Predictably, certain politicians are â" so to speak â" up in arms about it.
Considering how often these gun bills have come up, and then gone flaccid, it's going to take some industrial-strength Viagra to get gun control advocates to mount a campaign to put to bed any criticism and pass the climax of votes necessary for it to become a law.
Actually after reading through all of the discussion here it sounds to me much more plausible that the government might actually be trying to log everything off a few major backbones
That's what I'd do.
But I am certainly not qualified to go about telling anyone how to covertly access a computer system anonymously. Nor would I pretend that I could. That would require resources, mobility, knowledge, and access to things I don't have. Nor would I want to do any of that anyway. At least not to post what I do.
Not really. All you need is a pringles can, a wifi card with an SMT connector, and a couple pieces of software. Anonymity and mobility is easy, and the knowledge isn't specialized.
The problem isn't access, but entropy. The more you use a system, any system, the more ordered the access becomes; That is, before you access the system, you could say the entropic space to search to find your attempt is infinite, and with every interaction, the entropy reduces until eventually it reaches a threshold where the pattern becomes statistically unique. What most people don't realize... is how little time and interaction is required to reach that point.
The more you use a system, the easier it becomes to tie that use to an identity. Via comparative analysis with other identities, it eventually becomes possible to link it to a specific person. What this means then, is that in essence, no matter what methods you use to access a given system, the mere act of accessing it, independently of anything else, decreases your anonymity. And the more access, the less anonymity.
You can increase the complexity but you cannot prevent convergence to unity. Anonymity gradually drops to zero.
Yes, the invisible tap that nobody ever found that the government broke into a locked facility to install. How did they disable the video camera again? And why did the FBI bother to test my CALEA setup, when they had already tapped the network? That's.75 of a man hour they'll never get back that could have been used to pay for some sequestration time.
Arrogance and small-mindedness. I'm impressed. Well, let me clue you in: A government is a collection of agencies, not all of whom talk to each other or have the same agenda. And even within a single agency, this is true. Whatever group inside the FBI you dealt with may have found it easier for their purposes to hand you a device and let you do the work.
That doesn't mean that's the only way to do it. Or even that this 'tap' you speak of is a separate physical device. It could be built right into the firmware. I'll say it again: It's arrogant in the extreme to presume that just because you can't find it, doesn't mean it doesn't exist. There are people in the world far, far more experienced in the art of covertly hiding things, and I'm pretty sure they can clear the bar of "can't be found by a maintenance tech."
On what. I've seen the infrastructure. There were no unexpected splitters in the fiber. No unexplained connections in a router. If they tapped everything already, why did I have a dedicated CALEA box and such? It makes no sense, and is simply false.
You think they're going to tell you where the tap is? You, a lowly maintenance technician? Just because you couldn't find it doesn't mean it isn't there.
But who knows, maybe they have above top secret alien positron brain quantum foam storage technology (or insert your own fantastic technobabble) buried at area 51...
Oh no, nothing so implausible. People turned into wifi base stations that upload their consciousness into the cloud. Duh. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to meet a pretty girl in my blue snogging box and then catch a flight...
if you read James Bamford's books, you will begin to realize that most of the major US computer companies, from Cray to IBM, were propped up directly and secretly by the NSA to build supercomputers for it, secretly, years before the technology would reach the public.
I don't need a book to know the government funds technology improvements; They freely admit it. It's not exactly super spy secret stuff -- they created the internet. It's a safe bet that they continue to work on similar things.
Sorry I didn't specify Tor Node and Proxy. Watch the video. It shows the man in the middle attack by placing a proxy online and not even promoting it. Someone found it and the JS injected ran a man in the browser attack. Multiple proxies were worthless after the JS loaded.
Yeah, okay... why the hell would I let the browser be in charge of proxy-control? You're assuming by proxy I mean 'socks'. Heh. Ooookay!
Welcome to the USSA where freedom of speech means freedom to praise your government, where the right to bear arms means the right to go hunting, where the right to not be searched without a warrant doesn't apply, where due process can be ignored if the president wants you dead.
... Just like every other government on the planet. Government power is only restrained by the People. And the people right now are fat, docile, and more concerned with who'll win the next American Idol. We're a victim of our own material prosperity... but don't worry: When enough people have become impoverished, hungry, and desperate... that'll change. Again, just like every other government on the planet that has failed.
No, instead if you're a white Christian, you're guilty of "hate crimes" which is basically the same thing as the "terrorist" label.
So if you're standing in line at an airport and casually remark that you were found guilty of a "hate crime", people will react the same as if you said you are a convicted terrorist? Riiiight -- and I'm the queen of England.
but if formally charged for 'communicating terrorist threats' this would a set a chilling low bar for terrorist investigations."
Please. It's already chillingly low. How many christians have publicly said gays "should burn in hell" ? How many famous celebrities have said they would shoot government officials if they came to take their guns away? I could come up with dozens of examples of more volatile speech by talking heads on television... and god help us if I decide to include examples from that cesspool of humanity called the internet.
Being called a terrorist or avoiding that label all comes down to who and what you are. It is, and always has been, about that -- not what you say. Look at the boston bomber -- muslim. Terrorist. But the Aurora shooting? Not a terrorist. Those people that blew up a shiite church in Wisconsin? Not terrorists. In fact, as long as you aren't black, or a muslim, you can probably avoid the "terrorist" label.
The 'terrorist' label is just like the 'communist' label, and before that the 'fascist' label, and before that... you get the idea. Every generation has had their government-sponsored boogieman. Terrorist is ours.
You skipped a pretty important step there chief - deduping/compressing 20 exabytes of traffic a month...
A government that builds super-massive computing clusters for cryptography I don't think is going to have a problem coming up with a way to compress and decompress data and then use hash tables to detect duplicates. Besides, these are problems that were solved years ago in the civilian sector...
But do I believe they do so? No. If they did, they wouldn't have a way to mine the data.
Well, you heard it here first folks. An internet pundit doesn't believe the agent. Good enough for me!
It would possibly be useful as evidence after the fact, but not for monitoring purposes. It's way too much data.
Yeah... how much data does that particle accelerator thingie they buried in Europe generate again? Some really small number, like say 25 petabytes per year. Yeah. Way too much. And how much data does google have in its index again of just HTML text? More? Oh, okay.
Oh, and the guy said they use it as evidence after the fact... that's the main reason they're storing it. And as for monitoring purposes... if the data is already being recorded, why not use it for monitoring purposes? Is it because it makes more sense to serve a warrant to the teleco you're already tapping, when you already have the data, just to get another copy of it?
If he wasn't lying, he would be arrested for violation of his LIFE LONG NDA you sign when you take a job with the The FBI.
That's such a load of bullshit I'm surprised I'm the first to call you out on it. The overwhelming majority of the FBI's records are public; they're called court cases. And yes, the agents can discuss them. The agents can even discuss the methods that they use. The only thing agents can't discuss is material related to an active or ongoing investigation, or material that has been classified. There no evidence that either condition has been met here.
People should remember just how terrible Americans are at keeping a secret.
Yup. Everybody knows how to build nuclear weapons, stealth bombers, ICBMs, because we're terrible at keeping secrets. So, tell me, what's the maximum listing angle that any of our nuclear submarines can operate at before they automatically shut down? You don't know? Okay, how about this one: When is the next high-energy test of the HARRP? Don't know that one either? Umm, how about a real easy one: Who's the pilot of Air Force One? Ah, didn't think so.
Someone would have leaked this long ago, just as the secret room at the AT&T switch center was leaked within a couple months.
Yeah, it's a super duper big secret that the government can tap phones and digital lines. Dude, you make this leak sound like it was some kind of blow to our nation's intelligence operations, rather than having all the relevance of knowing the President ordered his latte with skim milk this morning. It wasn't a secret; It just wasn't advertised. There's a big difference. You won't find our nuclear missile silos in North Dakota on google map with the words "Secret Nuclear Missile Silos Here" underneath; But that doesn't mean they aren't there, nor does it mean that there's extra-special effort being taken to keep them secret. They just aren't advertised -- everyone knows they're there.
It wouldn't come from a lowly guy hyping a book.
Yes, a "lowly" agent of our largest law enforcement agency, discussing something that he did professionally for many years, and the tools he used to do that job should be trusted less than random internet pundit "leaking" the same information.
By this logic we should also believe Bob Lazar about alien technologies. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and the word of one insider means squat.
His "extraordinary" claim is that the government is doing what Google has already done: Indexing the entire internet, with the only difference being one of scale. I think if a private company started by a few college kids can do that, a government with nearly a trillion dollars in operating budget can come up with something.
So your argument is that they will cooperate or be shot? This isn't even a sane way for a conspiracy to operate.
Correct. But then, it's not a conspiracy. He's suggesting a corporation wouldn't cooperate with law enforcement requests. That's patently absurd; Corporations have little to gain and loads to lose if they decide to go against the government. Multi-billion dollar corporations aren't known for behaving like belligerant teenagers.
The point is that the scale of the conspiracy necessary to pull this off is vast enough to make this extremely unlikely.
Except it isn't a conspiracy; we're talking about a national 'darknet' that taps key points in the internet and then mirrors that data to a processing facility before being stored in a relational database. It's not a conspiracy, numerous government officials have already gone on the record as saying this technology exists, today, now. It's not classified. It's not a secret. They've come right out and said this capability exists.
LOL
A former agent for the counter-terrorism branch of our largest federal law enforcement agency talking about the technology used in counter-terrorism is about as credible as it gets, dude. LOL all you want, but your own cred is the only thing the rest of us are laughing at: You're an internet pundit.
ha ha, no. They totally do. Did you know that in 2011, 680 million drives were shipped? Do you really think a couple exobytes of data would even be a blip on the radar? That's only a few thousand drives.
Having run a large enough telecom operation to deal with CALEA I can say for sure that law enforcement very much needed our help to do anything with our customers' communications.
No they dont. Your equipment is standardized. Any geek with the right know-how can do it. But the FBI doesn't want the legal liability of messing up your equipment and then having to pay for it, so they let you do it. Big difference.
but they barely had enough technology sense to be able to do anything with it.
The people you worked with, yes. You don't need technical people to serve warrants and court orders. But, very obviously, you need them to analyze the data and provide evidence and testimony.
It's also wrong. I worked for a regional non-Bell telco. We didn't capture anything that wasn't ordered by a court order, and even then, only the bare minumum to meet the court order.
Were you a high-level employee with that company, and needed to know about all court orders? Next question: Have you ever seen a National Security Letter? Don't answer that as yes, by the way, as you'll go to jail.
But to say "all" is simply false. Maybe they keep all they get, but I know for a fact they don't get "all".
"All" is a highly variable thing. And they don't need to get every access point. They only need a fraction of them. Maybe your regional telco didn't get a letter because your NAP peers did.
Probably. He is trying to make a name for himself as a consultant.
He worked in the FBI's counter-terrorism division. I don't think he needs to "make a name" for himself. His resume already says enough.
If his claim was true, hundreds of people would know about it, and all of them would know they were breaking the law.
And as we know, government officials never break the law. Glad we cleared that one up.
but many of them would be in telecom companies, that would have no reason to cooperate,
They have guns. Lots of guns. Feeling lucky, punk?
). Of course, no amount of logic or absence of evidence this will stop the conspiracy theories (see below).
"Conspiracy theories by a former official in a credible position to know these things." FTFY.
Of course, if it actually was true, the FBI would probably hire shills to go on Slashdot and spread disinformation, and try to convince everyone that there was no vast conspiracy, so why should you trust me?
Why would the FBI give two shits about a geek news site? And why would they need to convince you, me, or anyone else, there wasn't a "vast conspiracy"? You're making a straw man here. A big one.
Think of the sheer amount of storage, electricity, infrastructure, personal, computing resources and so on that you would need in order to perform this feat. The numbers would be boggling and would account for a significant portion of the worldwide sales of all hard drives, tape back ups etc, etc.
Well, the internet was clocking about 21 exabytes per month in 2010. However, the overwhelming majority of that traffic is redundant; if you remove the redundancy in the data set and then compress it, you're probably looking at less than an exabyte of data over the public internet. You can reduce that further with whitelists; Traffic from Netflix, for example, is probably not going to contain super secret terrorist communications.
So let's say you can cut that down to only record the most relevant 5%. That's about 1 exabyte. How much would that cost? Well, in 2008, they guesstimated this to be about $400 million. A single stealth bomber costs about $2.1 billion; So the yearly storage costs of "the internet" is about 2 stealth bombers. -_-
So at least as far as the data storage is concerned, I think it's well within the government's budget. Now, making that data usable and analysis of it... hooo boy... that's gonna be the bitch of it. But storage? Solved.
Not that America is perfect, but you have no fucking idea what tyranny is.
tyr-an-ny, n.: (source: dictionary.com)
1. arbitrary or unrestrained exercise of power; despotic abuse of authority.
"All of that stuff is being captured as we speak whether we know it or like it or not."
2. oppressive or unjustly severe government on the part of any ruler.
"meaning every telephone conversation Americans have with one another on U.S. soil, with or without a search warrant -- 'is being captured as we speak.'"
3.undue severity or harshness.
"'No, welcome to America."
Would you care to revise your statement, Mr. Internet Pundit?
This guy seems to be implying that the government has some kind of man-in-middle technology that intercepts and records *all* traffic, which simply isn't true.
The majority of the internet goes over telecom links. The few parts of it that don't, almost always have at least one hop that transits one of the major carriers networks. They don't have to monitor "all" traffic. They just have to monitor one of the hops in the chain.
All IP traffic can be reduced to a stream. TCP/IP has some extra error-correction options to keep it all in order, but a stream is a stream nonetheless. And when you start looking at very large data sets, you're going to quickly discover that the majority of it is just a copy of another set of data.
People here seem to think that monitoring all network traffic is unrealistic because of the storage considerations, but they don't have to store every byte; Just the unique bytes. If you download the CNN homepage, the storage application doesn't need to hold onto that entire transaction; It can just record the headers and timestamp, and then reference the same stream that a few hundred thousand other people also downloaded.
Most of the internet's traffic isn't encrypted, and so the amount of entropy on it is low, despite the very high bandwidth. This statistical fact paired with shannon's laws, which in turn are based on the laws of thermodynamics, provide the basis of a practical surveillance solution.
When you add in intelligent filtering, the amount of data to be stored drops even more. You probably don't need to worry about terrorists communicating via Netflix for example; And that makes up a significant chunk of internet traffic (look it up; it's a surprise).
The other thing about intelligence assets is that they all have a 'use by' date. The more time goes by, the less valuable the data becomes. Eventually, you reach a point of diminishing returns; That is the point at which you can safely delete the data. It doesn't matter whether it contained terrorist communications or the next 9/11 or not... if you haven't found it by the cutoff time, it's worthless.
Combine these attributes and what this man is saying is, in fact, achievable. Now... processing that data and turning into useful, timely, and accurate intelligence... that, people, is a whole 'nother can of worms. And realistically, where the bulk of the resources is going to be. Storage is a non-starter. Analysis is the bitch of it.
Clemente: 'No, welcome to America. All of that stuff is being captured as we speak whether we know it or like it or not.' 'All of that stuff' â" meaning every telephone conversation Americans have with one another on U.S. soil, with or without a search warrant â" 'is being captured as we speak.' 'No digital communication is secure,' by which he means not that any communication is susceptible to government interception as it happens (although that is true), but far beyond that: all digital communications â" meaning telephone calls, emails, online chats and the like â" are automatically recorded and stored and accessible to the government after the fact. To describe that is to define what a ubiquitous, limitless Surveillance State is."
Dear US official;
All of my communications are sent via encrypted proxy, and set to stream constantly. The proxy dumps into Tor and a half-dozen other networks. I originally did this for shits and giggles, to see how hard it would be. I will admit the latency is a bit higher than doing it locally, but it is very usable in spite of this. I also signed up for the Tor Cloud project and run an EC2 micro-instance to help others do the same.
Originally, I just did this as an experiment, but after reading things like what you're saying and realizing that we've become a surveillance state on par with Iran, China, and North Korea (where did they get their filtering and monitoring hardware from again? Oh right: We gave it to them), I decided to keep it.
I don't do anything special with my super duper encrypted "all the things" setup. I wish I could say I was some elite ninja hacker or something, but all I really do is browse internet forum sites and read the BBC news, and you know, download a few TV shows here and there. I'm one of those people that doesn't have anything to hide per-se, but when I live under the tyranny of a government that has turned their citizens into the enemy -- the attitude that we're all criminals or potential criminals, and must be monitored pre-emptively, I feel like it's my duty to frustrate the hell out of people like you.
So I have been helping friends, family, and strangers, set their computers up the same way. Yeah, I know, some of them will probably use their newfound freedom and anonymity for evil, but frankly, even a terrorist attack a week and all the rantings in the world from you (that may even be justified) about how criminals can use this technology for their own nefarious purposes, doesn't deter me.
You crossed a line; Morally, ethically, constitutionally. By criminalizing the average citizen, you have become a bigger danger than all the terrorists, all the "real" criminals. You are corrupt, dangerous, and seek to undermine our democratic way of life. You hide in the shadows and see conspiracies everywhere, and are convinced of your own righteous cause. You are as dangerous as a religious fundamentalist, because just like their dogmas, yours demands absolute purity. There will always be more justifications to invade the privacy of others.
So I will continue to teach anyone who wants to, how to fight back against your tyranny. You're a threat to the way of life of not just myself, but my peers. You're a danger to all Americans -- you view us as the enemy. Your own people.
When you start giving me random increases in pay, I'll start doing random amounts of unpaid overtime.
Make sure the ranges for the call to random() are acceptable, otherwise you're going to get screwed by the law of averages. And if there's one thing you can count on managers to mess with... it's statistics.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Predictably, certain politicians are â" so to speak â" up in arms about it.
Considering how often these gun bills have come up, and then gone flaccid, it's going to take some industrial-strength Viagra to get gun control advocates to mount a campaign to put to bed any criticism and pass the climax of votes necessary for it to become a law.
Actually after reading through all of the discussion here it sounds to me much more plausible that the government might actually be trying to log everything off a few major backbones
That's what I'd do.
But I am certainly not qualified to go about telling anyone how to covertly access a computer system anonymously. Nor would I pretend that I could. That would require resources, mobility, knowledge, and access to things I don't have. Nor would I want to do any of that anyway. At least not to post what I do.
Not really. All you need is a pringles can, a wifi card with an SMT connector, and a couple pieces of software. Anonymity and mobility is easy, and the knowledge isn't specialized.
The problem isn't access, but entropy. The more you use a system, any system, the more ordered the access becomes; That is, before you access the system, you could say the entropic space to search to find your attempt is infinite, and with every interaction, the entropy reduces until eventually it reaches a threshold where the pattern becomes statistically unique. What most people don't realize... is how little time and interaction is required to reach that point.
The more you use a system, the easier it becomes to tie that use to an identity. Via comparative analysis with other identities, it eventually becomes possible to link it to a specific person. What this means then, is that in essence, no matter what methods you use to access a given system, the mere act of accessing it, independently of anything else, decreases your anonymity. And the more access, the less anonymity.
You can increase the complexity but you cannot prevent convergence to unity. Anonymity gradually drops to zero.
Yes, the invisible tap that nobody ever found that the government broke into a locked facility to install. How did they disable the video camera again? And why did the FBI bother to test my CALEA setup, when they had already tapped the network? That's .75 of a man hour they'll never get back that could have been used to pay for some sequestration time.
Arrogance and small-mindedness. I'm impressed. Well, let me clue you in: A government is a collection of agencies, not all of whom talk to each other or have the same agenda. And even within a single agency, this is true. Whatever group inside the FBI you dealt with may have found it easier for their purposes to hand you a device and let you do the work.
That doesn't mean that's the only way to do it. Or even that this 'tap' you speak of is a separate physical device. It could be built right into the firmware. I'll say it again: It's arrogant in the extreme to presume that just because you can't find it, doesn't mean it doesn't exist. There are people in the world far, far more experienced in the art of covertly hiding things, and I'm pretty sure they can clear the bar of "can't be found by a maintenance tech."
On what. I've seen the infrastructure. There were no unexpected splitters in the fiber. No unexplained connections in a router. If they tapped everything already, why did I have a dedicated CALEA box and such? It makes no sense, and is simply false.
You think they're going to tell you where the tap is? You, a lowly maintenance technician? Just because you couldn't find it doesn't mean it isn't there.
But who knows, maybe they have above top secret alien positron brain quantum foam storage technology (or insert your own fantastic technobabble) buried at area 51...
Oh no, nothing so implausible. People turned into wifi base stations that upload their consciousness into the cloud. Duh. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to meet a pretty girl in my blue snogging box and then catch a flight...
if you read James Bamford's books, you will begin to realize that most of the major US computer companies, from Cray to IBM, were propped up directly and secretly by the NSA to build supercomputers for it, secretly, years before the technology would reach the public.
I don't need a book to know the government funds technology improvements; They freely admit it. It's not exactly super spy secret stuff -- they created the internet. It's a safe bet that they continue to work on similar things.
Sorry I didn't specify Tor Node and Proxy. Watch the video. It shows the man in the middle attack by placing a proxy online and not even promoting it. Someone found it and the JS injected ran a man in the browser attack. Multiple proxies were worthless after the JS loaded.
Yeah, okay... why the hell would I let the browser be in charge of proxy-control? You're assuming by proxy I mean 'socks'. Heh. Ooookay!
Welcome to the USSA where freedom of speech means freedom to praise your government, where the right to bear arms means the right to go hunting, where the right to not be searched without a warrant doesn't apply, where due process can be ignored if the president wants you dead.
... Just like every other government on the planet. Government power is only restrained by the People. And the people right now are fat, docile, and more concerned with who'll win the next American Idol. We're a victim of our own material prosperity... but don't worry: When enough people have become impoverished, hungry, and desperate... that'll change. Again, just like every other government on the planet that has failed.
No, instead if you're a white Christian, you're guilty of "hate crimes" which is basically the same thing as the "terrorist" label.
So if you're standing in line at an airport and casually remark that you were found guilty of a "hate crime", people will react the same as if you said you are a convicted terrorist? Riiiight -- and I'm the queen of England.
but if formally charged for 'communicating terrorist threats' this would a set a chilling low bar for terrorist investigations."
Please. It's already chillingly low. How many christians have publicly said gays "should burn in hell" ? How many famous celebrities have said they would shoot government officials if they came to take their guns away? I could come up with dozens of examples of more volatile speech by talking heads on television... and god help us if I decide to include examples from that cesspool of humanity called the internet.
Being called a terrorist or avoiding that label all comes down to who and what you are. It is, and always has been, about that -- not what you say. Look at the boston bomber -- muslim. Terrorist. But the Aurora shooting? Not a terrorist. Those people that blew up a shiite church in Wisconsin? Not terrorists. In fact, as long as you aren't black, or a muslim, you can probably avoid the "terrorist" label.
The 'terrorist' label is just like the 'communist' label, and before that the 'fascist' label, and before that... you get the idea. Every generation has had their government-sponsored boogieman. Terrorist is ours.
You skipped a pretty important step there chief - deduping/compressing 20 exabytes of traffic a month...
A government that builds super-massive computing clusters for cryptography I don't think is going to have a problem coming up with a way to compress and decompress data and then use hash tables to detect duplicates. Besides, these are problems that were solved years ago in the civilian sector...
But do I believe they do so? No. If they did, they wouldn't have a way to mine the data.
Well, you heard it here first folks. An internet pundit doesn't believe the agent. Good enough for me!
It would possibly be useful as evidence after the fact, but not for monitoring purposes. It's way too much data.
Yeah... how much data does that particle accelerator thingie they buried in Europe generate again? Some really small number, like say 25 petabytes per year. Yeah. Way too much. And how much data does google have in its index again of just HTML text? More? Oh, okay.
Oh, and the guy said they use it as evidence after the fact... that's the main reason they're storing it. And as for monitoring purposes... if the data is already being recorded, why not use it for monitoring purposes? Is it because it makes more sense to serve a warrant to the teleco you're already tapping, when you already have the data, just to get another copy of it?
If he wasn't lying, he would be arrested for violation of his LIFE LONG NDA you sign when you take a job with the The FBI.
That's such a load of bullshit I'm surprised I'm the first to call you out on it. The overwhelming majority of the FBI's records are public; they're called court cases. And yes, the agents can discuss them. The agents can even discuss the methods that they use. The only thing agents can't discuss is material related to an active or ongoing investigation, or material that has been classified. There no evidence that either condition has been met here.
People should remember just how terrible Americans are at keeping a secret.
Yup. Everybody knows how to build nuclear weapons, stealth bombers, ICBMs, because we're terrible at keeping secrets. So, tell me, what's the maximum listing angle that any of our nuclear submarines can operate at before they automatically shut down? You don't know? Okay, how about this one: When is the next high-energy test of the HARRP? Don't know that one either? Umm, how about a real easy one: Who's the pilot of Air Force One? Ah, didn't think so.
Someone would have leaked this long ago, just as the secret room at the AT&T switch center was leaked within a couple months.
Yeah, it's a super duper big secret that the government can tap phones and digital lines. Dude, you make this leak sound like it was some kind of blow to our nation's intelligence operations, rather than having all the relevance of knowing the President ordered his latte with skim milk this morning. It wasn't a secret; It just wasn't advertised. There's a big difference. You won't find our nuclear missile silos in North Dakota on google map with the words "Secret Nuclear Missile Silos Here" underneath; But that doesn't mean they aren't there, nor does it mean that there's extra-special effort being taken to keep them secret. They just aren't advertised -- everyone knows they're there.
It wouldn't come from a lowly guy hyping a book.
Yes, a "lowly" agent of our largest law enforcement agency, discussing something that he did professionally for many years, and the tools he used to do that job should be trusted less than random internet pundit "leaking" the same information.
By this logic we should also believe Bob Lazar about alien technologies. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and the word of one insider means squat.
His "extraordinary" claim is that the government is doing what Google has already done: Indexing the entire internet, with the only difference being one of scale. I think if a private company started by a few college kids can do that, a government with nearly a trillion dollars in operating budget can come up with something.
So your argument is that they will cooperate or be shot? This isn't even a sane way for a conspiracy to operate.
Correct. But then, it's not a conspiracy. He's suggesting a corporation wouldn't cooperate with law enforcement requests. That's patently absurd; Corporations have little to gain and loads to lose if they decide to go against the government. Multi-billion dollar corporations aren't known for behaving like belligerant teenagers.
The point is that the scale of the conspiracy necessary to pull this off is vast enough to make this extremely unlikely.
Except it isn't a conspiracy; we're talking about a national 'darknet' that taps key points in the internet and then mirrors that data to a processing facility before being stored in a relational database. It's not a conspiracy, numerous government officials have already gone on the record as saying this technology exists, today, now. It's not classified. It's not a secret. They've come right out and said this capability exists.
LOL
A former agent for the counter-terrorism branch of our largest federal law enforcement agency talking about the technology used in counter-terrorism is about as credible as it gets, dude. LOL all you want, but your own cred is the only thing the rest of us are laughing at: You're an internet pundit.
I doubt they have the storage capacity.
ha ha, no. They totally do. Did you know that in 2011, 680 million drives were shipped? Do you really think a couple exobytes of data would even be a blip on the radar? That's only a few thousand drives.
You can't buy that much storage and not affect the market.
1 petabyte = 293 x 3.5 terabyte drives.
1 exobyte = 1024 petabytes.
2 exobytes = 600,064 drives.
Number of drives produced each year: 680 million in 2011.
So, umm.. 0.0006% increase in volume to satisfy that order. Yeah. I'm sure the market just buckled under that enormous demand.
Having run a large enough telecom operation to deal with CALEA I can say for sure that law enforcement very much needed our help to do anything with our customers' communications.
No they dont. Your equipment is standardized. Any geek with the right know-how can do it. But the FBI doesn't want the legal liability of messing up your equipment and then having to pay for it, so they let you do it. Big difference.
but they barely had enough technology sense to be able to do anything with it.
The people you worked with, yes. You don't need technical people to serve warrants and court orders. But, very obviously, you need them to analyze the data and provide evidence and testimony.
It's also wrong. I worked for a regional non-Bell telco. We didn't capture anything that wasn't ordered by a court order, and even then, only the bare minumum to meet the court order.
Were you a high-level employee with that company, and needed to know about all court orders? Next question: Have you ever seen a National Security Letter? Don't answer that as yes, by the way, as you'll go to jail.
But to say "all" is simply false. Maybe they keep all they get, but I know for a fact they don't get "all".
"All" is a highly variable thing. And they don't need to get every access point. They only need a fraction of them. Maybe your regional telco didn't get a letter because your NAP peers did.
Probably. He is trying to make a name for himself as a consultant.
He worked in the FBI's counter-terrorism division. I don't think he needs to "make a name" for himself. His resume already says enough.
If his claim was true, hundreds of people would know about it, and all of them would know they were breaking the law.
And as we know, government officials never break the law. Glad we cleared that one up.
but many of them would be in telecom companies, that would have no reason to cooperate,
They have guns. Lots of guns. Feeling lucky, punk?
). Of course, no amount of logic or absence of evidence this will stop the conspiracy theories (see below).
"Conspiracy theories by a former official in a credible position to know these things." FTFY.
Of course, if it actually was true, the FBI would probably hire shills to go on Slashdot and spread disinformation, and try to convince everyone that there was no vast conspiracy, so why should you trust me?
Why would the FBI give two shits about a geek news site? And why would they need to convince you, me, or anyone else, there wasn't a "vast conspiracy"? You're making a straw man here. A big one.
Think of the sheer amount of storage, electricity, infrastructure, personal, computing resources and so on that you would need in order to perform this feat. The numbers would be boggling and would account for a significant portion of the worldwide sales of all hard drives, tape back ups etc, etc.
Well, the internet was clocking about 21 exabytes per month in 2010. However, the overwhelming majority of that traffic is redundant; if you remove the redundancy in the data set and then compress it, you're probably looking at less than an exabyte of data over the public internet. You can reduce that further with whitelists; Traffic from Netflix, for example, is probably not going to contain super secret terrorist communications.
So let's say you can cut that down to only record the most relevant 5%. That's about 1 exabyte. How much would that cost? Well, in 2008, they guesstimated this to be about $400 million. A single stealth bomber costs about $2.1 billion; So the yearly storage costs of "the internet" is about 2 stealth bombers. -_-
So at least as far as the data storage is concerned, I think it's well within the government's budget. Now, making that data usable and analysis of it... hooo boy... that's gonna be the bitch of it. But storage? Solved.
Not that America is perfect, but you have no fucking idea what tyranny is.
tyr-an-ny, n.: (source: dictionary.com)
1. arbitrary or unrestrained exercise of power; despotic abuse of authority.
"All of that stuff is being captured as we speak whether we know it or like it or not."
2. oppressive or unjustly severe government on the part of any ruler.
"meaning every telephone conversation Americans have with one another on U.S. soil, with or without a search warrant -- 'is being captured as we speak.'"
3.undue severity or harshness.
"'No, welcome to America."
Would you care to revise your statement, Mr. Internet Pundit?
Might want to watch this Defcon presentation. Trusting a random tor node is a bad idea.
True enough, but who said I use just Tor? I said I use multiple proxies... Tor is just one such network available.
This guy seems to be implying that the government has some kind of man-in-middle technology that intercepts and records *all* traffic, which simply isn't true.
The majority of the internet goes over telecom links. The few parts of it that don't, almost always have at least one hop that transits one of the major carriers networks. They don't have to monitor "all" traffic. They just have to monitor one of the hops in the chain.
All IP traffic can be reduced to a stream. TCP/IP has some extra error-correction options to keep it all in order, but a stream is a stream nonetheless. And when you start looking at very large data sets, you're going to quickly discover that the majority of it is just a copy of another set of data.
People here seem to think that monitoring all network traffic is unrealistic because of the storage considerations, but they don't have to store every byte; Just the unique bytes. If you download the CNN homepage, the storage application doesn't need to hold onto that entire transaction; It can just record the headers and timestamp, and then reference the same stream that a few hundred thousand other people also downloaded.
Most of the internet's traffic isn't encrypted, and so the amount of entropy on it is low, despite the very high bandwidth. This statistical fact paired with shannon's laws, which in turn are based on the laws of thermodynamics, provide the basis of a practical surveillance solution.
When you add in intelligent filtering, the amount of data to be stored drops even more. You probably don't need to worry about terrorists communicating via Netflix for example; And that makes up a significant chunk of internet traffic (look it up; it's a surprise).
The other thing about intelligence assets is that they all have a 'use by' date. The more time goes by, the less valuable the data becomes. Eventually, you reach a point of diminishing returns; That is the point at which you can safely delete the data. It doesn't matter whether it contained terrorist communications or the next 9/11 or not... if you haven't found it by the cutoff time, it's worthless.
Combine these attributes and what this man is saying is, in fact, achievable. Now... processing that data and turning into useful, timely, and accurate intelligence... that, people, is a whole 'nother can of worms. And realistically, where the bulk of the resources is going to be. Storage is a non-starter. Analysis is the bitch of it.
Clemente: 'No, welcome to America. All of that stuff is being captured as we speak whether we know it or like it or not.' 'All of that stuff' â" meaning every telephone conversation Americans have with one another on U.S. soil, with or without a search warrant â" 'is being captured as we speak.' 'No digital communication is secure,' by which he means not that any communication is susceptible to government interception as it happens (although that is true), but far beyond that: all digital communications â" meaning telephone calls, emails, online chats and the like â" are automatically recorded and stored and accessible to the government after the fact. To describe that is to define what a ubiquitous, limitless Surveillance State is."
Dear US official;
All of my communications are sent via encrypted proxy, and set to stream constantly. The proxy dumps into Tor and a half-dozen other networks. I originally did this for shits and giggles, to see how hard it would be. I will admit the latency is a bit higher than doing it locally, but it is very usable in spite of this. I also signed up for the Tor Cloud project and run an EC2 micro-instance to help others do the same.
Originally, I just did this as an experiment, but after reading things like what you're saying and realizing that we've become a surveillance state on par with Iran, China, and North Korea (where did they get their filtering and monitoring hardware from again? Oh right: We gave it to them), I decided to keep it.
I don't do anything special with my super duper encrypted "all the things" setup. I wish I could say I was some elite ninja hacker or something, but all I really do is browse internet forum sites and read the BBC news, and you know, download a few TV shows here and there. I'm one of those people that doesn't have anything to hide per-se, but when I live under the tyranny of a government that has turned their citizens into the enemy -- the attitude that we're all criminals or potential criminals, and must be monitored pre-emptively, I feel like it's my duty to frustrate the hell out of people like you.
So I have been helping friends, family, and strangers, set their computers up the same way. Yeah, I know, some of them will probably use their newfound freedom and anonymity for evil, but frankly, even a terrorist attack a week and all the rantings in the world from you (that may even be justified) about how criminals can use this technology for their own nefarious purposes, doesn't deter me.
You crossed a line; Morally, ethically, constitutionally. By criminalizing the average citizen, you have become a bigger danger than all the terrorists, all the "real" criminals. You are corrupt, dangerous, and seek to undermine our democratic way of life. You hide in the shadows and see conspiracies everywhere, and are convinced of your own righteous cause. You are as dangerous as a religious fundamentalist, because just like their dogmas, yours demands absolute purity. There will always be more justifications to invade the privacy of others.
So I will continue to teach anyone who wants to, how to fight back against your tyranny. You're a threat to the way of life of not just myself, but my peers. You're a danger to all Americans -- you view us as the enemy. Your own people.
You've lost your way.
When you start giving me random increases in pay, I'll start doing random amounts of unpaid overtime.
Make sure the ranges for the call to random() are acceptable, otherwise you're going to get screwed by the law of averages. And if there's one thing you can count on managers to mess with... it's statistics. :)