Is no one targeting the 12333 Executive Order? Isn't that the one that causes the most mass spying abuses. It's great to see the FISA "warrants" targeted as well, as most just seem to look at the Patrio Act's 215 section, but I think they should look at the 12333 EO, too.
Wikimedia v. NSA: Wikimedia Foundation files suit against NSA
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Re: Wikimedia v. NSA: Wikimedia Foundation files suit against NSA
#92I'll be interested to see how the rulings on standing go. That seems like the crux of the matter to me, because the issue is not just "was your name mentioned," but also "were you harmed?"
4th Amendment cases are usually litigated in the context of a criminal appeal; obviously a defendant is facing real jeopardy in a prosecution, and therefore has standing.
Civil lawsuits exist to make plaintiffs whole after suffering a harm. But the court might find that being surveilled, alone and by itself, is not harm. The court could say that nothing has been removed, destroyed, prevented, or altered in Wikimedia's servers, so they have no harm to make whole.
The court could say that merely copying data does no harm to the original data creator or holder. (This argument might sound familiar here on HN, as it is sometimes used to argue that file sharing does no legal harm to publishers.)
Re: Wikimedia v. NSA: Wikimedia Foundation files suit against NSA
#93The solution should be technical: You don't want to NSA to read your communications: encrypt them (eg: HTTPS everywhere, encryption built-in everywhere). And that's us, builders of technologies, that need to make that happen. Basically securing against the NSA is the same as securing against hackers, it should be treated as a security threat like any other.
Ok, so the solution is technical. Let's say we already have super-strong, super-easy to use and implement crypto-systems.
All we have to do is convince people to use them, keeping in mind 95 percent of users use IMs such as Skype, Hangouts, iMessage, Whatsapp and Facebook Chat. Now all we have to do is get those companies to implement that encryption right? Oh wait, doing that for those companies would be illegal because the law wouldn't be on our side. Now what? Do we go back to convincing people to use obscure "darknet/used by criminals" tools that the government will do its best to denigrate? How much of a chance do you think we have to make those tools used by 80 percent of the population within 5-10 years?
Re: Wikimedia v. NSA: Wikimedia Foundation files suit against NSA
#94The solution should be technical: You don't want to NSA to read your communications: encrypt them (eg: HTTPS everywhere, encryption built-in everywhere). And that's us, builders of technologies, that need to make that happen. Basically securing against the NSA is the same as securing against hackers, it should be treated as a security threat like any other.
It's not one or the other, and the NSA has demonstrated that it will use all the resources at its disposal to circumvent any technical protection. The NSA also holds a trump card: the law and the US government. I assume at some point that Congress will pass laws, or the secret court will authorize, compelling every American company to essentially open itself to unfettered access and surveillance. US companies already…
This is why I am increasingly convinced that GPL(v3) is going to become a bastion of hope for privacy. The major problem is that companies want to make money off the software, close it up and proprietize it, and then the gov comes along with a NSL or blackbox or other comprimise and backdoors/weakens the system, and all of a sudden all the customers of the company are vulnerable. FOSS and in particular GPL, is the way around this. Software companies should be selling support, not the software (IMHO).
Re: Wikimedia v. NSA: Wikimedia Foundation files suit against NSA
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well as you're seeing with gay marriage bans being overturned, just because the majority want to strip the minority of their rights, they shouldn't be allowed to.
Then what you want is a republic or some system of anarchy, not a democracy.
The US is a republic.
Re: Wikimedia v. NSA: Wikimedia Foundation files suit against NSA
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you're focusing on the wrong thing. It doesn't really matter if it's legal or constitutional, because if it's not then they'll change the laws or reinterpret them in a new way or write a new Patriot Act. What we should focus on is whether a government should be allowed to operate in secrecy, without any public oversight or knowledge, and whether the government can be morally justified in surveilling citizens…
It matters to me, at least, that the law be followed as written. Rule by whim and secret dictate does not seem like a good system of government.
What if the law says that secret courts can decide using secret proceedings?
Re: Wikimedia v. NSA: Wikimedia Foundation files suit against NSA
#97The solution should be technical: You don't want to NSA to read your communications: encrypt them (eg: HTTPS everywhere, encryption built-in everywhere). And that's us, builders of technologies, that need to make that happen. Basically securing against the NSA is the same as securing against hackers, it should be treated as a security threat like any other.
I agree that the technical solution is the most important one, but it is a) not a solution we have ready right now, and b) one that will never be 100% effective. HTTPS everywhere is a good start, but it it does a poor job of defending against the NSA. Certificate authorities are fundamentally broken and users don't have the background knowledge to understand certs or why they are necessary. Even technical people don'…
The problem is how to have fundamental security. We already know or highly suspect the US Fed has backdoors at the hardware level. We cannot see the designs of our hardware because they are proprietary, so we cannot trust them. We start at a disadvantage.
Even discounting that, you cannot trust your firmware, because very few people are running libreboot or equivalently free firmware. Again, backdoors galore for state agencies.
But you solve those and then you need to trust your operating system. Firstly, the vast majority of people use proprietary operating systems. Secondly, even if you use a free operating system (and I mean pathologically free like Trisquel or Parabola) you get a set of security keys included you are meant to be able to trust.
The problem is that the international governmental muscle and influence of the US Fed means it is unlikely you can protect any of these private keys. They are all held by sufficiently large organizations that the US can strongarm them into giving them up, without even resorting to immediate violence.
But I'd feel more comfortable trusting the Arch master keys or the Debian councils keys, because both organizations are multinational collaborations of individuals where the majority can blacklist a compromised member. It sure beats key management by one vulnerable company. So that might work.
It is like how people talk about all this security mumbo-jumbo but all it takes is five minutes with some brass knuckles to get you to spill every password you have ever made. With the knowledge we have and the technology at our disposal the best I can at least do is pray that my OTR conversations over XMPP are secure, given that I have tried to minimize my attack surface on all these fronts, but there is no one solution that I can say "this machine guarantees me my security" because how can I know that the proprietary firmware on my hard drive is not somehow circumventing my dm-crypt layer (it would need some kind of collaboration with the chipset, though, since the keys never touch the disk raw)? I certainly know I cannot trust any hardware encryption at the least, but I don't see anything stopping proprietary motherboards from caching the keys used during hardware SIMD encryption routines (most Intel cpus support hardware accelerated AES 128, for example) in some unseen ROM the user never touches so the NSA can crack the hard drive.
Re: Wikimedia v. NSA: Wikimedia Foundation files suit against NSA
#98The solution should be technical: You don't want to NSA to read your communications: encrypt them (eg: HTTPS everywhere, encryption built-in everywhere). And that's us, builders of technologies, that need to make that happen. Basically securing against the NSA is the same as securing against hackers, it should be treated as a security threat like any other.
That's naive, because at some point, you have to trust the OS you're running and better yet, the hardware you're running on.
Re: Wikimedia v. NSA: Wikimedia Foundation files suit against NSA
#99I have some sympathy for our fellow hackers who work as contractors or in big companies, many of them with security clearance. Database engineers, software developers, data experts - the five eyes intelligence agencies directly and indirectly fund many of you readers of HN. They might be becoming increasingly disillusioned with their chosen life and/or unable to change course. Perhaps the money is too good, perhaps t…
They might have inside knowledge and believe that the NSA is in the right, but they would not be able to voice that belief to us, their friends and colleagues.
Given the way classified work is compartmentalized, I think any such belief would be either very narrow and heavily qualified or - more likely - mostly a matter of faith, emotion, and ego.
No grunt knows what all the grunts are doing.
Re: Wikimedia v. NSA: Wikimedia Foundation files suit against NSA
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have no problem voicing my beliefs publicly. I'm always more than willing to explain the policies of the NSA, and happy to denounce the actions of Edward Snowden. I don't think he was a traitor, by definition, but what he did was wrong. It isn't necessary to divulge confidential information, the situation is pretty clear. I don't see any point in re-litigating the whole thing on this particular thread though, it wo…
> I just wanted to say that people who support the NSA aren't hiding in fear. Unfortunately, that doesn't appear to be backed by evidence. Every single lawsuit challenging mass surveillance has been resisted by the Executive on the basis of state secrets and lack of standing. The Executive is using a judicial tactic to avoid having to answer the question of whether these programs are constitutional. When that questio…
1) I see nothing in the constitution that requires all court business to be done in public. The sixth grants a person the right to a public trial. As far as I know the secret court has never held trials, they have only granted warrants and other bits of due process that are not required to be public.
2) Seems to be a clear violation of the sixth amendment to me.
3) You seem to be a little to black and white to me. It is possible to think that they have done the wrong thing in some cases and need to be brought back in to line but not think that we need to completely destroy the government's ability to function.