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Mark Klein, AT&T whistleblower who revealed NSA mass spying, has died

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Re: Mark Klein, AT&T whistleblower who revealed NSA mass spying, has died

#221

Post by somenameforme »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #212
somenameforme wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What!?!? Yes PRISM is a mass surveillance program. And it's not metadata, it's piping entire content straight from the target to the NSA, in real time. This involves direct filtered data (such as Skype messages/videos) indirectly handed over by participating companies (which is probably all major tech companies in the US at this point), as well as raw upstream (essentially line tapping) data such as provided via STOR…

> Yes PRISM is a mass surveillance program You're more than 11 years behind the news. Less than a week after Greenwald published his initial ridiculous description of PRISM, it was corrected by the people who actually built the systems at the tech companies. He stupidly thought that the DITU was a machine at the companies that could get any data, when anybody with half a clue could have told him that it's obviously h…

This is overt misinformation. PRISM works directly with the companies (well, "indirectly" to offer plausible deniability). The section you're linking to entirely quotes some random government organization which is obviously an unreliable source on such topics. As is the writing, as opposed to sources, on Wiki.

This [1] is one of the more telling leaks. It's a technical users guide for NSA employees on using realtime Skype surveillance for all modes including video and landline on arbitrary targets. [1] It even includes debugging guides like why an agent might be getting multiple copies of the same message, as happens when somebody being spied on boots up a new device and all of their messages are sent from Microsoft to them (and the NSA) simultaneously, resulting a copy of older messages (from the snooper's perspective).

[1] - https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/field_document/Guid...

Re: Mark Klein, AT&T whistleblower who revealed NSA mass spying, has died

#222

Post by bb88 »

anonym29 wrote: post #171
worik wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> grave atrocities Tapping phones is immoral and unethical, IMO. But a long was from the "grave atrocities" that were uncovered at the end of WWII

It wasn't simply tapping phones, it is the warrantless collection of close to all global electronic communications. And the immorality doesn't stop there, that's where it starts. "We kill people based on metadata." - General Michael Hayden, former Director of the NSA, former Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence, and former Director of the CIA. This includes innocent people. Women, children, civilians. D…

If you're in a war of attrition (like the the US was in Afghanistan), and the other side already has agreed it's okay to kill innocents (9/11), then you're not going to win by fighting an "ethical" war -- whatever that means.

I'm not going to defend the CIA/NSA for actions taken inside the country. On the other hand, I'm not going to second guess decisions happening on the ground in an active war zone.

Re: Mark Klein, AT&T whistleblower who revealed NSA mass spying, has died

#223

Post by shadowgovt »

sethaurus wrote: post #208
timewizard wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You have to remember that half, possibly more than half, of the country is more than okay with what the NSA was doing and is doing. I doubt this. I'd also be interested to see if those people actually know, on any real level, what the NSA was actually doing. > If we don't like it, we could consider, maybe not voting the same people into that Congress. Over. And over. And over. And over. And over. And over. They so…

Forgive me for being obtuse, but what exactly are you claiming here? Are election results being faked?

They aren't. Fewer than 3/4 of eligible voters voted in 2020. In general, somewhere around 10% to a third of eligible voters actually vote in primaries, which are the elections that actually have the most impact on office holding.

Nobody needs to fake election results when Americans just don't show up to vote. It's a disquietingly under-informed and apathetic electorate.

Re: Mark Klein, AT&T whistleblower who revealed NSA mass spying, has died

#224

Post by kube-system »

emmelaich wrote: post #182
kens wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found a video with an identical National Plant Services sewer inspection van, inspecting a large-diameter sewer line: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVXceJ3Yxnw (The photo shows van TV-230 while the video shows van TV-217, so they are different instances of the van.)

I went to the Carylon website to find a list of their companies and got > Block Reason: Access from your area has been temporarily limited for security reasons. My area is Australia. https://caryloncorp.com/find-a-company/

It’s not uncommon for site firewalls to be configured this way for business that do not do work internationally.

Re: Mark Klein, AT&T whistleblower who revealed NSA mass spying, has died

#225

Post by shadowgovt »

llmthrow103 wrote: post #149
shadowgovt wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to remember that half, possibly more than half, of the country is more than okay with what the NSA was doing and is doing. It's not at all surprising that Congress would indemnify people for, more or less, doing what Congress authorized them to do. If we don't like it, we could consider, maybe not voting the same people into that Congress. Over. And over. And over. And over. And over. And over. A full 24 Sen…

It's obviously not a problem of electing the wrong people. There are enough checks and balances in the system to ensure that there is no change forthcoming.

The system is, indeed, set up to minimize revolutionary churn. The tilt that we're seeing right now towards fascism and white nationalism has been some 40 years in the making. It takes a lot of organization to tilt the whole thing.

This is a feature, not a bug. The system is architected, when something is controversial, default to no motion.

Re: Mark Klein, AT&T whistleblower who revealed NSA mass spying, has died

#226

Post by autoexec »

somenameforme wrote: post #202
lern_too_spel wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The really odd thing is that 85% of the general public will say "well of course they spy on email" even today, after Snowden's leaks showed that the Obama administration had shut that down.

What? No it didn't, not at all. The leaks clearly showed email as being one of the many things being directly surveilled. Here is one of the many slides directly acknowledging as much. [1] If you mean the rhetoric around it, then yeah - politicians lie, especially when engaging in what would be seen as deeply unpopular behavior. This isn't a shock. I assure you the admin that passed indefinite detention without charg…

I actually believed Obama when he spoke about ending the NSA's mass surveillance on the American people. He taught constitutional law. He knew exactly how wrong it was. I suspect that once he got into office he was either strong armed into changing his tune (and into ultimately giving the NSA more spying powers on the public) or he was shown enough secret evidence that it scared him into thinking it was necessary to violate the freedom of all Americans in order to keep us safe from terrorists. I'm not sure which scenario should worry me more, but at this point I don't think anyone in government has the ability to really stop the NSA.

Re: Mark Klein, AT&T whistleblower who revealed NSA mass spying, has died

#227

Post by autoexec »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #203
somenameforme wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? No it didn't, not at all. The leaks clearly showed email as being one of the many things being directly surveilled. Here is one of the many slides directly acknowledging as much. [1] If you mean the rhetoric around it, then yeah - politicians lie, especially when engaging in what would be seen as deeply unpopular behavior. This isn't a shock. I assure you the admin that passed indefinite detention without charg…

We were talking about mass surveillance. PRISM isn't that. They used to collect mass email metadata, using facilities like Room 641A. Snowden's leaks showed that they had already stopped. These days, it wouldn't even be technically possible, let alone legally possible, because pretty much all SMTP traffic is over TLS. Gmail won't even accept unencrypted SMTP connections.

> These days, it wouldn't even be technically possible, let alone legally possible, because pretty much all SMTP traffic is over TLS.

These days the government wouldn't need to decrypt email traffic going over the backbone. They'd march into the companies and ISPs who run the mail servers and monitor/collect everything from there directly, the same way they marched into AT&T and set up camp. The vast majority of the American's email can be obtained by controlling the servers of a very small number of corporations. We have Lavabit to thank for demonstrating that when the government comes knocking your only options are to comply or shut down (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavabit)

There's no reason to think that there isn't a Room 641A at Google, Apple, MS, etc.

Re: Mark Klein, AT&T whistleblower who revealed NSA mass spying, has died

#228

Post by samstave »

Scoundreller wrote: post #205
samstave wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats awesome. See my post below -- I have been tracking Eschelon since the early 90s... Guess what NSA router backdoors have become (mobile phones with socialifelog media apps on them) --- And like @tptacek said >> If it was the NSA, their van wouldn't look so goofy that people took one look at the photo and assumed it had to be an NSA van, which is what happened here. This is a bad movie plot trope: the bad guys ca…

The Onion was on this a looong time ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJ380SHZvYU

:-) thank you for that. DOPE

Re: Mark Klein, AT&T whistleblower who revealed NSA mass spying, has died

#229

Post by highwaylights »

dgrin91 wrote: post #93
themcaffee wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That certainly is just a Sewer TV inspection van! I have a hand in writing some of the software that is run on these and processes the videos that come out of them. They all have rack mounted PCs and a monitor with a joystick to control the crawler that goes in the pipe.

I can't tell if this is honest or sarcasm

Same. I can totally buy the joystick and the robot as I've seen this done in my area, but the rack mounted PCs and the headphones makes it seem awfully like he's telling Tom Cruise which wire to cut.

Re: Mark Klein, AT&T whistleblower who revealed NSA mass spying, has died

#230

Post by kleiba »

This is the sentence I was looking for:

> While we were able to use his evidence to make some change, both EFF and Mark were ultimately let down by Congress and the Courts, which have refused to take the steps necessary to end the mass spying even after Edward Snowden provided even more evidence of it in 2013.

Do you have to be a cynic to pretty much have expected this?

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