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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

#391

Post by mcovey »

LoganCale wrote: post #37
waterlesscloud wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, Larry Page says "... we provide user data to governments only in accordance with the law" If the law is that the NSA just has to request it, no warrant necessary, there you go.

The Electronic Communications Privacy Act says all email stored on a server that is older than 180 days is not protected under the 4th Amendment. Furthermore, the IRS appears to operate under the assumption that no email is protected. > New documents released to the ACLU under the Freedom of Information Act reveal that the IRS Criminal Tax Division has long taken the position that the IRS can read your emails without…

I've always wondered if I delete the email, does it count as "no longer stored"? I should, as a user, reasonably assume so, but I know it's kept longer than that, probably indefinitely.

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

#392

Post by rhizome »

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.

Ah yes, don't stereotype teenagers, just the "shallow and passive" ones! You know, the other people. The ones who aren't here. Where we are.

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

#393

Post by klibertp »

w_t_payne wrote: post #380
larrys wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Except when I'm on HN" Very possible that there are people on HN that don't care as well. But because of the overwhelming amount of people who make their opinions known who do care, it would be karma suicide to admit otherwise except in the most delicate terms. Even if you don't need or care about karma points it generally doesn't feel good to have people load up on you. I wonder at what point any issue within a gro…

I am vacillating. Fundamentally, I have a great deal of sympathy for the security services, understand the difficulty of the job that they have been tasked with, and can see no other reasonable way of achieving the goals that they have been set. However, my opinion flips and flops back and forth as I read each new revelation, get caught up in the moral outrage of the crowd, write something incendiary and provocative,…

> I think that at least some of the potential for abuse can be blunted by being more open and honest with ourselves, and by coming to terms with our own failings rather than trying to hide them.

I thought the same for a long time. Then I moved - ironically - to the "big city" (actually, it's getting smaller by the year, but it was second largest in my country some years ago). I thought that living in a big apartment building would give me anonymity and that I could do as I pleased, without being a subject of neighbours surveillance. I was wrong. It took them literally a week to learn that I'm not frequenting the mass in a nearby church. That meant, to them, all out war; I had lived there for a few years, but then I had to move, because I realized that damage to my mental health is just too great.

I'm sure there were some normal people there and that they didn't care. OTOH there were a few old geezers who made a hobby out of bullying others. The point is that you don't care about what people know about you only until they start hurting you because of what they know. Then you wish they didn't know in the first place. You may be even correct that majority of people wouldn't care about you and your own life, but there probably will be someone who will care, and who will make your life quite miserable.

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

#394

Post by w_t_payne »

klibertp wrote: post #393
w_t_payne wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am vacillating. Fundamentally, I have a great deal of sympathy for the security services, understand the difficulty of the job that they have been tasked with, and can see no other reasonable way of achieving the goals that they have been set. However, my opinion flips and flops back and forth as I read each new revelation, get caught up in the moral outrage of the crowd, write something incendiary and provocative,…

> I think that at least some of the potential for abuse can be blunted by being more open and honest with ourselves, and by coming to terms with our own failings rather than trying to hide them. I thought the same for a long time. Then I moved - ironically - to the "big city" (actually, it's getting smaller by the year, but it was second largest in my country some years ago). I thought that living in a big apartment…

Funny thing that, our innate capacity and inclination towards cruelty. Humans are evil; 'tis our very nature.

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

#395

Post by nathan_long »

twelvechairs wrote: post #127
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…

I think you are making some poor semantic arguments yourself. The simple case is that of the NSA document ("collection directly from the servers of these US service providers") against google ("The U.S. government does not have direct access or a “back door” to the information stored in our data centers"). These are two competing claims, neither of which have been supported by evidence and hence the burden of proof r…

>> These are two competing claims

Steve Gibson has proposed a scenario that makes both claims credible: that the NSA has installed fiber optic splitters (hence the name "prism") directly upstream from Google, Apple, etc and therefore can sniff all the packets headed to their servers without their knowledge.

Notes from Gibson's podcast: https://www.grc.com/sn/sn-408.txt

This scenario would be a large expansion of what Mark Klein testified was being done at AT&T in 2006 (https://www.eff.org/files/filenode/att/presskit/ATT_onepager...). It would also explain why the NSA slides showed service providers being added gradually: it would take time to carry out these secret installations.

If Gibson's analysis is right, Google et al would have no knowledge of the taps, yet the NSA would have most of their traffic.

Yes, SSL traffic is still impenetrable. However, 1) it can be stored for cracking in the future (perhaps in the Bluffdale facility) and 2) lots of traffic, like email traveling between hosts, is not encrypted.

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

#396

Post by vidarh »

mpyne wrote: post #350
vidarh wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Greenwald's statement here about the Prism program is explaining what the NSA document claims. This is clear from context. If it is false, it is false in the same way as a book reviews that recaps events in a novel is false. And unless I've missed some major revelation, it "appears to be false" on the basis of press releases from companies with an interest in not being caught with their pants down. Forgive me for not…

It's false in that it's technically inaccurate, even given nothing but the slides. E.g. "direct and unilateral access". Unilateral means exactly that only one party needs to decide, the reality is that it is bilateral access (both parties must agree). So that's at least one thing Greenwald managed to screw up in his "book review" of a single slide. The question is whether blame lies with Greenwald alone, or if Snowde…

> the reality is that it is bilateral access (both parties must agree).

How do you know this on the basis of the slides alone?

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

#397

Post by w_t_payne »

klibertp wrote: post #393
w_t_payne wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am vacillating. Fundamentally, I have a great deal of sympathy for the security services, understand the difficulty of the job that they have been tasked with, and can see no other reasonable way of achieving the goals that they have been set. However, my opinion flips and flops back and forth as I read each new revelation, get caught up in the moral outrage of the crowd, write something incendiary and provocative,…

> I think that at least some of the potential for abuse can be blunted by being more open and honest with ourselves, and by coming to terms with our own failings rather than trying to hide them. I thought the same for a long time. Then I moved - ironically - to the "big city" (actually, it's getting smaller by the year, but it was second largest in my country some years ago). I thought that living in a big apartment…

I have to admit: I am having difficulty parsing it all; and this difficulty is not limited to the current media circus around PRISM.

For example:- last year I heard my grandfather-in-law admit playing a part in a massacre, which I am pretty sure is this one, 60 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lari_Massacre. The story was coming via a translator, so I am not sure of the details, but I got the vague impression that he was one of the organizers. What do you do with information like this? How should I feel? Mostly, I feel confused. Ironically, my wife was working with the FCO legal advisers when the survivors of abuses committed during British rule originally sued - (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/may/05/mau-mau-victims-...). Funny how the tentacles of past misdeeds reach to the future! Perhaps blown by that ill wind of legend?

Moving on to more contemporaneous misdeeds, when I bore mute witness the UN happily paying off drug dealers in West Africa: http://reliefweb.int/report/guinea-bissau/un-peacebuilding-f... ... not that the alternatives were any prettier, but still: When you deal with all the evil and mess of the world, you get a bit tainted yourself. As per my grandmother's folksy aphorism: "When you throw a glove in mud, the mud doesn't get 'glovey'. "

Compared to all the evil that is out there, PRISM seems pretty sweet and innocent - and, to be honest, the revelations were hardly a surprise since the (phone metadata bit) was leaked (or obliquely hinted at least) to me over 12 months ago.

So: I think my sense of unease is more strongly related to our collective capacity for evil than anything else.

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

#398

Post by sergiosgc »

Falling3 wrote: post #369
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.

>Do not stereotype teenagers. So you can do it for him/her? >Yes, most in my generation are shallow and passive You seem very smart - maybe a genius. I've noticed that the smarter people are the more likely they are to denigrate their peers who don't hold the same values. And they're less likely to enjoy other parts of life due to the belief that these things are beneath them. It's not a cool attitude and it will not…

Just like very strong people aren't usually aggressive, really smart people aren't socially aggressive. Once you get past the point of "I can bash your head in and you know it", there's no use for overt aggressiveness.

Really smart people are helpful, appreciative and generally nice. The almost smart are the dangerous ones.

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

#399

Post by unclebucknasty »

n09n wrote: post #387
unclebucknasty wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny that you should mention moving goalposts. That seems to be the M.O. of the NSA apologists. First, the arguments is "It's not content. It's just metadata, which is no different from addresses on postal mail envelopes". That's already a terrible rationalization. But, then, revelations come out that it is more than metadata being captured. It's actual call content and no warrant is required for a run of the mill "…

Probably never. A lot of us "apologists" think that this is actually a good thing, but many are unwilling to admit it, even to themselves. For me, it's simply a matter of valuing truth over privacy.

It actually would be better for the apologists to come out and say that you want the government to have carte blanche access to all of our information. At least it's honest and doesn't waste people's time in these trivial non-debates about peripheral non-issues.

OTOH, of course, that posture is all the more stupefying. Which "truth", exactly, is so important that we should all be willing to give up our privacy?

And, how is it that you find it so easy to trust our government with such power? After all, if it is untoward human beings who make truth-finding so difficult that these drastic, privacy-defiling measures are necessary, then why do you have so much trust for other fallible human beings to wield this power?

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

#400

Post by booruguru »

f1nch3r wrote: post #334
Udo wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having just watched yesterday's RealTime (Bill Maher's show) as well as the mainstream news coverage of the week, I have finally come to the conclusion that no significant number of Americans has a problem with living in a surveillance state, not even the host and guests on a faux liberal talk show. Except when I'm on HN, everywhere I go there just are no people who see anything fundamentally wrong with the entire pr…

Bill Maher has a vested interest in seeing Obama not be made a fool.

What are you talking about? Maher criticizes Obama all of the time...and he gets lots of flak from liberals because of it.
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