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Edward Snowden: The Untold Story

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Re: Edward Snowden: The Untold Story

#141

Post by adventured »

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…

Some of the older estimates I've found:

NPR says zettabytes: http://www.npr.org/2013/06/10/190160772/amid-data-controvers...

Wired (2012) says yottabytes (maybe where this originally came from): http://www.wired.com/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/

From the NPR article:

"The NSA's Utah Data Center will be able to handle and process five zettabytes of data, according to William Binney, a former NSA technical director . Binney's calculation is an estimate. An NSA spokeswoman says the actual data capacity of the center is classified."

Re: Edward Snowden: The Untold Story

#142

Post by scrollaway »

cmdkeen wrote: post #117
scrollaway wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This school playground logic of "it's ok because they started it" sickens me. OK. I get it; espionage is a reality and only espionage can deal with it. But for god sake there's people in here commenting that Snowden is a traitor because he leaked information that didn't directly concern the american people. Really, now. Compare those two situations: "A group of hackers have targeted Syrian ISPs and, in an attempt to…

Espionage and intelligence are vital if you want to do anything like the current relief operation in Iraq. In Syria there was an ongoing international effort to stop the use of, and then secure, chemical weapons. You need effective intelligence in order to do that. A 10 minute internet outage is an awful lot less bad than what happens when a human intelligence asset gets caught by the kind of actors involved in Syria…

> A 10 minute internet outage is an awful lot less bad than what happens when a human intelligence asset gets caught by the kind of actors involved in Syria.

Is it? First of all, the 10 minute internet outage is real, while the asset capture is completely theoretical. Second of all, a 10 minute internet outage can and does kill people. ESPECIALLY in a country like Syria which is in the midst of a civil war; and I haven't even mentioned the much more concrete outcome of this being perceived as a terrorist attack, putting both sides of the conflict on guard etc.

Re: Edward Snowden: The Untold Story

#143

Post by pygy_ »

tokenadult wrote: post #15

I read through all the comments here before beginning to read the article. The comments that say that the usability of the article format is very bad are correct. The online format is too cute by half, and impairs readability. But the article is well worth reading. As Danso points out, the journalist who did the reporting on this article is a renowned independent investigative reporter, James Bamford, who has broken…

Regarding, the formatting, editing the style of `p` elements with the dev tools makes it much more readable.

16/24 or 14/21 combos for the font-size and line height work well for me, depending on widow width.

Right click a paragraph other than the intro -> "inspect element". In the right column, you can untick the "font-size: 21px;" and "line-height: 37px;" rules, to get 16/24 or set them to whatever you like.

Re: Edward Snowden: The Untold Story

#144

Post by electromagnetic »

differentView wrote: post #76
nabla9 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think records speak against your IMHO. 1. Ideology has not been the major modus operandi in long time (since 50's). Nowadays idealogical reasons are replaced by cultural and ethnic loyalties. Wast majority of people who spied for China have had Chinese heritage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_intelligence_operation... 2. Money and personal problems/reasons seems to be major reason for spying against US and f…

>Wast majority of people who spied for China have had Chinese heritage. Though I also believe this to be true, what we know for sure are that most of the people CAUGHT spying for China had Chinese heritage.

Exactly, its easy to spot a Chinese spy when you investigate your Chinese workers.

The notion that a spy is only someone loyal to a country is just quite frankly, silly.

Re: Edward Snowden: The Untold Story

#145

Post by alrs »

toyg wrote: post #55
nabla9 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think records speak against your IMHO. 1. Ideology has not been the major modus operandi in long time (since 50's). Nowadays idealogical reasons are replaced by cultural and ethnic loyalties. Wast majority of people who spied for China have had Chinese heritage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_intelligence_operation... 2. Money and personal problems/reasons seems to be major reason for spying against US and f…

your point 1 proves what I was saying: it's technically very easy to defend against Chinese spies -- just enact more stringent ethnic profiling. I'm not saying this is desirable, but even at very high level it clearly restricts attacking surface quite dramatically. The difficulties are political rather than technical in nature. I partially agree with your point 2, but "according to American counterintelligence" the s…

Be sure to block all of the white guys with yellow fever, while you're at it.

No, it's not a "political" problem.

Re: Edward Snowden: The Untold Story

#146

Post by debt »

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…

I know it seems crazy but they might have a storage technique that is unknown to the public.

Re: Edward Snowden: The Untold Story

#147

Post by noobface »

crunchcaptain wrote: post #62
elwell wrote: post #42

> One day an intelligence officer told him that TAO—a division of NSA hackers—had 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. This would have given the NSA access to email and other Internet traffic from much of the country. But something went wrong, and the router was bricked instead—render…

It's very interesting that TAO attempted to remotely compromise a core router. What happened to diverting Cisco boxes to an "undisclosed location" for installing implants?

It's illegal for US corporations to do deals directly with several governments. Syria most likely bought the gear used through gray/black market channels.

Re: Edward Snowden: The Untold Story

#148

Post by robszumski »

adventured wrote: post #141
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…

Some of the older estimates I've found: NPR says zettabytes: http://www.npr.org/2013/06/10/190160772/amid-data-controvers... Wired (2012) says yottabytes (maybe where this originally came from): http://www.wired.com/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/ From the NPR article: "The NSA's Utah Data Center will be able to handle and process five zettabytes of data, according to William Binney, a former NSA technical director . B…

Isn't it possible that these numbers reference the amount of data moving through the system ("handle and process") instead of raw storage capacity, which is probably significantly less and matches more realistic private-sector abilities?

Re: Edward Snowden: The Untold Story

#149

Post by adventured »

robszumski wrote: post #148
adventured wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of the older estimates I've found: NPR says zettabytes: http://www.npr.org/2013/06/10/190160772/amid-data-controvers... Wired (2012) says yottabytes (maybe where this originally came from): http://www.wired.com/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/ From the NPR article: "The NSA's Utah Data Center will be able to handle and process five zettabytes of data, according to William Binney, a former NSA technical director . B…

Isn't it possible that these numbers reference the amount of data moving through the system ("handle and process") instead of raw storage capacity, which is probably significantly less and matches more realistic private-sector abilities?

I think it's very plausible the datacenter will be capable of storing five zettabytes by the end of this decade (yottabytes are impossible, short of the NSA having wildly advanced technology we know nothing about yet; the energy cost alone based on today's technology would 'bankrupt' the NSA). I'm skeptical it got up and running with that kind of scale on day one. It'd be ridiculously far beyond their storage needs for many many years. I wouldn't be surprised if it was designed with that kind of scale in mind however, as the NSA would be thinking 10 and 20 years out.

Five zettabytes would of course be enough storage to allocate roughly one terabyte for every person on the planet the NSA could even theoretically hope to grab a single byte of data on in the next 20 years.

In ~20 years I have to suspect 5 ZB will not be nearly enough storage for what the NSA has in mind (due mostly to the expansion of information being stored in ever higher definition video and plausibly in some VR format within a decade).

Re: Edward Snowden: The Untold Story

#150

Post by TeMPOraL »

DanBC wrote: post #113
waylandsmithers wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they might have been attempting to simulate a magazine-like experience, where the pictures that required more scrolling than normal were supposed to be like turning the page to a full page image. I feel like I've seen this attempted before but with flashing down arrows to tell you that you need to keep scrolling. Based on the reactions here, I don't think it was successful, but I do appreciate efforts to enha…

> but I do appreciate efforts to enhance the reading experience. I don't. I just want the words. Ideally I want the words to be in a nice font and nice contrast and well laid out. In a perfect world there would be some diagrams and illustrations to support the text.

> I don't. I just want the words.

Me too. But I don't know what else to do other than reading longer articles through Pocket/Instapaper and sending everyone I know [0] as a reminder every once in a while.

[0] - http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

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