151–160 of 641 posts
I am going to be obliterated for this comment! Does the fact they've caught 300 terrorists in anyway justify what they're doing? I am not saying it does, I just wondered what people's thoughts were (although I can guess!). It's interesting that it was included in the article in an attempt to give it some 'balance'..
Honest, maybe naive question, but what types of programmers actively help build and maintain systems like this? I turned down a job for a company that is less than a mile from my house because I viewed their business as immoral. Hard for me to fathom anyone taking a job, helping to build systems like this. I get that many of the components of a system like this could be seen as harmless. However, a system of this com…
Um... surely this has to be a spoof. "Select foreignness factor"?? really? The user interface and way this is done just seems to amateur hour to believe this is actually true
The numbers seem way off and too keystone cop to be true. 20 terabytes is not large for the NSA. It can search BCC?? Only the sender has them. so everything would have to be collected at each ISP (which isn't impossible).. but I think the guardian has been trolled.
I guess what we need to ask ourselves now is whether we want any secrets at all. A true Panopticon -- a society where everyone could see what everyone else was doing -- might bring a "freedom" from certain types of subterfuge, and attack.
Then again, I don't want to live in it.
That leads us to the question of how we handle the flood of data when looking for hostile activity, because governments are certain to use available technology to trap, parse and search that flood.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This presentation is from 2008. According to the presentation on PRISM Facebook joined the program on 3 June 2009. That would indicate that the searches here are based, most likely, not on participation by Facebook but by passive sniffing of HTTP traffic and then session reconstruction.
In 2008 Facebook ran on HTTP, so back then it would have been easy to sniff this data. I believe Gmail also transferred in plain text back then. When those companies switched to HTTPS, the NSA likely 'leverage some pressure' to get them to join PRISM, which puts the data back in this system.
[0] https://www.facebook.com/blog/blog.php?post=486790652130
I am curious: Suppose this is true and NSA analysts have the technical capability to access enormous amount of information with no authorization. But if they do do that, agains the law and the rules and their actions are recorded in the system, they could face penalties no? I mean I could kill someone with a hammer technically, that doesn't make hammer bad per se, does it ?
What I'm trying to ask is: with all the hullabaloo Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc have made about individual, manual reviews of information requests, are we still being lied to? I suspect that we obviously haven't been told the whole story by these companies, and that they are a lot more implicit in this than they let on, but this article seems almost like definitive proof that they did indeed allow unlimited access to user information.
If this is saying what I think it's saying, then I feel seriously back stabbed by the startup darlings -- Zuckerberg, Brin and Page, etc -- that so many people here love and idolize. They should absolutely be held accountable.
This is brilliant, I love the screenshots: Foreignness factor: The person has stated that he is located outside the U.S. Human intelligence source indicates person is located outside the U.s. The person is a user of storage media seized outside the U.s. Foreign govt indicates that the person is located outside the U.s. Phone number country code indicates the person is located outside the U.s. Phone number is register…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The person is a user of storage media seized outside the U.s. Interesting, so everyone who ever hit a MegaUpload link is potentially a foreign entity?
Kind of puts into perspective why they would coordinate such a massive raid on Megaupload. The target may not have even been the data - merely seizing the data puts anybody who has accessed the megaupload website as an easy target.
Interesting; it appears someone failed to redact some data from the slides. In the Facebook chat example, the message is "to" 1536051595. Using the Facebook Graph API, we can gather information based on this ID: http://graph.facebook.com/1536051595 Which leads us to the Facebook profile ( https://www.facebook.com/arash.gorjipour.5 ) of an individual, real or contrived, named "Arash Gorjipour". His email address and p…
Probably picked at random. The screenshot 'test case' could have been you. We are all in the database after all.