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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

#221

Post by trevelyan »

tptacek wrote: post #178
trevelyan wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

Honestly, I don't really care about the "direct/indirect" distinction that bothers you: the only real opinion I have on that point is that if Snowden and some anonymous powerpoint junkie can reasonably characterize their access as "direct", then arguing over whether it is in fact "indirect" from some arcane technical perspective is a waste of time.

> when I asked if you disagreed with the post I made above, and you disagreed with only a small part of it

But I don't disagree with your third through fifth statements. I suspect you're wrong to assume that (1) the FISA process is providing reasonable judicial oversight over requests and that (2) providers manually review the appropriateness of individual data requests. As far as the rest goes, this statement of yours is the core point:

> It does not follow logically that because one interpretation of an NSA slide deck is [X] ... that that's the only reasonable interpretation of the slide deck.

Assuming you believe this, I do not understand why you are so hell-bent on attacking Snowden's credibility and dismissing the concerns many other people have raised about excessive surveillance. There are clearly reasonable interpretations of the released materials which make his statements (and those of the NSA and other whistleblowers) perfectly compatible with Google's own statements.

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

#222

Post by ccera »

kunai wrote: post #183
Homunculiheaded wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 beg…

Do not stereotype teenagers. I am merely fifteen years old, and if you take a look through my comment thread you may find more insight than you expected. Yes, most in my generation are shallow and passive; but that doesn't mean all are. There are some intellectuals on the fringes.

I looked through a bit of your comment history. You are a freak of nature. You easily rank somewhere in the top 1/10,000th of teenagers, probably in the top 1/10,000th of all people of any age. Your abilities are not generalizable.

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

#223

Post by Amadou »

kunai wrote: post #183
Homunculiheaded wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 beg…

Do not stereotype teenagers. I am merely fifteen years old, and if you take a look through my comment thread you may find more insight than you expected. Yes, most in my generation are shallow and passive; but that doesn't mean all are. There are some intellectuals on the fringes.

When I was a teenager I was much more convinced of the truth. As the song goes -- I was older then, I'm younger than that now.

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

#224

Post by tptacek »

leoc wrote: post #220
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…

> No court order is required for NSA to issue directives under FISA. As far as I can see (IANAL) most forms of FISA order do require a court order. FAA 702 orders are issued by the government rather than the FISC court, but still have to be reviewed and approved by the FISC. It's just that the nature of the court's review affords no protection to non-resident aliens (except by chance). > For all intents and purposes…

As I understand it: FAA 702 certifications require FISC approval, but 702 directives don't; there's a 1:many relationship between certifications and directives, and directives are what companies see.

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

#225

Post by eli »

Declan, there seems to be skepticism[0] about this story in some quarters. Could you address the concern that Jerry Nadler is simply confused about what he heard?

[0] https://twitter.com/AntDeRosa/status/346072065893355520 & https://twitter.com/BuzzFeedAndrew/status/346072058234540034 for example

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

#227

Post by philwelch »

tptacek wrote: post #75
philwelch wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can you rule out: 1. Google is lying. 2. Prism (or the backend thereof) is genuinely unknown to most Google employees. Those few employees who do know of it are lying. The others (i.e. legal) are ignorant because they have no need to know, and because it provides plausible deniability. 3. There exist NSA agents capable of passing a Google interview and installing backdoors, perhaps with the collusion of other age…

Is it possible that through some elaborate conspiracy with specific unidentified Google employees unknown to Larry Page or Google's General Counsel that NSA has obtained access to the servers that operate Google Mail? Yes. Is it plausible that having gained that access, their use of it is so routine that it has an official name ("PRISM") and a logo and appears in slide decks targeted at NSA analysts and is used a pro…

What about specific unidentified Google employees known to Larry Page, albeit not Google's General Counsel? (In the paraphrased, immortal words of Al Gore: of course it's illegal, that's why it's a covert operation.)

We don't know the intended audience of the slides, either, though with a data source as rich as all of Gmail, presumably there'd be tons of analysts capable of accessing it or else it would just be a waste.

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

#228

Post by EFruit »

kunai wrote: post #183
Homunculiheaded wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 beg…

Do not stereotype teenagers. I am merely fifteen years old, and if you take a look through my comment thread you may find more insight than you expected. Yes, most in my generation are shallow and passive; but that doesn't mean all are. There are some intellectuals on the fringes.

I'm 16. I agree with the second statement, but I'd like to point out this: if you're in the public school system and you aren't "shallow and passive", chances are good you'll be given hell if you show it. (Or maybe it's just me. I don't know.)

I'm new to the public school system this year. I live in an area that has no shortage of gun ownership and advocacy, and, the weekend after Sandy Hook, I went to the guidance office to express worry that perhaps some connections would be made that aren't really there. (Not about me individually, but about some poor soul that would slip up and get caught in something)

I was called back to the guidance office later that day, only to be told that I was effectively suspended until I could be, and I quote, "Mentally evaluated". It was handled as a "School Crisis", and I was a "Threat to the school".

Lucky for me, my parents acted quickly enough so that the school system's psychologist could be contacted.

It turned out to be nothing.

(This is the third of four encounters like this. I'm fairly certain I have the high score for most school crises caused in a single year.)

What a dangerous and shady person I am.

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

#229

Post by declan »

samstave wrote: post #197
zmmmmm wrote: post #109

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 (…

We need to hear what the NSAs version of listening is. Do algorithms parsing streams count as listening? Or only when a human sees it/hears it?

This is a very important point. NSA's definitions do not track common English usage.

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

#230

Post by declan »

tptacek wrote: post #180
twelvechairs wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wit…

Hey! That's me! (I've covered this beat at CNET for 11 years and at Wired and Time and Wired a second time before that for about 5 years. It's not the EFF's side I'd argue, but I'm flattered that you think so.)

Anyway, I've disagreed politely with before, but he is 100% correct here.

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