Google Asks Government For More Transparency, Other Groups Push Back Against NSA

Nerval's Lobster writes "In an open letter addressed to U.S. attorney general Eric Holder and FBI director Robert Mueller, Google chief legal officer David Drummond again insisted that reports of his company freely offering user data to the NSA and other agencies were untrue. 'However,' he wrote, 'government nondisclosure obligations regarding the number of FISA national security requests that Google receives, as well as the number of accounts covered by those requests, fuel that speculation.' In light of that, Drummond had a request of the two men: 'We therefore ask you to help make it possible for Google to publish in our Transparency Report aggregate numbers of national security requests, including FISA disclosures—in terms of both the number we receive and their scope.' Apparently Google's numbers would show 'that our compliance with these requests falls far short of the claims being made.' Google, Drummond added, 'has nothing to hide.'" Another open letter was sent to Congress from a variety of internet companies and civil liberties groups (headlined by Mozilla, the EFF, the ACLU, and the FSF), asking them to enact legislation to prohibit the kind of surveillance apparently going on at the NSA and to hold accountable the people who implemented it. (A bipartisan group of senators has just come forth with legislation that would end such surveillance.) In addition to the letter, the ACLU sent a lawsuit as well, directed at President Obama, Eric Holder, the NSA, Verizon and the Dept. of Justice (filing, PDF). They've also asked (PDF) for a release of court records relevant to the scandal. Mozilla has also launched Stopwatching.us, a campaign to "demand a full accounting of the extent to which our online data, communications and interactions are being monitored." Other reactions: Tim Berners-Lee is against it, Australia's Foreign Minister doesn't mind it, the European Parliament has denounced it, and John Oliver is hilarious about it (video). Meanwhile, Edward Snowden, the whistleblower who leaked the information about the NSA's surveillance program, is being praised widely as a hero and a patriot. There's already a petition on Whitehouse.gov to pardon him for his involvement, and it's already reached half the required number of signatures for a response from the Obama administration.

Comments

Glad to see some real pushback

[GodfatherofSoul]

Keep writing your Congressmen AND your local media outlets. Actually, write a letter, email it again, then call and leave a brief message about the same topic. And, make it clear that you will vote them out on that issue. They do cave in when they think their jobs are on the line.

Re:Glad to see some real pushback

[dunng808]

David Drummond got it just right. I do think wide scale monitoring should stop, but shedding some light on what really is happening is necessary to gain the voter's trust.

Big Government is more than just government. These are people, with agendas, who will abuse their power to achieve their personal objectives, wrapped in a shroud of doing what's right for the country. Then there is political party affiliation, where too often people are loyal to the point of treading on their opponents rights. Big Government puts power in the hands of individual people, and that is where it is abused.

Re:Glad to see some real pushback

[flu1d]

So what do I do when my Congressmen already publicly appose these tactics yet I have the suspicion that they privately support them? The two party system is working out well for the US. Either vote someone in who publicly discards your privacy or vote someone in who will denounce the very thing they're doing.

Re:Glad to see some real pushback

[girlintraining]

They do cave in when they think their jobs are on the line..

But they aren't. Everyone in every national-level election for the past twenty years has had their campaign paid for by the same people, often these same people (and groups) sponsored both candidates. And when they leave Congress, they'll have a job waiting for them with one of those groups... on one condition: They don't listen to you or your concerns.

The most we get anymore now from public outrage is this -- open letters that basically say "Nothing is wrong and we're working to fix it as quickly as possible!"

Re:Glad to see some real pushback

[meta-monkey]

And remember...they didn't do anything illegal, and it's only bad if it's illegal.

Re:Glad to see some real pushback

[Greyfox]

It's just because they got caught. We were all screaming about Carnivore back in the 90's and no one listened. The histronics associated with the realization that various TLAs are listening to all communications are disingenuous at best or the result of really, really bad journalists at worst. This story is not a story. It was a story two decades ago.

Re:Glad to see some real pushback

[jdogalt]

So what do I do when my Congressmen already publicly appose these tactics yet I have the suspicion that they privately support them? The two party system is working out well for the US. Either vote someone in who publicly discards your privacy or vote someone in who will denounce the very thing they're doing.

I think the standard answer is- get a job, work hard, get trust (misplaced or not), power, and money, then get access to the systems that are ripe for abuse. Then you will face a moral dilemna. On the one hand you could abuse those systems to gain more power and money. On the other hand you could pretend that they don't exist. On the other other hand, you could become an NSA whistleblower, and wonder what they will do to your wife and kids at GITMO. It's a toughey.

Re:Glad to see some real pushback

[houghi]

And YOU should write. Do not let companies defend your rights, because they are not interested in them.
Do not say later: we didn't know.

Re:Glad to see some real pushback

[Charliemopps]

David Drummond got it just right.

David Drummond got it completely wrong. He's either openly lieing or an idiot. The NSA doesn't have to let Google know they are taking data from them. If the NSA thinks they have the legal authority, they'll just plant their own DBAs at google, give themselves API access and run whatever queries they want against their data anytime they want. It's not like Google could tell given the amount of transactions they're likely seeing in a day. Likely the only reason Google ever sees a FISA request is because the data needs to be used in court.

There is an active and concerted effort to play down what's actually happened here. Remember that the united states spends 80 BILLION dollars on intelligence a year. They have several data centers that dwarf even Google in size. They pull more power than most large cities to run them. Do you really think this is limited to a few thousand or even hundred thousand data requests per year? The feds have access to all the data... from every large company... they are storing it, querying it, and likely doing all of this without a court order. Our government is completely out of control, this has to stop, and it's up to them to prove they've limited their surveillance, it's not up to us to trust them.

Re:Glad to see some real pushback

[Anonymous Coward]

Big Government is more than just government.

  “Collection directly from the servers of these U.S. Service Providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube [and] Apple.” (NSA Presentation)

In the US, your problem is that you have fascism, not big government.

Re:Glad to see some real pushback

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Then there is political party affiliation, where too often people are loyal to the point of treading on their opponents rights.

I want to comment on this point specifically because what you wrote is a common misunderstanding of such events. Their political opponents are just collateral damage - they are treading on the right of the citizenry to have a fair and representative government. Such actions are a crime against all of us regardless of party affiliation because they are essentially an attack on the democratic process itself.

Re:Glad to see some real pushback

[Frobnicator]

And remember...they didn't do anything illegal, and it's only bad if it's illegal.

That is where it gets tricky.

It is easy to jump to conclusions, but just like any other technical field, you need to pay attention to the legal details.

Technically what they did is legal. It is a loophole that has been in place for two centuries, ever since the Bill of Rights came into effect.

Police found early on that they cannot compel the person to give up their own records, so they went for business records on the people. For example, if you want to get evidence of tax evasion you don't audit the individual, you get their bank records and other business records. The individual's own records are of very little value to the government. Other examples are your credit report (it is not your data, it is the credit bureau's data), and medical history (it is not your data, it is the hospital's data). They followed the legal steps to compel businesses to give up information about you.

In that respect, they did follow the law. The spy organizations went to the courts, got a court order demanding business records, and executed the order. The codified law allows those requests, and the individual requests are legal. Congress knew about it, they made it legal. The courts knew about it, they have ruled on it many times. The spy agencies knew about it, they helped craft the laws. That is the law, and they followed it.

So leads to the difficulty.

Collecting some records is normally fine. That is how government has operated for two centuries now: Go to the courts, get a rubber stamp, get data from a business. For example, phone records may tie you (or your phone) to a crime. Police get a court's rubber stamp, get the record of an individual call from the phone company and proceed with their investigation. This is a long-established acceptable pattern.

The law allows for collection of all kinds of data. Collecting all records in aggregate CAN mean something different than individual records. Collecting every record means you CAN track associations and assembly (First Amendment) and your general security (Fourth Amendment). It is a little shaky because they didn't directly interfere with the rights of the individual. The aggregate data MAY be used that way. But just because something CAN happen and MAY be done, but so far nobody can PROVE they were used to actually violate either set of constitutional rights.

Without that proof, this is a very broad but still perfectly legal demand for data. Hence the difficulty under the law.

Although I can easily argue that mass collection of data violates the First and Fourth, I am unable to draw a line between where obtaining some records is legal (and it needs to be legal for the system to work) and where it is enough that it violates the constitution. That line needs to be figured out.

Re:Glad to see some real pushback

[Anonymous Coward]

David Drummond got it just right. I do think wide scale monitoring should stop, but shedding some light on what really is happening is necessary to gain the voter's trust.

Why should that be necessary? All that should be needed is a single judge to say that general warrants are unconstitutional. In the opinion, the judge could note that general warrants were one of the causes of the Revolutionary War. The judge could go on and say that the Virginia Declaration of Rights expressly forbid general warrants, which was then used to inspire the 4th Amendment. The judge would finally say that anybody who used general warrants should be tarred and feathered, just like the Founding Fathers would have done. Finally, the judge would note that fundamental freedoms are not subject to the whim of voters. This is why we have a Constitution.

Re:Glad to see some real pushback

[VortexCortex]

Soooo... In other words, we should trust our government.... to always be doing bad in everything they do.

I completely agree. How about this: Science. They make a claim some bill is good for us, we actually test the hypothesis and either keep or repeal the acts and laws if they are not beneficial, i.e. if there's no appreciable difference, then they get repealed because: Less rules = easier to understand system. We need to do this for every law on the book. Seems like what we need is science. I would start with three lettered agencies, followed by copyrights and patents. We have Zero evidence that they are beneficial. It would be irresponsible to continue running the wold on untested unproven hypotheses.

Re:Glad to see some real pushback

[postbigbang]

I'm not sure where you got "trust our government" out of that, but there'll be no clean sweep of anything. There will be kicking and screaming and feet dragging and lots of weird jingoistic aphorisms kicked around for a while.

Then it will continue, perhaps slightly hobbled. I'm not saying that I agree that it should continue, rather, the reality is you're up against very serious money and lots of misguided do-gooders here.

The worst problem: people now mistrust their governments more than ever. Transparency is in the crapper. It's not like we geeks didn't realize this was likely decades ago, rather, it's the revelation that once again, our worst fears are realized-- by our own paid officials.

Re:Glad to see some real pushback

[Master Moose]

open letters that basically say "Nothing is wrong and we're working to fix it as quickly as possible!"

Thant is my standard email to the teams whose tech I support

Re:Glad to see some real pushback

[multi io]

The question I've been asking myself is this: Snowden claims that he could "get your emails, passwords, phone records, credit cards", i.e. that NSA analysts can tap into pretty much any communication and read pretty much any mail that anyone sends. If that's true, why didn't he prove that to the Guardian people before he blew his cover? If I imagine I was someone who could read anyone's mail at will, and I wanted to expose myself to an outside reporter, the least I would do is show that reporter some emails that he wrote to his wife last week, or something. Just to prove my allegations.

If it's really true that the NSA essentially has random access to any Gmail/Apple/MS mail, this means that they either have a direct back door into Google's datacenters, or they're intercepting the communication at some backbone routers (which would probably imply a considerable additional load on the routers' CPUs, and they would have to have the private key to Google's server certificate (or the signing certificate, if they were to perform MITM attacks) -- I think it's well-nigh impossible to do those things in secret for a large number of connections and for an extended period of time). Frankly, I have a hard time believing that this is really what's going on.

Re:Glad to see some real pushback

[meta-monkey]

Because the line is a general versus specific warrant. The founding fathers did not want the king's men able to, under orders from the king, kicking in door after to door to see if you're doing anything wrong. So you need a specific warrant from a judge. "We have probable cause to believe this named guy is doing this illegal thing and so we're going to search this place for this object."

And the judge can't just rubber stamp it because when the evidence obtained via the warrant is used in the trial, if the warrant was obtained or used improperly, the evidence can be thrown out. That stamp is a safeguard for the citizen, and a check on the power of government, because executive officers (police) who either seek or use warrants improperly are liable to be fired.

But this is not that. This is a general warrant. This is "all phone records," not just "phone records of terror suspect Abdul from time A to time B."

And there's several ways to use this data, all of which are horrible in a "free" society.

1) The precedent is set. No judicial oversight is required to be declared an "enemy combatant." Holder has informed us that "due" process is required, but that is not necessarily a judicial process. A process of the President deciding "that guy's an enemy combatant" exists (by saying so), so that's all legal. And once you're an enemy combatant, you can be detained indefinitely, tortured, and executed (via drone), even if you're a US citizen. And nobody will give a shit, and it will all be legal.

2) Via the spying, "legal" metadata or "illegal" actual data, they identify you as an undesirable. Perhaps you're actually engaged in something illegal they'd like to stop. A whisper to an FBI agent, "hey, watch that guy." Then the FBI gets a legal warrant, busts you, and the fact that they knew to start watching you because of the super secret NSA spying is unknown and basically irrelevant.

3) Same as 2, but perhaps you're just a political dissident or a critic of the administration or the NSA. Or maybe you cut an NSA agent off in traffic. Who knows. Since everything is now illegal, you're always doing something wrong. They just have to find it, and since they know everything you've done, everywhere you've been, everyone you've talked to, everything you've bought and everything you've sold and every picture of your dick you've texted. What to do what to do...arrest you for violating the terms of use of a website via the CFAA like Aaron Schwartz? Audit your taxes like a Tea Partier? Reveal your affair to your wife? Make your boss aware of how much time you're spending on Slashdot? Somebody could ruin your life in all sorts of ways. Those ways might be "illegal" but how would you know that's how or why you were ruined?

It is point and click tyranny.

Re:Glad to see some real pushback

[Anonymous Coward]

> They have several data centers that dwarf even Google in size.

Source? Maybe something like this? http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2013/06/11/inside-nsas-secret-utah-data-center/

"5,000 servers to store the trillions upon trillions of ones and zeroes that make up your digital fingerprint. [...] Located just outside of Bluffdale, the NSA center is powered by 65 megawatts of electricity [...] According to the NSA, the Utah facility will cost $1.2B and is the Department of Defense’s largest ongoing construction project in the continental U.S."

That's the biggest. Sounds huge. But there seem to be many corporate datacenters of comparable or greater size:

http://gigaom.com/2012/01/31/the-era-of-the-100-mw-data-center/
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2011/08/01/report-google-uses-about-900000-servers/

Re:Glad to see some real pushback

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

> This story is not a story. It was a story two decades ago.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't take the opportunity to fix the problem. Who cares if the shit is fresh, its still shit that needs to be flushed out.

Re:Glad to see some real pushback

[Anonymous Coward]

We were all screaming about Carnivore back in the 90's and no one listened.

SecureBoot is this year's Carnivore. It's being forced on us so Microsoft and the US TLAs can have hardware level access to all of our computers.

Where's the screaming?

Re:Glad to see some real pushback

[Anonymous Coward]

David Drummond got it just right.

David Drummond got it completely wrong.

Both of you are rated +4 insightful right now. Typical /. group think.

Re:Glad to see some real pushback

[khallow]

Soooo... In other words, we should trust our government.... to always be doing bad in everything they do.

There's no need for this new meaning of the word "trust" when the governments in question readily demonstrate said bad behavior.

How about this: Science.

The premier counterexamples are the huge variety of environmental regulations and subsidies based allegedly (and sometimes truly) on scientific research.

For example, the US state of California requires a lot of irrelevant and useless warning signs on the basis that somewhere in a building there is at least one chemical that is "known to the State of California to cause cancer or reproductive toxicity". You can say "But that's not Science". Doesn't matter. That's how Science gets implemented.

Re:Glad to see some real pushback

[MickLinux]

Or that they have gotten CPU manufacturers to add back doors there, or that Google IS NSA, or that they arepretty much able to bully whom they want --and do (remember Paulson bullying the president of Bank of America into doing what was good for Paulson, against his fiduciary responsibilities to shareholders), or that the NSA can crack the strong encryption that we have.

Honsestly, I don't think that last is likely: it is too hard compared to the others. But I named only a few of many possibilities.

What's the worry? Carnivore was as bad when we were growing up. Worry should be reserved for things you can do something about.

See, Snowden's big mistake was not having step 2 in place: 1) reveal all the horrible things being done by the wicked, 2)??+ 3) freedom, justice, and the American way.

But to get there from here, you can't just have ought tos and shoulddas. And to wrest power from an evil organization like the NSA takes organization and greater evil. So if you succeed, all you are left with is greater evil. You can't get there from here.

So whistleblowing is no good. It doesn't work. Nor does revolution, or civil disobedience... take a lesson from The Rise And Fall of the Roman empire. When Rome fell, no slave revolt did it. Rather, the Roman Senate in a normal gesture of magnanimity, voted to feed the Vandals and then voted to contract the job to a corrupt Senator who was supposed to steal most of the money. Idiot stole it all,, and the vandals came into Rome looking for the promised food.as they left, the slaves went with them rather than starve, and Rome's economy...

Stopped.

So much for Rome.

Honestly, just wait it out. And forget the whistleblower protection laws. They're a low tech version of the honeypot.

Meanwhile, though, yeah, I stillwent over to whitehouse.gov and signed both petitions: Snowden AND Manning.

Re:Glad to see some real pushback

[Anonymous Coward]

The NSA doesn't have to let Google know they are taking data from them. If the NSA thinks they have the legal authority, they'll just plant their own DBAs at google, give themselves API access and run whatever queries they want against their data anytime they want.

You clearly have no idea how Google stores data.

Hint: it is not as simple as planting a "DBA", and "giving themselves API access" whatever that means.

AC because I actually work there.

Re:Glad to see some real pushback

[Anonymous Coward]

If that's true, why didn't he prove that to the Guardian people before he blew his cover?

Because he was just a contractor implementing the systems, not the authorized end-user.

I don't have access to production data. I certainly hope you don't either.

Re:Glad to see some real pushback

[c0lo]

Soooo... In other words, we should trust our government.... to always be doing bad in everything they do

Not necessarily. The healthy position is: never trust a government to do the right thing - always keep them in check. This is how the democracy works and the only chance to maintain a working democracy (this is why govt secrecy is bad). If you think it's expensive or dangerous, you are welcome to try the lack of democracy.

Note the difference to: always trust them to do the wrong thing - so let's throw a riot or a revolution every time they do something/anything.

Re:Glad to see some real pushback

[jma05]

I read this article earlier. I just wonder what they can possibly be doing with 5 zetabytes (I hope this part is wrong since this would cost at least a Trillion dollars for the having this kind of storage). Its almost as if Dilbert's pointy haired boss said: Go, make a copy of the Internet... and also wrote a check for it. Its a frikkin Panopticon. And all they have to show for it are two "maybe" cases?

http://www.salon.com/2013/06/10/what_spying_apologists_dont_want_you_to_know/

Re:Glad to see some real pushback

[Jesrad]

And if anyone wonders why all the federal agencies always get bigger, more expensive and more intrusive over time, here's why: because the one who pays (the taxpayer) is denied any right to say no. It's as simple as that. Anyone can always find more and more things to tray and build and implement in pursuit of these agencies' purposes. Moreover in the case of DHS and NSA and FBI and BATF, the taxpayer is also the suspect, making any attempt at getting these agencies under control automatically become a kind of dangerous activity which should be suppressed.

The system is biased towards tyranny, all because of one simple principle of operation lying at its foundation: you are compelled to pay for it. This principle is the systematic root of its evil.

Re:Glad to see some real pushback

[Therefore I am]

Nobody said it better than Winston Churchill... "Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."

Re:Glad to see some real pushback

[Toonol]

Both of you are rated +4 insightful right now. Typical /. group think.

That is the exact opposite of groupthink. That's individualthink.

Re:Glad to see some real pushback

[Anonymous Coward]

AC because I actually work there.

LoL -- So does "there" mean Google? or the NSA? Or are you admitting that you're one of these secret NSA DBA's with API access? (making "there" == both!) :S

Re:Glad to see some real pushback

[Anonymous Coward]

The question I have is where are all those libertarian wacko gun-nuts who went all frothy over the thought of asking for criminal background checks before selling firearms because they're "afraid of the 'gubmint' taking over"?

Isn't this kind of "secret information gathering" almost exactly the kind of thing that they're talking about defending against? I mean, if you're willing to go all ape-shit over the idea of a gun-registry, how the fuck are you not turning borderline-psychotic over the "we-know-everything-registry" that the NSA is compiling through this program?! and yet, they're all quiet as door mice now...

Hypocrisy inaction I suppose...

-AC

Re:Glad to see some real pushback

[Anonymous Coward]

The question I've been asking myself is this: Snowden claims that he could "get your emails, passwords, phone records, credit cards", i.e. that NSA analysts can tap into pretty much any communication and read pretty much any mail that anyone sends. If that's true, why didn't he prove that to the Guardian people before he blew his cover? If I imagine I was someone who could read anyone's mail at will, and I wanted to expose myself to an outside reporter, the least I would do is show that reporter some emails that he wrote to his wife last week, or something. Just to prove my allegations.

Maybe because Snowden hasn't worked there in a while. Tough to prove like that when you're not on the inside anymore.

Re:Glad to see some real pushback

[Anonymous Coward]

Appose is the perfect word for this. Somewhere between oppose and appease.

Re:Glad to see some real pushback

[lxs]

I think the real story is that this stuff finally provokes world wide outrage.

Re:Glad to see some real pushback

[Aqualung812]

and they would have to have the private key to Google's server certificate (or the signing certificate, if they were to perform MITM attacks)

Perhaps we're asking the wrong questions. Maybe it is true that Google never gave them access to their servers.

Has anyone asked if the government has demanded the TLS private keys? Could Google even answer that question?
Could they have just planted someone into each CA to take them? That doesn't seem that hard to do. Having top-secret clearance on your resume would help you get hired at a CA, not count against you.

Re:Glad to see some real pushback

[wootcat]

What we need is a law that allows anyone (individuals, corporations, government agencies) to inform the public of such eavesdropping, with protection and no ramifications by whatever agency is requiring them to do so. Then the NSA or whomever can't make these secret "let-us-in-and-don't-tell-anyone-or-we'll-throw-you-into-a-deep-dark-hole" demands.

Re:Glad to see some real pushback

[Anonymous Coward]

The law allows for collection of all kinds of data. Collecting all records in aggregate CAN mean something different than individual records. ...
  this is a very broad but still perfectly legal demand for data.

Whoa, wait a second... what? You started off really well there. There IS a legitimate reason for the cops to go get data about people, and the court is mostly a rubber stamp. But it all more or less works.

But then you make the magical jump to aggregated data. What? I'm sorry, no. Just because they can go get "all sorts of data" does not mean they can set up a dragnet to collect all data and then only measure the aggregate values. There is no warrant that allows the NSA to spy on EVERYONE and then just count how many times they have sex and ignore everything else. Warrants are( or should be) fairly specific about what exactly you're looking for and where. Because you have reasonable suspicion.

So no. No, if they have wholesale spying on everything, but super-duper-promise that they only use it in aggregate, that's still illegal. And to hell with having to prove that the secret spies with gag powers have abused their illegal spying. That's the biggest load of bullshit I've ever heard. If you can prove that the spies have performed illegal spying on people they're not supposed to spy on, then you have proved they have broken the law.

The loophole that they've been abusing is that they are allowed to wholecloth invasively spy on foreigners and people abroad. Which is somewhat troubling if they simply set up a deal to spy on Britans if the MI5 hands them data on US citizens. They're supposed to destroy the data if they happen across anything by US citizens, but that's probably being ignored. What's probably happening is that they set this thing up to catch ALL the data in a dragnet very-illegal sort of way for the purpose of only looking at data on foreigners. But as soon as they have their hot little hands on all that data you KNOW that someone will take a peek, it will be useful, and suddenly everyone is doing it all the time.

Re:Glad to see some real pushback

[tnk1]

So, because you can't think of a reason for them to have that space, it must be nefarious.

I can think of a lot of uses for 5 zetabytes. Most of them have to do with monitoring every other country on the planet. And that is what the NSA is actually supposed to do.

If you happened to be a foreigner to the US, I get why that would annoy you. If it makes non-US citizens feel any better, their own country is trying to do the same thing to the US and everyone else, with variable levels of success.

As for the "maybe" cases... you do recall that most of this is actually supposed to be classified. Any example where PRISM would be pivotal might also expose novel uses of the program that might be relatively trivially countered by targets, if they knew about what was being done.

I know when I play a game that I've won, I'll sometimes share details on my plan to win, especially if they were very situational, but if there is some novel or sensitive strategy that I can re-use, I'll never mention that. Half of intelligence and game playing is getting better at what you are doing, while keeping your opponents in the dark on winning strategies. If you just tell them that you used X strategy, then either a) everyone will use it in the future or b) everyone will be able to counter it.

Hey, I don't know, maybe it is an evil panopticon that they are running. However, I think it is instructive that the person who "blew this open" isn't actually an analyst who knows how this is used, but rather an IT guy who read some slides and came to his own conclusions. Do you think he was in the actual presentation where those slides were used?

Re:Glad to see some real pushback

[Anonymous Coward]

Since many more than 8 people have mod points, and the people who are mods probably fit comfortably within the supersets of people who hold either view, and further because upvotes are capped, it makes perfect sense that you could max out mod points on opposing posts.

If you wanted to see what "Slashdot" actually thinks, you need to start allowing actual votes.

I've been known to mod up posts that I don't agree with, if they are informative. If I disagree with them entirely, and they are not informative, I admit that I don't mod them up, but I don't mod them down either. Even more, I will reverse Troll or Flamebait moderations when it is clear that the post was neither, even if I completely disagree with the poster.

Re:Glad to see some real pushback

[tnk1]

I'm sure the poster has no idea how Google works.

On the other hand, I sincerely doubt that it would be particularly difficult to get that information with the right motivation and training. Most private companies have crap for security, even the ones who you would think would know better. They provide a hard shell, perhaps, but they invariably have a mushy center. It even looks like the NSA itself had a relatively mushy center.

An intelligence group like NSA with both money and people to throw at the issue would have no problem infiltrating Google or anywhere else. The reality is, however, that they probably don't go to that extent because they don't need to.

Re:Glad to see some real pushback

[tnk1]

You would just have to tap the network connections and then let the NSA's equipment do the heavy lifting. As I recall, when the US govt had equipment in AT&T's central office in SF, they used optical equipment to split the data that was coming over the fiber and funnel it straight into one of their traffic analysis supercomputers. I doubt it taxed the routers one bit. You might need to add a repeater here or there to keep the signal strong enough for transmission, but that's probably about it.

Getting access to Google's internal network would be a trickier operation, assuming they truly aren't cooperative, but it is probably feasible if you really, really wanted to and had resources and government power.

Re:Glad to see some real pushback

[tnk1]

Suffice it to say, there are probably a lot of things they could have done. There could be taps on fiber, key compromises, even plants inside the organization. Possibly all of the above.

Of course, I think it is most realistic to simply assume that companies like Google are cooperating with the government and just weaseling out of it through some sort of language acrobatics or by providing certain types of access that isn't actually handing over information, but that still allows the NSA to do it's work while Google doesn't ask too many questions.

Re:Glad to see some real pushback

[tnk1]

Or we could just repeal the legislation that makes National Security Letters have authority.

Encouraging leaks is a poor policy, mostly because it erodes trust between employer and employee. You might suggest that it is good that these people come forward, but in reality, that leaker with a conscience is no longer in the organization, and so he or she has selected themselves out of that department.

Moreover, I doubt a law is going to stop retaliation. Retaliation takes all kinds of form.

Attack the source of the issues in law, and if a whistleblower does need to come forward, then at least we know that there is no question that this stuff is illegal.

Re:Glad to see some real pushback

[tnk1]

Not sure what you're talking about. There are plenty of people pissed about this program. I'm wondering why people who are pissed about this aren't pissed about gun registries. Seems like it's the same thing, another government database on you.

Re:Glad to see some real pushback

[maharvey]

Maybe because that would be illegal, and he would be engaging in exactly the sort of abuse he is warning about? And while it's true they'll find a dozen ways to send him to prison for life, there's no reason to hand them additional ammunition on a golden platter. It would suck to get pardoned for your whistleblowing, but still go to prison for computer hacking. And the hacking angle might detract from his credibility - if Anonymous can do that, how does it prove anything about the government?

Re:Glad to see some real pushback

[dl_sledding]

Your statement inferrs that simply posing AC protects your identity on /., indicating that neither Google nor the NSA has the brains to figure out who you really are.

Calling BS on this one.

Re:Glad to see some real pushback

[Anonymous Coward]

The NSA not only has the private SSL key that Google uses (which is not that useful as Chrome uses ECDHE for forward secrecy) but they also have pretty much unfettered access to everything that uses Colossus for storage, so they can get anything they want with or without a FISA warrant.

Do you know an asshole that goes by the name of Brandon Downey? Ask him about what a joke security at Google is.

Re:Glad to see some real pushback

[multi io]

Perhaps we're asking the wrong questions. Maybe it is true that Google never gave them access to their servers.

Has anyone asked if the government has demanded the TLS private keys? Could Google even answer that question?

As I said, I don't think secret MITM attacks are viable for many connections and large amounts of traffic. And AFAIK some browsers these days (Chrome for sure) have learned from the recent Root CA disasters in that they explicitly expect some "well know" site certificates (and google.com would be one of those), so they wouldn't trust any other certificate that's been been issued to google.com and signed by a trusted root CA.

IMHO this PRISM thing does what we always more or less suspected the NSA is doing -- it intercepts large amounts of public internet traffic, and automatically or semi-automacally tries to extract intelligence from it. A lot of SMTP traffic on the public internet is still unencrypted (even Gmail still accepts incoming SMTP deliveries without requiring STARTTLS or anything like that). So there's no really big surprise, but at least now we know for sure.

Re:Glad to see some real pushback

[jma05]

Yes, I am currently a foreigner. I also lived in US, close to a decade, in the past. I would understand NSA wanting to have surveillance on countries where the US (or even its allies) has security threats from and perhaps some additional heads-up intel on the directions of foreign policy of friendly nations. Everyone does that.

What shocked me (although many of us suspected this since 2006) and everyone else is that they seem to be collecting data on EVERYONE in them, not just suspects or governments; and they are archiving it all. I would not be surprised at all if US monitored governments and significant foreign actors, but blanket data collection on regular foreign citizens (these are not just communications with US residents, but all email of people simply using US based email and other services from their own countries) is unheard of. This is quite at odds with the policies of all modern democracies to date. If you cannot relate to it, imagine how US would react if China or Russia were found to have grabbed private emails of all US citizens, mainly to mop up their own dissidents, but will keep all other email as well, you know... just in case. Would you still call this a "game" and a "winning strategy"?

NSA previously clearly and repeatedly stated that they well understood that they were not allowed by law, to have domestic US population under surveillance. I am not sure how you can defend domestic surveillance of this nature by simply saying that this is how things work in a cloak and dagger world. I thought there was an explicit legal separation of duties between national and international security agencies in US after previous fiascoes.

And if I understand US law correctly, congressional committees are not allowed to make up secret laws that clearly violate the constitution to legalize such things, without amending the constitution first - that would be null and void. Now that there is documentary evidence of constitutional violations, it will go to supreme court. ACLU already filed the case.

Tell me, do you think it is OK for some congressional committee to make a secret law to allow a gun registry so that it may save lives? Or is only the fourth amendment expendable? One can't just "classify" away constitutional violations. A citizen's duty to the constitution overrides duty to any NDA. In this way, Snowden is an American patriot, however expensive and inconvenient his actions will end up as. No one said running a democracy is supposed to be easy.

> I know when I play a game that I've won, I'll sometimes share details on my plan to win, especially if they were very situational, but if there is some novel or sensitive strategy that I can re-use, I'll never mention that.

No one cares about your strategy secrets. There are still some very basic *rules* of the game you need to adhere to if you want to be seen as a player. Loading the dice isn't a "strategy".

> isn't actually an analyst who knows how this is used

Well, he is hardly the only one. There have been other high-level, very experienced, whistle-blowers (Binney, Drake) who opined the same. The new whistle blower just produced concrete documentary evidence such that there may be a proper legal challenge. Tell me, how do you differentiate the morality and conduct of this guy from that of Daniel Ellsberg?

I don't believe I have these views just because I am a foreigner or have views from a minority. So far, I see that the guy who invented the Web, the guy who wrote the Patriot Act and the guy who leaked the Pentagon Papers (and considered a courageous hero, once passions cooled down), all think this is out of line and not in the long-term interests of the health of American democracy and freedoms.

Seriously, US is supposed to be lecturing the developing world about the rule of law, individual freedoms etc, not the other way around.

Oh the ironi...

[Anonymous Coward]

My ironi meter just exploted.

Re:Oh the ironi...

[Anonymous Coward]

So did my ESL meter. I think you mean "irony". That was a good post in theory.

stopwatching.us?

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh, I like to look up the lyrics for lily allen's fuck you, when I think my boss/coworkers lose out to the voyeurism fetish.

Facebook and Google and the NSA

[bl968]

I have been thinking about the claims by Facebook and Google that no government agencies have direct access to their servers, and that is likely quite correct.

What they do most likely have, is a tap point on Facebook's and Google's networks which can then snoop on all traffic between their servers and their users and visa versa then ship it off en masse to the NSA for processing and storage... So their statements while technically true, are still intentionally false and misleading.

It's been well known that the government has had these taps on the major phone company networks and the internet backbone for years.

Re:Facebook and Google and the NSA

[Synerg1y]

I read about this somewhere... they use a web crawler to get the PUBLIC data, private data requires court order, which is liberally given at the slightest suspicion of anything (remember that case w the teen girl and judge ordering her to give up her facebook password randomly?).

Also, the Utah datacenter was in the news a year or two ago, people didn't make a big deal of it then, even though it was correctly (now known) guessed that it would be used for mass surveillance.

They can just intercept everything else by hijacking an IX.

Re:Facebook and Google and the NSA

[bl968]

If that was the case then the NSA slides would not have listed both Google and Facebook as being onboard and partners in their PRISM system.

Re:Facebook and Google and the NSA

[CanHasDIY]

If that was the case then the NSA slides would not have listed both Google and Facebook as being onboard and partners in their PRISM system.

Unless that 'revelation' was intentional misdirection.

Re:Facebook and Google and the NSA

[Anonymous Coward]

They will continue to say 'no direct access' or whatever other prepared 'legal' bullshit re-definition of common sense they've cooked up.

They bottom line is that they are blatantly violating the constitution and directly offending virtually every single American in this country. This is a clear and present a danger to personal freedom as there can be.

Everyone should take an hour this weekend and use to the internet to see what their sitting reps and senators voted on atrocities like the Patriot Act, etc.

Vote these people out. Then demand that whomever takes their place repeal all of this garbage. Then we can move on to the bankers...

Re:Facebook and Google and the NSA

[Jonah Hex]

They are probably directed as part of the Special Source Ops program to tell the NSA version of the truth. If you are legally obligated to lie, to tell only the truth the government wants out there, you'd have to talk around it in order to promote change. So they are being false and misleading because they legally can't do anything else. They need to work in allegory and talk about aspects of it that they can talk about it in public. - HEX

Re:Facebook and Google and the NSA

[negRo_slim]

I have been thinking about the claims by Facebook and Google that no government agencies have direct access to their servers, and that is likely quite correct.

What they do most likely have, is a tap point on Facebook's and Google's networks which can then snoop on all traffic between their servers and their users and visa versa then ship it off en masse to the NSA for processing and storage... So their statements while technically true, are still intentionally false and misleading.

It's been well known that the government has had these taps on the major phone company networks and the internet backbone for years.

I've been feeling that they are liking arguing semantics. Sure the government doesn't have direct access but a 3rd party does and via perhaps their data the government gets what it wants or something a long those lines.

Re:Facebook and Google and the NSA

[Branciforte]

Because, as we all know, it is impossible to use powerpoint to create a presentation that is not the complete truth. It is not possible that someone was describing a system that they would like to have. Since it is powerpoint, it must be the truth.

Re:Facebook and Google and the NSA

[meta-monkey]

"Of course we don't have direct access! Internets go through routers."

Re:Facebook and Google and the NSA

[vettemph]

And why does traceroute show that EVERYTHING I ever trace goes through Washington, Ashburn VA. or McLean VA.

  I usually use the 'mtr' command (linux). I've been seeing this for years and have always been suspicious about it.
  The FBI wants us to report suspicious activity in case of terrorists. Well, I find this suspicious.

Re:Facebook and Google and the NSA

[Curunir_wolf]

Actually, they don't need access to Google and Facebook data, they have direct access to all communications at the connection points.

Re:Facebook and Google and the NSA

[The_Wilschon]

That's why we need to keep people from switching to LibreOffice. They've never quite managed to implement a TruthFilter(TM) like MS Powerpoint has.

Re:Facebook and Google and the NSA

[BitterOak]

I have been thinking about the claims by Facebook and Google that no government agencies have direct access to their servers, and that is likely quite correct.

What they do most likely have, is a tap point on Facebook's and Google's networks which can then snoop on all traffic between their servers and their users and visa versa then ship it off en masse to the NSA for processing and storage...

But most traffic to and from Facebook and Google now is SSL encrypted. So the questions is, has Google and/or Facebook provided the government with the means to decrypt it?

Re:Facebook and Google and the NSA

[jdogalt]

this

we are not crazy. They are misleading us, and it gets insane when they feel so guilty that have to resort to these tactics.

Re:Facebook and Google and the NSA

[Charliemopps]

What they do most likely have, is a tap point on Facebook's and Google's networks

You're way over-thinking this. The NSA just sends their DBA's over to google with fake credentials. They get hired based on their stellar work history. Then they create accounts with full access to Googles APIs and hand them over to the NSA. The NSA can run any query they want against googles data. They can even CHANGE it. It would be a trivial thing to do and would only be noticed if the traffic was excessive. I doubt there's any query that Google would even bat an eyelash at given their size.

Re:Facebook and Google and the NSA

[Anonymous Coward]

But most traffic to and from Facebook and Google now is SSL encrypted. So the questions is, has Google and/or Facebook provided the government with the means to decrypt it?

Maybe, but it's not necessary for Google or Facebook to provide the means. If the government (or any other powerful entity) decided you were noteworthy, and therefore decided to MitM you, they could have any of a dozen .. a hundred? .. any of a great many CAs issue a fake Google or Facebook cert, and your web browser would likely treat the sudden change of keys as a complete non-event. This type of attack wouldn't work in general (e.g. vs ssh) but against popular web browsers? No problem.

A PGP user from around 1990 (approximately) with a rule of "need 3 moderately trusted introducers to count as trusted" had better tech than our browsers have today. Imagine opening a time tunnel to that 1990 user, and telling him to mark a hundred random strangers that he knows nothing about, has never met, as "fully trusted." He'd laugh in your face. He'd say, "Oh, you're with the government." He'd marvel at how our ciphers got better and our key exchange got worse, making all the crypo tech so meaningless and irrelevant.

Re:Facebook and Google and the NSA

[Anonymous Coward]

Could be a quirk of your ISP. Heck, back when I was a network technician (2000) I remember there being a case where a misconfigured route caused many of our customers to have all of their data routed through the Chicago datacenter of the large telco that bought us. We were located in the Bay Area. Funny little anecdote, we probably would never have noticed it if it weren't for a complaint we got from someone who threatened to cancel his service after players on his Unreal Tournament server started griping about higher ping times.

Re:Facebook and Google and the NSA

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

> Unless that 'revelation' was intentional misdirection.

Doubt it. This isn't cold war spy-vs-spy stuff with levels on levels and double and triple agents. The "enemy" is a bunch of random dudes with basically no espionage capability - the idea of al qaeda or even the muslim brotherhood infiltrating anything in the US is just patently absurd. There is no reason for internal NSA documents to contain misleading information because there is no one to mislead - they get to straight out lie in testimony to congress, that's more than enough misdirection to cover any plausible risk.

Re:Facebook and Google and the NSA

[asmkm22]

Without knowing what the other 37 slides show, it's hard to say.

Re:Facebook and Google and the NSA

[highvista63]

There was an interview this morning on NPR with James Bamford where he claims the NSA has prisms installed on major fiber optic backbones to get their own duplicate direct feeds. So that's why they call the operation "Prism". See http://www.npr.org/2013/06/11/190601064/nsa-collects-massive-amounts-of-data-then-what.

Re:Facebook and Google and the NSA

[Anonymous Coward]

The 'spy' wouldn't be an 'enemy agent', but rather a leaker, whom this would be flushing out, with sufficiently juicy 'info'. If true, within a couple weeks the fallout will have been easily managed, the assumptions dismissed, the leaker caught, the eff et al made to look like fools.

Maybe not likely, but in the consideration still.

Re:Facebook and Google and the NSA

[Anonymous Coward]

He lost me at "this software is looking at the speed of light..." (though the NSA secret room is real it was discover by AT&T employee, Mark Klein)

The reallity is that they are storing everything, and at a latter stage, through data mining, they access the data in any way they want it to. In a time line way, in a personal profile way, they can compare profiles in a time line so they know if they were interacting in some way, etc. This became public thanks to a previous NSA's whistleblower William Binney

Re:Facebook and Google and the NSA

[Anonymous Coward]

Vote these people out.

I'm getting tired of hearing this. We did "vote these people out" and got Barack Obama. The guy flat out lied. He lied about warrentless wiretaps. He lied about closing gitmo. He lied about ending the Iraq war. The solution isn't vote him out. The solution is throw him out. Impeach the son of a bitch.

Re:Facebook and Google and the NSA

[stanIyb]

I'm getting tired of hearing this. We did "vote these people out" and got Barack Obama.

There's your problem. You're not supposed to vote out republicans and then vote democrats in; in matters such as these, they're more or less the same.

Re:Facebook and Google and the NSA

[kllrnohj]

I've been feeling that they are liking arguing semantics. Sure the government doesn't have direct access but a 3rd party does and via perhaps their data the government gets what it wants or something a long those lines.

That's because you *want* that to be true to justify your initial emotional reaction. Google has very clearly stated that nothing of the sort is happening. They are not playing words games in the slightest. There is no broad data dump - not directly, not "indirectly" (which is a stupid argument in the first place), nothing. The other companies have said similar things. Nobody is arguing semantics. PRISM as it was initially reported simply doesn't exist.

Seriously, the initial reports were just *wrong*, flat out. Anyone with half a brain could easily see that if they bothered to look. If the slides meant what they were initially reported on it would be the single greatest feat in the history of mankind as the budget was listed at $20M.

Re:Facebook and Google and the NSA

[anagama]

Well, considering the Feds admitted it was true, I think we can drop this line of thought.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/07/clapper-secret-nsa-surveillance-prism

Re:Facebook and Google and the NSA

[kllrnohj]

You're way over-thinking this. The NSA just sends their DBA's over to google with fake credentials. They get hired based on their stellar work history. Then they create accounts with full access to Googles APIs and hand them over to the NSA. The NSA can run any query they want against googles data. They can even CHANGE it. It would be a trivial thing to do and would only be noticed if the traffic was excessive. I doubt there's any query that Google would even bat an eyelash at given their size.

That would be damn near impossible. Do you really think Google has no security whatsoever on API access much less data access? I'm pretty sure if the new hire goes to the security team and says "hey, let me punch a hole in the network to the outside world for this API. Oh, and I need also need to approve this API to access all this data" they aren't just going to blindly say "sure thing, no problem!"

Re:Facebook and Google and the NSA

[Anonymous Coward]

While I do believe they have their own people in companies like Google as you describe, I'm pretty convinced that they also tap into all data streams in and out - in their entirety, including access to encrypted content by means of bogus certificates and MitM attacks.

Why? It's more consistent with NSA's history and the way they are thinking. They are already tapping directly into all sorts of foreign networks, so why not domestic ones? Remember the rumors about a "total information awareness" program whose existence politicians and officials denied so vigourously?

Re:Facebook and Google and the NSA

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody gets hired at google "based on their stellar work history" - you actually have to be good and show it in the interview.

On top of that, there is so much access control and auditing internal applications and protocols that it is essentially impossible to covertly access data that you're not supposed to have access to.

- Ex-Googler

Re:Facebook and Google and the NSA

[Charliemopps]

When the guy on the security team works for the NSA as well? Yes, he'll say exactly that.

Re:Facebook and Google and the NSA

[Branciforte]

All the Feds admitted was that they obtained information from those companies, which everyone already knew. And the Feds admitted that the program was called Prism. Nothing was said about "direct access" to servers at those companies.

Military contractors are probably the least honest people on Earth. It sounds like someone was putting a bullshit sales pitch together, when our "hero" took it for the truth and released it to the general public.

Re:Facebook and Google and the NSA

[Anonymous Coward]

He lied about closing gitmo

I know it doesn't suit your right-wing bias, but he's TRIED to close Gitmo a few times, except that the Republican House of Congress has defunded every such attempt. (I'm reasonably sure, tho not certain, that this is also true of getting out of Iraq).

Unfortunately, he can't close it because REPUBLICANS won't let him (and he's even gone on TV to ASK them to approve the funding to close it, but I realise you probably didn't see THAT on FAUX News)...

I'm with ya on wiretaps and drones tho: he's shown repeatedly that he's more of a near-center conservative than anything approximating an actual liberal...

-AC

Re:Facebook and Google and the NSA

[Anonymous Coward]

"The reallity is that they are storing everything, and at a latter stage, through data mining, they access the data in any way they want it to." If I recall correctly when the government was applying "enhanced interrogation" techniques, they hired private contractors to turn the screws... no culpability under the law for government employees. All the info regarding the leaks and PRISM -- I think that we are seeing half-truths. Sure... the alphabet soup agencies may only be collecting aggregate metadata... they would pass the job on to private contractors for really intrusive data.

Re:Facebook and Google and the NSA

[Anonymous Coward]

You fail to understand the scope of what you're up against. Every employee at Google is perfect? Is uncorruptable?

Re:Facebook and Google and the NSA

[tnk1]

Yes, the Republicans did that, but no, I doubt that would stop Obama from closing it if he really wanted to. Please don't tell me that he couldn't find the money to ship a few hundred people to some jail cells somewhere else. And if he fiddled with the budgets to do it, do you seriously believe that anyone would get enough votes to impeach him?

The problem is that I think Obama and every one on his staff knows that he can't close it, or stop the drone programs or anything else. The alternative is to simply state that he can't prevent terrorism at the level that we expect him to without those programs. While some of this stuff is overkill, the reality is that people would be asking "what the hell is the government doing?" if they didn't show that they were working on these problems.

Most people don't care that there are people in Gitmo. Not really. They just don't like that it makes us look bad. They also don't really care about people being blown up by drone strikes, at least, not enough to put humans on the ground who have a *slightly* better chance at separating the combatants from the non-combatants.

What are the other options? There is only one. Accept that people are going to die to terrorist attacks unless we run programs like this. And personally, if someone said that to me, I would say that I can accept that. However, most people can not or will not do that. Please don't tell me that you're somehow going to stop terrorist attacks without killing the people who are planning them, or incarcerating them somehow. And don't tell me that you're going to be able to pick them out of a population without a very strong level of surveillance.

I have only one problem with many people who complain about these programs. The want to have their cake and eat it too. I think they need to choose, and personally, I think that the best choice is to man up and accept that if you want to have your rights, you need to be willing to accept the lack of efficiency that they force upon your government. And that's fine with me.

Re:Facebook and Google and the NSA

[vettemph]

I was seeing this at my old house via earthlink/covad DSL.
Now I see it with Comcast.

Re:Facebook and Google and the NSA

[kllrnohj]

So at this point your claim is basically "Google is run entirely by the NSA"

Speaking of which, can I borrow some tinfoil? You clearly have a good stockpile, and I don't feel like running to the store right now.

Impeach Obama!

[Anonymous Coward]

And grab Bush Jr for a bit of justice while you're at it.
 
These guys need to see the inside of a cell for the rest of their lives.

Re:Impeach Obama!

[Anonymous Coward]

While it might be logical and judicial to impeach Obama for this, in a colorblind way, I think we need to remember that his is the first non-white male leader of a nation with a relatively recent history of slavery against a large portion of his racial heritage.

What exactly was the point of bringing up his race again? Who cares if he's non-white or a KIA hamster?

I myself therapeutically grow cannabis in the Free State of Kansas.

Hate to break it to you, but we can sort of tell...

Re:Impeach Obama!

[Virtucon]

And Dianne Feinstein and every Senate and House Intelligence Committee member who's voted for the budget and specifically been briefed on these programs.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/09/dianne-feinstein-nsa_n_3412026.html

Democratic Dianne Feinstein of California, contends the program helped disrupt a 2009 plot to bomb New York City's subways and played a role in the case against an American who scouted targets in Mumbai, India, before a deadly terrorist attack there in 2008.

She knew about it and trust me most of the members of congress all knew about this so if they show surprise now, trust me it's probably an act.

All the purse strings are controlled by congress and this $80 Billion we spend on intelligence gathering starts over there at that little domed place on the hill. Sure, the administration puts budget requests together and says "mother may I" from congress to get the money to spend. The whole provisions around the FISA court should also be scrutinized since it's "Secret" and it failed to not approve any request from any Intelligence agency last year, at all. A system like that doesn't sound to me like a valid check against authoritarian motives of collecting information even in the name of "The war on terror."

Re:Impeach Obama!

[Toonol]

There comes a point where, in your desire to avoid it, you inadvertently circle around to blatant racism again; you've hit that point.

It should be illegal but isn't, that's the problem

[Faizdog]

One of the best comments was from John Oliver on the Daily Show. In response to Obama's defense that there is the FISA court overseeing this and that member's of congress are briefed, he said great, so it's not just one branch of government acting improperly, all 3 are! That's supposed to be better (me paraphrasing). It's not that these programs aren't illegal, it's the very fact that they aren't that's a problem! (Or aren't considered illegal by the government, many would argue they are illegal in sight of the Constitution).

I'm usually a big government, bleeding heart liberal, but not in the areas of governmental police powers (monitoring citizens, etc). Basically, if the government is helping it's citizens, I support that (healthcare, etc) but if it's looking at it's citizens to protect itself, I don't like that at all.

Here are 2 quotes that were on /. yesterday:
"The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government."
-Patrick Henry

"The liberties of a people never were, nor ever will be, secure, when the transactions of their rulers may be concealed from them."
Patrick Henry

Tech Industry, Take Note from the Gun Industry

[cervesaebraciator]

If you're concerned about customer pushback from this surveillance, support the EFF like the gun industry supports the NRA. May the EFF be as effective in defending our first and fourth amendment rights as the NRA is at going after any opposition to the second.

Re:Tech Industry, Take Note from the Gun Industry

[meta-monkey]

I don't think you understand. The Internet has been militarized. The tech companies are now defense contractors.

Re:Tech Industry, Take Note from the Gun Industry

[Anonymous Coward]

And that would be all fine and dandy, if the users were the customer, not the product.

Re:Tech Industry, Take Note from the Gun Industry

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of the people against this spying are gun grabbing pussy idiots so that won't work.

Re:Tech Industry, Take Note from the Gun Industry

[Anonymous Coward]

I support giving a muzzleloader to every member of the militia.
Long live the second ammendment.

Re:Tech Industry, Take Note from the Gun Industry

[Anonymous Coward]

The internet has been re-militarized and all the involved tech companies are once again defense contractors. Not making any point it's just amusing.

Re:Tech Industry, Take Note from the Gun Industry

[Aug Leopold]

Then I guess you must be happy with PRISM because the definitions of certain words and terms changed over 250 years and because electronic data didn't exist in the 18th century.

Re:Tech Industry, Take Note from the Gun Industry

[felrom]

You missed the mark on two related points, but your heart is in the right place:

First, the NRA is monstrously powerful not because of the gun industry support. I mean, they give a lot of money to the NRA, but it pales in comparison to the donations from 5,000,000+ members. Secondly, it's not the tech industry that needs to take note, it's people who need to take note.

Look at the SOPA internet blackout. It worked, not because some of the major tech companies grudgingly signed on late in the planning stage in order to not lose face, but because of all the people who pulled down their individual websites, wrote congresspeople, and got involved. People did that. Not the tech companies.

So yes, much can be learned from the NRA, and the first lesson is that it's the people who have the power, not the companies. An EFF with 5 million active supporters would be as much of a beast in Washington as the NRA is.

Re:Tech Industry, Take Note from the Gun Industry

[cervesaebraciator]

[...] your heart is in the right place [...] Thanks for that. I also recognize what you say here while posting in another recent article. I would love nothing better than that proponents of internet freedom should be as enthusiastic (and willing to give money) as proponents of gun rights. Yet since the article was chiefly concerned with the industry, I directed my comment to the same. I really do dislike how the media speaks of "the gun lobby" and "the gun industry" in the same breath, as though the NRA didn't also represent a load of genuinely concerned citizens. Indeed, the NRA's attack ads against politicians as 'anti-gun' would be to little avail if voters didn't care about the issue. Yet as much as it will take out individual efforts to ensure that our first and fourth amendment rights remain secure (I guess I should also add fifth given the recent encryption question), it would also be a great boon if we had industry support. For the moment, freedom lovers, privacy advocates (at least from government intrusion) and many of the large internet companies have a shared interest in preserving freedom online. Would that all recognized common interests when they converge!

Re:Tech Industry, Take Note from the Gun Industry

[swillden]

First, the NRA is monstrously powerful not because of the gun industry support. I mean, they give a lot of money to the NRA, but it pales in comparison to the donations from 5,000,000+ members.

The gun industry provides approximately 3% of the NRA's annual revenues.

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/12/whom-does-the-nra-really-speak-for/266373/

Re:Tech Industry, Take Note from the Gun Industry

[cervesaebraciator]

Thanks for the link. I'd often heard (and crunching membership numbers and dues figured) that the bulk of their funds come from individual contributions rather than industry efforts. I'm wondering about the 3% number you're giving though.

Those membership rolls are also the NRA's financial backbone. According to its public tax returns, the group raked in $228 million worth of revenue in 2010. That included about $106 million from membership dues and fees alone, along with about $18 million from educational services. It made another $20.9 million by selling advertising in its publications, such as American Rifleman and American Hunter, largely to gun companies looking to market their gear (despite all those ad buys, the titles still appear to run at a loss). [...] Between then and 2011, the Violence Policy Center estimates that the firearms industry donated as much as $38.9 million to the NRA's coffers.

With those numbers (being generous and excluding the ad sales) would leave us with 38.9/228 for a hair over 17%. The only other number I can find that might give what you indicate is here:

Together with other companies that have joined the effort, MidWay has helped collect more than $9 million for NRA. MidWay's owner, Larry Pottfield, also happens to be the the group's largest individual donor.

That would give us 3.947%. But that's only what's provided by one group organized by Midway, a retailer. Your point, that the industry provides a minority of funds relative to individual contributions, stands but I must ask if I'm missing something in your reasoning.

Re:Tech Industry, Take Note from the Gun Industry

[Patch86]

Are you claiming that the gun industry hasn't been militarized?

Re:Tech Industry, Take Note from the Gun Industry

[swillden]

Notice that the $38.9M figure is a total for the years 2005-2011. I assumed those donations were spread evenly over the six years, giving an annual figure of $6.48M. 6.48/228 = 2.8%, which I rounded to 3%.

Re:Tech Industry, Take Note from the Gun Industry

[swillden]

I should mention that I thought it rather... sneaky... of the journalist to present annual values for all of the other elements, but a multi-year aggregate number for the industry donations. It seems like he was trying to make the industry donations look far larger than they are.

Re:Tech Industry, Take Note from the Gun Industry

[cervesaebraciator]

I see where you're coming from. Somehow I neglected the "between then and [...]". I don't think I'd average it out like that though. Particularly now that I followed the links they gave in the article. The $38.9M number comes from a Violence Policy Center study entitled "Bloodmoney". Here's the relevant portion, quoted from the fourth page in the pdf:

Contributions to the NRA from the firearms industry since 2005 total between $14.7 million and $38.9 million.

The figure is repeated on the pdf's ninth page (numbered 6):

Contributions to the NRA from the firearms industry since 2005 total between $14.7 million and $38.9 million.

The article takes these numbers and turns it into "as much as $38.9 million". Given a second look, I might even suspect your guess was generous.

It doesn't just seem sneaky; it was an conscious decision on the author's part. An author is perfectly justified in saying "as much as" when the range is relatively restricted. But when they lower end of the range is only worth 38% of the figure given, an author only leaves it out by choice.

I admit that I didn't read closely enough the first time to catch the "between then and [...]". Sloppy reading; summer does that to me. But really this article wasn't written for me anyway. Following the headline, "Whom does the NRA really speak for?", the section names IT SPEAKS FOR JOE SIX-SHOOTER, IT SPEAKS FOR GUN MAKERS, and IT SPEAKS FOR RIGHT-WING IDEOLOGUES, left me disposed to assume that I was not the intended audience. The intended audience here wants to see the role of gun manufacturers inflated as much as possible. Sure, the author concludes: "It would be reductive to call it a mere corporate lobbyist." But what he could mean by, "in any event, it's clear the NRA isn't just representing your average Joe Six-Shooter" is mystifying unless his precise intention to leave the impression that the NRA does not represent your hunting, target shooting, or pro-2nd amendment but otherwise likable neighbor (whom he nonetheless scurrilously labels "Joe Six-Shooter") as some evil interests, in it for the money. The target audience is one that wishes to believe this. I have to say, however, that this is a step up from the report the article cites, which claims:

The mutually dependent nature of the National Rifle Association and the gun industry explains the NRA’s unwillingness to compromise on even the most limited controls over firearms or related products (such as restrictions on high-capacity ammunition magazines) and its support of legislation that clearly favors gunmakers over gun owners (such as legislation limiting the legal rights of gun owners killed or injured by defective firearms). The NRA claims that its positions are driven solely by a concern for the interests of gun owners, never mentioning its own financial stake in protecting the profits of its gun industry patrons.

They say this as though manufacturers aren't just as happy to sell us three 10 round magazines rather than one 30 round magazine. And, further, as though gun owners and sellers might not have some interests in common (I suppose they would think people wouldn't want vegetables if it weren't for the profit-seeking efforts of grocers). I came away from reading their report rather surprised about how little certain companies care about the matter (sub $100k include: Browning, DPMS, Glock, S&W, Cheaper than Dirt (okay, not much of a surprise there), H&R, Hornady, Marlin, Remington, Sig--most of whom are plastered on the front of the report). Thanks for the link, in any case. The report had its opposite intended effect and in spite of their best efforts (and my lazy reading) I may have come away knowing more than than I did before.

Re:Tech Industry, Take Note from the Gun Industry

[swillden]

Thanks for the deeper reading. I looked through it quickly, just for the numbers, did my calculation and said "In other words, not much", and left it there. But clearly the article was far more deceptive than I had realized.

In other words...

[Trashcan Romeo]

"Please help us not look like your bitch."

So how aren't they spying on US citizens?

[BUL2294]

Given everything that I've heard about PRISM over the past few days, I have one major question...

How do they know who is a US citizen and who isn't?

I don't remember being asked nor answering a "citizenship question" when signing up for GMail, Hotmail, Facebook, Skype, YouTube, etc. Is the NSA data matching names to (known) citizens and throwing out that data? Kinda tough to accurately do so for the "Bill Smiths" of the world, not all of which live in the US. Are they building a profile of everyone by address, thus assuming US residents are "citizens"? If I set up a fake Hotmail account as "Bubbles Sanchez" and say I live in Miami (and my ISP says I'm in Miami), does that make me and my data a "citizen" in the eyes of the NSA?

Or are they simply vacuuming up everything from these sites and TELLING US they're not looking at US citizens' data, simply because they don't have a decent way (let alone a fool-proof one) to tell who is a citizen or not?

Re:So how aren't they spying on US citizens?

[BUL2294]

Oh wait... According to John Oliver, if some NSA system gives me a 51% "foreignness" rating, I must be a foreigner and not a US citizen.

Well, I feel confident...

Re:So how aren't they spying on US citizens?

[PolygamousRanchKid]

They have ways of knowing who is a US citizens . . . but those ways . . . are, like, secret . . . you know . . . ?

Re:So how aren't they spying on US citizens?

[NatasRevol]

Did they say they weren't looking at US citizens' data?

I understood that they said they were getting meta-data on everyone. Period.

And that it was legal because some BS rubber stamp court said so.

Re:So how aren't they spying on US citizens?

[BUL2294]

No, they don't. Sure, those born in the USA in a hospital and those who have passports are generally known. But there are people who don't know they even are American citizens, as they were born in a foreign country & had one parent who might dual-citizenship, yet have never set foot on American soil... I doubt the NSA knows those peoples' names & doubtful they're throwing out data associated with those people... I doubt the NSA knows unless the IRS comes knocking on those (unknown) citizens' doorsteps. (Happens to Canadians all the time...)

IIRC, one of the people who was supposed to be sent to Guantanamo a decade ago turned out to be a US citizen (by birth)--he even had no idea...

Re:So how aren't they spying on US citizens?

[Curunir_wolf]

How do they know who is a US citizen and who isn't?

Check out the Daily Show video and the clip they show from MS NBC, they're basically flipping a coin. 51% accuracy.

Re:So how aren't they spying on US citizens?

[cervesaebraciator]

They'll all know when they start getting bills for back taxes from the IRS.

Re:So how aren't they spying on US citizens?

[quarterbuck]

One thing that is known about Google is that it always keeps a record of the location an account was created in. If you created a Google account in Pakistan and moved to US for 10 years and then deleted all your emails at end of 10 years and then logged in to the account from UK, Google still will remember that this account was tied to a Pakistani user.
Maybe they use it to determine nationality ? Or maybe they assume you are an alien unless proved otherwise (credit cards, mobile numbers etc.?)

Re:So how aren't they spying on US citizens?

[cervesaebraciator]

You're getting the surveillance efforts mixed up--perfectly understandable given how fast this stuff's been coming out. He's talking about PRISM, a program whereby the NSA is able to obtain "email, video and voice chat, videos, photos, voice over IP conversations, file transfers, login notifications and social networking details." This is what the apologists would have you think does not cover everyone. You're thinking of the related FISA requests to Verizon, which covers more or less everyone.

Re:So how aren't they spying on US citizens?

[Anonymous Coward]

Some keywords for 'foreignness':

eh
spanner
farfegnugen

Re:So how aren't they spying on US citizens?

[coma_bug]

How do they know who is a US citizen and who isn't?

The fourth amendment protects all people, not just citizens:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

As Glenn Greenwald explains, "persons" and "citizens" have entirely different meanings in the Constitution.

Re:So how aren't they spying on US citizens?

[Patch86]

Are you implying that you're OK with your government massively invading MY privacy (as a UK citizen), as long as you're alright Jack? Nice to know that this isn't a moral issue of Orwellian abuse for you, but just a selfish desire to keep the thugs from your own front door.

I also hope you're OK with foreign governments returning the favour and monitoring your very move. Your definitely won't be complaining about having your rights violated if it's a British or Chinese agency reading your every email and logging your every phone call, right?

Re:So how aren't they spying on US citizens?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I mean, what are the odds that the NSA trades info with the MI5?

Re:So how aren't they spying on US citizens?

[Patch86]

High:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-22813893

Re:So how aren't they spying on US citizens?

[jammer170]

Whether I like it or not, I do expect foreign governments are (at least attempting) to watch any American citizen they have an interest in. That's the way spying and espionage works, and has worked for every country that is or has been in existence. If you honestly believe the UK does not have it's own intelligence services doing the exact same thing, then you are in for a very rude shock in the future. Hell, didn't you guys come up with James Bond, who is based in part on the very real life of Ian Fleming?

While prior to this point lack of resources have prevented foreign governments from collecting data on everyone, that is simply no longer the case. I suspect random bits of my internet history is sitting in many foreign governments' systems (and many foreign citizens' internet histories are sitting in American systems). However, there is a key differences between my government having my data and some foreign government having my data. The Chinese, Russian, UK, Australian, and other governments have very little control over me, and I don't have much control over them. So while I'm not really happy about it, I'm not really all that concerned about it either.

However, my government does have some control over me, and I it. That makes us, to some degree, adversaries. As the recent revelations about the IRS illegally targeting political groups contrary to the current government, there is reason for politicians to find information about me and use it to try to disenfranchise me, either directly by finding some act I have performed that can be construed as illegal, or else behind the scenes through blackmail, manipulation, or frustration. Further, the American constitution explicitly prevents collection of information about American citizens anywhere and anyone in America regardless of citizenship status, except in very specific circumstances (usually requiring a warrant) - something other countries don't necessarily have. So there are many reasons why I am okay with your privacy being violated by my government, and mine not. In a perfect world, I'd prefer no one's privacy being violated, but I don't live in a perfect world.

Of course, it is really hypocritical for a citizen of the UK complaining about privacy violations by a foreign government, given how your government has been increasing surveillance of their own citizens with very little outcry.

Re:So how aren't they spying on US citizens?

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL, you're exactly the kind of person that should be getting their data mined by the NSA. You're a fucking non-US citizen using a US-based service. And you still feel entitled to not be spied upon?

God damn, you eurotrash fags are the epitome of self-entitlement.

And as for your second point: I don't do business with any European countries. Why would I? Why don't you fuck off our services while you're at it.

Re:So how aren't they spying on US citizens?

[Anonymous Coward]

Which makes me wonder why they're doing it this way at all. I mean, we know they've been skirting the rules, having UK spy on US citizens, and US spy on UK, then trade info. Why not keep doing that? This doesn't have anything to do with surveillance. I think they leaked it on purpose, cause they already knew USians are too stupid to care. Now, they can do it in the open.

Re:So how aren't they spying on US citizens?

[Anonymous Coward]

if it's a British or Chinese agency reading your every email and logging your every phone call, right?

And actually listening your every phone conversation, routinely bugging your hotel room and re-planting the bugs once you have removed them, while the floor monitors report your every moves outside your room and agents follow your around to see if you talk to the wrong people, go to the wrong places, or point your camera, which you shouldn't really even have, to the wrong directions. Fortunately the Cold War is over.
  Oh..wait, there is a new global war now, the war against people in the wrong places and undisturbed optical cables.

Re:So how aren't they spying on US citizens?

[metaforest]

If you are in the US you have the freedoms of the Constitution. Regardless of nationality. Being present in the Nation is all that is required to protect you. Now the TLAs want to roll that back.... documented citizens are the collateral damage.

WTF is going on?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have just tried to add my signature from two different IP addresses and, in both cases, I am told that I have already signed this petition.

Re:WTF is going on?

[Toonol]

I just signed it, worked ok. Had to create an account; first petition I've ever signed. I think they're generally nonsense, but this issue has raised my hackles enough I'm going to do all the nutty 'awareness raising' I can.

Sure, complain about it now.

[Anonymous Coward]

We've all known that this stuff has being going on for at least a decade. There were lively discussions about it here then.
Why is everyone so suddenly concerned about it now?

There's nothing special about this new revelation other than a bit of a media campaign. Please, continue to be outraged. Someone payed good money to make sure you feel that way.

Re:Sure, complain about it now.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not excusing the behavior. Those are your words. I'm nobody. You're paranoid.
This story is old, like I said, about a decade old.

The current media barrage includes the MSM. Lots of outrage is being manufactured. It's being spewed all over the social media landscape. All the earmarks of a social media manipulation campaign are here.

It's nice that you feel strongly about this issue, and it is a just cause. Just don't forget in your passion that you might be manipulated.

While it's nice that this is out in the open all of a sudden, people really should have being paying attention a decade ago. Instead they called me a terrorist lover and un-american. Today I shrug and say "Told you so".. And then you spit in my face when I tell you about the next way you're being conned. Oh well. I'm used to it.

If I were to guess at the real meaning of recent events.. I'd say it's an attempt to create a feeling of big govt paranoia and mistrust among conservatives. This, Benghazi (or however its spelled), the IRS non-story, are a planed sequence of events to attempt to rile up the teapartiers and company for the coming elections. Nothing more.

Re:Sure, complain about it now.

[jdogalt]

best 4 score 0 post thread I've read ever probably. Lets enjoy this spectacle while it lasts. I for one, will pray that things get more better than worse. I say the three of us form a fake betting pool for fun, speculating on when the next spectacle will be, that involves the govt engaging in slurping mic and camvideo data from mobile phones when they are not making calls. We can make a seperate pool for when the next spectacle after that happens, and it is discovered that they have been slurping the same sensor data while the phone is allegedly 'off' (soft-off reprogrammed to be a black-screen, silent audio and leds app).

Good thing there is a good corn crop each year (here in my home state where I've been openly growing cannabis for the last 18 months or so). We'll never run out of popcorn.

Re:Sure, complain about it now.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not just to encourage big government fearing conservatives to vote, but also to discourage those who thought that they were voting against Bush's policies in '08 and '12 from showing up to the polls in '14. Or if they do show up, that they do so to vote third party

Re:Sure, complain about it now.

[anagama]

There is the difference between suspecting and being called a foil-hatter, and knowing for certain.

Re:Sure, complain about it now.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's kind of early for that. The people will forget all this ever happened by time the 2014 voting begins

And foreign resident US citizens?

[Bruce66423]

Who surely are being hoovered up?

the next month

[hurfy]

Google recieves a record low number of nasty letters, only 50. One for Alabama, One for Alaska........

Not interested in more noninformative information.

meh, too lazy to write out the full rant

Re:Personally, I'm more worried about Google

[Trashcan Romeo]

What is the federal government going to do? Probably nothing... unless you do something stupid like expose its war crimes. [See: Manning, Bradley] What might one employee in the federal government whom you pissed off do with a record of all your web searches? Use your imagination.

Stasi

[gmuslera]

Germans aren't happy about it neither. Will demand explanations to Obama when he visits them next week.

Re:It should be illegal but isn't, that's the prob

[CanHasDIY]

One you missed:

"Tyranny is defined as that which is legal for the government but illegal for the citizenry." -- Thomas Jefferson

Petition

[DaMattster]

Just signed it. Took a set of brass balls for Snowden to do what he did and, yes, he is a real patriot for standing up for the civil rights and liberties of the American people.

Re:Petition

[chihowa]

Another poster used the word "quisling" to describe those who are falling all over themselves to defend the actions of the US government right now. I think that suits you well. You have been all over these articles in the last few days trying so hard to paint this twisted picture that the US government spying on its own citizens is a good and noble action. Exposing the treachery of our supposed representatives is what makes the United States stronger. Licking boots has never made one stronger.

Re:Petition

[real-modo]

Just in case you're miguided rather than a quisling, here's a clue: there's a difference between the nation and its government, and there is moreover a difference between the institutions of government and the current controllers of those institutions.

The interests of these three do not necessarily coincide. Especially since Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, they do not.

Re:Petition

[hazah]

Da fahq did I just read? You mean to tell me that not having a death wish is now treason... good call genius.

Re:Petition

[Anonymous Coward]

thank you for your post. It is a perfect example of how blind fear can lead to irrational though processes.

Re:Petition

[Anonymous Coward]

"Some day this sort of "patriotism" may even lead to a successful attack"

      Bullshit. Sing me a new one.

"Some of them were even war heroes. Not these new "patriots," they steal secret data from the intelligence agencies and make it available to America's adversaries."

      The government became our enemySome of them were even war heroes. Not these new "patriots," they steal secret data from the intelligence agencies and make it available to America's adversaries. long ago and the public is just to brainwashed to notice. The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

"may even lead to a successful attack on the United States"

      It has happened before and it will happen again. Nevermind, we will deserve it. Yep, we earned that attack.

Re:Petition

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod this up. This is the core of the issue -- nobody likes to see our constitution be ignored, but the government seems to be focused on helping us. It's kind of hard to have sympathy for these types of whistle blowers, when their actions place our country at risk.

I don't know though -- maybe it's neccessary, and worth the price. Kind of hard to decide though, when we don't even know what we are condemning.

Re:Petition

[anagama]

Consider this ColdFjord analysis about why the FISA court constitutes oversight in the face of 11 denials over 34 years and 20000 requests ( http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/03/fisa-court-rubber-stamp-drones ):

The reason it is rare is not because it is a rubber stamp, but because the government attorneys are cautious about making the requests, and gather the proper proof that it is needed.

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3848163&cid=43969431

Compare with the Verizon order. OBVIOUSLY, every single Verizon customer in America is reasonably suspected to be a terrorist. A "cautious" government would only ask for such things after it has gathered sufficient proof, so they all must be suspected. /sarcasm

ColdFjord is the kind of idiot idiots point at say: "you fucking retard."

Re:Petition

[cold fjord]

Applying the logic in this thread, advocating that Americans have a reasonable defense against terrorism to prevent them from being killed in large numbers is now treason. On the other hand, patriotism is now stealing documents from American intelligence agencies instead of going to the Inspector General or Congress, making the documents available to America's adversaries where they may be used to bypass the defenses protecting Americans, fleeing the country to the "freedom" of Communist China, and maybe next to authoritarian Russia, and waiting for the outcome. And that outcome might very well be a successful terrorist attack causing mass casualties, or maybe even an attack by a rogue state such as Iran or North Korea. I think your civics lessons went off the rail at some point.

I do have a question for you. I see in your post that you consider Congress to be treacherous, which pretty much implies treasonous. From some of your other posts it appears you think the judiciary has Constitutional interpretation all wrong. And it goes without saying that President Obama must be wrong if the other two are. That means I'm being labeled a traitor by the rarest of geniuses who is right when everybody else is wrong about the Constitution, government in general, and the question of providing adequate protection from terrorists for ordinary Americans. With that sort of genius I would expect you to have something better to add to the discussion than name calling. Shouldn't someone of your rare gifts have either facts or clever arguments to add to the discussion? You've offered neither. Why?

I'm always happy to engage in reasoned debate with those that have good arguments, or consider facts that may prove me wrong. You have neither and so you rely upon ad hominem attack. What is even sadder is that you were moderated up for that nonsense.

Re:Petition

[cold fjord]

Working with classified programs is always going to be difficult. That is why Congress needs to be fully engaged and performing oversight to make sure what is going on is reasonable while the US is at war with Al Qaida. From the picture that seems to be emerging, the operation provides valuable intelligence, the procedural safeguards limit the risk to meaningful privacy, and the operation is under the scrutiny of the FISA court made up of judges from other US Federal courts that rotate through. I think it is reasonable to be concerned, but not panicked. If you have concerns, write your Congressman.

Take care

Re:Petition

[Anonymous Coward]

You have neither and so you rely upon ad hominem attack.

No, it's just that you're hardly worth the time, and you have only yourself to blame for that. When you go around acting as a government cheerleader, do you think that people who have a love for freedom are going to take you seriously? When you go around scaremongering and cowering over something that has an infinitesimally unlikely chance of hurting an individual, do you honestly expect to be taken seriously?

You're pathetic is what you are.

Re:Petition

[stanIyb]

This is the core of the issue -- nobody likes to see our constitution be ignored, but the government seems to be focused on helping us.

What happened to "land of the free, home of the brave"? What brave person would give up freedoms for security?

Give me one good reason I should give our government the benefit of the doubt when history has shown us that people with power will abuse it. In fact, history has shown us that even the US government will abuse its power. Why are you and that other fellow so disgustingly naive?

It's kind of hard to have sympathy for these types of whistle blowers, when their actions place our country at risk.

How did it place our country at risk? The only people placing our country at risk are those who betray its constitution.

when we don't even know what we are condemning.

That's part of the problem! They're so secretive that we don't know what they're doing, and thanks to such secrecy, they were able to violate people's rights and make it difficult for anyone to challenge them. Such things should absolutely not be allowed to begin with; they are the antithesis to a good democracy.

Re:Petition

[cold fjord]

I take it then you will be working to dismantle the fire department and ambulance service in your community? After all, you personally have a minute chance of needing them this year, right? And you carry no insurance on your home, since that is a small risk? And no life or health insurance either I take it?

Get back to me when you have that done.

You should also probably stop looking both ways before you cross the street. After all, you don't want to give in to fear, do you? The same goes locking the door to your home at night, staying out of bad neighborhoods after dark, wearing blaze orange for hunting, having a reserve parachute, wearing your seatbelt, not drinking expired milk, not licking metal poles when its freezing, and not peeing on electric fences. It's all "fear based."

Part of the problem on Slashdot is that so many here seem to be incapable of understanding that you can undertake actions based on prudence rather than fear. That seems to be a major limitation in many people's thinking. That represents quite a fall from the founding of America when prudence was considered a major virtue. Apparently no more. The only motivation now is "fear." I think that shows in your post.

Re:Petition

[Anonymous Coward]

I take it then you will be working to dismantle the fire department and ambulance service in your community?

This is what I mean when I say that you're just not worth the time. Doing small things to reduce the chances of injury (or to help other people in need) is quite a bit different than giving the government sweeping surveillance powers, so nice try there. Your examples are all completely ridiculous because of that, because most of the things you listed are more likely to happen than any terrorist attack, and because some of those are personal decisions (as opposed to the government spying on you).

No one's taking you seriously. No one.

Re:Petition

[Anonymous Coward]

... they steal secret data from the intelligence agencies ...

Hey, Russia wants to stop terrorists too. As apologists like to remind everyone: Email, tweets, blogs aren't secret information. If you've done nothing wrong, you've got nothing to hide. Government has a right to spy on people and countries. Let's not notice that Putin (Russia) is one step, maybe two steps above Erdogan (Turkey), on the scale of transparency and freedom.

... lead to a successful attack ...

Um. What sort of patriotism caused the 9/11 attack? Because we know the damage created by those patriots.

Re:Petition

[cold fjord]

Um. What sort of patriotism caused the 9/11 attack? Because we know the damage created by those patriots.

The 9/11 hijackers were essentially patriots of the Islamic Caliphate that was dissolved in 1923 with the fall of the Ottoman Empire. They support its restoration as one of Al Qaida's goals. (Actually that is a wider goal of Islamists.) They also want to see all nations under Muslim rule, implementing Sharia law, and their people converted to Islam. Bin Laden's two big demands after 9/11 was that the United States convert to Islam, and implement Sharia law.

I'll agree that Turkey has some big problem that Russia doesn't. Turkey is in big trouble. At the moment I think Russia could turn out better, although there are some issues of concern. The fall of the Soviet Union was hard on Russia, and I fear the people are not truly free yet of the chains forged by Soviet rule. Hopefully both nations are moving in a good direction.

Re:Petition

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, there is no way people like you can paint this guy in dark light. If Snowden cannot count as a patriot, then there are none left. Are you sure you have watched the interview and had a look at his bio?

Re:Petition

[chihowa]

The AC is right. All of your posts are full of this wild hysterical screeching and it's hard to take you seriously. Anytime somebody tries to argue with you, you respond with hyperbole and straw men. You've even done the same with my post by digging through my posting history and setting up some straw man, which I guess you expect me to defend.

Your entire position can be reduced to a blinding fear of terrorist attack. What is there really to argue with? We get it: there's no limit to the depth of your fear of terrorists. You're not adding anything to these discussions beyond driving that home again and again.

Re:Petition

[cold fjord]

I still don't really see you making any counterarguments or providing any new facts. Its pretty much all personal attack. So I'll give you one more attempt. Where do I go wrong below? Where is the hyperbole, the straw men? The blinding fear? I understand that injecting actual facts on this subject is unpopular with many people.

Terrorists exist. They've conducted attacks in the past. They'll continue to attempt attacks in the future. A significant part of the reason the number of successful attacks has been limited is due to hard work by the security services, good intelligence, and civic minded people. Crippling the intelligence agencies is a bad idea. In the past, people that stole large amounts of classified documents from the intelligence agencies, fled the country, and took refuge in a communist country where they began making the documents available to America's adversaries have been considered and called spies and traitors. Below is a list of a few attacks and arrests of terrorists.

2013 Boston Marathon bombing 3 dead, 254 wounded. Fifteen victims suffered amputations, two of which had double amputations.

2010 Attempted bombing of Times Square in New York City by the Taliban - Attack failed, car bomb could have been mass casualty event.

2009 The "Underwear" bomber - Attack failed, potentially could have brought down aircraft with death of all aboard

2009 Fort Hood massacre - 13 dead, 30 wounded

FBI’s Top Ten News Stories for the Week Ending January 27, 2012

Denver: Man Arrested for Providing Material Support to a Designated Foreign Terrorist Organization

Jamshid Muhtorov was arrested by members of the FBI’s Denver and Chicago Joint Terrorism Task Forces on a charge of providing and attempting to provide material support to the Islamic Jihad Union, a Pakistan-based designated foreign terrorist organization.

Baltimore: Man Pleads Guilty to Attempted Use of a Weapon of Mass Destruction in Plot to Attack Armed Forces Recruiting Center

U.S. citizen Antonio Martinez, aka Muhammad Hussain, pled guilty to attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction against federal property in connection with a scheme to attack an armed forces recruiting station in Catonsville, Maryland.

Washington Field: Man Pleads Guilty to Shootings at Pentagon, Other Military Buildings

Yonathan Melaku, of Alexandria, Virginia, pled guilty to damaging property and to firearms violations involving five separate shootings at military installations in northern Virginia between October and November 2010, and to attempting to damage veterans’ memorials at Arlington National Cemetery.

FBI’s Top Ten News Stories for the Week Ending January 13, 2012

1.Tampa: Florida Resident Charged with Plotting to Bomb Locations in Tampa

A 25-year-old resident of Pinellas Park, Florida was charged in connection with an alleged plot to attack locations in Tampa with a vehicle bomb, assault rifle, and other explosives.

Re:Petition

[Anonymous Coward]

I think he's one of the more level headed people arguing for PRISM. He does have some good points that there REALLY ARE bad guys out there and we have organizations to go stop them. It's just that he has some sort of undying faith that those organizations are trustworthy, above corruption, and can do no wrong.

We have a system for legally spying on bad guys. They have to get a warrent. The judge is supposed to keep a tight leash so as to avoid an oppresive police state. And it looks like that system is being side-stepped in a very illegal manner. But he doesn't see that. All he sees is the masses getting angry and beating down his heros. In his defense though, there ARE a lot of bad arguments against PRISM and generally stupid people being angry. But this sort of thing that is worth getting angry over.

The proper repsonse to his sort on this manner is "they should get a warrent" and "you can't trust a spies 'foreignness' assessment to keep them from spying on US citizens".

Re:Petition

[Anonymous Coward]

Is he APK?

Re:Petition

[Anonymous Coward]

It's okay. One day you may realize that the US government has been infiltrated by an enemy of the state. You are confused over who the adversaries are. You are being told by the enemy that they are your friends and to look the other way. Rather than calling them out on it, you believe them and support them.

Re:Petition

[Anonymous Coward]

He's just spamming links and telling everyone to trust the government, so I don't think so.

Re:Petition

[hammyhew]

Terrorists exist. They've conducted attacks in the past. They'll continue to attempt attacks in the future.

And? What of it? We all know this, so what is your point?

Crippling the intelligence agencies is a bad idea.

But why? The only reason you've left us with is that you're extremely afraid of terrorists and are willing to throw anything and everything away if you believe it will help stop them.

Re:Petition

[cold fjord]

You mean to tell me that not having a death wish is now treason... good call genius.

Based on the evidence of these posts, yes, apparently it is. Wanting to prevent terrorist attacks is apparently now considered treason in the West, at least among the Slashdot community. In the minds of those same people, it is by stealing data from intelligence agencies and making it available to America's adversaries that one becomes a "patriot." Moral confusion is rampant.

Re:Petition

[cold fjord]

Here is your logical disconnect.

You acknowledge the existence of terrorists, their attacks, and their determination to attack in the future:

And? What of it? We all know this

From there you apparently don't see any reason that the intelligence agencies shouldn't be crippled, which means they will be unable to perform their function of providing intelligence to prevent attacks.

But why?

The practical result of crippling the intelligence agencies will almost certainly be more successful attacks in the future which can easily kill hundreds, or even thousands, of people per attack. I don't see how you aren't making that connection, or that you don't think it is a bad thing that should be prevented.

From there you to nonsense.

The only reason you've left us with is that you're extremely afraid of terrorists and are willing to throw anything and everything away if you believe it will help stop them.

I never stated any such thing in either case. It is more personal attack than argument.

So maybe you could explain to me why you think it is OK to allow terrorists to attack your fellow countrymen, and possibly you, unimpeded by the security services acting upon good intelligence?

Re:Petition

[Anonymous Coward]

quisling. I've been lurking /. for for almost two decades. You're the first asshole that I want to reply to in person, so I can follow you around and point it out.

Re:Petition

[hammyhew]

The practical result of crippling the intelligence agencies will almost certainly be more successful attacks in the future which can easily kill hundreds, or even thousands, of people per attack. I don't see how you aren't making that connection, or that you don't think it is a bad thing that should be prevented.

I'm not saying it's a good thing that terrorists are able to kill more people, but you are supporting a solution that strips privacy away from everyone. I cannot accept that solution.

Do you really see the lives of those hypothetical victims as more important than personal privacy?

Re:Petition

[stanIyb]

No matter how you look at it, his opportunities were all pissed away. I bet he's just lashing out at everyone because of that.

Re:Petition

[coId fjord]

I'm not saying it's a good thing that terrorists are able to kill more people, but you are supporting a solution that strips privacy away from everyone. I cannot accept that solution.

Another logical disconnect. FISA courts provide the checks and balances that are required by the 4th amendment, so you should have no problem here. Well, that is unless you have a problem with all forms of warrants?

Your position has no logical grounding. You mock one type of "fear" (fear of terrorist) and replace it with another "fear" (fear of the government). Do you not see the hypocrisy here? Terrorists have no oversight, but the government does.

Do you really see the lives of those hypothetical victims as more important than personal privacy?

The victims are not hypothetical. Terrorism has claims many lives already. It is NOT hypothetical.

Re:Petition

[cold fjord]

Well, this is an interesting development.

Re:Petition

[Anonymous Coward]

I see. So now "Quislings" are those who want to prevent attacks against a country instead of assist attacks and conquest of a country. I think your civics lessons went off the rails at some point.

Re:Petition

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh oh. We broke him.

Re:Petition

[stanIyb]

Saying that he is one of the more level-headed people arguing for this disgusting practice isn't much of a compliment; he's still completely insane.

He does have some good points that there REALLY ARE bad guys out there and we have organizations to go stop them.

Everyone knows this. The problem is, freedom is far more important than security. He has no good points.

Honestly, arguments like his are what leads to nonsense like the TSA.

And it looks like that system is being side-stepped in a very illegal manner.

It was obvious it was going to happen, considering what it is.

Re:Petition

[hazah]

Firstly, the notion that the west wants to "prevent terrorist attacks" is quite laughable. There is very little evidence that much of anything practical had been done in that regard. Secondly, to actually believe that this is a real priority flies in the face of reason. Simple statiscs show that terrorist threat is... not a threat, therefore, assuming that the primary use is for terrorism is not logical. Thirdly, history shows that when a system can be abused, it is abused constantly. Fourthly, the fact that the wistle blower is in another country is because he is fleeing percecution, that is he was branded a traitor first, and was forced to appeal to those that would allow him to escape. That he has "intelligence", as you call it, is completely incidental in his case as the question still remains as to whether it was legal for this data to exist in the first place. Since no single nation was given the chance to concider this question through any democratic process at all, as a citizen of one of them he revealed a potentially huge flaw to his fellow citizens that they may decide. Throwing words like "stealing" and talking about "america's adversaries" makes you sound paranoid. You can't back that up. That he had to flee to save his own ass, I can.

Re:Petition

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it Friday? Seems like it.

Re:Petition

[SJHiIlman]

I could slurp your snap anytime.

Good!

[bogidu]

Tell them to get bent, Americans are citizens, not subjects!

Re:Good!

[cold fjord]

That's partially correct. Americans are citizens, but they are always subject to attack.

Re:Good!

[Anonymous Coward]

" subject to attack."

    What's this attack bullshit you're always spouting? Do you know something we don't?

Re:Good!

[jagapen]

We're also always subject to the far, far greater threat of disease, traffic crashes, gunshots, drownings, or weather events. I, for one, choose not to live in utter, pants-shitting terror every moment of every day over the possibility. If you wanna obsess about some vanishingly small probability, that's fine, just don't impose your neurosis on the rest of us.

Re:Good!

[cold fjord]

I know little that you couldn't, but apparently much that you don't. And that is sad, really. But you aren't alone. So, here is what I'm talking about to help you along.

Attacks against Americans that were attempted and not intercepted, or completed (this excludes war zones):

2013 Boston Marathon bombing 3 dead, 254 wounded. Fifteen victims suffered amputations, two of which had double amputations.

2010 Attempted bombing of Times Square in New York City by the Taliban - Attack failed, car bomb could have been mass casualty event.

2009 The "Underwear" bomber - Attack failed, potentially could have brought down aircraft with death of all aboard

2009 Fort Hood massacre - 13 dead, 30 wounded

2001 9/11 attacks - 2,973 dead. Two skyscraper towers destroyed, heavy damage to Pentagon.
Estimated damage to US economy: ~ $100,000,000,000.

2000 Photo: USS Cole - Video USS Cole - 17 dead, 39 wounded, major damage to US Navy destroyer

1998 Bombing of US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya - 224 dead, est. 4,000 wounded, both embassies heavily damaged

1996 Bin Laden's Fatwa - Text of the fatwa, or declaration of war, by Osama bin Laden first published in Al Quds Al Arabi

Small, limited sample, of other terrorism arrests and trials in the US:

FBI’s Top Ten News Stories for the Week Ending January 27, 2012

Denver: Man Arrested for Providing Material Support to a Designated Foreign Terrorist Organization

Jamshid Muhtorov was arrested by members of the FBI’s Denver and Chicago Joint Terrorism Task Forces on a charge of providing and attempting to provide material support to the Islamic Jihad Union, a Pakistan-based designated foreign terrorist organization.

Baltimore: Man Pleads Guilty to Attempted Use of a Weapon of Mass Destruction in Plot to Attack Armed Forces Recruiting Center

U.S. citizen Antonio Martinez, aka Muhammad Hussain, pled guilty to attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction against federal property in connection with a scheme to attack an armed forces recruiting station in Catonsville, Maryland.

Washington Field: Man Pleads Guilty to Shootings at Pentagon, Other Military Buildings

Yonathan Melaku, of Alexandria, Virginia, pled guilty to damaging property and to firearms violations involving five separate shootings at military installations in northern Virginia between October and November 2010, and to attempting to damage veterans’ memorials at Arlington National Cemetery.

FBI’s Top Ten News Stories for the Week Ending January 13, 2012

1.Tampa: Florida Resident Charged with Plotting to Bomb Locations in Tampa

A

Re:Good!

[stanIyb]

Isn't that cute? The baby is terrified.

Re:Good!

[anagama]

Please PLEASE PLEASE --- slip on bar of soap in your bathtub ( http://www.seattlepi.com/national/article/Someone-drowns-in-a-tub-nearly-every-day-in-1201018.php ). Seriously, DO NOT REPRODUCE. Your gene line is an intellectual dead end. If you have reproduced, please go for a family drive as often as you possibly can ( http://www.statisticbrain.com/car-crash-fatality-statistics-2/ ).

Re:Good!

[Anonymous Coward]

Already under attack from within the US government. Why is this so hard for you to understand?

Re:Good!

[coId fjord]

Reactions like yours are exactly what I hope for when I comment. It is rather amusing that you of all people call my gene line an "intellectual dead end."

Re:Good!

[cold fjord]

Now I see your game.

How do you trust liars and criminals?

[Anonymous Coward]

The government will lie and cover things up same as Gulf of Tonkin, Liberty ship bombing, WMDs in Iraq.

Active support for dictatorships world wide, suppression of democracy here and abroad (fbi infiltration of activist groups and suggesting criminal behavior)...

Trashing the planet environmentally...

They have lost all credibility (for some time now). I would prefer the military take over temporarily until a democracy can be installed...yup! I trust them more than politicians.

Re:It should be illegal but isn't, that's the prob

[udachny]

I'm usually a big government, bleeding heart liberal, but not in the areas of governmental police powers (monitoring citizens, etc). Basically, if the government is helping it's citizens, I support that (healthcare, etc) but if it's looking at it's citizens to protect itself, I don't like that at all.

- you, and others like you are the problem.

You gave the government its power to abuse the law, the Constitution, you gave the government ability to go above and beyond what is authorized by the Constitution to the government when you stand for things like 'helping citizens'.

The only way a government can really help citizens is by providing EQUAL TREATMENT UNDER LAW, which is where equal opportunities come from, which is what allows for maximum individual freedom. It is individual freedom that grows the economy by giving people incentives and removing barriers that prevent them from trying to get rich by building a better, cheaper product.

People are served best not by any government with growing powers, people are served best by other people trying to figure out how to serve people in the most efficient way possible by doing what people are actually interested in.

You are the root cause that created this problem, never a solution to anything.

Do we know if Verisign is involved with the NSA?

[Adult film producer]

I'm very curious about the security of my "cloud"

Burn It

[KeensMustard]

Burn it in the only way you can. Write letters, protest at every opportunity, and in every forum.

Be polite if you can, but recognise that social graces have their place, and if need be, you might need to be rude. Don't let quislings tell you "it's for the safety/the family/the children" without confronting them. Don't let quislings tell you "it's the fault of KODOS" they are just trying to make this a different discussion they can control.

We've all felt helpless for far too long. I say "we" I'm not an american, but every western country has seen this creeping up on them. I'm not stupid enough to imagine that the NSA doesn't keep data on me if that serves some commercial or political advantage for some client. So we stand with you. You aren't helpless. The pen is still mightier than the sword.

Re:It should be illegal but isn't, that's the prob

[amicusNYCL]

One of the best comments was from John Oliver on the Daily Show.

His best line was something like "we're not accusing you of breaking any laws, we're just surprised you didn't."

He also pointed out how the FISA courts, which are there to oversee any surveillance requests, have literally never denied a request. That's some good rubber-stamping action there.

innocents will suffer the most

[jpc1957]

Innocent individuals identified as suspects are the biggest issue to me. For all those people that say there isn't any issue with any level of snooping if you don't have anything to hide, you are exactly who should be worried. The more data available to analyze, the more false positives will be identified. And the attitude now is we can't risk any potential terrorist falling through the cracks. Combine that with gag orders, security letters instead of warrants, sting operations, indefinite determent.. It's guaranteed that some very unlucky and completely innocent people will be going through hell for a long time.

Re:innocents will suffer the most

[meta-monkey]

Also, I'm sick of the word "snooping." This is not snooping.

Snooping is what you do when you're 8 and you look in your parents' closet for your Christmas presents.

Snooping is what you do when you ask around if the cute girl in school has a boyfriend and if she just "likes" you or if she "like likes" you.

This is spying. This is invading. This is tracking, watching, monitoring, recording everything you, your mom and your kid sister do and storing it forever.

And what's scarier than that revelation? CNN. I always knew the media in the US was "US centric." The reporters are Americans, so of course they're going to be more forgiving of stuff the government does to foreigners. But I rejected the "conspiracy theory" that what they report is dictated by the government, as they're for-profit companies. And they're lazy, so the horse race, talking heads reporting was just what lazy companies do.

But that's not the case here. If they're just lazy...fuck, this should be easy. Massive government scandal. McCarthy/Watergate/Pentagon Papers all rolled into one. A reporter and a news agency could make a career, an empire out of this! Don't journalism students want to be Bob Woodward?

And what's on the front page of CNN right now? I just looked. A picture of George W. Bush and a headline "Miss me yet?" about a poll. Another story "Second term blues for Obama." The same "hero or traitor?" op-ed everybody else has wherein "security experts" call him a traitor and then they find misspelled quotes from stoners about him, like, tellin' off the man and stuff, man.

"Hero or traitor? Who can say!" Ummmmm...you can, CNN. That's your fucking job. It is literally the divide and conquer bullshit from Goebbels. Confirmation that both parties are totally fine with spying on every American citizen, and that's "second term blues?" SECOND TERM BLUES?! Completely unconscionable, unconstitutional, straight-up evil actions at the highest levels of the land, and that's "the blues?" No, CNN, that's not the blues. "Aw, shucks, I missed the bus and spilled coffee on my shirt" is the blues. This shit...this shit is not the blues. And the cure for the blues is the poll on the other story about electing a Republican next time, because that'll fix it, right?

They're really complicit in feeding the red vs blue bullshit machine, when it would be easier, and more profitable to investigate the whole system.

My dad always told me, "never attribute to malice what's just as likely ignorance." I thought CNN and the MSM were just lazy and inept, but...this isn't lazy or inept. This is directed. There's no other explanation.

I want my mommy.

Re:innocents will suffer the most

[cold fjord]

For all those people that say there isn't any issue with any level of snooping if you don't have anything to hide, you are exactly who should be worried. The more data available to analyze, the more false positives will be identified. ..... It's guaranteed that some very unlucky and completely innocent people will be going through hell for a long time.

When people are directly communicating with terrorist groups there would seem to be little chance of a "false positive." At the least it would reasonably indicate the need for additional scrutiny. The problem might actually be the reverse, the false negative. Consider the case of Major Hasan. He was in direct contact with American cleric turned terrorist, Anwar al-Awlaki. That direct contact was looked at and written off. Major Hasan then went on to kill 13 people and wound 30 at Fort Hood. It now looks like his court martial defense will be that he was defending the Taliban and Islam. In other words, he is expected to make what is essentially an admission in open court that he is a terrorist. Changing that attack from its current classification of "workplace violence" to what it really is, a terrorist attack, will make that the first mass casualty attack since 9/11, and Boston the second.

The thing about false positives is that they are likely to resolve themselves over time with additional scrutiny. I doubt that many actually innocent Americans have gone through "hell" on the basis of what you list. Gag orders and national security letters are used for data sources. Stings are used in ordinary criminal investigations as well. If they are really innocent, why would they be trying to buy stinger missiles, for example? Indefinite detention has been used as part of the Law of War focused operations overseas, and is completely legal for Prisoners of War.

The Fort Hood attack resulted in 13 dead and 30 wounded.
The Boston bombing resulted in 3 dead, 254 wounded. Fifteen victims suffered amputations, two of which had double amputations.
I think it is fairly likely that the number of dead and wounded in those two attacks are likely to far exceed the number of genuinely innocent Americans that will go through hell due to a false positive.

Who will guarantee there will be no more attacks if nothing is done? What is the life of an innocent victim of terrorism worth?

Re:innocents will suffer the most

[aaaaaaargh!]

I can assure you that hundreds if not thousands of completely innocent people communicate directly with any suspected terrrorist group on a daily basis, from telco representatives over the local store owner and the pizza delivery guy to the plumber.

More importantly, however, nobody is against surveillance of suspected terrrorist groups and their surroundings, but this debate is about pervasive and abundant dragnet surveillance of the whole population by means of all kinds of heuristics and data mining by 'expert systems' that are not properly validated or accounted for by the public and are open to abuse from those with a high enough security clearance - and obviously without proper judicial control, since otherwise Snowden's leak would have been impossible.

Referring to the Fort Hood and the Boston attacks is particularly cynical (and lunatic), since neither of them was prevented by any NSA surveillance - nor was 9/11.

Re:innocents will suffer the most

[Virtucon]

Referring to the Fort Hood and the Boston attacks is particularly cynical (and lunatic), since neither of them was prevented by any NSA surveillance - nor was 9/11.

You are correct. In both cases there were warning signs and warnings. In the case of Hasan, it was out there for all his peers and superiors to see but they all ignored it.

"There were all sorts of ... comments made throughout the year that made me question his loyalty to the United States, but nothing was done," said Finnell, who recalled one class during which Hasan gave a presentation justifying homicide bombings.
"The issue here is that there's a political correctness climate in the military. They don't want to say anything because it would be considered questioning somebody's religious belief, or they're afraid of an equal opportunity lawsuit.

Russia swears they warned us about the Tsaranev boys but strangely our government says it was "vague." Anyway, it sounds like a congressional boondoggle trip will find the answers. The FBI acknowledges it but says nothing suspicious was found. Humm, what happened to the old days? I can imagine J. Edgar Hoover (probably in women's underwear - ewww, reminder I need to patent that mental bleach idea I have been working on.) assigning a couple of agents to follow these two for at least a couple of months but did the government by looking at the data the NSA had dismiss them as suspicious?

But you touched off a thought I was having regarding what Prism is/isn't. Anyway, I'm wondering what the network map looks like for the Tsarnaev brothers regarding their communications. Since a friend to the Tsarnaev brothers was shot late last month by an FBI agent it brings a little more thought into this NSA program and the concept of "Six Degrees of Separation." Given that you or I may be only a few people away from knowing the Tsaranev brothers, does that make us suspects or possible terrorists? I know somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody that knows X and X does bad things. That to me in and of itself isn't a link but something like a Heat Map of my contacts would probably put a better focus on those relationships. I guess from the government perspective they're the only ones that know with a 50/50 chance that they can assume that I'm a foreign national. They have call detail records (CDRS) and Internet data to correlate, so what are they doing with the data and models projected from that data? I'm also thinking right now that there are a lot of folks in the academic community who'd like to have this data so they can start pulling apart more insight into social behavior.

Re:innocents will suffer the most

[Anonymous Coward]

Good on you! Maybe in a few more years you'll consider all the compelling evidence indicating that 9/11 was very much a false-flag operation performed by the same kind of people that have done all this stuff we hear about now. Those buildings were probably demolished with explosives. A missile probably hit the Pentagon. No aircraft actually crashed in Pennsylvania. The planes were probably flown by remote control.

All conspiracy nonsense, and there is no point in even looking at the evidence supporting this. Because the US government would never lie. There would never be a coverup. And there could never exist any defense contractor capable of pulling all this off and no one speaking up about it. And there was no motive for them to do something like this, anyway.

Re:innocents will suffer the most

[Whorhay]

I would like to see more front page coverage and discussion of this but I don't know that I want them solely running editorial bits about how evil it is. One of the qualities of Journalism is supposed to be attempting to maintain an unbiased point of view letting the reader/viewer form their own opinions. The opinion bits are editorials and should have their own space clearly marked as such. Although if there ever was a time for waxing editorial this would be it.

Re:innocents will suffer the most

[Anonymous Coward]

quisling

A Response?

[OverlordQ]

it's already reached half the required number of signatures for a response from the Obama administration.

You're expecting more than "We cannot comment on an ongoing criminal investigation."?

Potential Suicide

[Anonymous Coward]

As corrupt as this administration is, as a business do you really want to piss them off? They could make life really rough for you, or put you out of business.

Dear NSA, if you have done nothing wrong...

[Anonymous Coward]

.. then you have nothing to hide and nothing to worry about if we all look through your stuff.

Re:Dear NSA, if you have done nothing wrong...

[Anonymous Coward]

Right, because you can be trusted with sensitive information because... You say so?

Sorry, contrary to you and every self-important paranoid individual out there, their is no boogey-man out there to destroy your lively-hood, because you posted "fuck the government" on some obscure blog 5 years ago. Most likely, he wouldn't even give a rats-ass.

Your name has already been used!

[mha]

"Anonymous Coward" has already signed that petition. Maybe you should get a real name if you want to show support? ;-)

Consider the source.

[Anonymous Coward]

The primary objective of Google and the like is to vacuum up data about people and their behaviors.

Re:It should be illegal but isn't, that's the prob

[Anonymous Coward]

If the FISA courts have never denied a request, then that's proof nothing improper's going on!
Nobody's even asking for anything out of line. The system is working.

One

[asicsolutions]

The government should be all over this since they are going to the "give me all your data" model.
Google should soon safely be able to say: We got one FISA request last year.

Someone forgot the rules to be an Evil Overlord

[Anonymous Coward]

Rule 12: One of my advisors will be an average five-year-old child. Any flaws in my plan that he is able to spot will be corrected before implementation.

The administration needs someone to remind them what 'normal' is. This is getting just plain silly.

StopWatching.us

[Curunir_wolf]

Oh, yea, great idea there, Mozilla. Collect contact information for everyone opposed to government surveillance. That will be a nice database to use as a bargaining chip with the federal bureaucrats, won't it now?

Re:It should be illegal but isn't, that's the prob

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is "liberal" now associated with what is essentially a communist agenda? Forcibly taking wealth from one person to provide public services for others has nothing to do with liberty and everything to do with coercion.

Australia doesn't mind it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Big fucking surprise. In the UK and its colony, Herr Majesty's Government would have us all under 24 hour CCTV in the name of fighting terror and crime, and in the case of Aussies, to protect them from the scourge of small breasts and harsh language.

Fucking spineless bastards, the lot of them, getting the governments they deserve.

Re:Australia doesn't mind it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Assange is Australian and we're currently working on making him a senator. He worked with the American Bradley Manning. Snowden has received advice from Assauge regarding how best to evade extradition. Australians are presently penetrating the American military-industrial complex with deep loving thrusts. Such is the nature of our relationship.

Let the Internet fix this flaw

[Joe U]

I propose that we need to call on the brightest and best and put together a think tank for fixing the mess that passes for security these days.

It is well past time that we fix SMTP, DNS, HTTP and others to require strong point to point encryption and fail if that security is broken.

Re:Let the Internet fix this flaw

[TheRealMindChild]

Those are layers on top of TCP/IP. Fix it on the protocol underneath

Re:Let the Internet fix this flaw

[jdogalt]

residential citizens are almost universally prohibited from running servers via terms of service and lack of competing alternatives with equivalent bandwidth rates and better terms of service. This is the blueprint for how a dictatorship can control the internet. Star topology. Centralized Services and tap points. Distributed encrypted communication like that of pgp/gpg combined with smtp node servers including your local workstation (a system familiar to old geeks) is simply not an option in a dictatorship, because, strong encryption is pretty strong.

Re:Let the Internet fix this flaw

[Joe U]

Which is exactly why we need to get people to start talking about how to fix this. Properly done, it can be something as simple as a browser plug-in or as complex as a series of local services.

Either way, I don't know the solution, but I know we need a solution.

Re:Let the Internet fix this flaw

[real-modo]

TL;DR: Use TOR Project and the Guardian Project. Don't forget to donate!

What the NSA needs those supercomputers for is traffic analysis. See this for a simplified analogy which hints at some of the techniques used, and, I think, explains why the NSA needs supercomputers rather than Hadoop. The Government may well be telling the truth when they say they don't read your mail. But with enough traffic data, that doesn't really matter.

As I posted above, the problems with this are three. False positives; the potential for abuse; and the inability of government agencies (or any other large organization) to prevent penetration and consequent third-party abuse.

Re:It should be illegal but isn't, that's the prob

[meta-monkey]

What's truly scary? The one they didn't. So they rubber stamped thousands of orders that basically amounted to "everything anyone does anywhere," but on at least one occasion they ruled one thing "unconstitutional."

Get that? Recording your email, your search history, photos, videos, phone records, whatever, just fine. If that stuff was fine...what the hell did they want to do that WASN'T fine?

Serious Question: spoofed caller ID and NSA

[asicsolutions]

How well can the NSA determine the calls source?
I get telemarketer calls daily: "Pack your bags..."
Always spoofed caller ID from a VOIP indian call center.
The phone company can't seem to block these crap calls.
What's to stop someone from framing someone if they got a hold of a suspicious #.
Hate your spouse, spoof their # calling it. Hate your political opponent, do it to them.

Just curious.

Re:Serious Question: spoofed caller ID and NSA

[erroneus]

They apparently have a box in every telco office. They can completely trace any call back to its origin.

Re:Serious Question: spoofed caller ID and NSA

[AHuxley]

Yes if your telco can bill you for that call, the NSA knows where it came from, destination, duration. If your conversation is interesting you trip the "dictionary" list and get recorded.
If the number you called is interesting you get recorded.
If the voice print of the person you are calling is interesting you get recorded.
They have your voice print for all other calls you make.
They are, like your telco at your subscriber loop carrier ~ exchange level.
Caller ID is just some fancy layer packed in with a call. It looks nice for a consumer.

Re:It should be illegal but isn't, that's the prob

[istartedi]

"If the citizens are not vigilant, I fear we shall be frequently misquoted" --George Washington

https

[jdogalt]

Actually, they don't need access to Google and Facebook data, they have direct access to all communications at the connection points [zerohedge.com].

umm... https dude

Re:https

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

> umm... https dude

Unless google, et al are using compromised certs. They may not even know it if they are, maybe the NSA has co-opted the guy at each company who generates them. Cash, blackmail, misguided sense of patriotism, who knows but it is a seriously valuable point of vulnerability for all of them.

Re:https

[Anonymous Coward]

Then all internet comerce is compromised, fuck

Re:https

[real-modo]

Doesn't matter. The headers aren't encrypted; they know what IP addresses are involved. Get enough history, and you don't need the content. Read this (Warning; elementary mathematical concepts involved.)

Re:https

[real-modo]

To clarify, the problems with this are firstly the false positives - type I errors, secondly the vast potential for abuse, and thirdly the government's inability to withhold electronic information from anyone else who really really wants it.

Re:https

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, put yourself into NSA's lofty shoes for a second - of course you'd get the certs - either through court order, good 'ol spying, or the quantum computer in the basement.

Re:https

[kllrnohj]

Google is using ECDHE for HTTPS. Unless NSA has been running an incredibly good MITM that nobody has detected and has never once had a single outage or issue, HTTPS to Google has been uncompromised since 2011.

Sadly more people aren't using ECDHE yet, though, so the same can't be said of most sites which could very well have compromised certs. Perhaps this can be used to help push ECDHE more broadly, although I kind of doubt anyone will really care, sadly.

Re:https

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, they don't need access to Google and Facebook data, they have direct access to all communications at the connection points [zerohedge.com].

umm... https dude

Secret court order for certificates, dude.

Re:https

[secondhand_Buddah]

You are correct. They have access to the root certs. HTTPS using commercial PKI it totally accessible on the fly by US government surveillance agencies.

Re:https

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless google, et al are using compromised certs. They may not even know it if they are, maybe the NSA has co-opted the guy at each company who generates them.

That's an interesting idea. If it's true, then it would mean that those self-signed certs that web browsers like to scream and panic about are actually the only ones with any security behind them.

Perhaps this means that the reason that Firefox et. al. refuse to acknowledge that there is some security to a self-signed cert is because they work for the NSA as well, and so they want to encourage people to use certificates that the NSA has a copy of rather than some self-signed certificate that no one other than the person who created it has ever seen.

Re:https

[stewsters]

I don't understand, how would that protect them from someone stealing their private key?

Re:https

[Anonymous Coward]

With ECDHE, stealing a private key doesn't help you decrypt the data. The private key to encrypt the communication is ephemeral; even if you have the server's private key, that doesn't help you get the ephemeral private key.

Google Read This!!!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Your servers are exposed from a SIGINT perspective.

Seriously, Do Something Part II

[Goboxer]

I actually made most of this comment in another post about the NSA but it bears repeating.

ACLU Petition to Stop Massive Government Spying Program

Please sign that petition. Or go through the EFF action page. Or Write your Representative or Write your Senators. They are easy enough to find. Seriously. If you aren't telling the people that represent you how wrong, awful, and downright unacceptable the NSA actions are they have no reason to stick their neck out to change it.

Nobody is asking you to fight a war, like previous generations of Americans have. Just sign a petition. Write a letter. It is that easy to improve this country. Whether you think that is true or not, remember that an outcry from a small group of people have altered politics before and it can happen again. The only thing preventing this country from getting better is silence.

Re:It should be illegal but isn't, that's the prob

[jdogalt]

you sound a little like the Ayn Randian Libertarian I was 20 years ago. I suggest you pay a little more attention to the intimacy that our relatively recent history with outright slavery, and subtler forms of exploiting those who in various large subsets of humanity, have had their freedom of speech severely curtailed with no recourse to any effective system of justice.

Not only do I think your final sentence borders on silly (that the person you are replying to is the 'root cause' of these woes), but I think you are generally wrong. Having social safety nets in place, amongst a system that is almost unavoidably quite leisse-fair predatory (predatory in the sense that some of the winners are completely content winning while directly profiting from some of the losers that they are clearly, directly, stifling the free speech or other rights of)- ... is a good idea.

Now, I do believe that charity should generally be voluntary. But giving a person shelter, food, and clothing, rather than watching them waste away in the elements, is not only a pleasant thing to do, but also overall net profitable to everyone who failed to see the better wisdom of putting forth the effort necessary to have those safety nets sufficiently in place that there is no demand for a governmental safety net.

Someone forgot rules to being an Evil Overlord

[MoonKitty]

Rule 12: One of my advisors will be an average five-year-old child. Any flaws in my plan that he is able to spot will be corrected before implementation.

Zuckerbergist apology

[Anonymous Coward]

Privacy is dead; get over it.

Re:It should be illegal but isn't, that's the prob

[TapeCutter]

people are served best by other people trying to figure out how to serve people in the most efficient way possible by doing what people are actually interested in.

Yes, and that is what is called forming a government, the problem is not government itself the problem getting them to keep their eye on that goal. The "profit" from a well run public sewer/water works is that WE don't die, the profit from a well run UHC (such as the one here in Oz) is that it cost much less (1.5% of taxable income) and nobody goes bankrupt due to illness.

You are the root cause that created this problem

If you're not interested in that then fine but other people are and it has nothing to do with them trampling your rights and everything to do with "serve[ing] people in the most efficient way possible"..

Re:Do we know if Verisign is involved with the NSA

[Anonymous Coward]

If they 'can', they 'will'. In this instance they most certain can.

Begging to tell the truth?

[erroneus]

I'm sorry... but really? "Please, let us tell the truth?!" I can't say precisely when things went "too far" but I can definitely say that things have most certainly, and unquestionably, gone too far.

Re:Begging to tell the truth?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously? You can't tell when things went too far?!

Let me spell it out for you... Remember when you guys started raping Iraq and Afghanistan and every American proclaimed "God bless our troops who are defending our homes abroad"? That's when you went too far, when you started lying to yourselves so you could pretend you're not doing anything wrong. When your government said they'll spy on foreigners but not US citizens, how many of you said "but foreigners are humans too, there's no difference, spying is wrong no matter the target?" Not that many. You collectively went too far when you became anti-world.

Suffer how?

[Anonymous Coward]

Suffer an even higher level of scrutiny that they will never know about because it is secret?

Or are you suggesting that there are or will be innocent people who, based on "false positives" are actually tried and convicted for crimes that they haven't committed.

Re:Suffer how?

[jdogalt]

Suffer an even higher level of scrutiny that they will never know about because it is secret?

Or are you suggesting that there are or will be innocent people who, based on "false positives" are actually tried and convicted for crimes that they haven't committed.

Both pure capitalism, and pure communism work great... *in theory*. In practice, you find out that when people are not 'like minded' ('hive minded'), things work out much more messily. The people who suffer the higher level of scrutiny will come to know it. Secrets don't stay secret. And you don't have to be convicted of a crime, to have your livelyhood, and abiity to help provide for and protect your family extremely compromised. It is not the "non-misuse" of these systems that is most worrying (even though I do find it patently objectionable). It is the innevitable, and so vast it's almost unquantifiable temptation to abuse these systems for financial and other predatory gain (the prey being those without equivalent access to the systems), that will lead to their extreme abuse. Think the SS, or the Stasi. The end of the road is a 24/7 camera aimed at your bed, and your involuntary choice to have faith that such a system will be used to the benefit of you or humanity, and not as a tool for its sale into cyberslavery.

The fear this instills...

[Faizdog]

You know what's so scary about stuff like this? It's that it makes people afraid of what they will post and discuss. One absurd end of the spectrum is what I've heard Soviet Russia was sometimes like, people always afraid of what they said to whom.

I'm a naturalized US citizen. Due to my country of origin, I'm probably already on some watch list somewhere, despite the fact that I've never done anything remotely dangerous.
Now, I figure that give mes some points on some kind of a danger/threat scale.

This issue is something I care deeply about. Over the last few days, I've been hesitant about drawing attention to it and responding to it online/via electronic communications. I've posted on Slashdot about it, sent emails and texts to friends and relatives, posted about it on my Facebook status, submitted e-mailed letters to my congressional representatives through the EFF website, donated to the EFF and ACLU, read newspaper stories, articles, websites and commentaries, etc.

At each step, I've been afraid. What if being linked to this type of activity gives me more points on some kind of a danger scale? What if I cross a threshold? What if the government starts making my life difficult in subtle ways? Trouble flying? I am planning on marrying someone from my country of origin, what if my application to sponsor them for a greencard is denied? What if, what if?

That's the real trouble, this type of activity raises concerns and issues in people's daily lives. It creates a culture of fear. At the end of the day, I became a US citizen because I believe in the opportunity this country provides, and in the legal basis it was founded on, and the human rights it supposedly supports. I want to do whatever I can to support my country, and exercise my rights as a citizen to correct what I perceive are wrongs.

I'm really hoping that this advocacy doesn't hurt me in the future somehow. That's the real harm when government spies and tracks with a carte blanche, people who are doing nothing wrong but have much to lose are afraid.

Re:The fear this instills...

[Anonymous Coward]

> I'm a naturalized US citizen. Due to my country of origin, I'm probably already on some watch list somewhere, despite the fact that I've never done anything remotely dangerous.

This is a good thing. Why wouldn't it be. So long as they aren't actually invading your privacy, without other information. Its just a piece of information that can be helpful when combined with other information (like when a marathon gets bombed 2 miles from your house).

Of course you are on lists. Even visiting many such countries will get you on a list. Why on Earth wouldn't it?

Re:The fear this instills...

[real-modo]

Use The Onion Router Project (TOR), and persuade everyone you know to do so as well. TOR works better the more people use it.

On your phone, use the Guardian Project.

Note: there is no suggestion that the US government has some super-decryption powers. Https is fine, things encrypted with modern techniques and large-enough keys are fine.

The reason the NSA needs supercomputers, rather than a big Hadoop installation, is that it is doing traffic analysis - a massive linear algebra problem. See this for a simplified analogy of what it's doing.

Re:The fear this instills...

[Anonymous Coward]

I hear you man! I've largely stopped posting comments with my own accounts (and any place that requires identity validation - which is almost everywhere now), but that was mainly to avoid being tracked by all the commercial databases. It was annoying to think that your, let's say political, or other entirely personal opinions could end up being summed up on a sheet of paper that, let's say a fellow interviewing you for a new job would be holding in his hands.

But it's an entirely new level of concern when it's the government that's gathering all that info, and keeping it probably forever. I too know just how irrevocably badly an out-of-control government can treat its citizens. I still hope that US won't degenerate into a state like that, but the current course of playing loose (at best) with the constitutional rights, blatant lying to congress and the populace (as in Keith Alexanders' congressional testimony), and perhaps most stunningly remarkable apathy and resignation of most US citizens give me ample reason to worry.

For twenty years now, the internet has been a beacon of freedom for me. And now between corporate giants and security-crazed government that freedom is almost gone. There still possible legislative and technical solutions that could reverse this. Real privacy laws could be enacted, and a constitutional amendment could be made to limit secret legislative and judicial agendas (an obvious avenue for run-away government). Widespread adoption of strong encryption and distributed routing protocols could make this harder to track everyone en masse. We shall see how it plays out. But while the media is paying more attention to the pole dancing career of Snowden's gf than to the scandalous truths revealed by Snowden himself, I am afraid things are going to get worse before they might get better.

Re:The fear this instills...

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason it wouldn't be is if gross privacy violations are being performed on such flimsy bases, rather than combining with actual real information they have. Which is the point of this article.

Re:The fear this instills...

[jma05]

I second this. I am nearly in the exact spot as you (although not naturalized, nor in US ATM) and cannot help feeling the same way (lived in and like US, important issue for me, read everything on this, points, threshold etc). It does indeed have a chilling effect on electronic free speech even if it is all imagined because the scale of this is just mind-boggling. Realistically, one could argue that it is unlikely to be that draconian at this point. But it feels like a Pascal's wager (small effects from free speech vs. potentially large personal losses). Even if things are probably nothing like this now, given that they have enough storage to keep permanent records of all text content, who knows how anything will be interpreted a few years from now.

What recourse would I have if I some algorithm decides to put me on a no-fly list? I trained for years in stuff that has employment opportunities only in limited job markets and restrictions on mobility hurt. I am not even a citizen; even many citizens had no clue on why they were on such lists and were not allowed to contest.

Developed countries are great because of transparency. This introduces a humongous black box into the equation. US was supposed to stand for everything against things like these, not lead the way.

Re:The fear this instills...

[Anonymous Coward]

I say you're cold fjord, finally realizing no one will listen to posts under your real name. Even if not, if you can't see the problem with lists like these, you're just as bad.

Re:It should be illegal but isn't, that's the prob

[scot4875]

Why is it that "conservatives" are quick to point out that the Fed printing money isn't real wealth, but then can't see the contradiction of equating taxes with "forcibly taking wealth"?

--Jeremy

Right.

[Anonymous Coward]

David Drummond again insisted that reports of his company freely offering user data to the NSA and other agencies were untrue.

Sorry, but this is one time where I actually do trust the government. You're full of shit, Google.

Re:It should be illegal but isn't, that's the prob

[cold fjord]

One you missed:

"Tyranny is defined as that which is legal for the government but illegal for the citizenry." -- Thomas Jefferson

That doesn't really make any sense. I don't think any reasonable... make that any sane person would claim that individual citizens should be able to own nuclear weapons, nor for that matter arrest people and hold them for questioning. I'm not going to call that tyranny.

The "quote" is almost certainly apocryphal even if it is popular in certain political spheres.

Quotation: "Tyranny is defined as that which is legal for the government but illegal for the citizenry."

Variations: None known.

Earliest known appearance in print: No known appearances in print.[1]

Other attributions: None known.

Status: This quotation has not been found in any of the writings of Thomas Jefferson.

This country is full of hypocrites

[Anonymous Coward]

You guys are hilarious. You want the government to do its duty, and yet you want to turn your backs on the poor and needy. You people sicken me.

We have the government YOU deserve. The tyranny at the top has as much to do with your greed as it does with greed at the top.

nothing to hide

[game kid]

Google, Drummond added, 'has nothing to hide.'"

We know that, and that's the problem with Google. They never have anything to hide...and when we use their services, neither do we.

Phone the NSA and FBI's direct numbers

[Anonymous Coward]

Try and work out what numbers give direct access to the desks of real people, and phone up to complain...

Re:It should be illegal but isn't, that's the prob

[Anonymous Coward]

You could still apply the [apocryphal] quote by concluding that perhaps nobody should have nuclear weapons, period. Including nation-states.

Others have come to the same conclusion regarding capital punishment. While nobody individual should have the right to take another's life, neither should the government.

Re:It should be illegal but isn't, that's the prob

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not a very good definition.....

Re:It should be illegal but isn't, that's the prob

[cold fjord]

That may be, but they are both different debates. And it doesn't cover all the territory. Taxes, for example, and permitting. The government has those powers as well, but not my neighbor. The government many powers that people don't have.

Truth

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not the government that needs to be stopped. It's the media. We're slaves to their manipulation.

Re:Truth

[Anonymous Coward]

There are some stupid comments on this article but THAT one is the stupidest.

Donate to EFF

[opkool]

I just donated to the EFF.

Re:It should be illegal but isn't, that's the prob

[Anonymous Coward]

Moderators: modding down to 0 or -1 is supposed to be trolls and flamebait, not opinions you don't agree with.

Posting AC as I'm moderating. I modded the parent up and it's still at 0. I modded it up despite the fact that I vehemently disagree with everything in it, but it's not a troll or flamebait.

Re:Personally, I'm more worried about Google

[Anonymous Coward]

If you go against prevailing opinion here, even if you're not trolling your post gets modded -1 and will be hidden totally and completely. Hey, isn't this censorship? Nobody understands what irony means here.

Good Idea...

[Anonymous Coward]

Because transparency and security work so well together.

Perhaps people would like to stick to their principles regarding privacy with credit card companies too. I mean those people in the fraud department have access to ALL your data. I mean those guys are acting as if I would just give up my credit card information or lose my card and not realize it and not inform them. All my purchases go through review through their systems so basically they treat me as an incompetent fool who can't protect my own personal information.

Also their system OBVIOUSLY isn't working since they always tell me about fraudulent purchases AFTER they happen. I NEVER hear any information from them when they reject fraudulent purchases. Hell, I don't even have a clue what they're looking at exactly. They should provide transparency so I know how exactly they determine fraudulent purchases and make sure that my fees paid for their service is being will spent!

Rise up with me brothers! Our Liberty and Privacy is at stake! We need to demand that their fraud department stop treating us like incompetent idiots and demand that they dismantle their monitoring systems immediately! Those we would trade their Liberty for temporary security deserve neither!

Prison time would be better

[Anonymous Coward]

Clapper lied to Congress. See the 18:00 mark.
http://www.democracynow.org/2013/6/7/a_massive_surveillance_state_glenn_greenwald
He can be prosecuted, it can be jail time for contempt.

Also FISC court ruled the legal basis they're claiming as unlawful back in 2011. The PRISM program is not legal and hiding the courts ruling does not make it legal:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/06/government-says-secret-court-opinion-law-underlying-prism-program-needs-stay

"Sens. Ron Wyden and Mark Udall revealed the existence of the opinion, which found that collection activities under FISA Section 702 "circumvented the spirit of the law” and violated the Fourth Amendment's prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures."

That's just one ruling on one program that we know about so far. Please keep in mind we don't have the totality of this surveillance yet or the totality of the rulings against them because they've been covering their asses and lying to Congress when asked about it.

Shocking revelations

[esarjeant]

I honestly don't even see where the news is here -- we have a national spy agency that is spying on people. That's why it exists. What did we think they would do?

Re:Personally, I'm more worried about Google

[Anonymous Coward]

And furthermore:

If every non-troller on Slashdot can be expected to hold certain POV's as a matter of being respectable, then there is little reason for anyone here to fear programs like PRISM.

Because everybody already knows how everyone here thinks on any issue that matters, just by looking at their fucking resume!!!

Irony.

Re:It should be illegal but isn't, that's the prob

[hazah]

- USA used to have that before the mob broke it. It was cheap health care where people paid for most routine stuff out of pocket and 2 (two) dollars a month was one of the most popular health care insurance plans that provided catastrophic coverage. That's what provided cheap and sustainable health care without growing government in process, it actually was best in the world at the time before gov't cockroaches destroyed while the mob was cheering.

You need to get your head out of your ass and take a look around you. There is no incentive for *any* business to provide any actual health care with any degree of efficiency. They have all the incentive to continue to make profit off of you being sick. They need to sell you drugs, and paraphanalia on an on going basis for investors to be happy. You know... like all other businesses. Pharmaceuticals do come to mind

It's a funny thing that to work well, you need to have good health. It's a funny thing that those usually in poor health live in poor environments. Its a funny thing that people in poor environments are poor, can't work because of their poor health and can't afford any fucking insurance and can't even move away to minimize the damage. On second thought, it's a little sick that you'd even suggest making a buck off of something so vital.

And government, I mean a real government, the kind the constitution was supposedly describing, would be nothing but people wanting to stay in good health, and have incentive to fund it at a loss for it to stay that way. Did I mention that it's easier to work productively if you already have good health? You seem to flip this around. Sick or poor, work it off to pay for either food or shelter or your meds... this month. That works GREAT!

I guess you just hate children, and judge people based on class, not ability.

The infiltration is real

[Anonymous Coward]

the idea of al qaeda or even the muslim brotherhood infiltrating anything in the US is just patently absurd

I can't tell you who I am, but I can tell you I have been working on the same thing since the late 1970's - the Infiltration of Islamic movement (including Al Queda / Muslim Brotherhood) inside the USA

To many of you, when you talk about Islam/Muslim in America, you mind conjures up the image of "Malcom X / Louis Farrakhan / Crazy Arabs"

But the truth is, the infiltration of Islam is much more than what you guys realized --- It's the WHITE PEOPLE who have converted into Islam (either by pure "I wanna become a Muslim" conversion or by marriage) that has remained below the radar for the past 40-odd years I've been on the case

I first joined up with the "international students" from Middle East / Indonesia to get to know Islam (I was intrigued by the level of hatred of that religion) and I discovered that they do have a nationwide network (even back in the late 1970's) and no one is watching them

I tried contacting local authorities but all I got were "You're too paranoid / You're a racist" type of replies

So I joined them, I converted into Islam, I studied the Al Quran, I went to Middle Eastern countries (and African countries and Asian countries and also Europe and South America) getting to know how wide spread Islam was

I was (and still am) horrified

Do you know that in America the Muslims came from more than 50 countries worldwide ?

Do you know that they have their own "currency network" that can send large amount of money abroad to support terrorist organizations that even the IRS can't trace ?

Do you know that they have key people, in key positions, inside the US government ?

Do you know that many of our high tech firms have been occupied by them Muslims ?

And ... do you know that there are Muslims inside America who disguised as Christians ?

I know all that, I am still on the case, and the more I ply, the more I discover the level of infiltration they have on the American society

Yes, technically I am a Muslim (I had to be, or else I could never have carried out my infiltration), but deep in my heart I do not believe in any of their hokey-pokey bullshits

I love my country too much to let them roam free and to continue their plot against USA, from within

Re:The infiltration is real

[cffrost]

I think you've confused Slashdot with your local LARP forum.

Do you have a warrant yes/no

[Anonymous Coward]

By giving the companies immunity, it meant they don't have liability if they let the searchers exceed the warrant. So a simply checkbox is all that's needed. And the limits of the search, well a computer can't read a warrant, so they just promise not to exceed it.

We've seen from the FISA warrant, these warrants are just massive broad warrants. Covering almost 99.99% Americans. So even the warrant system itself is a joke.

And when EFF etc try to get details on the laws and rulings, the executive branch refuses even to tell the judge the page count of any document, let alone the content, making the Judicial branch irrelevant. Clapper lied to Congress, Congress make choices based on lies, making the Legislative branch irrelevant. It also seems that the secret court ruled against parts of this and only a few in Congress knew and kept it secret from the rest.

Re:Do you have a warrant yes/no

[tnk1]

I think the broad scope of the warrants is a bit deceptive. If someone wanted a warrant to take a picture of every person in the US while they were out in public and put it in a database, that would seem to be problematic. Of course, it's not, because you have no expectation of privacy in public, and you probably wouldn't even need a warrant. You'd just need to convince Congress that it would be a good idea to spend a metric fuckton of money on it.

As long as the warrant does not actually ask for information that delves particularly deeply into each individual's private life, then you could ask for information on 99.999% of the population and your privacy would hardly be impacted.

For the most part, these warrants are used merely to take advantage of private provider's networks so that the government does not need to build its own equipment and system to collect material in a different way. If they do learn something about you that is useful, they both need to store it, and they need to focus on you to bring analysis to bear. That information does nothing for anyone without analysis and process. Usually at that point, they would ask for a warrant to actually look at more specific data and the FISA court would presumably require probable cause before they let the NSA start reading detailed information like emails or VoIP call data.

That sure would be some hack :)

[Anonymous Coward]

"Do you really think this is limited to a few thousand or even hundred thousand data requests per year? The feds have access to all the data... from every large company... they are storing it, querying it

That sure would be some hack :)

liar's paradox

[Anonymous Coward]

Is Google et al. lying because they 'know' or have reason to believe that 'everyone else' i.e. their customers cannot find out the truth ?

Is the Obama Government lying because they 'know' or have reason to believe that 'everyone else' i.e. their non-Federal employee citizens of the U.S.A. cannot find out the truth ?

Welcome to what you call ---- democracy

[Anonymous Coward]

.""It would be irresponsible to continue running the wold on untested unproven hypotheses.""

Welcome to what you call ---- democracy??

I would point out several things..

It is arrogant not to think the US is unable to collect data or intelligence from other allies and there intelligence agencies to figure out who is doing what. It is arrogant to not think, the US has its own spies in allied countries or in the current groups that are threats (which has been reported several times by Frontline) the US is fully aware of any training grounds or groups whereabouts as we speak, including planned attacks in the US or in there respective regions. It is also arrogant not to think that these threats haven't used or will start using hacker tools to hide what they are doing, when it comes to being a US citizen.

Having said that I am very aware of the governments lame excuse over terrorism and plots being planned on US soil, let alone overseas. But this is how other overseas governments started there paranoid dictatorships, the fear becomes where does it stop? Politicians will start allowing laws or bill to allow government agencies to shut down or take out any threats that want to see politicians ousted, including the press (for as worthless as they are), the list goes on and on.
You have a choice, do not use cell phones and or the internet, but the data coleecting goes much deeper then that, I am waiting for exposure on how deep it really goes, or if they are there yet.

What is surprising is the agencies are trying to deny what they are up too, usually they are good at not saying a damn thing. And I question the EFF's motives anymore when they get involved, they seem to actually be supporting the Big companies, by calling smaller companies copyright or patent trolls, they recently released a list of companies looking out for your rights, and half the companies on that list if not all are listed in this story. The EFF more then likely knew this was going on, and they failed to say anything.

However I would go to the very first post that the governent is probably collecting the data without there knowledge, and the FISA letters are for cases involving possible court proceedings. However, these companies were listed as (more or less) partners or cooperating without any resistance with these agencies. They failed to make the public aware that they were involved with this, and now they can continue to go around and deny active involvement, since both parties agreed never to let the public know about this type of intelligence collecting. And neither side are going to just come out and say "oh yeah we had an agreement"..

It reminds me of an old song..

[Anonymous Coward]

With new lyrics of course...

Its my life. Its maaii life.
Stop Cypressing me, stop Corzining me.
Stop QEing me, stop taxing me.
Its my life. Its maaii life my brother.
Stop x-raying me, stop caring me
Stop frisking me, Stop touching me.
Its my life. Its maaii life my brother.
Stop droning me, stop disarming me.
Stop recording me, Stop listening me.
Its my life. Its maaii life big brother.

Lair's Paradox 2

[Anonymous Coward]

Obama Government asserts without evidence that NSA Dragnet and Prism thwarted Numerous Terrorists Threats because they 'know' or have reason to believe that 'everyone else' i.e. their constituents cannot find the truth.

Congress asserts without evidence that they were never informed of the NSA dragnet nor Prism at all because they 'know' or have reason to believe that 'everyone else' i.e. their constituents cannot find the truth.

Grr

[skyraker]

1) Sadly, too many people don't understand that these what the government was doing was legal, so you can't sue over them. Change the law if you must, but suing is stupid. 2) 'Widely' hailed as a hero?!? Why not also put that he's also 'widely' denounced as a traitor. 3) Keeping secrets from civilians is inherently non-democratic, but we accept it so that other countries do not have access to secrets we want to keep. It isn't for Mr. Snowden to decide if it is, as he says, an 'existential threat to democracy'. 4) The man knew what he was doing was illegal and fled the country before revealing himself. A true 'patriot' would've stayed and faced the courts. I'll give Bradley Manning that much credit.

Re:Grr

[moeinvt]

1) Sadly, too many people don't understand that a law which violates the Constitution is illegal. You can also file a lawsuit to challenge the Constitutionality of ANY law. How do you think courts are in a position to overturn laws if someone doesn't challenge the law by filing a lawsuit?

3) Maybe YOU accept it. I don't. It's the government, not the people, who want to keep the government's illegal activities "secret". As Snowden said, this is for The People to decide.

4) Why subject yourself to "justice" metered out by a government that is unjust? The traitors are in a position of power, but that doesn't mean they have legitimacy.

Re:Grr

[Anonymous Coward]

Really, dude. I want to dig in to 3 some more. Whose job is it to decide if it's an existential threat? If it's not each and every gov employee, then who is it? Am I just supposed to trust the gov to make the right choice? How will I know, if it's all secret. Bottom line, you and those like you don't want to have to think. You want someone else to do it for you. You like having someone else decide what is right and wrong.

They look at some "foreignness" factor apparently

[Anonymous Coward]

So if you use term foreigner are likely to use, or turn of sentences, then you are flagged as foreigner. I would like to the list frankly, because it sounds more likely they will catch people not speaking correctely english that foreigner.

This whole terrorist thing....

[Anonymous Coward]

It's fucking stupid. We're AMERICANS. Bring it the fuck on... on our shores. Go the fuck ahead, get lucky, topple a few more of our buildings. Know what? We'll FUCKING REBUILD THEM right down to the very same bolt. We don't need drones killig innocents overseas. Bring that shit here bro, BRING IT, we got more balls that you'll ever have. 3000 people dead? Who the fuck cares. Seriously. 3000 die every day of being obese drunk smokers.

MY FELLOW AMERICANS, you're a bunch of FUCKING PATHETIC NANCY's.
GROW SOME CONSTITUTION BETWEEN YOUR LEGS.

Re:This whole terrorist thing....

[Jesrad]

Haven't you heard, dude ? The terrorists have won... the elections.

Re:Burn It, see it, and VOTE it.

[Anonymous Coward]

You all need to realize that the balls your god gave you in 1776 still aply.
Write, call, and VISIT, your critters.
Promise them that unless they *BREAK THIS SHIT DOWN* you will vote them out of office.

And vote ONLY third party, ANY third party, and keep voting that way till there are three and even more parties in every state, every ballot, every time.
It is the ONLY vote you will make that will EVER count, the third party vote.

Re:It should be illegal but isn't, that's the prob

[Anonymous Coward]

You are weak and wrong, this 'opinion' must not be allowed to exist.

Re:It should be illegal but isn't, that's the prob

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, that quote was from Jean-Luc Picard.

Re:It should be illegal but isn't, that's the prob

[TapeCutter]

"- USA used to have that before the mob broke it"

Agree, at 54 I'm old enough to recall when the US system was a credibly called the "best in the world", at the time we had a similar system here in Oz but that was 40yrs ago and the rest of the western world has moved on since then (the same argument the US is having is one Oz had when I was in HS). Funny thing is that the US and AU taxpayer's already spend a very similar (per capita) amount on health care, despite the fact that Oz does not have the economy of scale the US has, so what's all the additional private money in the US actually paying for? Why cover for an average family of 4 costs you ~10X what it does me to get similar cover and statistically superior health outcomes? - ( Our "death panels" would need to kill an extra 20K patients per year to match US statistics )

most efficient way possible has nothing to do with government Fact: efficiency is no priority for governments, only growing power is priority....

Dogma is a piss poor substitute for the rational argument you had going for a while, in the case of health care it is sucking your red/white/blue wallet dry.

Besides all that, IIRC the US government gave business exactly what they wanted, they forced people to buy their product. They ruled out the taxpayer funded UHC option very quickly, which if based on the Oz model should have cost what they already spend.

Re:It should be illegal but isn't, that's the prob

[TapeCutter]

Thanks, matching deeds to words will always garner my respect..

Re:It should be illegal but isn't, that's the prob

[Anonymous Coward]

it's not a troll or flamebait.

that might be true in many situations, however this is not an ordinary situation. the account that posted it is a sock puppet account that is being used by someone who is angry that they can't spread unlimited amounts of hatred for free with their original slashdot account. they are entitled to their own opinion, however they should not be rewarded for opening additional accounts to make it look as if their opinion is accepted by more people.
 
 

Moderators: modding down to 0 or -1 is supposed to be trolls and flamebait, not opinions you don't agree with.

it is not about moderating down as a form of disagreement, it is about moderating down posts and accounts that are intentionally misrepresenting themselves and breaking the rules.

Dump it anyway

[ThatsNotPudding]

Put the Too Big To Fail theory to the test. If Google, Apple, Microsoft (kidding; they have no morals) and a few other biggies all dump what the jack boots told them to do, what would they do - line up the execs in front of a firing squad? Call their bluff; cockroaches and corruption can't stand sunlight.

Re:It should be illegal but isn't, that's the prob

[Trailer Trash]

I'm usually a big government, bleeding heart liberal, but not in the areas of governmental police powers (monitoring citizens, etc). Basically, if the government is helping it's citizens, I support that (healthcare, etc) but if it's looking at it's citizens to protect itself, I don't like that at all.

Bad news - you can't have one without the other. Remember that all of this is being done under guise of "helping its citizens" by protecting us from terrorists.

Meh

[ThatsNotPudding]

Keep writing your Congressmen AND your local media outlets.

This advice only works in cases where they're both not straight-up, zombie-like fascists.

The price of freedom

[Anonymous Coward]

Is eternal vigilance, in other words the nsa and politicians must be oversight and held accountable if / when they fail to follow the law and constitution, or is it so that they are above the law, constitution and values of society?

They need to just start doing it

[Anonymous Coward]

Release the data and pay the minor consequences later.

Re:It should be illegal but isn't, that's the prob

[Anonymous Coward]

They don't agree with it, so they think it's troll or flamebait. The slashdot of old will never return.

Mod-fags: You should be reading at -1, nested, and you should not even be downmodding. The editors can do that. You should only be upmodding and only those comments that are below 3.

civil war.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's how we end this crap.

Re:It should be illegal but isn't, that's the prob

[Anonymous Coward]

Dummy. The biggest reason people can't afford health care is because the gov pays for it. Make everyone pay for health care, and treat insurance for what it is, a hedge against catastrophe.

Simpsons movie?

[mgcarley]

This all reminds me of that scene in "The Simpsons: Movie" where the show the massive wiretapping complex with thousands of people and then the one guy suddently jumps up saying "Hey everybody, I found one!"

Excuse the quality, but http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQ2VQ2Rwb_k

Re:It should be illegal but isn't, that's the prob

[hazah]

Oh wow... swoosh? You can't make people incapable of paying for it pay for it. That's something a 3 year-old understands. The dummy's in your mirror.

The deck is stacked

[Anonymous Coward]

And as long as we keep allowing congress to take bribes from corporations nothing will change. Congress. Takes bribes. Right in front of the american people. And thinks it's ok. And we keep letting them do it. We the mother fucking people are getting sold out right in front of our faces and we can't do a fucking thing about it. Not. One. Fucking. Thing. Lock and fucking load. That's our only hope of bringing back the constitution. Oh wait, they know that! That's why they want our fucking guns now. Another blatant constitutional violation of our fucking rights. Fuck you USA government. Come at me. Come get my guns. You better bring a fucking tank.

a petition? seriously?

[Anonymous Coward]

You want to petition the white house over the largest constitutional violation in history? The white house has known about it for 20+ years now? Does your petition propose that the white house suddenly care about the constitution? Lol right. I'm sure that is going to happen. Even if they did pretend to, do you think it will result in anything actually changing? Oh hell no. They didn't need permission to grossly violate our constitution then, they dam sure won't need it now. And what is that... we now need laws passed to make our government observe our constitution? We need laws that just puts officials in jail when they violate our constitution. That's the law we need. Every president for the past 20+ years that has known about this needs a jail cell and then maybe our next president will think twice about stuff.

Re:It should be illegal but isn't, that's the prob

[Common Joe]

"Tyranny is defined as that which is legal for the government but illegal for the citizenry." -- Thomas Jefferson

That doesn't really make any sense. I don't think any reasonable... make that any sane person would claim that individual citizens should be able to own nuclear weapons, nor for that matter arrest people and hold them for questioning. I'm not going to call that tyranny.

We the people are supposed to be the government. We the people give certain special responsibilities to certain qualified individuals to carry out necessary functions of a society: police officer, judge, nuclear power plant permits, etc. When we the people are no longer able to control the government (a.k.a, what this Slashdot story is about), then that is tyranny. The quote -- whether or not made by Thomas Jefferson -- makes perfect sense.

Re:It should be illegal but isn't, that's the prob

[kilfarsnar]

Fact: efficiency is no priority for governments, only growing power is priority and you don't grow power to reducing costs, you grow power by growing the apparatus around you.

But why doesn't that apply to business as well? From what I have seen, business (especially big businesses) wants to maximize profit any way they can. If they can do it without providing the best product, they will. If they can do it through anti-competitive practices, they will. If they can do it by offloading externalities onto others, they will.

Inefficiency is also not only the province of government. I have seen ridiculous inefficiency in many companies I have worked for. I see it every day in my current job and I do not work for the government. I know in theory that businesses should seek to maximize efficiency to maximize profit. But that requires that decision makers recognize and properly diagnose inefficiency, and then deal with it in an effective manner. And that is by no means a foregone conclusion.

Re:Personally, I'm more worried about Google

[kilfarsnar]

If you go against prevailing opinion here, even if you're not trolling your post gets modded -1 and will be hidden totally and completely. Hey, isn't this censorship? Nobody understands what irony means here.

Though I agree that people shouldn't be modded down just for expressing unpopular opinions, it is not censorship. I browse at -1, so I see every post.

Re:It should be illegal but isn't, that's the prob

[Anonymous Coward]

>> When a business loses its money, it doesn't affect the larger economy

Been asleep in 2008, haven’t you? Major banks were going to fold, taking most of the economy with them. Even without such extreme cases, every business failure affects the community around it. People lose jobs, property sits empty for some time (days to years) etc.