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Snowden: NSA Working On Autonomous Cyberwarfare Bot
WIRED published a long piece on Edward Snowden today (worth a read on its own), and simultaneously broke news of "MonsterMind," an NSA program to monitor all network traffic and detect attacks, responding with a counterattack automatically. From the article: Although details of the program are scant, Snowden tells WIRED in an extensive interview with James Bamford that algorithms would scour massive repositories of metadata and analyze it to differentiate normal network traffic from anomalous or malicious traffic. Armed with this knowledge, the NSA could instantly and autonomously identify, and block, a foreign threat. More than this, though, Snowden suggests MonsterMind could one day be designed to return fire — automatically, without human intervention...
Snowden raised two issues with the program: the source of an attack could be spoofed to trick the U.S. into attacking an innocent third party, and the violation of the fourth amendment since the NSA would effectively need to monitor all domestic network traffic for the program to work. Also in Bamford's interview are allegations that the NSA knocked Syria offline in 2012 after an attempt to install intercept software on an edge router ended with the router being bricked.
Do the morons in NSA seriously believe that the USA is the only country with the technology to build a Digital Doomsday Machine? Has anyone of them watched Dr. Strangelove? Having said that, the level of hubris they are displaying seems about right.
Every US citizen is yelling for their constitutional rights broken by the NSA. But no Europeans complain about what the NSA is doing to THEM. Which is even worse. EU, fucking wake up.
or he knows what hes talking about. Treason is what the NSA is currently doing by failing to uphold the constitution, specifically the 4th amendment
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Do you understand what he means? He is saying that if there was some real, genuine change due to his actions he would be willing to return and give evidence in open court, to help with that change, even if it meant a prison sentence due to the letter of the law.
That seems amazingly charitable, considering he should really get a presidential pardon and be welcomed back as the heroic guy who did the right thing to expose law breaking and billions of constitutional violations.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Newsflash! Slashdot already has been targeted by NSA!!
Don't take my word for it: Link 1 and Link 2.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
Are you insane? We haven't even figured out if Google is evil or not.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
or he knows what hes talking about. Treason is what the NSA is currently doing by failing to uphold the constitution, specifically the 4th amendment
The NSA has blanket authority to do what they want. You do know they haven't stopped doing a thing. All these investigations are nothing more than a dog and pony show. The NSA is business as usual.
Incompetence is never good.
Incompetence in collecting and acting on information just means that the wrong people will be targeted and the "bad guys" will be missed.
A powerful, secretive, incompetent organization is the worst of all possible worlds.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
You should look up what Treason means. Because that's not what it means.
I did... per the constitution:
"Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court."
Base on that definition, neither are traitors under the constitution.
Per the English dictionary:
"the crime of betraying one's country, especially by attempting to kill the sovereign or overthrow the government."
The NSA is clearly, and without a doubt violating the constitution. So I'd say by that definition, they are guilty. But it's not a legal definition, it's just descriptive. The NSA behaves in a "Treasonous" manner but they are not guilty of legally defined Treason.
He acted for the benefit of the people of the United States, so he is working for an enemy of the United States government.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
'WIRED published a long piece on .. "MonsterMind," an NSA program to monitor all network traffic and detect attacks, responding with a counterattack automatically. From the article:'
Will this "MonsterMind" work on non Microsoft Windows network traffic?
welcome our new ...
"Identifying and blocking foreign threats" is the NSA's job
Sure, but that doesn't extend to knocking Syria off the internet or inserting back-doors into encryption standards or failing to report known vulnerabilities and the like. How about recording every single phone call in made in two countries? Some spying on foreign countries is expected and acceptable, but not the lengths the NSA has gone to. Spying on your allies, like Merkel, is definitely something America should be ashamed of and that the German people have a right to know about.
Knowing what is happening and their capabilities is essential for us to re-build the internet to be bulk-surveillance proof. There is zero chance of the NSA and GCHQ stopping what they are doing, so the only solution is technological.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
This project sounds to me like the NSA is attempting to build their own version of China's "great firewall", and that it'll be used domestically far more than it will be against foreign threats. I can easily see them sharing this with law enforcement agencies, even down to the local level, allowing them to essentially "turn off" internet access at will by blocking packets.
For example, yesterday, the FAA issued a no-fly order for parts of Missouri - this was presumably because there were racially-charged demonstrations over police killings planned for that day - to allow police helicopters free rein over that area. Now, with a system like this in place, I could easily see the police getting some intel that some people might be planning demonstrations and using this system to intercept a specific sub-set of packets: say, anything coming to and from social media from within the borders of the no-fly zone, to stop people organizing as easily.
"I think a prosecutor could make that case considering where he wound up." Wound up? We delivered Russia its' biggest prize by trying to hunt him down now didn't we? If anyone is paranoid its' the US with good reason too I might ad. The truth is hard to deal with when you lie a lot. So stop being such a bad liar.
Patriotism is most certainly not blind allegiance to the law or a certain country, in addition to not meaning you're a masochist or a martyr.
No matter that patriotism is too often the refuge of scoundrels. Dissent, rebellion, and all-around hell-raising remain the true duty of patriots.
- Barbara Erenreich
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
It is pain in the ass these kind of articles are babbling about pizza, elevator and all this irrelevant stuff about the personality of the interviewer and the interviewee. Go straigth to the facts of interest and cut down this article from 7 pages to only 1.
It's like the author is trying to write the first chapter of a novel he hopes Hollywood will buy for the next blockbuster. Give us the facts, we can wait for the movie.
Achille Talon
Hop!
Automating war is a scary. What people should really look at is things like the flash crash to know why; or even the recent BGP hijacks for that matter.
The more automation your create and the more those autonomous systems interact with one another the more potential you have for bizarre positive or negative feedback problems. Eventually the system becomes so complex it is no longer very predictable but plenty dangerous.
The stock market today can plunge 700 points for no fundamental reason what so ever. One machine starts selling, which triggers another machine to act and so on. Its bad enough when its only money, and these people want to weaponize it!
Or one person manages to compromise one machine and instructs it do something like advertise a route and the next thing you know thousands of other machines react to it making the attack possible.
Not to go all SkyNet but something like this could quite literally inflict massive damage on the world before any person even realizes something is wrong. Be pretty sad if a software bug ends modern society as we know it because some asshat military-industrial-complex guy thought automated strikes were a good idea.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
if he was a true patriot as he claims he'd have faced the music
Oh come on, what the hell is patriotic about being shoved in an oubliette some place, after a show trial where you can't present any evidence because everything is classified?
Snowden would never get anything resembling a fair trial before a jury of his peers. A show trial is the most he could hope, but its just as likely he'd be held pretty much indefinitely without trial on some flimsy constitutionally unsound national security pretext. If you want to know who the cowards are its Kerry, Clapper, and Alexander who want to burry him or avoid tackling his criticism with lies and indirection rather than confronting it with actual facts.
Going through the system, and there is evidence he did try does not work. Just try filing and FOIA request about anything that is connected to "terrorism" in their wildest imaginations (like animal rights) and see what happens. The first time you will probably get a nice letter back telling you: "they can't tell you why they can't tell" you what you wanted because 'national security'. Send a another request for ANY information on how they handled your first request and they will probably just stonewall. Which is ILLEGAL the law say they have 20 days to do something and the three letter agencies won't do that.
Statistically you are more likely to die falling out of bed than you currently are from any kind of terrorist attack. Logic would then dictate at the very least we would create a "Bedtime Safety Authority" to make sure we are all tucked in at night before investing more in counter terrorism and yet we keep allocating more and more federal to that; well that is what the NSA tells us they are doing with them anyway preventing terrorism. Then we also dump more money into policing while crime nears all time lows, and yet no recruitment fliers for the BSA are there to be found.
There are no good reasons for these people to be doing what they are so they instead just want to silence critics like Snowden. No Snowden is no coward he is the guy that gave up home, family, and a cushy job in paradise to keep this issue alive.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Then change the fucking laws by electing representatives that don't piss all over the constitution. That's the only way you'll fix the problem. Shit we've known for years the FISA court was out there and frankly the whole pseudo court system isn't unprecedented. Ever hear of Tax court? So to all the people who bitch and moan about how the country is spying on them, tell your fucking reps in DC to stop it. If they don't stop the spying then elect people who will and stop voting the party line in elections. If you don't then you have no room to bitch or complain.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Snowden would never get anything resembling a fair trial before a jury of his peers.
Snowden openly acknowledges doing pretty much everything he's been charged with.
You got me backwards. Ralph Wiggam, the guy supporting the NSA is the traitor.
LOL. I love Slashdot. If you don't 100% agree with me, then you're a traitor who supports the NSA.
And he has nobody to blame but himself.
For taking that course of action? I suppose so. But his course of action was not wrong, and thanks to that, we now have the details of what the government is doing and how it's doing it (or, for the more ignorant, that it was violating the constitution at all).
I'll give him credit for stealing a bunch of information and then publishing it, especially around the NSA's activities but after that it's all downhill from there.
Copying. Also, I'm not sure what you're expecting from him now. He did what he set out to do. Are you saying that if you do one amazing thing, you must do amazing things forever thereafter or "it's all downhill from there"?
That's the definition of a spy isn't it?
A spy for the people, I guess. How would you suggest that we reign in on an unstoppable government that violates the constitution in secret as it pleases if we can't even have someone leak some documents? Is being a "spy" automatically bad? I don't think so, and this all assumes he could even be called a "spy" at all.
Maybe old John Pollard [wikipedia.org] would like to be considered patriotic then?
The definition of patriotism you cited a few posts ago doesn't preclude him from being a patriot. It seems weird that this discussion of patriotism is happening again when you already agreed that Snowden's actions were patriotic (by citing such a definition, and admitting that you liked that he leaked the documents).
He gave the data to journalists to reveal. They have the freedom of the press and the legal and moral grounds to decide what is right to release. If you haven't figured out that much of this, i would suggest walking away from the conversation.
Spying on Americans is wrong.
In communist Russia, Americans spy on YOU.
... if not, so what)
(Think I got the meme right
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
Most spy agencies like to watch a new person as they advance, given small tests, trails, working with their handlers.
Left in place to advance and get to policy setting, overview or trusted command like level decades later without ever been noticed.
Walking in with bulk material for free and having another nation just accept it is a trap many nations have fallen for.
Any material offered might have spy bait mixed in it by default or be pre sorted to fool a nations own staff at different security levels. A nation that is offered this mix of random documents then rushes out to buy super computers, invests in new lasers or scans the skies for projects never started.
Russia has enough of its own trusted well placed people at different levels of other govs globally.
China likes the decades of very advanced education offered for free in other nations. Both outlooks differ from that of the US or UK in bulk instant 'win' of documents bought from people or from signals collected.
The planet wide signals intelligence network is great if your rushed/forced to use tame international telco like networks all the time. Other nations might just use people to travel the world and wait a week or so for a chat in person. Number stations like ideas can push rapid messages out globally.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Why to go to the trouble of mounting a distributed denial of service attack, that need thousands of infected computers to be effective, when you can just tickle a dumb bot to do the dirty work for you in the name of the government?