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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."
Don't use US services.
Businesses dont go out of their way to increase their costs with no tangible benefit. There is either a tangible benefit (Quid pro quo) or it was the best of a group of bad options (not doing it will cost us more.)
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.
"His name was James Damore."
Does someone really need to connect the dots?
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
Remember "national security letters" that were created as part of the "USA Patriot Act"? These were the special kind of fake warrants that were never approved by any judge, but any person or organization who got one wasn't allowed to tell anyone about, including a court of law (preventing anyone from saying "Hey, Fourth Amendment anyone?"). That would explain everything: why FISA didn't stop it, why the companies are cooperating with the NSA, and why they aren't including references to such things in their privacy policies.
Bless you, former senator Russ Feingold, for having the guts to stand up for the Constitution when the entire rest of the Senate ignored it.
I am officially gone from
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-collaboration-user-data
"Microsoft has collaborated closely with US intelligence services to allow usersâ(TM) communications to be intercepted, including helping the National Security Agency to circumvent the companyâ(TM)s own encryption, according to top-secret documents obtained by the Guardian.
The files provided by Edward Snowden illustrate the scale of co-operation between Silicon Valley and the intelligence agencies over the last three years. They also shed new light on the workings of the top-secret Prism program, which was disclosed by the Guardian and the Washington Post last month.
The documents show that:
* Microsoft helped the NSA to circumvent its encryption to address concerns that the agency would be unable to intercept web chats on the new Outlook.com portal;
* The agency already had pre-encryption stage access to email on Outlook.com, including Hotmail;
* The company worked with the FBI this year to allow the NSA easier access via Prism to its cloud storage service SkyDrive, which now has more than 250 million users worldwide;
* Microsoft also worked with the FBIâ(TM)s Data Intercept Unit to âoeunderstandâ potential issues with a feature in Outlook.com that allows users to create email aliases;
* In July last year, nine months after Microsoft bought Skype, the NSA boasted that a new capability had tripled the amount of Skype video calls being collected through Prism;
* Material collected through Prism is routinely shared with the FBI and CIA, with one NSA document describing the program as a âoeteam sportâ."
And you STILL want to do business with them? You STILL want to trust their OS with your personal files and/or communications?
What more do you need?
As an American, as an American who loves my country, I need to have the courage to face the reality --- that my country has ceased to be the land of the free, the home of the braves, but has turned into an empire which is moving towards oblivion
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
What do you expect Microsoft to do if the NSA come knocking with a request for information? Say no? You either provide it to them or your company will get severely fined with possible additional legal action taken against it.
Ask to see the warrant signed by a judge specifying the individual and information they are requesting the information for?
Say no when they can't produce that information?
Take the government to court when they demand you do something unconstitutional?
In other words, obey the law of the land rather the law of the individuals who happen to be in power at the time?
Other companies - sadly only a handful - have fought these illegal orders; Microsoft could follow that same course too. In fact, given that they have so much power over others, I'd say they have a /responsibility/ to do so.
Pursuit of profit may be the primary incentive for corporations, but it is not their only responsibility. Furthermore, failure to protect the interests of their customers will, in the long run, only /hurt/ their profits.
Nowadays anything and everything that are related to NSA has been condemned to death by a million cuts.
But we do need to tally up what has actually transpired to the American society BEFORE Mr. Edward Snowden decided to break his silence of the terrible truth ...
The American society before the Snowden era was already a very damaged and trouble society.
The United States of America, as a nation, has already become very heavily debt-ridden, and that the rights of the average Americans has already been greatly reduced by patent-trolls and the copyright-MAFIAA-trolls.
Taken as a whole, NSA is but one of the many players with the nefarous intentions to decimate the Rights of the average Americans as guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States of America.
I am not defending NSA, but I have to be fair.
It ***IS*** the system itself, which the government of the United States of America is but a part of it, that is behind the destruction of the Spirit of Americana.
They allowed, hmm... no, they ENCOURAGED the HUMONGOUS CORPORATIONS to encroach into our rights (via patents and copyrights), and they actively fanned phobia against "gun violence" / "terrorism" in order to expediting the destruction of the Bill of Rights.
But the most important aspect of all is this --- that the American people have failed to rise up against the system.
We have become a people who no longer care about our own Constitutions.
Instead of being proud Americans who will fight for liberty and justice for all, we have become the timid Americans who will sacrifice anyting in order to secure a place inside the "safety cocoon" prepared for us, by our Great Leader.
The true "1984" had arrived, and it had arrived 29 years later than as was promised.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Who says they didn't ask for the warrant? Do you know for sure how the requests went down? Also, what makes them illegal orders? If the courts uphold them, they aren't illegal (they might be immoral, but that's another story).
Google's just better at the PR in these cases. But in the end, both companies (indeed, most companies) look out for themselves. They probably know it's not worth fighting the Unites States fucking Government unless you're pretty damn sure it's worth it.
Kinda puts the whole uproar over Huwaei equipment into perspective doesn't it?
Yes, it does. NSA had proof-positive that running Huawei equipment was a bad idea, because they knew beyond any shadow of a doubt that it was possible to build in back doors.
This is not hypocritical. Hypocritical is when they say "if you don't have anything to hide, you have nothing to worry about" when they themselves are breaking the law to spy on us (and others) and then hiding the fact, albeit not very well at this point. But when they say "there could be back doors in that equipment so we shouldn't use it" they are entirely correct. That doesn't solve the problem of the NSA snooping on your communications, but their concern over foreign interests doing the same is still valid. They are concerned over foreign snooping; we are concerned, I hope, over all snooping.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
"If the courts uphold them, they aren't illegal"
This is unfortunately a common misunderstanding.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
The purchase of popular Skype and modification of supernode to ease snooping now makes perfect sense. MS is just a front for NSA spying!
Remember Microsoft already own a back door into every windows box - they call it "software update" - com patch Tuesday maybe you get something different from everyone else should the NSA want a peek - that's the problem with closed source code - who do you trust?
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:
But "if the courts uphold them" (what GP said) != "any statute passed by legislators" (what you quoted). You're talking about legislature, GP is talking about courts, and they are of course very different. If the court system, including the Supreme Court, passes judgement and says a law is enforceable, then indeed we can conclude that it is officially constitutional per our legal system. Your quote is not on topic to this point.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Haven't you people been paying attention?
Microsoft vs. DOJ was settled almost immediately after 9/11, from wikipedia "On November 2, 2001, the DOJ reached an agreement with Microsoft to settle the case". That's just enough time for the dust to settle, and for MS and the DOJ to wrangle a deal over permitting the government "backdoor access" to everything on your computer.
Why do you think the US government permitted a convicted monopolist to continue without any punishment?
The US DOJ had won the case, and like Aaron Schwartz, they were attempting to squeeze everything that's important to them from the convicted parth.
Sure, they were ordered to go along with the consent decree, but that's not a real punishment, like the rest of us were expecting.
Remember those NSA keys that were found in the release of Windows that included debugging symbols?...
They were there in MS Windows even BEFORE 9/11....Look it up here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSAKEY
Don't you people pay attention?
Sorry for all you conspiracy theorists, but:
Correlation does not imply causation.
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
I agree that one should question RedHat and a few other GNU/Linux distributions. Luckily we do not have to use RedHat if we choose to use GNU/Linux, there are many other variants. NSA may have a harder time getting their backdoors into Debian / Ubuntu than they have with RH, but there are questions there too. Anyone remember that "mistake" in Debians OpenSSL code which made it generate useless certificates for years without anyone noticing? As for the kernel itself.. I don't see it as likely that anyone would manage to put a backdoor in there. But it's open source, so you can I can and should take a look. Overall, I'd say you are much better off using Linux than Windows.
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
"Conspiracy theorist" is no longer a negative. Turns out a lot of conspiracy theory has been right all along. And even if not all of it is right, it has been demonstrated that the public trust has been completely compromised and so EVERYTHING the government does requires suspicion and scrutiny. It's much more convenient to try to think about other things or to just turn on the TV to see what else is on, but if you think that way -- if you're intentionally "protecting your sanity" by avoiding knowing the truth or debunking lies, then you are, by all classic definitions, sheeple. "Don't want to think about it. Don't want to worry about it. Just want to live your day to day life." That's sheeple talking.
You're being dismissive without considering the whole of reality. "This doesn't necessarily prove that." Great. But why stop there and smugly turn away as if you've demonstrated some kind of superior wisdom?
...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.
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.
Today, I've uninstalled Skype. And every single one of my colleagues. If trust is all you have as a company, and something like this happens, then you can go bankrupt for all I care.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
I don't think it's 'conspiracy' what the government's doing, they're behaving like every person and corp. Simply using legal and financial tools to get what they want.
1) Telecoms granted immunity.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/10/supreme-court-telecoms-win-immunity
2) Quest CEO claims retaliation by NSA for refusal (old)
http://dailycaller.com/2013/06/13/jailed-qwest-ceo-claimed-that-nsa-retaliated-because-he-wouldnt-participate-in-spy-program/
Here's my point in relation to Microsoft: That having won the case against MS, the DOJ had them 100% 'bent over the barrel' as it were. And in exchange for their continued assistance to the NSA, they were granted the 'consent decree' as a sort of 'released on probation', rather than breaking up the company at that time (or imposing other really draconian measures). As with all of the other secret FISC/DOJ agreements, just enter one for MS in relation to this case. MS would certainly have agreed to go along. Besides, monopoly is good for state control and Linux as an alternative would have looked bad to the NSA too. Method, motive, and opportunity.
Look what the facts of the case with the Quest CEO. The loss of the NSA contract (and the related mis-measure of income/profit as a result) directly created the situation he was charged with. I suspect that the government came to him looking for him to go along with the plan too. He didn't want to play ball, and when he tried to cash out and run away...they got him for insider trading. What's conspiracy about that? Method, motive, and opportunity.
Look at the ongoing investigation of Google now too. Not claiming that they're innocent, but DOJ gaining leverage with an 'ongoing investigation' of something or other is just their style. US Government wants into everyone's pants, any time they want too.
People did used to say I'm wearing a 'tin-foil' hat, but it's looking like the 'high fashion statement for 2013' these days.