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

131–140 of 407 posts

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

#131

Post by tptacek »

trevelyan wrote: post #129
tptacek wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm having a hard time parsing your question but can I ask a different one: do you disagree with any of the bulleted points in my comment above? I don't want to waste a lot of time petulantly agreeing with each other.

Yes. My suspicion is that your first two assumptions are incorrect, and that (1) FISA requests are not personalized under PRISM, and that consequently (2) there is no manual review or check against the abuse of power by providers on an ongoing basis. This is the only reasonable explanation I can think of for why the NSA would be trying to hide its request volume in the larger volume of overall requests from law enfor…

I don't understand the (1) and (2) thing. What does it matter whether the requests are "personalized"? In fact, I think they probably rarely are; you can look at Facebook's numbers to see the aggregates suggesting that most requests are for sizable numbers of accounts, not just one.

My point isn't that NSA's FISA directives are surgical; like you, I doubt that they are. My point is that upon receiving them, a lawyer at Google approves or rejects them, not a SQL query.

If you read all my comments on this whole annoying story I think you'll find that I'm rarely (maybe never?) sticking up for NSA, but I am happy to stick up for Google anywhere that I can. Google is actually (in this instance) fighting for your privacy, and then getting shellacked on message boards like this; what's worse, they're prevented by the USG from explaining what's happening. They're being equated with companies like AT&T, companies that appear to be sharing bedding with NSA. That belief is wrong, it's unfair, and it's counterproductive.

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

#132

Post by twelvechairs »

tptacek wrote: post #130
twelvechairs wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are making some poor semantic arguments yourself. The simple case is that of the NSA document ("collection directly from the servers of these US service providers") against google ("The U.S. government does not have direct access or a “back door” to the information stored in our data centers"). These are two competing claims, neither of which have been supported by evidence and hence the burden of proof r…

For those keeping score, this is another of the kind of comment that lead me to believe that most HN commenters take the obvious interpretation of "direct access".

What? I'm not putting forth any interpretation of 'direct access'.

I appreciate that it seems you are responding to a lot of comments but I really find this comment lazy and borderline offensive.

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

#133

Post by jlgreco »

wallio wrote: post #102
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.

I doubt that he has a professional conflict in this case. He is nothing if not consistent, his point of view here is exactly what you would expect from reading his past posts on other issues.

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

#134

Post by Homunculiheaded »

Lost_BiomedE wrote: post #95
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…

Part of the book 1984 was the complacence of the lower class. I am not targeting any class here but pointing out that a culture of complacency by division was a large warning in that book that is often overlooked.

It's really unfortunate that most people read 1984 as teenagers (I did). I went back to it as an adult, somewhat expecting it to be a let down. What I found was quite the opposite, there's a lot more nuance in that book than would really be absorbed by high school students being forced to read it.

"The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?"

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

#136

Post by tptacek »

gojomo wrote: post #126
tptacek wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Guardian went out of its way to characterize the access not only as "direct" but "unilateral".

I'd need to see the context to know if the Guardian was wrong where they used that exact word, or were simply describing something that exists with some companies or at another level of tapping.

A graf from Greenwald's original story:

When the FAA was first enacted, defenders of the statute argued that a significant check on abuse would be the NSA's inability to obtain electronic communications without the consent of the telecom and internet companies that control the data. But the Prism program renders that consent unnecessary, as it allows the agency to directly and unilaterally seize the communications off the companies' servers.

Every part of this graf appears to be false!

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

#137

Post by sneak »

tptacek wrote: post #114
sneak wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As 'DannyBee, himself a lawyer, pointed out a few days ago: no provision of any Federal law requires anyone to issue false statements. There are times you're prevented from saying things†, but there aren't times when NSA gets to put words in your mouth. † ... we think; the ultimate Constitutionality of this is up in the air.

I'm sure the lying part comes automatically when you want to keep your job and you can't tell your boss that you just broke every rule the company has.

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

#138

Post by coldtea »

tptacek wrote: post #36
eightyone wrote: post #33

Earlier 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…

>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.

Evidence being "Google denies it"?

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

#140

Post by dhess »

tptacek wrote: post #123
dhess wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is a data point; take it for what it's worth. I run my own email service (Postfix) on 4 different domains. TLS is properly configured on all of my mailhosts, using certificates issued by StartCom. My servers routinely receive mail from Google, Apple, Yahoo, GNU, and other major email providers. Most of the messages are from various mailing lists. I occasionally peruse the mail logs, and in the last 3 years, at l…

You're seeing Yahoo inbounds with TLS enabled? Because the service posted downthread seems to show that Yahoo won't accept inbound mail with TLS.

> Edit: sorry, I reversed the polarity wrt. your question. This confirms the other finding, i.e., Yahoo sends via TLS but doesn't accept.

I am. I sent this message to my personal domain from my Yahoo Mail account just now:

  Jun 16 01:46:01 shell postfix/smtpd[29319]: connect from nm4-vm6.bullet.mail.gq1.yahoo.com[98.136.218.165]
  Jun 16 01:46:01 shell postfix/smtpd[29319]: Anonymous TLS connection established from nm4-vm6.bullet.mail.gq1.yahoo.com[98.136.218.165]: TLSv1 with cipher DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA (256/256 bits)
However, it appears that Yahoo's MX did not accept TLS for my outbound reply. That's concerning....
Post reply on HN