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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.
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?
This comment was written with the intention to opt out of advertising.
"I want the good guys to win."
And you think the NSA and the US government are the good guys?
Agh! The stupid! It burns!
Why, yes! I AM new here.
You seem to assume that the choices are mutually exclusive: Soviet KGB-style interrogations and intelligence, or total Anarchy.
I ask you, why did we even fight the Cold War, and win it, if we were just going to embrace everything at a later time?
I am John Hurt.
no their mistake was to become one of the very things they where supposed to protect the you from, an abusive conspiratorial bunch of nut-cases that don't think they have to answer even to the politicians let alone the people.
A little too much efficiency leads to a police state, or a surveillance state, or a security state.
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!
I'm a Canadian, but I support the NSA, and the job it does to protect American (and indirectly) Canadian interests.
"But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother."
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.
Maybe the goal was to put the KGB out of business so we could hire its agents as consultants on the cheap.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
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!
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)
Recent revelations show the NSA can perform mitm against PKI at will. Within that context they can decrypt SSL traffic. You would have to implement SSL so that the key exchange does not rely on PKI for validation.
I ask you, why did we even fight the Cold War, and win it, if we were just going to embrace everything at a later time?
You are making the mistake of assuming that the cold war was fought between lovers of freedom, democracy and individual rights, vs totalitarian all controlling power hungry nut jobs.
Truth of the matter is, both sides were all controlling power-hungry nut jobs, and the cold war was a fight over who gets to be the all-controlling big-daddy of the world.
The problems with the Soviets is that they laid their system bare, they didn't bullshit. This is how life is, these are your rights, if you're a party member, or if you work to benefit the system, you will be rewarded with perks (Nicer houses, cushy jobs , nice car, sometimes even nice German/American ones).
If you don't work for the system, but not actively against it, you are pretty much left to your own devices, live and let live, and all that.
If you work against the system, directly or indirectly (or you piss off someone in power), then you can be arrested, tried, stuck in prison/work camp, or otherwise disappear.
Now the western system, that was far more subtle. They told you you were free, they gave you the impression you were, that you could choose who ruled you, but fundamentally I don't think the systems were different, like so:
If you work for the system, or to its benefits, you are rewarded with more tokens than most (currency) with which you can spend on bigger/nicer houses, or a nice foreign car, etc...
If you ignore the system and go about your daily life, you are pretty much left alone. You earn your keeps, pay your dues, and you live you life.
If you work against the system, directly or indirectly (or just piss off someone high up and well connected), you can be arrested, tried, put in a prison/work camp, or disappeared (via drone or otherwise). For minor misdemeanors they can just destroy you financially, which is another, less radical lever they have against you.
Turns out, when push comes to shove, people are more willing to serve you if you give them the illusion of freedom, choice and power. One ideology was in your face, the other was in the background. Turns out this worked well for a long time, until the internet came around and made knowledge dissipation so easy, that people began to realise what their world really looks like.
For some the revelations were not a surprise, for others it was a confirmation of what they suspected, but some are in shock about it all, and more are in denial about it.
An example of a toothless good guy? Well, Switzerland, for one. They have that citizen militia, but it's unlikely they'll be winning any wars with it.
So maybe Switzerland is a non-entity ... but the Swiss lead pretty good lives. I'd prefer for my country to be a non-entity; that way it would stop taxing me to pay for an oversized military and let me and my countrymen get back to the business of leading ordinary happy lives.
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.."
Man, if you think countries shouldn't have spy agencies you're nuts. Big Brother was a totalitarian government, not a spy agency. Remember, the only thing the NSA did wrong was to spy on Americans. If you think other countries aren't working overtime to spy on America, you're froot loops.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
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.
Should a distinction be made between 'spying on the American government' and 'spying on the American people?' It makes perfect sense that another country would want to know what US military capabilities and diplomatic ambitions might be, but it's another thing altogether when they are reading the emails of people with no involvement in international affairs just on the off-chance that something interesting might turn up.
Only if they don't have access to the certificates. At this point, I wouldn't be at all surprised if they do - either by 'tell no-one' top-secret requests, or by hacking into servers and just stealing them. Remember that only larger companies actually run and secure their own servers: If the server is hosted colo or a cloudy VM, what's do stop them just requesting access from whoever has physical control? You think Amazon would tell Mom and Pop's Email Co if the NSA gave a secret order for a copy of their server's drive?
Sorry. I read that as Crapper.
I thought the NSA was developing fiber optic periscopes that they could snake up the sewer lines.
Have gnu, will travel.
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.
If you think other countries aren't working overtime to spy on America, you're froot loops.
Crook logic, justifies anything by badmouthing the victim. There is no country with a surveillance apparatus of the U.S.' size. In the context of international relations, the U.S. chooses to behave like a bully and a mafia boss.
At the current point of time, the largest danger to democracy in the Western hemisphere is the U.S.A. And it does not help that the NSA drags the secret services of their "allies" into the quagmire of trying to evade democratic control and exert powers that are not supposed to be in the hands of the secret service.
In the Germany of the 30s and 40s, your neighbors could silently disappear overnight, dragged off and killed by the Gestapo. Germany is now back to the same situation, except that the Gestapo is run by the U.S.A. The NSA claims to have "thwarted" a large number of terrorist plots on German ground. By calling the "terrorists" on the phone and asking them to stop? Hardly. By letting the authorities bring them to court? There have been no court cases. There has been no due process exerted. Either the NSA is lying, or it is kidnapping and killing people on foreign soil or is inducing the foreign secret services to kidnap and kill on preselected information without informing the government.
Terrorists are peanuts compared to that.
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.
How do you know the USA or NSA are the "good guys"? Because they told you they were? Because the news portrays them that way? Would you feel the same way if these powers were used to blackmail those in public office, or to harass legitimate political protesters? What if they were used for industrial espionage, giving American companies an advantage over Canadian companies? It's a secret program, so no one really knows the extent of what it is used for. Do you just trust that the people in charge are honest and that their values line up with yours?
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
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.