Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

NSA infiltrates links to Yahoo, Google data centers worldwide

washingtonpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 614 posts

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

#271

Post by thrownaway2424 »

adventured wrote: post #200

Google will never do it, but they should drown the NSA in bullshit data. So much so it literally chokes the NSA's ability to spy on Google's services. Google is one of the few companies that could pull it off. They have $56 billion in cash and nothing to do with it apparently. They generate $12 billion in profit annually and growing. They have more financial resources, computing power, and brain power than the NSA do…

The portion of google's operation that NSA is tapping is already tiny. This article claims they got 181 million "records" of all kinds in a month. That's nothing! Google claims that gmail has half a billion active accounts. You think each of those active accounts only sends and receives one mail every other month? of course not.

The NSA is clearly already drowning, or being selective about what they are getting.

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

#272

Post by grecy »

f1nch3r wrote: post #137
Zelphyr wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You know what would outrage the public? ESPN being shut down. No better way to state it. Our government is fucking us with our pants on but we're too distracted (by people getting paid hundreds of millions of dollars to throw a fucking ball around) to care.

I bet if ESPN and shows like American Idol, etc. were knocked offline until we got our government back on track things would get done pretty fast.

But do you want things to get done fast?

The Patriot Act was done fast, and we can see what kind of mess that is.

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

#273

Post by mindslight »

cromwellian wrote: post #196
selmnoo wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They deserve to have their brands damaged. They didn't do their due diligence in encrypting data going through leased fibers -- they should have had the foresight to realize what a phenomenally bad thing this was. They didn't, hence why I'll never trust them again.

Do you also blame your car company when a thief breaks into it? Do you never trust banks again if a bank robbery happens? They were working on it, but full-on encryption everywhere within your internal network is expensive, and one tends to not imagine that buried dark fiber is dug up and tapped by one's own government. Let's say that they encrypted everything, and then you learn the NSA had kidnapped the children of…

> Why do I sometimes get the feeling that people specifically want to hate on these companies

Because they promote themselves as tech-based companies, yet abdicated their professional duty to design secure systems because insecurity makes for easier monetization.

You would very much blame a car manufacturer when it turned out that all of its cars were keyed the same.

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

#274

Post by blablabla123 »

ori_b wrote: post #92
mapgrep wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google was letting information flow between its data centers completely unencrypted until last month . http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/google-enc... Last month! Think about that for a second. Most people on HN wouldn't send a single file to their own backup provider in the clear. Google was sending gushing torrents of data, presumably including email, IMs, etc, over long distances that way. That's v…

> 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... ]

Assuming that the fiber end points only touch Google data centers, this would be ok, I guess.

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

#275

Post by chflamplighter »

lazyjones wrote: post #220
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…

> It turns out Stallman was just (far) ahead of his time -- as usual. Indeed, and it was always obvious if you took security seriously instead of regarding it as a game of probabilities and trade-offs where convenience wins. As we are being pulled very strongly towards a future where everything and everyone is connected all the time, we should really consider such radical approaches again and how to make them more co…

"game of probabilities and trade-offs where convenience wins" that is it in a nutshell, well said.

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

#276

Post by smoyer »

Would anyone else be interested in inserting a private version of a tracking pixel into each of their e-mails, so that you'd get a list of IP addresses where the mail was viewed back?

It would be interesting to see where mail was read versus where it is simply passed in plain text. Crowd-sourcing anonymous data might also allow us to determine which IP addresses belong to the NSA's systems.

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

#277

Post by tippytop »

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.

How do you know this is the case? In the diagram submitted within the article, the box highlighted with the smiley face is labeled "GFE" for Google Front-End [1], which means it's a Google controlled server. It seems more plausible to me that the NSA compromised this target with a FISA court order rather than hacking it. And if that is true, then someone at Google did know about it, they just weren't willing to discuss it because of a legal threat.

[1] Google server names: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/09/googles-server-name...

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

#278

Post by SeanLuke »

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 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?

Do you really believe that this is the modus operandi only of the United States?

Since, say, France has _at least_ the same position with regard to the rest of the world vs. French citizens, are you angry at France too? Will you cut all french, german, russian, and bahranian cables as well, so as to maintain a consistent position?

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

#279

Post by brymaster »

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?

Here, I did your own research for you:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-oper...

> Most addicted city (over 100k visits total) > Eglin Air Force Base, FL

http://blog.reddit.com/2013/05/get-ready-for-global-reddit-m...

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

#280

Post by shazow »

cromwellian wrote: post #86

Why didn't they release these documents a long time ago when everyone was racing to judgement that Google, Yahoo, et al were secretly in cahoots with the NSA helping to build drag-net surveillance extranet stuff for them? These are very important revelations! I mean, when Greenwald/Snowden/Guardian released the original PRISM accusations, these slides would have provided a much much more important set of evidence, in…

I have no internal knowledge about this, but influenced by this Twitter thread[0] I would speculate that Greenwald and friends gave Google (and whoever else) advance notice and the opportunity to react to it before publishing. Responsible disclosure, and all that (not that it really applies in this case, but still).

[0] https://twitter.com/ioerror/status/395636984313413632

Post reply on HN