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Mark Klein, AT&T whistleblower who revealed NSA mass spying, has died

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Re: Mark Klein, AT&T whistleblower who revealed NSA mass spying, has died

#311

Post by anonym29 »

bb88 wrote: post #222
anonym29 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasn't simply tapping phones, it is the warrantless collection of close to all global electronic communications. And the immorality doesn't stop there, that's where it starts. "We kill people based on metadata." - General Michael Hayden, former Director of the NSA, former Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence, and former Director of the CIA. This includes innocent people. Women, children, civilians. D…

If you're in a war of attrition (like the the US was in Afghanistan), and the other side already has agreed it's okay to kill innocents (9/11), then you're not going to win by fighting an "ethical" war -- whatever that means. I'm not going to defend the CIA/NSA for actions taken inside the country. On the other hand, I'm not going to second guess decisions happening on the ground in an active war zone.

Afghanistan had nothing to do with 9/11. Neither did Syria, or Iraq.

Vietnam wasn't self-defense. Korean war wasn't self-defense. CIA-instigated Color revolutions and Euromaidan weren't self-defense. Kosovo wasn't self-defense. Launching a cruise missile (a precision weapon that requires the operator to enter precise geographic coordinates prior to launch) at the Chinese embassy in Belgrade wasn't self-defense.

A vast and overwhelming majority of the military operations the post-WW2 USA conducts overseas are not acts of self-defense, they are acts of imperialism.

"I want to grow the imperial empire's influence and footprint" is not justification for murdering unarmed civilians. Never has been, never will be.

Re: Mark Klein, AT&T whistleblower who revealed NSA mass spying, has died

#312

Post by seanw444 »

kortilla wrote: post #180
lurk2 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the bad guys can't simultaneously be omniscient and so dumb they're trivially outed like this This is a false dichotomy. Federal agencies prove themselves to be fallible (even incompetent) all the time, they just have far more resources available to make up for their mistakes.

Unmarked vans drive around all of the time and nobody bats an eye at them. There is no reason to even bother with a big elaborate company name that anyone could google and do further background checks on

Unmarked vans drive around all the time. They don't typically park out front of a whistleblower's house. There is more scrutiny there than driving down any random street. Therefore, a more sufficient cover would be required.

Re: Mark Klein, AT&T whistleblower who revealed NSA mass spying, has died

#313

Post by CamperBob2 »

ajross wrote: post #308
CamperBob2 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US harasses and jails prominent dissidents. Russia murders them.

So surely it's more important and not less that notable Russians like Snowden use their influence to drive policy and change, right? Basically, you're just saying "It's OK not to challenge Putin if you're afraid". Which is fine. But I argue it needs to then inform the way we treat his other decisionmaking. The facts on the ground are at least as compatible with "Edward Snowden is a Putinist Partisan" as they are "Edw…

Yeah, maybe, but it's too easy for me to sit here in a comfy chair, safe in the US, and talk about what an exiled protester in Russia should do. I lack the moral authority to USplain to Snowden that the Russians are just sheltering him for his propaganda value, even though that's obviously what they are doing.

He owes us nothing. Through no fault of his own, he does owe Russia, though. If we didn't want Putin to make a useful puppet out of him, we (a) should not have placed him in a position to make the decisions he did, ideally by following our own laws to avoid inciting his actions in the first place; and (b) we should have been able to assure him of a fair trial without inciting snickers and guffaws.

You hear HRC saying (of Assange) "Can't we just drone him?" And you think Snowden has no cause for concern?! Naive.

Re: Mark Klein, AT&T whistleblower who revealed NSA mass spying, has died

#314

Post by freedomben »

lurk2 wrote: post #188
tptacek wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, the real argument here is between "something interesting" and "something boring", and it's message board so "boring" is heavily disfavored. But, yeah, it's a sewer inspection van.

My comment did not express any opinion as to whether this was or was not a surveillance van, and this has no bearing on the proposed alternatives being a false dichotomy.

With GP's clarification, it's still shaped like a false dichotomy but I don't think it's one in spirit. It sounds more like reductio ad absurdum to me, with a sprinkling of hyperbole for effect.

Re: Mark Klein, AT&T whistleblower who revealed NSA mass spying, has died

#315

Post by amiga386 »

7e wrote: post #293
kleiba wrote: post #230

This is the sentence I was looking for: > While we were able to use his evidence to make some change, both EFF and Mark were ultimately let down by Congress and the Courts, which have refused to take the steps necessary to end the mass spying even after Edward Snowden provided even more evidence of it in 2013. Do you have to be a cynic to pretty much have expected this?

No, you're not a cynic. The EFF takes exquisite pains to hide from you the fact that these programs spied on foreigners, which is the job of the NSA. Thus, they are necessary and proper, and perfectly legal. The EFF is a propaganda platform. You shouldn't take its claims at face value.

Don't give us this "perfectly legal" crap. To remind you: the NSA killed off ThinThread (that explicitly took care to avoid wiretapping US citizens' data) in favour of Trailblazer, which grabs ALL data, ALL the time, including ALL US citizens' data.

Their explicit intent was to break the law. They broke the law. Then Congress retroactively let them get away with it. They're still breaking the law today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThinThread

> The "change in priority" consisted of the decision made by the director of NSA General Michael V. Hayden to go with a concept called Trailblazer, despite the fact that ThinThread was a working prototype that claimed to protect the privacy of U.S. citizens. ThinThread was dismissed and replaced by the Trailblazer Project, which lacked the privacy protections

Re: Mark Klein, AT&T whistleblower who revealed NSA mass spying, has died

#317

Post by kbolino »

potato3732842 wrote: post #305
lern_too_spel wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SMTP connections are wrapped in TLS these days, so even if you were to collect email transfers bit for bit, you wouldn't be able to read them, not even metadata.

IIRC there's been speculation that the NSA can/has brute forced TLS keys up through 4096 bit size. I read a paper once that crunched the numbers on energy cost and compute time and whatnot it comes out looking like a reasonable investment for them. Obviously they'd have to keep such an exercise on the DL if they did do it because increasing key size is pretty trivial.

A 4096-bit RSA key is still well beyond the means of even a very capable state actor. The standard nowadays is 2048-bit RSA keys, cracking of which is also (probably) still beyond anyone's capabilities. Maybe a multi-year effort directed at a specific target might manage to crack a single key, but I wouldn't bet on it. RSA cracking efforts would almost certainly focus on smaller keys that are still being used despite the warnings.

However, even if they did crack a major infrastructure provider's RSA key, TLS nowadays uses ephemeral key exchange which provides forward secrecy. So it doesn't matter if an intelligence agency collected every packet, they could not decipher the contents after the fact. They would have to actively interdict every TLS handshake and perform a man-in-the-middle attack against both parties all the time.

It is extremely doubtful that this is happening en masse. Such a process would require an immense amount of online computing power directly in the path of all Internet traffic. Much of the compute available to intelligence agencies (and accounted for in back-of-the-envelope calculations by outside parties) is effectively offline due to airgaps. It's not like they want people doing to them what they're doing to others, after all.

It's much easier to send an NSL to Google to read your email than to try to intercept it over the wire. The latter capability would be reserved for high-value targets unreachable by the US legal system, not mass surveillance.

Re: Mark Klein, AT&T whistleblower who revealed NSA mass spying, has died

#318

Post by adastra22 »

ajross wrote: post #306
adastra22 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He has never expressed himself to be anything other than a patriotic American. Why would he be putting his life on the line for a country that he does not identify with? People who do that ti support just cause like Ukraine have my respect. But I wouldn’t expect if of anyone.

> Why would he be putting his life on the line for a country that he does not identify with? Edward Joseph Snowden is literally a Russian citizen!

Because he was effectively stateless, and that was the only option available. Context matters..

Re: Mark Klein, AT&T whistleblower who revealed NSA mass spying, has died

#319

Post by burnished »

tptacek wrote: post #83
themcaffee wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That certainly is just a Sewer TV inspection van! I have a hand in writing some of the software that is run on these and processes the videos that come out of them. They all have rack mounted PCs and a monitor with a joystick to control the crawler that goes in the pipe.

Gotta love this site.

Makes for a treasure trove of impromptu QA's in the comments

Re: Mark Klein, AT&T whistleblower who revealed NSA mass spying, has died

#320

Post by kmeisthax »

7e wrote: post #293
kleiba wrote: post #230

This is the sentence I was looking for: > While we were able to use his evidence to make some change, both EFF and Mark were ultimately let down by Congress and the Courts, which have refused to take the steps necessary to end the mass spying even after Edward Snowden provided even more evidence of it in 2013. Do you have to be a cynic to pretty much have expected this?

No, you're not a cynic. The EFF takes exquisite pains to hide from you the fact that these programs spied on foreigners, which is the job of the NSA. Thus, they are necessary and proper, and perfectly legal. The EFF is a propaganda platform. You shouldn't take its claims at face value.

So what you're saying is that the NSA wiretapping is OK because they're not doing it to you? That's really dumb.

Currently, the US is in a number of intelligence sharing arrangements in which countries ask other countries to spy on their own citizens for them. e.g. if the NSA can't spy on someone because they know they're American, they ask GCHQ to do it for them. And vice versa. This is why human rights need to be as universal as possible, because otherwise you just ask your buddy to do what you can't legally do yourself.

"We only spy on foreigners" is a water sandwich.

Furthermore, it is NSA policy to treat all encrypted traffic as foreign, and to archive it forever until it can be decrypted and searched to determine if it was legal to decrypt and search it. In other words, "we only spy on foreigners" is a guilty until proven innocent policy.

"Necessary and proper" is decided by a security apparatus with a conflict of interest. Nobody voted for this, the executive branch just decided to do it. As for legality, well, I'll give you that Congress retroactively made the spying legal. On the other hand, the US Constitution has a pretty clear restriction on the use of state power in order to search and seize. Being a foreigner is not in and of itself necessary suspicion to justify searching through all their shit, because being from another country is not a crime.

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