161–170 of 420 posts
It's ironic that when the Chinese attack against Google occurred, we thought the Chinese government was the most hostile state actor threat to worry about, but it turned out to be the US and UK government.
Why do people assume the Chinese government is not able to use similar techniques?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Chinese were targeting specific journalists and critics. Presumably to harass them. I'm not saying the US doesn't do that, but the evidence is not as clear.
They weren't actually. Google lied about that. It came out later that the real reason for the Chinese hacking gmail was to see which accounts had "lawful intercept" on them so they would know if their own spies had their cover blown. If the US knew about their spies, it was assumed that they would see the US sniffing the spies gmail accounts. http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-05-20/world/39385755...
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China doesn't have agreements with BT, AT&T etc which allow it to tap fibre in our countries at will. I'm sure they try some tapping, but they can't do it on the scale that GCHQ and the NSA have been outside China.
The Chinese do not need any agreements to tap undersea cables and are more than capable of doing just that.
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As a Brazilian that had ti witness the effects of US alliance during cold war... No, hell no. With a friend like that, who needs enemies?
You had enemies in the cold war. The USSR was much, much worse.
Sent aircraft carriers, ships and soldiers to help depose a democratically elected president, just because he wanted closer ties with China and wanted to do agrarian reform.
Disappeared lots of people (I don't know any personally, because I am too young, but I DO know personally lots of people that still want disappeared people back)
Spied on us (erm, that part still applies, no?).
Sabotaged our agriculture (ie: some plagues started after US agrarian engineers visited us to "help" with our agricultural technology).
Supported and funded very repressive crazy dictators that killed boatloads of people.
What the USSR did for us during the cold war: Gave us some really cool technical books in spanish (yes, our language is portuguese, but spanish is good enough), I still have a bunch of them, they are really good, somewhere around my house there is calculus books, structural engineering, and lots of other cool stuff, russian books but written in spanish, targeted at Latin America.
USSR borrowed us some scientists (Russia and Ucraine still do, by the way).
Helped our exiles, not only left wing ones, but right wing ones too.
Sold us some very interesting stuff, even if shitty sometimes (example: during the cold war Lada cars were very popular here).
Computers! (for example when some companies here tried to develop a computer compatible with the Macintosh, US government helped Apple in forcing them to stop, while Russians borrowed us some engineers and books)
Now, who were our real enemies in cold war again?
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You should respond to his argument instead of accusing him of brainwashing. The latter does nothing to advance the conversation.
Can't. I so disbelieve in his argument that I won't sign up for G+. Besides, as Upton Sinclair was fond of saying, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
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Would you still feel Google had screwed up if the way the US government got the data was to burglarize one of their datacenters and tap directly into the machines' CPUs and memory buses?
Yes (search for SSAE16 or SAS70). However, I would not feel the same way if US government would have used Area 51 technology to hack 4096 public key encryption. The difference from my perspective is that in "burglary" scenario (and un-encrypted traffic scenario as well) Google failed to protect against well known threats. And in the "alien technology" case Google did everything you can at the known security/technolog…
Wow. Just wow.
I think it's pretty clear that we need both technical and legislative fixes to NSA surveillance. Just one of the two isn't enough: to get be even vaguely confident that surveillance ends, we need both. The technical fixes I can't speak to, but the legislative ones I've been thinking about for a while. In the last week, there have been two prominent bills announced to deal with surveillance: - Bill 1: The FISA Improve…
Nor should it. Undermining the encryption used by legitimate surveillance targets and intercepting their communications is what the NSA is for. The point of legislative solutions isn't to stop having a signals intelligence agency. It's to limit that agency to spying on people it legitimately believes to be terrorists, agents of hostile foreign powers and the like.
If you have a mobile phone, you can be tracked, even if there is no GPS on the device. Besides this if the NSA chooses, they can track practically ANYONE in the world, all they need is a mobile number. I would not be surprised if this is actually one of the tools they have.
How?
Due to the nature of how GSM and mobile operators integrate when roaming. When a mobile operator signs an international roaming agreement, they setup signalling links between their switches and VLR's (Visitor Location Register).
The mobile operator in the visited country needs to authenticate you against your home network, this happens via SS7.
Once this link is established, it is assumed to be trusted, and most operators DO NOT apply any filtering on these commands. So with a carefully crafted SS7 command, you could request the location of a mobile subscriber, even if they have not even attempted to join your network.
Now here is where it gets interesting, get access to send ss7 commands from an operator with many international roaming agreements, and you can get details on practically any subscriber. Get access to 2-4 (i.e AT&T, T-Mobile, Vodaphone) of these massive tier1 operators, and you can get the location of practically everyone with a mobile handset.
It's ironic that when the Chinese attack against Google occurred, we thought the Chinese government was the most hostile state actor threat to worry about, but it turned out to be the US and UK government.
Why do people assume the Chinese government is not able to use similar techniques?
Of course the Chinese gov is able to do so without any repercussions. The difference should be that in a democracy you can't abuse your power without repercussions.
Oh, the hypocrisy.... > "Bypassing that system is illegal for a good reason." Yes, so is invasion of privacy. Yet Google has no problem breaking the law and violating civil rights for profit. > "Unfortunately we live in a world where all too often, laws are for the little people." Yeah, like tax laws and privacy laws... If you want to get on this high horse, you shouldn't be working for Google.
Erm, what? Which law did they break, and which civil rights did they violate?