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The NSA: An Inside View

lorensr.me

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Re: The NSA: An Inside View

#101

Post by kabdib »

hnriot wrote: post #94
colinbartlett wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have a great point, and the TL;DR of OP's entire post is "Unless you're doing something wrong, you have nothing to worry about." Which is the slimmest argument I ever hear in favor of these pervasive civil rights violations. I've never been a terrorist, never given any information to a foreign enemy, hell, I've barely ever even broken the law. But I do have a personal interest in Russia, speak Russian, and have b…

Doubt it, Russia isn't the enemy anymore, it is a country in disarray, trying to pick up the pieces after communism.

If there is anything to learn here, it is that a specific enemy is not necessary. You could get back-roomed for having said "I like Froot Loops" in a private email a decade ago. It could be /arbitrary/.

Re: The NSA: An Inside View

#102

Post by sitkack »

lorendsr wrote: post #27
andrewcooke wrote: post #6

The NSA is not a law enforcement agency. I am not one either. But I still have to obey the law. Maybe that's not what's implied by that statement? But if not, what on earth is meant (more exactly, what was the author's intent in saying something that seems obvious and irrelevant if taken at face value; what am I expected to infer?)?

I meant that the NSA is only looking at your information if a judge suspects that you are a foreign agent. It will not look at your information to determine whether you have done something else illegal, which is what it would do if it were part of a police state.

If I run a program to look at communications and it decides that I may have done something of interest, would you look at my file then? Where is the separation between collecting and "looking" when various pieces of code automatically determine interest and connections?

Re: The NSA: An Inside View

#103

Post by SchizoDuckie »

What bothers me most about the NSA stories is that all the damage control seems to be revolving around not pissing the US citizens off because their data is collected.

What about the rest of the world? They just have a carte blanche to tap everything from everyone 'regular joe' from outside of the US can't do Jack Shit about it, other than help invent newer and stronger encryption methods, since all our governments have their arms up the US's ass.

Re: The NSA: An Inside View

#104

Post by alfiejohn_ »

cypherpunks01 wrote: post #71
alfiejohn_ wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did your post have to go through some sort of internal review before you were allowed to publish it? I find it weird that you're allowed to blog, let alone blog about the NSA.

See bottom of post: This essay was deemed UNCLASSIFIED and approved for public release by the NSA's office of Pre-Publication Review on 11/21/2013 (PP 14-0081).

Thanks cypherpunks01.

I flagged it for my to-read list for after work. I'm an idiot and didn't RTFA.

Re: The NSA: An Inside View

#105

Post by sitkack »

lorendsr wrote: post #95
intslack wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/05/us-dea-sod-idUSBRE... >One current federal prosecutor learned how agents were using SOD tips after a drug agent misled him, the prosecutor told Reuters. In a Florida drug case he was handling, the prosecutor said, a DEA agent told him the investigation of a U.S. citizen began with a tip from an informant. When the prosecutor pressed for more information, he said, a DEA superv…

That sounds illegal. In same article: >Wiretap tips forwarded by the SOD usually come from foreign governments, U.S. intelligence agencies or court-authorized domestic phone recordings. Because warrantless eavesdropping on Americans is illegal, tips from intelligence agencies are generally not forwarded to the SOD until a caller's citizenship can be verified, according to one senior law enforcement official and one f…

So both the NSA and the DEA,IRS and ? are breaking the law. http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/07/us-dea-irs-idUSBRE...

How about they stop the illegal collection and then the illegal sharing cannot occur.

Re: The NSA: An Inside View

#106

Post by mrobot »

One thing that always bothers me is the assumption that we dislike the NSA because we're worried about them reading our personal emails and looking at our photos, and.. "you know.. our Instagramming". We should know it's not about anyone going through the process of reading our communications, it's about having automated systems hooked up to them, keeping them, and having the ability to use them. The human and electronic pieces of this system can act on you and change your life, even without you ever knowing about it.

Being hooked up to machines like this is losing a large part of our own power as a check and balance in our own government. We won't do it. If this program is "necessary" to fight terrorism, will i be considered a terrorist if i continue to disagree? What if i become very effective at disagreeing?

I believe that most should not be very concerned because most are not sending email to intelligence targets.

It's not just directly to intelligence targets. Can someone remind me what 3 hops from a base group of 117,000 targets is again? We're not talking about a home handwritten address book, this is linkedin, everyone i sold shit to on craigslist, everyone i've ever contacted. Heads per hop is like 100, at least. Anyway, should that group be concerned?

The Agency is an intelligence organization, not a law enforcement agency.

So what? Just because there's a boundary between the NSA and everyone else doesn't mean they aren't exploiting the same broken interpretation of Terry v Ohio to build systematic unreasonable-unarticulated-suspicion writ-of-assistance privacy violations. We disagree with the principle, not just the NSA. AT&T works directly with the CIA, the CIA works with the FBI, sharing on that side is just a cluster.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/10/data-sharing-la...

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/07/us/cia-is-said-to-pay-att-...

http://bordc.org/newsletter/2013/12/#data

And I would prefer a world in which spying was unnecessary. But humanity is not there yet.

No one disagrees that intelligence is necessary. We disagree with being wired up to management and machines that can (and always will) easily make mistakes. Privacy is a right, violating it to feed the machine is already diminishing us.

I refuse to eat your mayo.

Re: The NSA: An Inside View

#107

Post by rl3 »

sedev wrote: post #60
lorendsr wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for letting me know about parallel construction - I hadn't heard of it. You're right, abuses probably have happened more often than those caught.

If you'd never heard of parallel construction before today, that seems to powerfully undermine your credibility. Why should we take you more seriously than someone who says "I was a secretary at the NSA for years and I never heard of anything bad happening, therefore nothing bad happened"?

"I was in the Computer Network Operations Development Program, and my office was S32X: Signals Intelligence Directorate (S) > Data Acquisition (S3) > Tailored Access Operations (S32) > Special Tactics and Techniques (S32X)."

I think it is reasonable to say that he is slightly more informed to speak on these issues than a secretary.

It's really not surprising he hasn't heard of parallel reconstruction, considering:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6911200

Also, there's no need to be so hostile. It's simply his point of view, and by the very nature of the restricted work environment at intelligence agencies, it's not reasonable to expect him to have a complete picture.

To quote the very post of his that you're replying to:

"You're right, abuses probably have happened more often than those caught."

He's hardly saying nothing bad ever happened, or that all abuses are known for that matter.

Re: The NSA: An Inside View

#108

Post by emiliobumachar »

sedev wrote: post #55

This reads like it was penned by someone who's never heard of the Stanford Prison experiment or Milgram's research. When I read "I have a very high opinion of my former coworkers ... NSA employees are the law-abiding type ... You take a long automated psych test that flags troubling personality traits," I take away "the NSA is full of the kind of person who won't look at the big picture, who will follow orders withou…

Minor nitpick: at cryptography you are not trusting math, because it has not been mathematically proven that no algorythm exists to break a certain crypto method in five seconds on an off-the-shelf processors given only the cyphertext (except possibly for one-time pads with their drawbacks).

But after hardworking experts try and fail for years to break a crypto method, you can somewhat trust that attackers won't find it either.

Re: The NSA: An Inside View

#109

Post by aaaahhhhh »

Even if we accept that the NSA is comprised solely of benevolent actors practicing perfect discretion, and will remain so for the indefinite future, the mere act of collecting "everything" is an enormous hazard. OP recognizes as much:

CBS reported that in 2007 the US suffered an "espionage Pearl Harbor" in which entities "broke into all of the high tech agencies, all of the military agencies, and downloaded terabytes of information."

What's to stop this from happening again to the NSA? They couldn't even implement audit trails internally -- there should be huge doubt as to the agency's competence in securing their data.

Also, OP, did you not hear about parallel construction? How do you rationalize your statement that the NSA "is not a law enforcement agency" in light of this?

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/08/dea-and-nsa-team-intel...

Re: The NSA: An Inside View

#110

Post by jpatokal »

alfiejohn_ wrote: post #63
lorendsr wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No offense taken. I was not asked to write this, nor guided in its contents by the government.

Did your post have to go through some sort of internal review before you were allowed to publish it? I find it weird that you're allowed to blog, let alone blog about the NSA.

Did you read the friendly article?

This essay was deemed UNCLASSIFIED and approved for public release by the NSA's office of Pre-Publication Review on 11/21/2013 (PP 14-0081).

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