Stellar Wind (code name)
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/11-surprising-things-you-didn...
" The apparent incorruptibility of Mormons' moral righteousness make them ideal candidates for the nation's law enforcement and intelligence agencies.
Mormons are disproportionately represented in the CIA. A recruiter told the Salt Lake Tribune that returned Mormon missionaries are valued for their foreign language skills, abstinence from drugs and alcohol, and respect for authority "
I wonder if this has bearings on constructing the new data center in Utah?
The data center in Utah has more to do with cheap land, low cost, and low likelihood of natural disaster.
Besides, I presume the CIA factors that into their recruitment. Clearly, they don't need ineffectual communication with foreign assets so they would control agents who do just that. I imagine if Mormons are employed en masse, it would be for translations of already recorded data.
The church operates Missionary Training Centers with the main one in Provo, UT and other smaller centers distributed around the world. When somebody starts their mission they go there for a few weeks for a crash course in how to teach religious priniciples, the policies for missionaries, etc. A lot of missionaries are assigned to foreign countries or even language-specific assignments in the US. Those missionaries stay for 2-3 months to learn the language. It tries to be a fairly immersive program, taught by native speakers of the language and former missionaries, and has a fairly significant software component to it as well. I don't know specifics first-hand, but it was widely spoken about that groups in governments, etc... would visit to learn more about why the program was so effective in so little time. I don't think it's entirely the software, it's a pretty good program all-around - but it's certainly nothing to dismiss.
edit: The main website is http://www.mtc.byu.edu, but as language learning consulting is hardly their main goal, I doubt you'll find much more of an answer to your question there.
On my mission I spoke with everyone from those in prisons to the general populace to someone running for president of the country. He did become the president too. I/we did quite well in conversing with the apparent equivalent of foreign informants in the context of this discussion.
[1] http://www.lds.org.au/manual/preach-my-gospel-a-guide-to-mis... [2] http://www.lds.org.au/manual/teaching-no-greater-call-a-reso...
The cost of farm land seems to be around $9000/acre, and certainly under $20,000/acre. The major exceptions are places like Sonoma County, where vineyards are still profitable even though the land can go for $100,000/acre. But this is also a place where there's high population, so excluded from consideration.
A warehouse, for 30,000 sq. foot (about 0.7 acres) costs around $3 million, as does a 20,000 sq. foot office. (On average across the US.)
If you're talking about oil land, then that's not really farm land, is it? It's obvious that land with good mineral/oil rights can be worth a lot more.
In any case, oil doesn't seem like a good example. A derrick and pump don't need much in the way of land, and slant drilling means that any really expensive land can be avoided. I see prices in North Dakota of 'certainly under $20,000', even in that oil boom state:
"Linda Fisher, a Land Department leasing coordinator, said the three quarterly sales [in 2010] have fetched a record $269.2 million for about 135,000 acres, compared with about $103 million for 137,800 acres for all of 2009." (http://www.deseretnews.com/article/700059300/ND-oil-lease-au... ). That's an average of about $2,000/acre, though the boom has continued since then.
"At about the same time, records and interviews show, other companies were purchasing drilling rights to land on and near the reservation for $300 to $1,000 per acre plus royalties as high as 22.5 percent.... Two lawsuits allege that by buying Dakota-3, Williams effectively paid more than $10,000 per acre for those rights." (http://www.opb.org/news/article/land-grab-cheats-north-dakot...; )
I haven't found anything which says that $9,000/acre for oil land is "really a low figure these days." If anything, that seems to be only somewhat below the going rate.
On the other hand, it is high compared to non-irrigated farm land, which goes for no more than $3,000/acre for the most expensive county average in North Dakota. (The value in most counties is usually under $1,000/acre.)
So, where is this $20,000+/acre land you're talking about?
The topic asked about "bearings on constructing the new data center in Utah".
This specific branch started with "Low population density is almost redundant with "Cheap land"'. You said 'Not is the case where resources are found under said land or the land is farm land.'
That's two different cases: 1) resources are found under said land, and 2) said land is farm land.
I pointed out that category #2, "farm land", is generally not expensive compared to the price of building a data center. There are places where farm land costs $100,000/acre, but those are also places with high population density. Hence, I am in complete agreement with the statement that "low population density is almost redundant with farm land that doesn't have resources under said land."
You continue to talk about land which is in both category #1 and category #2. But that is not what my comment is about, and I never meant to imply that.
However, when I research it, I find that oil lands are not enough to greatly affect land which is both farm land and oil land. (BTW, not all farm land is oil land, and not all oil land is farm land.) I therefore would like more than your un-attributed claim that there is cropland going for $30K/acre in ND. The only examples I can find are for places which also have buildings on the land, which are included in the price.
I think would be misleading to include a $80,000 home on 5 acres of land for a total price of $100,00 as meaning that the land itself is worth $20,000 per acre. That isn't the situation we're discussing, since few would spend $100,00 on 5 acres with a house, only to tear down the house to build a data center, if 5 acres of land are available nearby for only $20,000.
I say these prices with some certainty having looked at news releases like http://www.ag.ndsu.edu/news/newsreleases/2013/april-1-2013/n... , which says:
"North Dakota cropland values increased by about 42 percent during 2012, according to Andrew Swenson, North Dakota State University Extension Service farm management specialist. ... The drivers that have pushed land values have been well-documented. Grain prices from 2007 to the present have been much higher than any year prior to 2007. Also, yields generally have been strong. For example, the three highest wheat yields ever have occurred within the past four years. This combination has provided several years of strong profit for crop producers, which has fueled their financial ability and desire to buy land. ... A factor that has been just as important in driving land values has been low interest rates. Interest rates to finance land purchases are attractive, while returns and confidence on alternative investments have been weak."
You'll notice that oil is not mentioned in that list as a major factor affecting farm prices.
That document also links to a PDF showing "the average per-acre values of cropland in North Dakota from 2007 to 2013." The highest average prices are in the South Red River Valley at just under $4,200 per acre. In western ND the highest average prices are $1,500/acre.
These numbers are so far from $30K that your $30K number must be an unusual outlier. It's certainly not high enough to affect someone's decision to build a data center in western ND.
Please provide some evidence which confirms your understanding.
Compared to the price of the data center, where the building alone costs $2 million to construct, $30K/acre is dirt cheap.
And I still don't believe you about the price of land. It must have been an extreme outlier, since I can't find any advertisements, any government reports, or anything else which agrees with you.
I wasn't much of an outdoors person before moving to Utah and really, really like that stuff now too.
Sadly, too many here in Utah support in the name of "bringing more jobs to Utah." They are willing to sell their liberty for a few extra jobs.
A gay mormon (which is just as common as a gay catholic, or a gay atheist) will be likely to be in the closet. They would probably be ostracised by family and friends if they were outed, lots of people in the general community would not be ostracised. Mormons are more vulnerable to that form of attack and compromise.
If you have a very open person that engaged on the occasional responsible drink, they are much more useful to spy agencies. How do you blackmail someone whose life is an open book? On the other hand, it could be relatively easy to blackmail a Mormon over some minor (from an outsiders perspective) infraction, particularly as the price for being excluded from the Mormon community is so high
I doubt that's even possible. How do you detect if a candidate is actually homosexual if they've been lying to themselves, their family and friends for decades? They're only homosexual activity might be the odd shame-filled masterbation session every few months, or the rare hook up. All it takes is one of those hook up people to blackmail the candidate.
Oh, like you don't think the U.S. government knows how to turn on your cell phone camera without you knowing?
You still need to understand the Mormon culture and church more so. I'm not sure what you mean by being excluded (Excommunicated, shunned, offended?) isn't absolute, in fact, no one really is excluded from the church as all are forever welcome (Some extreme edge cases aside) back. This is in an ideal situation and I know that in some locations that maybe a local leader or some local members because of lack of experience, their own mistakes or whatever don't truly welcome and help someone return. I'm also curious what are some of the minor infractions that were induce someone being excluded from the Mormon community..
Not all Mormons hide everything from their family, friends and leaders. We're encouraged to do the opposite, actually, in appropriateness and relativeness especially so when it's something quite bad which are the things someone would be blackmailed about. You wouldn't go blackmailing someone because he didn't read the Ensign every month which is something a Mormon probably wouldn't really bother telling anyone.
Also, someone who is a Mormon probably has fewer things to be blackmailed about—lewd pictures, drunken mistakes, egregious offenses to others and the law, hidden relationships (Sexual or otherwise), etc. are not things we seek out, instead, we actively avoid those things and not only actions but locations (Bars, night clubs, etc.) where more embarrassing/illegal things tend to happen. This is based on what I've seen and learnt throughout my life and I'm not pretending that these are any great or completely accurate comments, simply some postulations.
You're presuming that non-heterosexual mormons are able to just "turn that off" easily, without fail. There are numerous examples of either religious leaders or conservative political leaders engaging in same sex activity to imply that this is not possible.
I served a mission in eastern Ukraine (Донецк, Харьков) from 2008-2010 and there learned to speak Russian fluently. Since returning home I've had probably a half dozen offers to work for the FBI or other government offices. Every now and then the highest level Russian classes at BYU will get an announcement from some government agency trying to recruit us, and a lot of them are rumored to actually be the CIA.
It's more than just the language fluency (not all return missionaries speak the same level of Russian,) it's also having lived in the culture and living very conservative lifestyles (no smoking/drinking, emphasis on families, etc.) and fierce loyalty. It's the overall perfect stereotype for what government agencies want.
Combine that with how cheap everything is ($80K/year is a pretty solid job here and $500K bought my parents a 3-story 3,000 square foot house). That's the reason Adobe, Microsoft, Novell, eBay, Overstock.com, Goldman Sachs etc. have all started to put up shop in Utah - it's ideal if you want people who are content to do a good job with their 8-5 and go home to their families.
The new data center in utah is probably a mixture of all of these things; everything is uber-cheap including workforce, so why not put a data center there? (Bluehost is here as well).
Off topic, but one of those things is not like the others... Novell was founded in Utah more than 30 years ago.
When I hear "shocked", it makes me think that you think my comment is prejudiced in some way, or is perhaps making a wrong judgement on motivations for locating a data center.
Anyone who thinks there wasn't a big "there's plenty of Mormons there to recruit for the job" factor in the decision is kidding themselves. Cheap land can be found in virtually every part of the country. There are tons of tech workers in Colorado, Arizona, Alabama (Huntsville), Texas (Austin/San Antonio metro area), etc. All of these places have super cheap land.
Glad to finally see some outrage though.
Legitimate question: what's new about what is breaking in the news right now? Merely confirmation that the NSA is conducting indiscriminate phone-taps?
Exactly! I was wondering the same thing.
There is no discrimination - this is everybody, all the time.
That's kind of a big deal.
It's also pretty damn brave of whoever leaked the document.
His original article is here...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone-record...
Also, 6 is a numerator. The denominator is unknown. Are there more leaks under the Obama administration, period? Are people more willing to leak? I don't feel like there's enough information available to make a judgement call.
There is a very interesting book called The Puzzle Palace, about the early history of the NSA and its forerunners. The telegraph system had ATT cooperating with the government to let them have a copy of everything. This is before telephones. I always assumed this never stopped.
That they no longer operate on a cloak-and-dagger basis, and that all three branches (judicial, executive, legislative) are demonstrating an unprecedented level of cooperation -- the "checks and balances" we so hold dear in democracy are now null and void.
Previously, plausible deniability and "neither confirm nor deny" public relations policies dominated the privacy debate arena, however now we can move forward beyond that and we can have a frank and honest discussion about it all.
The window of opportunity to debate these broad-sweeping and baseless violations of privacy is distinctly ajar, however it is closing quickly.
The various levels of government will soon rely quite heavily on this domestic surveillance network and implementing restrictions after the fact is almost always impossible.
Well, there's one check / balance aspect that is still "in play" at least in theory: the 2nd Amendment.
I think that is true only if you make certain assumptions - assumptions which I consider unfounded.
For example, if an armed revolution broke out, are we assuming that no military units would defect and join the rebellion? If so, I'd consider that questionable.
Also, are we assuming that the rebels are armed only with pistols, shotguns and semiautomatic rifles? No way... first, factor in IEDs and homemade weapons, and then factor in the likely capture of at least some military grade weaponry, and/or ilicit supply of those weapons to the rebels.
Nukes aren't even part of this equation, so no point bringing that up at all.
The thing I'd worry most about in a rebellion scenario, is the air superiority of the standing military. But if we're talking guerrilla warfare... well, it's hard to bomb an enemy when you don't know where they are.
Finally, consider sheer numbers: I forget the numbers now from last time I looked this up, but the number of members of the standing US military is fairly small relative to the population of the US. And there are a LOT of guns out there. And as somebody (possibly Stalin) once said "quantity has a quality all it's own". Get enough Americans to participate, and you'd have a chance.
Anyway... not to suggest that it's a given, nor do I hope this scenario ever unfolds. Just food for thought.
Presumably you are aware of the Iraq and Afghan insurgencies.
Wasn't there a legal requirement that ISPs install some sort of box for law enforcement usage back in the early 2000s?
Also, I recall reading article from around the same time where a network operator noticed mysterious taps that appeared in his fiber rack over night. These were at a major peering point(lvl3 or att?). The taps went into the ceiling and over a wall. When he questioned their existence, he wasn't allowed to remove them or investigate further.
This has been going on ever since the internet and cell phones became popular. The difference now is that they are less secretive about it. See before, you had to have your ally(the UK, AUS, etc...) log communications for you and you'd log communications for them. Then there's no risk of federal or local laws getting in the way. It looks like just good old fashioned espionage. I guess after 9/11, the powers that be felt that wasn't good enough.
No, it's the 99% of cases that were completely unwarranted in the first place that we've actually got to be concerned about.
I found this article to be useful in differentiating the various terms:
On its face, the document suggests that the U.S. government regularly collects and stores all domestic telephone records. I use the caveat because there are several ways to interpret it, assuming it is real. (It looks real.)
A few definitions: to "collect" means to gather and store; to "analyze" means that a computer or human actually does something with the records; to "intercept" means that a computer or human actually listens to or records calls.
... The NSA, under the FISA Amendments Act, is able to analyze metadata, like incoming and outgoing call records, so long as the Attorney General certifies that a particular set of information is useful for reasons of national security. Then, the NSA asks the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to order that a company comply. As that bill was being ironed out, this step was requested by private companies because they wanted protection from lawsuits in case innocents — or millions of innocents — found that the NSA had gathered their call information.
My own understanding is that the NSA routinely collects millions of domestic-to-domestic phone records. It does not do anything with them unless there is a need to search through them for lawful purposes. That is, an analyst at the NSA cannot legally simply perform random searches through the stored data. He or she needs to have a reason, usually some intelligence tip. That would allow him or her to segregate the part of the data that's necessary to analyze, and proceed from there.
In a way, it makes sense for the NSA to collect all telephone records because it can't know in advance what sections or slices it might need in the future. It does not follow that simply because the NSA collects data that it is legal for the NSA to use the data for foreign intelligence or counter-terrorism analysis.
http://theweek.com/article/index/245228/the-fbi-collects-all...
This is written specifically about the telephone call metadata, but being able to differentiate exactly what is collected about Internet traffic would also aid this discussion. Unfortunately this would only be possible if the government was more transparent about what is being collected.
Fixed that for you.
You'd think that, but you'd be wrong. Since Smith v. Maryland (1979) the standard has been that you don't have an expectation of privacy in the records of the calls you make (as opposed to the content of those calls), on the grounds that you necessarily share that information with the phone company. This is analogous to not having any expectation of privacy on the street, eg which friends you choose to visit or which places you go that could be observed by third parties, or the lack of privacy in who mail letters to, which information is shared with the post office.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_v._Maryland)
Now in 2006 Congress decided that consumers should have such privacy after all, and amended the telecommunications act of 1934 to make it illegal for phone companies to sell or share subscribers' call data, but that law contains a broad exception for law enforcement and intelligence gathering activity.
http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BILLS-109hr4709enr/pdf/BILLS-10...
Here's a good (non-jargon) summary of the arguments on both sides from late last year: http://www.courthousenews.com/2012/10/03/50935.htm From the legal standpoint, it's important to bear this context in mind, rather than assuming the current situation is the result of massive overreach by this administration, or the government since 9-11. The fact is that the NSA of today sits atop foundations dating from from the Cold War
By chance I picked up a 70s spy novel at a thrift store the other day, and it's all about Soviet sleeper agents hidden in the US and activated by coded messages in telephone calls - the heroes are in a race against time to pinpoint the origin of the calls and interrupt the planned sequence of events. I happened to notice the book because I remembered being scared of the movie trailer as a kid since it seemed to suggest that calling the wrong number could result in a violent death (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Qg0w8qbBQo). So in the book the author was clearly worried about the openness of US society providing America's enemies with the tools of its own destruction - not unlike today's anxieties over cyber-warfare - and there's an implicit argument that high speed communications infrastructure is too powerful a force multiplier not to be under government supervision. Agree or not, it presented a surprisingly prescient understanding of asymmetrical warfare, to the point of seeming like domestic propaganda.
I mention this not to justify current NRA data collection, but to offer some historical context for how the law came to be the way it is. Too often, privacy discussions on HN are pendant on mythical notions of privacy being considered sacred until very recently. Historically (and going back all the way to the country's founding) the scope of the 4th amendment has been a lot narrower than people imagine and courts have generally not given much weight to the idea of a right to privacy. The notion that the Constitution provides a right to privacy wasn't articulated by the Supreme Court until 1965, in Griswold v. Connecticut (a case about birth control that paved the way for Roe v. Wade). See http://faculty.ncwc.edu/mstevens/410/410lect16.htm for a good overview. Griswold is still considered bad law by a lot of legal scholars, who think that any right to privacy needs to be added to the Constitution by amendment rather than extrapolated by judicial imagination.
In the future, I hope that the legal interpretation of privacy is changed. Just because we entrust a company or individual detail of our lives does not mean we should give up all privacy interest in those details. I'd like to see a roughly similar right to privacy with regard to our transactions with commercial agents as with legal or medical agents (i.e. attorney-client privilege and doctor-patient confidentiality). In other words, employing an agent to act on our behalf should not automatically remove all privacy of that act.
Of course the problem with rewriting the Constitution every time you have an idea for improving it is that after a while you end up with the sort of Constitution we have in California, which is less a collection of guiding principles than a heap of legislation on steroids: http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/const-toc.html
At bottom, what you have is a set of conflicting imperatives. It's perfectly reasonable to charge government with the job of protecting people from military attacks, and as we saw in 2001 the costs of failure to do so can be truly severe. The opportunity costs of investing the government with broad powers to prevent such attacks are much harder to quantify. I have to say that I think the 'war on drugs' has been legally and practically far more destructive of liberty than the Patriot act or the NSA (but please don't interpret this as an endorsement of the latter). I don't worry about top-down totalitarian government nearly as much as I do about the inexorable economics of privately run prisons and city and county pension gaps. People don't care as much about the liberty of crack- and meth-heads (since drug addicts stereotypically have little consideration for others), so we craft these overbroad laws intended to protect the legitimate interests of good people by scapegoating ne'er-do-wells.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
And are funneling all of the traffic to a datacenter in Utah with "yottabyte" scale capacity, with the goal of having enough capacity to archive the data for 100 years:
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/al...
The NSA whistleblower who disclosed the project to the public was the person who wrote the backend of the system, which was originally designed for foreign data collection only. The NSA later repurposed the system for domestic data collection too. The goal, according to him, is to build models of every single person in the country, model the social graph, and be able to classify people as potential threats.
Another example of government waste and redundancy. We already have Facebook for this!
More detail of the theoretical system: http://personofinterest.wikia.com/wiki/The_Machine
AT&T is just one of ~15 Tier 1 providers, never mind large number of tier 2 providers that carry the majority of internet traffic. There would need to be 1-10 such rooms in every NFL city and metro area in the US to do that owing to peering (public & private) and regional traffic. IMO that's simply too big of a undertaking to happen in secrecy.
Far more likely that it happened to be a handy place to watch traffic from transpacific cables or non-US IP traffic from non-US Tier 1. Actually, going by 10-20 sites I'd put my money on spying on non-US Tier 1 provider traffic.
His claim is that Stellar Wind was originally designed specifically for foreign intelligence gathering, then repurposed by the NSA to do domestic spying. Domestic spying was his motivation for leaving the NSA and becoming a whistleblower in the first place.
The fact that a program has the capability to process certain information does not have any bering on whether or not the information is actually capable of being collected and delivered to the program.
I guess it depends on how broadly one defines "all the Internet traffic they can get their hands on". I'm saying they can't get their hands on that much, and what they can, based on the reported locations of other intercept rooms, could be legitimately foreign traffic at points where foreign providers peer.
So far as tapping any significant portion of US internet traffic goes, a large portion of the entities on this list: ftp://ftp.arin.net/info/asn.txt would have to be in on it.
Actually, going by 10-20 sites I'd put my money on spying
on non-US Tier 1 provider traffic.
Based on what you'd have to do to capture foreign traffic as opposed to US traffic it makes sense that the Room 641A sites are intended to capture foreign traffic. All the public information supports this. There isn't any public disclosure of the type of infrastructure needed to comprehensively monitor US IP traffic.
If they are trying to capture foreign IP traffic there would need to be a intercept device where the foreign network interconnects with the US networks and where cables land. Large foreign providers tend to have 20 or fewer IP POPs in the US clustered in the same places. Look at networks maps from Tata, ReTN, NTT, etc. You will see many of the same locations. To tap them you'd put a intercept site in Seattle, Bay Area, Chicago, Miami, New York, and Virginia. Maybe Atlanta & Texas.
By the nature of the internet US traffic would get caught in that. E.g. ReTN had too much inbound traffic so they sold a college in Chicago some cheap outbound traffic. Now ReTN loses a router and their peering goes down so the bits to that college get hauled out to Europe and back. Bits just got captured. ThinThread (Binney's program) reportedly accounted for that and would mask US person PII pending a court order to decrypt it.
The fact that Trailblazer doesn't mask PII is a issue, but both programs would have captured US person PII, the difference is the addition of a bureaucratic hoop that the current and past administration would order jumped in a heartbeat. It isn't like ThinThread required a FISA Judge to walk over with a crypto token and descramble the data.
The nature of the problem means some US traffic will be caught but that does not make it a domestic spying program.
Unlike many other countries with a domestic internet surveillance regime (Syria, Egypt, Iran just to name a few) the US does not mandate that traffic pass through the national carrier or otherwise limit connections within its borders. Syria can drop in a few Blue Coat boxes and catch everything. In the US you'd need thousands, if not tens of thousands of intercept devices -- one or more for every edge in the graph of ASs (http://www.caida.org/research/topology/as_core_network/). It is not a insurmountable problem but it would take a act of Congress (likely challenged to the Supreme Court) and the cooperation of a lot of people to implement. It would not happen overnight or in secret.
Now, US providers are required to support CALEA but that is targeted at individual subscribers and most manufacturer implementations aren't suited to wholesale spying.
This isn't to say 641A sites couldn't work in hand with CALEA, just that it would be a bit more legit than "omg nsa taps all the wires". E.g. 641A could be watching traffic to/from a Jihadi site hosted in France without a court order under the Protect America Act of 2007. NSA notes someone from a US IP has been posting things that indicate radicalization. NSA passes it to FBI to check out. FBI gets a court order for a CALEA tap for the US IP. FBI sends order for tap to ISP. No wholesale tapping of US traffic is necessary. Of course in this example watching anything to/from the US without a FISA order is likely not kosher prior to PAA hence the warrantless surveillance controversy.
When fearmongering over home-grown lone wolf terrorism get louder, that's when the real trouble starts (except they probably have all the info needed for that over the counter from TransUnion etc).
And what are your credentials, exactly? Did you work for the NSA? Is there some reason I should believe you over an NSA whistleblower? As far as I can tell you're just guessing, and your guesses disagree with someone with insider knowledge.
Putting taps on undersea cables is risky. Cables are closely monitored and quite frequently are owned by multi-country consortiums so if you don't want a party to the consortium to find out you might not want to stick a tap in the landing station. Also, you might only care about public IP traffic and not want to see piles of corporate MPLS traffic. I'm not saying that's what happened, just that there are valid reasons why tapping fiber coming into the country wouldn't be desirable.
It is entirely possible that you are claiming a "there exists" and I'm arguing against a "for every". I'm sure we both agree that there exists a NSA program that happens to intercept some US traffic. That's what Binney and others have claimed. I'm arguing that going beyond that isn't supported by the leaks OR the nature of the internet.
I run operations at small regional Tier 2 ISP/transport provider with 25 provider edges on that AS graph that I mentioned before. I've personally installed, repaired, or inspected all cable and gear that 12 of those links traverse end to end and there weren't any secret spy boxes. So, no, I'm not just guessing. I can guarantee that quite a few people aren't having their bits snarfed wholesale when they email (local ISP mail to school mail), post on locally hosted community forums, or reserve a book at their local library.
My network may be too small to matter, but any comprehensive intercept regime would require myself and every other Tier 2 (transit + unpaid peering) ISP to cooperate.
At first I thought it didn't matter that they can see what I do, because if I store a movie of my underground lair with nukes and a few F-22s in Google Drive, they can't use the evidence against me in court unless they get a warrant. But let's be real: if you've got a movie of yourself shooting some guy in the face in Google Drive, they're going to find a way to get that warrant before you delete the movie. And they'll have a copy of it to show the judge. You don't even know they've seen your not-so-secret stuff. The fact that they do this in a clandestine manner effectively makes it unconstitutional since the warrant protection is easy for them to circumvent.
Al-Awlaki was murdered on suspicion that there was an imminent threat to US persons. No warrant obtained. Al-Awlaki's son was murdered, again without warrant, because of complicated reasons that boil down to his last name being Awlaki.
Any of those videos by themselves would be enough for you to be included on the kill list, and executed. No court would have to be involved. You could also be executed by mistake, like Awlaki's son, or many Yemeni children that were so. Or being kidnapped in Italy by CIA agents into a plane, and imprisoned without trial. Or you could be an Al-Jazeera journalist, being arrested by the Pakistani army, then imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay for six years without any crime charged against you, like Sami al-Hajj. It's all fair game.
Oh, don't forget that you could lose your job as a politician because you hired a prostitute, and the Mormon CIA doesn't like that. Definitely fair.
Nothing gets deleted from FB. So the data is there for a long time - further, FB is careful about where they build datacenters and hold the data so as to ensure that FB is the owner of the data, and not subject to some foreign government claiming that they own the data of their national users.
Google surely has the same team, tools and procedures.
What about Dropbox? and Box? How do these companies deal with this whole situation? FB has an entire .gov policy/interfacing office in DC - do these other companies as well?
Probably in the same form they do for law enforcement. A little booklet with every photo ever uploaded (deleted or otherwise), every message, location and IP address the user has ever used, every single click they have made in the interface. Seriously.
Here's an example booklet, complete with redactions.
http://www.scribd.com/fullscreen/88465177?access_key=key-247...
Interestingly, this has roughly coincided with the growth of cloud services. When using a cloud service, there is some level of conscious acceptance that someone else is processing your data and can see what you're doing, and you're more-or-less OK with it. I wouldn't have guessed that people would be so eager to use cloud services whole-sale.
I think that at this point, people tend to assume that anything that leaves their computer will/can be inspected, and for the large part they're OK with it.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxnp2Sz59p8
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Binney_%28U.S._intellig...
The entire premise that democracy would work is flawed. Take Turkey. A ravaged, torn, depressed state, brought back to life by a fucking dictator, Kemal Ataturk. And now? Riots and revolution are taking place on the streets of Istanbul.
I'm not saying dictatorship is the best idea, but a good, conservatively Green or Green Libertarian government is the only path to resolution. But since the United States mass public is uneducated and apathetic (unlike how it used to be 300 years ago, and also markedly unlike quite a few in Europe who actually give a fuck about their rights), don't expect it to happen any time soon.
And for those who think this is elitism:
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are,
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
- TennysonThis is why privacy advocates (and libertarians more generally), can't get more popular traction: the incredibly derisive and arrogant tone with which they address their fellow citizens, and their flippant, dismissive attitude towards democracy.
Why should I listen to the opinions of someone who calls my parents, most of my friends, my in-laws, my wife, etc, "mindless"? Just because they have different priorities and care about different issues, or (gasp!) have different ideas about the appropriate boundaries of police surveillance?
It is not that you are mindless, it is that we are too dumb to contain the sums of human knowledge within our head. Individually, we can be great at disciplines that we specialize in. But expecting us to decide competent government officials to represent us? That's impossible.
I'm not trying to launch ad hominem attacks on you or your relatives. I'm trying to get people to wake up.
Fact is not everyone sees life in terms of slippery slope fallacies. The status quo is really pretty good, and it's perfectly rational to think there are more pressing political concerns than the NSA knowing how often you call your mom. My dad has his pet issue (he's anti-war), and my wife has her's (she's an adherent feminist). People aren't mindless or irrational because they don't share your political beliefs or your priorities with respect to political issues.
Actual former East Germans still remember the Stasi and Germany itself has fought for privacy (see Germany v. Facebook).
Everyone has different levels of privacy needs. I imagine you are OK with people seeing your face, knowing your name, or generally overhearing your conversations on the street. This is simply a different level of openness than being OK with people knowing what websites you visit or hearing your telephone conversations remotely.
In the same way that I don't care if some random guy at a coffee shop sees me visiting HackerNews or watching cat videos, I don't really care if the government sees it either. How does that make me mindless?
edit: I'd also add that I've never felt this elitism from libertarian figureheads either. I can clearly recall Milton Friedman saying that libertarianism should never be forced on people, and if it isn't taken up freely then it wasn't meant to be.
You sound like a bleeding "blame the victim" sexual harassment apologist. All the other secretaries are okay with the bosses' constant groping, what's the big deal? Maybe they like being touched. You were asking for it by dressing that way (putting your data on the cloud) anyway.
Well, it's not their fucking decision whether the abused secretary should put up with the boss's wandering hands!
So your point fails even within the four corners of your analogy. That secretary will have a pretty tough time arguing that her boss's handshake was sexual battery, even if she belongs to an obscure religion that considers hands to be sexual objects.
Privacy advocacy is popular among the upper classes, because they really don't want anyone from the lower classes sticking their noses into their business.
Libertarians are unpopular because some of their policies are deeply unpopular. For example, many libertarians oppose the Civil Rights Act of 1964 because they feel it violates their first amendment rights.
That is, in my experience, my friends' only real problem with the TSA (other than the hassle). They hate people with GED's bossing them around.
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/05/why_arent_ther...
and the TSA's response:
http://blog.tsa.gov/2012/03/viral-video-about-body-scanners....
Draw your own conclusions.
I hope that this is either patently untrue or you're just misled.
It won't stay at the top of the news for even two weeks. Most people don't care because a) it doesn't actually affect their lives and b) they actually want government to monitor traffic patterns for potentially suspicious activity. As a society, some 25% of our labor force is engaged in some sort of security activity, not counting police and military. This is arguably a consequence of the fetishization of private property in the US compared to other countries: http://tuvalu.santafe.edu/~bowles/GarrisonAmerica2007.pdf
a good, conservatively Green or Green Libertarian government is the only path to resolution
Er...I think you're going to run into some consistency problems there.
United States mass public is uneducated and apathetic (unlike how it used to be 300 years ago
Highly questionable. Most people in 1713 were not educated at all and even if we look at the revolutionary period we should remember that wealthy landowners whose writings have come down to use were economically exceptional (eg John dickinson, the 'Penmnsylvanian farmer' who was chided by Alexander Hamilton for implicitly arguing for 'free as in beer - http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfi... and http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfi... ...please excuse my gross oversimplification, but it's a fact that many colonists saw revolution as a means to get out from under state and private debts owed in England).
Giant corporations competing for market share need to consider the operational security implications of bribable government employees having access to their trade secrets and strategies.
The recent case of the NYC cop that was planning on kidnapping and eating women would be chilling enough, but becomes even more horrifying when you learn that he was using law enforcement databases to stalk potential victims.
No human or group of humans can be trusted with total information awareness.
And do those who say "if you've got nothing to hide, it's not a problem," I ask the classic question: "so, why do you own curtains?"
Which he now supports in the fullest.
But where are the Republicans on this issue? After what feels like about 300 years of them calling Obama a fascist who's trying to turn America into the USSR every day, what do we hear from them when soviet-type stuff actually happens on his watch? Nothing. They're too busy with Benghazi and other non-scandals.
For example, an alien with a criminal record who is unable to prove their right to be present in the US on the spot can be detained incommunicado for six months before being entitled to any kind of hearing. This is a step forward; until a few months ago, the government was able to detain said alien indefinitely: http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=9721558833419753...
Bear in mind that the President is sworn to uphold the laws as they are, even when he disagrees with them; his powers are far more circumscribed by Congress than most people appreciate, viz. Obama's oft-repeated desire to close Guantanamo, which has gone nowhere because Congress won't authorize funds for setting up detention facilities on the mainland. It's not so much the case that Obama wants to know who you were calling last Tuesday as that he's supposed to maximize the government's legislated powers to defend the US from attack. If he ordered the NSA to suspend this sort of intelligence-gathering and subsequently a terrorist attack took place that could supposedly have been prevented, he'd be impeached. The whole Benghazi thing is arguably an effort to build momentum for impeachment, IMHO - if the GOP gained supermajority control of the Senate the current House would draft articles of impeachment in a heartbeat.
Then I remember I still want to visit the US some time. It pretty much kills all the best ideas.
"Free this week, for quick gossip/prep before I go and destroy America?"
If I go to the US and "physically" spy, I'll get prosecuted, won't I?
To be clear: I don't want to go to war.
All international slights are weighed against the cost of losing the offending country as a trade partner. This is how most peace is maintained these days.
"The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him." -- Nuremberg Principle IV
Those that perform traitorous deeds to prevent traitorous deeds are traitors to their nation and themselves. -- Me
I'm sure there are tons of ethical implications, and the NSA has its share of shady activities, but part of it seems to be akin to that final scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark when the government loses the powerful, dangerous artifact in some nameless Army warehouse filled with tons of beef jerky or whatever it was.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/opinion/the-national-secur...
It features William Binney, who apparently is one of the better mathematical minds the NSA has ever had. He quit over the NSA's actions in 2001.
http://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/1fs228/this_is_n...
Which belies one of the most insidious parts of Stellar Wind... that the NSA could've just tapped the cables which link the US to other countries, but they chose to spy directly on US citizens as well.