NSA infiltrates links to Yahoo, Google data centers worldwide • Hacker News Board

Re: NSA infiltrates links to Yahoo, Google data centers worldwide

#401

Post by jmagoon » Wed, Oct 30, 2013, 10:32 PM UTC

xal wrote: post #229

Zelphyr wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You know what would outrage the public? ESPN being shut down. No better way to state it. Our government is fucking us with our pants on but we're too distracted (by people getting paid hundreds of millions of dollars to throw a fucking ball around) to care.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses

Love this, had never heard of it before. My generation drives me mad. 20-30 year olds whose major pursuit in life is frivolity, who complain when they don't have the jobs necessary for them to pursue their frivolity.

We're beyond this: "I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain." And have reached a point where the majority of people spend their time in bread and circuses. God damn it.

Re: NSA infiltrates links to Yahoo, Google data centers worldwide

#402

Post by w_t_payne » Wed, Oct 30, 2013, 10:32 PM UTC

sukuriant wrote: post #160

w_t_payne wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to work in the antivirus industry, and, as I recall, anything that even hinted at a history of hacking or virus-writing would lead to instant dismissal and black-listing (from pretty much the entire computer security industry). I imagine that the same prohibition would now apply to former government employees also. The sad fact of the matter is that we cannot trust individuals that have ever worked with these…

Why would the anti-virus industry refuse to hire people that had developed viruses? Aren't those the people that think like virus writers and could write better antivirus software? Same with the hacking half of that. Those are the people that best know how to secure systems. Wouldn't it be the people that used to be blackhat and have transitioned to gray or white-hat hacking that would be the best people to provide t…

Anti-virus endpoint software is essentially (and necessarily) a rootkit. Businesses installing antivirus software are placing an incredible amount of trust in the antivirus vendor.

Without trust, the antivirus vendor has no business whatsoever. As a result, they are (or jolly well should be) ultra-careful to earn that trust. This includes subjecting their employees to a certain degree of vetting.

In the age of cloud computing, the same relationship dynamics are observed between businesses and the cloud vendors to whom they entrust their data.

See? There it is again: Trust.

Important stuff.

Re: NSA infiltrates links to Yahoo, Google data centers worldwide

#403

Post by anonymousDan » Wed, Oct 30, 2013, 10:33 PM UTC

cromwellian wrote: post #186

BillyMaize wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>In theory, fully homomorphic encryption could allow the best of both worlds above. I completely encrypt my data on my machine --- nobody else has the key --- then send it into the cloud where cloud companies can do operations for me like searching, sorting, filtering, etc, all without ever decrypting the data or learning what it is. Can you explain this to me? I don't understand how you can search encrypted data.

You don't need full homomorphic encryption to do encrypted search, look up PKES systems, there's tons of papers on it now ( http://crypto.stanford.edu/~dabo/abstracts/encsearch.html ). It's possible to encrypted keyword search with trapdoor functions in such a way that the server can't learn anything about what you're searching on, nor what is stored.

Are you aware of any vaguely practical systems for a variant of keyword search that just returns whether the keyword was found (e.g. 1 for found, 0 for not found) but with the added requirement that the result must itself be encrypted? I suspect it degenerates to fully homomorphic encryption though.

Re: NSA infiltrates links to Yahoo, Google data centers worldwide

#404

Post by belzeboss » Wed, Oct 30, 2013, 10:34 PM UTC

danbruc wrote: post #156

bradleyjg wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's hard not to come to the conclusion that these activities were essentially criminal. I don't see how the administration can fail to disavow them, investigate them fully, and hold their instigators accountable. It feels like Special Prosecutor time. The government takes the position that their agents are almost completely unconstrained by law when it comes to actions taken abroad aimed at non-US persons. Even we…

I am at a loss for words. Arrogant, self-righteous, disrespectful, ignorant, mendacious...nothing cuts it. It is illegal in the US but who cares about the rest of the world? I can not remember when something similar made me that angry as the current conduct of the US does. If I would not know better that this would negatively affect the whole world and innocent US citizens and that emotional reactions are usually not…

> What really pisses me of is this sentiment of thinking of non-US citizens as second class humans.

When a group puts a draws a line of Us and them, they are making enemies. With this approach the NSA is declaring the USA as the enemies of all those being spied upon. The more similar news spread the more this mentality that "The USA is the enemy" will spread and its only a matter of time that more countries turn a blind eye or even facilitate terrorist actions against the USA.

Re: NSA infiltrates links to Yahoo, Google data centers worldwide

#405

Post by rhizome » Wed, Oct 30, 2013, 10:35 PM UTC

swombat wrote: post #113

sixothree wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen no indication that Google considers the NSA any sort of opponent.

I think they do now. There has to be some sort of sense of personal professionalism of the many highly qualified security experts working at Google, that is hurt by the revelations that the NSA basically fucked them over and drew a slide with a smiley face on it about how they fucked them over.

Then again, plausible deniability. Google is of less use to the NSA if they have fewer customers.

Re: NSA infiltrates links to Yahoo, Google data centers worldwide

#406

Post by panarky » Wed, Oct 30, 2013, 10:36 PM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #81

alternize wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

while they might not have access to the "Google servers", it now is almost certain they have access to the "Google network" (i.e. fiber cable access). as seen in previous reports, intercepting sea fiber optic traffic between continents seems something the NSA has mastered...

> while they might not have access to the "Google servers", it now is almost certain they have access to the "Google network" (i.e. fiber cable access). If the article is correct, the NSA does not have that. What they have is an agreement that they can submit search terms and get matching data from a system operated by their British counterpart, GCHQ. It is GCHQ who, per the article, has a direct tap somewhere inside…

There have been reports going back to the Echelon days that the NSA and GCHQ collaborate to evade each nation's laws.

The ideas is that US agencies supply the UK with technology and training, the UK collects sigint in the US with US knowledge, then shares intelligence with US agencies.

The US reciprocates by spying on UK citizens and sharing the intelligence with UK agencies.

That way US agencies can say they don't spy on innocent Americans on US soil. But it's just another elaborate deception.

Re: NSA infiltrates links to Yahoo, Google data centers worldwide

#407

Post by pnathan » Wed, Oct 30, 2013, 10:36 PM UTC

tripzilch wrote: post #381

pnathan wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The purpose of intelligence agencies is to spy on non-citizens, both in peacetime and in wartime. One might argue that traditionally they focused on public figures in the foreign states and that spying on average foreigners is new; I don't know if that's true, but seems plausible. It would generally be a dereliction of duty for the NSA/CIA to not spy on non-Americans. The same holds true, modulo agency name and count…

Come on, say it to my face! You don't believe non-US people have a right to privacy. That's me! Your agencies can do whatever they want to me, but not to you. You're on the public Internet, you're not "within national borders", and everybody can hear what you just said. Say it to my face. Tell me how you feel that it's just fine to violate my privacy, that it's apparently perfectly fine to pry into my life, hack my p…

I think that, in today's world, everyone, particularly public people of interest to other countries, should reasonably expect to have foreign countries gather information about them, up to and including spying.

For example, if I was doing important security research, I would fully expect to have the Russians, Chinese, Israelis, etc, looking into my work.

I don't believe the US is exceptional. I expect other countries to have interests in US citizens and to carry out their interests to advance their national interest.

This expectation is entirely separate from my opinion of the morality of said act.

Re: NSA infiltrates links to Yahoo, Google data centers worldwide

#408

Post by akjj » Wed, Oct 30, 2013, 10:38 PM UTC

danbruc wrote: post #156

bradleyjg wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's hard not to come to the conclusion that these activities were essentially criminal. I don't see how the administration can fail to disavow them, investigate them fully, and hold their instigators accountable. It feels like Special Prosecutor time. The government takes the position that their agents are almost completely unconstrained by law when it comes to actions taken abroad aimed at non-US persons. Even we…

I am at a loss for words. Arrogant, self-righteous, disrespectful, ignorant, mendacious...nothing cuts it. It is illegal in the US but who cares about the rest of the world? I can not remember when something similar made me that angry as the current conduct of the US does. If I would not know better that this would negatively affect the whole world and innocent US citizens and that emotional reactions are usually not…

> It is illegal in the US but who cares about the rest of the world?

I think it's entirely justifiable to give the NSA more latitude abroad than domestically. To turn reverse the scenario, as an American, I would far rather have the French or the Germans conducting surveillance on the United States than the US government. People keep comparisons to the Stasi, too often they forget what the Stasi's purpose was: to suppress political opposition. Here in the US, surveillance was used for the same purpose, on a much smaller scale, during the J. Edgar Hoover era. Political opponents of the government were spied on with the intent of blackmail or embarassment.

That's the whole reason why government surveillance is so scary. It puts so much information in the hands of an organization with such far-reaching powers in law enforcement and otherwise that the combination is prone to abuse. When the US spies on foreign citizens or vice versa, the potential for abuse is much less. The NSA has neither the interest nor the ability to harass political opponents in Germany and France, and the same goes in the other direction.

Re: NSA infiltrates links to Yahoo, Google data centers worldwide

#409

Post by caseydurfee » Wed, Oct 30, 2013, 10:44 PM UTC

nickpyett wrote: post #142

Larry Page should step down as CEO. It would never happen, as Google shares would drop like a bomb and give credence to the argument that the cloud isn't secure enough, but at least it would show that someone at Google cares. It would create a landmark moment though; something that would spark more debate in both the media and with American politicians.

Better yet: appoint a goat to be CEO and then ritually sacrifice it. Maybe write "Google Cares" on the side of the goat before killing it.

I guarantee that would spark some interesting debate!

Re: NSA infiltrates links to Yahoo, Google data centers worldwide

#410

Post by danbruc » Wed, Oct 30, 2013, 10:50 PM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #396

danbruc wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As pointed out above, misconduct of other countries does not justify the own behavior. There is really no big difference between collecting the information on your own or letting someone else do the dirty work and then just crabbing the results. I should have pointed out more clearly that I am not especially against the behavior of the USA but against behavior like this in general but I did so in some other comments.…

> for example I can not even imagine any EU country doing something like Guantanamo By the information that has publicly come out about the "black sites" operated by the US and its allies -- from which prisoners were later transferred to the not-secret facility at Guatanamo where at least a show of adhering to international humanitarian law was made, several EU countries were actively involved in the system, and the…

Source? If true, I completely missed that side of the story. The worst I could find after a quick search was that the UK allowed extraditions to Guantanamo even after learning about the torture happening there.