk about it, he wouldn't. The conversation turned to other stuff, and when we were about to close it, he said "They know." I asked "What could they know?" He said, "They know." and that was the end of it. It was an odd feeling, but I've never made a phone call or sent an email since then without thinking about what the message might mean in some oddball filter.
Stop being assholes. If you abuse the public trust and break our laws we will encrypt everything by default and you will have to work your asses off to get shit.
Constitution
November Charlie
The premise is ridiculous. Everybody around here seems to want to believe that the government is much more interested in what they are doing than they could conceivably be.
that have to read through all my Star Wars android sexy fanfiction. Do you think it's a coincidence R2D2 and Jawas are roughly the same height? Though my Ivanova/Troi stuff is much better, I think. So Mr. NSA reader #18424293, I apologize for that whole Tuskan Raider/mini-pod racer scene; it was uncalled for.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
So, what you're claiming is that ALL the SMTP traffic in the US is captured during it's path to it's target, sent to some massive data center, and recorded?
So every ISP in the US has equipment in it's data centers to do the filtering and send the data to this data center? Really?
Have you seen what a graphic representation of the routing table for the whole internet looks like?
Pull the other one.
stop Chinese hackers from exfiltrating corporate and government data? If the NSA is monitoring all the Internet traffic they should easily be able to identify data being sucked out and sent to China (probably through a few third party countries). I've said this before...it is against US law to "spy" on US citizens in the US. My bet is the NSA is monitoring all the emails/traffic and if a piece of data meets certain criteria thresholds (e.g. terrorist conversations and the parties are not US citizens, etc.) they can act on it, if not it get forwarded to the bit bucket.
So, could people now start emailing goatse attachments around just to keep the guys at the NSA from opening their email...?
In this country we've got few making decisions for many. I'd rather the NSA and similar groups just go out of business.
They've got our emails for now, but in the future they'll have our thoughts (maybe even already!) . Our thoughts could be recorded and being processed in a database as we speak. More on thought recording technology.
This isn't Obama, it's Congress!
Afghanistan is the ultimate test bed for military weapons systems and (much more importantly) surveillance systems - which are already being rolled out in the US under the Orwellian justification of Security. We're not there for justice nor even revenge; just R&D.
If I was a criminal who had something important to hide, I would most definitely not use email, even with PGP or some other encryption method. I would use a pigeon and an USB stick.
I hope they are reading all my Nigerian money scams. Insightful and very useful information. The rest of my emails are pretty boring.
Are we there yet?
OK here's the dynamic at play.
As technology advances, it heavily favors destructive offense over defense. Armadillo shells, castles and distance were all effective defenses once.
Later, at least you still needed an lot of other people to kill a lot of other people. The Constitution was born here.
Then came the bomb.
Later, at least you still needed a smaller number of highly skilled people and access to rare materials and rare know how .You born were here.
I don't need to tell slashdot readers that the number of people and the skills needed and the access to needed materials are all trending downwards.
Here's an equation that expresses this relationship succinctly:
1/ F = ( (D (superscript V) * A ) / N )
with
F is your Freedom and 1/F is your potential loss of freedom,
N is the number of bad actors needed to use a technology
A is the accessibility to whatever skills and materials those bad actors need
V is the number of victims effected by their bad actions
D is the level of Damage done to their victims ranging from inconvenience to death.
Given a suitable quantitative model of these variables , you can just plug in the numbers and watch your start to shrink.
A bunch of people stealing credit card numbers or one guy writing a computer virus that effects millions? D isn't an a true existential threat, so the base remains calm.
A mutant country only trying to build the bomb? No victims no damage,but let that country succeed and spread its technology and those actors actually start to use that bomb and see what happens. At the extreme, 1/F -> 0 , as in, you're dead.
A small group of terrorists trying to create a super virus? This is where things start to go really badly. D and possibly A go way up, and your freedom is threatened. The only factor really saving you is V- it's hard to make Sarin gas , say, effect a lot of people.
But let V D and A all take off and basically your freedom is going to be severely impinged. It has to be, because the first organizing principle of society isn't freedom or democracy or human rights, it's survival.
I am not saying this makes me happy.
You never want to get to a situation where VD and A are getting very large, but what are you going to do to stop it? Technology marches on. Knowledge becomes more widespread. 3D printers are a Good Thing. I think we all see where this is going.
It's nobody's fault. People are just whatever evolution shit out its ass over the course of a few million years. More and more of hose people are gaining theoretical access to WMD . It's nobody's fault.
You can change the living circumstances for these humans and try to implement regimes which bar access to WMD. That's our approach now.
A different approach is to try to arrange the world so the usual causes of discontent are removed for as many people as possible. Those would be poverty, ignorance, illiteracy, disease, famine, a decent place in a decent world.
The problem with that approach is i> it doesn't work Men-apes, no matter how much power and how many females they have only want more. Ask Arnold. Ask Bin Laden. Ask Trump. Ask anyone.
The drive to expand your sphere of power and control and access to the mating rights to yet more females is a monster that only gets hungrier the more it's fed. How many wives did Bin Laden have? How much money was he born into? How much esteem and status did he inherit? Ditto Trump. Ditto Forbes. Ditto the Record Executive / TV Evangelist / CEO / Senator and Professional Athlete of Your Choice.
Ditto Genghis Khan and his relatives for that matter .
Technology marches on and no one is going to, or even could , stop it. People are motivated to do what they do which is express a set of drives that served them well- a few hundred thousand years ago.
We have to change what people are if we're going to surviv