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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

#301

Post by jholman »

eightyone wrote: post #33
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…

"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…

That quote IS Greenwald walking it back, while saying he's not walking it back.

Greenwald is saying, in effect, "Well, I'm not saying the NSA does or doesn't have direct access; I'm just telling you that I saw a powerpoint slide that says that." Uh huh.

Basically I'm agreeing with tptacek's downthread point: the slide deck claims "direct access", but other than that slide deck, there has been no evidence to support this, and some evidence against it.

As I've said before, I think we should assume that slide deck is a little hyperbolic. This is a deck that claims you can real-time monitor all communications in the world for only $20M. I'm not saying it contains no truth; I'm saying it's a _slide_ _deck_.

Also, btw, the Greenwald article you quote is not his finest. From what I've read in the last two weeks, I respect his agenda, and I respect his efforts to air this story, but some of his self-analysis is seriously lacking. If you're interested in my extensive dissection of that article, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5884619

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

#302

Post by arethuza »

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.

The complacence of the proles in 1984 was carefully engineered - they were fed mindless entertainments (songs, novels, porn) and ruthlessly culled of anyone who appeared to show political awareness.

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

#303

Post by jholman »

tptacek wrote: post #26
sneak wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the NSA would need direct access to the servers that run Google Mail. They do not have that access; Google has categorically denied it, and the Guardian walked the claim back. Also, I don't necessarily buy this. I don't think Google's denials are lies, as Google is not a single brain, but thousands of individuals. Hard to prove a negative.

You think it's possible that NSA got direct access to Google's servers in a way that was invisible to Google's CEO, it's general counsel, its Chief Architect, Justin Schuh of their security team, and any of their thousands of employees, most of whom would immediately report such a thing if they discovered it? Moreover, having obtained this illicit access, in direct defiance of the corporation that owns and controls t…

Just to pick a nit, I assume by "Chief Architect" you mean Yonatan Zunger. He's the chief architect of Google Plus, not of Google at large. While I do value his public statements, he doesn't really have responsibility for the great majority of the systems where we-the-public care about surveillance.

Your point, though, absolutely stands.

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

#305

Post by twelvechairs »

leoc wrote: post #258
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…

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…

Thanks for that. Best response I've seen on these issues - I hope others read it.

I'm not sure on the requirement for a FAA702 directive to be issued to Google however. Surely the upstream operations (which come under the same heading of FAA702 in the slide) don't require a FAA702 directive? I'm no expert but the directives seem to serve as a means to access the information, not as a necessity for disclosure of information should it be available by other means....

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

#306

Post by careersuicide »

einhverfr wrote: post #249
Lost_BiomedE wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Indeed all states derive their power from the consent of the governed, do they not? What would have happened if even a third of Iraq decided to ignore their government under Saddam? The government couldn't have responded. Governments work because we agree to do what they say. Now things like drones centralize some of the power in ways that could not be done before but only to a point and the complexity overhead count…

>Complacency is how tyranny works everywhere and in all ages.

I think your point specifically about Iraq is largely likely to be correct, but I have never been able to swallow this argument, which comes up just about every discussion of tyranny I see/hear.

A fundamental component of true tyranny is violence or an immediate threat of violence (as opposed to the somewhat more abstract monopoly on force that democratic governments have). At the risk of sounding trite: it's easy to call people complacent in the face of a tyrannical government when it isn't your family that will be the target of that violence. Resisting a strong and deeply rooted tyrannical government is not for the feint of heart or those with precious things to lose. To say those that don't give up the tenuous stability they have to attempt to foil the will of the government are complacent is dangerously close to shifting the blame on the victims of abuse.

I suppose it would be fair to say that in any tyrannical state that many are, in a way, resigned to their fate. For most people in that situation anything besides begrudging acceptance of the way things are is not far from suicide. In the case of the US I would wholeheartedly agree that apathy is a huge driving force behind our government taking power it should not. Implying that's how it works everywhere and every time seems very unfair.

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

#307

Post by Joeri »

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?

They could have algorithms transcribing the sound into text, focus on keywords, show the text anonymized to analysts to check whether there's something there, and still claim they're not directly targeting or 'listening' to someone so can do all of that without a warrant.

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

#308

Post by lazyjones »

alephnil wrote: post #296
pasbesoin wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ca…

> it will be bit less than 143 petabytes a year, or about 36000 4GB hardisks

4TB harddisks you mean ... But why stop at Americans? It's obviously feasible to record all phone calls made anywhere in the world, forever. Hooking into large network operators won't be such a big problem either.

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

#309

Post by lazyjones »

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…

> To have the email of arbitrary Americans without a warrant, the NSA would need direct access to the servers that run Google Mail.

Not really. They would only need to get every incoming and outgoing e-mail forwarded/copied to one of their servers. That's not strictly "direct access to Google's servers". At least for incoming e-mails, it would also simply suffice to listen in on some backbone node while having access to Google's private keys to circumvent the TLS encryption (let's ask Larry about those instead).

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

#310

Post by MisterWebz »

trevelyan wrote: post #221
tptacek wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

Congratulations everyone, tptacek just successfully diverted a big part of this whole thread into an argument about something that was supposed to be irrelevant to this thread.
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