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NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants

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Re: NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants

#341

Post by PavlovsCat »

alan_cx wrote: post #318
kunai wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do not stereotype teenagers. I am merely fifteen years old, and if you take a look through my comment thread you may find more insight than you expected. Yes, most in my generation are shallow and passive; but that doesn't mean all are. There are some intellectuals on the fringes.

Right, there is something no one here it telling you. Older people are bare faced liars. Why? They operate primarily out of fear. They are scared for their job, business, mortgage, possessions, status, kids (you!!), their investments, health care, etc, etc. But more than anything, they are scared for them selves. Why? The more you have to lose, the more fear and paranoia you acquire. The older you get the LESS wise y…

When I was younger, nobody did as much for me as Noam Chomsky (information) and George Carlin (not going insane over said information) when it comes to these things, and both were way older than you are now.

I agree that there is a lot of potential and purity in youth, even in its follies. But I would like to point out that some people are kinda dead in spirit even when they're young, and some old people are rather lively up to the very point where they fall over and die... and urge you to not give up on yourself that easily. The very fact that you're this frustrated and outspoken means you ought not to. How alive you are is not JUST a function of your age. So stay alive, become more alive, pass it on and thanks.

Re: NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants

#342

Post by rayiner »

jlgreco wrote: post #150
rayiner wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not talking about privileges, I'm talking about the nature of what is "private information." I don't think the ethics of the government collecting information you share with people on Facebook you might have met once, along with god knows how many employees at Facebook, Google, etc, are clear cut.

And I say that how we should treat Facebook collecting data and how we should treat governments collecting data (even data from Facebook) are entirely disjoint. Anything else is a peculiar brand of corporatism.

I'm not talking about how we treat Facebook collecting data versus the government collecting data. I'm talking about how we treat the government collecting data that we freely give to Facebook versus how we treat data that we keep under our mattress. How do you define the ethics of privacy with respect to Facebook posts that have a wider audience than if you had posted something on a bulletin board in your office.

Re: NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants

#343

Post by hownottowrite »

niels_olson wrote: post #211
pasbesoin wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recall some months ago a seemingly fairly technical and generally informed commenter -- here on HN, I believe -- laying out their back of the envelop calculation of what it might take to archive all the U.S. voice traffic. The resulting figures were currently readily achievable, and they became increasingly... "trivial" (my interpretation) with the already announced and in progress data center expansions. And here,…

The real problem is that once a government program is started, good luck shutting it down. Look at the GITMO detainee program.

Correct. If there's one thing that governments are good at, it's storage. Long term storage.

Re: NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants

#344

Post by tripzilch »

tptacek wrote: post #246
unclebucknasty wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what? The subject of this thread is that the NSA admitted that analysts can listen to the content of all of our phone calls without a warrant. We are having this discussion because the Snowden link put the NSA front and center. Yet, you are arguing some mundane semantics? Instead of smearing the people responsible for these revelations, why not try to focus on the big picture? That is, all of this is leading to lo…

No, I am arguing that AT&T rolled over (and, as it turns out from today's Gellman piece in WaPo, took money from the USG to do it), while Google fought back. But commenters on boards like this are happy to shit all over Google because (a) any allegation that Google rolled over to the USG confirms their biases, (b) they're inclined to put people into binary "agrees with me entirely" or "disagrees with me entirely" buc…

If they didn't want to be "evil" they shouldn't have been collecting these gigantic amounts of data without properly protecting them from parties such as the NSA.

For all the promotion they put into two-factor authentication for account-safety, "suspicious login attempt" notifications, etc, if they had done the same for GPG in GMail/Chrome, that would have been a huge step towards giving the mainstream a taste of actually being in control of their own privacy, I'm not saying we wouldn't have this problem right now, but we'd be in a way better position of dealing with it, for sure.

edit: to be clear, that is one of the many reasons why I think this arguing about whether this access is "direct" or whether it's "sorta kinda direct" distracts from the real issue: access.

Re: NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants

#345

Post by mpyne »

magoon wrote: post #333
EFruit wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm 16. I agree with the second statement, but I'd like to point out this: if you're in the public school system and you aren't "shallow and passive", chances are good you'll be given hell if you show it. (Or maybe it's just me. I don't know.) I'm new to the public school system this year. I live in an area that has no shortage of gun ownership and advocacy, and, the weekend after Sandy Hook, I went to the guidance o…

That sucks, I'm sorry to hear that, but I'll make an observation and you can take it or leave it: You didn't properly evaluate their position and what is expected of them. They are held to a certain standard they may personally disagree with but their careers are on the line. Students have a hard time realizing this.

Apropos is Holmes's psychatrist over in Aurora, Co.

School faculty have to worry about their own little mini-9/11's every day that a kid walks in worried about a problem, because how would they ever be able to show their faces to the parents again if that worried kid ended being the 1/10,000 kid that would end up bring violence to their school, and the school had done nothing?

Re: NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants

#346

Post by mpyne »

16s wrote: post #327
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #77

Since the modus operandi seems to be for the NSA to suck up everything it can and decide later it seems (wild speculation follows) that the NSA might be sitting on audio recrodings of all your phone calls for the past several years. Can you imagine the number of divorce cases that would impact? Civil lawsuits? Proof of innocence or guilt in a crime? Hell, get a decade or two of this and historians alone would have a…

Most American's don't care. They are too busy on Facebook or playing games on their iphone/android, taking pictures of themselves in the bathroom, etc. The Native Americans gave their land away for beads. Modern Americans give their constitutional rights away for electronic gadgets that they can play with.

Native Americans on the whole didn't give anything away. They had their land taken by force and by disaster.

Re: NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants

#347

Post by wavefunction »

D9u wrote: post #325
Homunculiheaded wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really unfortunate that most people read 1984 as teenagers (I did). I went back to it as an adult, somewhat expecting it to be a let down. What I found was quite the opposite, there's a lot more nuance in that book than would really be absorbed by high school students being forced to read it. "The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you beg…

I had no problem understanding the many nuances of 1984 the book, and that was over 35 years ago. I also had no problem seeing a problem with the central banking system and fractional reserve lending. Perhaps you disliked "being forced" to read classics, but many of us contemplated these writings thoughtfully.

You may find there are even more nuances now that you have those additional 35 years under your belt, who knows...

Re: NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants

#348

Post by mratzloff »

ataggart wrote: post #332
Udo wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having just watched yesterday's RealTime (Bill Maher's show) as well as the mainstream news coverage of the week, I have finally come to the conclusion that no significant number of Americans has a problem with living in a surveillance state, not even the host and guests on a faux liberal talk show. Except when I'm on HN, everywhere I go there just are no people who see anything fundamentally wrong with the entire pr…

Few men want to be free; most just want fair masters.

A great quote from Sallust, a statesman of the Roman republic. Specifically, he lived toward the end of the Roman republic.

Another quote of his that seems applicable here:

"Yet many human beings, resigned to sensuality and indolence, uninstructed and unimproved, have passed through life like travellers in a strange country."

Re: NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants

#349

Post by mpyne »

tripzilch wrote: post #344
tptacek wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I am arguing that AT&T rolled over (and, as it turns out from today's Gellman piece in WaPo, took money from the USG to do it), while Google fought back. But commenters on boards like this are happy to shit all over Google because (a) any allegation that Google rolled over to the USG confirms their biases, (b) they're inclined to put people into binary "agrees with me entirely" or "disagrees with me entirely" buc…

If they didn't want to be "evil" they shouldn't have been collecting these gigantic amounts of data without properly protecting them from parties such as the NSA. For all the promotion they put into two-factor authentication for account-safety, "suspicious login attempt" notifications, etc, if they had done the same for GPG in GMail/Chrome, that would have been a huge step towards giving the mainstream a taste of act…

Maybe I'm the stupid one here, but how does Google offer to provide people 4GB of email and storage... without actually storing that?

And like you yourself mention, to add security to prevent automated hacking scripts from 0wning accounts to add to a botnet (attempts that happen orders of magnitude more often than an NSL or FISA warrant) they have to add IP tracking for individual accounts.

You talk about GPG but there's little safe way to do that from client-side JS, would defeat most of the point of offering free email for Google in the first place, and is already supported just by offloading that onto a real email client.

Re: NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants

#350

Post by mpyne »

vidarh wrote: post #288
tptacek wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A graf from Greenwald's original story: When the FAA was first enacted, defenders of the statute argued that a significant check on abuse would be the NSA's inability to obtain electronic communications without the consent of the telecom and internet companies that control the data. But the Prism program renders that consent unnecessary, as it allows the agency to directly and unilaterally seize the communications of…

Greenwald's statement here about the Prism program is explaining what the NSA document claims. This is clear from context. If it is false, it is false in the same way as a book reviews that recaps events in a novel is false. And unless I've missed some major revelation, it "appears to be false" on the basis of press releases from companies with an interest in not being caught with their pants down. Forgive me for not…

It's false in that it's technically inaccurate, even given nothing but the slides.

E.g. "direct and unilateral access". Unilateral means exactly that only one party needs to decide, the reality is that it is bilateral access (both parties must agree).

So that's at least one thing Greenwald managed to screw up in his "book review" of a single slide. The question is whether blame lies with Greenwald alone, or if Snowden mislead him into that by stupidity or malice.

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