61–70 of 180 posts
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We didn't know but it wasn't paranoid to assume it. The reason was the Echelon leaks and what was done about those. The answer: nothing.
It wasn't paranoid in crypto-knowledgable circles. It earned you a tinfoil hat outside of them. That's why Snowden was important.
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> I heard about those taps in 2008/2009 Back then the excuse was that they were only being used to collect foreign traffic. Snowden revealed their loose interpretation of "foreign" and many more domestic activities happening outside of AT&T NOCs. Foreigners' rights aren't protected by the constitution. Citizens' are and now we have legal standing to force the government to respect the law which we didn't have before…
It was fairly widely known in the network engineering community in 2003/2004 that the "Echelon" system collected an extensive amount of domestic data for each of the five eyes, using legal dodges where a foreign agency (like GCHQ) would siphon american/canadian data and feed it to the NSA and CSE, and vice versa. Those who knew how much the system had changed from satellite-intelligence gathering (from the era prior…
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"Without Stallman's foresight of the need for public domain open source software, there would only be proprietary software, all subject to PRISM." Or proprietary, shared-source software provided by nonprofits or companies in jurisdictions that aren't surveillance heavy. No, you don't need FOSS to avoid PRISM lol. It has its advantages in resisting totalitarianism for sure but you don't actually need them. More of aut…
There was a cultural change when Bell was broken up and UNIX became less laissez-faire, a paradigm shift. Software became valuable and not just bundled with hardware. Stallman saw it coming early enough that he had completed his GNU Free toolchain in time for Torvalds to use it. A developer community is less likely to arise when your modifications can be closed and you cannot fork. If your business runs in someone el…
We're still waiting on FOSS model to do that. Nobody has. Fortunately, the cathedral builders in industry and good CompSci are sometimes open-sourcing stuff after the fact. RISC-V, GenodeOS, seL4, NaCl, etc.
"police and the government then have the authority to search through your entire life in your pocket just because you are pulled over for a broken taillight" This is the classic Snowden formula. Establish a false premise that has no faith in the government or constitutional rights, then continue to paint a picture of a dystopian future. This guy should be writing sci-fi novels... [edit: I predicted at least 5 down vo…
Why do you think 'faith' is required in a logical argument?
What future?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was fairly widely known in the network engineering community in 2003/2004 that the "Echelon" system collected an extensive amount of domestic data for each of the five eyes, using legal dodges where a foreign agency (like GCHQ) would siphon american/canadian data and feed it to the NSA and CSE, and vice versa. Those who knew how much the system had changed from satellite-intelligence gathering (from the era prior…
Echelon was never publicly acknowledged. Carnivore was explained as only targeted at suspected criminals under investigation. Snowden's revelations were the first hard , undeniable facts in the matter showing the true scope of the unconstitutional activity.
https://fcw.com/articles/1999/06/02/congress-nsa-butt-heads-...
Anyway, it was all over US media from 1999-2001 plus European Parliament with plenty testimony and recommendations. And again, the link encryption recommendation was in US security requirements anyway.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I heard about those taps in 2008/2009 Back then the excuse was that they were only being used to collect foreign traffic. Snowden revealed their loose interpretation of "foreign" and many more domestic activities happening outside of AT&T NOCs. Foreigners' rights aren't protected by the constitution. Citizens' are and now we have legal standing to force the government to respect the law which we didn't have before…
It was fairly widely known in the network engineering community in 2003/2004 that the "Echelon" system collected an extensive amount of domestic data for each of the five eyes, using legal dodges where a foreign agency (like GCHQ) would siphon american/canadian data and feed it to the NSA and CSE, and vice versa. Those who knew how much the system had changed from satellite-intelligence gathering (from the era prior…
> But at the same time, we technologists as a class knew academically that these capabilities could be abused, but nobody actually believed they would be abused. Because why would you do that? It seemed so antisocial as a basic concept. I guess so? Not me though. Snowden literally only proved what I had learned on my own. > But we were confronted with documented evidence in 2013 that even what most people would consi…
You knew GCHQ tapped Google's datacenter-to-datacenter links?
> But at the same time, we technologists as a class knew academically that these capabilities could be abused, but nobody actually believed they would be abused. Because why would you do that? It seemed so antisocial as a basic concept. I guess so? Not me though. Snowden literally only proved what I had learned on my own. > But we were confronted with documented evidence in 2013 that even what most people would consi…
> Um. Who thought this? Ever? Since the 90s.
To be clear this meant who thought we had "a fairly forthright upstanding government [not] abusing these capabilities in the most indiscriminate way" ever since the 90s.
The EFF warned long ago something was going on when AT&T was putting beam splitters on Internet backbones to feed the NSA. Then Snowden revealed how everything is tapped. Then, be sure all mainstream encryption is "NOBUS". Nothing is truly random. Someone somewhere has the master key: elliptic curve cryptography using magic numbers from NIST? "Secure boot" by Intel? OpenSSL? Microsoft software? All backdoored. Trust…
I heard about those taps in 2008/2009 I think. Snowden hasn't really given us anything truly new. It's also bizarre how quickly everything he presented was/is accepted as fact immediately without question. I think it's way more likely Snowden was intentional. He's still working for the Federal government and the leaks are intentional so that the Federal Government could announce to the world that they are spying on a…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I heard about those taps in 2008/2009 I think. Snowden hasn't really given us anything truly new. It's also bizarre how quickly everything he presented was/is accepted as fact immediately without question. I think it's way more likely Snowden was intentional. He's still working for the Federal government and the leaks are intentional so that the Federal Government could announce to the world that they are spying on a…
I hope you're being satirical. This is such a classic formulation of a conspiracy theory that I hope it's intentional. If so, bravo! If not, then like all conspiracy theories you need to account for everyone who would need to be in on the secret, how they're all keeping the secret, and why--what's in it for them.