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Former NSA chief Keith Alexander has joined Amazon’s board of directors

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Re: Former NSA chief Keith Alexander has joined Amazon’s board of directors

#441

Post by phobosanomaly »

deathgrips wrote: post #416
srean wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How hard was it to get that room at AT&T with or without "court order" that you speak about. Do you consider secret courts to be in scope of this discussion. Then there is this That and this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposition_Matrix

No court order was necessary because AT&T consented to the NSA presence. Just like how your employer can hand over your corporate laptop to the police without needing a warrant. If you don't like it, consider dealing with another business and encrypting your traffic with a full tunnel VPN. Yes. Secret courts are reasonable due process. Do you have an alternative method that wouldn't release damaging information? Are…

> Do you have an alternative method that wouldn't release damaging information?

Yes, independent review by a board or committee separate from the defense intelligence complex who will help determine if the information is actually damaging or if it's just some bullshit a midlevel staffer at the Pentagon determined is 'damaging.'

As an American, I am deeply disturbed by the complete absence of transparency of these programs to Congress and the American people. And honestly I'm not convinced that the people running these programs have any ability to see the forest for the trees, or if they're not just some D.C. automaton skilled enough at groupthink and not asking questions to get the tippity-top security clearance.

Is it a drooling idiot running the program? Dunno. Classified.

Re: Former NSA chief Keith Alexander has joined Amazon’s board of directors

#442

Post by deathgrips »

soraminazuki wrote: post #430
deathgrips wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because if that information were released it would cause significant damage to the country. Why on earth is my company's TLS private key kept a secret from all the employees?

> Why on earth is my company's TLS private key kept a secret from all the employees? A far more adequate analogy would be a company spying on all of its customers and employees, and then lie when asked about it.

Companies regularly monitor employee activities on corporate networks and computers. They have a responsibility to make sure employees aren't using the company's assets to break the law, steal corporate information, leak private information, or irresponsibly download and run malware. If you tell employees exactly what the company is monitoring and the exact methods they use to monitor activity, the monitoring becomes useless because people will subvert it.

Re: Former NSA chief Keith Alexander has joined Amazon’s board of directors

#443

Post by deathgrips »

phobosanomaly wrote: post #440
deathgrips wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

America won't arrest you on your vacation here just because you criticized the country on social media. I'd take American hegemony over Chinese hegemony any day of the week.

US did more or less drone-strike this American and his 16 year-old son for criticizing the county on social media. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anwar_al-Awlaki The difference between 'recruiter' and a guy who sent some emails to some people is unfortunately a distinction that is up to some dweeb with more top-secret security clearances than medals on a North Korean general. I assume it's the same thing in China, the…

No...

>"According to U.S. government officials, as well as being a senior recruiter and motivator, he was centrally involved in planning terrorist operations for the Islamist militant group al-Qaeda"

We are better off with him dead. He was American, but his allegiance was to al Qaeda and he was planning to murder civilians.

Re: Former NSA chief Keith Alexander has joined Amazon’s board of directors

#444

Post by deathgrips »

srean wrote: post #433
deathgrips wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No court order was necessary because AT&T consented to the NSA presence. Just like how your employer can hand over your corporate laptop to the police without needing a warrant. If you don't like it, consider dealing with another business and encrypting your traffic with a full tunnel VPN. Yes. Secret courts are reasonable due process. Do you have an alternative method that wouldn't release damaging information? Are…

So you agree that court orders are not that fancy a deterrent that you made it out to be. You said > If they wanted to intentionally examine your network traffic, that would require a court order. I just gave you an example when that did not matter. > Are you interested in talking about surveillance specifically or every talking point of the usual anti-American tirades? Whenever you are willing to have an honest disc…

They don't need a court order to sniff packets and do bulk collection. All that data goes into huge data centers. If they want to query that collected data for an American's information, they get a warrant. No human looks at an American's data before getting a warrant. You'd do well to familiarize yourself with their process, which is highly publicized.

Re: Former NSA chief Keith Alexander has joined Amazon’s board of directors

#445

Post by deathgrips »

phobosanomaly wrote: post #441
deathgrips wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No court order was necessary because AT&T consented to the NSA presence. Just like how your employer can hand over your corporate laptop to the police without needing a warrant. If you don't like it, consider dealing with another business and encrypting your traffic with a full tunnel VPN. Yes. Secret courts are reasonable due process. Do you have an alternative method that wouldn't release damaging information? Are…

> Do you have an alternative method that wouldn't release damaging information? Yes, independent review by a board or committee separate from the defense intelligence complex who will help determine if the information is actually damaging or if it's just some bullshit a midlevel staffer at the Pentagon determined is 'damaging.' As an American, I am deeply disturbed by the complete absence of transparency of these pro…

>independent review by board or committee

Their spying on Americans is reviewed by judges and courts. They get warrants for every american they spy on.

The senate intelligence committee may (behind closed doors and under the oath of secrecy) inquire about just about anything the intelligence community does.

The president may at his or her sole discretion declassify any information.

Haven't you heard, the first rule of conflict is "all warfare is deception"? Try running a state with zero secrets and see how far you get.

Re: Former NSA chief Keith Alexander has joined Amazon’s board of directors

#446

Post by deathgrips »

srean wrote: post #434
deathgrips wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you find a way for a country to exist with 0 enemies, please let us all know.

Don't change goal posts now. I responded to your claim > I'm very sure that you're wrong. Do you have any evidence that the NSA kidnaps and tortures people? that NSA can get people tortured or killed without much difficulty.

Do you think the NSA gives the orders on who to kill and who to kidnap?

Re: Former NSA chief Keith Alexander has joined Amazon’s board of directors

#447

Post by nix23 »

phist_mcgee wrote: post #303
nicoburns wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a developer I completely agree. I have some knowledge of system administration, but I much prefer with dedicated professional where possible. It's partly just a different set of expertise, but I think it's partly also why it's best to have dedicated people doing QA work. The attitude required to do the work is completely different to dev work, and it's hard for one person to wear both hats.

Seconded. A sysadmin dedicates their professional life to deeply understanding systems, networks, and their interconnection. I am lucky if I can keep up with changes to my languages and frameworks as a programmer! Thank goodness there are sysadmins out there who can help us poor programmers out when our relatively basic understanding knowledge of linux fails us.

>Thank goodness there are sysadmins out there who can help us poor programmers out when our relatively basic understanding knowledge of linux fails us

Sometimes, and sometimes we have to ask the developer of that exact OS-subsystem/driver/firmware(AARGH!!) because it fails us too...and here we have a closed circle ;)

Re: Former NSA chief Keith Alexander has joined Amazon’s board of directors

#448

Post by deathgrips »

boomboomsubban wrote: post #426
deathgrips wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you just have the word of one activist? Sorry, that's not enough evidence for me to believe it. If the NSA wanted to unlock a random journalist's phone, they would be able to hack it.

>Do you have any evidence...? It also links to another similar account a few days before that. And why would Egyptian activists make that up? Plus, even if the NSA isn't regularly doing the kidnapping, torture, and killing themselves, they certainly help our other organizations do these things. Things like the disposition matrix, black sites, and locally with parallel construction all rely on their surveillance.

How did she know he worked for NSA? Did she have any way to verify he was an American or worked for the NSA? Do you think the NSA hires people who specialize in HUMINT? Why would he tell her he works for the NSA?

Too many unanswered questions. It's more likely she made it up because it gets people angry and that's what activists need to do.

If you have problems with other parts of our government, by all means criticize them and be an activist. Speak your mind and vote. Making up stuff about the NSA is intellectually lazy.

Re: Former NSA chief Keith Alexander has joined Amazon’s board of directors

#449

Post by srean »

deathgrips wrote: post #446
srean wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't change goal posts now. I responded to your claim > I'm very sure that you're wrong. Do you have any evidence that the NSA kidnaps and tortures people? that NSA can get people tortured or killed without much difficulty.

Do you think the NSA gives the orders on who to kill and who to kidnap?

"Order" not sure, "recommendations" very conceivable. Anyway the issue is not NSA issue is the freedoms and protections offered by the country. If NSA doesnt but CIA does, its not any better.

You started with the claim that unlike China an US citizen is unlikely to get his/her privacy encroached on quoting all sorts of processes. I just gave examples where these processes didnt do much in preventing breaches of such encroachments. Add to that what we know is just a clouded view into the tip of the iceberg because of provisions of secrecy. If the clouded tip of the iceberg looks the way it does, it is not hard for someone not so deluded, or not so deprived of a full deck, to fill in what the rest of the iceberg could look like.

Re: Former NSA chief Keith Alexander has joined Amazon’s board of directors

#450

Post by freeflight »

deathgrips wrote: post #135
Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>figure from the NSA who illegally spied on Americans I like the way you included just 'Americans', may be because it's just the domestic spying which is against U.S. law, may be because you thought 'spied on Americans' hits harder for an American reader than just 'spied on everyone'. But, for someone outside USA or China; there's absolutely no difference between U.S. tech or Chinese Tech w.r.t Privacy, what U.S. doe…

America won't arrest you on your vacation here just because you criticized the country on social media. I'd take American hegemony over Chinese hegemony any day of the week.

> America won't arrest you on your vacation here just because you criticized the country on social media.

America won't even let you enter the country if you, or somebody on your feeds, criticized it on social media [0]

People who are too vocal in their opposition to the US government, or just been in the wrong places at the wrong times, have been plenty known to be abducted into torture black sites [1], if not straight up killed by a drone strike because literal SKYNET [2] interpreted their meta-data [3] as that of a terrorist.

And none of that is even accounting for the reality that the US has the highest incarceration rate on the planet, so if there's a place you will most likely be arrested during your vacation, then that's gonna be the US.

But I guess it's easy to forget about these parts of US hegemony while pointing at China over "social credit scores" putting people on no-fly lists.

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/27/border-deny-entry-united-s...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_rendition

[2] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/02/the-n...

[3] https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2014/05/10/we-kill-people-base...

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