151–160 of 420 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Three letter agencies approach the executive team directly. A decision to participate has to be made at the exec team/board level. If the CEO doesn't know about it, then the company has some serious communication issues.
"Willingly" is the point of contention. The CEOs complied. Whether they felt like they had a choice in the matter is another question entirely.
I think it's interesting to ask why these programs are so widely hated. These are national security assets: evidence gathered here will never be used in a drug case, or a tax evasion case. Why not? These tools exist for the bigger fish: the dozens of Soviet-era nuclear weapons believed to be missing, or the small amounts of dangerous pathogens that periodically vanish from research labs. These are what the government…
The problem isn't so much the collection of the data, it's that checks and balances that are in place are completely opaque to public scrutiny. Everything is classified
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What alternative do you suggest?
If only there was a provider that respected your privacy and allowed you to use basic unix primitives to interface with your cloud storage... If only... http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They hand out these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_security_letter You're not even supposed to reveal that you are complying (gag order). Google has been in the news recently about fighting one in court.
We have been fighting this US policy since 2006: http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt
I think it's interesting to ask why these programs are so widely hated. These are national security assets: evidence gathered here will never be used in a drug case, or a tax evasion case. Why not? These tools exist for the bigger fish: the dozens of Soviet-era nuclear weapons believed to be missing, or the small amounts of dangerous pathogens that periodically vanish from research labs. These are what the government…
I'm just going to leave these here: https://www.cdt.org/content/donate https://supporters.eff.org/donate
https://cloud.torproject.org/ https://www.torproject.org/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy etc.
Nitro is a library for painlessly writing scalable, fast, and secure message-passing network applications
I think it's interesting to ask why these programs are so widely hated. These are national security assets: evidence gathered here will never be used in a drug case, or a tax evasion case. Why not? These tools exist for the bigger fish: the dozens of Soviet-era nuclear weapons believed to be missing, or the small amounts of dangerous pathogens that periodically vanish from research labs. These are what the government…
How is a democracy functional when a secret and parallel government has access to undisclosed powers which override those of the existing democracy? This isn't just an issue of separation of power between branches of government -- citizens are forced through law to hide the existence of this para-judicial system, as if it is a phantom of our minds.
It's one thing to do it legally. It's another to do it without approval from Congress. It's another to do it without approval from Congress or the will of the people.
Although, between FISA and PATRIOT ACT, it more or less is "legal". Either way, you're on the right track. It's a slippery slope and as far as I'm concerned, PRISM is slippery enough to feel like I can say that without feeling silly for using the phrase "slippery slope" seriously (and even worse, three times in one post).
I think it's interesting to ask why these programs are so widely hated. These are national security assets: evidence gathered here will never be used in a drug case, or a tax evasion case. Why not? These tools exist for the bigger fish: the dozens of Soviet-era nuclear weapons believed to be missing, or the small amounts of dangerous pathogens that periodically vanish from research labs. These are what the government…
Search queries alone will probably tell you which way a person is leaning in an election. That by itself is not good in a democratic process hinged on secret ballot. What if the information of everyone that voted for a given candidate is collected, passed under the table to another "bad guy" in another agency, such as IRS, and then used to inflict financial harm. Yes, very far fetched, but such power is an enabler.
It seems that having courts grant warrants provides a necessary level of review by a psudo-independent body, as to sufficiently protect against undue invasion of privacy.
Based on the description in the article, I'm not sure if there are a lot of protections against personal use, like spying on a girlfriend. (When I used ChoicePoint for background investigations, it only recorded my "permissible purpose" selection, but no real validation, just an audit log of the search.)
Note link at the bottom to the powerpoint slides in question: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/politics/prism-...
That link looks more like a security classification to me.
A somewhat redacted, 158-page manual describing how to code these markings:
http://www.fas.org/sgp/othergov/intel/capco_imp.pdf
A cheat sheet from 2008, by Julian Assange: