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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

#291

Post by vidarh »

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…

The slides claim NSA has access to company servers. It does not claim they have free access to whatever they want. A system of "dropboxes" coupled with a system to get specific sets of data onto them - whether reviewed by humans or not - could fit with that.

That would not contradict the Guardian reporting, or even what the NSA's slides claim.

The rest of what you state also does not contradict Guardians reporting: They make specific claims about specific subsets of these companies data.

You keep arguing about an expansive interpretation of the reporting even when faced with much more restricted alternative interpretations.

When comes to relying on press releases with denials, I'm clearly more cynical than you - I assign them pretty much zero value as evidence. I'd expect these companies to issue denials whether the claims are true or not, so I don't see the press releases as containing any useful information to draw inferences from.

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

#292

Post by tptacek_ »

jlgreco wrote: post #214
tptacek wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does it mean for a corporation to be at "the same level as" a government?

Go find an anarcho-syndicalist and ask them what they think of self-secribed libertarians and anarcho-capitalism.

I agree

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

#293

Post by philwelch »

tptacek wrote: post #265
philwelch wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

This is just innuendo.

You're overcommitted to the hypothesis that Google is completely uninvolved based on their own denials which carry close to zero informational value.

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

#294

Post by epo »

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.

Stereotypes exist for a reason, they are convenient (and sometimes, highly accurate) generalizations. You are a prime example of another type of stereotype.

In my experience (and I am somewhat older than you claim to be) people who declare themselves insightful, aren't. People who declare themselves intellectuals are usually full of it ("most in my generation are shallow and passive").

You may think you're bright but for now, you are just another type of stereotypical teenager with very limited life experience pretending to know things you simply do not comprehend.

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

#295

Post by robbiep »

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.

That's what I thought when I was 15. It's probably what most academically gifted 15 year olds think.

Go back and read some of your stuff in another 5 years, and then another 5. And tally the face palms. It's a good exercise in humility, something that is often hard to appreciate as a 15 year old

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

#296

Post by alephnil »

pasbesoin wrote: post #174
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,…

A phone call can be compressed to 10 kbits/sec or less given a good speech codec and still be understandable, if not of very good quality. That means that if you are on the phone 20 minutes every day, it will be around a half a GB per year.

If every American is on phone that much, it will be bit less than 143 petabytes a year, or about 36000 4GB hardisks. That is a bit, but the datacenter in Utah presumably have a capacity of a yottabyte, or nearly seven order of magnitude more than what is needed to record all phonecalls for a given year. They would have capacity to store all phone calls for nearly a million years if the yottabyte figure is right.

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

#297

Post by w_t_payne »

The chain of command relies on trust, trust that officials will tell the truth to those who oversee them. It seems to me that the chain of command is broken.

NSA officials lied to the public.

They lied to Congress.

If the allegations of procedural abuse are true, they have lied to and deceived every single mechanism that has been set up to oversee and control their operation.

They have gone rogue.

If this supposition is true, their actions go beyond simple criminality. This is treachery; treason and mutiny against the people of the United States.

Let us raise the hue and cry! Traitors! Traitors in our midst!

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

#298

Post by w_t_payne »

robbiep wrote: post #295
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.

That's what I thought when I was 15. It's probably what most academically gifted 15 year olds think. Go back and read some of your stuff in another 5 years, and then another 5. And tally the face palms. It's a good exercise in humility, something that is often hard to appreciate as a 15 year old

I went back recently and read some of the stuff that I wrote when I was 19 or 20. I came to the sad conclusion that I am getting thicker and more ignorant with age.

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

#299

Post by ErsatzVerkehr »

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.

Meh - your comment history is relatively sophomoric.

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

#300

Post by mtgx »

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 (…

Which is why they are keeping the interpretation secret.
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