Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft's Cooperation With NSA Either Voluntary, Or Reveals New Legal Tactic
holy_calamity writes "When Microsoft re-engineered its online services to assist NSA surveillance programs, the company was either acting voluntarily, or under a new kind of court order, reports MIT Technology Review. Existing laws were believed to shelter companies from being forced to modify their systems to aid surveillance, but experts say the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court may now have a new interpretation. Microsoft's statement about its cooperation with NSA surveillance doesn't make it clear whether it acted under legal duress, or simply decided that to helping out voluntarily was in its best interest."
It could be 'voluntary' complience, with the quotemarks. The classic offer-you-can't-refuse approach. Perhaps a government representative just explained that one way or another the NSA was going to get total access, but if MS (or any other company) complied now they could at least deign the taps in a way suited to their infrastructure, whereas resisting the request would result - after a couple of sessions of congress - in a new law mandating an NSA-designed system be installed and probably break half their well-designed systems by forcing centralisation.
In the UK we used the same approach to compel ISPs to install anti-child-porn filters: The government never actually passed a law mandating ISPs install filtering, they just made it quite clear that they would pass a law if the industry didn't collectively do so 'voluntarily.' This suits the govermnent very well, because it means the filtering list can be maintained by the IWF, an ultra-secretive unaccoutable non-governmental organisation with all the procedural transparency of a lead brick. If they screw up and block wikipedia, no government department gets the blame and no embarassing enquery is launched.
I'm expecting exactly the same tactic will be used within a few years to pressure ISPs into blocking regular adult pornography too - there's already a major tabloid and a couple of MPs campaigning for it. To protect the children, of course.
Although apples taste nice, the fact of the matter is that microsoft is only one (albeit a big fish) of a number of companies who have bent-over-backwards for the NSA/CIA/MOSSAD.
Google`s Brin is ex-israeli army, Facebook`s Zuckerburger has undisclosed interests in israel (a foreign entity), and Akamai was founded by an israeli-commando?
Hold up, lemme get this write....... The "mines" of the vast majority of private personal data are afilliated with israel? Can this be true? If so, what sort of proportions are we looking at?
"I understand the telephone-metadata of 80% of american cellphones is generated by a company called "AMDOCS", an israeli company. This, in combination with the proportionate/disproportionate illicit access of personal data via israeli-afilliated companies, certainly beggars proverbial belief."
- clicked, not signed, Kaiser So-Say
I don't see what the NSA/FISA has to offer in return, so its probably being done due to a threat, and at that point you have to wonder what other companies are also doing for the same reason.
In exchange, they get their share of stolen data in order to compete against other (probably mostly foreign) companies. That data can be used to win orders in a bidding competition, for example, and to get previews of planned production models and other strategic information. Don't think for a second that MS would not offer their eager help for that kind of intel.
See http://cryptome.org/echelon-ep-fin.htm for reference. Bit old, though.
* Offer valid untill Sept, 11, 2001
Everything has an expiration date, need to read the fine print to find them.
The purchase of popular Skype and modification of supernode to ease snooping now makes perfect sense. MS is just a front for NSA spying!
Chinese backdoors. US backdoors. Aussie backdoors. Not just government, you can't even trust the companies you pay to look after you. Can anyone be trusted? Everyone will now encrypt the shit out of everything making it easier for the next bin Laden and perverts to hide their crimes.
It's worse than that. Joseph Nacchio at Qwest did resist and is now in prison. Given the secrecy and that Qwest is the only company to have publicly resisted, he certainly looks like a political prisoner, visibly targetted pour encourager les autres. Key evidence was suppressed on "national security" grounds. This was even before the "patriot" act. A couple of links:
Yeah, put Linux on it.
For your reading amusement during the installation:
http://www.redhat.com/workshop/defense/agenda/
Panelists:
Neil Ziring: Technical Director, NSA Information Assurance Directorate
Al Holt: Technical Director, NTOC, NSA
Terry Sherryl: DISA FSO
David A. Waltermire: Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP) Architect, NIST
It's weird that no one on /. seems to be curious if a corporation that is a leading contributor of OSS sofware with over a billion in revenues each year and a cozy relationship to the US defense sector has been pressured, like Microsoft, to put in backdoors/exploitable vulnerabilites into the Linux kernel or any of their other products. Yes, it's open source, but who audits the code? Supposedly each commit is signed off by another kernel dev. However, in most cases you have one developer signing off on commits of another developer from the same organization. Most times its just rubber-stamp procedure. Given that Linux is used across the world, it seems highly unlikely that the US government would only put pressure on proprietary software and services companies to comply with its demands to make their products easier for them to bypass?
Not to be too glib, but the braves died out long ago under the watch of Andrew Jackson.
I have a serious question for you: why do you love your country? I can understand why one could love the ideals that your country was founded upon as they are beautiful. I can understanding wanting to get involved in politics to try and steer the country in a direction that you think is better than where it is now. Why a love of country, especially a country that has been doing immoral things for quite some time?
The last moral war the US fought, in my estimation, was World War II. It was declared by Congress, and the entire nation sacrificed for it. There was a draft. People left their comfortable jobs and went off to defend the world against tyranny, oppression, and genocide. There was a defined end goal.
Korea certainly did not fit that bill. Our entrance into Vietnam was based on lies. Beruit was Reagan trying to take the focus off Iran-Contra. The First Iraq War was based on lies and oil. Afghanistan was perhaps justified (though by no means moral, in my estimation). The Second Iraq War was also based on lies and oil.
The CIA has a track record of overthrowing democratically elected leaders if they judge them not in the best interests of the US. Remember the Iraninan hostage crisis? That was a response to the CIA reinstalling the Shah. Remember Saddam Hussein? The US put him in power.
Ever since the creation of the NSA and Hoover's reign at the FBI there has been spying on American citizens. Do not think that PRISM is new. The intelligence agencies have been making incremental gains towards it since the Red Scare. The biggest gain of all was convincing the public that CALEA compliance was important (that is, remote, digitally tappable equipment providing both voice and data flowing over the lines).
So, given all of that, why do you love your country?
I'm sorry, but I'm not buying the primary argument here — that this level of surveillance is necessary in order to catch terrorists. (Never mind that it took this scandal leaking for Obama to actually say "terrorists".)
Are terrorists actually stupid enough to communicate using public services like this? You'd think that, at the very least, they'd be using Tor, or their own private equivalents. More likely than not, they're not even communicating electronically; Bin Laden communicated with the outside world through a very non-electronic trusted courier.
It seems to me that their argument is a red herring — that their real purpose is surveilling us, for partisan/corrupt purposes. Witness the harassment of Tea Party groups by the IRS, journalists by the Attorney General, and the NYPD's abuse of that data.
"Once we've identified and embraced our sickness, we'll have strength...and that's when we get dangerous." - John Waters
Last time I checked, the Korean war was the result of a North Korean invasion of South Korea, not some random US expansionist move.
Well, there's that Constitution thing. The ideals in it are pretty darn good. The implementation leaves much to be desired.
In our defense: fuck the Boomers. We were lied to.
There was a long road getting from throwing out a king just to replace an aristocracy across an ocean with a local one to when our grandparents smashed totalitarianism, then came home and took to the streets to make real that "all men are created equal" line.
But the fact that we traveled that road, the fact that we thought it was worth traveling at all, was the proof of the nobility of the American spirit. We weren't good because we were always good: we were good because we were always getting better.
Our grandparents made some mighty big steps. But their kids. Our parents. Fuck. And by the time we were old enough to get out of their suburban lie factories and participate in the economy and the government...boom. Towers, war, economic collapse, surveillance state.
You want to know why I love my country? Because Thomas Jefferson, Mark Twain, Harriet Tubman, Teddy Roosevelt, Chuck Yeager, Martin Luther King, Elvis Presley and Neil Fucking Armstrong, that's why.
You know why I'm mad as hell about it right now? Because the entire generation born between 1946 and 1964.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
...from the US today, or actually WORSE in the US today: You can democratically elect one of two parties that both continue on the same path.
I know that's a cheap comment to make (and I too am from Germany lived and worked in the US for many years - and loved it), but wouldn't you say there's more than just a grain of truth? How I too celebrated when Obama was elected! How very stupid of me.
(Guys, until we get a uterus, it's none of our business and unless it's your uterus, it still none of your business.)
WRONG. Until the law is changed to reflect male choice in the matter, you are wrong. Its not jsut a woman's body issue if the man is forced to pay for a child he doesnt want. Everyone worries about forcing women to have kids they may not want, but never say a goddman thing about the men we jail for missing child support payments. We put people in jail for DEBT. Men should have at least SOME say in the decision or at the very least be able to walk away if the woman decides to keep it. Until a man can be absolved of responsibility, its our issue too.
Good-bye
The colossal fuckup started with two guys in the Pentagon drawing a line on the map in an effort to stop the Russians advancing all the way across Korea before the Japanese surrender. The competent Korean leaders that had been fighting alongside the Russians and Chinese rushed south to Seoul thinking that they could be part of setting up a single Korea, while batshit insane Kim the nobody stayed in the north. The US President finally worked out that Stalin was a much of a monster as his military advisors and Churchill had been warning him about and US troops moved in to enforce the border, trapping the north with the idiot Kim. Then the vast number of veteran Korean troops that had been fighting the Japanese for years some distance away in China eventually came home and the war was on about six months later.
It can be argued (and is frequently) that the arbitrary line on the map drawn in the Pentagon was the major cause, but either way it was the only reason for US involvement. So there's the "random expansionist" bit, more random than expansionist and really more about making sure that Russia didn't get much of Japan than anything about Korea.
I suspect the border on the north of North Korea is also a bit arbitrary since there is a Chinese province there that was almost exclusively populated with ethnic Koreans until around the 1960s.