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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.
I guess "most transparent" actually referred to us and not the government.
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."
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.
No, I don't hire a lunatic to clean up a mess. The Tea Party (as I see them separate from the Republican Party) carries a lot of weight for what has happened in our recent political environment. The RNC would be best served by forcing a split or not recognizing members that associate with the Tea Party. Let them attempt to stand outside the power structure the RNC has built.
As to the Democratic response, it has always been the case that the Democratic party was more fractious, less prone to lock step voting then the republican party members. When the Democrats held power, it was Blue Dog Democrats that stopped the ability of the DP to fully implement their programs. Single payer may have made it through, but for southern dixiecrats that would not support such a bill. Such is democratic politics.
Still, I'd rather a party who attempts to represent their people, then one who primarily represents their backers and cannot have independent voting on issues. At times I was close to supporting some republicans (John McCain in 2000 for example). Later I am glad I listened to my gut for he, like most of his colleagues were blowing smoke to hid their true nature...opportunists.
Life is a great ride, the vehicle doesn't matter
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."
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.
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
Can't send mail from a domestic connection. Those IP ranges are on every spam blacklist, as most mail sent from them is the work of spam-sending malware. You can recieve, but not send.
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.