Slashdot Mirror
Verizon Ordered To Provide All Customer Data To NSA
Rick Zeman writes "According to Wired, an order by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court '...requires Verizon to give the NSA metadata on all calls within the U.S. and between the U.S. and foreign countries on an "ongoing, daily basis" for three months.' Unlike orders in years past, there's not even the pretense that one of the parties needed to be in a foreign country. It is unknown (but likely) that other carriers are under the same order."
I don't know about you, but I am shocked! *ONLY* 3 months?
Thirty four characters live here.
This is a puzzle. What magic line would they cross by demanding names as well, when the amount of information they already require is enough to determine the individuals involved in a call and then some. This smells of a careful exclusion crafted by the AG or some such to skirt a law.
If you ever argued that the second amandment is here to ensure you can protect yourself from opressive goverment, it is about time to stack up on ammo. I'd say its going to go down soon, but in case you haven't noticed, it all already went down.
I am sure it will only be for 3 months and certainly they would not ask again. It is only a one time thing, of that you can rest easy, citizen.
The full story, with link to the court order, is at The Guardian -- http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone-records-verizon-court-order
The story and TFA say "The sweeping order, issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, requires Verizon to give the NSA metadata on all calls within the U.S. and between the U.S. and foreign countries on an “ongoing, daily basis” for three months."
What have you seen that restricts it to a small subset? The actual order is secret, and I didn't find any links to the actual order, though a number of organizations claimed to have a copy.
Learn to love Alaska
The Verizon data is the tip of the iceberg, this is a tiny leak, it only covers an FBI request, it doesn't cover the full data grab. Congressmen, Ron Wyden, Mark Udall etc., ex CIA, everyone keeps hinting at the extent of the data grab and people go into denial about it.
Other data being grabbed:
1. URLs visited, times and ip addresses (sniffed from the network intercepts put in in post 2001)
2. Email headers (right there in the pipe)
3. Linkage data, you sent the email from that iPad/Android tablet? Theres the link between IP address and email address (right there in the pipe).
4. Search data, https is no obstacle to a FISA warrant.
5. Billing records of the phone, the identity of the user of the phone, data linking to their email address etc.
6. Visa/Mastercard/Credit Card/Paypal/WesternUnion, ATM data,.....
7. Bank transactions, (and not just the SWIFT data the EU handed them), handed over under excuse of 'laundering'
8. Facebook, all visible data and all deleted data
9. What you said on slashdot, even as AC, including drafts
10. What you said on every public website on every blog, on everything linked to your ip address and in turn linked to your real id.
11. Every public'ly buyable database
12. Your voting preference (already well analysed for political parties)
13. Your IRS data
14. The contents of all email older than 6 months.
15. Add that to the Verizon data (where you are, who you called, when)
It's a zoo, you're in a cage and those creepy guys outside staring at you, they're your zoo keepers.
Be careful what you say, to whom, who you're with when you say it, re-read you emails with a jaundice eye, can it be misconstrued by a malicious actor?
Are you outside the USA? Do you think you're immune?! Have they got any lever on your elected politicians? Is he a puppet now?
Could you, or have you ever upset anyone with access to that surveillance data?
Have you ever expressed views that might cause you to be targetted by anyone with access to that surveillance data?
Have you expressed pro-gun views? Do you imagine every creep with access to your private data is pro-gun?
Have you expressed anti-gun views? Do you imagine every creep with access to your private data is anti-gun?
Have you expressed strong Republican views? Do you imagine every creep with access to your private data is Republican?
Have you expressed strong Democrat views? Do you imagine every creep with access to your private data is a Democrat?
The only safe views to hold in a surveillance state are bland views. Be grey, keep your head down, express no strong views. Do nothing of note have friends who do nothing of note.
Don't think, that just because you're doing nothing illegal, that you're safe.
Having an affair is not illegal, yet General Patraeus was outed by on FBI agent Fred Humphries as a favor to a friend!
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/holly-petraeus-scott-broadwell-silent-petraeus-scandal/story?id=17718793
And in retaliation his supporters outed General Allen for having an affair with the FBI agents friend, and leaked photos (taken from surveillance of his friend) of a picture of him shirtless he sent her.
Do you really think you've done nothing wrong? That you have nothing to hide?
I'm pretty sure your data contains enough to lose you your job, end your marriage, lose custody of your children.
After many years of travel and living in other countries, my political views shifted from right to left and I felt myself to a "liberal" democrat.
Like so many others, I was caught up in the whole "hope" for change with Mr. Obama.
One could say that regarding the police state, he is worse than nearly all who came before him, but I think that is missing the point. Democrat, Republican, I have come to the realization that it makes not difference at all. The system is simply designed to abuse.
The alphabet soup agencies do not care who is the present. After all, they will still be there after the President is long gone and the next fellow seeking ever greater powers replaces him.
So, does it really matter who you vote for?
I really doubt it. The folks who have enough cash to even register with voters are all part of the same socioeconomic class. Classes look out for their own, not for other classes.
I suspect things will get much, much worse before they ever get better. At least if history is any indication of the future.
Good luck citizens.
Funny how there's such a huge passionate uproar about supposed loss of second amendement rights, but comparitively little concern about actual loss of fourth amendment rights...
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
if I voted for Romney. And they were right.
William Biddy, who was involved in the early part of this data grab, explaining why he became a whistleblower:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuET0kpHoyM
This is from 2012, before Boston. He says they've intercepted at least 15 TRILLION communications with the system.
Worth noting, is that despite a decade of data grabs, they didn't stop Boston. The claimed purpose doesn't work.
http://epic.org/privacy/wiretap/stats/fisa_stats.html
Since 2004, when they started spying on Americans, there have been 143,364 FISA warrants, similar to this one, applying to Americans.
This is one warrant among 143364 similar warrants. 0.0006975% of the warrants.
There's a link to the actual order in TFA.
Like everyone else, I have no idea what they're doing, but no, it doesn't rule out focused surveillance. It could easily be a way to obscure who they're surveilling, so that Verizon, for example, has no way of knowing which customer they're interested in.
Say I'm a burglar, and I want to know when you're not home. When you're not home, is the best time to break into your house and take all your stuff.
One strategy is to stand outside your house, staring at it. You come out, we stare at each other for a few nervous seconds, and then you drive off. Aha, you're not home now. So I begin picking the lock on your door. The last thing I think, before you smash in the back of my head with a shovel, is how clever I was to make sure you had left. I was too fuckwitted to think you might be curious by our earlier staring encounter, and that you drove around the block, parked, and came to see WTF I was up to.
Another strategy is that I hang out at a major intersection, seemingly taking notice of every car that passes by. Little do you (or anyone else) know, yours was the one I was interested in. You don't it's it's suspicious at all, to drive by someone standing by the side of the road a mile from your house. That guy was just looking at all the cars going by. Not focused at all, huh? Then how come your house is the one I emptied that day?
If wired leaks a story about how Verizon was forwarding records about Dahamma to NSA, then you know they're watching you. If wired has a story about how Verizon is forwarding records about Dahamma plus a hundred million other people to the NSA, well shit, that wasn't about you. Nothing to be nervous about. They're not out to get you; they're out to get everyone.
Or maybe they're really out to get just you.
The Guardian has a copy here. I believe they actually broke the story, not Wired.
And you're right, it's not limited to a subset; it is ALL calls not wholly originating outside the US:
The most worrying part to me is not the call records, which we already knew the NSA was tapping into at the trunk level, but that they have access to all cellphone call metadata, including location vis a vis cell tower triangulation. This effectively means the NSA can roughly track the movements of all Americans, or at least those of us whose smartphone data services are constantly pinging the network.
...I remember thinking that no sane citizens of any democratic country would ever allow the the state to amass such abusive and intrusive powers.
And then, I read today's Slashdot article.
So, given that it was bad under Bush, and is now worse under Obama, it is readily apparent that regardless of whichever political party you choose to vote for, all roads lead to the same end. The system will prevail. Is anarchy the only solution then?
What was Verizon's response?
No need to worry, you can trust corporations.
1984 here we are
NSA spying on all electronic communication is (very) old news. Microsoft's Xbox One (increasingly known as the XBone) has been designed from the ground up to massively increase the surveillance abilities of the NSA.
The new console has 8 CPU cores and 8GB of memory. It actually runs as two distinct computers, with two CPU cores and up to 3GB of RAM forming a special 'Kinect' computer system that has its own OS, and is continuously processing the input from the Kinect sensor systems, regardless of what the user is currently using the console for (including AAA games that appear to NOT use the Kinect sensors in any way).
The Kinect computer is constantly generating snapshots of data from the camera and microphone array, and stores these snapshots as encrypted files in a dedicated area of the enclosed HDD. These snapshots include full face photographs of each new person who enters the room. The Kinect computer is designed to compare sound and video/image data with a signature list (that can be changed and updated remotely), so that full video and sound recording can be triggered if the signature patterns are matched. This data can be either stored on the HDD (again, as encrypted streams) or immediately streamed to a remote server over the Internet if the console is currently online.
Signature triggers can include things like gunshots or sounds of explosions, people talking in a given language (say Arabic), or a man shouting at a woman.
Signatures can also (thanks to the body movement recognition ability of Kinect) represent given physical actions by people (for instance, two people engaging in love-making). Yes, you read that correctly- the Xbox One can be set to start streaming video to any remote server on the Internet if it detects people having sex in front of the camera.
Most 'signatures' are quite small pieces of data, and the console can have many thousands of signatures active at any time. Usually triggering a signature will allow an actual Human to remotely inspect some of the snapshot data being constantly generated to determine whether to activate full streaming. This practice is similar to that used by the NSA for decades when spying on ALL phonecalls- phonecalls are also routed through signature systems, and those that trigger on any signature are flagged for immediate inspection (although ALL phonecalls are actually recorded and later subject to much deeper mining).
The NSA (and other security services around the globe) have long dreamed of placing their spying equipment into the homes of every citizen. Mobile phones have gone some way to achieving this (the NSA collects, where practical, all the image data captured on mobile phones, but this is obviously severely limited by the bandwidth issues). The Xbox One puts a dream spy system into the living rooms of millions of people, together with massive amounts of mains powered computing resources to pre-process the data captured.
Microsoft demands that ALL applications and games have some Kinect functionality to encourage owners to keep the Kinect bar fully 'calibrated'. The Kinect system CANNOT ever be deactivated. If the Kinect sensors report any failure, the console refuses to run games/applications. If the sensors detect any problem with visibility (like tape over the cameras, or Kinect turned to face a wall), the console pesters the user to recalibrate the system. One can start a game, and then block the cameras in some sense, but research by Microsoft and the NSA has determined that people willing to buy the Xbox One, even if they are aware of the worst stories about invasion of privacy, will cease taking any measures to protect their privacy after only a couple of weeks of ownership.
Conversely, those who are prepared to ALWAYS block the cameras when not using a 'Kinect' game, or those who forego Kinect functionality altogether and permanently 'blind' the sensors will prove to be the tiniest minority, and can be safely considered to be no different from those who refuse to buy the console in the first plac
Note that this was signed the week after the boston bombings, two days after Ibragim Todashev was killed by the FBI. They were likely trying to follow various other related leads.
Also of note:
- This document is top secret, not to be declassified until 2038, so close your eyes.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2013/jun/06/verizon-telephone-data-court-order
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
thinking that your buddies and your machineguns are going to overthrow the most powerful nation in the world is just delusional.
Thinking that the professional military will be the ones trying to stop you when things become bad enough that the average U.S. citizen even considerings the attempt - that is the truest delusion.
We have a professional military made up of independent thinkers from all over the U.S. They are not robots, they are not trained to obey without question. If you ask them to start firing on home towns they are going to want to have a pretty clear reason why.
Citizens being armed just keeps everyone honest and is basically just like using a seat belt. You'll probably never need it, but if you need it you REALLY need it.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Obama definitely has had words of condemnation for those who voted for Romney.
it is readily apparent that regardless of whichever political party you choose to vote for, all roads lead to the same end. The system will prevail.
Not if you consistently vote in people who aim for reduced spending and smaller government.
As you say, all roads lead to the same place. But a smaller government with a smaller budget can simply only do so much. The smaller the amount of money the government gets the less money there is to track everyone, store data on everyone, or funnel money back out of government to private citizens who helped elect people.
It truly is the ONLY way to limit the reduction of potential harm from the system.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I so often see this argument, not just on /. but all over. "Why do you not vote for someone else then".
Just think about it for a little while. When is the last time that a person running for president was not already extremely rich and a member of the ruling class?
These folks do not care about us no matter what they say. They know what side their bread is buttered on.
I, like I suspect all people would love to vote for a person who is running because he really wants to change the system. To rein in the powers of an abusive and authoritarian government.
But I KNOW that such a person would never make it. Hell, I wouldn't even know he was running.
Do you think that the media, who is controlled by the ruling class would give him coverage? If you think for one moment that you will be allowed to upset the status qua then you are delusional. Open your eyes. It is not about left vs right. It really is class warfare. I know that even if the IRS says I am upper middle class, to the ruling class, I am one of the masses. The tools. The means to an end.
It seems you have no right to say I am stupid especially since after reading your post it is clear you have a limited reading comprehension. I should not say though. I have no doubt you read only the first line and then replied.
I say this because I see that you are trying to turn this into a let vs right issue. A, "my political team can kick your political team's ass".
Do you not understand that this is used to manipulate you? To get you into a frenzy and direct you anger and your fellow peasants rather that to direct your anger to your masters?
Look, I am not saying I agree with everything Democrats do. What I do agree with is taking care of my fellow man. I agree with not denying a man medical care simple because he cannot afford it.
You see, everything you have, your car, your TV, your iPhone, you have these things because we live in a society. We ALL benefit from be a part of it. As such, we all have a responsibility to do things which help it.
Yes, I know that capitalism says you should take are much as you can and then stab your neighbor in the face, eat his children and then take what he has, but do you really think that is a good long term strategy.
I know folks like you cannot be convinced away from a polarized way of thinking but you should stop to ask yourself, what kind of person would take all the benefits from his fellow man yet do nothing in return and additionally actively try to prevent others from doing so as well.
Remember comrade, democrat, republican, socialist, they are just words. Just because your party tells you it is bad, does not mean it is true.
Not if you consistently vote in people who aim for reduced spending and smaller government.
As you say, all roads lead to the same place. But a smaller government with a smaller budget can simply only do so much
Oh, that may be true, but wherever can I find people who aim for reduced spending and smaller government?
Surely, you don't mean Republicans, do you? Because they remember about the noble goal of smaller budget/smaller government only while Democrats are in power. And who's idea was it to keep wars in Afganistan and Iraq off the budget (as "emergency supplemental appropriations bills")? Brilliant strategy to keep a low "budget"
"Not if you consistently vote in people who aim for reduced spending and smaller government."
I've seen a lot of mouthy political bullshit along these lines, but no actual politicians who are interested in implementing it (lots and lots of politicians who want to reduce spending in areas they don't like, while increasing it for areas they do, however).
Sorry, but while that argument is appealing, it's bullshit because you're not specifying WHAT functions you eliminate with the meaningless statement, "reduced spending and smaller government." Where are you reducing the spending? What functions does this "smaller government" fulfill, and which functions does it not fulfill? Unless you specify exactly what to cut, this is just empty rhetoric with very little meaning - like saying, "We need to get rid of regulations" - which ones? Why? What is the cost-benefit analysis?
Moreover, it is absolutely possible to have a much smaller government that focuses all or most of its efforts on military and intelligence services - the Syrian government is an excellent example of this, focusing very little (in terms of expenditures) on actual effective social welfare functions (providing subsidized housing, etc. which it did, but very badly), but almost exclusively on maintaining a police and military state, and I'm sure the same can be said for many dictatorial regimes. Indeed, libertarian approaches often cede only military and possible intelligence services as necessary state functions, producing exactly that type of outcome.
What "reduced spending" and "smaller government" actually seem to result in is decreased social services (education, health care, etc) while leaving military and intelligence budgets intact (often beyond what the military is actually requesting, as we've seen often enough in recent years in the US, e.g. the F35 controversy). I imagine as the number of people at the bottom increase and become restless due the lack of social services, you'd find even more support from everyone else to INCREASE the domestic intelligence presence and law enforcement, rather than to reduce them.
Czars? really You understand there are no czars, it is just a term to refer to high-level presidential appointments. The same appointments that every president has made. It is not an actual title.
And regarding Executive orders, Obama has far fewer then any other president in recent history.
http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/executiveorders.asp
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
The thing is, going around any former Soviet run country and talking to people about how things were, you could see the Democrats heading this direction a mile away
I was born in USSR, and I can confidently say that this is pure bullshit.
Social welfare is not communism or socialism. Generally speaking, it is not socialism until you cannot legally own private (as opposed to personal) property, which was the case in the USSR. Democrats do not have any intention of changing that part, and their economical program is fully compatible with capitalism. There's nothing fascist about it, either - they focus on rights of individuals, not on rights of the state.