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Mark Zuckerberg addresses PRISM

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Re: Mark Zuckerberg addresses PRISM

#201

Post by masterzora »

frisco wrote: post #70

I'm now just confused. If I understand it correctly, the government has publicly acknowledged the program and tried to explain how it's "limited and legal," but extant nonetheless. Now the companies are all uniformly denying it. The options: - The companies are lying. - The government has infiltrated these companies and developed backdoor access the executive team is unaware of. - The government is intercepting traff…

Option #5: They have a program regarding some data acquired in some manner but since it's still classified, even if something is leaked, they're not going to sit down and explain the specifics to everyone. The government's response has been vague at best.

My assumption is some combination of #4 and #5, really.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg addresses PRISM

#204

Post by arange »

Dove wrote: post #178
dkulchenko wrote: post #23

Look at the two writeups (Zuckerberg's and Page's) side by side. Each has 4 paragraphs. Each of the pairs of paragraphs addresses the same thing. 1st paragraph: we wanted to respond to these claims. 2nd paragraph: never heard of PRISM, don't give direct access. 3rd paragraph: each request goes through legal channels. 4th paragraph: encourage governments to be more transparent. Terrifying. EDIT: It gets worse. Here's…

I'm not impressed. Most press releases have only a handful of paragraphs. I'd believe it was common to go over the topics of "What We're Talking About, What We Deny, What We Affirm, and How It Could Be Better." It may look impressive that they all say they don't allow "direct access to servers", but it's hardly surprising, since the original Guardian headline[1] was "Top-secret Prism program claims direct access to s…

or all these companies are intentionally making similar press releases in hopes people will catch on that theyre being coerced into denying involvement. this way they're (assuming they have one) fulfilling their denial obligation with the NSA, yet still are protesting what they dont actually want to be doing

Re: Mark Zuckerberg addresses PRISM

#205

Post by akama »

namwen wrote: post #194
lifeguard wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally integrated corporate-state repression of dissent what could go wrong? http://s3.amazonaws.com/dk-production/images/14030/large/Occ...

Could you explain what exactly that is?

I might be wrong, but I believe it a section of the leaked document that discussed using a sniper to kill leaders of Occupy movements.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg addresses PRISM

#206

Post by c0ur7n3y »

frisco wrote: post #70

I'm now just confused. If I understand it correctly, the government has publicly acknowledged the program and tried to explain how it's "limited and legal," but extant nonetheless. Now the companies are all uniformly denying it. The options: - The companies are lying. - The government has infiltrated these companies and developed backdoor access the executive team is unaware of. - The government is intercepting traff…

#1 - It's really pretty simple. The companies get legal immunity from the government by denying the existence of the program. They already are, no doubt, indemnified. Companies are so risk averse they wouldn't do it without immunity. Disclosing information about the program would violate the conditions of that immunity.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg addresses PRISM

#207

Post by dylangs1030 »

nostrademons wrote: post #141
dkulchenko wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Realistically though, can you imagine there being so many CEOs knowing that this thing is going on and being forced to lie about it, and not one of them spilling the beans? Even if the gov tries to arrest them for leaking classified information, they'd be near-impossible to convict following the inevitable massive public outcry.

You don't get to be CEO unless you can learn to lie & keep secrets. OTOH, I'm more skeptical about the implementation side. Have you ever set up a feed between two different organizations that needs to transmit a massive amount of data in real-time? It's an immensely complicated undertaking requiring a whole team on both sides, with managers, engineers, techwriters, QA, and support staff. It seems a little unbelievab…

>"You don't get to be CEO unless you can learn to lie & keep secrets."

That doesn't actually answer the parents question. What is the likelihood that a bunch of tech leaders would know about this and it wouldn't get out? That any group of people wouldn't let this out?

I agree with the latter half of your comment, but the first sentence is as powerful as saying, "The only way to keep a secret between three people is if two of them are dead."

They both sound like ominous truths, but neither is a particularly compelling argument.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg addresses PRISM

#208

Post by louthy »

coldtea wrote: post #154
slg wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The implication that there is some central figure behind this giving these companies scripts to read meets the most common flaw of governmental conspiracy theories. It requires the government to be simultaneously incredibly competent and incompetent. If the NSA was able to keep this project under wraps for so long with the number of people involved, I think they would be smart enough to at least slightly alter the wo…

> The implication that there is some central figure behind this giving these companies scripts to read meets the most common flaw of governmental conspiracy theories. It requires the government to be simultaneously incredibly competent and incompetent. Which is exactly what governments are. Extreme resources, very smart people, and very idiot people, incompetent bureaucrats, messy cover-ups, all co-exist, all the tim…

> If you think it matters, I'm afraid, you give the American public too much credit.

Not just the American public. This is blanket spying on the people of the world. Now that might sound less problematic for Americans who want to see those pesky terrorists brought to justice, but it also allows the NSA to build up profiles on everyone.

US border security is already a nightmare, god knows what they can do with this kind of information. Ever searched for torrents on Google? Your next trip to the States might be interesting.

It seems also they could be sharing this data with other national security agencies, which is where this gets really scary:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-22813893

Global Big Brother.

Personally as a user of Gmail, Skydrive, GDrive, Dropbox, Facebook,... I find this incredibly disturbing. I will be doing whatever I can to remove my dependency on any service hosted in the US.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg addresses PRISM

#209

Post by stfu »

brymaster wrote: post #152
jlgreco wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The airforce base has sock puppets?

I think he's talking about this: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-oper... and citing this http://blog.reddit.com/2013/05/get-ready-for-global-reddit-m... where it shows: Most addicted city (over 100k visits total) Eglin Air Force Base, FL

That's news to me. And it would also explain why the spy scandal is pretty much a non-story on Reddit.

At the moment all there is on the front page are 2 stories on Greenwald and some "collecting anti surveillance arguments thread".

I guess after their role in promoting the anti-SOPA movement they got some "special attention.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg addresses PRISM

#210

Post by mpyne »

frisco wrote: post #70

I'm now just confused. If I understand it correctly, the government has publicly acknowledged the program and tried to explain how it's "limited and legal," but extant nonetheless. Now the companies are all uniformly denying it. The options: - The companies are lying. - The government has infiltrated these companies and developed backdoor access the executive team is unaware of. - The government is intercepting traff…

Option #6: PRISM is the NSA-end of an interface to each named company to help automate data collection. The company still grabs the data, still runs each request through their legal team, etc.

But there's no email or fax needed, requests arrive via something like a JSON request and are automatically returned to NSA once the company looks up the requested data.

Company doesn't know NSA calls it PRISM. As far as the company is concerned it's just a bridge from their systems to the NSA for valid law enforcement reasons, why should they care what NSA calls it?

That would also explain why it's so cheap ($20 million). Or rather, why it's so expensive given how little it really is...

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