NSA slides explain the PRISM data-collection program
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
Isn't it kind of surprising that the leak for this came from a career intelligence officer and not one of the many tech-utopia idealists who work at these kinds of startups? Not necessarily someone at the executive level, but one of the scores of employees required to assess, review, and implement the alleged backdoor? It's not just a matter of ethics, but just that you'd think someone must be idealistic/reckless enough to leak it from the companies' side
Edit: Also, as has been pointed out elsewhere...this program only cost $20M a year? If that's the price of eternal security, I'd say we got a pretty goddamn good deal. The shitstack that is the government's stimulus contracts database alone cost $18M to build (http://www.propublica.org/article/stimulus-transparency-watc...). And what percentage of a fighter jet's paint job does $20M cover?
I'd say it's possible that the government is unconstitutionally intruding on our privacy but also doing it in a bumbling way (which also has its downsides).
> “They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type,” said the “career intelligence officer” who gave documents describing PRISM to the Washington Post.
Think of the engineering needed at multiple endpoints to allow something like this...I can believe the NSA has some of the best cryptoanalysts, but our best front-end hackers as well (do they have their own Meteor.js)? I'm only being slightly pedantic here. If this is "literally" possible, then the amount of work needed for the collaborating companies is non-trivial. It's one thing to pass along uber-authentication credentials allowing an NSA-agent Zuckerberg-like privileges...that could be something implemented with as few as a couple people. But to bake in something right out of a hacker movie?
It just makes a few of the claims sound a bit suspect...because what is terribly frightening is the government's ability to aggregate and analyze this information in bulk, not to peep in on you as you're typing in real-time, which would be one of the least efficient ways ever to spy on the general American public's online activity.
And no, I'm not being an apologist for federal expansion of powers. I'm pointing out that some of what this source is leaking seems to be beyond reality, not because of technological sophistication, but because of the number of mundane moving parts and actors that would seemingly have to be involved (theoretically, wouldn't they have to have as many datacenters as all the companies they're vacuuming from?). The entire PowerPoint slide set looks like something a get-rich-quick contractor would whip up to win a fat contract that would never actually be scrutinized for viability.
But still, even if the government doesn't actually have the capability as described, it is wrong for them to not disavow it...it's not any good if their mindset is: "Oh we're not doing that...yet...but we would love to, some day)
But even real-time interception would not (seemingly) be that valuable to analysts. Assuming that suspects aren't dumb enough to use their own personal accounts and to talk of their plans explicitly, it seems analysts would want the historical aggregate of which alias accounts talked to which other alias accounts.
Hell, Facebook can already figure out if you're connected to someone even if you've never directly interacted on the service...if the allegations are true, I wonder how much of the requested data comes with pre-baked network-calculated goodness?
Ozone Widget Framework developed by the NSA https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4960506
The hacker-movie-esque visuals don't hurt http://ozoneplatform.org/
This line of thought is similar to another comment on HN stating that "we should be grateful to Google".
- Oh, they take only $20M? We should be grateful for that. Let them do whatever it takes to "protect our freedom".
I'm very surprised to see this kind of reasoning on the hacker's forum.
I'm not. HN is typically more liberal than what some might consider a traditional hacker to be; I'd imagine the real hackers congregate somewhere else. Somewhere less "white hat-y", if you will.
The problem with getting through to people who are willing to surrender their freedoms for a false promise of security is that they don't see the government as a threat. If the government is not a threat then why not surrender your freedom to them? Are they not there to protect us?
This idea has been present throughout history and most notably in western literature. It's believed by some that in order to have an achievable utopian society we must enslave ourselves to the government only at the cost of our personal freedoms. By this definition we've long been enslaved, it's just that some are now noticing it.
Of course some level of opposition will always be present. However the size of such is so small that the power they have must be leveraged through some alternative means. Some say this is the internet. We now know that's not true.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beam_splitter
Some parts of this technology are actual prisms (several patents pop-up via google) , this might remove all parties legally speaking.
Furthermore these can be installed fairly easily without anyone really knowing, though some physical access is required.
The same technique was used in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A and pretty much all over every pipe, including the one this data went throught to show up on Hacker News.
Yes we all "knew". All of us "knew". Some of us have "known" for something like 15 years. (Which, BTW, is why I'm most sure why Obama is getting so much flack. Its a Clinton - Bush - Obama scandal.)
But none of us, not one, actually did know anything at all. We suspected, or assumed. But we did not know. Not unless one of us is working for the NSA, etc, etc. (Ironic if I have just picked on the one poster who is)
Now we do know. It is absolute. No doubt, no shouting down, we know.
There is a huge difference: Before we were written off as conspiracy nuts jobs. Now we have certain knowledge.
Im not picking on you personally. Your post is one of many in the past couple of days. As such I have not down voted you, that would be unfair. But please, can people stop with this sort of comment? We all know we "knew".
You are picking on people; we really did know, not "know." It was obvious, it remains obvious, and the fact is that its going to continue and get worse despite the revelations of this week, unless we do something.
Painting rational people who notice and complain about government overreach as paranoid is precisely what enables the expansion of these policies. You should be asking what you can do now to help rather than setting us up to be further discredited or ignored by implying our years of complaining weren't substantiated until just now.
NSA doesn't even have to deny anything. Let the other interested parties wash their hands, and leave with a "told ya" smile.
Not sure if it was intentional or not, but seems a very convenient prank. I know, Conspiracy theory^-1. We'll see.
That, plus knowing what we know about big data projects, I have a suspicion this "system" has very limited functionality.
Were any of those ever confirmed with documentation?
If things get really bad, perhaps there'll also be a bit of "I was as shocked and angry as you were when I learned about these things for the first time from my morning paper," followed by a few rounds of "Quick, look over there, some right-wing guy said something stupid!"
But right, it can't be kept in check because it will bleed out into other areas of law enforcement. Then we hit back. But I do think people's thermometers are good enough to know when something like this is warranted and when it's not. When you remember that we are at war, on our own soil, this is a very minor thing. But if one major attack happens though it will create a panic and then we'll see major changes to our way of life. And a lot of the same tough guys here from New York and San Francisco will be the ones demanding it.
And those are the ones we know about, Obama doesn't spike the ball on that stuff quite like Bush did.
And if you think there wouldn't be global ramifications for blowing up the New York City subway line you're not thinking clearly.
Sorry, but you cannot scare me with terrorism. I would rather see the rare terrorist attack than live in a country where I have to think twice about what I say on the phone.
Also, on a meta-point, every time I see someone start their post off with the word 'Bullshit' on HN - and I see it quite often, like it's some sort of HN meme - I always think: gee, that post would have lost nothing from the exclusion of that first word and probably would have been a little more in service of promoting civil discourse.
However, not everything was beatings, disappearances and terror. Believe it or not, East Germany wasn't all downsides. People were employed, general crime was apparently quite low, children felt relatively safe, children were given education (though indoctrination was certainly a heavy component), they were clothed and fed. While the standard of living sounded like it was relatively low across the board, it also seemed that this standard of living was more evenly distributed than might have been the case in some other places at the time. Obviously traditional Communism has borne out to be more or less unsustainable, and I won't be participating in any debate about Communism vs other dogmas, but I feel I would not be accurately conveying all that I've been told were I not to mention these counterpoints to the Stasi's behaviour.
One fascinating thing my partner has told me is that for some reason, the memories she has of East Germany before the wall came down tend to be in black and white, in her mind's eye.
As you retell, the Stasi were quite big on the human intelligence angle, but I doubt they would have had to resort to such measures would they have had access to the kind of communication infrastucture that is common in the developed world today. Such a system as the NSA et al have access to now, would have been a Stasi wet dream, I'd imagine.
I grew up as a kid in Romania, we didn't have the Stasi but we did have the Securitate (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Securitate), which were as bad if not worse. I would like to confirm that from half a Globe away what I'm reading about the NSA gives me the chills.
Had we been asked to participate in the decision somehow, armed with a bit of the 'transparency' this government keeps talking about, we might have weighed the evidence and democratically chosen the exact same course of action - although I'm not 100% sure of that. But none of us were asked.
The only "terrorists" I worry about is the US government itself.
http://news.cnet.com/2100-1029-6140191.html
They've been doing it with cell phone microphones for years apparently.
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/03/petraeus-tv-remote/
Tech like the XBox One will make this pretty easy (as its microphone is always on and the Kinect cam is integrated).
(Because they deny it? Then better leave Google off the list, too - they deny it as well).
Now I really have a reason to install Debian Wheezy on MBPr. ;p
This is no way to live. Something must be done.
Part of the reason I chose it. ;)
Years ago, something called Ubuntu came up to spread linux to the masses. While it was hard to install and maintain a linux pc before, Ubuntu made it so that it was almost as simple as windows. I know this is a baseless conspiracy theory, but would it be too far fetched to think maybe Ubuntu was sponsored by the government to spread linux and lull the people into a false sense of security in their linux environment?
I'm thinking mostly about Gmail. Because virtually everyone now is using it…
The whole content of any communications? Just origin/dest?
This is becoming scary.
According to slide 2, all of it. You might be confusing this with yesterday's Verizon story, which was "only" metadata -- caller, sender, time, and duration. This one is "actual" data -- email content, chat text, audio/video of VoIP calls.
(From the article, there's also a parallel NSA program (BLARNEY) that collects metadata only. I don't know why there's two of them).
Which is what is probably happening right now.
[1] https://www.google.com/intx/en/enterprise/apps/business/ [2] http://www.google.com/enterprise/apps/education/customers.ht...
I think YouTube too, saw a mention of it in one of the articles linked from HN. Which I guess makes sense from their point of view, there was this case about 3 months ago of two Russian spies caught in Germany who had "taken orders" by way of YouTube comments (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732453200457836...).
And then of course there's all the "jihadist" YT videos (Arabic Nasheeds and all that) with lots of comments that may hold "useful" data, like IP addresses of those commenting. Of course I've long time ago created a YT playlist with a couple of these nasheeds (even though I don't understand a word some of them do sound really nice), which I hope to counter-act in NSA's eyes by my loyal membership to /r/murica and limitless fanboyism for the works of Thomas Paine.
And why are you omitting Apple from the title while listing Google twice (YouTube)? and what the hell is "msn" and "y"?
If HN hates google, then it has ninjas after Apple and Facebook.
This is not about the "NSA, CIA, or FBI" - it's about those other companies enabling those gov agencies to gather such information, why doesn't someone from those companies speak up that deploys this software?
Is it really about $$$? Is it the same reason programmers create SPAM bots?
SOOooooo, which one of you geeks wrote the code to track call data, then wrote a script to export the data to the NSA - THEN you didn't tell the rest of tech community.
DISAPPOINTED IN YOU
While I understand that this had been uncovered today, is it really that surprising.
It's my fault.
There is no authority without responsibility.
If you don't like that, don't accept the job.
[FWIW I didn't like Bush either]
If he didn't he is just incompetent and unfit to lead the "free" world.
>Apple told CNBC, "We have never heard of PRISM. We do not >provide any government agency with direct access to our >servers, and any government agency requesting customer data >must get a court order."
They are not providing a back door, but it isn't the _means_ of providing information to the NSA that citizens are upset about, it is the 'providing information to the NSA' part.
Plus, careful wording allows all sorts of out. Google says they don't provide a "back door", but this sort of thing could be defined as coming in the front door.