Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants

news.cnet.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 407 posts

Re: NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants

#101

Post by rayiner »

st0p wrote: post #62
tptacek wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So what? The NSA is harvesting data on an unprecedented scale. It might be legal but it is definitly unethical. Whether the initial reports were 100% accurate or not is irrelevant. What does matter is that this now out in the open and hopefully something changes.

The ethics of data collection in the age of people sharing all sorts of information with Google, Facebook, etc, are not a clear cut thing.

Moreover, it's not meaningless whether its illegal or not. Indeed, it makes all the difference in the world. Laws can be changed if we don't like their outcomes--a government that's ignoring the law is something else entirely.

Re: NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants

#102

Post by wallio »

tptacek wrote: post #12

So that's not good. You can see how that could be happening; NSA has trunk-level access to telephony circuits. Telcos are engaged in a long-running game of footsie with the government that makes billion dollar Internet companies look like anarcho-capitalists. But I'm not seeing how we get from there to the contents of email. To have the email of arbitrary Americans without a warrant, the NSA would need direct access…

tptacek why are you always defending ridiculous statements and behavior by the US administration and spy agencies? You seem willing to bend over backwards (or is it forwards) to justify any statement from the authorities but will attack the tiniest issue in a fellow HNers post.

Have you and/or your company ever worked for them? If so it would explain a lot.

Re: NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants

#103

Post by anologwintermut »

kniht wrote: post #23
sneak wrote: post #17

Earlier 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).

> provided they don't use cipher modes that provide forward secrecy They use a PFS cipher spec: http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2011/11/protecting-...

For HTTPS. I will bet you they don't use perfect forward secrecy for TLS with SMTP traffic. Not because they don't want to , but because it likely isn't supported for a huge set of the servers they connect to. A large number SSL terminators/ accelerators that e.g Microsoft uses, don't likely support it and who knows about other stuff.

Re: NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants

#104

Post by comex »

burntsushi wrote: post #80
tptacek wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The process as I understand it: * NSA (or some other USG agency) issues a directive to the provider under authorization from FISA. No court order is required for NSA to issue directives under FISA. * If the provider is Google, Yahoo, or Facebook†, that directive is reviewed manually by the provider. * In at least the case of Yahoo, where this step is supported by court documents, but probably all the other cases too…

> If you're telling me that this is the understanding most HN people have about what "direct access" means, I'd direct your attention to this very thread to rebut that argument. I'm not at all saying that. I'm saying that most HN folks do not share your definition of what "direct access" means. I specifically said that it seems like most people are quite aware of the ambiguity of the meaning of "direct access" in a c…

Bullcrap. When people saw "direct access", they concluded direct access - as was reasonable, at the time, from what the leak seemed to show; I did the same. Many of the people on this site have since realized that that is not true (although there were sure a lot of crazy theories about the specific wording of the initial denials), but most of those people are no longer saying "direct access", and there are people still saying "direct access".

Re: NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants

#106

Post by rickhanlonii »

burntsushi wrote: post #80
tptacek wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The process as I understand it: * NSA (or some other USG agency) issues a directive to the provider under authorization from FISA. No court order is required for NSA to issue directives under FISA. * If the provider is Google, Yahoo, or Facebook†, that directive is reviewed manually by the provider. * In at least the case of Yahoo, where this step is supported by court documents, but probably all the other cases too…

> If you're telling me that this is the understanding most HN people have about what "direct access" means, I'd direct your attention to this very thread to rebut that argument. I'm not at all saying that. I'm saying that most HN folks do not share your definition of what "direct access" means. I specifically said that it seems like most people are quite aware of the ambiguity of the meaning of "direct access" in a c…

Hear, hear if you thought about it long enough to know they didn't give the NSA a database console with read-only rights!

Re: NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants

#107

Post by sneak »

tptacek wrote: post #72
sneak wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never claimed it was illicit. I just said it was secret, and that disclosure of such secrets carries an incredibly harsh penalty. You're doing the strawman thing again, despite claiming otherwise. :/ Just because they've pushed back doesn't mean the system isn't automated. It could have been a matter of "implement the automated system now, per the FISA order, and then we can have a go-round in front of the FISA cou…

Where by illicit I mean "is occurring without the knowledge of Google's CEO or General Counsel, despite their publicly voiced opposition to any such program."

I'm not sure. It could be that they know about it and are gag-ordered (can't fight city hall!), or that they were intentionally left out of the loop for purposes of plausible deniability.

This is military intelligence we're talking about here, they take their mission very, very seriously. I wouldn't be surprised if there were multiple, independent, redundant programs for monitoring this data.

Re: NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants

#108

Post by tptacek »

trevelyan wrote: post #99
tptacek wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The process as I understand it: * NSA (or some other USG agency) issues a directive to the provider under authorization from FISA. No court order is required for NSA to issue directives under FISA. * If the provider is Google, Yahoo, or Facebook†, that directive is reviewed manually by the provider. * In at least the case of Yahoo, where this step is supported by court documents, but probably all the other cases too…

Still arguing with the NSA over their own capabilities? I'm actually curious how you rationalize this worldview given the bizarre news over the last few days that the Fed is insisting on burying NSA FISA requests among requests from every other law enforcement agency when reporting statistics? Leaving aside the point that aggregated and anonymized information seems to pose absolutely zero security risk and should not…

See what I mean? This is the kind of comment that makes me think most HN people commenting on NSA think NSA has direct, unilateral access to Google Mail's servers --- as The Guardian (incorrectly) reported.

Re: NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants

#109

Post by zmmmmm »

There's something sick and wrong in the semantics of how the laws have been interpreted here.

The authorities seem to have decided that they can record anything they want, any time they want. The legal boundary is only crossed when somebody listens to the recording. So it is fine for them to slurp up every bit of data they can tap into and then retrospectively figure out which bits they were authorized to listen to (with almost no oversight, as indicated by this article).

But most normal people don't interpret privacy that way. They consider the act of recording without consent the violation of privacy. The listening afterwards compounds it, but the power of the third party comes from having the conversation recorded, not the listening.

This misinterpretation of privacy is a subtle but deliberate and totally corrupt act by the authorities.

Re: NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants

#110

Post by dbbolton »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #77

Since the modus operandi seems to be for the NSA to suck up everything it can and decide later it seems (wild speculation follows) that the NSA might be sitting on audio recrodings of all your phone calls for the past several years. Can you imagine the number of divorce cases that would impact? Civil lawsuits? Proof of innocence or guilt in a crime? Hell, get a decade or two of this and historians alone would have a…

If they were obtained without a warrant, wouldn't they be inadmissible as evidence, especially if they were being used in an inculpatory rather than exculpatory manner?
Post reply on HN