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AT&T has a fiberoptic splitter copying our data to NSA

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Re: AT&T has a fiberoptic splitter copying our data to NSA

#211

Post by jbm »

Glide wrote: post #164
joelhaasnoot wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, oh yes, the government always does the right thing...

As korean american, I would love if you would qualify your statement about Korea.

Although none of us are enamored with North Korea, there was a fair share of atrocities that were committed by UN forces on the NK population and the South Korean government against communist sympathizers in their own country. The Wiki article goes into it in some detail. (No, it doesn't make it OK because "they were doing it".)

(As an aside, I sometimes bitterly contemplate how many great Korean minds were lost in that war because of their personal politics)

Re: AT&T has a fiberoptic splitter copying our data to NSA

#212

Post by judegomila »

I was walking past the building wondering why they had .mil style no windows for such a large building. Other exchanges I had visited had windows. If we had collectively given the NSA rights to check our data, this would be ok. We didn't give them the rights. Think of the insider trading, that could be occurring by corrupt NSA officials.

Re: AT&T has a fiberoptic splitter copying our data to NSA

#213

Post by positr0n »

davidandgoliath wrote: post #110
rdtsc wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I knew about it too and I am always baffled at the general population's indifference to it. I guess when you are in debt, about to lose your house, your job, your health insurance, you don't really give a crap if Uncle Sam looks through your emails ... ?

Understand that a lack of privacy isn't a problem until it's a problem, e.g. someone has something against you and needs something to wield against you. The government & large corps. will happily use propaganda against you, and it's easier for them to find dirt on you with little to no privacy. Think of it this way, the average person has something in their past they're probably not happy about that could be misused…

Honest question: do you really think they store every piece of communication that flows through the internet, just waiting for some random teenager they spied on to run for president? The way I imagine it the data runs through a lot of filters that look for evil words/phrases/whatever. Those few emails/sms/etc will be stored and sent to NSA analysts. I doubt they care about the usual type of "dirt" you use against people.

I am against the illegal spying, but what you're saying seems like a conspiracy theory.

Re: AT&T has a fiberoptic splitter copying our data to NSA

#214

Post by StavrosK »

noahl wrote: post #201
StavrosK wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would a phone use an OTP? Would you send the key by carrier pidgeon to the guy every time you wanted to make a phone call? There's absolutely no way to get security without some sort of verification by the user. At the very least, you need someone to verify that the keys are correct "can you read me your phone's security serial?". It shouldn't be too hard to create affordable, usable phones based on PKC. The prob…

Public key cryptography seems like the wrong choice for phones, because it's relatively computationally intensive, and you'd want a phone to use the cheapest hardware imaginable. However, there is an alternative that would work. You can use a symmetric cipher (AES is the current standard), and exchange keys via Diffie-Hellman key exchange, which is a method of securely generating a shared private cipher key over a pu…

That's how most encryption protocols work now, by exchanging symmetric encryption keys at the start. There are protocols to do this, PGPfone was written in the 90s.

Re: AT&T has a fiberoptic splitter copying our data to NSA

#216

Post by binspace »

cyrus_ wrote: post #203
reedlaw wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever I mention libertarian principles on HN I get a mixed response, but this is one situation where we must demand individual rights. We need to elect politicians like Ron Paul who oppose big government intrusions into our privacy. This country is supposed to be a bastion of liberty and we go to war to "protect freedom" and "democracy" and yet we are less and less free every day. When we see articles about Chines…

The flip side of course being that libertarians generally oppose the kind of government regulation that could stop this heinous merger from further destroying an already non-classical market.

Government regulation will not stop this, it's top secret. Just give the NSA less money.

Re: AT&T has a fiberoptic splitter copying our data to NSA

#217

Post by forgottenpaswrd »

leot wrote: post #185

The argument that there is some steady march toward tyranny and erosion in our freedoms would make sense if it weren't for the fact that these programs have existed in one form or another since WWII (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echelon_(signals_intelligence) ). Furthermore, when, exactly, were the good ol' days, those days from which we are presumably descending into tyranny, when we (all, not just white folk)…

Today a big computer room could transcribe the entire telephone communications of all America, and store it for later view.

You can use computers to search for whatever pattern you want in milisecons. I think this makes it different from the past.

Re: AT&T has a fiberoptic splitter copying our data to NSA

#218

Post by mikepurvis »

leot wrote: post #183
fingerprinter wrote: post #21

One thing I see people saying on here is that people should care....and I do...but I don't know _what_ to do with it! Can someone show/tell me what I, an average person, can do? It feels a bit overwhelming and things like this point out how powerless we really are. I hope I'm wrong and there are things we can do...I just don't know what they are. EDIT - Asking two more specific questions: 1. What can we do technicall…

If any of the major webmail providers, with millions of active users, offered "brain dead" PGP (i.e., PGP signatures by default, and automatic PGP encryption and decryption whenever possible), many of the others would follow suit and a lot could be done to counter this kind of program ... ... and, furthermore, it would take a huge bite out of spammers and phishers while allowing you to, e.g., talk to your doctor and…

For a while, I've liked the idea of a client-side PGP plugin for Gmail. Essentially, you have a greasemonkey (or bookmarklet, whatever) script which performs the encode on send and save draft, and the decode on receive.

Of course, it kills Gmail's big feature, which is search. But for that, I figure you could take the wordlist from the email, hash each one individually, and then paste that at the bottom of the message. So your searches would still find matching messages, they'd just be a garbled mess to Google or any interceptor.

This doesn't seem like it'd be terribly complicated, but I don't think anyone's done it.

Re: AT&T has a fiberoptic splitter copying our data to NSA

#219

Post by reedlaw »

cyrus_ wrote: post #203
reedlaw wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever I mention libertarian principles on HN I get a mixed response, but this is one situation where we must demand individual rights. We need to elect politicians like Ron Paul who oppose big government intrusions into our privacy. This country is supposed to be a bastion of liberty and we go to war to "protect freedom" and "democracy" and yet we are less and less free every day. When we see articles about Chines…

The flip side of course being that libertarians generally oppose the kind of government regulation that could stop this heinous merger from further destroying an already non-classical market.

We need more government regulation to stop...government regulation?

Re: AT&T has a fiberoptic splitter copying our data to NSA

#220

Post by sharednothing »

SoftwareMaven wrote: post #18
drivebyacct2 wrote: post #3

This is literally years-old information. I was aware of and hollering about this at people as a highschooler at debate and speech tournaments. Same thing then as now, no one cares, or those that do care don't care enough. Besides, who cares if you have nothing to hide. Right?

My father-in-law said exactly that to me. I wanted to reach out and smack him. Unfortunately, it isn't just a "mental copout", either. He is a very intelligent person who has arrived at a conclusion that the government oversight is OK because he has nothing to hide and (I have inferred) he is very afraid of those who do have something to hide.

Your father-in-law has poor grasp of the concepts "Freedom of association", "Innocent before proven guilty", and "Unreasonable Search".
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