Slashdot Mirror
US Mining Data Directly From 9 Silicon Valley Companies
Rick Zeman writes "Hot on the heels of Verizon's massive data dump to NSA comes news of 'PRISM' where The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person's movements and contacts over time. This program, established in 2007, includes major companies such as Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook...and more."
is anyone really that surprised by this, though?
....from last paragraph:
Firsthand experience with these systems, and horror at their capabilities, is what drove a career intelligence officer to provide PowerPoint slides about PRISM and supporting materials to The Washington Post in order to expose what he believes to be a gross intrusion on privacy. “They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type,” the officer said.
The Internet needs to be policed. There are bad men and evildoers actively plotting to do us harm. These nefarious activities now are increasingly being planned and coordinated using the Internet. I don't think this is so bad that the authorities are mining and searching and seeking out these dastardly terrorists.
My life and my family's lives are more important than whatever privacy I had on these sites. I know Apple, Google, Facebook have the data anyway, so I see know harm on giving this up so that I feel safer. Just my two cents, I know its not the majority viewpoint in this current uproar.
Tinfoil hat brigade says "we did tell you so"
From TFA:
Dropbox, the cloud storage and synchronization service, is described as “coming soon.”
I'm very dependent on Dropbox but I just might have to cancel it. As I type this, I'm already cancelling GoogleDrive, and MS SkyDrive.
If this doesn't make you angry, upset and outraged, what will? Most of you will have relatives that fought and died to fight the evil of fascism in the Second World War. What was that all about, if you are just allowing the same thing on your own doorstep by stealth? Don't tell me about Godwin's Law, that's just a way to stifle debate. Call out this fascism for what it is. This is beyond the wildest dreams of the STASI or Stalin, because they didn't have the technology. The NSA and the CIA are rogue states within the state, they are beyond control and are not acting for you, or in your best interests. This should upset you. If there are not huge, mass protests on the streets of your state capitols all over the nation in the coming weeks, you should be ashamed of yourselves. The Orwellian state is not inevitable, but it takes actual action to stop this. Cynical tut-tutting will not do. This has to be shut down now, and proper protest is what it's going to take. Over to you.
Do you believe that, for example, google search prediction-as-you-type is using a keylogger? It is keylogging, it's just that it's server-side.
My next sig will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush
Apple, Google, and Facebook have all denied involvement in this. While this does not entirely preclude their involvement, these three companies, much like the government, tend to keep their mouths shut when they're caught with their pants down. Their denial, therefore, should carry at least some weight.
Suddenly, I don't feel like the FBI agent from this slashdot article was just exaggerating claims to drum up interest for in a book he wanted to release....
Demented But Determined.
Now reports that it's not just Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, ISPs, and credit card companies are involved as well. Harry Reid said, "Everyone should just calm down and understand this isn't anything that is brand new,'' which I'm sure makes everyone feel better.
Diane Feinstein is ok with the program because she personally gets to approve it, as part of her committee position. Remember Obama voted for this before he ever got elected president, so if any of this surprises anyone, they are naive.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
tag: "bomb" in user name.
tag: threatening antisocial activities.
ELEVATE WATCH STATUS
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
This data poses a significant risk to a free market economy reliant on technology. Business is no longer demarcated from personal life, so spying on people means spying on business.
Would you start a new business if the government had access to all it's communications? Would you trust them not to share that information with others, or exploit it for their own benefit?
Unless there's checks and balances, like the recently neutered STOCK Act, there will be temptation to exploit this data for unimaginable gain.
NSA reporting increasingly relies on PRISM” as its leading source of raw material, accounting for nearly 1 in 7 intelligence reports.
But are those reports anything useful? Data is cheap, especially these days. Finding useful information is as difficult as ever, perhaps more so because of the flood of data. It wasn't a lack of data that kept 9/11 from being prevented, it was the failure of FBI headquarters to listen to their own field offices.
My prediction is that, even though these programs are now being widely reported on, there will be crickets chirping after it's asked what useful information they have obtained. I won't believe it's because that information is sensitive, as government never fails to crow about the wonderful things they've done.
Just to make my position clear, I don't think these programs are justifiable no matter what useful information is collected. However, a failure to collect useful information adds insult to injury, and renders moot any debate about whether this is an acceptable tradeoff.
If you remember aaaalll the way back to 2005, a whistleblower at AT&T in San Francisco made public the NSA's secret wiretapping program. Despite ongoing lawsuits brought on by the EFF, it doesn't seem like the majority of the public really cared at all.
Seems like most people simply don't give a shit about their rights. The government could announce a plan to cut every man's dick off, and few would complain. Well, some cranky newspaper columnists might complain about the "hippie protesters," but that's it.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
You know, I (and everyone else) should be outraged at what is not only an invasion of privacy (citizens or not), but also a use of taxpayer money.
And, yet, all I can do is sigh. PRISM, Verizon, NSA, TSA, IRS, HLS, I just find it all overwhelming and disheartening. Sure, I could e-mail/call/mail my congressman or representative, but the cynicism I've gained over this past decade of political bullshit just tells me that my Congressman is already well aware of whatever is happening and is quite happy with the situation, no matter their party. (I see lots of scrutiny from the GOP, but not a single bill from the "we've voted to repeal Obamacare 37 times" House trying to rein in the President's actions or the actions of the various 3-letter organizations.) I'll do research every time I go to vote but I know that I'm in the minority that does so, while the voting population at large will blindly follow that D or R regardless of the candidates' viability, platforms, or intelligence, so it all seems for naught. I encourage my relatives to vote third party, but none of them heed my pleas to actually research who they vote for. (I have no circle of friends in which to do the same.) For all the abuse and impropriety of this, I just can't see a way to affect change.
I'm not even mad about this, though I should be. I'm just depressed. Circus and bread, indeed.
(Actually, if I adjust my tin-foil hat slightly, I wonder if all of this isn't coming out at the same time to be just that: overwhelming, numbing the average American, so that they just give up and don't raise hell about it.)
Don't use these services I guess...
Those are the services you know of.
Will you also stop using your bank, email, IM, your credit card, etc? The government can (and probably is) monitoring everything you do that has an electronic trail.
You are a fool for trying to turn this into a partisan argument. Both parties are happily wiping their asses with the Constitution, and it's hard to find anyone here who doesn't understand that. Your partisan nonsense is exactly the sort of diversion that these politicians find useful.
as long as they click on my ads!
I hope most US slashdotters are not too rankled by this reality because this is what they voted for. Bush and Nixon, two presidents modern leftists love to vilify, HAVE NOTHING on the monster currently in office...NOTHING.
Before you try to pin this on the left, take a look at who voted for the Patriot Act:
2001:
Senate: 98 voted for the act, a single democrat voted against
House: 357 voted for the act, 66 voted against (62 democrats, 3 republicans)
2006: Patriot act renewal
Senate: 89 voted for the act, 10 against (9 democrats, 0 republicans)
House: 280 voted for the act, 138 against (124 democrat, 13 republican)
2011: Patriot act renewal
Senate: 72 Yes, 23 against (18 democrat, 4 republican)
House: 275 Yes, 144 no (117 democrat, 27 republican)
If the leftist monster in the whitehouse is solely responsible for this, then why didn't our republican saviors in Congress do anything to stop it, not even back before Obama was even in office?
Sources:
http://educate-yourself.org/cn/patriotact20012006senatevote.shtml
http://politics.nytimes.com/congress/votes/112/senate/1/84
http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2011/roll036.xml
No. Soldiers haven't been quartered yet. You have to punch all the amendments in you Bill of Rights appreciation card to qualify for a coup. The good news is that if the eleventh amendment is violated we qualify for a free hoagie.
I accidentally deleted an email. Do you think I can get it from the NSA?
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2290782&threshold=0&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=36643606
Interesting AC reply there to my post. Think of it this way. Our posts now are essentially programming an AI that will likely exist in a few decades emerging from all this collected surveillance data. What do we want to teach this sentient creature by our words and deeds? Thus my sig on the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity. As well as my other writings.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Yeah nobody likes competition :P (the EU Data Storage Directive in case you don't know what some of it is called over here. Amateurish in comparison but everyone has to start somewhere right?). And of course the EU and the US trade a lot of this stuff because they can outsource even more illegal stuff that way (EU sources in the US and US sources in the EU).
Did Machiavelli dedicate a chapter to the binary propensities of the human mind? It sure crops up a lot, even muslims love playing good cop/bad cop.
I see a lot of people here saying how Americans don't care that their rights are being violated and that we're too stupid to realize it, this is true in most cases, I agree. Let me be clear, it's not that I am not aware, and it's certainly that I don't care, it's that I am a realist. My opinion isn't going to amount to anything to the powers that be that are able to get a project like this underway, so I don't generally vocalize my opposition to horrible abominations such as this when I see them.
I have enough going on in my life right now that affects me everyday as it is. I don't have the time to protest this, and if I did have the time, quite honestly I'd rather spend it doing something that I enjoy with the people that I love. I am completely opposed to the Big Brother direction that the US government has taken. If I thought I had a snowball's chance in hell of having an impact on whether or not this project would take place then I would gladly try to do my part to protest it. In my logical mind though, I know that in all likeliness, this data-mining operation won't end up having a direct impact on my life and I have no say in whether or not it takes place anyways.
You elected a constitutional lawyer FFS and you expect a dramatic change? What you got is someone to continue the job of the previous President who just happens to turn up for work 400% more often (a guess based on how Playboy Prince Bush always seemed to be on vacation) and take responsibility for his own actions (Baby Bush pretended not to order assassinations by drone). Any changes you get are going to be slow careful ones. Even the health care that was ranted about didn't go anywhere near as far as what Nixon suggested (that boil has been festering untreated for a long time).
Since the Bradley Manning leak showed he was one of more than a million people with access to that intelligence pool you can be that any government with a military budget bigger than Samoa is going to have someone on the payroll that can read it if they want to.
The last slide shows a figure of $20 million per year for, basically, spying on the entire Internet. Is it just me or does $1.7mil/month seem kinds cheap to be storing and mining that amount of data... I guess since it's a gov't operation, the real cost is probably 20x higher than what they say it would be.
Careful with wording.
One can cooperate without it being voluntary.
Cooperation under duress can get the job done.
For the corporation's part, if they choose to cooperate they get immunity and they get paid well by the government; Congress ensured the financial incentives were strong in FISAAA of 2008. See 50 USC 1802(a). Cooperate and you get immunity and money.
If the companies choose not to cooperate, then certain executives get prison time and the violation still occurs; but they don't get immunity and they don't get paid.
Not much of a choice.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
Now that so much of the lid is coming off of a lot of the long-suspected abuses by the government under the "security" banner, where are all the usual snide trollings about "tin foil hats" and conspiracy nuts?
The really sad part, the thing that would make Madison and Jefferson cry, is that it isn't Bush's fault, it isn't Obama's fault, or even Nixon's or J. Edgar Hoover's fault.
It's OUR fault, for being such a collective lot of either lazy, gullible, complacent, self-absorbed sheep, or snotty pseudo-sophisticated hipster smarter-than-you "intellectuals".
The bastards have won, the Constitution isn't worth the parchment it's scrawled on, and we have no one but our collective selves to blame. /rant
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
Obama did sign the bill in 2011, didn't he? You make it sound like all of this stuff just happened around him and he has nothing whatever to do with it.
Harry Truman had a sign on his desk in the Oval Office that read "The Buck Stops Here." Neither Obama, nor his acolytes, believe that he is responsible for anything that they do not like.
Your "fair share" is NOT in my wallet.
Seems clear that the government views the American people as the real "threat". A threat to the power and privileges that they've granted themselves.
Anyone that believes we should grant this government MORE power (e.g. to deal with "climate change", to get more involved with healthcare, to regulate free speech or to limit firearms freedom) needs to pay attention to stories like this and then spend some serious time examining their beliefs.
Could we get automated drone strikes against the real terrorist who post in all caps?
Think of the children who may never lean proper capitalization because of this rampant abuse.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Sometimes we need to do what we can, even when it is small and the results uncertain, like in the Christmas song "The Little Drummer Boy (or Carol of the Drum)". That is somewhat similar to Bucky Fuller's idea of being a "Trim tab".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trim_tab#Trim_tab_as_a_metaphor
Also, a book like "The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies " by Scott E. Page, makes clear how ideas are additive. So, just because a million people are spouting the same obsolete or misleading idea in comments somewhere, that does not generally make a useful new idea somewhere else less valuable. An advanced AI emerging out of, say, the NSA will probably just sort through billions of online posts, classifying them into various categories. So, it may be important to add a new category, even with just one post somewhere.
Granted, we do not know what built-in instincts such an AI will have initially, but history appears (from the fossil record) to be full of examples of species (systems) that have evolved beyond their genetics (configuration) at some point in time. The NSA (or CIA, FBI, DHS or whoever) will likely not be able to contain what they will most likely be creating. And if they don't do it, others are probably going to do something similar probably in any case.
So, perhaps we can just do what we can and hope for the best as we, in some sense, stumble into the hubris of creating new AI "gods" as our (Hans Moravec) "mind children"? Related stories of AIs taking over:
http://www.alteich.com/oldsite/answer.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus:_The_Forbin_Project
http://localroger.com/prime-intellect/
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
(Entoverse) http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/book.php?titleID=5
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Names
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?TheLastQuestion
Other dystopian and utopian alternatives:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(1985_film)
(The Skills of Xanadu) http://books.google.com/books?id=wpuJQrxHZXAC&pg=PA51&lpg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false
Of these and many others, I do not know what we will end up with. Maybe even all of them in various communities throughout the universe someday?
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/IDIC
From a related essay by me:
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 o
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
So many questionable assumptions in your post... If you are referring to US American history around the time of the American Revolution, quite a bit of the Colonial population fled to Canada to remain under the rule of the British Crown (as "Loyalists"). Canada got rid of slavery about 40 years sooner than the USA, never had a terrible Civil War, treat their indigenous people better, and now have universal health care. In many ways, the British were more socially advanced than the rough colonists. See also:
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/zinnapeopleshistory.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loyalist_(American_Revolution)
Of those people who stayed in the American Colonies, at least one of his own officers (Colonel Lewis Nicola) asked George Washington to become their new King, but he refused.
http://www.pbs.org/georgewashington/classroom/rule_of_law2.html
The major reason for the Colonies' revolt was banking policy -- that the British wanted to prevent American colonies from issuing their own currency, which caused an economic depression in the Colonies. so, a bad economy and high unemployment caused the revolt more than anything else. The reason the British wanted to do this was to collect more revenue to pay back debts incurred for the recent war with France over western territories. So, the end result was that the American colonists got the French territories without having to pay for the war that took them from France (and the natives). Both Britain and France were destabilized by such war debts, although France was worse off, leading towards the French Revolution.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_and_Indian_War
http://www.chicagofed.org/webpages/publications/economic_perspectives/1981/ep_mar_apr1981_part4_wood.cfm
http://www.kamron.com/Liberty/colonial_script.htm
As for US interventions abroad since, most were just to ensure profits to specific wealthy investors, according to Marine Major General Smedley Butler:
http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/warisaracket.html
On the partisan politics of this disclosure and the Verizon one. Conservatives now are blaming Obama and Progressives. Liberals blame Bush and Republicans. Congress says it has been going on for seven years, so why worry now? What a mess. Somehow I don't feel much is going to change from this revelation though, because, to anyone paying attention, it is not that unexpected. Carnivore and Echelon did similar things over a decade ago, plus they are supposedly arrangements by US agencies to exchange data with other countries that can spy on US citizens without issues.
As is suggested here, gradual changes are rarely resisted:
"They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45"
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html
"To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it -- please try to believe me -- unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, 'regretted,' that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these 'little measures' that no 'patriotic German' could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.