Edward Snowden: The Untold Story • Hacker News Board

Re: Edward Snowden: The Untold Story

#131

Post by grecy » Wed, Aug 13, 2014, 8:27 PM UTC

chatmasta wrote: post #68

belorn wrote: post #47

A division of NSA hackers attempted in 2012 to remotely install an exploit in one of the core routers at a major Internet service provider in Syria, which was in the midst of a prolonged civil war. But something went wrong, and the router was bricked instead, which caused Syria to suddenly lose all connection to the Internet. So in middle of a war zone, US conducted sabotage to core infrastructure of an other nation,…

> In middle of a war zone > In peacetime So which is it? There was (is) a war raging in Syria, the US has interests there -- like it or not -- and the NSA is a US intelligence agency. This story sounds like an example of the NSA just doing its job. I have no problem with the NSA spying on foreign communications or disrupting them. After all, that's their job. What else would we use the NSA for? What I do have a probl…

> I have no problem with the NSA spying on foreign communications or disrupting them.

Great. The US is basically in perpetual war, so I'm sure you've got no problem with other countries doing exactly the same thing to the US!

Re: Edward Snowden: The Untold Story

#132

Post by bgentry » Wed, Aug 13, 2014, 8:33 PM UTC

> Indeed, some of his fellow travelers have already committed some egregious mistakes. Last year, Greenwald found himself unable to open the encryption on a large trove of secrets from GCHQ—the British counterpart of the NSA—that Snowden had passed to him. So he sent his longtime partner, David Miranda, from their home in Rio to Berlin to get another set from Poitras. But in making the arrangements, The Guardian booked a transfer through London. Tipped off, probably as a result of GCHQ surveillance, British authorities detained Miranda as soon as he arrived and questioned him for nine hours. In addition, an external hard drive containing 60 gigabits of data—about 58,000 pages of documents—was seized. Although the documents had been encrypted using a sophisticated program known as True Crypt, the British authorities discovered a paper of Miranda’s with the password for one of the files, and they were able to decrypt about 75 pages. (Greenwald has still not gained access to the complete GCHQ documents.)

FYI, Glenn Greenwald is denying that any of the claims in this paragraph are true, and says that Wired never even contacted him or Miranda about the article:

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/499570835989213184 https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/499570963638669312 https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/499572407284563969 https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/499587347630284800

Re: Edward Snowden: The Untold Story

#133

Post by jwjwtest » Wed, Aug 13, 2014, 8:34 PM UTC

wwwwwww

Re: Edward Snowden: The Untold Story

#134

Post by awhitty » Wed, Aug 13, 2014, 8:41 PM UTC

dabernathy89 wrote: post #17

XorNot wrote: post #3

So there's a bigger story here: good lord is the web-design here irritating. They've overridden scroll events so they at best don't work properly. Scrolling on a laptop gives you a weird non-mapping slide animation. This is seriously one of the most unreadable articles, from a design sense, that I've ever seen.

I actually don't mind this kind of scrolling - I think it can be useful for storytelling. In this example the scrolling over text doesn't seem to be messed with, which is good. I think what's frustrating about this example in particular is that there is no feedback for scrolling when the page 'pauses' on an image. There should at least be an element moving so that the user knows the page isn't freezing.

I wonder if this kind of scroll-hijacking can be used to prevent accidentally going back with gestures in Safari and Chrome on horizontal-scrolling websites.

Re: Edward Snowden: The Untold Story

#135

Post by nostrademons » Wed, Aug 13, 2014, 8:43 PM UTC

yardie wrote: post #127

cyorir wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Considering the fact that the US was completely caught off guard by the scope and effectiveness of ISIS I have to question the effectiveness of SIGINT programs like the NSA. I have to assume honestly that these programs outlandish budgets are not for tracking terrorists but to control the domestic populace. I must disagree with this interpretation. I think that only the American public and (some) American media were…

A terrorist organisation has established a caliphate state in a country the US formerly occupied and control. If they are being coy about it they must love taking pie in the face. It doesn't look like it, that is a fact. The US doesn't have an answer to these guys. There is no upside to us losing influence in a region to a terrorist organisation and then letting them embed themselves as a valid government. How did th…

The huge variable being ignored here: the sustained high price of oil along with technological breakthroughs has made extraction of oil shale economical. The U.S. has the largest reserves of oil shale in the world, over twice the total recoverable oil reserves of Saudi Arabia. My sister is a petroleum geologist: a large proportion of oil production has moved back domestically over the last 5 years.

Most recent geopolitical shifts can be traced back to the Middle East no longer being strategically important to U.S. interests any more. In 2007 we were worried that rising oil prices would trigger a financial crisis that would severely hurt American interests; controlling mid-east oil was critically important. By 2010 the financial crisis had happened, it was clear that gas prices were not coming down, and oil production was moving back domestically. There was no longer any reason for us to be in Iraq, so Obama got us out, and as far as the U.S. is concerned the Middle East can collapse into the Dark Ages and we won't care, as long as they leave Israel alone. So far ISIS has been more anti-Palestine than anti-Israel.

Re: Edward Snowden: The Untold Story

#136

Post by frandroid » Wed, Aug 13, 2014, 8:48 PM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #129

logfromblammo wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Chinese spies are not in the NSA. They're in the Beltway Bandit and Silicon Valley companies, copying the source code for the drivers used in industrial machinery and weapons systems. They are smart enough to make spying into a profitable business instead of just a mechanism to move tax dollars to the right people. And with respect to using it as a tool of oppression, we simply don't have anything new to teach th…

The Chinese spies are in China. They install malware onto the computers of American engineers in Silicon Valley, which then takes on the task of copying the source code needed for critical software systems. This is the 21st century. There's no need to put yourself in physical danger by entering the country you wish to spy upon. Everything is done electronically.

I wish people backed their claims with evidence.

Re: Edward Snowden: The Untold Story

#137

Post by e0m » Wed, Aug 13, 2014, 8:48 PM UTC

This mentioned the NSA's "Mission Data Repository" in Bluffdale, Utah. They mentioned it could hold 1 yottabyte of data.

Let's put into perspective 1 yottabyte:

All Gmail accounts (~500 million users * 10GB/user = ~5000 PB) + All Facebook photos (~2 billion users * 1GB/user = ~2000 PB) + All of Netflix's videos (1-5 PB) + Library of Congress (10-30 PB) + Wikipedia (0.0005 PB)

= ~7000 PB = 7 Exabytes. = 0.0007% of 1 Yottabyte!!!

1 Yottabyte = 250 billion 4TB hard drives.

A hard drive is about 4" x 1" x 5.75".

The Pentagon is a big building (6,636,360 sqft over 5 floors). If you started stacking hard drives inside the Pentagon it would take about 50 pentagons to hold 250 billion hard drives.

At scale you might be able to make a 4TB hard drive for somewhere between $10 and $100.

1 Yottabyte would be $2.5 trillion - $25 trillion in hard drives. That's a couple USA GDPs.

Okay, I think a yottabyte clearly can't be what they mean because that's just unfathomable.

They also mention a 1 million sqft facility.

In a 1 million sqft you can probably pack about 250 million 3.5" hard drives. If each drive was 4TB you'd end up with 1 million PB, or 1000 EB, or 1 Zettabyte

So by Yottabyte they might (maybe) mean Zettabyte. Only off by a factor of 1,000.

Even still, all of the data of Gmail, Facebook, Netflix, Library of Congress, etc is still probably only ~10% of this data center.

Nuts.

Re: Edward Snowden: The Untold Story

#138

Post by frandroid » Wed, Aug 13, 2014, 8:50 PM UTC

darksim905 wrote: post #126

adityab wrote: post #18

Two key 'new' things from this article, that were previously unknown: 1. The NSA exploited the firmware of a Syrian core internet router, and bricked it by mistake. This was an "oh shit" moment (sic). So in it's eagerness to scoop up all digital communications, it killed the majormost way for citizens to communicate while in the midst of a civil war. Great. 2. There is a project called "MonsterMind", which 100% autom…

>There is a project called "MonsterMind", which 100% automates adversarial hacking in retaliation to detected attacks. Very Strangelove-ian, as the article says. I have peers who have known about that for a solid 6 months who talk about it. It's nothing new. The Gov't has been working on stuff like that, with stuff like that & have those ideas at the core of everything they do for years.

Were they talking about it in public online forums, and/or publishing articles? This is what "new" means here.

Re: Edward Snowden: The Untold Story

#139

Post by nostrademons » Wed, Aug 13, 2014, 8:52 PM UTC

frandroid wrote: post #136

nostrademons wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Chinese spies are in China. They install malware onto the computers of American engineers in Silicon Valley, which then takes on the task of copying the source code needed for critical software systems. This is the 21st century. There's no need to put yourself in physical danger by entering the country you wish to spy upon. Everything is done electronically.

I wish people backed their claims with evidence.

Here's what's publicly available:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Aurora

Re: Edward Snowden: The Untold Story

#140

Post by jerhinesmith » Wed, Aug 13, 2014, 8:53 PM UTC

e0m wrote: post #137

This mentioned the NSA's "Mission Data Repository" in Bluffdale, Utah. They mentioned it could hold 1 yottabyte of data. Let's put into perspective 1 yottabyte: All Gmail accounts (~500 million users * 10GB/user = ~5000 PB) + All Facebook photos (~2 billion users * 1GB/user = ~2000 PB) + All of Netflix's videos (1-5 PB) + Library of Congress (10-30 PB) + Wikipedia (0.0005 PB) = ~7000 PB = 7 Exabytes. = 0.0007% of 1 Y…

Could they be using tape drives? This wikipedia entry says limits of 35TB were achieved in 2011 and limits of 185TB were achieved in 2014. The 2011 achievement wasn't expected to be commercially available for 10 years. Would that also preclude industrial/government availability?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tape_drive#Capacity

Edit: Ha, nevermind, even if they had 185TB tape drives, they'd still need 5 billion of them (unless my math is way off).