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Google Takeout means something else in light of PRISM

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Re: Google Takeout means something else in light of PRISM

#41

Post by mtts »

sentenza wrote: post #14

I am kind of surprised how many people on HN try to downplay the PRISM thing. The recent revelations and controversy directly affect the business prospects of any US firm that stores data. A couple of months ago I was on an education business fair in Germany and the first thing I heared at the booth of many data-handling businesses was: "We don't store anything in the United States. All our servers are in Europe/Germ…

I doubt this is really an issue. Maybe some knee jerk anti-American types might spew nonsense like this but Europeans with a little more sense and insight and who actually care about this stuff are well aware that:

1. By law all European telecom providers, including ISPs, are required to provide a backdoor for everything that goes on on their networks (the infamous Data Retention Directive)

and

2. All European security agencies cooperate quite willingly with their American counterparts. Some more so than others (the ones from the former Eastern Block are particularly notorious in this regard) so if an American three letter agency wants your data, it'll get it.

Re: Google Takeout means something else in light of PRISM

#42

Post by leoc »

danso wrote: post #18
leoc wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But Google said it denies taking part in PRISM Did it really? It seems that PRISM is the software support etc. to semi-automate the FISA procedure at the Internet companies. Google claimed never to have heard the term 'PRISM' but that could easily be true-but-insignificant. (It's possible that the "PRISM" name is also being used by the NSA to cover old-fashioned wiretapping of emails etc., but that wouldn't involve…

Well, yes, really, insomuch as can be expressed in typical human language: > > First, we have not joined any program that would give the U.S. government—or any other government—direct access to our servers. Indeed, the U.S. government does not have direct access or a “back door” to the information stored in our data centers. We had not heard of a program called PRISM until yesterday. That's a broad flat out denial. A…

But that's perfectly compatible with them being in PRISM. It seems PRISM is indeed not a backdoor or a means of direct access for the US Government, but is a conduit for FISA requests to be approved by Google's (and other firms') lawyers. They hadn't heard the term "PRISM" but that's because the US "intelligence community" hadn't used it to them when discussing the system.

Re: Google Takeout means something else in light of PRISM

#43

Post by jacquesm »

chmars wrote: post #35
jacquesm wrote: post #6

Let's all do a blogpost on PRISM and see how many eyeballs we can get. Google takeout most likely has nothing whatsoever to do with PRISM or any other NSA programme, why go through a clunky one-user-at-a-time batch process when you can be comfortably sitting right where the action is, where updates are incremental and where information is available when it happens instead of when you ask for it. Push over pull any da…

User data export features as they have been common recently – Facebook und Twitter for example offer similar features as Google Takeout – could without any doubt be used to export data for all kind of other 'users'. NSA might tap every single bit of communication worldwide but getting structured data for users of specific interest directly from Google etc. is still much easier.

Except that in the case of google they have said that they only do that on a person-by-person basis, and that PRISM is apparently a wholesale affair.

There just simply is no tie-in between google checkout and PRISM as the article alleges as far as I can see.

Re: Google Takeout means something else in light of PRISM

#44

Post by jacquesm »

wavefunction wrote: post #12
Udo wrote: post #2

Exporting every account on a daily basis can't possible work for Google or the government. To be scalable and useful, and to meet the "no direct access to our servers" mantra, they would instead need for Google to replicate all database updates straight onto the NSA servers. That's no small feat, and it certainly requires explicit engineering effort, but it's not a hugely complex undertaking either. Maybe the infrast…

Or they just put something upstream of the "server." It's actually trivial if you really think about it.

It's actually not that trivial, if you really think about it.

Re: Google Takeout means something else in light of PRISM

#45

Post by jerrya »

Home Depot sells shovels.

Sometimes bad guys kill people and use the shovels from Home Depot to bury the bodies.

There was this really great Zombie movie from 1985, Return of the Living Dead, that took place in a funeral home. I'm not going to give any spoilers, but you really need to see it.

Shovels mean something else in light of this discovery. Sorry Home Depot, I think your shovels have been co-opted.

Re: Google Takeout means something else in light of PRISM

#46

Post by leoc »

onecommentonly wrote: post #20
leoc wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not unless the NYT report is completely wrong, and the Internet companies are lying very blatantly. By all accounts PRISM is a conduit for FISA requests and responses, each of which is still approved by Internet-company lawyers. If they were servicing extremely-broad FISAs like Verizon's "send us all your phone metadata" then the distinction would be academic, but both Google and the NYT seem clear that Google hasn't…

"If they were servicing extremely-broad FISAs like Verizon's "send us all your phone metadata" then the distinction would be academic, but both Google and the NYT seem clear that Google hasn't accepted anything on close to that scale." Maybe I read it wrong but Verizon was ordered by the court to do just that and to shut up about it. I doubt they were asked to accept, just the court ordered it and it is so because it…

Drummond and Page said

Until this week’s reports, we had never heard of the broad type of order that Verizon received—an order that appears to have required them to hand over millions of users’ call records. We were very surprised to learn that such broad orders exist. Any suggestion that Google is disclosing information about our users’ Internet activity on such a scale is completely false.

Now that could conceivably be a bald lie - or I suppose they could just conceivably have lost awareness of what their FISA/NSL/warrant-handling lawyers were approving, to a spectacular extent - but otherwise they aren't handling any Verizon-scale FISA warrants. However, you're right: there's a big grey area between Verizon-scale "megawarrants" and the "specific orders about individuals" the tech companies say they process. NYT said "FISA orders can range from inquiries about specific people to a broad sweep for intelligence, like logs of certain search terms" while the tech companies largely reasserted that they only process "specific orders about individuals". It seems that only one source can be accurate here.

BTW I assume that Verizon wasn't really just forced into handing over all its metadata: there was probably a bit of a gentleman's agreement in the government producing an omnibus FISA order and Verizon agreeing not to contest its legality. Everyone spends less time processing FISA orders, the government gets all the metadata it wants, and Verizon gets a sicknote to cover it legally.

Re: Google Takeout means something else in light of PRISM

#47

Post by smtddr »

aiiane wrote: post #31
smtddr wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's one thing to have a bankaccount in the Netherlands, that's easy. A whole data-center? A data-center with all the infrastructure to support it and employees and it still needs to be fast enough that we can't see a slowdown from moving it out of USA? That's a different undertaking.

Google actually has many data centers outside the US (in addition to those it has inside the US).

Yeah I know. To do what the parent comment is asking, there can't be any US data-centers. That's not realistic.

Re: Google Takeout means something else in light of PRISM

#48

Post by astrange »

alan_cx wrote: post #7
mtgx wrote: post #3

When this came out, I remembered about that whole "you can never really delete your Facebook account, or the data from Facebook's server" situation. The whole NSA thing could also be one of the reasons why you can not. Oh, and you can't delete your Skype account either. Not even in the UI.

I wonder if deactivating one's FB account triggers a copy to be sent to the NSA? The "Logic" being a panicked user trying to cover tracks.

I wonder why the quality of posts has gone down so far this week.

Re: Google Takeout means something else in light of PRISM

#49

Post by rachelbythebay »

smtddr wrote: post #28
realo wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That, exactly. Google, Apple, Facebook and friends go to great lengths to evade taxes. When it comes to tax matters, those companies have no hesitation to use all the tricks available to a trans-national company. And they pay very smart people to invent schemes that ensure a maximum amount of money is kept out of the US IRS hands. If Google, Facebook and friends were truly serious about protecting their users' privac…

It's one thing to have a bankaccount in the Netherlands, that's easy. A whole data-center? A data-center with all the infrastructure to support it and employees and it still needs to be fast enough that we can't see a slowdown from moving it out of USA? That's a different undertaking.

What if I insinuated that certain multinational companies already choose which data centers get certain products due to tax reasons? As in, "product X can go into building #1 but not building #3, and product Y can go into #3 but not #1".
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