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NZ Police Got PRISM Data Before Raid On Dotcom
Bismillah writes "Police affidavits show that the New Zealand Police requested and received assistance from the country's signals intelligence agency, the GCSB, which appears to have used PRISM to intercept Kim and Mona Dotcom and the Megaupload associates' communications."
You have to wonder who WASN'T involved with Kim Dotcom at this point. It's absurd the amount of time and money that was used to investigate this one man. Personally, I've always felt he was a bit egotistical. But man, When goverment(s) bring THIS much force to you, you kind of deserve to be a bit over the top.
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On the upside, with this cat out of the bag now, at least it is going to be brought up in court. Kim doesn't seem to be the sort of chap who will keep quiet and just let it slide. He is probably straightening his tie as we speak and about to knock on the door of the nearest court in NZ.
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What the FUCK has happened to my country?
Funny how the justification for the program was all about the terrorists. Now, we find out that it wasn't just used for terrorists, pedophiles, and drug traffickers, but also for people the copyright lobby dislikes.
And yet, I find myself completely unsurprised. How long before all this surveillance infrastructure gets used against farmers standing up against Monstano, or generic drug makers, or individuals advocating for shorter copyright terms? How long before this gets used to stifle political dissent and free speech?
Soon, if it isn't already happening. Very, very soon.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
When the US is in command, nothing is excessive when protecting the income of Big business.
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What's interesting is that our Prime Minister effectively admitted in parliament (by refusing to answer in a situation where "no" would have been a far better answer for him and one he would have given had it been true)just 2 days ago that the GCSB (or NSA wanna bes) have been funded by the US to the tune of millions of dollars.
So what did they buy? probably a Prism to put in our fibre access to the rest of the world. And I guess enough of a back channel to send it all to the US. I can see now why the second pacific fibre was nobbled because they wouldn't accept the use of Chinese infrastructure - wouldn't do to have some other country's backdoors in the routers rather than the US's.
Generally you see a line between law enforcement "signals intelligence" and national security signals intelligence. I would expect that the use of national security assets for ordinary law enforcement would be limited. I have a hard time seeing that it would be justified in this case.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Cold what do you expect NZ to do when it comes under pressure from the USA? At anytime the USA can turn off the NSA data stream.
NZ learned a lot from the Rainbow Warrior, international treaties, understandings, letters, assurances, visits, friendships and decades of cooperation are totally worthless.
When NZ asked Australia, the US, UK for small amounts of basic telco help with France they got very little back.
So NZ now knows its place, when the US asks for anything, NZ does all it can with all its tools (NSA was very good to the NZ gov and vast, expensive new telco work).
National security assets where in no way limited and NZ national security staff seemed happy to help before any new telco/spy law changes.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
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Wait, are you saying that PRISM was used for enforcement of some media company's copyrights?
Or was it used to try to prop up the arrest after the fact?
Because once there is proof that these systems are secret to the population of the USA, but used freely to enforce some copyrights for campaign donners, shit could hit the fan in high places.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Generally you see a line between law enforcement "signals intelligence" and national security signals intelligence. I would expect that the use of national security assets for ordinary law enforcement would be limited. I have a hard time seeing that it would be justified in this case.
Especially when the "law enforcement" issue was basically a civil matter of copyright.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
http://youtu.be/JtVbHBIyFKw
They don't even bother to check the script they are given. It's not even as professional as books on tape or someone blindly reading the news.
They may be elected officials, but they certainly are not working for the public. To make it worse, you know that they sold themselves for next to nothing. A few hundreds of dollars of campaign contributions and an empty promise of fundraising is all it takes. They're not just whores, they're cheap whores.
Why is Snark Required?
Sarcasm aside, this ridiculous claims has actually been made by not only copyright agencies, but the US government, to justify more money for copyright-enforcement efforts.
news.cnet.com/Terrorist-link-to-copyright-piracy-alleged/2100-1028_3-5722835.html
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2008/03/us-attorney-general-piracy-funds-terror/
Firstly, there's no difference between "law enforcement" and "national security" except in the eyes of egomaniacs who think that there brand of crime investigation (e.g. "terror" - seriously, could you get any more emotive?) is Totally More Important and should receive all sorts of Special Dispensations.
Secondly, intercepting data of suspected criminals - and there is a lot of good evidence that this guy was engaging in criminal activity - seems sensible. It shouldn't be all cloak and dagger, and "signals intelligence" should just be regarded as another way of collecting evidence.
Thirdly, people like this, who are essentially making huge bank by distributing other people's work, don't really deserve their income. They are the flip side of the copyright cartel.
The copyright cartel are also leeches and ought to be just as thoroughly investigated for their dirty bribery and lawyering practices.
A pox on all their houses.
Not really. I used to believe people gave a shit, but really - they don't. Most people really don't care. Even if the accused is accused of something they do every day they will sit on the jury and convict because the specific circumstance doesn't apply to them, because the prosecutor is so persuasive about how the specific way the accused is claimed to have done it is a criminal act, and take the lesson to mind their ways ever after about that specific way. Until they are in the dock proclaiming that it is not fair to people who were like them and will convict them too for failing to observe a different specific nuance of imaginary property in an exquisitely specific different way.
This is an odd game where the combatants define the rules dynamically after the fact. For a decade after play ends the outcome is in doubt. The only real way to win is not to play. Or to be one of the many lawyers who get hourly fees to contest the outcome.
In my mind it's just one symptom of the cancer of lawyers infesting the body public. Class action laywers have given up even the pretense of giving their clients a coupon for a discount toward their opponent's products in settlement as justification for their disproportionate share of the penalty, and now collect without compensating the victims at all. In cases like Prenda they generate their own plaintiffs, respondents and misdeeds to generate profits out of whole cloth.
It is not fair. It is not right. But this is how it is, and unless people unite to fight it this is ... hey, Wilfred's next season dropped on Netflix. BRB.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
No one forced him to use an international communication system.
So two governments cooperate to spy on each others' citizens with no judicial oversight and you are ok with it because ... wait. Why are you OK with it? Because the communication was international? So you believe that no international communications should enjoy privacy protections? Why?
[Citation needed]. Specifically a situation where people in general give a shit, rather than unique powerless individuals.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Funny how the US always criticizes other countries for human right violations and references their constitution as a safeguard against government abuse. Meanwhile, state agencies are collecting information on the entire internet population and handing it out to foreign governments to aid oppressing their population. The irony!
I wish that was funny.
I no longer take the human rights thing seriously when coming from my country. Until they start following the constitution, this country is completely dysfunctional. In the past, when something was declared/ruled as unconstitutional, it mean "you're done. cease doing it." For some reason, it doesn't mean that any longer. Now it's just "yeah? so?"
Tyranny & corruption have graduated from the individual-nation level, to being a global/international level game. National leaders/power-brokers have realized the advantages to cooperation, at least on limited terms, with the leaders/power-brokers of other nations toward the goal of controlling ever more of people's lives, liberty, and wealth.
It's corruption and betrayal/treason/tyranny on a global, international scale. This is the non-tinfoil/black-helo, real-world "NWO". It isn't some wild super-secret conspiracy theory. It's just your everyday human corruption and lust for wealth and power that has evolved over time and with the opportunities that technology advances and mass media propaganda over time provide to operate across borders, political systems, and even sovereign interests.
It's things like TFA describes, and things like the US and UK or NZ each spying on the other's citizens and exchanging the data to avoid legal/constitutional proscriptions against domestic spying. Things like treaties that "force" a (or a set of) national laws to be changed/abolished to comply with treaty terms, when the whole aim was to get said changes made against popular wishes and/or to avoid/bypass legal/constitutional restrictions.
The fact that Snowden's and other's whistle-blower domestic surveillance revelations happened at all indicates that either the surveillance apparatus and infrastructure has grown so enormous and all-encompassing that it was bound to happen, or that things are so much under their control that it really doesn't matter that much any longer to those in power if the public finds out.
Or both.
None of which bodes any good for regular people anywhere, not just in the US, as TFA illustrates so well.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
I like how we are told by every government mouth piece how much harm these revelations by snowden, manning and fisa declassifications are doing to there anti terror intelligence work, but were willing to risk exposing it for copyright infirgment. Kinda cuts right through their bullshit about this being for the public good.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Some people seem to care, but it seems we're in the minority.
Another poster brought up the Occupy movement. Everything I've heard about how that movement was "dealt with" frankly made my skin crawl. Another example is the Tea party. It started out as a grassroots libertarian protest against "too big to fail" back in 2008, but by 2010 it had been completely co-opted into an astroturf wing of the Republican party.
The thing is that the powers that be have a very good understanding of psychology and sociology to the point of being expert manipulators. However, the only way it works is if enough people have their bread and circuses. When enough people are "getting by" (but only through "hard"/stressful work, so they can feel as though they've earned what they have and deserve no more and no less because after all if they wanted more they could just work "harder" and the magic Invisible Hand or else the magic Sky Wizard will provide more) they tend not to care about what's going on in the larger picture.
The thing that's been really creeping me out honestly in the past two to three-ish years is just how damned well the powers that be understand this dynamic.
It seems that the real trick is that people don't care right up until one of their family is targeted. Then they start caring. Until then, however, they'll reason that if they're doing ok that the propoganda in the mainstream media must be true. They want to pat themselves on the back for their hard work and good decisions like not getting "into drugs" (i.e. they've successfully resisted the devil in marijuana all these years so they must be good people and anyone who even gives into the devil/marijuana/"drugs" once must be a bad person). So, if the mainstream media says that the Occupy movement is just a bunch of aimless drug seekers who are defecating in public spaces, it must be true.
Of course, the trouble is programs like the oft mentioned here on /. COINTELPRO. All a powerful entity needs to do is plant enough people in enough highly visible places in a movement, and they can effectively control perception of that movement. Want to paint Occupy as a bunch of dirty hippies without jobs looking for handouts? Send in enough people to loudly ask every passer-by if they have any weed, and tell them to harass local businesses and generally be obnoxious.
A more prosiac example would be federalized Romneycare/Obamacare. The ACA seems to be utterly set up to fail. Insurance companies are already raising their premiums and blaming the ACA while really none of the provisions of the ACA that matter have kicked in yet (health insurance exchanges, vouchers/subsidies as I understand it, and the personal mandate). The thing that really worries me is how many people buy into the narrative that health insurance companies just have to raise premiums because of Barry and his Kenyan socialism so blindly instead of being more sceptical of the insurance companies themselves and demanding better justification for premium hikes than just "because ACA." The lack of critical thinking in the masses is truly terrifying.
Sure, it all sounded like a lot of tinfoil hattery even a few years ago. However, the more information that comes out, the more we can begin to suspect that perhaps our tinfoil hats really weren't on too tight after all. Now we have verification of things like "parallel construction," wide-scale domestic spying, incestuous data sharing among agencies, secret courts, national security letters, and a complete breakdown of due process.
However, the public isn't too worried. After all, they haven't come for me or anyone I know personally, and all the people I know are hard-working Americans, so therefore, there must be an element of truth that if I don't have anything to hide, it must really be the case that I don't have anything to worry about. History be damned.
So of course these "leakers" are just malcontents the reasoning goes. They're access information t
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You mirrored my thoughts so well I wanted to thank you for expressing them. Just this morning I am listening to an NPR article where the NPR "reporter" interviewed Mr. Muller, soon to be retired head of the FBI. Generally it was a fluff piece, but what started to bother me was when they talked about 9/11 and how the FBI, Federal Bureau of Investigation, was now tasked with protecting our country from *terrorist* and acting *preemptively*. Really? I thought, When did Investigation turn in to Surveillance (aka FBS).
So Mr. Muller tells us that instead of focusing on small things like white collar crime and violent crime he now needs to focus on an incredibly small group of people who pale compared to the terrorism Bankers, Hedge Fund managers, and other white collar criminals have committed against the people of this country. He even states, "We only have some much money so we spend it chasing bad guys with bombs that we cannot catch till after they explode"...well, my interpretation of he banal comment.
Normally I am not a conspiracy type of person, but I cannot help, but wonder that after 9/11 as all of our law enforcement is now shifted to l;ook for bad guys in the desert, laws like Glass-Segal are repealed, Wall Street investment brings this country (and the world) almost to the point of ruin, and the FBI was unable to investigate, because they were spending so much time looking for terrorists. Good timing.
My final thought as I listened to the end of this fluff was that the NPR reporter was just another tool to be used in a propaganda machine. She didn't ask or talk about why the FBI felt white collar crime was less important, she did not ask or push questions about unwarranted surveillance an d the FBI's role, and she certainly did not act like a reporter; she acted like a prop for a show. Very disappointing. I fear that investigative journalism is all but buried as Corporations hold more control of media centers. Ask the hard questions and soon you are shut out of access and the talking heads still get face time from the toodies trotted out by primary Media conglomerates.
Fox - Owned by Rupert Murdoch (and branched in many countries)
ABC - Owned by Walt Disney Corp
NBC - Owned by General Electric
CBS - Viacom, but ( Predecessor firms of Viacom include Gulf+Western, which later became Paramount Communications Inc., and Westinghouse Electric Corporation.
CNN - Time Warner
Iit is amazing how only 4 major conglomerates control, TV, Radio, Print, and more and more Internet media to the point where most of the content was absorb comes from only these four sources..
In a country that championed the idea of the 4th Estate, it has been supplanted by a Jim Taylor machine so vast it may not be brought down. Even NPR, my bastion of good reporting now seems to be losing ground. (sigh)
Life is a great ride, the vehicle doesn't matter
Denninger quoted here, voted for Obama BTW:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/10/20/karl-denninger-tea-party_n_770108.html
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good