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WA Post Publishes 4 More Slides On Data Collection From Google, Et Al
anagama writes "Lots of new program names, flowcharts, and detail in four previously unreleased PRISM slides published by the Washington Post today. These slides provide some additional detail about PRISM and outline how the NSA gets information from those nine well known internet companies. Apparently, the collection is done by the FBI using its own equipment on the various companies' premises and then passed to the NSA where it is filtered and sorted."
I've already quit Google. Now how about you?
Google et al. said something, IIRC, like 'we do not collect and pass on any info to the NSA'. Technically true, but also completely irrelevant to whether or not the NSA was actually collecting data.
Asking corps or government about what they do and don't collect is like asking a genie for a wish: one must phrase the question perfectly, or they'll twist it any way they can in order to answer what you asked, but not what you really wanted to know.
This is an unconstitutional power that the USA federal government usurped from the people, it doesn't actually matter how they grab most of it, however what does matter is that they do and it looks like it's not going to stop until the system crashes and there is no more money to run it.
Encrypt your communications, encrypt everything you can. Use self signed certificates, by the way, avoid Certificate Authorities, AFAIC they only make it easier to create a MITM attack, not harder. They can confirm to your device that a certificate is valid even if it is not the certificate that you want to use. Of-course if you use CAs do not let them generate your keys for you.
At this point the behaviour of browsers to treat self-signed certificates as worse than plain text should be suspect to everybody, there is no rational explanation to that sort of attitude except: we don't want you to use certificates that authorities can't revoke and replace.
You can't handle the truth.
You're totally wrong.
We've SUSPECTED spying. It was even reasonable to suspect that, though you could still be called a foil hatter.
Now we KNOW.
It is like the difference between an untested hypothesis you strongly suspect is true, and experimental results that confirm the hypothesis. The confirmation allows a next step to taken on a fully informed basis rather than belief.
So you are totally wrong -- this is NOT nothing. This is confirmation and if we don't do something about it now, it will be seen as a free pass to do this and more. That's why you should care -- apathy now absolutely ensures a deteriorating future.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Sometimes I have to wonder if this lack of concern isn't all our fault.
Before Snowden:
Wild-haired man: The gub'ment be spying on us! The NSA, the CIA, the FBI; they all are reading our emails, monitoring our online chat and seeing all the websites we go to! And all of them telecom and internet companiers are involved too!
Common citizen: Oh, you wacky nutcase; you've been going on for years about this. Where's your proof of this great conspiracy, huh? They aren't spying on us! This is America and that sort of thing doesn't happen here!
After Snowden: /somebody/ a while ago. Anyway, it's been going on forever and the only thing different now is that its out in the open, so why make a fuss about it now?
Wild-haired man: The gub'ment be spying on us! They see everything you do online, everything! And the big internet and telecom companies are in cahoots with them! And look, now I got irrefutable proof!
Common citizen: Well, of course they were spying on us. Hasn't this been known for years? I remember hearing about it from
It's sort of like crying wolf, except the warnings were always true. Instead of making people disregard you, it instead acclimatizes them to the threat to the point where it doesn't seem dangerous anymore (also seen in sci-fi movies where the aliens use conspiracy theories to make people ignore the threat of a coming alien invasion).
Perhaps we should dub this tactic "Snowden's Law"?