31–40 of 51 posts
"The Guardian understands that a total of 850,000 NSA employees and US private contractors with top secret clearance had access to GCHQ databases." 850,000 employees/contractors?? - That can't be correct can it?
[1] http://news.clearancejobs.com/2011/09/26/how-many-people-hav...
A) Access is MUCH broader than just tapping Google, FB, MSFT, etc. Access is at the far broader level of telecommunication cables. Encryption can be broken later, with specialty FPGA chips.
B) More importantly, with the US taking "everything foreign" and with GCHQ (also) taking "everything foreign" ... the Venn set of these two closely associated govt spying operations means they get "everything, period", including US domestic communications.
If true, the original Snowden revelations are (small) child's play to what may actually be being surveilled, which may indeed be everything.
"This was done under secret agreements with commercial companies, described in one document as 'intercept partners'. […] some companies have been paid for the cost of their co-operation and GCHQ went to great lengths to keep their names secret. They were assigned 'sensitive relationship teams' and staff were urged in one internal guidance paper to disguise the origin of 'special source' material in their reports for…
"The Guardian understands that a total of 850,000 NSA employees and US private contractors with top secret clearance had access to GCHQ databases." 850,000 employees/contractors?? - That can't be correct can it?
Roughly 1.5 million people have top secret clearance[1], I would personally be alarmed if over half of them had access to data like this, although I can't say it would surprise me at this point. [1] http://news.clearancejobs.com/2011/09/26/how-many-people-hav...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm confused as to how anyone could have believed that one of the 5 largest signals intelligence agencies in the world could not have been tapping Internet backbone cables. Can we just resolve this right here? The Internet backbone is tapped. To whatever extent NSA isn't looking at our traffic (or is pretending not to, or pantomiming not doing it), some other foreign SIGINT agency is. To believe otherwise is to belie…
> I'm confused as to how anyone could have believed that one of the 5 largest signals intelligence agencies in the world could not have been tapping Internet backbone cables. I feel bad for conspiracy theorists. Had they made the same statement a month ago, they would have been called tin-foil hat wearing nuts and now people say things like the above so casually and pretend like it was obvious all along. I wouldn't b…
He nit-picks small details to steer conversation away from the big picture. Any notion of abuse, scandal or surprise is routinely dismissed. People who disagree are brushed off as hysterical or conspiracy theorists.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is the current understanding regarding the crackability of SSL?
It has been discussed over and over on hackernews recently so just tldr version. Let’s consider two scenarios. 1) NSA forces CA to issues a certificate for google.com and decide to man-in-the-middle you. In that case there is a mechanism call certificate pinning. To put it simply certificates of Google, Facebook, Twitter etc. are hard coded into Firefox and Google Chrome. (Microsoft provides this ability in IE using…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Roughly 1.5 million people have top secret clearance[1], I would personally be alarmed if over half of them had access to data like this, although I can't say it would surprise me at this point. [1] http://news.clearancejobs.com/2011/09/26/how-many-people-hav...
I'm personally alarmed that so many people (presumably) have had access to this material and yet these leaks are only _now_ coming out.
When someone puts their life on the line and opens their mouth, there is enough attention on the matter for other people to come forward safely.
If the attention is not there, people disappear (without trial in some cases) and end up rotting in jail somewhere.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm personally alarmed that so many people (presumably) have had access to this material and yet these leaks are only _now_ coming out.
Most government employees with top secret clearance (DV in the UK) like I was are scared of the consequences of breaking the rules. When someone puts their life on the line and opens their mouth, there is enough attention on the matter for other people to come forward safely. If the attention is not there, people disappear (without trial in some cases) and end up rotting in jail somewhere.
This being more or less the entire stated mission of GCHQ, I wonder who's actually surprised by this revelation.
I'm truly appalled that the GCHQ see it as their job to collect network traffic from every communication passing through the UK, and pass that on to foreign intelligence agencies and politicians in the UK and abroad. The potential for corruption and abuse there is astounding, and no organisation or person should have anything like this amount of power over our lives. Politicians can be bribed, judges turned, legal cases undermined, corporate financials exposed, and leaders overthrown, all at the whim of any one of the millions of people with access to these databases, which apparently also have appallingly lax access controls and standards of oversight, along with their terrible standards for defining which signals they should intercept.
If complete surveillance of the population is the purpose of the GCHQ, it should be shut down in my opinion, but I think that's a perversion of the role of signals intelligence in our society. The purpose of these agencies should be (and originally was) to defend the communications of our government from interception, to intercept communications from known enemies of the nation and to assist law enforcement and the judiciary in intercepting the communications of criminals, using all the standards of reasonable suspicion, judicial oversight etc that we hold so dearly to in collecting evidence in every other domain. Just because it's easier and more practical for them to intercept everything and record it for later use, doesn't make that extreme violation of many of our codes of privacy and law acceptable, predictable or desirable. It has enormous implications for our society, this is an essential debate when so much of our lives are now held in digital form, and I'm surprised that you try to blow it off as old news and of little consequence.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'm confused as to how anyone could have believed that one of the 5 largest signals intelligence agencies in the world could not have been tapping Internet backbone cables. I feel bad for conspiracy theorists. Had they made the same statement a month ago, they would have been called tin-foil hat wearing nuts and now people say things like the above so casually and pretend like it was obvious all along. I wouldn't b…
For the record: I believe it's more likely than not that the NSA already has a CA key (or several) in its possession.