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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

#171

Post by twelvechairs »

tptacek wrote: post #141
twelvechairs wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The two are not really competing claims; the argument over whether they are is the argument that NSA could in fact have direct access to the servers operating Google Mail. I'm not trying to single you out, sorry.

Are you saying that the "collection directly from the servers" claim of the NSA document is simply the systems we already know about (FISA warrants or otherwise) until proven otherwise?

To me the terminology of the document probably (though not necessarily) indicates something more serious, but I'm not sure its necessarily 'cables into gmail' (which you seem to indicate as the only alternate). For instance, potentially someone working for Google may transfer selected records out manually without the knowledge of Google.

Thanks but I'm not so concerned to be 'singled out' as 'lumped in'. I want to get to understand your views more than simply disagree. I hope my previous posts haven't seemed too argumentative either.

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

#173

Post by larsonf »

There is one huge reason why this isn't as scary as it could be:

Tabloids.

If you read through the Tabloids, there is no doubt that some of the stuff in there is slightly true. But you, as the reader, have really no way of knowing what is true or not. So just the fact you have all this information really puts you in the same position of not having any information--not knowing what to believe is almost as bad a problem as not knowing at all. So you are really forced to ignore most of it.

Now, the NSA can read everything you say/write/browse/whatever. Ok, well, what about the people who know that someone is listening so they intentionally create fake stories? Part of being a good criminal or anything is misdirection. Maybe you portray over email (for, get this, years) that you have hideouts at x, and you are good at y technology, and you associate with z people---but in reality you only ever say meaningful stuff in person. Anyone doing anything actually wrong is doing this anyways. That's why there are private code languages in the first place.

So, no, the power is not in the hands of who can listen, it's in the hands of who can deceive--which is you.

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

#174

Post by pasbesoin »

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…

I recall some months ago a seemingly fairly technical and generally informed commenter -- here on HN, I believe -- laying out their back of the envelop calculation of what it might take to archive all the U.S. voice traffic.

The resulting figures were currently readily achievable, and they became increasingly... "trivial" (my interpretation) with the already announced and in progress data center expansions.

And here, in this article, we have a description of Brewster Khale coming up with what is truly a trivial dollar amount to accomplish this.

It's increasingly apparent that there is probably no technical limitation to their accomplishing this.

The only question remains, is any other limitation stopping them?

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

#176

Post by uptown »

paulsutter wrote: post #67
tptacek wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most SMTP does, but does most SMTP that originates or terminates at Google Mail? I don't think so. (Here it's worth noting that mail between Google Mail users doesn't ever hit the public Internet in plaintext SMTP). I do not think it's unfathomable that NSA has Google Mail's public key. I do think it's unfathomable that, having illicitly obtained that key, their possession of it wouldn't be one of the most closely gu…

What percentage of email stays within gmail? Main point - I'd be willing to bet that the NSA collects as many private keys as it can. Can't prove it, don't need to. I'll conduct myself as if they have all the private keys. That's a loss of freedom, and that's not what the authors of the fourth amendment intended.

Some percentage. It's also been reported that one tactic used by terrorists or suspected terrorists was to share a login to an email account - editing unsent messages that live on the email provider's servers in draft mode. Email monitoring won't catch those.

The same technique used by former CIA Director David Petraeus and Paula Broadwell to communicate.

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

#177

Post by jlgreco »

mayanksinghal wrote: post #162
sneak wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-st…

Then we should definitely consider DDG, a much smaller company in the same country, sharing its keys with NSA. They too might be under some gag order that not only stops them from saying that they are compromised but also gagged to say that their users are anonymous so that all the terrorists, law breakers and cheating husbands use this service because of a false sense of security. It is not beyond the realm of possi…

> Then we should definitely consider DDG, a much smaller company in the same country, sharing its keys with NSA.

Do we not? The only reason to think that the situation for Google and DDG is different is that DDG may be insignificant enough to ignore.

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

#178

Post by tptacek »

trevelyan wrote: post #168
tptacek wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For fuck's sake. So you don't just disagree with (1) and (2), but with the whole thing. Why not just say that? Yes, to whatever extent that slide deck said NSA has direct access to the servers that run Google Mail, I am arguing with the slide deck.

Two days ago you were arguing with a slide deck. At this point, you're also arguing with a NSA brief of Congress and numerous public statements by members of Congress. Swearing at me isn't the solution in any case. If you want to stop taking flack on HN, you should stop attacking the credibility of whistleblowers on the rhetorical basis that you know more about what the NSA is doing than the NSA does.

No. You're making an unfounded assumption, which is that the interpretation Glenn Greenwald and Barton Gellman took of that slide deck --- an interpretation Snowden appears to share --- is also what NSA believes to be the case about their access to Google's servers.

It does not follow logically that because one interpretation of an NSA slide deck is that they have direct access to the servers operating Google Mail that that's the only reasonable interpretation of the slide deck. In fact, in the week since we found out about the deck, it's looking less and less and less likely that the original interpretation is reasonable at all.

I don't mind flak (as I'm sure you can tell), but I do mind being drawn into unproductive discussions; when I asked if you disagreed with the post I made above, and you disagreed with only a small part of it in one comment but then the whole premise of it in a later comment, I got frustrated, because why take the time to reply to your comments if you're just going to move the goalposts around?

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

#179

Post by twelvechairs »

mpyne wrote: post #159
twelvechairs wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're saying that Google's claims compete with NSA's. They don't.

Thanks for the response. See my reply to tptacek above. I probably should have said 'appear to compete' or similar, as reading them together does not lead to an easy answer - and there are a number of possibilities as to how you could interpret them.

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

#180

Post by tptacek »

twelvechairs wrote: post #171
tptacek wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The two are not really competing claims; the argument over whether they are is the argument that NSA could in fact have direct access to the servers operating Google Mail. I'm not trying to single you out, sorry.

Are you saying that the "collection directly from the servers" claim of the NSA document is simply the systems we already know about (FISA warrants or otherwise) until proven otherwise? To me the terminology of the document probably (though not necessarily) indicates something more serious, but I'm not sure its necessarily 'cables into gmail' (which you seem to indicate as the only alternate). For instance, potential…

Marc Ambinder, a reporter who has covered the national security beat for many years (before that he was a political reporter for The Atlantic, and before that the White House reporter for --- I think? --- CBS), reported that PRISM is a system of dropbox servers and a user interface that allows seamless access to all of those servers, presumably so that analysts don't have to keep track of which data is affiliated with Google and which data is affiliated with Yahoo.

Other reports have corroborated this.

Declan McCullagh, who has covered this beat for CNet for something like 10 years and is most notable on HN for jumping into threads and arguing the EFF's side of any given story against me (in other words: not a guy prone to support of the establishment), ran a story last week with sources that also denied that NSA had unilateral access to Google Mail.

The NYT just a few days ago ran a story with a linked FISA court order that documented Yahoo's attempt to push back on a FISA directive, a process that would not have been necessary (for the government) had NSA had direct access to Yahoo's servers; the court order demanded that Yahoo turn over data.

And, of course, Google categorically denies that NSA has direct unilateral access to their servers and, for that matter, that they've been able to obtain records for large fractions of their user base. Those denials have come from multiple levels of the company, from the CEO to the General Counsel to their tech leaders to people on their security team.

I'm not simply supposing that NSA doesn't have this access. Based on the evidence available, I am drawing the obvious conclusion that they do not.

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