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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?
... 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.
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
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!
Which is why you should be a huge fan of Ron Paul. Most people here are too smart (or dumb) for their own good. They'll bitch and complain for hours how the government is too big, gets into our lives, spies on us etc.. Then they'll turn around and complain that people need health insurance, schooling, and everything else under the moon and it's up to the government to do that. Yes, in a perfect world everyone would be taken care of and live happy, but that just isn't the case and never will be.
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.
deduplication?
it's a lot of emails - but not a lot of data really - now if they are storing attachments....
if they did keep each full email for every person, my mom would need her own san based on the amount of stuff she forwards to me.
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?
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.
Sure, they've got all those emails. Unfortunately, you don't have the security clearance needed to get them back.
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It's also possible to advocate for both health care and privacy.
At what point will psychiatrists have to stop classifying people as paranoid simply because they believe the government is tracking them?
Some of us even recognize the difference between government resources used for spying and government resources used to provide health insurance, schools, etc.
they're being given to us instead...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
The trouble is, all of the vendors selling the software and hardware to do all of this kind of surveillance have one helluva lobby. They probably make the lion's share of their yearly profits from selling to government. Big Business is just way too cozy with government, whether you are democrat or republican. These days it is probably impossible to get elected without the corporate donations because it is just so damn expensive. I am grateful for whistleblowers like these because it shows just how frivolously government continues to spend our money. Why the hell are we stepping up surveillance on our own citizens when we've got a shit-ton of other problems not being addressed? It is good that government fears its populace, government should be fearful. However, these programs succeed because of the apathy of most American citizens. To shut government down, it would just take a majority of us. Has it ever occurred to anyone that the drama in politics might actually be "staged" to keep us divided so government can secretly whittle away our freedom while we are left unawares?
I am not a criminal, but yes I do this on a daily basis. And I strongly suspect most people do. Not everything that's sensitive, is criminal in nature.
It's commonplace to communicate about business dealings by e-mail; also the sensitive ones. E-mail is just too convenient to stop using the moment something may be sensitive; actually that's a reason to not stop using it, as e-mail at least leaves a written record, allowing you to look back in discussions to see what was agreed upon (or not).
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:
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 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
No. This would be true if the Republican or Democrat party was acceptable, but both are highly unacceptable. When your two evils are vomit and diarrhea, choosing the lesser of two evils only hurts you. It doesn't help a damn thing.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
If you believe abortion is murder, you may pick Republicans as the lesser of two evils because in the event of a Court Appointee, you save a lot of lives. If you believe a woman's right to control her body is sacrosanct, you may pick Democrats as the lesser of two evils because otherwise you prevent a lot of intolerance.
Either way, you're voting for a government that kills people without trials, in terms of drone targeting. But that doesn't mean there's no difference.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
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
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.
Bingo, we have a winner.
The parties most certainly are different in several important respects - but, if you look at it, it's as if they have carefully cherry picked several hot button issues on which to be different - abortion, gay marriage etc. It's very convenient, because all those issues tend to be highly emotional for both sides - and hence people rank them over other stuff - and present few opportunities for compromise, festering the "us vs them, no middle ground" mentality. From there it's very easy to convince the majority to vote, not for your candidate, but against the other guy - because if he wins, the unspeakable horror of e.g. murdering babies is going to happen; and surely you wouldn't want that to happen, right?
That certainly helps, but votes carry much more teeth than campaigns. Some small percentage of the population has to be willing to "throw away" their vote to an independent (or Green, Libertarian, Socialist, etc.) in order to convince the larger population to start taking the party seriously and stop voting for what they perceive as the second-worst candidate.
Be the early adopter that you want to see in the world.