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NSA infiltrates links to Yahoo, Google data centers worldwide

washingtonpost.com

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Re: NSA infiltrates links to Yahoo, Google data centers worldwide

#241

Post by danbruc »

einehexe wrote: post #222
danbruc wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am at a loss for words. Arrogant, self-righteous, disrespectful, ignorant, mendacious...nothing cuts it. It is illegal in the US but who cares about the rest of the world? I can not remember when something similar made me that angry as the current conduct of the US does. If I would not know better that this would negatively affect the whole world and innocent US citizens and that emotional reactions are usually not…

If you had read the article you would know that this data was given to the NSA by the GHCQ. Would you cut off the UK? Australia and Canada?

I read the article. But I am not angry because of the actual incidents - what makes me angry is the sentiment, thinking of non-US people as second class humans. And I would happily lunch everybody into outer space who does this, including everyone from my own country, Germany.

Re: NSA infiltrates links to Yahoo, Google data centers worldwide

#242

Post by ck2 »

outworlder wrote: post #227
mapgrep wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The likelihood miles and miles of cabling, much of it presumably leased, will be compromised is nowhere near comparable to the likelihood a normal, single-location office/home ethernet LAN will be compromised. (And if you think both are easily compromised, that only adds to my original point.)

Fiber optic links are not so easily compromised. Not without service interruption, which will raise quite a few eyebrows.

The US has submarines which are entirely designed to splice fiber optics without interruption.

They literally bring part of the cable into the sub and work on it from there.

Re: NSA infiltrates links to Yahoo, Google data centers worldwide

#243

Post by chestnut-tree »

tptacek wrote: post #2

It's hard not to come to the conclusion that these activities were essentially criminal. I don't see how the administration can fail to disavow them, investigate them fully, and hold their instigators accountable. It feels like Special Prosecutor time. That aside, let me re-make a point I keep making: Google had no knowledge of NSA's physical compromise of their data centers. But still, they pushed harder than anyone…

"Google had no knowledge of NSA's physical compromise of their data centers. But still, they pushed harder than anyone on the whole Internet for the adoption of modern TLS with forward-secrecy..."

You're talking about security only. What about privacy? Security and privacy are not the same thing (although they overlap).

No other company has such a rapacious appetite to track and record online behaviour in one form or another - whether it's signing into your Chromebook to print to your desktop printer or using Google Analytics, Google wants to capture it all. Their vaguely-worded privacy statements tell you nothing about how they use this data, who sees it, or just how personally identifiable it is.

Take ChromeOS, the fact that you have to sign-in in with your Gmail account means potentially every activity you perform while in the OS is tracked by Google. I'm amazed at how little discussion is made of this. (I would never run ChromeOS for this reason alone.)

I've no doubt that Google takes security matters seriously. I'm not at all convinced they take privacy seriously.

Re: NSA infiltrates links to Yahoo, Google data centers worldwide

#244

Post by toufka »

a3n wrote: post #172

> The infiltration is especially striking because the NSA, under a separate program known as PRISM, has front-door access to Google and Yahoo user accounts through a court-approved process. 1. Spy on whatever the hell you want without benefit of warrant. 2. Discover something interesting. 3. "Parallel construct" a way that the information could have been legally obtained. 4. Get a warrant based on the parallel constr…

It's parallel construction all the way down. Discover via extralegal, point mass-capture in that direction, sniff out and send to 'legal' 702 or 215 databases, hint to FBI/DEA buddies, get normal warrant, and now you've got your criminals!

In that way, killing the 702 or 215 powers really wouldn't do that much, because they can just derive their parallel construction from elsewhere.

Re: NSA infiltrates links to Yahoo, Google data centers worldwide

#245

Post by rasur »

dragonwriter wrote: post #33
tonyplee wrote: post #3

"vice president for security engineering Eric Grosse announced that the company is racing to encrypt the links between its data centers. " Isn't this useless? They can serve Google NSL and the court can force the company to release the SSL keys for the encryptions - just like Lavabit. Google CEO/Board can not shutdown the company like Lavabit. What can they do, get out of USA like how they got out of China?

> Isn't this useless? No. > They can serve Google NSL and the court can force the company to release the SSL keys for the encryptions - just like Lavabit. They can't do that without Google knowing about it, knowing what data is covered by the NSL and having the opportunity to challenge the request, or to factor the fact of the requests and the extent of information covered by it in evaluating Google's lobbying priori…

>or, for less duplication, build a fleet of transport vehicles that could hold data centers, and piece by piece transfer their existing US datacenters into those transports.

Or, they could build data centers on barges and float them out of difficult jurisdictions. ;)

Re: NSA infiltrates links to Yahoo, Google data centers worldwide

#246

Post by icelancer »

allochthon wrote: post #206
danbruc wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am at a loss for words. Arrogant, self-righteous, disrespectful, ignorant, mendacious...nothing cuts it. It is illegal in the US but who cares about the rest of the world? I can not remember when something similar made me that angry as the current conduct of the US does. If I would not know better that this would negatively affect the whole world and innocent US citizens and that emotional reactions are usually not…

I would just cut all cables to the US, ... deny US citizens to enter any foreign country and then just do your shit over there and get happy with it. Whoah, there. Your grievances are well-placed. But keep in mind that it's a certain subset of agencies in the US government that are responsible for the problems you're upset about, not all US citizens. As for fixing things, the government has become literally unmanagea…

>not all US citizens

The vast majority of citizens support these initiatives. Given the winner-take-all approach we employ, it is not a stretch to say that yes, we all share blame.

Re: NSA infiltrates links to Yahoo, Google data centers worldwide

#247

Post by bradleyjg »

DannyBee wrote: post #218
bradleyjg wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's hard not to come to the conclusion that these activities were essentially criminal. I don't see how the administration can fail to disavow them, investigate them fully, and hold their instigators accountable. It feels like Special Prosecutor time. The government takes the position that their agents are almost completely unconstrained by law when it comes to actions taken abroad aimed at non-US persons. Even we…

"The government takes the position that their agents are almost completely unconstrained by law when it comes to actions taken abroad aimed at non-US persons. " It's worse than this. You also generally can't sue the US government civilly unless they allow you to. US has abrogated sovereign immunity in certain situations for certain types of torts, but ..

Civil immunity is a subset of completely unconstrained by law. For example, judges are entitled to absolute civil immunity for actions taken in an official capacity. But they have occasionally been charged criminally for actions for which they were civilly immune.

Re: NSA infiltrates links to Yahoo, Google data centers worldwide

#248

Post by bilbo0s »

danbruc wrote: post #156
bradleyjg wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's hard not to come to the conclusion that these activities were essentially criminal. I don't see how the administration can fail to disavow them, investigate them fully, and hold their instigators accountable. It feels like Special Prosecutor time. The government takes the position that their agents are almost completely unconstrained by law when it comes to actions taken abroad aimed at non-US persons. Even we…

I am at a loss for words. Arrogant, self-righteous, disrespectful, ignorant, mendacious...nothing cuts it. It is illegal in the US but who cares about the rest of the world? I can not remember when something similar made me that angry as the current conduct of the US does. If I would not know better that this would negatively affect the whole world and innocent US citizens and that emotional reactions are usually not…

I'm a US citizen.

Born and bred.

And, at this point, I can't in good faith say that I would blame you.

I think it's pretty safe to say that getting rid of a President is no longer enough. My sense is that the people who make these policies really are "Beyond Elections". They are constants in our government. And appear unassailable.

I doubt very much that we, the American People, could even IDENTIFY the people setting or implementing these policies, much less rid ourselves of them.

I think in the present environment, it wouldn't be imprudent for other nations to look to their own interests.

Re: NSA infiltrates links to Yahoo, Google data centers worldwide

#249

Post by helpfulElf »

krelian wrote: post #191
sage_joch wrote: post #132

If I scroll the Reddit frontpage (without being logged in), I am not seeing any NSA stories, despite being on the top of /r/WorldNews, /r/news, etc. Anyone know the story behind that?

It's a conspiracy of course to try and hide this information from the public. That's the answer you were looking for, right?

You joke but if you don't think subtle censorship tools have already been deployed you're mad.

Re: NSA infiltrates links to Yahoo, Google data centers worldwide

#250

Post by jjoonathan »

bjt wrote: post #192
bhousel wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would NSA agents go through all the trouble of tapping cables when they could probably just gain employment at Google and do whatever they want. I don't think encryption would make a difference here.

I'm not sure why you think that's so easy to do. You need a person who: 1. Has the technical credentials and interviewing skills to get hired at Google (not easy). 2. Has a security clearance. 3. Wants to be a spy. 4. Can get themselves assigned to the team working on datacenter interconnects. 5. Can set up a tap on the interconnect without getting caught. That sounds both hard and expensive to me.

Finding such a person would be difficult (but not impossible) for you or for me, but conditional probabilities work heavily in the NSA's favor. They have thousands of in-house people already satisfying 1, 2, and 3. 5 can be perfected by a team and taught to any of those thousands of people and 4 can be achieved with resume tweaking and, at most, a few repeat trials.

It's the same reason why security through obscurity doesn't work: if you chain together 5 obfuscation layers that each keep out 80% of competent hackers, in total they probably keep out 85% or 90% of competent hackers if you're lucky, but certainly not 99.99%, because everyone who bypasses the first layer has a much higher probability of having the skills to bypass the other layers as well.

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