Why is Snowden a traitor but Nadler not? Did Nadler not just go to the press with information that was part of a secret NSA briefing?
Nadler is a U.S. Congressman, Snowden is an IT grunt?
NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants
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Re: NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
You think it's possible that NSA got direct access to Google's servers in a way that was invisible to Google's CEO, it's general counsel, its Chief Architect, Justin Schuh of their security team, and any of their thousands of employees, most of whom would immediately report such a thing if they discovered it? Moreover, having obtained this illicit access, in direct defiance of the corporation that owns and controls t…
Not invisible, no. (Please don't strawman.) I think that some of those people have knowledge of a secret program that enables access to the data (maybe without direct access to the servers that house it). That would make it easier to manage without having to bring all the SREs and such into the conspiracy. I think that most of those people would not allow their lives to be destroyed with federal charges (or maybe eve…
I don't have to build a straw man. I'd just say people should read your comment, work out its narrative in their heads, and ask which is more likely: that PRISM is an elaborate scheme by which NSA gained illicit access to Google's servers, or that it is what other reporters have now reported that it is: a unified collection system for documents manually provided by Internet companies in response to FISA directives.
People that think the "manual" part in that last sentence doesn't matter should read the court order in the Yahoo case the NYT reported, where Yahoo went several rounds with NSA and the FISC to try to fight a specific FISA directive.
Note that Google, Facebook, and Yahoo have all taken pains to point out that they've pushed back on FISA directives. Which is something you can't do if the system isn't manual.
Re: NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
"and the Guardian walked the claim back" No they didn't. "The Guardian has not revised any of our articles and, to my knowledge, has no intention to do so. That's because we did not claim that the NSA document alleging direct collection from the servers was true; we reported - accurately - that the NSA document claims that the program allows direct collection from the companies' servers. Before publishing, we went to…
I'm not interested in the semantic argument. Emily Bazelon called The Guardian out this week on the Slate political podcast, as have many others; this is now a mainstream criticism of how The Guardian reported the story. Either way: the original notion that NSA had direct access to the servers that actually operate Google Mail has been found to be unsupported by the evidence published thus far. I call this out contin…
For reasons which should be glaringly obvious, you're not going to convince anyone on HN that a view is the right one simply because drama-hungry mass media has decided it is.
Re: NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants
#44Why is Snowden a traitor but Nadler not? Did Nadler not just go to the press with information that was part of a secret NSA briefing?
Because he's a lawyer cross-examining a witness.
Video: http://www.c-spanvideo.org/clip/4456141
From TFA: Mueller initially sought to downplay concerns about NSA surveillance by claiming that, to listen to a phone call, the government would need to seek "a special, a particularized order from the FISA court directed at that particular phone of that particular individual." Is information about that procedure "classified in any way?" Nadler asked. "I don't think so," Mueller replied. "Then I can say the following," Nadler said. "We heard precisely the opposite at the briefing the other day. We heard precisely that you could get the specific information from that telephone simply based on an analyst deciding that...In other words, what you just said is incorrect. So there's a conflict."
Re: NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants
#45So did Obama blatantly lie to us in his statement, or is he not aware what's going on? I have to think, if they admitted it to Congress, Obama had to know.
He said they weren't listening in on calls from Americans, not that they couldn't.
“The National Security Agency does not listen to Americans’ phone calls and it is not reading Americans’ emails. None of these programs allow that,” -Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., chair of the House Intelligence Committee.
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2013/06/intelligence-co...
Re: NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that the (theoretical) MITM attack is played out not between the user and google, but google and the other email provider. For example, a person on gmail sending mail to a yahoo account could be comprimised when google talks to yahoo. EDIT: Yahoo does NOT use TLS SMTP[1]. Also, Gmail fails Cert verification...[1] [1] http://www.checktls.com/perl/TestReceiver.pl
Google uses TLS SMTP. Later Nice catch. I based the Yahoo thing off message board posts with people getting TLS SMTP working, but from their mail clients, not server-to-server. The Google Mail certificates don't validate because their hostname doesn't exactly match the host for which the certificate was issued ("mx.google.com"). I don't think that's a huge problem in practice.
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Re: NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
A copy of Google's SSL private keys, provided they don't use cipher modes that provide forward secrecy, would suffice if they'd already tapped all the transit fibers (though not gmail-to-gmail).
A copy of Google's private keys would be a more outrageous and damning discovery than NSA somehow having direct access to Google's servers. NSA doesn't have Google's private key.
First, most SMTP travels without encryption.
Second, it's unfathomable to me to imagine the NSA isn't doing their damnedest to obtain all private keys. I have no idea how many they do have, but it seems foolish to assume they don't have a specific private key.
Why do you think the NSA would regard private keys as some kind of sacred ground? For example, they could go after it the same way the Chinese do - phishing attacks against employees. They most certainly use those techniques outside the US, how can you be sure they don't within the US?
I could never pretend to be sure they -are- doing it, but it seems a lot more difficult to be sure they -are not-.
Re: NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
It'd also be vastly easier to do once, covertly, and then keep secret, versus a live connection that mirrors them the plaintext copies. I'm not so sure they wouldn't just do both.
You're saying that despite the fact that everyone who hits Google Mail with Chrome uses a ciphersuite for which Google's private RSA key only works if you actively man-in-the-middle the connection , no matter how many hard drives you have in Utah, that NSA stole Google's private key, and then (I repeat:) documented that fact in a slide deck for NSA analysts? You could more easily and credibly argue that NSA has solve…
I think you may be forgetting that it's not all-or-nothing. Not everyone uses Chrome.
I can't speak to a slide deck; We've only seen some slides for one program (PRISM). I am quite sure that NSA has several different programs variously encompassing collection and decryption. Hopefully in the next few days or weeks we'll see details about more of them.
I don't think it's beyond the realm of possibility for a nation-state adversary with a ca. $10bn annual budget (that happens to be the same country where Google lives) to get a copy of Google's key, no.
Re: NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants
#49So did Obama blatantly lie to us in his statement, or is he not aware what's going on? I have to think, if they admitted it to Congress, Obama had to know.
He said they weren't listening in on calls from Americans, not that they couldn't.
This really is becoming like 1984. First we had a president arguing about the meaning of "is". Next we get the the DIA lying to Congress say "No" when the truth was "Yes" and then when caught explaining he answered in the "least untruthful manner".
Now when our president says [1]:
"nobody is listening to your telephone calls"
"if the intelligence community then actually wants to listen to a phone call, they’ve got to go back to a federal judge"
"nobody’s listening to the content of people’s phone calls"
"do not involve listening to people’s phone calls, do not involve reading the emails of U.S. citizens or U.S. residents, absent further action by a federal court"
It actually means this [2]:
"If the NSA wants 'to listen to the phone,' an analyst's decision is sufficient, without any other legal authorization required"
[1] http://stream.wsj.com/story/latest-headlines/SS-2-63399/SS-2...
[2] http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57589495-38/nsa-admits-lis...
Re: NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
He said they weren't listening in on calls from Americans, not that they couldn't.
“The National Security Agency does not listen to Americans’ phone calls and it is not reading Americans’ emails. None of these programs allow that,” -Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., chair of the House Intelligence Committee. http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2013/06/intelligence-co...
It is possible for that to be true, too: that to the best of anyone's knowledge, even though NSA retains the capability to listen to arbitrary calls, it has used that capability only in instances where they are reasonably certain that the calls weren't from Americans.
(Although half the site seems to think I'm an NSA supporter, here I'll again make it clear that the telco access NSA seems to have is an extremely bad thing.)