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Stellar Wind (code name)

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Re: Stellar Wind (code name)

#81

Post by deelowe »

voxmatt wrote: post #4

I'm glad someone posted this. My immediate thought after reading the breaking news about the massive phone surveillance was, "wait, did people not think this was happening?" I'm really not a conspiracy nut, but that Wired article and the NYTimes reporting made it pretty clear that the Gov't is pretty much collecting everything they can get their hands on. Glad to finally see some outrage though. Legitimate question:…

This has been around for much longer than people realize. What does everyone think this is used for these days: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON All those intercept points didn't just go away.

Wasn't there a legal requirement that ISPs install some sort of box for law enforcement usage back in the early 2000s?

Also, I recall reading article from around the same time where a network operator noticed mysterious taps that appeared in his fiber rack over night. These were at a major peering point(lvl3 or att?). The taps went into the ceiling and over a wall. When he questioned their existence, he wasn't allowed to remove them or investigate further.

This has been going on ever since the internet and cell phones became popular. The difference now is that they are less secretive about it. See before, you had to have your ally(the UK, AUS, etc...) log communications for you and you'd log communications for them. Then there's no risk of federal or local laws getting in the way. It looks like just good old fashioned espionage. I guess after 9/11, the powers that be felt that wasn't good enough.

Re: Stellar Wind (code name)

#82

Post by regehr »

batbomb wrote: post #21
JPKab wrote: post #19

My brother worked for years in the intelligence community. One of the common stereotypes within the IC regards the fact that Mormons are heavily overrepresented, for various reasons that involve foreign language skills from mission trips, a reputation for respecting authority, abstinence from drugs/alcohol, family connections, ease of gaining security clearances, etc. The stereotype in the IC regarding Mormons is the…

Nuclear physics and nuclear energy as well. The data center in Utah has more to do with cheap land, low cost, and low likelihood of natural disaster.

A major natural disaster is a certainty in the SLC area: we're surrounded by active faults.

Re: Stellar Wind (code name)

#84

Post by rmc »

JPKab wrote: post #19

My brother worked for years in the intelligence community. One of the common stereotypes within the IC regards the fact that Mormons are heavily overrepresented, for various reasons that involve foreign language skills from mission trips, a reputation for respecting authority, abstinence from drugs/alcohol, family connections, ease of gaining security clearances, etc. The stereotype in the IC regarding Mormons is the…

Conversely a certain subset of Mormons are going to be very vulnerable to a certain type of attack that the regular (incl. more liberal subsets of) population would not be vulnerable to.

A gay mormon (which is just as common as a gay catholic, or a gay atheist) will be likely to be in the closet. They would probably be ostracised by family and friends if they were outed, lots of people in the general community would not be ostracised. Mormons are more vulnerable to that form of attack and compromise.

Re: Stellar Wind (code name)

#85

Post by groby_b »

kunai wrote: post #45
rayiner wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What is truly a scary thought is if the vast, mindless mass of people... This is why privacy advocates (and libertarians more generally), can't get more popular traction: the incredibly derisive and arrogant tone with which they address their fellow citizens, and their flippant, dismissive attitude towards democracy. Why should I listen to the opinions of someone who calls my parents, most of my friends, my in-laws…

Mindless with respect to political issues, is quite appropriate, I think. When my mom or my dad or my grandma says, "I have nothing to hide" (and they do, whenever I call them about some privacy concern), my respect for them with regards to political issues, drastically drops. Perhaps "mindless" is harsh, but they certainly aren't being insightful or politically educated. I'm not trying to launch ad hominem attacks o…

I can guarantee you that you won't get people to wake up by insulting them. At least I can't recall a single case that's ever worked.

Re: Stellar Wind (code name)

#86

Post by pchristensen »

brown9-2 wrote: post #50
eli wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Utah also has cheap land and really cheap electricity.

And a pretty low population density: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_populati...

Utah overall population density is low but the Salt Lake metro is in geographically constrained valleys and fairly dense (maybe halfway between LA and Midwestern densities). The deserts and mountains are not useful for the NSA.

Re: Stellar Wind (code name)

#87

Post by smith782 »

nwh wrote: post #76
samstave wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook has internal teams and tools used to do searches on activity of users, when law enforcement requests come in FB looks at the request and makes a judgement on whether to comply with it. They supply information such as when and from what IP a user logged in, and can provide user content - however I do not know to what extent they provide it. Nothing gets deleted from FB. So the data is there for a long time -…

> however I do not know to what extent they provide it. Probably in the same form they do for law enforcement. A little booklet with every photo ever uploaded (deleted or otherwise), every message, location and IP address the user has ever used, every single click they have made in the interface. Seriously. Here's an example booklet, complete with redactions. http://www.scribd.com/fullscreen/88465177?access_key=key-2…

The link gave me an error 400: bad request message. I changed the ending of the url from recommendation=false to recommendations=true, and it worked. Just in case anyone was attempting to see the proof.

Re: Stellar Wind (code name)

#88

Post by anonymous »

lolcraft wrote: post #35
alexvr wrote: post #20

Does anyone know how they do this, technically, and to what extent? Does Google just feed them billions of emails, or what? Do they type my name into a form on Amazon.com to get SSH access my EC2 server? And how the hell do they see my finances? Do all of those terms of service agreements say, "By the way, we give your private information to the government without question" ??? At first I thought it didn't matter tha…

The CIA doesn't ask for judicial warrants, and doesn't have to. Extrajudicial murder is legal. Al-Awlaki was murdered on suspicion that there was an imminent threat to US persons. No warrant obtained. Al-Awlaki's son was murdered, again without warrant, because of complicated reasons that boil down to his last name being Awlaki. Any of those videos by themselves would be enough for you to be included on the kill list…

So it's like the KGB, but worse (the KGB didn't kill careers because you had sex). Living in a country from the former communist bloc, I can tell you what the endgame looks like. It looks like 60% of the population willingly collaborating with the security service and writing reports for them. If I were American, the first thing I'd do is convert to mormonism.

Re: Stellar Wind (code name)

#89

Post by homosaur »

bascule wrote: post #73
brown9-2 wrote: post #16

It's useful when discussing this topic to break the word "spy" down into more discrete terms to understand exactly what we are discussing. I found this article to be useful in differentiating the various terms: On its face, the document suggests that the U.S. government regularly collects and stores all domestic telephone records. I use the caveat because there are several ways to interpret it, assuming it is real. (…

We know exactly what's being collected: all the Internet traffic they can get their hands on. They have installed beam splitters on Internet backbones at facilities around the country: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A And are funneling all of the traffic to a datacenter in Utah with "yottabyte" scale capacity, with the goal of having enough capacity to archive the data for 100 years: http://www.wired.com/threat…

Before it's crime, it's pre-crime.

Re: Stellar Wind (code name)

#90

Post by WestCoastJustin »

There is a interesting talk on youtube [1] by William Binney (a former U.S. intelligence official turn whistle blower) [2], where he talks about the tech behind ThinThread [3]. He describes how ThinThread uses Latent semantic indexing [4] to pull together all this metadata into a type of fingerprint. There are various reports (see google) that Stellar Wind was based on a component of the ThinThread capability or that Stellar Wind was an off shoot of ThinThread.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxnp2Sz59p8

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Binney_%28U.S._intellig...

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThinThread

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_semantic_indexing

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