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Schneier: The NSA Is Commandeering the Internet
Nerdfest writes "Bruce Schneier writes in The Atlantic: 'Bluntly: The government has commandeered the Internet. Most of the largest Internet companies provide information to the NSA, betraying their users. Some, as we've learned, fight and lose. Others cooperate, either out of patriotism or because they believe it's easier that way. I have one message to the executives of those companies: fight.'"
The only way to win this is to get FISA eliminated. Without first eliminating the gag orders and the Star Chamber...I mean FISA courts, we cannot succeed on the whole.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
NSAnet?
So we were right in the 90s when we thought Facebook was a CIA front?
Trash cans tracking MACs.....FBI turning on my mic......1984 is only going to be 30 odd years late......
>> The government has commandeered the Internet
Somewhere, I'm sure Al Gore is pissed.
And not just Google and Amazon. There's a big long list.
Scott McNealy had it right back in '98 or so when he said "You have zero privacy now. Get over it."
We need the illegal surveillance of the world to STOP.
Now!
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Drop this idea of the "government" as some evil alien entity with unknown motives. The issue here is that the NSA is being a bunch of assbags to internet companies.. At the behest of other companies. In this case, security services contractors. Why does everyone forget the warnings about the Military Industrial Complex? This is the Security Industrial Complex and we're throwing away our freedoms so some slimy fucks can make a buck. There is a reason most of our "generals" are desk jockeys whose' primary job is shuffling papers and securing funding.
Some say never attribute to malice what could be explained by incompetence. I say never attribute to incompetence what can be explained by greed.
This isn't "The Atlantic" reporting; it's an article by Bruce Schneier. This guy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Schneier
Feel free to dismiss his concerns if you like, but don't dismiss them just because you don't like the mag they happen to be printed in.
Koans and fables for the software engineer
No WE must Fight. Go to public meeting when the ELECTED Congressmen/women who write these laws. Question then send a clear message change it or be removed from office. The reason it has gotten so bad is not because big company's dont fight it its because we the electors choose to ignore it. I'm guilty as well but i do vote. Hound the bastards they dont want to get voted out of office the perks are great. Stop blaming others blame ourselves.
Jack of all trades,master of none
Unless the green robot has a new age weapon I suspect the faction with the guns is going to win over the interests of the technology industry.
But Bruce is Bruce, and he'll hatchet up all those zombies!!!!
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
The other way to "win" is to move your company offshore - or start it offshore - and not sell your products or services to Americans, and hope the Americans get fed up enough to demand change.
Of course, that may just be trading one nosy government for another.
For governments, one way to "win" is to have a policy of creating direct bulk-data communications channels with other countries when possible, and use encrypted tunnels for all other communications so there is a "direct virtual connection" between the source and destination countries.* This will cost money and will have a performance penalty but it's worth it in both privacy and public relations terms.
*This is not a substitute for end-to-end encryption, but it will make country-in-the-middle snooping of otherwise-unencrypted or weakly-encrypted data that much harder, making wholesale snooping or keyword-triggered snooping by a country "in the middle" impractical.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
More seriously, Bruce is relatively respected, certainly more than any 3 letter agency at the moment. And moreover, having actually read the article, he's right. That's exactly what's happening. No foreign or multinational will use US based servers and services from here on out, or very very few naive ones will. People in the US are looking to use non US servers. That alone is a telling statement.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
When you're focused on sucking in everything, you're not focusing on analyzing anything. Somehow, we didn't have the resources available to keep the Boston bombers under surveillance, but we have the resources to keep 300+ million innocent citizens under watch.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
What does that have to do with anything? Who created the Internet is utterly irrelevant to whether or not these actions are moral.
Newsflash, that story is bullshit. Cern, MIT and Cologne had more to do with the Internet than Arpa. In fact I can't seem to find a single protocol developed by Arpa that is still in use today. I guess you just had to be there to understand that the whole Arpa thing is bullshit propaganda that started getting tossed around in the mid to late 90s. Fucking noobs.
This subject of the article is not new, we have seen similar information for years. The same can be said with Snowden, he was just the most recent in a list of whistle blowers warning you of what's happening.
I agree with the articles point that you are not safe. I also agree that people fool themselves into thinking that if they play on the team they will be protected. Those points are not new, and not unique to TFA either. I have relatives that were young Germans in the 30s so hear from first hand accounts how "team" players were treated. In addition to personal experiences, I read history books which are full of examples of how there is no safety in being a "team" player and how much danger there is in a Government collecting this much data on citizens.
You dismiss the article because of the source, yet offer no counter to their position or opinion. The best you can do is toss out a Red Herring/Ad hominem fallacy to dismiss the thoughts in the article? Not that I would be surprised, this is /. after all.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
We might as well just throw in the towel and go back to using kite string with styrofoam cups to communicate (kidding). Seriously though, all the "fighting" in the world doesn't stand a chance against the almighty dollar. Anyone who fights can either be forced to cooperate or else probably be bought-off. Since clearly after all that CISPA protesting the govt just went ahead and did it anyway, that pretty much says loud and clear weather or not they have any interest in what the public has to say in the matter. So the only solution I can think of is that we gotta find an alternative; something decentralized that can't be easily bottlenecked and used as a point-of-origin to intercept and track what is supposed to be private. Global wireless mesh networking is the only alternative I can think of, but for as many times as I've brought it up, someone always shoots the idea down and insists its not possible (just like going to the moon used to be "not possible", right?).
the existing infrastructure is too closely controlled by the government and corporations
there needs to be peer to peer mesh networking which integrates with the current technology until we can wean ourselves off of the "controlled" infrastructure
large organizations are the enemy of individual freedom
Bruce Scheier has been found to have committed suicide in a public park in DC in the middle of the night.
Or so they say.
Meanwhile, Mr. Schneier remains alive and well living under a secret, undisclosed false identity.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
People in the US shouldn't be looking at non-US services. Traffic that crosses the border is the traffic that's most likely to be snapped up and actively analysed. Of course, that government-supplied incentive not to communicate with the outside world is horrifying in its own right.
It's not like there is equal power here and there is any way to put up much of a fight. Either they give the information to the NSA or the NSA takes the information. It's a lot easier to sell it than to deal with the hostile takeover or the underhanded means or the legal offensive. The average CEO is defenseless not only against the NSA but against any government agency.
Fighting is only a symbolic gesture. There is nothing anyone can do really to stop the NSA from getting what it wants.
And somehow you are just your genes/body, a body grown from your cells with an empty brain worths the same as you. Internet is not just an empty building (that anyway, the US government didn't create alone, a lot of what makes it work was created elsewhere), most what makes it worth is the content on it. And we all created it.
Does that bio mention anything about him offering to pay the legal bills of those companies who decide to "fight"? Or offering to visit the company execs in prison when the feds put them there for running their mouths to the press?
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
Use the Deep Web and darknets. The internet as a medium is useful, you don't have to use one of a finite list of known gateways/providers.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Bruce Schneier is sell-promoting at times, but he is the best we have for publishing about security concerns.
Question: Is what was learned about the NSA is the only thing that isn't legal?
The Plan:
First you commit an unbelievably heinous and cowardly act.
Then you sit back and watch as they eat their own laws and freedoms...the very things you despise.
Then you win.
Why would terrorists waste the energy trying to change western culture when we'll happily do it for them?
This is a great article, save for the fact that Bruce Schneier himself is the CTO of a company that has implemented spying on their customers. He works for BT, and they have had numerous cases of not only admitting to spying, but implementing Phorm to monitor their customers' activity. Where Bruce tells other companies to fight, he refuses to acknowledge this issue.
In fact I can't seem to find a single protocol developed by Arpa that is still in use today.
TCP/IP? :p
So they wont use US based servers and services? So where are they going to go? Any country they go to will have a government with a 3 letter agency spying on the servers and services and passing it to the NSA.
Not only that but the NSA could use other means to spy on multinationals and turn them into NSA friendly multinationals.
Of course, one could also make a similar observation about things like the US Constitution. In both cases, we have had to fight an ongoing battle, political and legal, to maintain the freedom and openness built into the original. We haven't always had total success at this. The natural state is that our "rulers" constantly try to subvert such things that interfere with their power over us.
The NSA is just one of the more recent instances of this. Anyone at all familiar with US (and network) history should be able to rattle off a long list of similar actions on the part of those who want control over our lives.
Not that there is anything specifically "American" about this. It's hard to find any government (or corporation ;-) anywhere that doesn't behave similarly. It's just part of "the human condition", as the literary folks would express it.
Prediction: Legal measures to fix this situation will have no effect. The government will simply create a new secret agency with a new name, which will use different words to describe what they're doing, and it'll be just a continuation of the NSA's work. Does anyone have any accurate count of how many times this has already happened? (Likely not; some of them probably never became public. ;-)
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Those are your chances of being a victim. 230 deaths a year is the justification for all the tax dollars, trampled rights and illegal activity.
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Considering that the main targets of this surveillance are countries like Germany, France, Brazil, Japan and others (that don't seem to be Al-Qaeda training countries) is clear that the target is not citizens protection, but probably intellectual property stealing (and this is proper stealing, as could end with a patent over that, not like people that just copy leaving you with the original). Wonder if countries will start to repeal IP treaties with US over this.
the existing infrastructure is too closely controlled by the government and corporations
there needs to be peer to peer mesh networking which integrates with the current technology until we can wean ourselves off of the "controlled" infrastructure
large organizations are the enemy of individual freedom
But we cannot do that for everything. For stuff which isn't important it can be anonymous. For just chatter and discussion it can be anonymous. But when you want to actually make decisions or actually do things then there has to be accountability.
You can be anonymous in what you read or say if it's not taken seriously. But if you want to be taken seriously then you cannot be anonymous. If you're reporting a crime you can be pseudo-anonymous but if you want to secure a conviction then you have to name names and if you do that then you have to name yourself.
correction, you do not have to name yourself, but you need to be pseudo-anonymous enough that you have an identity even if its virtual and you need at least a digital signature. You cannot be completely anonymous and be taken seriously.
Anonymous sources is not considered journalism. That is just rumor mongering.
Sheeple are frequently painfully unaware of the processes that create decent societies, so when their once decent society comes under attack from within, don't even realise what they risk losing if they refuse to act.
The USA is an a cycle of spending ever large amounts on its Earth threatening military machine. The more the military grows, the more powerful the supporters of the military become, until every aspect of American life is shilling the wonders of a society that exists to serve and grow the military. No American now dares to question the obscenity of America's mass murdering butchers in uniform.
Spying follows the same pattern, but worse in this way. Whereas military investment usually fails to show clear positive results, spy programs merely have to prove they grab more data about more people to be seen as successful. Take Bill Gates and the NSA's ultimate spy platform, the Xbox One. This puts a camera, microphone and motion recognition system into the home of MILLIONS of Americans at ZERO cost to the US government. The sheeple actually pay to have the world's most sophisticated real-time spy device in their own living rooms (or children's bedrooms).
What US government would have said "No!" to Gates' proposal? Bill Gates promises to provide a running tally of each person who enters/leaves the same room as his console, 24/7. He promises that the running cost to the NSA is minimal, as each Xbone reports daily its record of individuals that appeared before it (the console sends head shots to the NSA cloud servers, so the NSA can link location with straightforward face recognition to put a name to each person tracked by the Xbone). Microsoft has already declared that the Kinect sensor system that allows this is always running, and the encrypted traffic that constantly flows from the console to the cloud defies the ability of any investigator to identify exactly what the Xbone is doing at any one time.
The vicious circle, or positive feedback, is fully active. All that remains is to worry about what future use a government may put the information it gathers to. America jails more people than anywhere else, and as with the military and spying, is rapidly accelerating the grown of the prison industry. How easily Clinton II or any future US dictator (your presidents ARE dictators, but with fixed term limits) could introduce new classes of 'thought crimes'.
The US Constitution should be amended to make all forms of government surveillance EXCEPT clearly targeted acts with individual court approval, illegal by principle. This especially applies to 'anonymous' full surveillance projects that claim that if the sources of data remain anonymous, that is OK. Freedom from ALL unwarranted surveillance should be added to Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Conscience. The vast majority of the NSA and similar agencies should be dismantled (and there are plenty of real examples from history where nations have dismantled their spying organisations when they became abusive).
But good is NOT going to happen. The sheeple have been carefully groomed, and more importantly dis-empowered. The sheeple therefore do not provide a countermanding societal force of any kind, so the military, prison system, spying, and mainstream media propaganda programs continue to grow at a truly alarming rate. What happens when only one side is pushing? If you know anything about the History of our Race, you'd realise the answer is almost too scary to comprehend. America is going to be responsible for WW3. This cannot be prevented now. Every aspect of American society is preparing for the next World War (even if most of the sheeple are too thick to notice this, as they cheer their murderous troops in whatever nation exterminating slaughter they are currently engaged in).
When the real war finally kicks off, the NSA will provide the most comprehensive list of all those that need to be rounded up. Google's algorithms will weed out leaders and potential leaders of all effective anti-war sentiment. In many ways, this whole technological farce is playing out to return us to the times when the King could declare war, and the sheeple had no choice but to go along with the declaration.
Which doesn't say much.
Right - did you see the map of the hardware locations for XKeyscore? All over the place. Irritates me that as a non-American, it's quite possible that my communications, even domestically within my own country, are being monitored by the US. And they certainly would be if I communicated with someone in a different country that required peering through the US (which from where I am, is most other countries).
Or offering to visit the company execs in prison when the feds put them there for running their mouths to the press?
Doesn't the mere notion that a person could be incarcerated for talking to the press kinda indicate that there's something horrifically fucked-up about the situation?
The Constitution guarantees a right to free expression, and a right to a free press, so where the fuck does this idea that it's reasonable to take away someone's freedom for sharing information come from?
In other news, the SCOTUS recently ruled that it's perfectly legal to lie in a political ad. WTF, my fellow Americans... WTF.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Consider the source, take with grain of salt, etc.
That's a textbook ad hominem attack.
Do you have anything substantial to say about the arguments within, or are you just proudly declaring that you've already shut your mind because you don't like the source?
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
It's OK, the government isn't recording your data, General Alexander explained it all, they aren't interested in your data! Its only things like, who you spoke to, when you spoke to them, how often you speak to them, whether they speak to terrorists, whether they speak to people who speak to terrorists, whether you speak to people who speak to people who speak to terrorists, that sort of thing.
They know you are cheating on your wife, or stealing from your workplace (because you keep speaking to that woman, or visiting a bank website that doesn't have an account in your name), but they don't mind about that. Well the bank thing they do, but they will kick it over to the IRS and/or FBI when they get bored of trying to decide if you are a terrorist or not.
Remember, they only record your metadata. There's no data there! You are OK with that because they aren't tapping communications of Americans right? .
Basically if you are offering any products or services over the Internet now you are baiting your customers into being spied upon. Every email you send is inviting the recipient to reply and be spied upon. Its not just about what you do. Its about what others on the net do in response. Every action you take condoning the use of this medium is tricking other people to use it too.
They havent just usurped the Internet. They have contaminated it. They have defiled it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morality
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
No foreign or multinational will use US based servers and services from here on out, or very very few naive ones will. People in the US are looking to use non US servers. That alone is a telling statement.
I wonder how many of us have started to write or say or do something, then after a moment reflection, decided not to do so because.... well, you know.
Even a Wikipedia search might make you interesting.
A distinct chilling effect is occuring.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Schneier is assuming that it matters if a company's customers trust it. But with the relative lack of ISP competition in the US, where are customers of large ISPs supposed to go? What difference does it make whether their customers trust them?
Bruce Schneier does The Abyss: I had a mental image of Ed Harris yelling into Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio's face "FIGHT! FIGHT! FIIIIIIIIGGGGGHHHHHTTTT!!!!1one" when reading the last sentence of the summary.
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
Three, I thought we hated the big bad corporations. Now we want them to fight our battles with the government we generally side with against them?
Are you actually trying to argue that our government is an enemy of corporate power? Half the time politicians end up with a cushy overpaid job with one of them when they leave public office. They aren't enemies. The corporations couldn't even exist in their current form without the government to protect them from liability, from individual responsibility. Corporations and the government are the best of friends.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Every country is doing this. But i guess USA bashing is 'in' this year.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Does that bio mention anything about him offering to pay the legal bills of those companies who decide to "fight"?
I think the argument he is making is that the economically sound decision for those companies actually is to fight, given that their actions will eventually become known. Betraying your customers trust is never good for business in the long run. Those who fight are ultimately investing in goodwill, even if they lose.
Apparently I've already decided that for me it doesn't matter, given that I posted. If anything, this has caused me to be more vocal. Something about my rights being violated or some minor such thing, at least according to Alexander, Clapper, and Co. I wonder how they'd feel if we had the same data published hourly on a "What's Alexander doing?" or "Where's Clapper?" web site? After all, it's nothing personally identifying, right?
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Very simple, the internet should slowly and effectively hand privacy to the users. The privacy of my message and its metadata should depend on me and my destination somehow. That's all, and any company offering that as much as possible should be prefered.
It fills some kind of "need" and people gotta have it. Much like Here Comes Honey Boo Boo.
They did, in China. Alas, home was the U.S.
davecb@spamcop.net
No, just tunnel your email out of your ISP to where the MX record of your recipient says and use PGP. Methinks Silent Circle will eventually offer that (note who is a founder, and what his relationship to PGP was)
davecb@spamcop.net
WhereInTheWorldIsClapper.gov, sounds reasonable to me.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Germany here: The problem is: Our own BND is just as bad.
Russia here. WTF are you complaining about?
Aussie here, Bruce lost the tapes again, can one of you guys send us the backup?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Germany here: The problem is: Our own BND is just as bad.
Russia here. WTF are you complaining about?
Aussie here, Bruce lost the tapes again, can one of you guys send us the backup?
Nigerian here, I have your tapes, and if you can kindly assist in repatriating my royal father's $37 million frozen asset to your account, we can certainly have a mutually beneficial relationship.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Seen this shit coming way back then. Fuck George Shrub and his fucking war on terror, and his 'homeland security' and his WMD's and bullshit wars. Fuck the whole bunch of them. While nobody was paying attention the last 50 years we became a nation of mindless consumerbots, all of us awash in propaganda and far too many who are virtually illiterate. And we've just kinda stood around the last 12 years, mesmerized by media and internet and getting our piece o' the "american dream" while the fuckers looted us blind, snuffed out the constitution, AURGHGHGHGHGHGHGHG!
to ID the spammers and nuke the fuckers from orbit!
Rick B.
No foreign or multinational will use US based servers and services from here on out, or very very few naive ones will. People in the US are looking to use non US servers. That alone is a telling statement.
I wonder how many of us have started to write or say or do something, then after a moment reflection, decided not to do so because.... well, you know.
Even a Wikipedia search might make you interesting.
A distinct chilling effect is occuring.
Baaa! I will not have my freedom of speech impinged! I do what I have always done and if the NSA wants to talk to me, fine, come get an earful!
... because the "crazy" people were right!
a small heads up, the US government started wikipedia to brainwash people, 80% of the population are actually robots and you dont even want to know what the aliens do to you in your sleep.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
You know where citizens never have to worry about terrorism felling their perfect snowflakes? North Korea.
Spoiler: They don't hate us for our 'Freedom'; they hate us for our foreign (corporate) policy. George Washington was right re: foreign entanglements.
What would motivate executives of large Internet corporations (the Verizons, the Googles, etc) to fight the government on this issue? Number one, they are not the ones who are threatened by government spying. Number two, they have no political disagreement with the purpose of the spying, which is done by a capitalist government in defense of capitalism. So, to repeat myself, don't hold your breath.
"We have met the enemy and he is us." - Pogo 1953
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
I realise this will not come as a shock to most of the /. community but the internet was born out a government program under the Advanced Research Projects Agency. To pretend like government intrusion and monitoring was never built into the DNA of the net is naive in the extreme.
If you start with the assumption that anything you do on a networked device is vulnerable then you wont be disappointed when your online 'privacy' or 'rights' are violated by the very people who gave you the ability to expose yourself in such a way.
Its better to think of yourself as less interesting to the government than you would think. Yes, the government can spy on you and your online habits but chances are you are not interesting enough to be of interest. If you suspect you are then get clued up on how to protect your own privacy rather than bleat to the very people who are violating it in the first place.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
Hmm, what is the purpose of your comment? Are you suggesting it is probably just better to give up, roll over, give in? Are you suggesting something else? I don't know. Your comment only seems to say "Is this guy gonna help you when fighting is hard?", and I'm not sure why that needs to be said.
Indeed: it rather reminds me of usenet, where the community created a computer network over the objections of a telephone polyopoly.
I speculate we will see two out of perhaps three or four initiatives suceed in the next little while:
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
Doesn't http://prism-break.org/ protect you against NSA?
Casteism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arpanet
"The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was one of the world's first operational packet switching networks, the first network to implement TCP/IP, and the progenitor of what was to become the global Internet. "
Apparently a simple Google search was beyond you too. ARPANET was the first network to implement TCP/IP. From what I can tell, the universities and IEEE that documented standards were mainly documenting what was already operational on ARPANET. They weren't defining the previously-unused standard, but describing the standard already used.
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