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Room 641A

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Re: Room 641A

#51

Post by twoodfin »

kulahan wrote: post #46
margalabargala wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, so we would expect the magnitude of the changes from 9/11 to be about 1/14th the magnitude of the changes we do to prevent car deaths.

Maybe if you have zero understanding of things like emotion and humanity, and also cannot tell the difference between an accident and a mass murder . Otherwise, this is surface-level insanity.

hn comment threads on most articles have rapidly taken on the character of Reddit threads ca. 2009. This argument in particular was a classic back then.

I’ve started downvoting inanity and flagging one-liner, content-less snark, but unless the mods get serious on stuff that hits the front page, I don’t see that trajectory changing.

Re: Room 641A

#52

Post by monocasa »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #6
smalltorch wrote: post #2

Hi NSA. I don't envy the NSA position. I mean honestly it seems like an impossible task to sniff all the packets and find anything useful. A mission to secure the people whilst not infringing personal rights in today's world is a really really hard problem.

They don't sniff all the packets to find anything useful. Snowden showed that they intercept certain packets flowing between particular sources and destinations that might contain useful information. In Snowden's leaks, one such application was email inbox backup transfers for big Internet companies that did not (at that time) encrypt their WAN traffic, from which they mined the sender and recipient to build a social…

> They don't sniff all the packets to find anything useful. Snowden showed that they intercept certain packets flowing between particular sources and destinations that might contain useful information

Their legal argument was that it was actually ok for them to grab and store all packets, and that it wasn't a search until they ran an actual search that matched against that stored traffic.

> In Snowden's leaks, one such application was email inbox backup transfers for big Internet companies that did not (at that time) encrypt their WAN traffic, from which they mined the sender and recipient to build a social graph, a program that the leaks said had already been shut down.

That was private fiber they had spliced into, not anything routed across public Internet. That's why the DCs weren't encrypting it to begin with.

Re: Room 641A

#53

Post by wat10000 »

smalltorch wrote: post #2

Hi NSA. I don't envy the NSA position. I mean honestly it seems like an impossible task to sniff all the packets and find anything useful. A mission to secure the people whilst not infringing personal rights in today's world is a really really hard problem.

It’s a position they chose. They could say, mass surveillance is unconstitutional and wrong, but we’d be happy to continue with our mission of targeted intercepts and providing secure communication to our people.

Re: Room 641A

#54

Post by margalabargala »

kulahan wrote: post #46
margalabargala wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, so we would expect the magnitude of the changes from 9/11 to be about 1/14th the magnitude of the changes we do to prevent car deaths.

Maybe if you have zero understanding of things like emotion and humanity, and also cannot tell the difference between an accident and a mass murder . Otherwise, this is surface-level insanity.

This is America. We see constant mass murder of random citizens, often children, via mass shootings. So maybe the question is, why was 9/11 special among murder?

Re: Room 641A

#55

Post by BobbyTables2 »

Levitating wrote: post #15
Cider9986 wrote: post #5

9/11 was used as an excuse to create more mass spying on Americans even though 2,977 people died while 42,116 died from car accidents that same year.

> even though 2,977 people died while 42,116 died from car accidents that same year I have trouble understanding your logic. A lot of trouble is made to prevent car accidents. We require driving licenses, we develop whole categories of law and do plenty of research to make driving safer.

We’re certainly not trying 15x harder to prevent car accidents as done to prevent another 9/11.

Prior we had metal detectors for people and hand luggage x-ray. Now we have x-ray backscatter for people, ID and facial photography, and a whole lot of other nonsense. Liquids banned, visitors at the gate not permitted, and the list goes on…

I don’t entirely agree with the actual measures taken purportedly to prevent a recurrence, but it’s hard to argue anything other than significant steps were taken.

Roughly a million people have died in car accidents since. Was there really nothing possible to prevent a fraction of them?

Where’s the new government organization? What new laws have been passed to prevent? What safety features are now required to mitigate such?

Ok, we have backup cameras and the funny headlights that turn off when the turn signal is on. Mission Accomplished?

Re: Room 641A

#56

Post by lern_too_spel »

monocasa wrote: post #52
lern_too_spel wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't sniff all the packets to find anything useful. Snowden showed that they intercept certain packets flowing between particular sources and destinations that might contain useful information. In Snowden's leaks, one such application was email inbox backup transfers for big Internet companies that did not (at that time) encrypt their WAN traffic, from which they mined the sender and recipient to build a social…

> They don't sniff all the packets to find anything useful. Snowden showed that they intercept certain packets flowing between particular sources and destinations that might contain useful information Their legal argument was that it was actually ok for them to grab and store all packets, and that it wasn't a search until they ran an actual search that matched against that stored traffic. > In Snowden's leaks, one su…

> Their legal argument was that it was actually ok for them to grab and store all packets, and that it wasn't a search until they ran an actual search that matched against that stored traffic.

No, they never made that argument because they don't grab and store all packets. Instead, they stored the metadata extracted from these packets (the sender and receiver). This program has ended prior to Snowden's leaks according to his documents, but the telephone pen register collection was still ongoing.

> That was private fiber they had spliced into,

No, this was public Internet, at places like Room 641A. There was nothing in the leaks suggesting they had spliced private fiber.

Re: Room 641A

#57

Post by godwinson__4-8 »

> On August 15, 2007, the case was heard by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and was dismissed on December 29, 2011, based on a retroactive grant of immunity by Congress for telecommunications companies that cooperated with the government. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case.

"Retroactive grant of immunity" is a nice reminder that the law is ultimately about power.

Amass enough power and the law is yours.

Re: Room 641A

#58

Post by [deleted] »

wat10000 wrote: post #49
wavemode wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mass surveillance has certainly gone too far, but comparing 3000 premeditated murders to car accidents is not really a logical way to argue that. We investigate murder for a reason, despite it being a much rarer cause of death than natural causes and accidents.

Why? Seems to me that dead is dead, regardless of how it happens.

[deleted]

Re: Room 641A

#59

Post by monocasa »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #56
monocasa wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They don't sniff all the packets to find anything useful. Snowden showed that they intercept certain packets flowing between particular sources and destinations that might contain useful information Their legal argument was that it was actually ok for them to grab and store all packets, and that it wasn't a search until they ran an actual search that matched against that stored traffic. > In Snowden's leaks, one su…

> Their legal argument was that it was actually ok for them to grab and store all packets, and that it wasn't a search until they ran an actual search that matched against that stored traffic. No, they never made that argument because they don't grab and store all packets. Instead, they stored the metadata extracted from these packets (the sender and receiver). This program has ended prior to Snowden's leaks accordin…

> No, they never made that argument because they don't grab and store all packets. Instead, they stored the metadata extracted from these packets (the sender and receiver). This program has ended prior to Snowden's leaks according to his documents, but the telephone pen register collection was still ongoing.

The utah data center is their buffer. And they were storing large amounts of traffic because they had their diffie-helman hack.

> No, this was public Internet, at places like Room 641A. There was nothing in the leaks suggesting they had spliced private fiber.

I've talked to Google engineers about this. They spliced private fiber. Google was smart enough to encrypt anything routed over public internet, but thought that their private WAN was safe until the disclosures.

Re: Room 641A

#60

Post by lern_too_spel »

monocasa wrote: post #59
lern_too_spel wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Their legal argument was that it was actually ok for them to grab and store all packets, and that it wasn't a search until they ran an actual search that matched against that stored traffic. No, they never made that argument because they don't grab and store all packets. Instead, they stored the metadata extracted from these packets (the sender and receiver). This program has ended prior to Snowden's leaks accordin…

> No, they never made that argument because they don't grab and store all packets. Instead, they stored the metadata extracted from these packets (the sender and receiver). This program has ended prior to Snowden's leaks according to his documents, but the telephone pen register collection was still ongoing. The utah data center is their buffer. And they were storing large amounts of traffic because they had their di…

> The utah data center is their buffer.

The Utah data center hadn't even been constructed at the time of Snowden's leaks, so obviously there was no evidence for that in the leaks.

> And they were storing large amounts of traffic because they had their diffie-helman hack.

Again, there was no evidence that they were doing this in the leaks. The leaks said that they did full take data collection only in a specific set of regions like Afghanistan.

> I've talked to Google engineers about this. They spliced private fiber.

Those engineers simply misread the leaks. What they did was insert their network analyzers in places like Room 641A, next door to an IX where subsea cables connect to private routers. These cables pass through that room first. No splicing required. If you look at the third slide in the PRISM/US-984XN deck, you can see that this happens only on international infrastructure like these subsea cables, not on purely domestic DC to DC links.

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