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How Mark Klein told the EFF about Room 641A [book excerpt]

thereader.mitpress.mit.edu

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Re: How Mark Klein told the EFF about Room 641A [book excerpt]

#131

Post by dylan604 »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #90
dijit wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a moral psychological quandary: quit and hope everyone shares your moral compass. (hint: they don’t). Or work to pressure change internally, and occupy space that might have gone to a more morally flexible person if it was made vacant; but while doing so engage in supporting immoral behaviour.

Neither work without organizing. You cannot apply any meaningful pressure from the inside as an individual worker. You also do not need to work someplace to organize it.

If you work outside of the organization and compel someone to act on your behalf, you will be charged with that. It's how journalists have been tripped up in the past. If someone leaks to a journo, the journo is not part of the leak. If the journo asks someone to get data to be leaked to them, they've overstepped and get into trouble. That's something to not be forgotten.

From the inside, talking to coworkers definitely seems risky. If they are not like minded, they could report you. It'd have been better to just have quit at that point.

Because of all of that, "ethical" leaking really does seem like the only option left. It's then a matter of can the leaker live with the consequences.

Re: How Mark Klein told the EFF about Room 641A [book excerpt]

#132

Post by Fnoord »

ACCount37 wrote: post #99
anonymousiam wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not proud of it at all. The revelation was startling to me, and I was pretty unhappy about it. It was done in the name of "stopping bad people from doing bad things", but it was still illegal (at least in the white world). Snowden had the same dilemma. He was asking the NSA lawyers about the legality of their programs, and he never got an honest answer. Quitting would not have stopped the activity, and disclosing…

The "ends justify the means" mentality in various government security agencies is very, very real.

Not just for government security agencies, and not just in USA. Police generally fall for it as well.

Re: How Mark Klein told the EFF about Room 641A [book excerpt]

#133

Post by autoexec »

hungryhobbit wrote: post #106

Isn't AI both the problem ... AND the solution here? True, you can't publish a book anonymously anymore: that ship seems to have sailed. But if you want to publish a political piece or anything else potentially "substantive", can't you just ask AI to rewrite it for you? Instant anonymization!

AI doesn't seem like it'd be much help at all.

Unless the AI is 100% offline and locally hosted there's a record there. Also generating text isn't really the hard part of being anonymous. You also have publish it somewhere, and somewhere it will be seen, and that also means a trail back to you.

Most of the time the information you have to share, especially anything verifiable, will be traceable back to you. That's the problem with knowing something very few people have the access to know. Anyone who does know will be one of a very small number of people.

If what you're telling the public isn't at least somewhat verifiable you're just another anonymous/random person spewing unconfirmable conspiracies and you should expect to be treated that way. No respectable publisher is going to print crazy unsourced manuscripts filled with unverifiable claims. The internet is already filled with people doing that who rightly get ignored making that a very crowded space. The ability for AI to push out massive amounts of unconfirmable conspiracies at rates that were previously difficult to achieve is only going to make the problem worse.

Re: How Mark Klein told the EFF about Room 641A [book excerpt]

#134

Post by jijji »

anonymousiam wrote: post #66

"One big change impacting surveillance was clear: Prior to September 11, the U.S. had what could reasonably be called a “wall” separating foreign surveillance for national security purposes done by the NSA from domestic surveillance for law enforcement purposes done by the FBI." It turns out that the above statement is not entirely correct. I was aware of this rule at the time (early 90's), and was very surprised to…

in 2002 I worked at an AT&T major datacenter and watched the NSA install all the black boxes in every rack, complete with a black curtain and armed guards while they did the project (St Louis). Before that it was still going on, it just wasnt so embedded like they did in 2002.

Re: How Mark Klein told the EFF about Room 641A [book excerpt]

#135

Post by firebot »

esafak wrote: post #104
firebot wrote: post #13

Kevin Mitnick also discovered this.. ages ago.

Source?

Hackers 2: operation takedown is based on a true story.

https://www.cybereason.com/blog/malicious-life-podcast-kevin...

> his brother introduced him to a hacker named Eric Heinz, who told him about a mysterious piece of equipment he came across while breaking into Pacific Bell: SAS, a testing system that allowed its user to listen in on all the calls going through the telephone network. SAS proved to be too great of a temptation for Mitnick, who desperately wanted to wield the power that the testing system could afford him.

Then of course other people started finding similar black boxes at other telecoms and data centers.

Ghosts in the wire (his book) mainly focuses on the FBI using the system for wiretaps. And if they can, I'm sure the NSA could just as easily.

Re: How Mark Klein told the EFF about Room 641A [book excerpt]

#136

Post by badlibrarian »

ShroudedNight wrote: post #128
dr_dshiv wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that… what?? Is this technical innuendo?

I assume the implication was an intercept facility.

I think it was 600 W 7 St. A quick Google of NSA tap plus that address turns up serious press reports from 7 or 8 years ago. It was clearly put up in a hurry. But I can't imagine I was the only one who noticed. I was just some dumbass serving a music site and it was totally obvious something was up.

Re: How Mark Klein told the EFF about Room 641A [book excerpt]

#137

Post by Der_Einzige »

mrandish wrote: post #105
throwworhtthrow wrote: post #2

Beware, this is a book excerpt rather than a standalone blog post, so it ends on a cliffhanger. Still a fun read.

Hopefully, this comes as no more of a spoiler than revealing the Titanic sinks at the end of the movie... but, everything Mark Klein revealed in 2006 (and that Snowden revealed in 2014) is still happening daily - along with much, much worse. And just this week congress is acting to further extend the secret extra-expanded FISA powers we don't even know about. U.S. Senator Ron Wyden is on the Senate Intelligence Commi…

Ron Wyden is my favorite senator and a great example of why Oregon is such a based/amazing state.

Re: How Mark Klein told the EFF about Room 641A [book excerpt]

#138

Post by galangalalgol »

dylan604 wrote: post #84
anonymousiam wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not proud of it at all. The revelation was startling to me, and I was pretty unhappy about it. It was done in the name of "stopping bad people from doing bad things", but it was still illegal (at least in the white world). Snowden had the same dilemma. He was asking the NSA lawyers about the legality of their programs, and he never got an honest answer. Quitting would not have stopped the activity, and disclosing…

Quitting would just be the first step in "I do not want to participate in this". Whistle blowing is much more complicated in that you are hoping to not just not be participating but maybe stopping it altogether. Being young and single compared to being older with dependents would absolutely make that decision harder. Violating secrecy laws to disclose illegal activity seems like something that should have a caveat to…

Actually they do. The law states that not only is it illegal to classify stuff to hide illegal activity, things classified that way are not actually classified. The whistleblower before Manning was very careful about what they leaked, and apparently went through the right chains. He was found guilty of misusing government property and given a slap on the wrist... And blackballed from working anywhere they had reach. But the law itself upheld that what he leaked was not classified.

Re: How Mark Klein told the EFF about Room 641A [book excerpt]

#139

Post by ProllyInfamous »

badlibrarian wrote: post #123

I suppose this is as good a place as any to dump this. In 2002, I was hosting a 1U server in downtown Los Angeles. No cages, minimal security, pretty sure I just walked in. Crash carts sat unattended, usually a screen filled with porn and a cable running on the floor to the nearest tap. I got the feeling that many of the techs were hosting porn sites as a side gig. On my second visit, in plain sight, was new construc…

>fiber bundles going in and out

I worked data centers for my IBEW apprenticeships — during Snowden revelations — and it was definitely "confusing" knowing that all the technology they said didn't exist existed. "Black, LLC" didn't officially exist/make connections among our clientele.

Unless you were actively vandalizing our public infrastructure, I never questioned anybody's presence/activities on our datafloors.

Probably security is tons better now, but the social entries are still most-commonable.

Re: How Mark Klein told the EFF about Room 641A [book excerpt]

#140

Post by firebot »

esafak wrote: post #104
firebot wrote: post #13

Kevin Mitnick also discovered this.. ages ago.

Source?

Also it's important to know that it was a private company 'technically' doing it.

Like they still do (just buy the data instead of getting warrants for them.)

Apparently, if the government did this directly that would be a breach of our constitutional rights and blah blah blah blah. But if a private company does it's fine (there's probably something in the terms of service or license agreement waiving your rights) this and then they go buy that data from the private company and that's apparently okay.

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