NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants

Yes, most in my generation are shallow and passive; but that doesn't mean all are. There are some intellectuals on the fringes.

I also had no problem seeing a problem with the central banking system and fractional reserve lending.

Perhaps you disliked "being forced" to read classics, but many of us contemplated these writings thoughtfully.

I think your point specifically about Iraq is largely likely to be correct, but I have never been able to swallow this argument, which comes up just about every discussion of tyranny I see/hear.

A fundamental component of true tyranny is violence or an immediate threat of violence (as opposed to the somewhat more abstract monopoly on force that democratic governments have). At the risk of sounding trite: it's easy to call people complacent in the face of a tyrannical government when it isn't your family that will be the target of that violence. Resisting a strong and deeply rooted tyrannical government is not for the feint of heart or those with precious things to lose. To say those that don't give up the tenuous stability they have to attempt to foil the will of the government are complacent is dangerously close to shifting the blame on the victims of abuse.

I suppose it would be fair to say that in any tyrannical state that many are, in a way, resigned to their fate. For most people in that situation anything besides begrudging acceptance of the way things are is not far from suicide. In the case of the US I would wholeheartedly agree that apathy is a huge driving force behind our government taking power it should not. Implying that's how it works everywhere and every time seems very unfair.

He probably was told in his classified briefing that NSA could record and collect phone calls without a warrant.

Mueller, on the other hand, would be talking about actually tapping into that data, which would need a warrant.

I'm not sure I buy the argument that you can record a phone call without a warrant just because it's using VoIP or some equivalent instead of a physical wiretap, but it does sound similar to the other arguments that have been made to collect data for later analysis by warrant if necessary.

4TB harddisks you mean ... But why stop at Americans? It's obviously feasible to record all phone calls made anywhere in the world, forever. Hooking into large network operators won't be such a big problem either.

In contrast, total IP traffic is in the tens of exabytes per month [1], but much of it is re-transmission of content such as movies, that the NSA is not interested in storing. I wonder what sort of steganography detection they have in place.

[1] http://www.cisco.com/en/US/solutions/collateral/ns341/ns525/...

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/nov/05/whos-in...

Another quote of his that seems applicable here:

"Yet many human beings, resigned to sensuality and indolence, uninstructed and unimproved, have passed through life like travellers in a strange country."

That seems to be one of the downsides of the karma system - when a population of high karma users tend towards a certain point of view it creates social pressure for others to reinforce the orthodoxy. It doesn't help that once you get the down arrow, you're free to simply downvote opinions you disagree with rather than engage the poster.

I've wondered once or twice whether karma shouldn't be publicly visible anyway. After all, one should be able to judge a post on its own merit without having a measure of the posters' relative popularity to tell you how much you probably should agree with them or not.

Fundamentally, I have a great deal of sympathy for the security services, understand the difficulty of the job that they have been tasked with, and can see no other reasonable way of achieving the goals that they have been set. However, my opinion flips and flops back and forth as I read each new revelation, get caught up in the moral outrage of the crowd, write something incendiary and provocative, then sit back, think a bit, and regret (maybe) being so rash.

But then again ... I understand all too well the tremendously vulnerable situation that the general population is in with respect to the state, and comprehend the risk of abuse, not so much from individual analysts or the current administration as much as from the opportunistic acts of a future administration.

But then again ... It is foolish to expect answers to come easily when the questions themselves are so difficult, so it is natural to strike out in the wrong direction a few times before finding a good path.

As a former member of the diplomatic community living in the US, I am (now as then) almost certain that the NSA were recording all of my telephone calls and internet browsing activity, as well as bugging the apartment in which we lived. It did not then and does not now stop me from browsing for kinky porn, having massive stand-up arguments with my wife, and emailing the Samaritans about wanting to commit suicide. (TMI, I know, sorry - but they can only hold something over your head if you want to keep it a secret).

I chose not to care then, and I have to continue choosing not to care. (Not a decision one can undo easily, anyway). Living in a glass goldfish bowl or not, life goes on; and perhaps the best (or least worst) thing that can come out of all of this is that we become a little bit more honest about human imperfection and fallibility - I do not think that I am alone in being an imperfect, flawed human being.

Perhaps if we stopped pretending to be perfect (or at least not-as-deranged-as-we-really-are) we would be somewhat less vulnerable to those who would seek to exploit the information imbalance.

So, I guess I do not care about them invading my privacy, because that boat sailed a long time ago. I do care in principle about them invading everybody's privacy, because of hypothetical future abuses. I think that at least some of the potential for abuse can be blunted by being more open and honest with ourselves, and by coming to terms with our own failings rather than trying to hide them.

Alexander might have meant Snowden wasn't supposed to have that capability. Or that Snowden had it but wasn't supposed to use it that way, so he "couldn't" do it under the law (but could in practice).

It's hard to say; the testimony has often used obfuscatory weasel words and conveniently shifting definitions, and the avuncular grandparents in the Senate aren't exactly vigorous in their cross-examination.

The revelations of the past week seem to put this category of idea back on the map.

How would we know otherwise?

As you note, that "would be a more outrageous and damning discovery" - so there's more incentive to keep it closely held. It would help the NSA do what it feels it must, simply by using its other network taps. And, it would help minimize the risk of discovery without involving extra employees and ongoing connections, all while retaining the ability for Page/Drummond/etc to deny involvement.

Those add up to making a key compromise more attractive for NSA and Google than the alternatives.

Second, it's unfathomable to me to imagine the NSA isn't doing their damnedest to obtain all private keys. I have no idea how many they do have, but it seems foolish to assume they don't have a specific private key.

Why do you think the NSA would regard private keys as some kind of sacred ground? For example, they could go after it the same way the Chinese do - phishing attacks against employees. They most certainly use those techniques outside the US, how can you be sure they don't within the US?

I could never pretend to be sure they -are- doing it, but it seems a lot more difficult to be sure they -are not-.

I think that some of those people have knowledge of a secret program that enables access to the data (maybe without direct access to the servers that house it). That would make it easier to manage without having to bring all the SREs and such into the conspiracy.

I think that most of those people would not allow their lives to be destroyed with federal charges (or maybe even extralegal harassment, who knows - they do run secret prisons) in the process of reporting such a thing.

Tens of thousands of others have chosen to keep quiet about NSA's extralegal collection practices (from the contractors at the IXes installing beam splitters, to the mechanics who welded the fiber grabber arm onto the nuclear sub). Why is it such a stretch to think that 3 or 5 or 10 at Google wouldn't?

It's not even a stretch to think that NSA would have done their homework to know _which_ people inside of Google would be both able to participate and could be coerced into keeping quiet.

1. Google is lying. 2. Prism (or the backend thereof) is genuinely unknown to most Google employees. Those few employees who do know of it are lying. The others (i.e. legal) are ignorant because they have no need to know, and because it provides plausible deniability. 3. There exist NSA agents capable of passing a Google interview and installing backdoors, perhaps with the collusion of other agents.

Companies the size of Google are, in software terms, Borg cubes of interacting systems. No one comprehends the whole thing, and some degree of secrecy between services is normal. Who would notice if, say, Gmail traffic was being replicated onto NSA-controlled hardware? A small part of a small part of the Gmail team. No one else would likely notice even if it was done in an obvious way.

Your point, though, absolutely stands.

No evidence has been published, and who is talking about Google Mail anyway?

You're mincing words. Your comments clearly indicate that you think "direct access" unambiguously means "access to servers that run GMail that the NSA can snoop on any time they like." But from what I've seen, most comments on HN adopt and acknowledge a more ambiguous definition.

The one you propose is the extreme. But other definitions include an interface for the NSA to request data and have it deposited in some "drop box" that can then be accessed by the NSA (all without a warrant). It's reasonable to call this "direct access", particularly if the audience is not tech savvy. (Which is something we don't know.)

Moreover, most folks here seem painfully aware that "direct access" really hasn't been qualified. It seems reasonable your definition isn't really true, but that doesn't mean the Guardian's reporting is incorrect. (The Guardian never put forward a precise definition---either because they didn't have one or were unwilling to release it.)

Personally, I think you are attributing way too much certainty to the HN crowd.

Whether the initial reports were 100% accurate or not is irrelevant. What does matter is that this now out in the open and hopefully something changes.

"NSA Prism program taps in to user data of Apple, Google and others • Top-secret Prism program claims direct access to servers of firms including Google, Apple and Facebook • Companies deny any knowledge of program in operation since 2007"

The first sentence states:

"The National Security Agency has obtained direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other US internet giants, according to a top secret document obtained by the Guardian."

Emphasis on according to a top secret document obtained by the Guardian. If you read on, the content of the article supports this title and summary. It doesn't matter what Emily Bazelon has said, it don't matter what others have said, and it certainly doesn't matter what the mainstream criticism is when determining whether or not the statements in the article are accurate. The slides say the NSA can "collect data directly from the servers" of these companies. Guardian states the the slides state that the NSA can collect data directly from the servers of these companies.

That is a demonstrable fact. In fact, I just demonstrated it.

Now, I'm in the camp of people who think that whoever wrote the slides just didn't know what they were talking about. Neverthess, I'm also in the camp of people who think that the Guardian was accurate in their reporting--because the reporting is right there to be read.

We could, of course, argue over the congruace between the phrases "direct access" and "collect data directly from the servers," but you said you weren't interested in semantics.

[1]: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-n...

My point is that it is irrelevant whether it is true or not that NSA has capability to access to all our emails. The key is whether our legal framework allows that or not. My understanding is that NSA can collect all the data it needs (emails, phone calls, etc.) and they will not break the law - even without FISA court order. So maybe the law needs to be changed...

The simple case is that of the NSA document ("collection directly from the servers of these US service providers") against google ("The U.S. government does not have direct access or a “back door” to the information stored in our data centers"). These are two competing claims, neither of which have been supported by evidence and hence the burden of proof rests equally with both cases.

Anything else (By the Guardian, Slate, the 'mainstream view on HN' or yourself) is purely speculative.

You seem to place the burden of proof on one claim over another and hold a very specific view on what 'direct access' means.

You also seem to hold a strange interpretation of the Guardian's reporting, but I won't get into that as its largely immaterial to the real subject.

Evidence being "Google denies it"?

I think your analysis is perhaps being biased a bit by the idea that dealing with all the email data would be massively expensive.

Also, consider that phone companies already have existing government granted monopolies, while companies like Google and Facebook are significantly more vulnerable to bad press or some kind of disruption triggered by public mistrust.

Hence one possible strategy for minimizing the impact of Snowden's revelations would be to admit to the phone aspect of the powerpoint and to drastically minimize the relationships with web companies.

Also considering the power of ad network cookies and the amount of information stored, the intelligence value of internet companies' data dwarfs the value of phone call data by several orders of magnitude.

The Guardian has reported that an NSA document says they do, and that Google says they don't. As far as I have seen, the Guardian has not made a claim either way.

You choose to trust Google. A lot of other people here choose to trust the NSA documents more.

Stop making one then.

Ah, I was wondering why you were doing this.

Personally I prefer to believe, when it is hinted that the NSA might have access to my emails, that this is true and later be proven wrong (which IMO hasn't been done conclusively yet), rather than the other way around: assuming everything is fine, and then piece by piece being proven wrong as more evidence trickles in.

Note that the above is a hypothetical example, since, being a EU citizen, I already know for a couple of months that the NSA in fact does have the ability to request any of my data without a warrant, given that it resides on a US server.

... Come to think of it, could it be that also influences your perception of what is "the mainstream view" on HN? A lot of people do not explicitly state they are not US-citizens every time they mention how upset they are the NSA can read their emails.

What gives you that belief, and if it's TLS-secured, would you assume it has the same forward-security as (eg) Chrome-to-Gmail? Or might it be something else, because it happens out of sight, that is a little behind-the-times?

As you are one of the three most common defenders of the state that I have noticed on this site, that would be very surprising to me. But quite interesting if so, it would be some indication that your perspective on the issues and seeming constant defense is an indication of spiraling paranoia in counterparties to your arguments. Is this how you see it?

But even if Google isn't obligated to lie, it might still be lying.

Maybe Google is lying, not because it's obligated to by the law, but because it's immune from the consequences of lying and the government is leaning on them in other ways.

Maybe Google is afraid of the backlash that will follow if they don't lie.

Maybe Google has carefully written their denials to be technically true, but still hide the real extent of the data they're giving to the NSA. This was my original point, which you completely ignored.

And yes, maybe Google is being completely forthright.

We have very little information, and information we do have may be wrong. Given that, I don't think it's wise to conclude that transmitting email over an encrypted channel is enough to keep out of the hands of the NSA.

EDIT, quick, and not to make a thread of it: a) NSA is the referent to tea-leaves, not you; b) the rest is advice; and c) lol.

And you know this...how exactly? I can't say they do but it wouldn't surprise me. To say that they don't however is a different story. What's the difference between phone metadata http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/06/06/nsa_veriz... and email metadata? Why one is OK and the other is not, assuming NSA goes to court to get them? In fact, emails over 180 days have very little protection.

(Although half the site seems to think I'm an NSA supporter, here I'll again make it clear that the telco access NSA seems to have is an extremely bad thing.)

I see annoyance with some clearly partisan statements and actions. I see people talking about the pathetic, even laughably bad polls done on the subject, and badly misinterpreting the statistics. And, of course, there's the idiot who decided that if half of Democrats support an action, that must mean all Democrats are mindless Obama supporters.

But I see no one suggesting that all outrage about this is partisan, much less shrilly.