31–40 of 91 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because, outside US, government agencies and companies that considers their communication security critical will choose another provider. They are paying Google Apps, Microsoft 365, etc.
Would anyone (especially from a foreign country) who considers their communication security critical really be using any of those services today?
Blow the whistle on what? The problem with the "conversation" going on in these threads is that no one is defining that first. If we're talking about the first leaked version of PRISM, we still don't even know if it exists or how it works. Subsequent revisions have made it seem that if the NSA doesn't have the immediate ability to query the companies' backends, then they have some kind of carte blanche ability to ask…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
... and shareholders who care more about profits than morals I think this issue goes against shareholders because they can lose real customers feeling defrauded. It's realistic to expect legal actions against Google/Microsoft/etc operations outside US, mainly for Government accounts.
What makes you think these companies are going to lose any substantial number of customers? Most of the anger here is directed at the government, and it is only a small minority of people who even are angry about this. Only a very tiny minority of people will actually stop using Google or Facebook because of this incident.
Blow the whistle on what? The problem with the "conversation" going on in these threads is that no one is defining that first. If we're talking about the first leaked version of PRISM, we still don't even know if it exists or how it works. Subsequent revisions have made it seem that if the NSA doesn't have the immediate ability to query the companies' backends, then they have some kind of carte blanche ability to ask…
For the post linked in the headline, those seem like shocking accusations, but the kind I'm now accustomed to taking with a grain of salt. It seems perfectly plausible that the guy legitimately deserves a 6 year sentence for reasons unrelated to any of this. As for the subject/headline, which I'm not sure is related to the particular post linked, it seems pretty simple. Tech companies would probably see PRISM with mu…
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Well it's a real (if secret) court, so I assume it would be what normally happens for contempt of court.
It's my understanding that the secret court ruled the primary legal justification for PRISM (FISA Section 702) as unconstitutional. The Justice Department is trying to keep that ruling as secret as possible. [1] So, really, what would they do? [1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/06/government-says-secret...
More broadly though, I don't understand how you can possibly have secret courts. Justice not only must be done but must be seen to be done, otherwise its not justice.
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It's my understanding that the secret court ruled the primary legal justification for PRISM (FISA Section 702) as unconstitutional. The Justice Department is trying to keep that ruling as secret as possible. [1] So, really, what would they do? [1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/06/government-says-secret...
How can they rule the justification as unconstitutiona when the judges were giving court orders under that justification? More broadly though, I don't understand how you can possibly have secret courts. Justice not only must be done but must be seen to be done, otherwise its not justice.
I don't understand how you can have secret courts either. It's a perversion of what this country was founded upon.
Blow the whistle on what? The problem with the "conversation" going on in these threads is that no one is defining that first. If we're talking about the first leaked version of PRISM, we still don't even know if it exists or how it works. Subsequent revisions have made it seem that if the NSA doesn't have the immediate ability to query the companies' backends, then they have some kind of carte blanche ability to ask…
>If not, and there's a very real chance that neither of these are true, then the question doesn't make sense. Particularly since every tech company leader (and the NSA) are insisting that neither is true.
(I'll keep talking about Google specifically just to narrow things down for now.)
* NYT suggested that FISA orders can be broad and shallow ("a broad sweep for intelligence, like logs of certain search terms") instead of narrow and deep (eg. everything on person or company X), but CNET's source contradicted that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5845878 .
* The Washington Post used language which suggested that Google's lawyers may have been taken out of its FISA-702-order-execution loop altogether, but NYT contradicts that and Google has denied it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5847846 .
* The Verizon mega-warrant suggests that NSA might be gathering data under similarly broad FISA orders, something that (like broad-and-shallow orders) would make "no direct access" a lot less meaningful, but that's been denied by Google https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5847959 and the various anonymous sources seem to be contradicting it too.
* The NYT article http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/08/technology/tech-companies-... seemed to hint at the possiblity that the Google lawyers processing FISA orders could be suffering some kind of reverse regulatory capture or that Larry Page and Chief Legal Officer David Drummond could have lost track of the extent and nature of what they were approving. There doesn't seem to be any specific evidence for that though.
One thing that does seem to be true is that if you make it more convenient for the NSA to get data under FISA 702 orders it will respond by getting a lot more of it. Apparently the NSA's PRISM stack boasts of a 63% increase in the number of communications obtained in 2012 from Google http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-n... (and much larger increases at other companies). Still, it seems the PRISM system hasn't - or at least, hasn't yet! - facilitated an order-of-magnitude or game-changing increase in the scale of FISA 702 snooping. Overall there doesn't seem to be any great change in what we think we know http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2013/05/fisaca... about that.
So, unless some of those hinted worries are true, there doesn't seem to be anything very big that Larry Page could have brought to our attention that wasn't public knowledge last week already. The biggest news is probably the increase in the scale of the data requested, and if Page cared enough about that he could presumably just have done a Twitter and declined to build a semi-automatic pipeline...
(IANAL or anything else.)
There are several valid reasons why they didn't blow the whistle: 1. As the NYTimes article leaks[1], the leaders of these tech companies may not actually know the extent of FISA and PRISM within their servers - employees cooperating with the NSA would be forbidden from sharing this even with the CEOs. 2. What are they blowing the whistle on? There are a flurry of competing facts and fragmented stories. It came out a…