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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

#261

Post by bilbo0s »

unreal37 wrote: post #175
bostonpete wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> actions taken abroad aimed at non-US persons. Aren't Google and Yahoo US persons? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood#Corporatio...

Actually, if I were Google or Yahoo, I would be getting my lawyers to prepare some type of lawsuit. Not that I think it will succeed, but Google/Yahoo are direct victims here.

Well...

given the game the leakers are playing with these documents...

I would wait before I made any definitive statements about who is a victim and who is a villain.

The release of these documents seem to be carefully timed and calculated to give the government, corporations and people involved in the surveillance state the time and latitude to incriminate themselves.

Not only are the Government, the corporations and the people involved trying to tell a story... clearly the leakers are trying to tell a story as well.

Are we at the climax of the leakers' plot? or are we still building?

I think it might be best to get a look at all the cards first... and then decide what happened.

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

#264

Post by mindcrime »

brown9-2 wrote: post #173
ori_b wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google was letting information flow between its data center completely unencrypted until last month. http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/google-enc... . Last month! Over their own private WAN. The analogy would be sending things in the clear over your LAN. [Citation: http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~rcs/research/google-onrc-slide... ]

Do they actually own and operate all of the wires between various datacenters? That sounds like a huge undertaking.

I doubt they own all of the links they use worldwide, but Google did go on a buying binge a few years ago, acquiring large amounts of "dark fiber". There's some discussion about that whole topic here:

http://www.howstuffworks.com/tech-myths/5-myths-about-google...

http://news.cnet.com/Google-wants-dark-fiber/2100-1034_3-553...

http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=633236

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

#265

Post by rryan »

thyrsus wrote: post #103
andy112 wrote: post #28

Can anyone explain what exactly is meant by "SSL added and removed here! :-)"?

[Edit: apparently, the decryption does not happen real time. Instead, the encyrpted traffic is stored and decrypted later. Either NSA/GCHQ think the latency introduced by doing a full mitm with the private key would blow their cover, or they're using some algorithm that isn't fast enough for full mitm. The below is a bad interpretation.] My interpretation is that they've acquired - either via bag job or by unpublishe…

Your interpretation is completely wrong.

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

#266

Post by yuvadam »

driverdan wrote: post #259
cs702 wrote: post #208

Wow. Years ago, I remember reading Richard Stallman's "How I do my computing"[1], an essay in which he explains why he usually does not connect to any websites from his own machine, downloads web pages from a headless browser running in some server, does not have any user accounts for any web applications, does not buy anything over the Internet ever, does not use any social networking sites, and otherwise abstains f…

> Jeez, that's way too paranoid Of course it is, it's ridiculous. What the NSA is doing is despicable but why would that keep you from creating a user account or viewing a webpage from your computer?

Because some users do not have the privilege of doing even such rudimentary tasks, without the danger of being persecuted, prosecuted or worse by the tyrant regime they happen to be living under.

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

#267

Post by diminoten »

betterunix wrote: post #19
jakewalker wrote: post #4

If that graphic - that taunting smiley face, drawn when it was assumed that no one was watching - isn't enough to outrage the general public, I don't know what it will take. This is not super technical - it's easily explained and should be easily understood by the masses. And it should cause outrage.

You know what would outrage the public? ESPN being shut down. Most people do not actually care about their privacy. Even if everyone had the technical chops needed to understand what has been happening, most people never spend much time contemplating the importance of privacy rights.

People deal with risk every single day in various forms. How can you expect a person to care about the risks a lack of privacy theoretically provides, when they're already not caring about the risks texting and driving pose? It takes laws to get people to stop texting while driving, and even then they don't really stop.

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

#268

Post by cromwellian »

ochs wrote: post #257
cromwellian wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they don't understand what's going on, wouldn't that argue in favor of doing more detailed research and analysis before writing claims? The original assumptions/claims in the Guardian story on PRISM are now shown to be false. This caused a lot of negative blowback on the companies involved. Don't we expect our investigative journalists, to well, actually investigate things, instead of rushing to print?

How where they false? The PRISM program is real. There is a way for the NSA to automatically access Google's databases, with Google's knowledge under secret blanket (not case-by-case) court orders. They where clearly lying when they denied any "direct access".

No they weren't lying, as there is no evidence that Google had knowledge that the NSA had been tapping their dark fiber. What everyone assumed after the Guardian story was that Google had built some kind of firehose feed or portal for the NSA to just login and get whatever they wanted, never in any of those stories did they say the NSA was taking data against Google's knowledge or will.

For example, there was a famous slide showing when each company "joined the PRISM program", but the actual slide merely says "Dates when PRISM collection started for each provider". The reporter inserted the terminology "joined" which implies a partnership that didn't exist.

What these revelations reveal is that the NSA supplemented the data they got on a case-by-case basis through NSLs by outside-the-datacenter fiber taps of traffic, as well as upstream unencrypted HTTP and SMTP/IMAP traffic.

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

#269

Post by maurits »

wyck wrote: post #5

Is that an official document with an actual smiley face? What ever happened to the admins / programmers standing up for what is right, or do they just gobble down a paycheck and turn the other way?

Because people compartmentalise and so for engineers this is most probably not a political thing but just an interesting difficult problem that is fun to work hard on.

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

#270

Post by einehexe »

danbruc wrote: post #241
einehexe wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you are not angry at the GHCQ for tapping Google and Yahoo then I don't know what to tell you.
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