Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

NSA infiltrates links to Yahoo, Google data centers worldwide

washingtonpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

461–470 of 614 posts

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

#461

Post by GHFigs »

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…

Especially when the story broke there was a lot of outrage about (accidentally) spying at US citizens, but spying at non-US citizens and breaking foreign law in peacetime is deemed acceptable.

What did you used to think foreign intelligence services did?

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

#462

Post by generj »

dsl wrote: post #372
DannyBee wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://gigaom.com/2008/02/25/googlenet-update-google-buys-a-...

From the link: > Google is buying a piece of a new transpacific fiber optic cable Only a half dozen or so companies actually own undersea fiber. It requires a huge amount of effort to lay and maintain including hundred million dollar cable ships. Everyone (even Google) leases, or in this case buys, capacity on shared cables.

Google has the cash to lay their own now though.

Or just buy a company which does.

I wouldn't be surprised if they do so in the future.

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

#463

Post by JabavuAdams »

allc wrote: post #312
sukuriant wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

because of their underlying lack of ethics. You need to have ethical hackers that are interested in the wellbeing/security of a community/society. Even if they know the systems from both perspectives, if they even have a moral deficiency, what's to stop them from committing insider attacks/writing exploits of the system? You cannot trust that type of people unless you know for certain that they have abandoned their p…

I'd wager that most people's ethics are more malleable than that. Also, don't underestimate the power of the golden handcuffs.

Having a spouse, kids, and a nice house in a nice neighbourhood makes any kind of anti-social behaviour that much harder to justify from a purely pragmatic, never mind ethical point of view.

I.e. young men often have nothing much to lose and act accordingly.

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

#464

Post by georgemcbay »

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…

For what little is it worth, a lot of us American citizens have a real problem with our government not extending the concept of the natural rights that we supposedly have to everyone, everywhere. Of course, these days they aren't even really bothering to discriminate and are just fucking us all over, though I guess they do apologize a bit more when they get caught fucking over Americans.

Also, while I think this sort of spying is terrible I'm even more sickened by things like the fact that we keep killing innocent people with drones and such and justifying it as acceptable collateral damage when nobody will tell us who the real targets were, why they had to be killed, and why that was so important that accidentally killing a few hundreds or thousands of innocents while pursuing them is reasonable.

At this point we're so far down the slippery slope that the rest of you might as well cut us off if you can. I'm unconvinced we are going to right this ship anytime soon, we as the group of citizens whose net worth isn't in the billions have lost control of the bus.

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

#466

Post by Perseids »

cromwellian wrote: post #268
ochs wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How where they false? The PRISM program is real. There is a way for the NSA to automatically access Google's databases, with Google's knowledge under secret blanket (not case-by-case) court orders. They where clearly lying when they denied any "direct access".

No they weren't lying, as there is no evidence that Google had knowledge that the NSA had been tapping their dark fiber. What everyone assumed after the Guardian story was that Google had built some kind of firehose feed or portal for the NSA to just login and get whatever they wanted, never in any of those stories did they say the NSA was taking data against Google's knowledge or will. For example, there was a famou…

> What these revelations reveal is that the NSA supplemented the data they got on a case-by-case basis through NSLs by outside-the-datacenter fiber taps of traffic, as well as upstream unencrypted HTTP and SMTP/IMAP traffic.

Which still does not contradict the original speculation that Google provided bulk data for PRISM. We do not yet know enough of all the stories as to judge who spied or helped to spy on us in what extend. There are too many lies, too many secrets and far too little liability out there to let the big companies of the hook yet.

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

#467

Post by AYBABTME »

spikels wrote: post #297
danbruc wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

While I agree the NSA's conduct is outrageous you seem to be confused about how countries actually work. Every country treats non-citizens worse than citizens - fewer rights and benefits, more limited (if any) work opportunities, additional hassles, etc. And most countries have intelligence agencies that spy on foreign countries and their citizens often in ways that break foreign laws. Don't be so naive.

The problem is not so much about the expected behavior of a spy agency, or how the US government justify itself "But it's only on non-citizens". That's kind of expected, like you explained.

The problem is when the medias, the public and politicians are reassuring and reassured by that "But it's only for non-citizens".

To a foreigner like me, what I see is that US citizens, medias and politicians are just fine with my fundamental rights being violated. That is as long as I'm not a US citizen... a clear statement that to those eyes, the problem is of less magnitude because I'm not as important a being as US citizens are.

Do I have less a right to privacy because I am not a US citizen? Is it more ethical or moral?

I'm not talking of my legal rights on a US soil; because legality has not much to do with morality. Really, in this argument I don't care about the NSA's goal, or all the spy agencies' goals. I care about how the public reacts; nobody cared as long as it was only about violating the privacy of those without US citizenship. Second class humans.

That's incredibly insulting. It makes me angry.

And worst of all, I feel like I can't even express myself on that topic without fearing repercussion. When one day at the airport, I'll cross the custom lanes and some automated filter will have flagged me as a national security threat because I once posted outrage about how they treat non-citizens.

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

#468

Post by jlgreco »

Perseids wrote: post #455
jlgreco wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are a few cable repair ships that pull broken cables to the surface and fix them, but other than that... No one can reach it and no one will bother it. Even if you pull the cable up to repair it, it is unlikely that you would discover the tap. The device used in Operation Ivy Bells was designed to detach from the cable if the cable was lifted. Non-intrustive tapping might not be possible with fiber (it isn't,…

Why is the traffic in the fiber cables not encrypted between the endpoints? That would instantly nullify the attacks. Is AES hardware not cheap enough yet?

Traditionally encryption is left to higher layers.

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

#469

Post by jlgreco »

leot wrote: post #414
tripzilch wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Every state privileges its own citizens. There are good reasons for doing so that have nothing to do with bigotry or exceptionalism.

Some of us don't consider human rights a "privilege".

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

#470

Post by frozenport »

wyck wrote: post #5

Is that an official document with an actual smiley face? What ever happened to the admins / programmers standing up for what is right, or do they just gobble down a paycheck and turn the other way?

`cat /dev/internet0 | grep -i 'Terrorists'` and then it doesn't sound so bad.
Post reply on HN