(I wonder if these people remembered those conversations after Snowden.)
[0] Like the people on the Cypherpunks mailing list
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Puzzle_Palace
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Zimmermann#Arms_Export_Co...
what percentage of the US population do you reckon could "make an educated guess" about the technological capabilities of the US government in 2002?
please remember this is a technology discussion forum, not a general public forum.
> Zimmermann's PGP encryption software
"PG what? Encryption? like the cryptkeeper? I like hans zimmer music"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_warrantless_surveillance_(...
Lots of people knew that mass surveillance was likely with the advent of the internet, prior to 641A in 2006.
Here's a present time one for you - all US based cloud providers, including Apple, are providing full (and probably indirect) real time access to everything stored on those servers to various organizations including, but not limited to, the NSA. Lawsuits around this issue are motivated solely by an effort to do away with parallel construction [1] and enable the evidence obtained through such means to be able to be directly used.
Lots of people know this, lots of people also think this is crazy talk. And prior to Snowden, and to a lesser degree Klein, the overwhelming majority fell into the latter camp regarding anything even remotely close to the scope and scale of what the NSA was doing.
"Electronic voting machines are 100% safe and as safe as paper ballots if not more".
(I assume the 85% number is made up, but for whatever the number is the point stands)
If you think there's no collection on e-mail, rather than just legal shell games being played with terminology and various compartments, then I've got a bridge to sell you.
In fact, the bridge is made of metadata and nothing else.
Obviously they'd have to keep such an exercise on the DL if they did do it because increasing key size is pretty trivial.
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.
https://blog.encrypt.me/2013/11/05/ssl-added-and-removed-her...
That pissed a lot of people off at Google, and served as a major catalyst for their in-house RISC-V networking hardware.
If you mean the rhetoric around it, then yeah - politicians lie, especially when engaging in what would be seen as deeply unpopular behavior. This isn't a shock. I assure you the admin that passed indefinite detention without charge or trial [2] wasn't some crusader for civil rights. Obama was just ridiculously charismatic and could sell a drowning man water, but he was no different than the rest in behavior.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM#/media/File:PRISM_Collec...
[2] - https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/president-obama-signs-in...
Man... When a bombastic politician promises something but doesn't deliver, the common response is "Oh, well, of course he just made an empty promise. What can you expect?". When a more genial politician that affects a more-typical reserved public face promises something but doesn't deliver, they get the benefit of the doubt. "Surely that wasn't an empty promise just to get more power! Surely something happened that convinced them against their better judgement not to do it.".
Respectfully, these are a class of people who have no problems saying trivially-verifiable lies to the public at large (as time has proven that there are no lasting consequences for lying to the public), and little problem with lying to members of Congress or even the courts (again, because here "lately" there are no real consequences for the act).
Don't believe what they say, believe what they do... because you're not privy to the conversations that they have that actually matter, so you have no idea what they actually intend.
This, in many ways, is what made the Founding Fathers so unique. They were in a position to grant themselves effectively any and all powers they might ever desire. Yet instead, they sacrificed all of that in pursuit of a more free and just society, in many cases to their own detriment. In modern times I do not think there's any real comparable examples. Instead it's just endless power accumulation, tempered only by the oft liminal protest of the citizenry.
There are real comparable examples, from South America and Africa, and America herself. You won't hear about them much, partly because they break important narratives and partly because often the US went to extraordinary lengths to smear, coup and/or murder those people.
Examples:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvador_Allende
He did. Snowden's leaked documents showed that he has already ended mass email surveillance. He ended mass phone surveillance after the leaks. Do you have any evidence whatsoever that he didn't?
These days the government wouldn't need to decrypt email traffic going over the backbone. They'd march into the companies and ISPs who run the mail servers and monitor/collect everything from there directly, the same way they marched into AT&T and set up camp. The vast majority of the American's email can be obtained by controlling the servers of a very small number of corporations. We have Lavabit to thank for demonstrating that when the government comes knocking your only options are to comply or shut down (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavabit)
There's no reason to think that there isn't a Room 641A at Google, Apple, MS, etc.
This is illegal. If it were possible, they wouldn't have bothered with taps.
Beyond that, you ignored my previous argument. If they were already doing this, why bother to collect metadata from taps?
These programs all overtly violate, amongst other things, the 4th amendment, but the structure of our legal system makes it effectively impossible to legally challenge them.
This is pure ignorance. If it actually sucked up everybody's data, everybody would have standing. Snowden's leaks showed that they don't, that only the phone metadata program did.
You're more than 11 years behind the news. Less than a week after Greenwald published his initial ridiculous description of PRISM, it was corrected by the people who actually built the systems at the tech companies. He stupidly thought that the DITU was a machine at the companies that could get any data, when anybody with half a clue could have told him that it's obviously https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Intercept_Technology_Unit. The Wikipedia PRISM article's description is very clear and well-cited, and it includes Snowden's slides there to cross reference the description with. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM#The_program
The FBI tells the companies to forward the communications of specific targets to the FBI. PRISM is a data integration system that ingests that data from the FBI into NSA systems.
This [1] is one of the more telling leaks. It's a technical users guide for NSA employees on using realtime Skype surveillance for all modes including video and landline on arbitrary targets. [1] It even includes debugging guides like why an agent might be getting multiple copies of the same message, as happens when somebody being spied on boots up a new device and all of their messages are sent from Microsoft to them (and the NSA) simultaneously, resulting a copy of older messages (from the snooper's perspective).
[1] - https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/field_document/Guid...