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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

#251

Post by tptacek »

etherael wrote: post #234
tptacek wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do no work whatsoever for the USG, or for any defense contractors. That's not an accident. There are other software security firms that do; Matasano does not. Once again: I am not sticking up for NSA. I do not trust NSA. I probably share your opinion of NSA, modulo I might not mythologize their capabilities as much as other people on HN do. I am sticking up for Google. I have friends who work there. I think very h…

When you say "that's not an accident" do you mean to imply you'd have ethical objections to it? As you are one of the three most common defenders of the state that I have noticed on this site, that would be very surprising to me. But quite interesting if so, it would be some indication that your perspective on the issues and seeming constant defense is an indication of spiraling paranoia in counterparties to your arg…

Yes, I have an ethical problem with doing the kind of work I do for defense contractors or for the USG. I'm not saying that doing work for USG, or even software security work for them, or even offensive software security for them is prima facie unethical; I only know that I don't feel qualified to navigate the ethical quagmire, and thankfully am not required to do so.

I'm also not a defender of the state. However, of the subset of HN users who are noisy enough to remember by name, I'm probably the most statist; believing in the utility of law enforcement probably puts me just slightly to the left of center among noisy HN'ers.

In the real world, I'm a liberal.

Be careful about assuming that you know what's in the heads of other people just from how they comment on HN. The things that spark arguments on HN aren't a realistic cross-section of policy debates in the real world.

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

#252

Post by [deleted] »

EFruit wrote: post #228
kunai wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

[deleted]

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

#253

Post by tptacek »

jlgreco wrote: post #237
declan wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And even more evidence that would take too long to summarize. is correct here.

How many times are you going to make this exact same comment? Just upvote him if you think he's so right.

He's a reporter who has been doing reporting on this story with actual sources. His confirmation of individual comments of mine is useful, at least to me; don't worry, eventually I'll write a comment that will contain something he knows to be wrong, he'll notice it, call me out for it, and you can start jumping up and down again.

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

#254

Post by tptacek »

fnordfnordfnord wrote: post #194
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…

NSA has all the access they need. Which side of the property line their equipment resides on is a detail. Google is bound by what they're treating as a lawful order, to lie, as is anyone on NSA's team. If NSA doesn't have hardware inside Google, they have what they need to read the data at the boundaries of the Google system.

Nobody is bound to lie. That is not a FISA requirement or a requirement of any other federal statute.

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

#255

Post by tptacek »

philwelch wrote: post #227
tptacek wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wa…

I don't follow. Larry Page and Google's General Counsel jointly signed the denial.

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

#256

Post by pradocchia »

tptacek wrote: post #242
pradocchia wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dude. They have the content of email too. I'm going to make a wild guess here and assume it falls under the "required by law" category of the denials. Well, too bad for them, too bad for us. Welcome to the future, and there's scant chance that any of this will ever get rolled back. Meanwhile, its also fairly obvious that some security folks sympathetic to the NSA have your ear. You like them, you respect their skills…

Dude. Provide evidence for extraordinary claim. I'm all ears. Also: this content vs. metadata thing? Also I think a red herring: they don't have full metadata access from Google Mail either.

This is an exercise in synthesis, not analysis--akin to reading tea leaves. By all means, keep two ledgers: a) claims with hard evidence, and b) suppositions on a tree of conjecture. Though again: having informed opinions on secret programs is structurally a fools errand. Better keep that ledger quarantined, and look for new fruit on the tree of conjecture. You would be well equipped to capitalize on it.

EDIT, quick, and not to make a thread of it: a) NSA is the referent to tea-leaves, not you; b) the rest is advice; and c) lol.

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

#257

Post by tptacek »

pradocchia wrote: post #256
tptacek wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dude. Provide evidence for extraordinary claim. I'm all ears. Also: this content vs. metadata thing? Also I think a red herring: they don't have full metadata access from Google Mail either.

This is an exercise in synthesis, not analysis--akin to reading tea leaves. By all means, keep two ledgers: a) claims with hard evidence, and b) suppositions on a tree of conjecture. Though again: having informed opinions on secret programs is structurally a fools errand. Better keep that ledger quarantined, and look for new fruit on the tree of conjecture. You would be well equipped to capitalize on it. EDIT, quick,…

YOU'RE OUT OF YOUR ELEMENT! This Chinaman is not the issue, Dude.

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

#258

Post by leoc »

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…

If you look at the source of the "collection directly from the servers" terminology, the You Should Use Both slide http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/08/nsa-prism-server... , it's fairly clear that PRISM collection is being contrasted to "upstream" collection. In the context, it would be natural to describe getting someone's GMail account state (plus a live feed of account updates) through a FISA directive (and an API) as "collection directly from the servers": the stated alternative is recording the packets of someone's IP connections as they cross into and out of the US, a much more indirect and not-from-the-server(s) option. Then there's the fact that the slide heading is "FAA702 Operations". Using FAA 702 on Google requires the US Government to serve a FAA 702 directive to Google; getting a Google employee to hand over information without Google's knowledge would not be using FAA 702 at all.

(Further, the fact that Greenwald couldn't figure this out from looking at the You Should Use Both slide by himself - instead, actually producing the slide in the belief that it was evidence which undermines the FISA-API theory - and still can't or won't get it after having it explained to him, undermines the thesis that he's both able and willing to interpret the PRISM presentation carefully and accurately. Though he wasn't the only journalist to (apparently) misinterpret the "direct access" claim at first.)

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

#259

Post by cwp »

tptacek wrote: post #163
cwp wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's true, email is mostly transmitted over TLS. But I'd be very reluctant to conclude that the NSA doesn't have clear-text for the vast majority of email that gets sent. Google and other email providers have denied giving the NSA access to their servers, but if you think about it, that would be a lousy way to share data with the NSA, from a purely technical point of view. A company like Google is going to be constan…

No, as 'DannyBee has been at pains to point out, no federal statute ever obligates anyone to lie about anything.

The law is more than the statues. The rulings of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court are classified, so we don't know how the statutes are being interpreted and applied. We do know, however, that the executive has a history of using bizarre legal theories to skirt the spirit of the law.

But even if Google isn't obligated to lie, it might still be lying.

Maybe Google is lying, not because it's obligated to by the law, but because it's immune from the consequences of lying and the government is leaning on them in other ways.

Maybe Google is afraid of the backlash that will follow if they don't lie.

Maybe Google has carefully written their denials to be technically true, but still hide the real extent of the data they're giving to the NSA. This was my original point, which you completely ignored.

And yes, maybe Google is being completely forthright.

We have very little information, and information we do have may be wrong. Given that, I don't think it's wise to conclude that transmitting email over an encrypted channel is enough to keep out of the hands of the NSA.

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

#260

Post by philwelch »

tptacek wrote: post #255
philwelch wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wa…

I don't follow. Larry Page and Google's General Counsel jointly signed the denial.

Hypothesis: Page was lying; the General Counsel was in the dark for plausible deniability and genuinely believes to this day that PRISM doesn't exist, at least not in a way that involves Google.

I don't see this hypothesis as being anywhere outside the wheelhouse of the NSA. Even outright infiltration (i.e. the hypothesis that not even Page is in the know) is, well, kind of the point of intelligence services, but it's not necessary.

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