Live data from Hacker News

NSA collects millions of text messages daily in 'untargeted' global sweep

theguardian.com

71–77 of 77 posts

Re: NSA collects millions of text messages daily in 'untargeted' global sweep

#71

It's become like science fiction, or a bad joke. Whatever you can imagine the most powerful intelligence agency imaginable doing, the NSA is doing. I am literally unable to think of anything that the NSA is _not_ collecting or controlling. Every SMS message sent? Yep. Location data on every cell phone? Yep. Controlling a 100k-computer botnet, including via radio transmitter to contact computers not on the internet? Y…

How about that thing in the Dark Knight Batman film, where he hacks into all the cell phones and then uses reverb / echo analysis to somehow create a 3D volume rendering of the space.

They can't do that yet, right? Right?

Re: NSA collects millions of text messages daily in 'untargeted' global sweep

#72
post #20

"Communications from US phone numbers, the documents suggest, were removed (or “minimized”) from the database – but those of other countries, including the UK, were retained." I'm interested in knowing the specifics on this. US data goes into a database and is then proactively removed? Minimization procedures [1] allow the nsa to keep US data up to 5 years to determine where it's coming from. It's also kept if "they…

Your weed-buying friends are quite safe from the full power of the NSA and 'parallel construction' being brought to bear on them and their petty crimes. I can't really understand why anyone would even _think_ that would be the case?

In fact, I just don't understand the problem people have with the 'parallel construction' of evidence. By its very nature, if the original evidence existed, and new alternative sources can be found, these it must be believed that they point to the fact a crime has been committed. In which case it should be prosecuted, and the criminals brought to justice. Or are people suggesting that if the NSA finds evidence of a crime, that crime can no longer be prosecuted even using alternative, non-NSA sourced evidence? That we should just wait until investigators stumble across the crime by accident, and allow many criminals to avoid prosecution?

My feeling is that if a valid and uncontested, un-tainted evidence trail exists, showing that a crime has been committed, then morally there is no problem. We are not talking about the use of torture to obtain the original evidence, for example, rather it is a side effect of the intelligence gathering process. This sort of cross-pollination between intelligence agencies and law enforcement has always been present, and the source of the original 'tip off' was generally inadmissible due to classification or to protect sources.

This is not even a new idea. Law enforcement has to deal with 'tainted' and inadmissible evidence all the time, from protected sources, conversations overheard in bars and so on... Sometimes the evidence has even been allowable at the time it was collected, but circumstances change later. Anyway, in these situations it is standard practice to try and obtain different, non-tainted and admissible evidence pointing to the same outcome.

We now have a new word for this, in 'parallel construction' but the outcome is no different.

Re: NSA collects millions of text messages daily in 'untargeted' global sweep

#73
post #51
post #20

"Communications from US phone numbers, the documents suggest, were removed (or “minimized”) from the database – but those of other countries, including the UK, were retained." I'm interested in knowing the specifics on this. US data goes into a database and is then proactively removed? Minimization procedures [1] allow the nsa to keep US data up to 5 years to determine where it's coming from. It's also kept if "they…

I would assume much longer. I have a recollection [i.e. I cannot build a google query to find a reference right now] of some poor schmuck working with a tribute band who asked him to send a text message of the lyrics to "Machine Gun" (a Jimi Hendrixs song). Something along the lines of 'please send us machine gun'. He promptly replied with the words and a few hours later was on the wrong end of an armed response team…

Surely the official version makes perfect sense?

How many similar messages, that at first glance seem suspicious, are ant each day? If GCHQ was trolling for these automatically and forwarding them all to the local police, they would be overwhelmed. It seems much more likely that the reply went to the wrong destination, and a public spirited recipient panicked and notified the police.

No need to invoke the panopticon here...

Re: NSA collects millions of text messages daily in 'untargeted' global sweep

#74
post #72
post #20

"Communications from US phone numbers, the documents suggest, were removed (or “minimized”) from the database – but those of other countries, including the UK, were retained." I'm interested in knowing the specifics on this. US data goes into a database and is then proactively removed? Minimization procedures [1] allow the nsa to keep US data up to 5 years to determine where it's coming from. It's also kept if "they…

Your weed-buying friends are quite safe from the full power of the NSA and 'parallel construction' being brought to bear on them and their petty crimes. I can't really understand why anyone would even _think_ that would be the case? In fact, I just don't understand the problem people have with the 'parallel construction' of evidence. By its very nature, if the original evidence existed, and new alternative sources ca…

The problem I have with parallel construction is that it rewards potentially illegal behavior on the part of law enforcement and prosecuting attorneys in a manner that's difficult to police.

"Parallel construction" doesn't just mean "look for other evidence of the same crime", it involves keeping the existence of the original, inadmissible evidence secret from the defense and the court, then constructing a chain of events that plausibly would have lead to incriminating evidence without knowledge gained from the illegal search.

Among other things, this secrecy deprives the defense a reasonable opportunity to argue the inadmissibility of the new evidence on the grounds of it being the fruit of the original, illegal search.

Note that I say "argue" — there are right ways and wrong ways for law enforcement and prosecutors to "work around" tainted evidence, but if the existence of tainted evidence gathered in secret is routinely hidden from defendants and courts, it becomes very hard to hold anyone accountable for going about things the wrong way.

Re: NSA collects millions of text messages daily in 'untargeted' global sweep

#75
post #4

metacontent (message content) & metadata -> smiley face, slide 2 interesting definition of metacontent

That was the first thing I picked out too. From wikipedia (I know..): > Meta ... is a prefix used in English ... to indicate a concept which is an abstraction from another concept, used to complete or add to the latter. How is the entire message content abstract to the entire message content? It seems like they've just added the prefix to get around some legal obligation. What the fuck.

It's a bit more nuanced than that. What they seem to be doing is looking at the contents for automated text messages such as missed call alerts or texts sent with international roaming, and using that to generate metadata such as call data or geo-location data, called 'content-derived metadata'. So it's generating new metadata records by analysing the content.

Re: NSA collects millions of text messages daily in 'untargeted' global sweep

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you need to initiate a secure session manually, and my experience was that unless you knew the other person was for sure using text secure, this could cause problems, since of you tried to handshake with the other person using a stock app, it could get stuck in the handshake. This was a while ago, so I don't know if the problem still exists. Text secure is great, though. Really, really great.

Wonder how this works: https://whispersystems.org/assets/screens/textsecure_upgrade... Unfortunately, there are no explanations on webpage and I'm not currently into the mood of reading source code to figure things out. Maybe outgoing (unencrypted) SMS sent through TextSecure app are tagged as "hey, we can upgrade this to secure comms". Then all you have to do is use the app. But I really don't know.

The current SMS-based version of TextSecure uses whitespace tagging for contact discovery.

The next-gen data-based TextSecure protocol (which is currently deployed in CyanogenMod's WhisperPush implementation of TextSecure, but not yet in the Play Store app) uploads a hashed list of the user's contacts to the server for contact discovery.

https://whispersystems.org/blog/contact-discovery/

Re: NSA collects millions of text messages daily in 'untargeted' global sweep

#77

It's become like science fiction, or a bad joke. Whatever you can imagine the most powerful intelligence agency imaginable doing, the NSA is doing. I am literally unable to think of anything that the NSA is _not_ collecting or controlling. Every SMS message sent? Yep. Location data on every cell phone? Yep. Controlling a 100k-computer botnet, including via radio transmitter to contact computers not on the internet? Y…

How about that thing in the Dark Knight Batman film, where he hacks into all the cell phones and then uses reverb / echo analysis to somehow create a 3D volume rendering of the space. They can't do that yet, right? Right?

You know, honestly, thinking about it, I'm not feeling certain to say no.

First, could they get an audio feed of all or many of the cell phones in a given cell?

Second, can, you know, Science, or science the NSA has, do that 'reverb / echo analysis' thing?

I don't really know either way, but find the second one more dubious than the first.

Post reply on HN