'Everyone in US under virtual surveillance' - NSA whistleblower
rt.com
rt.com
In my opinion that would be an exercise in futility.
I think a proper response to this issue is to simply promote social depravity on a grand scale.
Everybody should just constantly read/watch/listen to media involving things like methamphetamine manufacturing, nuclear & home made weapons/chemicals, illegal currencies, human trafficking, hardcore pornography, armed rebellions, the middle east, famous terrorists, serial killers, bon jovi, etc
All of those are a lot more interesting to the common man than lessons on how to use PGP....which is theoretically breakable thanks to the advent of quantum computing.
If everything is being sniffed and stored, there have to be a number of very specific topics that are being sought after in that data.....in my opinion it'd be far worse if the government wasn't searching for things like human trafficking and nuclear weapons (things, hopefully, we can all agree are not good).
Television series like "Breaking Bad" are already pulling weekly audience number of around 3 million plus. One could argue that you wouldn't even have to do much promotion, as these topics already seem to be mainstays in much present day pop culture
Given a list of dodgy search keywords, youtube links, etc etc etc, regularly updated from a central location (think like a websense blocklist but in reverse), uses a configurable amount of bandwidth. Hits these sites with a human-like usage pattern when HTTP traffic from your LAN IP is detected (so it only works when you're actually browsing the web).
Plug it in and gain plausible deniability from most forms of government shenaniganery. Given critical mass, makes most forms of government behavioral analysis (and possibly advertiser behavioral analysis) useless.
Build it on the raspberry pi or similar platform. Materials cost is $35 plus shipping materials. Main time investment is limited to maintaining the blocklist and the central servers.
Hmm. Wonder how this could sell to the soccer mom crowd...
Would also raise some interesting and thorny questions for the server side. If enough people are using the box for the effect to be meaningful, then a lot of sites are going to have a lot of useless web traffic; yet allowing sites to "opt out" or having an identifier of some kind of the box's traffic completely defeats the purpose of the system.
I call them my cable modem and tivo
A dynamic list would be better,granted, but a much harder nut to crack.
If a million people installed this plugin, that would avg 5 queries every 5 minutes, that would be avg 1.4e9 queries per day, a tiny fraction of the intertubes.
edit: but, apology to parent, you'd never sell a browser plugin...
If you're the only one using a noise box, or are part of a very small minority of users that do, the random noise you generate is just increasing your attack surface through which the government can more easily target and identify you.
This is a minor quibble with your overall point, but what I've quoted is wrong. The underlying encryption algorithms for modern PGP implementations are breakable with Shor's algorithm on a quantum computer, but not all encryption algorithms are vulnerable and a PGP implementation in the future could use such an algorithm as default instead. (For instance, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McEliece_cryptosystem)
Croatian nuclear FBI colonel plutonium Ortega Waco, Texas Panama CIA DES jihad
fissionable quiche terrorist World Trade Center assassination DES NORAD Delta
Force Waco, Texas SDI explosion Serbian Panama Uzi Ft. Meade SEAL Team 6
Honduras PLO NSA terrorist Ft. Meade strategic supercomputer $400 million in
gold bullion quiche Honduras BATF colonel Treasury domestic disruption SEAL
Team 6 class struggle smuggle [Hello to all my fans in domestic surveillance]
The algorithms used for text mining are much more contextual and semantic than what would be fooled by the simple gags I commonly see on the Internet. Those gags might send a message of sorts but they don't make anyone's job more difficult. For a start, they know you are not a terrorist or whatever; nothing about your life as modeled across myriad data sources suggests that. Instead, you will be some random person pretending to stick it to The Man, which they don't care about and never lands in front of a person.
To chaff the state-of-the-art data mining would require some sophisticated computer science and sophisticated operations. You would (1) have to understand the state-of-the-art algorithms used and (2) devise a way to break those algorithms transparently. It is not a trivial task by any means even for someone that understands what is involved.
Superficial attempts to chaff surveillance systems might feel good but they won't accomplish much against a sophisticated adversary. The tech these days is much too good. Even leaving a minimal footprint for analysis is becoming nigh impossible.
Show the government your disapproval of their trampling of the constitution. Join Al-Qaeda.
That's what I was getting at with my "Breaking Bad" comment.
A sort of "total depravity" is already a big part of pop culture, so it'd be easy to ignore false positives of people crying wolf.
What I was getting at is that what they're looking for is kind of a big unknown. If media about illegal things is so popular and they ignore it, it leads one to think that data being mined is possibly being used in a fashion similar to a personal agenda.
That's what's truly dangerous about monitoring at this scale. It's not so much that it's happening it's that they're creating something that could grant someone almost god like powers.
If I were to make an analogy, I'd say it's like a man buying a pistol to protect his family and then his child finds it loaded in a night stand.
It certainly might be the case that all net traffic is being stored by the NSA, but this man's say-so is hardly proof.
Now seriously, the government got too big. What are you going to do about it?
Caution! Everything you say here or anywhere is being recorded, and may or may not be used against you in a court of law.
I mean if we know that there are Room 614As [1] all over the country, and that they are diverting nearly ALL communications to their facilities, in addition to them building new facilities to house data all the time [2].
All of this culminating with their shiny new data center [3], which cost 2 billion dollars to build, covers 900,000 sqft, and has a 40 million dollar annual utility bill, it becomes less about proving that they're doing this, but proving that they aren't doing this.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
[2] http://www2.sacurrent.com/news/story.asp?id=69607
[3] http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/al...
Because I personally can't imagine another datastream 1) of such magnitude and 2) worth billions of dollars to build a data centre for.
First, they'd need a shadow Internet backbone capable of transporting all that data to the DC. Second, they'd have to build a system with the same write-rate as all of the internet backbone. This stuff isn't cheap, and the NSA's budget is big, but not that big.
As 1/3rd of the US's internet traffic is porn, which you can really just de-dup by URL, it's a safe bet to say that they're filtering before they transmit data back home. The same goes for streaming video traffic. The remainder is mostly web with a small fraction being actual communication between people. For the NSA's mission, even implemented in the most evil way, they just don't have the money, means, or motivation to record everything. Instead, filtering on *hotmail.com connections, anything over SMTP ports, etc. makes substantially more sense.
Your actual data is just a subpoena away anyway in most cases.
Free == didn't come out of the NSA's budget
We know, thanks to XCD, that 7523 hard drives per second is created by the storage industry (globally, a total of 650 million drives per year). Say that the average storage space is over the last 5 years, around 500GB.
That mean, so long NSA buy's 0.265% of all hard drives produced each year, they will have enough hard drives to record all data transmitted inside the US borders.
They would still need to write the data. One obvious way would be to store it on site, and transport the drives to a central place. Drives are not big, but it is a noticeable work, so if people were doing this, there should be more verifiable proof of it. If we include post-storage compression, finding duplicates and any other tricks, the numbers should be able to be lowered by 50-75% or so, and might be enough to send some through the wire and only the overflow through drives loaded onto trucks.
One could also ask what 0.265% of the storage industry output is in raw cash. To answer that, my answer is, I dont know :).
Consider how big the Internet is. Even if the NSA has 5 100,000 square foot data centers, think about adding up the aggregate data center footprint of Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Rackspace, etc, etc. That comes to a lot more than 500,000 square feet. And this does not even get into the enormous data resources in Asia and Europe.
A much more likely scenario is that they are heavily filtering the data in real time and keeping just what looks useful or suspicious. That is still scary, but less fantastic than the idea that every packet is getting stored by the NSA.
I've looked at my own traffic and how much content useful for storing I'd have and it's probably less than 500Mbytes per month. And that's counting downstream and upstream.
But net is not the only thing NSA is interested in storing - banking, other records, communications over satellites, etc goes in there as well.
What's truly scary is people are sort of "meh" about this. Or they don't believe that this is really happening, as most of this thread seems to be the case in point.
I was thinking something to the effect "I will make all data I save that references your account or IP available to you through the following portal" - I of course, can't do it yet, as I haven't built the portal or figured out how to separate the data, but I think it's a neat solution to some of the problems I have (e.g. I really want to start doing console logging on VPSs 'cause it gives me a wealth of data when someone says "something was wrong with my VPS last night" - but so far I haven't (I do log physical consoles, just 'cause it's impossible to deal with hardware otherwise) due to privacy concerns.)
I need to limit the number of times I give myself extra work as 'motivation' - you get to the point where you spend all your time shooting alligators, and don't have any time at all to drain the swamp.
I mean, sometimes this is better than just not doing it? but not in this case, if you ask me.
Somewhere I read a quote: People under surveillance, are already imprisoned.
The first step is to understand that one is under surveillance.
Paranoids don't make backups, they just stream their hard drive across the Internet and let the NSA archive it.
The FBI accessed all of Broadwell's IP address info and email accounts with nothing more than subpoena's.
I believe they are storing this information, they just don't have the technology yet that can sort it and allow access to it. So the Petreus emails are probably being stored at the NSA as well, it was just easier for the FBI to get them from Google.
1) Constitutionally they (NSA) seemed to have found a loophole that states that just storing the data on the disk doesn't constitute spying|invasion of privacy. Only when someone (a human) looks at the results then it triggers all the Constitutional restrictions. Sounds like a bunch of bullshit to me, but that's how they are justifying it.
2) A court subpoena or an executive "magic-Patriot-Act-Federal-Injunction whatever it is called?" when issued can apply to all the data, including historic data from the beginning of time associated with that individual. So, if they ever get a subpoena say when you are in your 50's they could legally pull all the data you generated, created, accessed since the day you were born.
Basically it is pretty obvious they are just planning on storing all the data they can. Therefore the big new data center with a 65MW power station next to it.
My hope is only that someone who is involved in this, just like this whistle-blower, will realize that this is wrong and will expose it and the public in general will start caring enough about this to turn this into a major political issues.
So the problem is, what does it mean for the public in general to care? Or rather, what is the value of truth in a world where we have no agency?
The troubling truth is that many people would be either happy (or at least accepting) if the people doing the monitoring were also making big dents in the amount of spam being sent, or catching major criminals.
That's actually simple - public should use strong encryption. That's it. I.e. those who care about such violation of civil freedoms have no other option anyway, if attempts to prevent this surveillance will continue to fail (and with the current power - they most probably will).
I predict in the future after a couple of high profile scape goat cases where a famous suspected terrorist, illegal movie downloader, or say whistle blower, cannot be prosecuted because they used encryption, the use of encryption will become illegal.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/03/01/forced_decryption_ru...
However I think if some state is to ban encryption, it can be called a police state without any doubt.
The problem with outlawing encryption is: everyone needs it for business purposes and to protect public / private infrastructure. If SSL encryption were to be forbidden, e-commerce would become very difficult...
Also interesting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaffing_and_winnowing ("Chaffing and winnowing is a cryptographic technique to achieve confidentiality without using encryption")
For instance many care about some "moral" or "religious" issues that have no bearing with objective reality. So a lot time, mental and emotional effort goes into those issues.
It is kind of interesting that caring about privacy in general is become weird it is almost demonized and relegated to criminal sphere by default -- terrorism, child pornography, drug dealing, piracy all those "hot" issues can be triggered in order to argue against privacy. A few fear words sprinkled here and there, a scapegoat show trial and we are not too far from just using encryption becoming illegal. By default it has become "weird" defending privacy when the opposite should be true -- it should feel "weird" defending erosion of privacy (at least in this country given its Constitutional principles).
The messaging/stimulus/response isn't fully ingrained into people yet, but there is a strong need of an equally useful counter narrative.
However this still does not justify mixing up signal with noise. If you want to talk about NSA surveillance - fine. But then don't start with Petreus who has nothing to do with it.
That seems like a giant blinking point of failure.
1) Just because we the HN readers and Reddit readers, and other people who take an active interest in either being up to date with this sort of stuff, know about this, doesn't mean that population at large either a) knows about it, b) believes it (this sort of stuff sounds too much like conspiracy theories, even if it's real in this case).
2) Just because there were some news about it a few years ago, and there was like a mini-outrage for like a week, and then nothing really happened, doesn't mean we should stop talking about it now, and just let them continue doing it. The point is to keep raising awareness, and incite people to fight for their rights, and demand answers from NSA and the administration. More than that - demand change.
Re to 2): again, this isn't going to raise awareness. The vast majority of people here already know about this.
Also worth pointing out, in the video he reminds us that the definition of "crime" is not set in stone.
> If the time that it will take to break the encryption by brute force is significantly longer than your expected remaining lifespan
....just because we don't know about a vulnerability in SHA-3 today doesn't mean that we won't in ten years. SHA-1 and SHA-2 were once thought to be secure, and they may yet be even more broken than we realize.
Furthermore, that also makes a major assumption about computing hardware. Particularly with the (possible) advent of quantum computing and the possibilities that large-scale quantum computing would provide, I think it's impossible for anybody to do more than speculate about the future like that.
How much would it actually cost to store all the emails that American citizens send and receive? I find it difficult to visualise a system of checks and balances approving the massive budget required to house all that data. And the technical challenge of sifting through those emails would be seriously hard. I understand that this might not be just about national security, but it could also be a power game on the part of the FBI. One has to consider how much [national security | power] this really affords [US citizens | the FBI] when measured against the gargantuan expenditure required to actually pull it off. This makes me totally skeptical. Additionally, by saying 'basically the e-mails of virtually everybody in the country' Binney demonstrates his lack of conviction and uncertainty of his own claims.
So, if his words aren't the giveaway, then two minutes of critical thinking will make the interview seem alarmist and inaccurate.
NSA budgets aren't approved by the entire house, but by secret meetings of the intelligence sub-committee.
This datacenter is definitely being built. It is so well known that Wired did a cover story on it:
I'm not an American, but I guess rules can be mended and solutions found in a country where 1.1 trillion USD can just "vanish" (http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/729997/posts).
Also, I've commented on the NSA probably intercepting on the people in command immediately after the Petraus affair hit the media (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4767644), but I had hopes that they would stop at those people. Someone in the comments reprimanded me for viewing things in a CSI-like manner (CSI the TV show), but it was not that, just the natural reflexes of a former kid who has grown in Eastern Europe with Securitate ruling and surveying everything in sight. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Securitate)
I'm not very knowledgable as to the feasibility of such a device, and quite frankly don't know where to begin, but I would love to hear from someone who might know more.
As a back of the napkin, rougher-than-order-of-magnitude calculation, it seems more feasible for the government to tap into existing email providers' databases than to try and administer their own. Would it not simply be easier to file requests (perhaps in a quasi-legitimate manner) for data from Google/Yahoo/MS/Apple than to try and catalog the entire email history of the Internet?
On the other hand, recording everything through a key bottleneck leaks no information about what is specifically of interest. It also allows retrospective looks at things that might not have seemed interesting enough to request up front. And 'certain ports'? Bah! Get it all. Maybe future breakthroughs (or current undisclosed innovations) can render it all transparent.
This may not be the 'easiest' approach, but it's definitely the 'best', for maximum knowledge, if you can afford/manage it.
The proper spelling is 'Narus', which is also the name of the supplier company, based in Sunnyvale and since 2010 a subsidiary of Boeing. You can read about them and their capabilities at:
Your logic is definitely sound. It's just mind boggling to me that anyone could possibly be logging everything thrown through every port. Every single day. Just, wow.
* http://yro.slashdot.org/story/05/12/25/0029204/nsa-data-mini...
* http://slashdot.org/story/06/04/07/1246259/att-forwarding-al...
* http://yro.slashdot.org/story/07/11/09/2040206/ex-att-tech-s...
Mirroring traffic at the ISP would be much harder to detect, more thorough, and reduces the number of pesky admins who would come across surprises in their logs. My vote is on that approach -- it's similar to how spy satellites are operated now ("record everything and playback like it's a DVR when we need it").
As an aside, this is the third time in as many days that I've seen 'repeated' content from old Slashdot on HN. Not sure what I make of that trend.
By contrast in the case of ssh the server and client each store a key for the specific connection. In this case your connection is essentially as secure as the key exchange. And if a mitm (Man in the middle) attack was already in place when you established a connection for the first time, then ssh will warn you if the mitm attack ends. ( Since in this case the server sends you a different public key than the stored one, which was corrupted by the mitm attack. )
The same principle that should make Verisign trustworthy (centrally recognized / audited trust authority) makes them vulnerable to nation-state tampering, or more specifically, eavesdropping.
Verisign merely signs your certificate. It does not even know your private key and hence also can't pass it to governments.
I have no doubt they can do it, but it seems to be consigned to their bag of tricks for special occasions.
I'm aware the US government has CA certs installed in pretty much all browsers. Obviously being a CA allows you to MITM any SSL connection (though probably not without someone noticing, if done on the scale people are talking about, which is probably computationally prohibitive anyway).
But isn't it impossible to decrypt passively sniffed SSL traffic in all cases?
Furthermore, at least Chrome restricts most Google domains to a known CA. So MITM is not possible for Gmail either.
Having the internet's root keys does two things:
1) The government can impersonate as most sites to perform a MITM, which is rare and would only happen on specific, targeted people.
2) The private keys reduce the search space for brute force 128-bit decryption to the point that it can be completed in near real time. If the government were to have direct access to the fiber backbones, then they could monitor SSL traffic as easily as plain-text traffic. Hence, "solved problem." Part of the trick behind this is pre-computing a lot of commercial site's individual private keys ahead of time. If you do nothing but monitor headers you would know the top 90% of hosts to pre-compute first.
To be clear -- I don't know what the government does or does not do. But I know a little bit about crypto and the industry, and I'm inferring what the government does based on 'innocuous' requests it makes regularly to a popular crypto products such as the one I worked on.
It seems like every day a new article comes to light about how the government is blatantly violating it with complete disregard.
Worse, nobody seems to be doing anything about it.
I think this myth was debunked, interestingly enough
"A declaration of rights is not a creation of them, nor a donation of them. It is a manifest of the principle by which they exist, followed by a detail of what the rights are; for every civil right has a natural right for its foundation, and it includes the principle of a reciprocal guarantee of those rights from man to man. As, therefore, it is impossible to discover any origin of rights otherwise than in the origin of man, it consequently follows, that rights appertain to man in right of his existence only, and must therefore be equal to every man."-- Thomas Paine
And please distinguish between the long-term goals and values of the USA and the craven personal interests of its present rulers. In pieces I've read and seen from RT, they've often honored the former while excoriating the latter. Which is something I wish an American news source could do. I'll know it's possible as soon as I see a single example.
has the ACLU and the same guy if that makes it more legit.
The 10 zetabyte storage capacity estimate is based on building size. I think we need more details.
It's worth asking why no other media organization has run with this story.
How much other media covers EFF efforts in general for example? You are right - practically nobody does it.
Hardly. The warrantless wiretapping thing was all over the news when the story broke. So was SOPA (which serves to completely destroy this canard on its own; as the media companies had a direct interest in supporting that law yet still reported on the controversy.)
This, plainly, isn't newsworthy outside of tech circles yet.
A conference where people talk about deploying packet shaping gear is not newsworthy outside of a very niche circle. Yet.
So that's a good thing then right? If they are critical they are more likely to present topics without sugar coating them? They don't have to fear American advertisers pulling adds off the air, they don't have to fear not being invited to the White House news room and having access to govt related press releases.
Now when it comes to Russia related news, that's when I found they are painting a picture completely divorced from reality.
And in general that is also true with other news media. Like Al Jazeera. They are pretty good and factual except for stuff happening in Qatar. Which is unfortunate but also expected.
> It's worth asking why no other media organization has run with this story.
I think if you read Chomsky's "Manufacturing Consent" book you'll get an answer to that question.
Well I don't think they made this guy up. I don't they exactly spliced the dialog to change the meaning of what he is saying. I think this guy is real. So that +1 for RT reporting on the story (the truth).
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4247829
"> The source of the submitted article, rt.com, is not known for careful journalism.
"Understatement of the year."
Quite the contrary. RT is pretty well balanced when it comes to USA. A lot more so than Fox or CNN say.
RT is not balanced when it comes to Russia though.
>> RT: It seems that the public is divided between those, who think that the government surveillance program violates their civil liberties, and those who say, 'I've nothing to hide. So, why should I care?' What do you say to those who think that it shouldn't concern them.?
>> WB: The problem is if they think they are not doing anything that’s wrong, they don’t get to define that. The central government does, the central government defines what is right and wrong and whether or not they target you. So, it’s not up to the individuals. Even if they think they aren't doing something wrong, if their position on something is against what the administration has, then they could easily become a target.
It's Bluffdale, not Buffdale. And it creeps me out every time I look across the valley at it.
I really wish the investors in the company I was working on building to encrypted email for the "common man" would have been willing to invest what it would really take to make it work. We were on the right track. :(
I wouldn't trust Microsoft - the world's largest Trojan.
I guess you are saying that Google willingly allows the NSA to decrypt the data? What would Google have to gain there? Because they certainly have a lot to lose.
Knowing what web sites you go to, if you are otherwise interesting, is worth knowing even if they can't read the bits. Pen registers do that with phones, and that's valuable enough that there are legal protocols about it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pen_register
Just because you can't eat the whole enchilada doesn't mean the beans aren't worthwhile.
A good argument can then also be that you should never trust emails outside your own provider? If you are sending to an @gmail to @gmail, you should be covered a bit better?
The burden of proof being so low here on HN on matters like this is alarming.
not even a little bit.
> Also, they are US-based, and have to comply with US cryptography laws
unless you're talking about sending encryption software to iran, huh?
Well, a little bit. The NSA is the largest employer of Mathematicians in the world, and excluding Universities, they own that title by a very large margin.
What are all of those elite nerds researching? Cryptography.
(I used to live in a country that was then ruled by a dictatorship, and I am aware of how people behave under such rule. That country now has a free press and free, contested elections for the national leadership.)
I would invite HN readers to consider that report, then consider over a decade of technology improvements have since occurred, then consider how little of the public's interest has been engaged in such matters. Having done so, consider supporting the efforts of a small number of parties like the EFF and Assange to raise awareness of these issues and fight for the public interest and individual rights.
I know there's already Jitsi or Pidgini with OTR that can do this for Google Talk and FB chat, but those are just other apps that you need to install, and I think a Chrome plugin/"app" would see much wider adoption. Or should we just wait for web crypto before this can be possible (2014)? Or just wait until Google themselves to do it? (if ever)
Standalone XMPP clients anyway are way better than Google Talk web application, since they are more flexible and allow using several accounts at once.
Hi NSA!
2.) Narus doesn't sell to citizens. Citizens aren't allowed to have information on what kind of monitoring Narus does because it's national security classified.
>The exact use of this data is not fully documented, as the public is not authorized to see what types of activities and ideas are being monitored.
Failing that, you might be able to enlist the help of some of the APT folks who've been downloading all the F-35 plans. Why would we expect Boeing's network to be more secure than Lockheed's?
If one were really patient and as immoral as the NSA, one could start moving around a lot of fabricated-but-plausible evidence against USA citizens for national security-type crimes, and then paying special attention to federal prosecution notices. If you noticed which manufactured "evidence" turned up most often, you'd be able to run a kind of oracle attack by fine-tuning for what got prosecuted the most. In addition, many of these framed citizens would be so obviously innocent that even our debased court system would acquit. This would undermine the perceived accuracy of this fancy expensive system. After federal prosecutors look foolish a couple of times when relying on super-secret we-can't-tell-you-where-we-got-this surveillance data, word will get around.
However it's done, if someone figured out how to characterize which packets get saved (I still refuse to believe they're saving every packet sent in the USA), one could generate many such packets, which could be obviously bogus upon inspection but enough to fool the initial analyzer. That's a DOS right there.
Just throwing out some ideas. I'm sure you smart guys have already thought of all this.
American and other news agencies (say Al Jazeera) also seem to follow the same pattern more or less.
So it helps to monitor and compare various news outlets and you can sort of see who they cover the same story and how they spin and then, well, decide for yourself if you can't independently verify the facts. If you can then you can benchmark and compare the performance/quality of each of the news sources.
So isn't it more like 'A large part of the worlds population under virtual surveillance'?
What is freedom? A functional definition might be -- you're not prevented from doing things when you try to do them.
Interested in electronics? Want to build an igniter for your home-brew rocket engine? Fine ... if we know enough about you to conclude that it's for fun, not for killin'
Want to build a rocket? Great ... if you're not likely to endanger others or sell your knowledge to those who might.
In a perverse way, more detailed profiles could lead to better discrimination between those who have esoteric interests but are unthreatening vs. those whose who are threats.
Of course, if you build it, it will be abused ... but it's an interesting thought experiment.
(In a nutshell: "Room 641A is a telecommunication interception facility operated by AT&T for the U.S. National Security Agency, beginning in 2003, and exposed in 2006. [...] It is fed by fiber optic lines from beam splitters installed in fiber optic trunks carrying Internet backbone traffic [...] contains several racks of equipment, including a Narus STA 6400, a device designed to intercept and analyze Internet communications at very high speeds.")
MIT TechTV – The Government is Profiling You http://techtv.mit.edu/videos/21783-the-government-is-profili...
"Where do you see this going in 5 or 10 years? I see it becoming a totalitarian state. An imperial president (a dictator). Unless we do something."
"It doesn't matter if you say 'bomb' or not. Everything is stored now."
While it's not acceptable it surely can't be surprising? Especially seeing the other attacks on liberties happening every day.
Having said that, other people mention a bunch of problems with the article. Warrants provide easy legal access; connections are encrypted (and it'd be scary if that encryption was broken); the reliability of Russia Today; etc.
The problem is your government, whether Rep or Dem, sees you, the people, as the enemy. There for, the government is your enemy, an enemy with in. It must be logically. How else can that work? Now, why does your constitution allow guns? Why do so many US citizens insist on their right to gun ownership? Is it not to oppose such an enemy? Yet all Americans do is sit on their big old butts and type stuff on the internet. So, what are all those guns for? Polishing and comparing to penises? Are women attracted by them?
What makes me laugh (or is it cry) as a Brit is that mention universal health care and its commie time, people on the streets claiming health care will kill granny. Yet here is a Democrat government continuing and expanding the removal of your freedoms and privacy started with a Republican hawk government, and your all cool with it. All you do is bleat on the web, and that's that. As some one pointed out, you knew this in 2006. Yet here you are 6 years on, and its worse. You do nothing.
Don't get me wrong, its the same every where. People just accept this stuff. Which is why this disgusting spying on your own people lark, KGB style, is in fact absolutely acceptable. Your inaction says so.
Until the people say no, the government, either party, UK or US, does what the hell it likes. Its up to us.
USA! USA!