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NSA General Counsel Insists US Companies Assisted In Data Collection
Related to yesterday's story about the NSA, Advocatus Diaboli (1627651) writes with this excerpt from The Guardian: "Rajesh De, the NSA general counsel, said all communications content and associated metadata harvested by the NSA under a 2008 surveillance law occurred with the knowledge of the companies – both for the internet collection program known as Prism and for the so-called 'upstream' collection of communications moving across the Internet. ... nearly all the companies listed as participating in the program – Yahoo, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and AOL – claimed they did not know about a surveillance practice described as giving NSA vast access to their customers’ data. Some, like Apple, said they had
'never heard' the term Prism. De explained: 'Prism was an internal government term that as the result of leaks became the public term,' De said. 'Collection under this program was a compulsory legal process, that any recipient company would receive.'"
The Feds kept the receipts!
When Apple said they'd never heard of Prism, they were using lawyer-speak to conflate not knowing the official program name with not knowing the program existed.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
The first rule of NSA data collection is that you don't mention NSA data collection or the NSA .. ever.
Unless you want to be tried by a secret court and end up somewhere you really don't want to be.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
They likely would have been charged as traitors for admitting the whole thing... The legal agreement must say something about keeping silent and that would STILL be in effect to this day as long as the legal agreement is still active.
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If you are an individual who received one of these orders and you are working at a company are you even legally allowed to inform your superiors and coworkers about the specifics of the request? Seems very likely that management was largely kept in the dark unless compliance with the order required some large government compensation like apparently it did with Verizon and other telecoms.
Who thinks the NSA has to explain this to us carefully? The major concern of these big companies is their next buck.
Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.
No doubt in my mind.. The real question is, did they have a choice?
Somehow - I doubt it.
And
But what was not said was
So they did not lie but they did not tell the whole truth either.
This sounds like the NSA is trying to redirect some of the negative attention they have received from this elsewhere. Although that doesn't necessarily mean it isn't true.
Water is wet
The sun rises in the east.
I'm sure that the big providers did know (or looked the other way and pretended not to know) about the data collection either under an implied or explicit threat that the data collection project was to remain absolutely secret under penalty of law. It's unlikely that the NSA spent the time and money to reverse-engineer (and continually update) whatever protocol Google uses to back up customer data across datacenters to let them effectively snoop that data -- without Google's help there's too much danger of a code change breaking the surveillance, letting data go unmonitored until the NSA catches up again. And it's pointless to dedicate hundreds of engineers to doing this continual reverse engineering when all it takes is a national security letter to force Google to cooperate.
So since the providers have continued to stay silent and refuse to admit that they knew anything about it, why would the NSA "reward" them for their cooperation by revealing that the providers knew about it all along?
their ass kissing, brown nosing, corporate crime profiteering shit. in the name of reducing liability for damages if the people sue back! and so far the public has not sued back, which they should because we can maybe overthrow some of these monopolies, make some money, and send them into bankruptcy. at which point, we rebuild without their shit.
The occupy movement should in fact focus it's strategy exclusively on legal action against the corporations and the government to undo all the harm they've done, and to gain some power.
and the NSA themselves are sitting there downplaying the abuse, insisting it was only meta-data when it was content of all communications, word for word. and watching us masturbate on webcams, hacking our cellphone devices to turn them into roving bugs even when the power was off, and using satellites and radar to remotely spy on us even under cover of buildings and getting access to our thoughts and data through very illegal means. http://www.oregonstatehospital...
Of course American companies cooperated. What exactly were they supposed to do?
"Nice company you've got there. It would be a shame if anything happened to it."
It would have been nice if someone would have shown some spine here. However, the fact that no one had the balls to stand up to the NSA really doesn't get them off the hook for anything.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Because your reputation for truth and veracity is so well established. Why you would never think of lying to the public. You treat us almost as well as you treat Congress :D
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
We know they did, and if some people ever find out they assisted on collection of their information, then those companies should expect a military response.
For once the NSA tells the truth! I never thought I'd see the day. Must be that "transparency" thing the president was talking about.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I'd like to know how much of the American economy is directly related to this BURNING of the constitution in a too-big-to-fail way? How big will the crash be if it does get fixed... We all know that once you go down this road there's no turning back, so... Say goodbye to FREEDOM, bye!
They do it the same way the president does it. They don't tell the press secretary anything... then he can say "We aren't aware of anything like that!" and maybe even the president doesn't directly know... but 1 guy knows... the guy in regulatory compliance... or the corporate lawyer. Of course, that person doesn't go out in public to discuss it so they can never actually called out as liars. But we all know the truth.
NSA should NOT be taking this public. It is bad enough that Snowden is a traitor, but NSA needs to SHUT UP.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
1. It seems to me that the credibility of the NSA is such that I don't believe much if anything they say. As such I am going to disbelieve this until substantial evidence supporting it is presented.
2. Even if it is true, the fact that many NSA data gathering programs are accompanied by gag orders and other secrecy requirements there is no particular reason for me to believe that the cooperation of the companies was at all voluntary and they could disclose what was happening to my data without peril of extreme and secret legal penalties.
So all in all this is a completely ridiculous thing for him to say, and it has no particular utility for the general public even if it were absolutely true.
Who is talking? A lawyer!
Anyone getting a NSL K N O W S about it but goes to jail if s/he talks about it.
You are, by far, one of the most serious crackpots on this site
how DOES the NSA integrate all this data? considering how badly most companies abysmally SUCK at integrating their OWN data even WITH the benefit of in house SMEs (often the very people who build the data models) how does one general case the problem of "one ETL to rule them all!!!"?
Traitors, the lot of them.
Unfortunately, there are multiple ways of finding the 'traitor' here...
I seem to recall Yahoo's CEO saying something along the lines of "If I discuss government surveillance programs, I go to prison as a traitor; if I don't comply with them, I'm also a traitor." (obviously paraphrased)
So if you're damned if you do, and damned if you don't, I'd go with the one that doesn't involve a very public slam-dunk federal crime.
This is especially true with our current legislature (both houses, all parties), as well as multiple executives (both R and D), whom have voted to make the surveillance legal, and a Supreme Court that has also sided with the other two branches.
I can't really fault anyone faced with that decision.
The law as it currently stands may be horrible, but it is still the law, and the only way out is for voters to elect leaders who want to remove it.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
US Code 702
executive order.
One was law written by congress, the other was an executive order. This is not an NSA problem...
The silver lining to this was it allowed these companies to deflect anger onto the NSA. Good, because the NSA are the ones to blame, I might not like what MS, Apple, etc were doing, but I can't blame them for it. Responsibility for this fucking mess lies foremost with the state spying agencies, specifically the NSA.
I worked at the NSA a couple years and saw Vint Cerf talk at a meeting at the NSA in 2009. Cerf was being asked for his opinion on using hadoop at the NSA. One thing he did say was that he was there as a salesman, to sell google products to the NSA. Also the google tech talk "The Secret History of Silicon Valley" is illuminating. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I worked at the NSA a couple years and saw Vint Cerf talk at a meeting at the NSA in 2009. Cerf was being asked for his opinion on using hadoop at the NSA. One thing he did say was that he was there as a salesman, to sell google products to the NSA. Also the google tech talk "The Secret History of Silicon Valley" is illuminating. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Now people believe this? Where was everyone that modded people like myself down every time there was an article over how these companies "knew nothing" and "were unaware of various tactics used to obtain [steal] data". The fact these companies rarely get hacked, shows they have decent security, so they should've known of any breaches. And lets not forget all the holes they intentionally put in place, specifically designed for the NSA and other spying agencies to freely steal whatever they wanted..
Users of /. should be considered traitors, those that completely blew this off as "companies being bullied". I don't just believe everything I read and stay in the gray area, but there were to many anonymous comments from people associated with government that kept hinting this was going on, after it was first leaked by Snowden. And then the obvious PR attempts by government to claim companies had nothing to do with willfully aiding them.
Double standard, they can do this and get huge pensions after they quit or given special deals to retire, and still walk away with there retirement. The average Joe/Jane goes into prison and pays hefty fines.
If the statement in TFA was true, I would have heard of the program. But I didn't.
Another case of the NSA lying.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
The idea that private companies would voluntarily take on the expense and risk of giving their customer data to the NSA is ridiculous. Whatever "cooperation" the NSA got from companies must have involved legal and other threats by the NSA both to comply with their demands and to keep silent about it.
The NSA has outsourced their Lawyers? Between this and that pesky issue of SPYING ON THEIR OWN PEOPLE, how are they NOT traitors?
The program in question on this thread targeted foreign governments, terrorists, etc. The Supreme Court has ruled that the 4th amendment protects US citizens home and abroad BUT only foreign nationals inside of the United States (http://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2819&context=flr) The government has strong legal grounds for the program and procedures of due process and oversight.