91–100 of 110 posts
Reposting this from a previous thread ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5897654 )... I remember during the Boston bombing investigation, Tim Clemente, a former FBI counter-terrorism agent, told Erin Burnett on CNN that they could go back and get access to the content of the calls between the deceased bomber and his wife, Katherine Russell. After some Googling, I found a partial transcript of the CNN interview...…
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I read some research about provably secure steganography , which claim that if you know the statistics of the communication channel, you can build secure steno, at least to the level one way functions. So it is interesting if in reality there is a stego detection tool. www.cs.umn.edu/~hopper/tc-stego.pdf Btw one of the authors is Luis von ahn, the founder of duelingo, the language teaching/translation app.
> if you know the statistics of the communication channel, you can build secure steno That's a pretty big if though. I mean, if you miss one nuance the NSA didn't, then your scheme could be toast. At least in the high data limit.
Also, most of the research in the field has been done on black and white image, so it not directly usefull.
And come to think on it, if we're talking about image stego, what prevents the NSA from controlling the statistical distributions of output of cameras in such a way that stego will be noticed(even after some image transforms) ?
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I'm curious about the storage media they might have... is it just plain old rotational harddrives? Who made them -- Seagate? Western Digital? It's curious that no word has come out from that front -- "wow, this customer is requesting a _LOT_ of storage devices... like, more storage space than what is available in the world". And really, because of this I think the idea that they might have some in-house innovation is…
I am sure a lot of it is tape. IBM sells a 900 PB tape library [1]. They could store the actual phone calls on tape, and then only put the necessary metadata for finding it on hard drives. [1] http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/storage/tape/ts3500/
Nice to see somebody pointing out the obvious bullshit regarding the Utah facility's real purpose (content storage, not metadata). What kind of iron do you need to run NLP on a day's worth of content (let's limit "content" to voice transcriptions from phone calls)? Suppose I want to pick out "bomb" in near real-time? How many $billions for total information awareness? Even the best algo is going to produce false posi…
I'm curious about the storage media they might have... is it just plain old rotational harddrives? Who made them -- Seagate? Western Digital? It's curious that no word has come out from that front -- "wow, this customer is requesting a _LOT_ of storage devices... like, more storage space than what is available in the world". And really, because of this I think the idea that they might have some in-house innovation is…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here's a question I've been pondering: Did the NSA want PRISM to leak? Having everyone in the world know that someone is watching will have significant sociological effects. It is akin to the idea that "God is watching". Thousands of years ago the fear of God and promise of reward was the carrot and stick that resulted in people working together for the greater good rather than pursuing self interest. It was the invi…
I've also wondered if perhaps Snowden is still on CIA payroll. Maybe the NSA didn't want this leaked but CIA did.
So far he's been presented as a lone wolf with assistance now from groups like Wikileaks but acquiring data on his own and initiating things up himself. But that may not be the case.
Reposting this from a previous thread ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5897654 )... I remember during the Boston bombing investigation, Tim Clemente, a former FBI counter-terrorism agent, told Erin Burnett on CNN that they could go back and get access to the content of the calls between the deceased bomber and his wife, Katherine Russell. After some Googling, I found a partial transcript of the CNN interview...…
Here's a question I've been pondering: Did the NSA want PRISM to leak? Having everyone in the world know that someone is watching will have significant sociological effects. It is akin to the idea that "God is watching". Thousands of years ago the fear of God and promise of reward was the carrot and stick that resulted in people working together for the greater good rather than pursuing self interest. It was the invi…
The NSA's endless budget expansion is now at risk, while almost half of the House of Reps voted to nearly shut the program down last week.
No doubt, the next mid-term cycle will be dominated by people on the left and right, campaigning on the promise to shut down these insane programs. The next campaign for President will likely turn out the same.
From Obama's perspective, this is a complete nightmare. His legacy as President will be tarnished, with even the true believers now deeply disillusioned.
So here's my startup idea: Stenographically-encoded messages in high-def porn. It's secure communications with a built-in subscription model! Porn accounts for a huge chunk of internet traffic today, and video doesn't compress too well. Get enough people exchanging messages in porn videos and all of a sudden, those listening in have a whole hell of a lot more bytes to sift through. (I'm only half joking.)
If I am not mistaken you mean "steganography" and not "stenography" as the latter is the person(s) that transcribe in a courtroom. I have never seen a spell check that had the word steganography in it though.
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Recent history tells us there's proof out there, and that it typically follows a denial by Obama or the intelligence communities.
I get your emotional position, but this is just some bad logic. "If the government denies it, it must be true" is not a useful tool. How about "recent history says that this kind of thing could potentially be true, and that the government wouldn't admit if it was."
RUSSELL TICE: ...The NSA were targeting individuals. In that case, they were judges like the Supreme Court. I held in my hand Judge Alito's targeting information for his phones and his staff and his family.
If true, that's... mind boggling. What possible valid reason could the NSA have to secretly monitor the calls of a US Supreme Court justice? And his staff, AND family?
I really hope this allegation is false.
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> if you know the statistics of the communication channel, you can build secure steno That's a pretty big if though. I mean, if you miss one nuance the NSA didn't, then your scheme could be toast. At least in the high data limit.
You're right, that's a very big if. Also, most of the research in the field has been done on black and white image, so it not directly usefull. And come to think on it, if we're talking about image stego, what prevents the NSA from controlling the statistical distributions of output of cameras in such a way that stego will be noticed(even after some image transforms) ?
It would be easy enough to make a one-click batch process, and would help provide cover noise for real communication channels.