The real story in the NSA scandal is the collapse of journalism
zdnet.com
zdnet.com
Here we have major publications publishing something and then major corporations denying it. Then the publications step back from it, but not entirely.
At the same time, this is an issue about which the parties involved may be under a legal obligation to lie. If there is a room at Facebook that does the same thing as the room at AT&T, would Facebook be allowed to tell you about it? Of course not.
So now we have media outlets contradicting each other and genuine sources legally prohibited from providing true answers, which means we'll never know what actually happened. This is what you get when you pass laws that prohibit the public from knowing the truth and wage a campaign against leakers.
So now the media looks incompetent, the corporations look like government shills and the government looks like an authoritarian nightmare -- and this even though they maybe haven't actually done anything. All because they attacked our method of finding the truth and destroyed its credibility.
Maybe these companies have VOLUNTARILY lied, that's possible, but that's also rather unlikely as that would suggest they are friendly with the NSA for some reason.
That is the logic behind the idea of a warrant canary, but my understanding is that they have never actually been tested.
The frequency with which rsync.net representatives bring up their warrant canary in community conversations (such as those on HN) suggests to me that their canary is still legitimately alive (one would expect them to be less proud of it, where it coerced), but do we really know that is the case? The very nature of these things prevents us from saying things like that with certainty.
For a time, until USA PATRIOT Act was amended, these letters were allowed to forbid you from consulting a lawyer about the letter. So if the letter included demands that it was not allowed to include (perhaps: "Lie."), how would you even know that those demands were not allowed? For that matter, if you received a letter today that said this amendment to the Act was not relevant in this particular circumstance and you were not allowed to consult a lawyer, what would you do? Call their bluff?
So what are you supposed to do if you're not allowed to disclose something and someone directly asks you about it? An obvious evasion is clearly going to be a de facto admission, and you're not allowed to admit it, so you either have to lie or mislead. I'm not sure the distinction between a lie and a misleading statement is particularly meaningful in this context.
None of the big tech companies have an incentive to cover up: for them wiretapping both an extra cost and a continuous PR nightmare.
But hinting that you're bound by a gag order shouldn't be permitted by the gag order since that would compromise its effectiveness -- certainly a risk averse corporation could imagine a prosecutor arguing as much.
>None of the big tech companies have an incentive to cover up: for them wiretapping both an extra cost and a continuous PR nightmare.
As I understand it the government compensates them for the inconvenience.
I wonder how that works. If stories about pervasive US surveillance of a burgeoning tech startup cause their european market to be DOA, how could that startup be correctly compensated?
The slide with the explicit formulation in published today:
"Collection directly from the servers of these U.S. Service Providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Paltalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple."
This supports the claims of Glenn Greenwald's article and is exactly what companies claimed not existing.
Especially in the context of that slide where they are contrasting it with their "upstream" collection which would require sorting out the packets (and presumably decrypting them) before analyzing the data.
If it is true, whats worrying is how fast things can escalate to Dr. Stranglove territory.
...
He's made a career of banging the drum that the cyber-boogeyman apocalypse is going to happen real soon now, and the ACLU and EFF are trying to get everyone killed, since the clipper chip era.
So we see shots of NYT reporters checking Google News and talking about twitter. And then the most appalling bit of the film where Judith Miller justifies her behavior by trying to pass the buck to the government, as if anti-war sources (like the FAS) who were actively debunking the crap she was publishing and clamoring for attention did not actually exist.
The overreach by various government agencies has been an injustice that needs to be addressed but the issue doesn't have to be clouded by pulling in the complicated disputes about 'social justice'
> Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Mark Udall (D-Colo.), who had classified knowledge of the program as members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, were unable to speak of it when they warned in a Dec. 27, 2012, floor debate that the FISA Amendments Act had what both of them called a “back-door search loophole” for the content of innocent Americans who were swept up in a search for someone else.
> “As it is written, there is nothing to prohibit the intelligence community from searching through a pile of communications, which may have been incidentally or accidentally been collected without a warrant, to deliberately search for the phone calls or e-mails of specific Americans,” Udall said.
US Senators with classified knowledge of the program don't have knowledge of what exactly it entails or how it is being used. I can forgive the Post for getting some of the details wrong.
> Wyden repeatedly asked the NSA to estimate the number of Americans whose communications had been incidentally collected, and the agency’s director, Lt. Gen. Keith B. Alexander, insisted there was no way to find out. Eventually Inspector General I. Charles McCullough III wrote Wyden a letter stating that it would violate the privacy of Americans in NSA data banks to try to estimate their number.
This is what I was referring to when I said the Senators didn't know how exactly it was being used. It is pretty basic knowledge about the program.
Has the NSA incidentally collected data on 300 Americans? On 3,000? On, say, 300 million?
If ones assumes that William Binney both knows what he is talking about and is telling the truth, then the NSA has been collecting data on Americans since before September 11th.
If the rest of what William Binney says is also correct, then the NSA initially was keeping the data on Americans anonymized, for viewing only after a court order -- but then after September 11th disabled data anonymization for some order of time.
If the data has been anonymized once again, this may present legal problems in how officials can guarantee this because it would reveal past illegal activity which those same officials may have been involved in.
[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/06/confirmed-nsa-spying-m...
How true, in this case.
But it has been the Post, not the Government, who altered it. Sad, shameful and pathetic.
</snark>
There are plenty examples of poor journalism, but I personally feel more encouraged that there is decent investigative and brave journalism going on after this week.
Both are equally suspicious and egregious in their own rights. What is important is the investigation of both of these programs and the final conclusion. Until that conclusion is met, I think it's best for everybody to shut up and get on with their lives.
It was bad, and I, like many others, was angry. But now is the time to wait, and be careful about which services we decide to use.
Declan McCullagh of CNET examined the Washington Post story independently and concluded that the Post story was wrong.
The Cnet "analysis" depends on the credibility of their unnamed source. The reader is left to decide whose source sounds more believable, Cnet's or the WaPo's, and which version of the story they find likely.
The problem inherent to secrecy (which isn't an argument for abolishing it) is that the public is left to draw conclusions from partial facts and an unverifiable amount of misdirection.
Based on what we know so far, the stories have at a minimum gotten significant press coverage about the volume of FISA requests and (per the NY Times and Marc Ambinder) the cooperation of many US tech companies (though not Twitter) in building a streamlined approach to surveillance of nonUS persons. With public discussion, it ay be harder to invoke the state secrets clause. And we're not done yet. "Collapse" seems a litte overstated.
IMO both journalism and the American people failed to pay adequate attention to this issue, both have gotten what they paid for, and the faux-surprise act of both is hilarious.
In this case 'direct collection' i.e. a backdoor didn't make sense for a lot of reasons and didn't square with the program was described in other sources that came out after the slides were released.
But the real problem is secrecy. This is a complicated program with many actors and the media can't be expected not to report information clearly contained in leaked NSA slides even if they can't get the context 100% right.