For purposes of national security the 4th amendment doesn't apply, the bar is 'reasonable suspicion' not 'probable cause'. No warrant is required.
Which is why I didn't mention it right off, though Snowden is quick to argue that point.
But mass storage of communications intercepts without individual reasonable suspicion, whether listened-to or not, may be arguable as a violation of the Fourth Amendment to the Supreme Court should they decide to hear it. It IS a search even if the 'seeing/hearing' is deferred. Under the general theme of unenumerated rights, any action that places the entire population under surveillance indiscriminately cannot argue that any 'reasonable suspicion' justifies it, for it would invariably include all persons worthy and unworthy of suspicion. You'd have to argue that everyone passes the test for suspicion. At that point the pinball machine says TILT and the game is over.
I think the Freedom of Association angle is just as compelling however.
It is hardly a novel perception that compelled disclosure of affiliation with groups engaged in advocacy may constitute as effective a restraint on freedom of association as [affirmative governmental action in other cases.] This Court has recognized the vital relationship between freedom of association and privacy in one's associations. ~Guilt by expressive association: political profiling, surveillance and the privacy of groups, p.636
Mass storage of traffic or communications (and association through metadata not specifically requested by court) is a 'compelled disclosure' to the government. It may be difficult to achieve in practice, but is it too much of a stretch to extend 'houses, papers, and effects' to include verbal or typed communications with others over a network? Think of the archaic meaning and intent here for 'papers'. It has been upheld to include sealed letters in transit and the opening of mail without due process is clearly a 1st amendment violation. This post was a 'letter' from myself to Slashdot, and until it appears on the public page it is a 'paper'.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Says it all, if we have the courage to fight for it.
NSA probably now has access to the direct streams telecoms use to consolidate their billing and geolocatioon data, from taps on the underlying circuits. If it's encrypted then nudge nudge wink wink here's the key. So telecoms no longer need suffer the indignity and PR risk of transmitting the data.
NSA Warrantless Wiretapping is not just an invasion of privacy. They have actually claimed to Congress that they do NOT consider information intercepted and stored indefinitely... to be unlawful at all! Until or unless someone reads it. This subverts Freedom of Association too, since any future tyrant would have access to this cradle-to-grave data of our families and friends and (now! with super-cells!) movements.
To get up to speed quickly this whitepaper by Andrew Clement seems to cover all the bases. Look past the straw man 'Metadata Collection' within it for 'NSA splitter'. Or you might start as I did years ago with James Bamford's fascinating 1982 book Puzzle Palace. While most of it dwells on what is now history and goes on at length about NSA's Charter which explicitly forbid domestic intercepts, there was a single passage in this book that revealed something else. I will quote it because I believe Bamford intended it as a dire warning: "Another indication of NSA's "broadband sweeping of multi-circuited domestic telecommunications trunk lines," David L. Watters told the Senate Intelligence Committee [in 1978!] lies in the Agency's request for an amendment to the wiretap law that would permit NSA to engage in warrantless wiretapping "for the sole purpose of determining the capability of equipment" when such "test period shall be limited... to... ninety days." Continuing, he warned: "Let there be no misunderstanding here. There is only one category of wiretapping equipment or system which requires up to ninety days for test and adjustment, and that system is broadband electronic eavesdropping equipment, the vacuum-cleaner approach to intelligence gathering, the general search of microwave trunk lines. I make this assertion on the strength of actual experience in the electronic intelligence trade and on the strength of over twenty-five years' experience in the telecommunications profession. An ordinary, single-line wire tap requires only five minutes to adjust and test."
Sure this pre-Internet quote discusses microwave, which was the long-line 'broadband' of choice in those days... but NSA's intentions to dig in at places where American citizens speak with each other is clear. Since then, Thomas Drake, Bill Binney and Mark Klein have all come forward alleging domestic surveillance far exceeding 'telephone records'. Klein is of special note, for it is he who revealed the existence of secret Room 641A in the lawsuit Heptig vs AT&T that the Electronic Frontier Foundation took almost to the Supreme Court... who actually declined to hear the case on grounds that the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 protected AT&T from liability for involvement with any illegal activities. Sound normal? This was a law passed after the lawsuit was filed. In response to it, even. Oh.
That should make you a bit angry. We're not talking about telephone records here. We're talking about fiber splitting with drop-in access to the whole slurp. Which also contains voice these days. Any real despot who comes to power will discover that the United States is prepared to deliver real-time private communications and databases of activity for its citizens, cradle to grave, that had been collected with no 'probable cause' whatsoever.
Why the fuck would anyone want to build this thing
Students (and researchers) will finally be able to 1-click their way to success!
And professors (using software instances on the same cloud) will already be using AI grading software that will be fooled by it. It's all reminiscent of this cartoon which is actually a 2009 re-draw of an earlier cartoon by the same artist. It was hilarious until it actually started to happen.
As to the fear-hype about an AI doing something that humans can do just as well (piece together narratives and make things up)? LOL. To sell your startup company to spooky investors on and off the Beltway, nothing boosts your brand like starting some terrifying overblown rumor about your company's technology. The way investors think is, if it's so 'dangerous' in the future the stock will be worth a lot so I'd better get in on the ground floor with the other spooks. And become a rich immoral investor spook.
It's just the beginning. Look out for goofy advertisements that say "A.I. so advanced, to use it we must wear HAZMAT suits!" then you know you will have entered bizzaroland. I saw it all happen before with ads in 70s-80s computer magazines.
My boss slaps a folded-over InfoWorld magazine onto my desk, thick enough to kill a rat with in those days. He says with obvious glee, "How bout dem apples?"
It is Steve Gibson's INFOWORLD column of March 8 and Gibson (with obvious glee) has caught a manufacturer of Hercules graphics cards red-handed. The standard WinBench program had conducted a series of tests --- and in one particular test of text display, in which the phrase "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog's back then sat on a tack" is continuously painted on the screen --- the card performed oddly spectacularly. It was that one score that when combined with the others, ranked the card above the competition. Suspicious, Gibson changed a single letter in the test phrase and the card's score dropped to a reasonable range. The card was apparently recognizing that a test was in progress and 'cheating' by failing to actually over-write this static text repeatedly.
I love the comment by the manufacturer when Gibson contacted them (read it!) but what intrigued the industry the most was that the cheat was not to be found in the Windows driver code, it had been embedded into the firmware of the accelerator chip. In the next Winbench version the test phrase jumped around the lazy screen's back during the test, rendering the cheat obsolete.
Being an established computer consultant, I got to provide input when the US Virgin Islands' election system was upgraded, a good friend on the Board of Elections brought over a bunch of brochures for me to review one evening in the early 1980s. There were chad systems ("Punch cards? You must be joking!") and push-button machines ("Where's the paper trail? Do you know what a 'hacker' is?" "It's available but 'costs extra'. Are these people for real??"). And there were optical zoned page scanners.
My friend and I agreed -- his vote on the Board of Elections -- was to keep the paper ballot. People are used to it. If anything, beef up the security and oversight surrounding transport of ballots cast; use bleeding-edge technology cautiously and wisely: do the counting of paper ballots with optical readers. Because just like the money counter machines, you can do it again quickly to see if you get the same result. And if the machines break and the power goes out -- the election process is 'safe', breezes along as smoothly as ever -- only the results are delayed.
Just WHEN was it decided that election results needed to be tallied in hours or minutes? From where did the pressure arise such that hand counting of paper ballots (or in the least, optical scan of same) is too slow? That we instead impose few-vendor centralized no-paper systems that are inherently hackable?
Here's the test I impose. A paper ballot system may also have its problems -- BUT -- any given layman you bring in off the street to observe the tally process will have a clear view of a ballot box's chain of custody. Any layman observing the subsequent counting of those ballots (by hand or optical reader, with verification of random batches to test the reader) has a clear grasp of the process, and can tell whether the system is honest. No one can say if a wholly computerized system is honest. And even if you find someone who claims they are sure, no one can tell whether they are being honest.
If it's Democracy you want, use as simple a voting/tally system as possible; for the tally process use as many human beings as possible, local volunteers as participants and observers. If it's Oligarchy you want, go ahead and totally castrate the process of transparency by implementing insecurity through obscurity, touch screen BS with no hope of verification or recount.
The idea of all-electronic voting really should have been laughed out of the room, once upon a time. This is coming from a techie who favors modernization in other areas of society. xkcd agrees.
My friend on the Board was voted down: they decided to purchase push-button machines from Shouptronics... but at least each station had its own built-in battery backup and built in receipt-type printer that ran a paper tape. Unlike most today.
From that day long ago when you first heard someone describe their website as an >>>EXPERIENCE<<<... you know your simple literary text-based past is past. Now it's all about EYEBALLS on the PAGE, and the full extent of what tracking is possible with cookies and cookiecruft in gooblegook URLs that may be embedded levels deep. The HTTP Last-Modified: header is dead, even the ignoble ETAG is fakery-trackery in many cases. Your page has content hidden within it, often built on the fly by JS because the 'experience' requires total compliance and continual browser obsolescence. RSS is just giving it away.
Ironically this comes on the heels of bandwidth and compression techniques that really could have blown us away with triple-to-ten-throughput back in the slow modem and PPP turnaround delay days. I mean, we could have been swimming in text like the Matrix! Instead of the Matrix's goofy nonsense KanjiGreekWhatsits dribbling down from the top of the screen,
IMAGINE a whole generation of children who might have had grown up NOT with the thumb twaddling tile-scrolley Instagram twiddle-screen tiny web page mush and over-resolution JPGs... but with an actual Matrix style of text presentation. They might have learned to read multiple streams in parallel (up/down or lleft/right) with crisp bright text illuminated in the same ANSI color palette that Jesus used.
And when these ANSI text character sprites began to float in a 3D field, now you're talking. Things could recede in Z with axis-flopping... and the same kids who can solve a Rubik's cube in seconds could keep a mental position within a virtual space, one that would NOT disappear when some WEBFUCK decides it's time for everyone to upgrade... it would be a style/presentation uniquely their own, that would evolve as an extension of their mind. Instead of this HYPER-LITERATE possible Universe we now have,
Look Ma! It's a rectangle with a talking head! Let's watch it and listen to what it has to say... even though I can read three times as quickly.
AND OF COURSE I'm only generalizing on method when I talk ANSI (though I'm serious about the reduced color palette). By all means make this Matrix-style text sprite environment support Unicode and the world's scripts and symbols. And expandable tiles that represent visual zoomable image and video -- but my rub is those tiles MUST reduce to the size of characters so they join the text stream, not disrupt it. And if you clamor for EMOJIs that's backwards and stupid. Emojis are tools of Big Brother, who's just waiting in the wings for people to express themselves in pictorial symbols so Big Brother can change the symbols overnight.
FYI - I've never met anyone with such detailed opinions about the way pharmacies do business who wasn't also an opiate addict, and I work for a harm reduction clinic. You might want to be careful what you're "putting out there".
Haven't met many people, then? What an ugly comment. So insinuating things about other people is your idea of 'harm reduction'? What is your take on my remark about chocolate milk then? I've been a Systems Analyst and consultant by trade, You're an opiate troll.
Uh... yes, right down past its Walden Two collectivist ending. Manna is a pretty much a re-telling of Skinner's work, and you should seek out Walden Two and "Uh... read the whole thing." Both are typical of the way socialism is presented as a utopia in the making, in utter disregard to the intermediate steps that break down to chaos and toxic regimes in the real world Manna is a toxic regime imposed on most of the world's population (whose resources are no longer their own) to support a small utopian elite in Australia.
The implication is that the colony in Australia is a model for the rest of the world, but in our actual world it would never end that way with ANY centralized globally system of governance. Manna makes this out to be a friendly computer that knows all, just as BF Skinner imagined a ethereal almost supernatural spirit that led humanity in that direction... but that global computer would (in fact) be re-programmed to sacrifice the needs of many towards the benefit of a few.
(From Manna)
Everyone is equal
Everything is reused
Nothing is anonymous
Nothing is owned
Tell the truth
Do no harm
Obey the rules
Live your life
Better and better
It gets worse than whats-in-inventory. There is a SPECIAL CASE of mechanized disorder regarding items not in inventory. I first experienced this with pharmacies when I had to fill a regular prescription.
I'd show up near the same day of the month like clockwork. Sometimes they'd be able to fill the prescription and sometimes they could not. When they could not I'd head to a competitor and pay a slightly higher price. But I'd always check them first. And sometimes the second store didn't have any either and I had to go to a third place. On the third successive month that I was informed they were out... I held back and watched the clerk who was the head pharmacist and I asked, "Did you write it down?" What do you mean, he said. "The fact that you had to turn away a customer, what the drug is and how many." Oh no, our computer system tells us when we're out and how much to order. "Why isn't it working then? This is the third time I've been turned down." He said, the computer varies the amount we order but it changes from month to month and we have surges of demand and then next month, very little, so we don't order any. "Isn't that strange for prescribed drugs? It means you have no customer loyalty because you turn them away and they stay away. And when someone is told you cannot fill the order, no one writes it down and adds it up. If your computer system doesn't have a way you can record the fact that you turned away a customer, then it is stupider than a human being. Your sales vary because people are being tossed back and forth between pharmacies ny necessity rather then preference. I'll bet your competitors have the same dumb system. If YOU start a log of what customers were turned away for and manually adjust your orders... I'll bet you'd improve your business." It was like a light went on in the attic. They were never short again.
Years later now, many people -- even store managers -- are past the robot stage. I'm one of the only customers that takes managers aside and describes chronic shortages. The answers vary but it's often a shrug of helplessness, especially with computer inventory control and stocking brands like soda and milk. . Chain stores have started to ask customers at checkout, "Did you find everything?" and sometimes they'll become confused if I ask for a slip of paper to write my own note to the manager. Otherwise it falls down the memory hole. I've told managers, "A store without chocolate milk will get walkouts. People will abandon their carts and leave." and the manager was not convinced. "People cannot get full size chocolate milk in convenience stores at a decent price. They have to go to another grocery store anyway, they don't want to wait in two lines, so they'll just leave. Asking at checkout if they found everything isn't enough. How many people leave empty handed?" Hmmm....
Of all the dystopian fiction I have read, THIS story -- though there's no war or zombies in it -- is the most terrifying. Every other dark future has its struggles to survive and challenges to solve. But this story offers no hope at all. It leads past the movie Idiocracy, but not that one, an alternate Idiocracy future where energy drink Brawndo will forever water the crops.
The records are supposed to gather attention away from the buildings and the idea of full intercept of gathering of communications. It's a shell game, and you're supposed to think "they were naughty but are sorry and they took care of it." Watch now as the 685 million records eclipse the prior story and the news networks start talking about 'records' and not 'taps'. Mission accomplished.
Senators do this too. Ask them a question about buildings or taps, or the infrastructure for continuous warrantless surveillance, and they'll pretend you asked them about that handy voluntary call record sharing program. Press firmly and they'll do it again. Press harder and they move on to the next question.
(if you have a Reddit account and you've disabled 'new' Reddit you'll have to open a private window for these links)
PEAK SCREEN. At my aspect, ~6+ articles per screen. 583 words on screen. Scroll to bottom then click, ensuring you can backtrack a page at a time. Small static memory footprint.
SUCK SCREEN ~2.5 articles per screen. 203 words on screen. Browser crashin' JS stuttering Infinite scroll thumb-stroking smartphone masturbation.
Screens are doing just fine. Designers are deep-throating smartphones.
The insinuation is, the practice is not relegated to willing participants such as AT&T, it may well include other carriers whose fiber has been secretly split in the 'telecom risers' that ascend throughout the building. Are Young/Natsios insinuating this from theory or an anonymous tip? You may as well ask how licks to the center of a Tootsie Pop.
CRYPTOME.ORG is a spooky and funny place... since 1996 it has provided a continuous stream of articles, whistle-blows and odd bits for the intelligence community, even serving as a pre-Wikileaks leaks site. Its regular visitors most surely include spooks of the world, that is, the 'top brass' that are not terrified of surfing into things beyond their own cubicle secrecy level. John Young has managed to maintain a playful counterpoint to the stern countenance (serious face) of the State intelligence profession and tugs on the community and keeps them coming back for more, or so he says, looking at his logs. He doxxed them before 'dox' was a word, blew the cover on deep state telecom interception and NSA Charter violations (no one listened of course) and has embarked on other projects as amateur sleuth. His post-9/11 Ground Zero photo collection is hi res and second to none.
Over the years he has dropped interesting tidbits with 'A Sends...' (Anonymous)... his PGP key is ludicrously long... and some of the tips appearing on his site have had the stamp of foreign state actors. Of course he posts it without personal bias and you can bet some true limited hangouts and pissing contests have been published on Cryptome to get them 'out there'. For $100 he offers the entire collection of hosted files to date. A great gift for Santa Spook.
Callback to a recent posting on 5EYES that references this topic. I'm lukewarm about this 'exposé', they're presenting a number of buildings that are communications exchanges and dubbing them NSA buildings. Weatherproof climate controlled spaces are not spooky. This is ripe for debunking as anyone counters with their primary uses, and this issue is too critical to have agitated people harassing anyone who enters and exits the buildings as spooks. We now have two full generations of young who were not exposed to telecommunications lore. The latest generation, scarcely even landlines.
The dangerous technology is scattered throughout as splitter cabinets and the occasional server room. And 'dark' fiber of course, to carry the booty to Utah.
What a rude little reply. I assume you're talking about 'threats' to Earth from such missiles while the threat from asteroids is... God's will? I'll put more effort into mine than you did, just quote a relevant bit from my letter,
It is time for a global showdown between two major personality types of our time: those who are prepared to act quickly and decisively to mitigate this existential risk, and those who will oppose on many fronts... and it will be a showdown, for the opposition will attempt to 'quantify' the existential threat to a level where it could be passed over for this and the next generation, as has already happened, or dismissed altogether. They will call this 'logic, statistics and science' though it is none of those.
It is a mental disorder. Great oratory is called for, stern resolve also.
People who think they have plenty of time find it easy to propose or oppose anything, and language is rich with rhetoric of delay. Deficits grow less than we had feared, progress is made on countless fronts, we are closer now than ever before, love is just around the corner. In our developed world there are as many people able to survive by talking about things as those doing things. To the modern civilized mind global cataclysm is safely ensconced in speculation, early history, sacred text and cinema. Liberal arts education focuses deeply on the 'tabloid disasters' of history, strictly human atrocities that we and our neighbors would never repeat. It's someone else's job to think about such things, even if no one does. Easy to assume we are in the middle-weave of some tapestry between a dim beginning and distant end.
Expect opposition to the idea that erstwhile enemies, even bitter enemies, should all come together to assemble a collective weapons platform that could -- through some mishap or menace -- send kinetic weapons down to places on Earth. A humorous cosmic irony, the ultimate Prisoner's Dilemma, that a whole species would knowingly seal its doom with its failure to trust one another as individuals.
There is NO way to debate this to any unified consensus in the end. Despite the greatest tenets of all world faiths... the human race is experiencing technical difficulties, please stand by. The language of distrust and paranoia has become far more subtle and intricate, more lucrative, more fun, than the language of trust and action.
It is my conviction then, that there can be no round table with talking sticks and common vote. One of the remaining superpowers must step forward to announce that it is committed to resolving this 'existential threat' for all of humanity... to begin immediately without debate. It shall be conducted transparently with assurance that others who come to agree such action is necessary, may join the effort.
That is where America comes in. Apollo, showing that we could land on the Moon, was the first step. Artemis, goddess of the hunt, is next. Let us hunt space rocks.
It is nice to see that the Obama-era plan has been fleshed out and in the current plan the real rubber-hits-the-road moment is,
3.4 Identify, assess the readiness of, estimate in the costs of, and propose development paths for key technologies required by NEO impact prevention concepts. This assessment should include the most mature in-space concepts --- kinetic impactors, nuclear devices, and gravity tractors for deflection, and nuclear devices for disruption -- as well as less mature NEO impact prevention methods. Technology assessments should consider contemporary work, including potential synergies with relevant private industry interests (e.g., asteroid mining). They should also consider NEO impact scenarios that may have received insufficient attention thus far (e.g., binary asteroids, high-speed comets). [Short term; NASA, NNSA, DoD]
Asteroid interception is where the goofiest ideas emerge to monopolize discussion and take debate away from practical ideas that would give us a chance of survival in all cases. When you interrupt geeks talking about their favorite solution, something like deploying solar sails to nudge asteroids, to point out their scenario is for an extremely narrow case and it would be irresponsible to pursue such an idea to the exclusion of more practical ones... they get all butthurt.
1. kinetic impactor rockets loaded with payloads of simple Lunar dirt 2. missile battery on Moon, manned, truly ready to launch at a moment's notice 3. hundreds, even thousands -- that can swarm to ensure multiplicity and mass 4. the result: best possible assurance of deflect/destroy for any existential threat
Anything less, or more, is a half solution or placebo fantasy to appease fanboys of exotic and impractical technology.
+THANK YOU, I was just looking for the link to share. The story Manna is must-read.
While we're both here though I would like to say how cool your Google+ login is. It shows up in your post like a bright red beacon. I once even wrote a haiku-poem for Google+ login icons on Slashdot. Take it! It is yours!
Google Plus Login red on a green Slashdot sea setting my soul free
exotic matter how I long to fly with you Google Plus Login
Google Plus Login fancy Google Plus Login Google Plus Login
primitive tribesmen gaze at the little red square dream of things to come
While everyone frets about the possibility that robots might some day behave like people, people are behaving like robots, today.
Transactional systems have rollback logic and procedure. Real Programmers build transactional systems. Otherwise they are just 'lazy automated shortcuts'. When lazy automated shortcuts make corps think they can lay people off, the circle of incompetence is complete.
All I ask is the opportunity to prove to the world once and for all that I am financially irresponsible. While proving that money cannot make me happy.
Sure, back in the days when email clients followed strict protocol, before every JS and php jockey scripted in their favorite arbitrary limitations to front ends, count dots and strike odd characters. The days when adding mailbox+anything@ was guaranteed to deliver to mailbox@...when you were actually encouraged to place a final trailing dot to your email address to subvert delays from the many "try it as a hostname if it's not final-dotted" resolvers that were out there in use, those were hairy. All so people in marketing could email "harry@sales" and it would be delivered internally because it would try sales.thecorp.com.
I tacked the MX record on to the TLD, sent a few emails to myself from several shells and www-email gateways worldwide which delivered successfully... then took it out because we didn't have a business model for it and I didn't want to introduce any bizarre side effects. It was like Internet nerd blueboxing.
Hey wait. This is a tech site. How about leveraged them, or even used them?
Imagine non-tech readers. It's a gimmick to trigger one of those "there oughta be a law" responses. THIS is how we get laws against the sale and possession of radio scanners that can tune in unprotected police communications. And instead of forcing police to upgrade their equipment, they get a bonus opportunity during traffic stops to pretend that their K9s 'signalled' the presence of an illegal scanner. Which in turn, encourages farmers to grow smaller potatoes.
Slashdot Mirror
For purposes of national security the 4th amendment doesn't apply, the bar is 'reasonable suspicion' not 'probable cause'. No warrant is required.
Which is why I didn't mention it right off, though Snowden is quick to argue that point.
But mass storage of communications intercepts without individual reasonable suspicion, whether listened-to or not, may be arguable as a violation of the Fourth Amendment to the Supreme Court should they decide to hear it. It IS a search even if the 'seeing/hearing' is deferred. Under the general theme of unenumerated rights, any action that places the entire population under surveillance indiscriminately cannot argue that any 'reasonable suspicion' justifies it, for it would invariably include all persons worthy and unworthy of suspicion. You'd have to argue that everyone passes the test for suspicion. At that point the pinball machine says TILT and the game is over.
I think the Freedom of Association angle is just as compelling however.
It is hardly a novel perception that compelled disclosure of affiliation with groups engaged in advocacy may constitute as effective a restraint on freedom of association as [affirmative governmental action in other cases.] This Court has recognized the vital relationship between freedom of association and privacy in one's associations. ~Guilt by expressive association: political profiling, surveillance and the privacy of groups, p.636
Mass storage of traffic or communications (and association through metadata not specifically requested by court) is a 'compelled disclosure' to the government. It may be difficult to achieve in practice, but is it too much of a stretch to extend 'houses, papers, and effects' to include verbal or typed communications with others over a network? Think of the archaic meaning and intent here for 'papers'. It has been upheld to include sealed letters in transit and the opening of mail without due process is clearly a 1st amendment violation. This post was a 'letter' from myself to Slashdot, and until it appears on the public page it is a 'paper'.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Says it all, if we have the courage to fight for it.
NSA probably now has access to the direct streams telecoms use to consolidate their billing and geolocatioon data, from taps on the underlying circuits. If it's encrypted then nudge nudge wink wink here's the key. So telecoms no longer need suffer the indignity and PR risk of transmitting the data.
NSA Warrantless Wiretapping is not just an invasion of privacy. They have actually claimed to Congress that they do NOT consider information intercepted and stored indefinitely... to be unlawful at all! Until or unless someone reads it. This subverts Freedom of Association too, since any future tyrant would have access to this cradle-to-grave data of our families and friends and (now! with super-cells!) movements.
To get up to speed quickly this whitepaper by Andrew Clement seems to cover all the bases. Look past the straw man 'Metadata Collection' within it for 'NSA splitter'. Or you might start as I did years ago with James Bamford's fascinating 1982 book Puzzle Palace. While most of it dwells on what is now history and goes on at length about NSA's Charter which explicitly forbid domestic intercepts, there was a single passage in this book that revealed something else. I will quote it because I believe Bamford intended it as a dire warning: "Another indication of NSA's "broadband sweeping of multi-circuited domestic telecommunications trunk lines," David L. Watters told the Senate Intelligence Committee [in 1978!] lies in the Agency's request for an amendment to the wiretap law that would permit NSA to engage in warrantless wiretapping "for the sole purpose of determining the capability of equipment" when such "test period shall be limited... to... ninety days." Continuing, he warned: "Let there be no misunderstanding here. There is only one category of wiretapping equipment or system which requires up to ninety days for test and adjustment, and that system is broadband electronic eavesdropping equipment, the vacuum-cleaner approach to intelligence gathering, the general search of microwave trunk lines. I make this assertion on the strength of actual experience in the electronic intelligence trade and on the strength of over twenty-five years' experience in the telecommunications profession. An ordinary, single-line wire tap requires only five minutes to adjust and test."
Sure this pre-Internet quote discusses microwave, which was the long-line 'broadband' of choice in those days... but NSA's intentions to dig in at places where American citizens speak with each other is clear. Since then, Thomas Drake, Bill Binney and Mark Klein have all come forward alleging domestic surveillance far exceeding 'telephone records'. Klein is of special note, for it is he who revealed the existence of secret Room 641A in the lawsuit Heptig vs AT&T that the Electronic Frontier Foundation took almost to the Supreme Court... who actually declined to hear the case on grounds that the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 protected AT&T from liability for involvement with any illegal activities. Sound normal? This was a law passed after the lawsuit was filed. In response to it, even. Oh.
That should make you a bit angry. We're not talking about telephone records here. We're talking about fiber splitting with drop-in access to the whole slurp. Which also contains voice these days. Any real despot who comes to power will discover that the United States is prepared to deliver real-time private communications and databases of activity for its citizens, cradle to grave, that had been collected with no 'probable cause' whatsoever.
Why the fuck would anyone want to build this thing
Students (and researchers) will finally be able to 1-click their way to success!
And professors (using software instances on the same cloud) will already be using AI grading software that will be fooled by it. It's all reminiscent of this cartoon which is actually a 2009 re-draw of an earlier cartoon by the same artist. It was hilarious until it actually started to happen.
As to the fear-hype about an AI doing something that humans can do just as well (piece together narratives and make things up)? LOL. To sell your startup company to spooky investors on and off the Beltway, nothing boosts your brand like starting some terrifying overblown rumor about your company's technology. The way investors think is, if it's so 'dangerous' in the future the stock will be worth a lot so I'd better get in on the ground floor with the other spooks. And become a rich immoral investor spook.
It's just the beginning. Look out for goofy advertisements that say "A.I. so advanced, to use it we must wear HAZMAT suits!" then you know you will have entered bizzaroland. I saw it all happen before with ads in 70s-80s computer magazines.
repost
My boss slaps a folded-over InfoWorld magazine onto my desk, thick enough to kill a rat with in those days. He says with obvious glee, "How bout dem apples?"
It is Steve Gibson's INFOWORLD column of March 8 and Gibson (with obvious glee) has caught a manufacturer of Hercules graphics cards red-handed. The standard WinBench program had conducted a series of tests --- and in one particular test of text display, in which the phrase "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog's back then sat on a tack" is continuously painted on the screen --- the card performed oddly spectacularly. It was that one score that when combined with the others, ranked the card above the competition. Suspicious, Gibson changed a single letter in the test phrase and the card's score dropped to a reasonable range. The card was apparently recognizing that a test was in progress and 'cheating' by failing to actually over-write this static text repeatedly.
I love the comment by the manufacturer when Gibson contacted them (read it!) but what intrigued the industry the most was that the cheat was not to be found in the Windows driver code, it had been embedded into the firmware of the accelerator chip. In the next Winbench version the test phrase jumped around the lazy screen's back during the test, rendering the cheat obsolete.
Why would a self-driving car company name itself
!! WHAMO !!
?
Being an established computer consultant, I got to provide input when the US Virgin Islands' election system was upgraded, a good friend on the Board of Elections brought over a bunch of brochures for me to review one evening in the early 1980s. There were chad systems ("Punch cards? You must be joking!") and push-button machines ("Where's the paper trail? Do you know what a 'hacker' is?" "It's available but 'costs extra'. Are these people for real??"). And there were optical zoned page scanners.
My friend and I agreed -- his vote on the Board of Elections -- was to keep the paper ballot. People are used to it. If anything, beef up the security and oversight surrounding transport of ballots cast; use bleeding-edge technology cautiously and wisely: do the counting of paper ballots with optical readers. Because just like the money counter machines, you can do it again quickly to see if you get the same result. And if the machines break and the power goes out -- the election process is 'safe', breezes along as smoothly as ever -- only the results are delayed.
Just WHEN was it decided that election results needed to be tallied in hours or minutes? From where did the pressure arise such that hand counting of paper ballots (or in the least, optical scan of same) is too slow? That we instead impose few-vendor centralized no-paper systems that are inherently hackable?
Here's the test I impose. A paper ballot system may also have its problems -- BUT -- any given layman you bring in off the street to observe the tally process will have a clear view of a ballot box's chain of custody. Any layman observing the subsequent counting of those ballots (by hand or optical reader, with verification of random batches to test the reader) has a clear grasp of the process, and can tell whether the system is honest. No one can say if a wholly computerized system is honest. And even if you find someone who claims they are sure, no one can tell whether they are being honest.
If it's Democracy you want, use as simple a voting/tally system as possible; for the tally process use as many human beings as possible, local volunteers as participants and observers. If it's Oligarchy you want, go ahead and totally castrate the process of transparency by implementing insecurity through obscurity, touch screen BS with no hope of verification or recount.
The idea of all-electronic voting really should have been laughed out of the room, once upon a time. This is coming from a techie who favors modernization in other areas of society. xkcd agrees.
My friend on the Board was voted down: they decided to purchase push-button machines from Shouptronics... but at least each station had its own built-in battery backup and built in receipt-type printer that ran a paper tape. Unlike most today.
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From that day long ago when you first heard someone describe their website as an >>>EXPERIENCE<<< ... you know your simple literary text-based past is past. Now it's all about EYEBALLS on the PAGE, and the full extent of what tracking is possible with cookies and cookiecruft in gooblegook URLs that may be embedded levels deep. The HTTP Last-Modified: header is dead, even the ignoble ETAG is fakery-trackery in many cases. Your page has content hidden within it, often built on the fly by JS because the 'experience' requires total compliance and continual browser obsolescence. RSS is just giving it away.
Ironically this comes on the heels of bandwidth and compression techniques that really could have blown us away with triple-to-ten-throughput back in the slow modem and PPP turnaround delay days. I mean, we could have been swimming in text like the Matrix! Instead of the Matrix's goofy nonsense KanjiGreekWhatsits dribbling down from the top of the screen,
IMAGINE a whole generation of children who might have had grown up NOT with the thumb twaddling tile-scrolley Instagram twiddle-screen tiny web page mush and over-resolution JPGs... but with an actual Matrix style of text presentation. They might have learned to read multiple streams in parallel (up/down or lleft/right) with crisp bright text illuminated in the same ANSI color palette that Jesus used.
And when these ANSI text character sprites began to float in a 3D field, now you're talking. Things could recede in Z with axis-flopping ... and the same kids who can solve a Rubik's cube in seconds could keep a mental position within a virtual space, one that would NOT disappear when some WEBFUCK decides it's time for everyone to upgrade ... it would be a style/presentation uniquely their own, that would evolve as an extension of their mind. Instead of this HYPER-LITERATE possible Universe we now have,
Look Ma! It's a rectangle with a talking head! Let's watch it and listen to what it has to say... even though I can read three times as quickly.
AND OF COURSE I'm only generalizing on method when I talk ANSI (though I'm serious about the reduced color palette). By all means make this Matrix-style text sprite environment support Unicode and the world's scripts and symbols. And expandable tiles that represent visual zoomable image and video -- but my rub is those tiles MUST reduce to the size of characters so they join the text stream, not disrupt it. And if you clamor for EMOJIs that's backwards and stupid. Emojis are tools of Big Brother, who's just waiting in the wings for people to express themselves in pictorial symbols so Big Brother can change the symbols overnight.
FYI - I've never met anyone with such detailed opinions about the way pharmacies do business who wasn't also an opiate addict, and I work for a harm reduction clinic. You might want to be careful what you're "putting out there".
Haven't met many people, then? What an ugly comment. So insinuating things about other people is your idea of 'harm reduction'? What is your take on my remark about chocolate milk then? I've been a Systems Analyst and consultant by trade, You're an opiate troll.
Wow, for a moment I thought I was on the Internet Movie DataBase. Do you have an actual f opinion of it or is it just 'bad feels' all the way down?
Uh... did you read the whole thing?
Uh... yes, right down past its Walden Two collectivist ending. Manna is a pretty much a re-telling of Skinner's work, and you should seek out Walden Two and "Uh... read the whole thing." Both are typical of the way socialism is presented as a utopia in the making, in utter disregard to the intermediate steps that break down to chaos and toxic regimes in the real world Manna is a toxic regime imposed on most of the world's population (whose resources are no longer their own) to support a small utopian elite in Australia.
The implication is that the colony in Australia is a model for the rest of the world, but in our actual world it would never end that way with ANY centralized globally system of governance. Manna makes this out to be a friendly computer that knows all, just as BF Skinner imagined a ethereal almost supernatural spirit that led humanity in that direction... but that global computer would (in fact) be re-programmed to sacrifice the needs of many towards the benefit of a few.
(From Manna)
Everyone is equal
Everything is reused
Nothing is anonymous
Nothing is owned
Tell the truth
Do no harm
Obey the rules
Live your life
Better and better
Rules for thee but not for me.
It gets worse than whats-in-inventory. There is a SPECIAL CASE of mechanized disorder regarding items not in inventory. I first experienced this with pharmacies when I had to fill a regular prescription.
I'd show up near the same day of the month like clockwork. Sometimes they'd be able to fill the prescription and sometimes they could not. When they could not I'd head to a competitor and pay a slightly higher price. But I'd always check them first. And sometimes the second store didn't have any either and I had to go to a third place. On the third successive month that I was informed they were out... I held back and watched the clerk who was the head pharmacist and I asked, "Did you write it down?" What do you mean, he said. "The fact that you had to turn away a customer, what the drug is and how many." Oh no, our computer system tells us when we're out and how much to order. "Why isn't it working then? This is the third time I've been turned down." He said, the computer varies the amount we order but it changes from month to month and we have surges of demand and then next month, very little, so we don't order any. "Isn't that strange for prescribed drugs? It means you have no customer loyalty because you turn them away and they stay away. And when someone is told you cannot fill the order, no one writes it down and adds it up. If your computer system doesn't have a way you can record the fact that you turned away a customer, then it is stupider than a human being. Your sales vary because people are being tossed back and forth between pharmacies ny necessity rather then preference. I'll bet your competitors have the same dumb system. If YOU start a log of what customers were turned away for and manually adjust your orders... I'll bet you'd improve your business." It was like a light went on in the attic. They were never short again.
Years later now, many people -- even store managers -- are past the robot stage. I'm one of the only customers that takes managers aside and describes chronic shortages. The answers vary but it's often a shrug of helplessness, especially with computer inventory control and stocking brands like soda and milk. . Chain stores have started to ask customers at checkout, "Did you find everything?" and sometimes they'll become confused if I ask for a slip of paper to write my own note to the manager. Otherwise it falls down the memory hole. I've told managers, "A store without chocolate milk will get walkouts. People will abandon their carts and leave." and the manager was not convinced. "People cannot get full size chocolate milk in convenience stores at a decent price. They have to go to another grocery store anyway, they don't want to wait in two lines, so they'll just leave. Asking at checkout if they found everything isn't enough. How many people leave empty handed?" Hmmm....
Manna by Marshal Brain
Of all the dystopian fiction I have read, THIS story -- though there's no war or zombies in it -- is the most terrifying. Every other dark future has its struggles to survive and challenges to solve. But this story offers no hope at all. It leads past the movie Idiocracy, but not that one, an alternate Idiocracy future where energy drink Brawndo will forever water the crops.
June 25 2018: The Intercept draws attention to buildings they allege contain NSA splitter-taps taps on communications networks, and especial cooperation by AT&T.
June 28 2018: NSA jumps the shark releasing 'limited hang out' claiming they oopsied 685 million 'records' and are deleting them like good Boy Scouts.
The records are supposed to gather attention away from the buildings and the idea of full intercept of gathering of communications. It's a shell game, and you're supposed to think "they were naughty but are sorry and they took care of it." Watch now as the 685 million records eclipse the prior story and the news networks start talking about 'records' and not 'taps'. Mission accomplished.
Senators do this too. Ask them a question about buildings or taps, or the infrastructure for continuous warrantless surveillance, and they'll pretend you asked them about that handy voluntary call record sharing program. Press firmly and they'll do it again. Press harder and they move on to the next question.
More,
>Reddit post on 5EYES and NSA splitters
> Things have got to change, But first, you gotta get mad!
> NSA and the Desolation of Smaug
> I am Sam. Uncle Sam I am.
> I really hated Men In Black
> Am I the first to suggest... BLACKMAIL??
> Sherlock Holmes: training wheels for NSA surveillance
> Stick a fork in the Republic, it's done. HR4681/309 (failed submission)
> The backbone, then (1980s) and now
> Whatever happened to the 'old' NSA? Directive 18?
> Last Wish: The Pact (dystopian fiction)
(if you have a Reddit account and you've disabled 'new' Reddit you'll have to open a private window for these links)
PEAK SCREEN . At my aspect, ~6+ articles per screen. 583 words on screen. Scroll to bottom then click, ensuring you can backtrack a page at a time. Small static memory footprint.
SUCK SCREEN ~2.5 articles per screen. 203 words on screen. Browser crashin' JS stuttering Infinite scroll thumb-stroking smartphone masturbation.
Screens are doing just fine. Designers are deep-throating smartphones.
Meet Me at Your Riser [2013] is a purely aesthetic Phillip Glassy video presentation by Deborah Natsios, who with John Young runs the successful CRYPTOME.ORG website.
The insinuation is, the practice is not relegated to willing participants such as AT&T, it may well include other carriers whose fiber has been secretly split in the 'telecom risers' that ascend throughout the building. Are Young/Natsios insinuating this from theory or an anonymous tip? You may as well ask how licks to the center of a Tootsie Pop.
CRYPTOME.ORG is a spooky and funny place... since 1996 it has provided a continuous stream of articles, whistle-blows and odd bits for the intelligence community, even serving as a pre-Wikileaks leaks site. Its regular visitors most surely include spooks of the world, that is, the 'top brass' that are not terrified of surfing into things beyond their own cubicle secrecy level. John Young has managed to maintain a playful counterpoint to the stern countenance (serious face) of the State intelligence profession and tugs on the community and keeps them coming back for more, or so he says, looking at his logs. He doxxed them before 'dox' was a word, blew the cover on deep state telecom interception and NSA Charter violations (no one listened of course) and has embarked on other projects as amateur sleuth. His post-9/11 Ground Zero photo collection is hi res and second to none.
Over the years he has dropped interesting tidbits with 'A Sends...' (Anonymous)... his PGP key is ludicrously long... and some of the tips appearing on his site have had the stamp of foreign state actors. Of course he posts it without personal bias and you can bet some true limited hangouts and pissing contests have been published on Cryptome to get them 'out there'. For $100 he offers the entire collection of hosted files to date. A great gift for Santa Spook.
Callback to a recent posting on 5EYES that references this topic. I'm lukewarm about this 'exposé', they're presenting a number of buildings that are communications exchanges and dubbing them NSA buildings. Weatherproof climate controlled spaces are not spooky. This is ripe for debunking as anyone counters with their primary uses, and this issue is too critical to have agitated people harassing anyone who enters and exits the buildings as spooks. We now have two full generations of young who were not exposed to telecommunications lore. The latest generation, scarcely even landlines.
The dangerous technology is scattered throughout as splitter cabinets and the occasional server room. And 'dark' fiber of course, to carry the booty to Utah.
Other writing you might not enjoy,
> Things have got to change, But first, you gotta get mad!
> NSA and the Desolation of Smaug
> I am Sam. Uncle Sam I am.
> I really hated Men In Black
> Am I the first to suggest... BLACKMAIL??
> Sherlock Holmes: training wheels for NSA surveillance
> Stick a fork in the Republic, it's done. HR4681/309 (failed submission)
> The backbone, then (1980s) and now
> Whatever happened to the 'old' NSA? Directive 18?
> Last Wish: The Pact (dystopian fiction)
What a rude little reply. I assume you're talking about 'threats' to Earth from such missiles while the threat from asteroids is... God's will? I'll put more effort into mine than you did, just quote a relevant bit from my letter,
It is time for a global showdown between two major personality types of our time: those who are prepared to act quickly and decisively to mitigate this existential risk, and those who will oppose on many fronts... and it will be a showdown, for the opposition will attempt to 'quantify' the existential threat to a level where it could be passed over for this and the next generation, as has already happened, or dismissed altogether. They will call this 'logic, statistics and science' though it is none of those.
It is a mental disorder.
Great oratory is called for, stern resolve also.
People who think they have plenty of time find it easy to propose or oppose anything, and language is rich with rhetoric of delay. Deficits grow less than we had feared, progress is made on countless fronts, we are closer now than ever before, love is just around the corner. In our developed world there are as many people able to survive by talking about things as those doing things. To the modern civilized mind global cataclysm is safely ensconced in speculation, early history, sacred text and cinema. Liberal arts education focuses deeply on the 'tabloid disasters' of history, strictly human atrocities that we and our neighbors would never repeat. It's someone else's job to think about such things, even if no one does. Easy to assume we are in the middle-weave of some tapestry between a dim beginning and distant end.
Expect opposition to the idea that erstwhile enemies, even bitter enemies, should all come together to assemble a collective weapons platform that could -- through some mishap or menace -- send kinetic weapons down to places on Earth. A humorous cosmic irony, the ultimate Prisoner's Dilemma, that a whole species would knowingly seal its doom with its failure to trust one another as individuals.
There is NO way to debate this to any unified consensus in the end. Despite the greatest tenets of all world faiths... the human race is experiencing technical difficulties, please stand by. The language of distrust and paranoia has become far more subtle and intricate, more lucrative, more fun, than the language of trust and action.
It is my conviction then, that there can be no round table with talking sticks and common vote. One of the remaining superpowers must step forward to announce that it is committed to resolving this 'existential threat' for all of humanity... to begin immediately without debate. It shall be conducted transparently with assurance that others who come to agree such action is necessary, may join the effort.
That is where America comes in.
Apollo, showing that we could land on the Moon, was the first step.
Artemis, goddess of the hunt, is next. Let us hunt space rocks.
It is nice to see that the Obama-era plan has been fleshed out and in the current plan the real rubber-hits-the-road moment is,
3.4 Identify, assess the readiness of, estimate in the costs of, and propose development paths for key technologies required by NEO impact prevention concepts. This assessment should include the most mature in-space concepts --- kinetic impactors, nuclear devices, and gravity tractors for deflection, and nuclear devices for disruption -- as well as less mature NEO impact prevention methods. Technology assessments should consider contemporary work, including potential synergies with relevant private industry interests (e.g., asteroid mining). They should also consider NEO impact scenarios that may have received insufficient attention thus far (e.g., binary asteroids, high-speed comets). [Short term; NASA, NNSA, DoD]
Asteroid interception is where the goofiest ideas emerge to monopolize discussion and take debate away from practical ideas that would give us a chance of survival in all cases. When you interrupt geeks talking about their favorite solution, something like deploying solar sails to nudge asteroids, to point out their scenario is for an extremely narrow case and it would be irresponsible to pursue such an idea to the exclusion of more practical ones... they get all butthurt.
My own solution which I've broadcast to Trump and two NASA directors and others, is simple and direct. No nukes or exotic technology.
1. kinetic impactor rockets loaded with payloads of simple Lunar dirt
2. missile battery on Moon, manned, truly ready to launch at a moment's notice
3. hundreds, even thousands -- that can swarm to ensure multiplicity and mass
4. the result: best possible assurance of deflect/destroy for any existential threat
Anything less, or more, is a half solution or placebo fantasy to appease fanboys of exotic and impractical technology.
+THANK YOU, I was just looking for the link to share. The story Manna is must-read.
While we're both here though I would like to say how cool your Google+ login is. It shows up in your post like a bright red beacon. I once even wrote a haiku-poem for Google+ login icons on Slashdot. Take it! It is yours!
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setting my soul free
exotic matter
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primitive tribesmen
gaze at the little red square
dream of things to come
While everyone frets about the possibility that robots might some day behave like people, people are behaving like robots, today.
Transactional systems have rollback logic and procedure. Real Programmers build transactional systems. Otherwise they are just 'lazy automated shortcuts'. When lazy automated shortcuts make corps think they can lay people off, the circle of incompetence is complete.
Kinda reminds me of the time I went all apeshit about a company named 'HireVue'. Hint: outsource your hiring interviews to a compoooo-ter! The cloud is my master! I've been chosen!
All I ask is the opportunity to prove to the world once and for all that I am financially irresponsible. While proving that money cannot make me happy.
I@VI
Put an MX record on a TLD?
Sure, back in the days when email clients followed strict protocol, before every JS and php jockey scripted in their favorite arbitrary limitations to front ends, count dots and strike odd characters. The days when adding mailbox+anything@ was guaranteed to deliver to mailbox@ ...when you were actually encouraged to place a final trailing dot to your email address to subvert delays from the many "try it as a hostname if it's not final-dotted" resolvers that were out there in use, those were hairy. All so people in marketing could email "harry@sales" and it would be delivered internally because it would try sales.thecorp.com.
I tacked the MX record on to the TLD, sent a few emails to myself from several shells and www-email gateways worldwide which delivered successfully... then took it out because we didn't have a business model for it and I didn't want to introduce any bizarre side effects. It was like Internet nerd blueboxing.
[TFA] security researcher has abused them
Hey wait. This is a tech site.
How about leveraged them, or even used them?
Imagine non-tech readers. It's a gimmick to trigger one of those "there oughta be a law" responses. THIS is how we get laws against the sale and possession of radio scanners that can tune in unprotected police communications. And instead of forcing police to upgrade their equipment, they get a bonus opportunity during traffic stops to pretend that their K9s 'signalled' the presence of an illegal scanner. Which in turn, encourages farmers to grow smaller potatoes.
I'm too ugly for even one camera, let alone three.
My friends chipped in to get me a basic phone.
Now I don't have to look at them either.