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If I scroll the Reddit frontpage (without being logged in), I am not seeing any NSA stories, despite being on the top of /r/WorldNews, /r/news, etc. Anyone know the story behind that?
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When your opponent uses Navy submarines to tap undersea cables right under the Soviets' noses, you probably shouldn't trust your leased fiber with unencrypted data. This interception could occur where undersea cables make landfall without any datacenter antics.
Why would NSA agents go through all the trouble of tapping cables when they could probably just gain employment at Google and do whatever they want. I don't think encryption would make a difference here.
1. Has the technical credentials and interviewing skills to get hired at Google (not easy). 2. Has a security clearance. 3. Wants to be a spy. 4. Can get themselves assigned to the team working on datacenter interconnects. 5. Can set up a tap on the interconnect without getting caught.
That sounds both hard and expensive to me.
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> actions taken abroad aimed at non-US persons. And there is an interesting counterpoint to that, e.g. > "If the Americans eavesdropped on cellphones in Germany, they broke German law on German soil, and those responsible must be held accountable." http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2013/10/28/world/obama-unaw...
They did not break German Law. Germany still has past WWII contracts with the Allied Nations in certain areas. http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&tl=en&u=ht...
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Typically, if a diplomat constantly breaks the laws of the nation they're sent to in this manner, they get kicked out, and if the sender country in question keeps sending this sort of diplomat, the embassy would eventually be closed.
I cannot imagine Germany closing the US Embassy.
It's hard not to come to the conclusion that these activities were essentially criminal. I don't see how the administration can fail to disavow them, investigate them fully, and hold their instigators accountable. It feels like Special Prosecutor time. That aside, let me re-make a point I keep making: Google had no knowledge of NSA's physical compromise of their data centers. But still, they pushed harder than anyone…
> It's hard not to come to the conclusion that these activities were essentially criminal. I don't see how the administration can fail to disavow them, investigate them fully, and hold their instigators accountable. It feels like Special Prosecutor time. The government takes the position that their agents are almost completely unconstrained by law when it comes to actions taken abroad aimed at non-US persons. Even we…
I am not saying it's OK, but in that case, most US citizens aren't even affected. In the case of surveillance, data from US citizens is being directly compromised. Their attempt to do what they want to foreign individuals with surveillance actually causes some collateral damage to US citizens.
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Yea, but as collateral damage, the rope hung the tech companies and damaged their brands by who knows how much.
They deserve to have their brands damaged. They didn't do their due diligence in encrypting data going through leased fibers -- they should have had the foresight to realize what a phenomenally bad thing this was. They didn't, hence why I'll never trust them again.
Let's say that they encrypted everything, and then you learn the NSA had kidnapped the children of one of their network engineers and forced him to turn over some keys. Again, whose brand deserves to be damaged here, the company, or the immoral nation state with vast military industrial resources at its disposal?
Why do I sometimes get the feeling that people specifically want to hate on these companies when the real outrage should be for the government spooks.
It's hard not to come to the conclusion that these activities were essentially criminal. I don't see how the administration can fail to disavow them, investigate them fully, and hold their instigators accountable. It feels like Special Prosecutor time. That aside, let me re-make a point I keep making: Google had no knowledge of NSA's physical compromise of their data centers. But still, they pushed harder than anyone…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
When your opponent uses Navy submarines to tap undersea cables right under the Soviets' noses, you probably shouldn't trust your leased fiber with unencrypted data. This interception could occur where undersea cables make landfall without any datacenter antics.
I've seen no indication that Google considers the NSA any sort of opponent.
“It’s an arms race,” said Eric Grosse, vice president for security engineering at Google, based in Mountain View, Calif. “We see these government agencies as among the most skilled players in this game.”
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> It's hard not to come to the conclusion that these activities were essentially criminal. I don't see how the administration can fail to disavow them, investigate them fully, and hold their instigators accountable. It feels like Special Prosecutor time. The government takes the position that their agents are almost completely unconstrained by law when it comes to actions taken abroad aimed at non-US persons. Even we…
> The government outright tortured people for years, and nothing has come of it. I am not saying it's OK, but in that case, most US citizens aren't even affected. In the case of surveillance, data from US citizens is being directly compromised. Their attempt to do what they want to foreign individuals with surveillance actually causes some collateral damage to US citizens.
Google is one of the few companies that could pull it off. They have $56 billion in cash and nothing to do with it apparently. They generate $12 billion in profit annually and growing.
They have more financial resources, computing power, and brain power than the NSA does, and they're one of the few companies on earth that can say that (the only?).
A billion a year thrown at choking the NSA with a flood of data, I'd argue, would work extraordinarily well.
The NSA has a substantial budget (but how much spare budget?), but I don't believe they could afford the processing and storage costs that can be generated from a billion dollar per year effort of bogus data spewing (particularly if Google matches it with a dramatic effort put toward encryption R&D to multiply the cost the NSA suffers significantly more than just basic processing & storage costs).
The NSA's grand new data center in Utah cost billions and will have taken years to build. Google could probably force them to attempt to build a new one every single year forever, particularly given how bloated every effort by the government is and easy Google could generate 'infinite' volumes of data. Google should pro-actively help Yahoo, Facebook and others out in teaming up to drown the NSA.
The biggest threat to Google is the NSA. Google should act accordingly. Just as they would react with financial investments to any other competitive threat.