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NSA Scraping Buddy Lists and Address Books From Live Internet Traffic
Charliemopps writes that the Washington Post reports "The NSA is collecting hundreds of millions of contact lists from all over the world, many of them belonging to Americans. The intercept them from instant messaging services as they move across global data links. The NSA is gathering contact lists in large numbers that amount to a sizable fraction of the world's e-mail and instant messaging accounts."
According to the leaked document (original as a PDF), the NSA is intercepting some chat protocols and at least IMAP, and then analyzing the data for buddy list information and inbox contents.
Host your own email server on a Pi. Encrypt everything. Go back to Fidonet or even to snail mail.
I am in the process of doing just that.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
I am so sick of hearing this idea that just because I am not a citizen of the USA then somehow I have less rights to privacy.
That when a government department actually does its job, and does it well, everyone seems upset. I want my intelligence community to be competent, get all the information we need to protect our interests, and do it well, and the NSA has done this and then some. Their only mistake was perhaps a lack of internal security. Instead of criticism, they should be commended for a job well done. The world is not a safe place, and information is power. I want the good guys to win. I'm a Canadian, but I support the NSA, and the job it does to protect American (and indirectly) Canadian interests.
I do not even know if the Fidonet infrastructure is still working or not.
Yes, I was a sysop back then.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Yes. Posting all your contacts on the Internet is open to breaches of privacy (regardless of zero-day exploits).
Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft - all of them kowtow to the NSA, the CIA, the FBI. Why?
Because in return their lobbyists get to bend the ears of the legislators.
Why is anyone surprised by any of this?
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I guess "most transparent" actually referred to us and not the government.
You have *less* rights to privacy than a USA citizen? In this case of privacy is there a number less than zero?
The USA citizen that has no special associations is a peon, pal. We're in the same boat.
We caused it. We elected people that wrote the PATRIOT Act and gave those powers to the NSA.
We are the ones who get all side tracked when a politician says "Look! Some gay people want to get married!" Or look "Abortion!" Or "We need security and we need to make adjustments to our Liberty!" ""If you are against it, you are helping the terrorists!""
And assholes like Hannity and Rush jump on board and their listener/lemmings just nod their heads and parrot the same things and the politicians go along because they want to keep their powerful, cushy, overpaid jobs. And the terror-industrial-military complex rakes it in!
And in the meantime shit like this sails on through.
And we got this mess in Congress right now and it's our fault. We allowed the lunatic fringe to ( less than 0.5% of our population) to fuck it up for everyone else.
As it stands, the Republican party will never - ever get another vote from me - ever. They are too nutty and they need to dissolve.
It's been an open secret for years now that the branches of the federal government tend to "bury" their budget inside of other allocations to hide them from outsiders, supposedly explaining the existence of $500 hammers and $1,000 toilets. Is the NSA also doing this, but with bandwidth rather than dollars? It might explain how suddenly the various ISPs are up in arms about bandwidth hogs and how a small percent are using up the majority of the bandwidth available on the network....
Have a Virgin Mobile USA smartphone? Give VMRoms.com a try!
Now that is an awful thing to do. It may violate the rights of the most important people in the world!
(News-overlay with rotating globe, North-America in full focus, all other continents shrunk down and barely recognizeable...)
Please do only spy on towelheads, frogeaters and sausage-lederhosen- people. And the mostly unknown tiny, untidy, yellow oder brown/black rest...the ones with the banana-skirts, y'know?
It's also well known that all metadata of all snail mail packages are recorded, logged, tracked, whatever. On top of that, the ability to open, check contents, and re-seal packages when so desired is there and you'd be hard pressed to detect it in most cases. Snail mail won't help.
What the FUCK has happened to this country?
But they're only tracking who is talking to whom, so that's ok right? Right?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Which email providers offer IMAP without using SSL?
Or does the NSA perform MitM extensively (it would be easy to detect - just keep copies of the certificates forever and create a white-list of proven certificates)
I mean, who should prosecute him for perjury? Fast and Furious Attorney General Eric Holder? Eric Holder already has examined his own repeated perjury before congress about his own unconstitutional grab of executive powers and concluded that it's nothing to write home about.
You won't bring justice to other corrupt government officials via the corrupt Department of Justice. Least of all for perjury or overstepping of their mandate or bullshitting congress or evading oversight.
For one thing, your email domain is unlikely to be taken seriously by existing email providers if you run a server from your home (and consumer ISP plans won't let you do this anyway); running it from a hosting provider would hardly improve privacy even with encryption. The call to "encrypt everything" would, for email, imply using PGP which leaves the 'who' and subject parts of the messages unencrypted.
If you want to run something really effective against corporate-state mass surveillance, then go for this. Everything is encrypted end-to-end by default, and its designed to carry everything from P2P like bittorrent to decentralized email based on DHT. It even runs on Android!
The NSA plays their games, and we play ours.
Everybody need to to start useing and exchanging Dis-information. Send the NSA on a wild goose chase.
NSA has been discovered going through everyone's garbage. When asked to comment, after first deigning repeatably under oath in a least 15 separate recorded incidences of misleading and false statements under oath directly to Congress, Today, Obama said he just learned of the existence of the NSA... "OMG, What a surprise!" Obama was reported as saying when he saw the paper this morning, this despite the fact that Snowdens revelations were a full years ago... A leak through the WH says "If NSA is going through your garbage, it's been reported that in most cases almost all garbage is later returned." .. "Reports Black funding for routine Garbage collection of all Americans will be fully implemented in 2 years, and a reported 82 Trillion dollars a year which the Fed is reportedly supplying huge loans at only 32.26% compounding interest, the first year is expected to whip entire SS reserves.."
What the hell is the NSA being paid to do? Right now they're spending money, manpower and resources on trolling the internet for people's buddy lists and address books. For what? Because some terrorist might spill the beans on his super plans over AIM?
This is getting ridiculous. The NSA has clearly become a giant black hole of money which can and will hire an office full of people, a warehouse of computer equipment, and a 20 year maintenance plan just to keep tabs on who is sending instant messages to who -- foreign or domestic.
This isn't 1984 anymore. It's Brazil. I'm sure the NSA would like to think of themselves as Information Retrieval, but in reality they more resemble the Department of Records, no doubt complete with busy-seeming employees goofing off for most of the day.
May the Maths Be with you!
If this is the case, why is it that most of these articles use phrases like "many of them belonging to Americans"? If it doesn't matter, why is the point made? The answer, of course, is that it does matter. That is, it matters to American law. For reference, see https://www.aclu.org/nsa-surveillance-procedures and highlight the word "Americans".
Speaking as a non-American, I think it shouldn't matter whether I'm American, Austrian, or Azerbaijani. We're all human and we all have the same rights. I find it offensive when I read these articles and there's always the "including Americans" tagged onto the article headline, like somehow it's OK if it's done to non-Americans. I realize it wouldn't be much different if any other country had been caught with their pants down. It's just that in this case it's the US (again).
www.clarke.ca
Don't use unencrypted sevices.
Use encryption supplied by 3rd parties that uses proveable algorithms.
Don't store your data on 3rd party sites.
Use open source software.
At one time, talking about Echelon tagged you as a tinfoil hat wearing nerd...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON
who's laughing now :D
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
There are already ads for local email and web services based on recently revealed truth about USA.
Don't want 'friends' to read your communication?
Use {local brand name}.
Of course if you use them, things will be still read by your country's services, but at least they are your compatriotes, not foreigners, they fall under your law, not USA twisted law (except where some corporation long hands will reach for you), and you might be arrested by friendlies, not by illegally invading Seals or Rabbits.
You forgot the part where they are building a 40 square-mile, 70 billion dollar warehouse in Utah to house everyone's garbage.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Instant Messaging has always been tightly coupled to Intelligence gathering by the racist state of Israel. The many IM companies based and linked to Israel were specifically created for the purpose of tracking the communications of vast numbers of Internet users. Why do you think IM services DEMAND your messages go through their servers? An IM service ONLY needs to act as match-maker in order to function, and yet not one of them works this way.
Facebook, Microsoft and Yahoo might as well be divisions of the NSA. Google is actually the R+D division of the NSA. Every major intelligence service in the West deploys "shadow-Google" installations, massive centres of data-storage, indexing, mining etc, based entirely of the hardware and software infrastructure used in Google's 'civilian' centres.
When the NSA taps directly into the backbones of the Internet, it is NOT to gather information held by the Internet giants- that data they get directly from the source. No, the NSA is involved in bluesky work as well, so they spend tens of billions each year exploring the theory of collecting data "in the wild". They do this because they can- because the monsters that rule you give them so much money, that not doing so would seem 'odd'.
When new trends appear of the Internet, the NSA attempts to mine available data BEFORE they simply go to the new companies and demand direct access. This is useful practice, if nothing else, and helps develop new hardware and software surveillance methods. However, the quality of information gathered this way is CRAP to say the least. These methods overlap those used when specifically targeting individuals, without the same purpose, so are hard to justify against the work of other divisions of the NSA.
The NSA is vastly and ecstatically more interested in the Microsoft Xbox Home citizen surveillance project. Millions of complete morons, at their own expense, placing insanely sophisticated NSA spy devices in their own homes, and giving the NSA instant access to the information.
Do you know that Slashdot has NEVER directly highlighted the link between Microsoft, Bill Gates, and the NSA. Yeah, it's promoted some stories that sorta addressed this issue in a sideways, depreciating fashion, to avoid suspicion. In the same way, Slashdot has completely ignored Bill Gates' partnership with Fox News supremo, Rupert Murdoch, to create the inBloom full surveillance database of every child in the USA. Likewise, the fact that Gates is one of the major players behind the CORE CURRICULUM project dumbing down kids all across America.
When you have an Xbone in your home, the NSA get daily reports of who and when people use the living room. When you have an Xbone in your home (and worse, in your kids' bedroom) the NSA have a complete list of EVERY Xbone currently connected to the Internet, and can command any given console to immediately start streaming video to their servers. Like to have sex in the dark- well Microsoft thought of this, and gave the Xbone a first-class IR camera system that sees you clearly in the dark. Not a feature any game developer requested, or would have a use for. The depth/TOF/motion sensor that Kinect is famous for already uses IR, so did NOT need an ordinary IR camera to function.
NSA spying on the Internet is a done deal, yesterday's news, and is utterly comprehensive and complete where possible, and where not possible will always require expensive old-school methods only really viable for spying on specific targets. If people started using end-point encryption in the IM conversations, for instance, there is ZERO universal ability for the NSA to spy on such communications if inserting back-doors into the software proves impractical.
The irony is that the NSA (and other spy agencies) LOATH censorship and crackdowns by governments on Internet users, cos an open Internet is EASY to spy on, but a government suppressed Internet forces users to finally adopt solutions that defeat much of what the NSA currently does. Encryption is a nightmare to the
Lucky you. In my country if you reach into your pockets when a cop approaches, you're likely as not to get a gun drawn on you, and if you keep digging, 9mm slugs will soon be thudding into your body
Meanwhile, in the Islamic country of Malaysia, the Interior Minister (the one who is in charge of the regular and secret police force) is publicly telling the cops to SHOOT FIRST and ask question (if there is any), later.
And, incidentally, cases where innocent citizens in Malaysia were killed by the police ~ and there are a lot of these cases ~ are going nowhere.
The courts are taking their sweet own time to process, and for the cases where the courts did tried, the police were all found NOT GUILTY.
In one case, where someone was found choked to death while under police custody --- the Malaysian kangaroo courts found that the deceased HAD CHOKED HIMSELF TO DEATH.
Flood the NSA system with junk. SPAM it.