111–120 of 135 posts
The land of the free and the home of the brave. Indeed.
Hey, you make jokes but where did the Guardian relocate when the UK was preventing them from publishing leak-related stories?
The story in the Guardian by Antony Loewenstein certainly reports that William Binney's personal opinion as a former employee of NSA is that NSA is gathering up and recording whatever it can and that NSA has a "totalitarian mentality." That is a very important issue, if true, but it is at least debatable that NSA is really that thorough in its actual practices and really that generally blatant in disregarding the civ…
Or maybe foreign intelligence is simply far more difficult.
I can't imagine its easy to intercept high level government communications in Russia where they can simply order US bases companies to turn over user data.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
“All cats are libertarians. Completely dependent on others but fully convinced of their own independence.”
Good joke, but sort of backfires! Aren't cats notoriously good at surviving in the wild? Both feral and domestic cats (if they have to).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
1) It doesn't require a revelation to be career ending for the person involved to be believe it could be damaging (and therefore be susceptible to blackmail). 2) It doesn't require all politicians to be be lack personal integrity and give way to blackmail, even a few can tip a balance. 3) Selective/distorted leaking could also tip the balance in places as to who gets elected. 4) Calls could be monitored to take advan…
Indeed. CIA director lost his job when the FBI spied on his mistress' email account. No.2 Admiral of Strategic Command lost his position too for some gambling scandal. Certainly possible to coerce or blackmail other positions of power that are unelected. Not everybody is shameless like Anthony Weiner
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, what would it take to record the whole US? One version says that we make ~5 calls a day on our phones [1] and ownership hovers at 80-90% of the 18+ population (and probably a bunch younger). The US is 311 million, lets say 80% of 300 million, so 240 million people making 5 calls / day. The average call length is 1.8 minutes right now [2]. So we've got 240 mil person * 5 calls / person-day * 365 days * 1.8 min /…
Standard POTS audio is a single 3.4kHz bandwidth channel. Compressing VOIP codecs allow a wider range, but still sound great at 12kb/s. So without any non-COTS tech and without sacrificing the lilt of grandma's sparkly voice, we're already at a 90% reduction of your numbers. So let's go with 190 TB/day. Say we keep 30 days in hot disk storage, and spool it off to a digital tape robot afterward. We'd need a few thousa…
On the final point, agree. This is in the range where its cost is round off error in some of the large security budgets. (+ probably far more for the labor, ops, ect...)
That was one of the main reasons I worked through it, because it sounds like a horrifically large task, but its really not even that crazy in terms of data rates and storage when you break it down.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, what would it take to record the whole US? One version says that we make ~5 calls a day on our phones [1] and ownership hovers at 80-90% of the 18+ population (and probably a bunch younger). The US is 311 million, lets say 80% of 300 million, so 240 million people making 5 calls / day. The average call length is 1.8 minutes right now [2]. So we've got 240 mil person * 5 calls / person-day * 365 days * 1.8 min /…
Standard POTS audio is a single 3.4kHz bandwidth channel. Compressing VOIP codecs allow a wider range, but still sound great at 12kb/s. So without any non-COTS tech and without sacrificing the lilt of grandma's sparkly voice, we're already at a 90% reduction of your numbers. So let's go with 190 TB/day. Say we keep 30 days in hot disk storage, and spool it off to a digital tape robot afterward. We'd need a few thousa…
The story in the Guardian by Antony Loewenstein certainly reports that William Binney's personal opinion as a former employee of NSA is that NSA is gathering up and recording whatever it can and that NSA has a "totalitarian mentality." That is a very important issue, if true, but it is at least debatable that NSA is really that thorough in its actual practices and really that generally blatant in disregarding the civ…
Some of the thoughtful points brought up in discussion of my parent comment of course address important issues that I didn't discuss at length in the parent comment. I should make clear that I fully agree with everyone here that if the common people of the United States (or of any other country) don't work together zealously and with mental toughness and solidarity to defend basic civil rights, then we are all hosed. I've seen one country's transformation from stark dictatorship to democracy and rule by law first-hand,[1] and that experience makes me very eager indeed never to see the United States slide into dictatorship. Similarly, I'd be happy to see the "tyranny of the Taliban"[2] reported on by the Guardian newspaper (the same newspaper that is the source for the article we are all discussing here) fall everywhere, and never return. People who have the dictatorial impulse try to spread their control as far as they can reach, and it takes concerted action to fight for and maintain freedom, which is why I frequently recommend that my fellow Hacker News participants study the writings of the Albert Einstein Institution,[3] based on the experiences of people power movements that have overthrown dictatorships.
Simply put, I am one of many Americans who has not only participated in public protests about NSA activities in view of my local police and TV cameras,[4] and I will continue to decry and protest about interference of my freedom or my family's freedom by anyone. Along the way, I am trying to engage in what one thoughtful comment described as discussions around "threat mitigation and risk mitigation," to understand better what private actions on my own part, what governmental actions by my government, and what actions by other actors will best maximize your freedom and mine.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5985720
[2] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/nov/18/terrorism.afgha...
The story in the Guardian by Antony Loewenstein certainly reports that William Binney's personal opinion as a former employee of NSA is that NSA is gathering up and recording whatever it can and that NSA has a "totalitarian mentality." That is a very important issue, if true, but it is at least debatable that NSA is really that thorough in its actual practices and really that generally blatant in disregarding the civ…
That's just as speculative as absolutely every other bit of speculation that's flying around, though.
If you're in the NSA's shoes, and it turns out your budget is insufficient to analyze the mass of stuff you're recording, you don't stop recording stuff. You'd use this "analysis crisis" to justify additional budget for expanded analysis efforts, especially if it takes the form of automatic systems developed and sold by contractors located in the districts of selected legislators.
My own speculation is that yes, they're recording and keeping (for a little while, at least) absolutely everything they can get their hands on, doing massive damage to the ideals of freedom and democracy and America in general in the process, but surprise surprise, all that recording simply turns out to be much less useful than everyone had hoped.
"The police," broadly speaking, have argued for (often successfully) more and more high-tech spying capability for many decades now, but it's not obvious that such capabilities have made any big improvement in public safety. We may all fantasize about magic wands that could make our jobs easier; for some reason, American authoritarians actually believe they can buy such a thing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They are not allowed to spy on US persons without a warrant. Full stop. The law is quite clear. Further, the court ruled that metadata was exempt from protection because, in part, it was voluntarily handed over to a third party by the end user. I'd love to hear how you came to your conclusion that only politicians, et. al. enjoy such protections.
While that use to be true, it isn't anymore. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_summary_of_the_Patriot_... https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130917/13395324556/court... https://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security/government-confi...
What exactly used to be true that is no longer true?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So what your saying is you'd be able to destroy all crawlable evidence on the internet and wipe the memories of all your friends and strip out every reference to a "gay bar" or the like from your finances? I think you greatly overestimate how effective people could be in wiping their fingerprints from the internet. There is a reason people talk about once you post something on the internet its out there forever. You…
The parent comment is saying that those things wouldn't be created in the first place if the environment were already hostile to them. You can hide your present to some extent, but not erase the past.
That isn't how the internet or public communication works. The Nazis were able to identify the people they sent to concentration camps because of past associations, even once it became clear what they were doing because people don't live in a vacuum.
By the same token, you aren't going to be able to nuke all your facebook posts, twitter posts, etc. that might obviously flag you as gay "magically" whenever a fascist type government comes to power. The evidence is already there and completely out of your control.
If bad people come to power you are screwed regardless of what the NSA is currently doing. At worst, this shaves a few months off the process.
The most hilarious part of this is, all of you arguing with me about this in a public forum. Do you think you can magically go back and delete all these posts if some truly evil people came to power?
Nope.
I'm amused by the downvotes and arguments because:
1) You've publicly provided information that isn't going to go away already to show which camp you'd end up in if the people arguing with me are right. This information isn't vanishing simply because its posted publicly on the internet. It isn't going to magical become invisible in the future.
2) I've said I agree with the basic premise in my parent comment and basically said it was people who were vulnerable/edge cases that are getting screwed. That is still going to the base regardless of what happens because you only need control of 51% of the electorate to remain in power. The US electorate has shown, consistently, it will believe lies.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09... "For now, there appears to be little political reason to back down. A Washington Post-ABC News poll taken Sept. 5 to Sept. 7 found that 51 percent of voters think Obama would raise their taxes, even though his plan would actually cut taxes for the overwhelming majority of Americans. Obama has proposed eliminating income taxes on seniors making less than $50,000 a year, but 41 percent of those seniors say their income taxes would go up in an Obama administration."
The ability to fabricate falsehoods and get 51% of people to believe it is a far, far greater threat than the NSA. The fact none of you seem to notice this or even care worries me more than the NSA does. If I can get 51% of people to believe any lie I tell them, I can rule any democracy in the world.