281–290 of 420 posts
There was a time when those in the Intelligence Community had this lesson burned into their brains.
I've lived under surveillance before, so I feel my perspective might be somewhat appropriate. I won't comment on the specifics (uninteresting and irrelevant, had to do with where I was living). I won't even make a statement about whether it's justified in my case or in general. I'd just ask everyone here to do one thing: Watch this, then ask yourself how you feel (if it doesn't go directly to 6:40, fastforward to it,…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Buffett (via Berkshire Hathaway) has made huge amounts of money selling insurance against catastrophes. This includes natural disasters such as earthquakes, tsunamis, and floods, as well as other catastrophic events including terrorism.
Acts of war and nuclear disasters are excluded from insurance.
I think it's interesting to ask why these programs are so widely hated. These are national security assets: evidence gathered here will never be used in a drug case, or a tax evasion case. Why not? These tools exist for the bigger fish: the dozens of Soviet-era nuclear weapons believed to be missing, or the small amounts of dangerous pathogens that periodically vanish from research labs. These are what the government…
> I think it's interesting to ask why these programs are so widely hated.
Because most people do not like when bunch of geeks are laughing at their pillow talk or sex talk with wife over the phone? Because we have a right to privacy, like most human beings..?
> These are national security assets: evidence gathered here will never be used in a drug case, or a tax evasion case.
And you know this because of what??
> Why not? These tools exist for the bigger fish: the dozens of Soviet-era nuclear weapons believed to be missing, or the small amounts of dangerous pathogens that periodically vanish from research labs. Just exactly what was the last time you heard government proudly announcing they were able to stop a pathogens spread attack? Or nuclear weapon being recovered? Give me a break! They couldn't even stop two morans with pressure cookers in Boston and you trying to tell me they will track some pathogens that vanished from a lab??
> Ok, but no one here is going to argue that stopping terrorism is bad: the problem is in how we define terrorism. How about this: terrorism is when you secretly drone a group of people in Afganistan and as a "collateral damage" you kill some 8 year old boy. Then his father happen to build up anger against americans, board a plane and walk to Times Square to detonate his vest. He is a terrorist, right? I mean, you barely heard about some children being droned by accident, and then you have Manning facing possible capital punishment for releasing materials like Apache "mistake" attack on civilians. But sure you will hear about that fanatic detonating on us soil. You want to stop terrorism? Fine! Immidiately withdraw ALL troops from ALL foreign soils: Iraq, Afganistan, everywhere where americans are sticking their nose where it doesn't belong to! How on earth are they protecting us soil by occupying Iraq, for crying out loud?? Once you stop invading countries, dronning innocent people, you will all of sudden see nobody cares about coming to america and blowing themselves up.
> It's important to remember that we still have a functioning democracy. No we don't. Money buys power, power buys money. When you big and powerful enough, you are innocent regardless of charges. You are "too big to fail", or other crap. You are given billions of tax payers money to survive while others bankrupt. Democracy ended in 60s.
> If you -- Hacker News reader -- decided to run for congress tomorrow, you might not win, but you won't be killed, sabotaged, or secretly blocked. Oh okay so for that reason let's stop the human kind progress here and just gave up everything because since we are not following example of some African countries, then everything will always be fine.
> While some individual politicans may be corrupt, the system broadly is not. How about this: while system broadly is corrupt, some individual politicans are not.
> These programs are enforcement mechanisms; the laws themselves are still made by the people, No they are not. They are made by entities; government entities. You watch news lately? Bengatzi 9 months later - no answers, no one guilty, no one brought to justice, Rice promoted. Fast and Furious - One US marschall dead -- noone found guilty, noone brought to justice, IRS -- same story plus individual taking 5th. People in government ARE NOT accountable and until this changes up to bringing criminal charges (against people like the one in charge of lavish $50MM spending at IRS), noone will care or be scared!
> While we as a population may argue about social issues like gay marriage and abortion, our government is not fascist. Read the definition on Wikipedia. We are in fact very close to it.
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The loss of privacy is massive in comparison to the lives lost to terrorism. More people die each year due to car accidents than have lost their lives to all terrorist attacks on US Soil. If the information that is being gathered is about safety, then why isn't the government isn't creating a massive program to strictly monitor highway speeds, traffic roadways, and increase traffic safety then? Answer: The informatio…
We have such a massive program, according to many; the NTSB is a big bureaucracy and a lot of people consider the whole concept of speed limits and traffic police as a encroachment upon their freedom rather than a reasonable collective decision on how to share transit arteries. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master. This seems a rather inappropriate apho…
Of 400 employees.
If PRISM only really costs $20M/year (per the slide deck), it has to be the greatest bang-for-buck IT project in Federal history. I'd let it go if we can get rid of all those multi-billion satellite projects and 3/4ths of the staff.
Damage to perceived 'rights' is OK, as long as it is done efficiently.
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They were on S3 at one point in time (and pretty widely known as the biggest S3 customer). I'm not sure if they are on S3 today. This may depend on when you interviewed.
From the caliber of engineers I talked to, I can't imagine them bringing storage in house without some major churn. It is a sea of fresh CS grads with no real world operational experience.
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Microsoft now runs the supernodes instead of them being random high bandwidth Skype users. Your computer uses a supernode to find the address of the user you want to reach, but you still connect directly to that user to communicate. People misunderstood this change to mean that call traffic traversed Microsoft servers. That said, it has been shown that at the minimum China has keys to decrypt peer to peer communicati…
How does Skype's key exchange work? If the supernode hands out an address for a server that intercepts the call, would the Skype client still accept it and connect?
When logging in an RSA public/private key pair is generated and the public key is sent up to the server. The username to public key mapping is seeded to supernodes and inserted into the global address book.
A calling party looks up the username on a supernode and receives the public key of the answerer as well as some magic to help them establish a direct connection even if both are behind NAT.
The caller generates a single use AES256 key for the session, encrypts it N times where N is the number of other parties on the call plus a number of built-in "observer" certificates. These encrypted keys are all sent over the wire to the other parties, whom are each able to decrypt 1 of the N encrypted payloads.
Each party encrypts traffic to the others using the session specific AES key.
If you are a government agency with a private key that matches one of the observer public keys (Russia, China, and India have openly claimed to have these), and you are able to record the setup for the call, you are effectively another party in the group chat and have access to the session key.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's impossible to have a meaningful conversation if you intentionally view anyone else's opinions in the worst possible light . You may have a valid interpretation of what I said, but it's clearly not the interpretation I intended to convey. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity
You cited an irrelevant quote and are invoking the principle of charity to demand that anigbrowl give it a pass. It would be easier if you just admitted that the quote is about censorship and not privacy and move on. You're weakening your rhetorical position by defending something that's obviously wrong, and not central to your point.
It's like you think comments are some sort of game where you can win or lose. I think I'll just let readers read my comments and opt out of this silly game you want to play.