Hacker News Reader

Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

I'm not interested in the semantic argument. Emily Bazelon called The Guardian out this week on the Slate political podcast, as have many others; this is now a mainstream criticism of how The Guardian reported the story.

Either way: the original notion that NSA had direct access to the servers that actually operate Google Mail has been found to be unsupported by the evidence published thus far.

I call this out continuously and obnoxiously on HN because it is very much not the mainstream view on HN; most of the people commenting on the NSA story on HN say things that make it clear that they believe NSA continues to have the direct access to Google's systems that Google and the Guardian say they do not have.

View on HN

> most of the people commenting on the NSA story on HN say things that make it clear that they believe NSA continues to have the direct access to Google's systems

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.

The process as I understand it:

* NSA (or some other USG agency) issues a directive to the provider under authorization from FISA. No court order is required for NSA to issue directives under FISA.

* If the provider is Google, Yahoo, or Facebook†, that directive is reviewed manually by the provider.

* In at least the case of Yahoo, where this step is supported by court documents, but probably all the other cases too based on provider public statements, the provider has the option of refusing to comply with the directive, at which point they send lawyers to FISC.

* For all intents and purposes USG never loses at FISC.

* Some process happens at the provider in which data pertaining to the directive is collected, marshalled into some kind of bundle, and placed on a secure drop box server ("similar to an FTP server"); it is NSA's access to these servers that "PRISM" refers to.

If you're telling me that this is the understanding most HN people have about what "direct access" means, I'd direct your attention to this very thread to rebut that argument. I'm accused upthread of "mincing words" but would respond by arguing that any attempt to characterize the process in this post as "direct access" is a much finer mince; a brunoise of words, if you will.

† Because those providers have publicly stated that.

Still arguing with the NSA over their own capabilities?

I'm actually curious how you rationalize this worldview given the bizarre news over the last few days that the Fed is insisting on burying NSA FISA requests among requests from every other law enforcement agency when reporting statistics?

Leaving aside the point that aggregated and anonymized information seems to pose absolutely zero security risk and should not be classified in the first place, there seems a fairly obvious reason for the move that contradicts at least one if not more of your assumptions above.

See what I mean? This is the kind of comment that makes me think most HN people commenting on NSA think NSA has direct, unilateral access to Google Mail's servers --- as The Guardian (incorrectly) reported.

I don't see how you can possibly jump to that conclusion. But if you don't want to analyze the question from the position of the NSA (as you should be doing), then you are welcome to personalize it. So reiterating the question, which of your assumptions listed above do you think I suspect are wrong based on the kerfuffle over statistics reporting?

Put another way, why on earth does NSA seem to care so much about aggregating its FISA requests with other law enforcement agencies when reporting statistics to the public?

I'm having a hard time parsing your question but can I ask a different one: do you disagree with any of the bulleted points in my comment above? I don't want to waste a lot of time petulantly agreeing with each other.

Yes. My suspicion is that your first two assumptions are incorrect, and that (1) FISA requests are not personalized under PRISM, and that consequently (2) there is no manual review or check against the abuse of power by providers on an ongoing basis.

This is the only reasonable explanation I can think of for why the NSA would be trying to hide its request volume in the larger volume of overall requests from law enforcement: an attempt to massage the average user-accounts-compromised-per-request downwards when reported to the public. If there are any other explanations you can think of for why it matters how the aggregate statistics are reported, I would be curious to hear of them.

And obviously, abuse of the FISA process renders splitting hairs about what constitutes direct/indirect access meaningless. FISA abuse plus an automated dropbox provides exactly the sort of data access that Snowden and the NSA repeatedly insist they have, while reconciling Google's claims with those of the NSA.

I don't understand the (1) and (2) thing. What does it matter whether the requests are "personalized"? In fact, I think they probably rarely are; you can look at Facebook's numbers to see the aggregates suggesting that most requests are for sizable numbers of accounts, not just one.

My point isn't that NSA's FISA directives are surgical; like you, I doubt that they are. My point is that upon receiving them, a lawyer at Google approves or rejects them, not a SQL query.

If you read all my comments on this whole annoying story I think you'll find that I'm rarely (maybe never?) sticking up for NSA, but I am happy to stick up for Google anywhere that I can. Google is actually (in this instance) fighting for your privacy, and then getting shellacked on message boards like this; what's worse, they're prevented by the USG from explaining what's happening. They're being equated with companies like AT&T, companies that appear to be sharing bedding with NSA. That belief is wrong, it's unfair, and it's counterproductive.

> If you read all my comments on this whole annoying story

Your comments have repeatedly attacked the credibility of whistleblowers, derided their claims as factually and technically impossible, and asserted that NSA statements about NSA capabilities are wrong.

> My point is that upon receiving them, a lawyer at Google approves or rejects them, not a SQL query.

I don't think Google has much say in this, but what do I know? Only that your assertion otherwise is in open conflict with claims by Snowden and the NSA officials who have briefed Congress, both of whom tell us that authority over which targets to tap is in practice delegated to security analysts.

> Your comments have repeatedly attacked the credibility of whistleblowers, derided their claims as factually and technically impossible, and asserted that NSA statements about NSA capabilities are wrong.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who's noticed tptacek's tendency to defend "The Establishment" at every turn, whatever naughtiness comes up. There he goes again. I wouldn't be surprised if he had some ties to the government.

Not sure what you mean here by the establishment. I see him defending google, and rightfully so. I think google is one of the few companies who have been fighting for the privacy rights of users. It would be a shame if other companies saw the effort google puts into this, only to be tar and feathered for something they might not be guilty of.. Those other companies might decide its not worth sticking their neck out for users..

> I think google is one of the few companies who have been fighting for the privacy rights of users

.. While happily shitting on their privacy behind their backs by giving a copy of all their communications to the NSA? -That kind of "fighting"?

For fuck's sake. So you don't just disagree with (1) and (2), but with the whole thing. Why not just say that?

Yes, to whatever extent that slide deck said NSA has direct access to the servers that run Google Mail, I am arguing with the slide deck.

Two days ago you were arguing with a slide deck. At this point, you're also arguing with a NSA brief of Congress and numerous public statements by members of Congress.

Swearing at me isn't the solution in any case. If you want to stop taking flack on HN, you should stop attacking the credibility of whistleblowers on the rhetorical basis that you know more about what the NSA is doing than the NSA does.

No. You're making an unfounded assumption, which is that the interpretation Glenn Greenwald and Barton Gellman took of that slide deck --- an interpretation Snowden appears to share --- is also what NSA believes to be the case about their access to Google's servers.

It does not follow logically that because one interpretation of an NSA slide deck is that they have direct access to the servers operating Google Mail that that's the only reasonable interpretation of the slide deck. In fact, in the week since we found out about the deck, it's looking less and less and less likely that the original interpretation is reasonable at all.

I don't mind flak (as I'm sure you can tell), but I do mind being drawn into unproductive discussions; when I asked if you disagreed with the post I made above, and you disagreed with only a small part of it in one comment but then the whole premise of it in a later comment, I got frustrated, because why take the time to reply to your comments if you're just going to move the goalposts around?

Honestly, I don't really care about the "direct/indirect" distinction that bothers you: the only real opinion I have on that point is that if Snowden and some anonymous powerpoint junkie can reasonably characterize their access as "direct", then arguing over whether it is in fact "indirect" from some arcane technical perspective is a waste of time.

> when I asked if you disagreed with the post I made above, and you disagreed with only a small part of it

But I don't disagree with your third through fifth statements. I suspect you're wrong to assume that (1) the FISA process is providing reasonable judicial oversight over requests and that (2) providers manually review the appropriateness of individual data requests. As far as the rest goes, this statement of yours is the core point:

> It does not follow logically that because one interpretation of an NSA slide deck is [X] ... that that's the only reasonable interpretation of the slide deck.

Assuming you believe this, I do not understand why you are so hell-bent on attacking Snowden's credibility and dismissing the concerns many other people have raised about excessive surveillance. There are clearly reasonable interpretations of the released materials which make his statements (and those of the NSA and other whistleblowers) perfectly compatible with Google's own statements.

Congratulations everyone, tptacek just successfully diverted a big part of this whole thread into an argument about something that was supposed to be irrelevant to this thread.

Funny that you should mention moving goalposts. That seems to be the M.O. of the NSA apologists. First, the arguments is "It's not content. It's just metadata, which is no different from addresses on postal mail envelopes". That's already a terrible rationalization.

But, then, revelations come out that it is more than metadata being captured. It's actual call content and no warrant is required for a run of the mill "analyst" to listen to those calls.

So, now the goalpost is being moved to whether the NSA has "direct" or "indirect" accesss to gmail servers--a specious and inconsequential debate over some subjective semantics.

What will it take for the apologists to actually grow concerned about what's really happening here?

Probably never. A lot of us "apologists" think that this is actually a good thing, but many are unwilling to admit it, even to themselves.

For me, it's simply a matter of valuing truth over privacy.

It actually would be better for the apologists to come out and say that you want the government to have carte blanche access to all of our information. At least it's honest and doesn't waste people's time in these trivial non-debates about peripheral non-issues.

OTOH, of course, that posture is all the more stupefying. Which "truth", exactly, is so important that we should all be willing to give up our privacy?

And, how is it that you find it so easy to trust our government with such power? After all, if it is untoward human beings who make truth-finding so difficult that these drastic, privacy-defiling measures are necessary, then why do you have so much trust for other fallible human beings to wield this power?

It doesn't matter which truth exactly. The more information they have access to, the better the decisions they will be able to make (in theory, at least).

I don't trust them to wield that power because I don't need to trust them. I hope that by wielding that power, they destroy it by making it clear to the world that privacy no longer exists.

Sounds like you're not familiar with the rules of Calvinball, friend.

That comment made this whole thread worthwhile.

You misread the article - the briefing seems to only specifically mention wiretapping phone calls. The author goes on to say:

> Because the same legal standards that apply to phone calls also apply to e-mail messages, text messages, and instant messages, Nadler's disclosure indicates the NSA analysts could also access the contents of Internet communications without going before a court and seeking approval.

Meaning the US Gov't believes it has as much legal right to access e-mail as it does phone calls. Claims that they've done so in the same way (that is, in massive numbers with very little oversight or attention) are speculation. As more evidence begins to surface, it seems like telephone companies like AT&T and Verizon have been far more complicit in the NSA's indiscriminate surveillance programs than companies eg. Google that control e-mail - when's the last time you saw AT&T publish a transparency report detailing government requests for user data?

The NSA brief to congress wasn't referring to PRISM at all. Telecommunications interception != PRISM.

The slide deck was always very ambiguous. But it was very interesting that it said that analysts should use both methods (PRISM and interception)

> If you're telling me that this is the understanding most HN people have about what "direct access" means, I'd direct your attention to this very thread to rebut that argument.

I'm not at all saying that. I'm saying that most HN folks do not share your definition of what "direct access" means. I specifically said that it seems like most people are quite aware of the ambiguity of the meaning of "direct access" in a couple slides and that we can only guess at what it precisely means.

Your comment clearly indicates otherwise:

    Either way: the original notion that NSA had direct access to the servers that 
    actually operate Google Mail has been found to be unsupported by the evidence 
    published thus far.
    
    I call this out continuously and obnoxiously on HN because it is very much not 
    the mainstream view on HN

Which seems like you're implying that most here believe literally in some direct tap on a provider's servers. But that isn't my experience.

Bullcrap. When people saw "direct access", they concluded direct access - as was reasonable, at the time, from what the leak seemed to show; I did the same. Many of the people on this site have since realized that that is not true (although there were sure a lot of crazy theories about the specific wording of the initial denials), but most of those people are no longer saying "direct access", and there are people still saying "direct access".

> there are people still saying "direct access".

Undeniably. What tptacek thinks though is that those people are "most" people on HN.

burntsushi thinks this is plainly false, and I agree with him. I think tptacek is seeing whatever it takes to stroke his ego.

Personally I'm not sure we're reading the same HN. Maybe today the facts regarding Prism are finally catching up but it certainly wasn't the case yesterday or the week+ before.

Yes, that is exactly what I think most people on HN that comment on this issue believe.

Hear, hear if you thought about it long enough to know they didn't give the NSA a database console with read-only rights!

It's possible, I suppose, that most HN people think that Google has, somehow, given the NSA a way to access their Bigtable database directly and query it--thereby entrusting the information on the structure of their database, and subsequently their billions of dollars, to NSA analysts making a few tens of thousands of dollars a year--ignoring entirely the ridiculous notion that such access is even physically possible or enabled.

That doesn't change the fact that they're wrong.

Google couldn't possibly give the NSA "direct access" in the way you're defining it without creating a subsystem to service it--like, say, a secure staging server that requires being populated by processes which run and pull the data from disparate parts of their system, whose access would most easily be accesses via FTP. Anyone technologically literate who considers what "direct access" could mean deeper than a surface level should arrive at the obvious conclusion that "direct access" does not mean the Google equivalent of a MySQL console.

I think that's an excellent summary, but also: that SFTP-like access almost certainly keeps happening, for that targeted account, after the initial request. Perhaps it happens hourly, or even faster when relevant account events (login, message-received, message-sent, voip-call) occur.

For most of the world -- those who have never SSH'd into a machine, nor had machine 'root' access -- that rapid-batch-dump access still would be fairly described as "direct access". Word meanings vary based on context and the expertise of the discussion participant; the slide deck and the journalistic reports were all written at the level of fuzzy understanding, not technical precision. Practitioner nitpicks about the implementation details don't refute them.

The Guardian went out of its way to characterize the access not only as "direct" but "unilateral".

The Guardian reported what the NSA documents claims PRISM does.

You keep implying that The Guardian is making unsubstantiated claims, but their article is full of "NSA claims" and quotation marks, and it would take someone intentionally trying to read something else into it to ascribe these claims to The Guardian.

Are you claiming The Guardian is lying or mistaken about what the NSA documents says?

Because if you are not, then your beef should not be with The Guardian articles, but with the NSA documents.

It's possible the NSA documents are technically incorrect, but if that is what you believe, then complain about the NSA rather than attack the reporting, as in that case attacking the reporting just seems like a weak attempt at making your arguments seem more credible by attaching the claims about "direct" access to the reporters rather than the NSA.

So what? The subject of this thread is that the NSA admitted that analysts can listen to the content of all of our phone calls without a warrant. We are having this discussion because the Snowden link put the NSA front and center.

Yet, you are arguing some mundane semantics?

Instead of smearing the people responsible for these revelations, why not try to focus on the big picture? That is, all of this is leading to long overdue appropriate dialogue, that is engaging our representatives in the oversight that is required to uphold our Constitution. Big picture!

No, I am arguing that AT&T rolled over (and, as it turns out from today's Gellman piece in WaPo, took money from the USG to do it), while Google fought back. But commenters on boards like this are happy to shit all over Google because (a) any allegation that Google rolled over to the USG confirms their biases, (b) they're inclined to put people into binary "agrees with me entirely" or "disagrees with me entirely" buckets that presume anyone who argues with them must be apologizing for NSA, and (c) because it's fun to talk about big companies like Google being evil and less fun to talk about them working hard not to be.

You think these are mundane semantics. I think they're more meaningful than that. People on HN can't get me to shut over the right fix for a CSRF bug or how taxicabs can be licensed; why would anyone think I'd back down on an issue like this?

It's more that a lot of people are more inclined to trust a leaked NSA document that claims NSA does the type of things that people already believed NSA does, including when it implicates Google, than a Google PR denial of a very specific interpretation of the same.

In the absence of more evidence about what exactly PRISM does, what we have is guesswork, but guesswork where believing some interpretation of the NSA documents becomes easier the more revelations of extensive NSA surveillance via other channels that are coming out.

If they didn't want to be "evil" they shouldn't have been collecting these gigantic amounts of data without properly protecting them from parties such as the NSA.

For all the promotion they put into two-factor authentication for account-safety, "suspicious login attempt" notifications, etc, if they had done the same for GPG in GMail/Chrome, that would have been a huge step towards giving the mainstream a taste of actually being in control of their own privacy, I'm not saying we wouldn't have this problem right now, but we'd be in a way better position of dealing with it, for sure.

edit: to be clear, that is one of the many reasons why I think this arguing about whether this access is "direct" or whether it's "sorta kinda direct" distracts from the real issue: access.

Maybe I'm the stupid one here, but how does Google offer to provide people 4GB of email and storage... without actually storing that?

And like you yourself mention, to add security to prevent automated hacking scripts from 0wning accounts to add to a botnet (attempts that happen orders of magnitude more often than an NSL or FISA warrant) they have to add IP tracking for individual accounts.

You talk about GPG but there's little safe way to do that from client-side JS, would defeat most of the point of offering free email for Google in the first place, and is already supported just by offloading that onto a real email client.

I don't want you to shut up or back down. I am just baffled by your priorities and incoherent sense of scale.

Here we have revelations by the NSA, that analysts can listen to anyone's phone calls. In America. This subverts just about the entire spirit of the Constitution and some of the letter.

But, you would rather spend your time isolating some relatively minute detail that Snowden or others may or may not have gotten wrong.

And the thing is, neither you nor anyone here even knows enough to draw conclusions as to these minute details. A few weeks ago, we didn't know that the NSA was collecting metadata on so many calls. A few days ago, we didn't know that analysts were eavesdropping without warrants. Yet people like yourself would argue vehemently on behalf of the government. The more that comes out proving you wrong, the more you dig in and move the goalposts. It makes one wonder what the government would have to do to actually concern you.

And the thing is, while you argue things you couldn't possibly know, there are now enough solid facts coming out (including admissions by the NSA) that should be of grave concern to you. Yet, here you are again focused on trivial, unprovable details.

I won't argue the subjective notion of whether the details are mundane. That's opinion. But, I don't understand how anyone can have such a skewed sense of scale when comparing the relative importance of what you choose to argue versus that of the astonishing revelations being brought to light about our government.

I'd need to see the context to know if the Guardian was wrong where they used that exact word, or were simply describing something that exists with some companies or at another level of tapping.

A graf from Greenwald's original story:

When the FAA was first enacted, defenders of the statute argued that a significant check on abuse would be the NSA's inability to obtain electronic communications without the consent of the telecom and internet companies that control the data. But the Prism program renders that consent unnecessary, as it allows the agency to directly and unilaterally seize the communications off the companies' servers.

Every part of this graf appears to be false!

The 1st sentence seems fine: the companies have no practical way to withhold consent.

The phrasing "directly and unilaterally seize" seems exaggerated given the preponderance of current revelations and denials, but if Prism includes other not-yet-revealed acquisition methods, might still be substantially true. After all, the denials you're relying on are from company leaders who also said they've never heard of Prism.

I can believe Greenwald got overexcited in that phrasing, and trusted the slide deck (including as-yet-unreleased slides) too much. Just like perhaps Obama was a bit clumsy and overeager to reassure with his phrasing, "Nobody is listening to your telephone calls."

The companies can withhold consent simply by not consenting. Both NSA and the company then have to appear before a federal court and argue the case; a court then orders one side or the other (obviously: virtually always the company) to back down.

It bothers people that the USG virtually always wins these cases. But I think it shouldn't bother people as much as it does, for a couple of reasons:

* It's also the case that state governments win most attempts to get Title III wiretaps; in those cases, it's because getting a Title III wiretap is an expensive process that involves a shitload of paperwork, and prosecutors don't waste the time going for them unless they're sure they're going to win. It appears easier to get a FISA directive upheld, but it's not free.

* It's what you'd expect to see happen if the USG was only using FISA to conduct foreign surveillance, which, while I wouldn't take NSA's word for it, is not at all hard to believe; what is the motivation for them to set up a paper trail with the FISC of doing something else?

> but if Prism includes other not-yet-revealed acquisition methods, might still be substantially true

Yes, but that's close to being a tautology: what outlandish claim might not turn out to be true if in future startling new revelations supported it? In fact, direct access in the NSA-has-root sense is less likely in light of the PRISM slides: why file 702 orders and dicker with webco lawyers if you're able and willing to get whatever you want through some kind of back channel? Why create a Top Secret overview and training resource for Internet surveillance and apparently not mention this backdoor?

There's lots of evidence there's way deeper unrevealed stuff: hints from earlier NSA-careerist whistleblowers and Snowden. ~40 more slides in the PRISM deck that Greenwald has seen. Possibly thousands more documents Snowden has provided to Greenwald and perhaps other journalists. Representative Sanchez (D-CA) describing what's public so far as "the tip of the iceberg". Representative Nadler (D-NY) essentially acknowledging warrantless domestic wiretaps, at analyst discretion, in apparent contradiction to sworn testimony of General Alexander a few days ago, and President Obama's comments a week ago.

So while of course, we can't assume every covert acquisition method darkly imaginable is happening, it would also be foolish to assume that exactly what has been clearly documented so far is the full story.

Why the trouble of extra legal orders and a paper trail if the NSA already had deeper covert access? Well, the government isn't efficient and different levels can't always work together. For example, why did the DoJ use more normal procedures to get AP phone records, when the NSA already had all that data? Also, when you have a treasure trove of info obtained in illegal ways, or in ways you don't want to admit, and you want to act in ways revealing that you have that info, you can try to get it again in a second, redundant way: one that you can explain, and maybe legally rationalize.

And when nobody inside or outside your organization has the whole picture, the fact that there's some legal process for getting some info from, for example, Google, might serve as plausible cover deflecting questions about how exactly so much more info winds up in the system.

In fact, that's one possible mechanism for the PRISM slides' author thinking that the access to Google et al is so much more powerful and 'direct' than the companies' own measured response process can explain. They're each blind men feeling different parts of the elephant.

Greenwald's statement here about the Prism program is explaining what the NSA document claims. This is clear from context. If it is false, it is false in the same way as a book reviews that recaps events in a novel is false.

And unless I've missed some major revelation, it "appears to be false" on the basis of press releases from companies with an interest in not being caught with their pants down.

Forgive me for not being so willing to jump to conclusions about which claims to believe.

It's false in that it's technically inaccurate, even given nothing but the slides.

E.g. "direct and unilateral access". Unilateral means exactly that only one party needs to decide, the reality is that it is bilateral access (both parties must agree).

So that's at least one thing Greenwald managed to screw up in his "book review" of a single slide. The question is whether blame lies with Greenwald alone, or if Snowden mislead him into that by stupidity or malice.

> the reality is that it is bilateral access (both parties must agree).

How do you know this on the basis of the slides alone?

> No court order is required for NSA to issue directives under FISA.

As far as I can see (IANAL) most forms of FISA order do require a court order. FAA 702 orders are issued by the government rather than the FISC court, but still have to be reviewed and approved by the FISC. It's just that the nature of the court's review affords no protection to non-resident aliens (except by chance).

> For all intents and purposes USG never loses at FISC.

Well, it has lost at least one signficant case at FISC, it's just not letting us see the ruling.

As I understand it: FAA 702 certifications require FISC approval, but 702 directives don't; there's a 1:many relationship between certifications and directives, and directives are what companies see.

Yes, that seems to be the case.

You may not be interested in a semantic argument, but it's a semantic point you're arguing. The title of the article in question[1] is:

"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...

> 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.

The slides do say the NSA can "collect data directly from the servers" of these companies. (Well, they say that the NSA uses "collection directly from the servers" of these companies, to get the quotation exactly right.) But the Guardian stated the the slides state that the NSA has root access (or similar) on the servers of these companies. It was wrong about this.

The Grauniad didn't publish a story saying "the NSA has a PowerPoint presentation in which the phrase 'collection directly from the servers' appears, but we do not pretend to offer any interpretation of what may have been meant by this". What it published was a story which said (in paraphrase) "the NSA has a PowerPoint presentation in which the phrase 'collection directly from the servers' appears. What the NSA means by this is that it has root access on Google, Facebook and friends." The NSA writer was correct; the Guardian's reporting of what he said was wrong, both in the sense that it misreported what the NSA writer was claiming, and the claim it misreported him/her as making was (unsuprisingly) untrue.

Where exactly did the Guardian or Greenwald claim the NSA has root access on servers? I haven't seen that anywhere? Please supply a quote of the part of an article you're referring to so we can make up our own minds about what was said.

It's quite possible Guardian journalists and editors summarised some points in a sloppy way due to lack of understanding (in particular using direct access instead of directly from), but the broad thrust of everything I've read from them has been surprisingly accurate (as journalism goes), and Snowden's claim to have access to any account at will (given enough clearance) is now sounding far more plausible after these recent revelations that calls recorded and can be accessed without a warrant by any agent with the clearance to do so, and according to cnet, perhaps emails too. To an analyst asking for calls/emails, this would seem very much like 'direct and unilateral access', even if from google's end they only respond to lawful orders and don't allow universal tapping as the phone companies do.

I'm surprised that people are talking up minor quibbles over the interpretation of one slide as if all debate hinges on them given the scale of the surveillance which has been exposed. We don't know for sure exactly how the PRISM process works, and what matters is not the process but the legal safegaurds in place (or lack of them), and the extent of surveillance. Why not debate facts we do know and have confirmed?

What Greenwald/Guardian said about "direct and unilateral access" is what is meant by the paraphrase of "root access".

The story made it sound like an NSA analyst could just open an xterm and copy any data about any Google/Facebook/Hotmail/Skype/etc. user, whether the company agreed or not. That is the part that is not only false, but which Greenwald has refused to back down on by just pounding the slides over and over.

I don't know why I'm so surprised that a writer reporting on tech-heavy privacy issues would be so clueless about technology but it just gives me even more reason to be jaded about activists in general.

Oh well, at least we still have the EFF and ACLU.

That phrase says nothing about root or xterm and I think you're being misleading by attempting to paraphrase it that way though I think I see how you got there. That's one possible interpretation of it (though not one Greenwald has backed), but it's equally possible, given the assertions of Snowden in the video with the article (which we now know to be true at least for phone calls), that it was an attempt to describe the experience of an analyst using such a system, requesting full access to a user's account, and getting it without interacting with google staff (after what delay we don't know), possibly without any legal paperwork other than making the request. We simply don't know enough details to be able to describe the process any better, we don't even know all the possible sources of intel for it.

Since Greenwald provided the sources for his statement and the article clearly indicates which quotes are attribution and which bits are commentary I didn't interpret it the way you did, and do think it's highly misleading to characterise this as a fundamental flaw in the article, or as something the guardian has 'walked back' - the guardian is not a monolithic entity and features content from all sorts of contradictory viewpoints. The writer wasn't clueless about technology necessarily - remember this sort of writing goes through many hands on the way to publication, and attempts to synthesise knowledge from various sources for a non-technical audience, while not revealing damaging details which could leave them open to prosecution. That process is going to result in text which is not as precise or illuminating as we or the writer would like.

So I'm all for correcting reporters like Greenwald where they over-reach or imply too much, and I do think he should have clarified this particular detail which has been left very vague, but we should clarify or correct, not attack and patronise, reporters who don't specify technical details, and bear in mind that technical questions of mechanism are not the only story here; there are far more important legal and ethical questions.

Also note the Google statement from the story:

> In a statement, Google said: "Google cares deeply about the security of our users' data. We disclose user data to government in accordance with the law, and we review all such requests carefully. From time to time, people allege that we have created a government 'back door' into our systems, but Google does not have a back door for the government to access private user data."

A backdoor pretty much implies unfettered (as well as clandestine) access - a limited-privileges backdoor is conceivable, but unlikely. Note that the Guardian didn't say 'here's a weaselly statement that doesn't deny what we're alleging' - it said 'here's a denial of what we are alleging'.

If we're to criticise journalists, we should hold ourselves to the standards we expect of the them. The article said:

'In a statement, Google said'

You paraphrase this as the article saying:

'Here's a denial of what we are alleging'

The article said or implied no such thing, as your direct quote shows, it merely attributed the quote, without comment. It didn't talk about back doors or denials, Google did, probably in response to more fantastic speculation around the Internet prior to this.

> If we're to criticise journalists, we should hold ourselves to the standards we expect of the them.

In the interests of precision, let me first amend the Guardian non-paraphrase and paraphrase above to 'here's a weaselly statement that doesn't deny what the NSA document claims' and 'here's a denial of what the NSA document claims'. This matters because the article deliberately sets out to report the NSA slides instead of setting out to explicitly report the NSA slides as accurate, and Greenwald later made much of this.

> The article said or implied no such thing, as your direct quote shows, it merely attributed the quote, without comment.

The immediately preceding paragraph is:

> Although the presentation claims the program is run with the assistance of the companies, all those who responded to a Guardian request for comment on Thursday denied knowledge of any such program.

This makes it clear that the next paragraph is, to the Guardian's understanding, Google denying knowledge of any such program.

I see what you mean now from this context, thanks for the clarification, however it is just restating that they are denying that they knew of prism, not all allegations. Part of the confusion here is that the slides say one thing, the article summarises it (perhaps loosely) and google denied something else altogether (back door etc). I would note though that the article did not say they had unfettered access via a back door, or root access or any such detail, those are things implied in the google statement, which curiously denied things the article did not allege.

Personally I thought the article did an OK (though far from perfect) job of summarising the puzzling gaps between the slides and the company statements, and didn't imply all the things people have read between the lines, but wish it had gone into more detail, however I don't feel that's a hugely important part of this story. It sounds like we might hear a bit more detail over the coming weeks.

>What the NSA means by this is that it has root access on Google, Facebook and friends.

This just simply isn't true. The article doesn't say that. Your support for this claim below is that this is what they meant by "direct and unilateral," which you cannot know to be true.

If Google et. al. setup dedicated servers which aggregate the relevant user data the NSA wants, and gave the NSA FTP access, then this would be--by definition--direct and unilateral access. FTP falls under any reasonable definiton of direct, and Google would not have to be involved in any data transmission, thereby making it unilateral.

And can't we all just agree that the idea of giving root access is so outright ridiculous that nobody would intend that as a meaning? Maybe read only access, but root access? Ridiculous.

I think you are making some poor semantic arguments yourself.

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.

>> These are two competing claims

Steve Gibson has proposed a scenario that makes both claims credible: that the NSA has installed fiber optic splitters (hence the name "prism") directly upstream from Google, Apple, etc and therefore can sniff all the packets headed to their servers without their knowledge.

Notes from Gibson's podcast: https://www.grc.com/sn/sn-408.txt

This scenario would be a large expansion of what Mark Klein testified was being done at AT&T in 2006 (https://www.eff.org/files/filenode/att/presskit/ATT_onepager...). It would also explain why the NSA slides showed service providers being added gradually: it would take time to carry out these secret installations.

If Gibson's analysis is right, Google et al would have no knowledge of the taps, yet the NSA would have most of their traffic.

Yes, SSL traffic is still impenetrable. However, 1) it can be stored for cracking in the future (perhaps in the Bluffdale facility) and 2) lots of traffic, like email traveling between hosts, is not encrypted.

For those keeping score, this is another of the kind of comment that lead me to believe that most HN commenters take the obvious interpretation of "direct access".

What? I'm not putting forth any interpretation of 'direct access'.

I appreciate that it seems you are responding to a lot of comments but I really find this comment lazy and borderline offensive.

You're saying that Google's claims compete with NSA's.

They don't.

Thanks for the response. See my reply to tptacek above. I probably should have said 'appear to compete' or similar, as reading them together does not lead to an easy answer - and there are a number of possibilities as to how you could interpret them.

Certainly true that there are a number of possibilities. The one that seems to make sense per Occam's Razor and the mass of evidence we now have is that Prism is an NSA-side "facade pattern" against a set of company-specific FISA/NSL-compliance APIs.

In NSA-speak this is "collection directly from the servers of $FOO" because there is no wiretap or other SIGINT or ELINT shenanigans. They ask, or the FISA Court compels by warrant, for a company to turn over information they have, the company sends it over electronically.

Prism, on the NSA end, takes care to feed that information that is sent over to whichever analyst is working the case, patches up company-specific details so the analyst doesn't have to worry about it, etc. But they don't have feelers onto every datacenter owned by those 9 companies so there is no "direct access to data", as has been errorneously and loosely parroted around.

The two are not really competing claims; the argument over whether they are is the argument that NSA could in fact have direct access to the servers operating Google Mail.

I'm not trying to single you out, sorry.

Are you saying that the "collection directly from the servers" claim of the NSA document is simply the systems we already know about (FISA warrants or otherwise) until proven otherwise?

To me the terminology of the document probably (though not necessarily) indicates something more serious, but I'm not sure its necessarily 'cables into gmail' (which you seem to indicate as the only alternate). For instance, potentially someone working for Google may transfer selected records out manually without the knowledge of Google.

Thanks but I'm not so concerned to be 'singled out' as 'lumped in'. I want to get to understand your views more than simply disagree. I hope my previous posts haven't seemed too argumentative either.

Marc Ambinder, a reporter who has covered the national security beat for many years (before that he was a political reporter for The Atlantic, and before that the White House reporter for --- I think? --- CBS), reported that PRISM is a system of dropbox servers and a user interface that allows seamless access to all of those servers, presumably so that analysts don't have to keep track of which data is affiliated with Google and which data is affiliated with Yahoo.

Other reports have corroborated this.

Declan McCullagh, who has covered this beat for CNet for something like 10 years and is most notable on HN for jumping into threads and arguing the EFF's side of any given story against me (in other words: not a guy prone to support of the establishment), ran a story last week with sources that also denied that NSA had unilateral access to Google Mail.

The NYT just a few days ago ran a story with a linked FISA court order that documented Yahoo's attempt to push back on a FISA directive, a process that would not have been necessary (for the government) had NSA had direct access to Yahoo's servers; the court order demanded that Yahoo turn over data.

And, of course, Google categorically denies that NSA has direct unilateral access to their servers and, for that matter, that they've been able to obtain records for large fractions of their user base. Those denials have come from multiple levels of the company, from the CEO to the General Counsel to their tech leaders to people on their security team.

I'm not simply supposing that NSA doesn't have this access. Based on the evidence available, I am drawing the obvious conclusion that they do not.

The slides claim NSA has access to company servers. It does not claim they have free access to whatever they want. A system of "dropboxes" coupled with a system to get specific sets of data onto them - whether reviewed by humans or not - could fit with that.

That would not contradict the Guardian reporting, or even what the NSA's slides claim.

The rest of what you state also does not contradict Guardians reporting: They make specific claims about specific subsets of these companies data.

You keep arguing about an expansive interpretation of the reporting even when faced with much more restricted alternative interpretations.

When comes to relying on press releases with denials, I'm clearly more cynical than you - I assign them pretty much zero value as evidence. I'd expect these companies to issue denials whether the claims are true or not, so I don't see the press releases as containing any useful information to draw inferences from.

Hey! That's me! (I've covered this beat at CNET for 11 years and at Wired and Time and Wired a second time before that for about 5 years. It's not the EFF's side I'd argue, but I'm flattered that you think so.)

Anyway, I've disagreed politely with <tptacek> before, but he is 100% correct here.

Thanks for the detail - I now understand you view far better than earlier in the thread. will read these articles when I have the time

If you look at the source of the "collection directly from the servers" terminology, the You Should Use Both slide http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/08/nsa-prism-server... , it's fairly clear that PRISM collection is being contrasted to "upstream" collection. In the context, it would be natural to describe getting someone's GMail account state (plus a live feed of account updates) through a FISA directive (and an API) as "collection directly from the servers": the stated alternative is recording the packets of someone's IP connections as they cross into and out of the US, a much more indirect and not-from-the-server(s) option. Then there's the fact that the slide heading is "FAA702 Operations". Using FAA 702 on Google requires the US Government to serve a FAA 702 directive to Google; getting a Google employee to hand over information without Google's knowledge would not be using FAA 702 at all.

(Further, the fact that Greenwald couldn't figure this out from looking at the You Should Use Both slide by himself - instead, actually producing the slide in the belief that it was evidence which undermines the FISA-API theory - and still can't or won't get it after having it explained to him, undermines the thesis that he's both able and willing to interpret the PRISM presentation carefully and accurately. Though he wasn't the only journalist to (apparently) misinterpret the "direct access" claim at first.)

Thanks for that. Best response I've seen on these issues - I hope others read it.

I'm not sure on the requirement for a FAA702 directive to be issued to Google however. Surely the upstream operations (which come under the same heading of FAA702 in the slide) don't require a FAA702 directive? I'm no expert but the directives seem to serve as a means to access the information, not as a necessity for disclosure of information should it be available by other means....

For not being interested in "the semantic argument", you have previously shown lots of confidence in the Governments secret semantic interpretation.

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

I'm not interested in the semantic argument about whether publishing a story that contradicts a previous story without issuing a correction on that previous story counts or does not count as a "walk back", that term having no specific technical meaning the argument can rely on.

I'm not averse to all semantic arguments.

So what? The NSA is harvesting data on an unprecedented scale. It might be legal but it is definitly unethical.

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.

The ethics of data collection in the age of people sharing all sorts of information with Google, Facebook, etc, are not a clear cut thing.

Moreover, it's not meaningless whether its illegal or not. Indeed, it makes all the difference in the world. Laws can be changed if we don't like their outcomes--a government that's ignoring the law is something else entirely.

> The ethics of data collection in the age of people sharing all sorts of information with Google, Facebook, etc, are not a clear cut thing.

It is a peculiar brand of corporatism that thinks the privileges afforded to corporations should somehow be considered when talking about the privileges given to governments. Quite the opposite of what one normally sees, but still curiously the same.

I'm not talking about privileges, I'm talking about the nature of what is "private information." I don't think the ethics of the government collecting information you share with people on Facebook you might have met once, along with god knows how many employees at Facebook, Google, etc, are clear cut.

And I say that how we should treat Facebook collecting data and how we should treat governments collecting data (even data from Facebook) are entirely disjoint. Anything else is a peculiar brand of corporatism.

You realize that when you call something "a peculiar brand of corporatism", you're saying something equivalent to "a label that thus far exists only in my mind".

Is there a more direct, refutable way you could construct your claim? How would anyone falsify your argument otherwise? You know what else is a (very) peculiar brand of corporatism? "Not corporatism".

I suppose I did not spell this out clear enough for you.

A traditional corporatist could be accused of trying to bring corporations up to the same level as governments. Rayiner seems to be playing at the idea of bringing governments up to the level of corporations. Despite appearing to be opposing positions, it should not take a rocket scientist to find the common ground.

Of course if you have no interest in doing so, it should not be surprising that you won't.

What does it mean for a corporation to be at "the same level as" a government?

Go find an anarcho-syndicalist and ask them what they think of self-secribed libertarians and anarcho-capitalism.

As long as we're playing at labels, I am a socialist and you are a goddamned idiot. There is no such thing as a corporatist. You're just using it as a nasty word to accuse your debate opponents of malicious intentions.

Back to the point: people freely give their personal data to Facebook. Facebook now knows that information and can publish it, sell it, whatever. The people have no expectation of privacy which would be necessary for a 4th Amendment defense. Anybody can go to Facebook and just ask for the data, government agents included. It is Facebook's choice to give it away, set a price, or refuse.

I'm not talking about how we treat Facebook collecting data versus the government collecting data. I'm talking about how we treat the government collecting data that we freely give to Facebook versus how we treat data that we keep under our mattress. How do you define the ethics of privacy with respect to Facebook posts that have a wider audience than if you had posted something on a bulletin board in your office.

So the reporter says there was an elephant in the room, but instead of an elephant, it was two donkeys. The reporter gets it wrong, but what about the two donkeys? What the hell are they doing in that room?

> I call this out continuously and obnoxiously on HN because it is very much not the mainstream view on HN; most of the people commenting on the NSA story on HN say things that make it clear that they believe NSA continues to have the direct access to Google's systems that Google and the Guardian say they do not have.

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.

NSA has all the access they need. Which side of the property line their equipment resides on is a detail. Google is bound by what they're treating as a lawful order, to lie, as is anyone on NSA's team. If NSA doesn't have hardware inside Google, they have what they need to read the data at the boundaries of the Google system.

Nobody is bound to lie. That is not a FISA requirement or a requirement of any other federal statute.

You're very naive to believe that.

The gov't somehow manages to compel people to lie despite the absence of some "Federal Pants on Fire Act"

1. Place a Warrant Canary.

2. Receive NSL.

Even those who've conceived of the Warrant Canary know that it depends upon the notion that the gov't will not coerce the NSL recipient to leave the Canary unmodified.

We don't have to use the Warrant Canary hypothetical to see that the US gov't has in the past used force to compel individuals to lie in the furtherance of its goals. Police forced Rachel Hoffman to arrange a drugs buy and wear a surveillance device to the proposed exchange. This is a common police practice carried out by government agents at every level of government. If the government will use such tactics for drugs, they will most certainly use them for national security.

I don't follow any of this. I don't know what warrant canaries have to do with the fictitious belief that NSLs compel companies to lie.

Well, if you place a warrant canary, and then receive an NSL, the warrant canary must be modified, as that is its sole purpose. If you leave the warrant canary in tact, then you've lied. The act of changing the warrant canary will by definition violate the (secrecy) terms of the NSL and possibly invoke gov't reprisal. Even without the warrant canary the terms of an NSL may compel an individual to lie through coercion, depending upon circumstance.

I didn't say that the NSL compels each recipient to lie, in every case. I said the gov't can and does compel individuals to lie. That's not a "fictitious belief" it's a fact. Then I offered a concrete example of widespread gov't conduct supporting that claim.

If you keep waiting to see it spelled out in black and white, "Be it ordered on this day the NSA under the authorization of Congress and President Obama (with all their signatures) that you shall go on the Today Show and Charlie Rose's show and tell everyone that we can't read everyone's email and that we're all a great bunch of guys." you're likely to have to wait a while. You're being obtuse and I think you know that. It probably works well in other areas of your life, but it makes you ill-suited to make judgments about non-trivial issues because it is rare that all relevant facts become obvious as an atomic operation.

For reasons which should be glaringly obvious, you're not going to convince anyone on HN that a view is the right one simply because drama-hungry mass media has decided it is.

>Either way: the original notion that NSA had direct access to the servers that actually operate Google Mail has been found to be unsupported by the evidence published thus far.

Evidence being "Google denies it"?

And that The Guardian ran a story contradicting it, and that Marc Ambinder reported a story suggesting that PRISM was a dropbox system and not direct access, and that Declan McCullagh ran a story with sources saying that NSA does not have access to Google Mail, and the NYT running a story with an attached court order from the FISC showing Yahoo availing itself of the opportunity to try to deny NSA access to its servers, and the idea that NSA having direct access to Google is an extraordinary claim requiring not just some evidence, but extraordinary evidence.

And that the actual slide "collection directly from the servers" came from supports Google's version https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5887627 .

And even more evidence that would take too long to summarize. <tptacek> is correct here.

How many times are you going to make this exact same comment? Just upvote him if you think he's so right.

He's a reporter who has been doing reporting on this story with actual sources. His confirmation of individual comments of mine is useful, at least to me; don't worry, eventually I'll write a comment that will contain something he knows to be wrong, he'll notice it, call me out for it, and you can start jumping up and down again.

True!

Semantics - the study of meaning. So you're saying you're only interested in a meaningless argument?

Imagine if you were designing a system to store massive amounts of intercepted email data for archival and occasional retrieval. The design would be quite different from gmail and it would require a lot less infrastructure.

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.

You think the average American would be less concerned about direct access to Google Mail than they would about the NSA having the ability to listen to everyone's phone calls?

I think the opposite, which is why I think the story is evolving to minimize the gmail access being done.

Perhaps it's evolving closer to what the truth actually was the whole time?

That is possible, though what we're seeing is the result of the PR response of the NSA taking effect. The NSA does not have any incentive for the truth to be revealed, only for the public to stop worrying about it.

Unless I have missed something, Guardian has NOT said the NSA does not have direct access.

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.

If I'm on helm of NSA, I would recruit spys on important positions so that the agency can have access to any data on minutes notice. Of course, in accordance to the law. And I believe it is legal for NSA to recruit somebody in a company to spy / give NSA access to the data.

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...

"I'm not interested in the semantic argument."

Stop making one then.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com