Documents from Glenn Greenwald's new book [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Documents from Glenn Greenwald's new book [pdf]

hbpub.vo.llnwd.net

88 pointsspacefight28 comments

"Beginning on 7 March 2013, PRISM now collects Microsoft Skydrive data as part of PRISM's standard Stored Communications collection package. .... This success is the result of the FBI working for many months with Microsoft to get this tasking and collection solution established"

"Skype stored communications will contain unique data which is not collected via normal real-time surveillance collection. SSO expects to receive buddy lists, credit card info"

"On 31 July, Microsoft began encrypting web-based chat with the introduction of the new outlook.com service. .... MS, working with the FBI, developed a surveillance capability to deal with the new SSL"

As a fan of your tech... fuck you Microsoft. They seemed like the ones screaming the loudest and trying to do the most. After reading this I highly doubt it. You have complying with court orders and "partnering" with them. Clearly Microsoft didn't just comply with them. Personally I feel most of the stuff Greenwald "holds back" has to do with companies and I hope he keeps releasing it.

It also seems if everyone switched to SSL it would significantly screw up their game (except when you give them a back door on the other end).

Some interesting things just from flipping through it quickly:

- Condoleezza Rice appears to have asked the NSA to spy on our allies to help with negotiations in applying sanctions on Iran.

- The NSA intercepts packages of networking equipment and places 'beacons' in them.

- Looks like they have access to pretty much every large website, it appears they can easily search by IP or even username.

Edit: Feel free to add more, I certainly missed a lot.

I think that's going to be Susan Rice, since it says ambassador. Condoleeza was NatSec Advisor and then SecState. Also it takes place in 2010, long after Condoleeza Rice left government.

Update (x2): The link in the title is to the uncompressed version which is password protected. The correct link is http://glenngreenwald.net/pdf/NoPlaceToHide-Documents-Compre.... Or the link to the uncompressed version from the CDN: http://hbpub.vo.llnwd.net/o16/video/olmk/holt/greenwald/NoPl...

Original comment, now redundant: Glenn has chosen to password protect this, yet it is accessible via Scribd. It would be ethical to have it removed from Scribd until Glenn decides to release this to the public.

It's a PDF of leaked documents though... If you consider leaking it from the original source to be fine, why do you consider leaking it from Greenwald to be somehow unethical?

It's not leaked at all. They just mooved the PDF off-site to a CDN. No issue.

I'm not going to speak for the parent poster, but on one hand you have: leaking details of controversial secret actions from a powerful government organization to a journalist. On the other hand you have leaking from a journalist "his" scoop that was already in the pipeline to get published without any indication there is an immediate time pressure justifying it.

These two immediately strike me as very qualitatively different, and if we assume that the parent poster is actually talking about ethics it would follow that they do not have an absolutist view on leaking and that the context matters.

> It would be ethical to have it removed from Scribd until Glenn decides to release this to the public.

Is this sarcasm? Has Poe's Law struck me again?

He claimed he wants to release them right after the book goes public. The book went public.

There's a slide here that lists the embassies we've bugged.

Yeah. The detail on that really crossed a line into sources and methods (not that other released haven't already).

Only the embassies of friendly/allied countries as far as I can tell. I'm sure the list of bugged embassies is a lot longer - there's a lot of notable omissions there.

It sort of makes sense, right?

You know where your enemies stand--it's a last minute defection from an ally or a need to exert a little extra pressure that might be trouble.

it's on a CDN now - can't update the URL in the submission.

http://hbpub.vo.llnwd.net/o16/video/olmk/holt/greenwald/NoPl...

Source: http://www.glenngreenwald.net/ No password.

Isn't this just from his own server? https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/466162717754028032

Direct link in the tweet still works, but obviously you don't want to HNammer the guy's site ...

I'll be disappointed in the NSA if they're not selling their access to hedge funds and other major corporations. This'd be great to front run mergers and other similar events. C'mon, guys -- let's not be small time with the corruption here. Go big or go home.

Now, how exactly do these companies think that this sort of collaboration will not utterly destroy the trust that non-US companies have had for American IT services? You can only lie so much until people stop listening to anything that you have to say, even if some of it is true.

I also appreciated the clear explanation of the CDN loophole. Good presentation, guys! Good job!

Also, despite increased access to 'intelligence,' the US continues to make poor strategic decisions, blunder into wars that it loses, lurch from financial crisis to crisis, and lose the trust of both its domestic citizens and important foreign allies. Tons and tons of 'data' but negligible intelligence.

You know of Snowden because he is the only one who got access to this information and decided to expose it, ruining his own life in the process.

How many other NSA workers, in the same situation, have made the (far more profitable) decision to keep their knowledge secret and use it for personal gain. A dozen? A hundred? A thousand?

Well, we know of at least some in government agencies involved doing so, because some of the information that has become public as a consequence of the Snowden leaks (not part of those leaks, necessarily, but information that was released afterwards) has revealed numerous instances of abuse of the surveillance system for personal purposes by people with direct access (not just using the information about the system for personal purpose, but using the surveillance systems themselves for personal purposes.)

The NSA can't handle all relationships. For the link to investment bankers, you have to look to the CIA. Averell Harriman, the Dulles brothers, etc. are early manifestations of those links.

One of the remarkable things that comes out in those slides is how few nominally non-aligned nations can actually operate a government that isn't thoroughly permeated with US intelligence capabilities.

NSA not only penetrates, but has the cooperation of the operators of the vast majority of communications bandwidth on the planet. The governments in these countries have no ability to maintain confidentiality, and can't really operate with meaningful sovereignty.

Brazil appears to be the largest example of a country attempting to operate independently that hasn't come under overt economic attack.

Apart from being unjust, this condition is very brittle. The people in these countries are as free as is convenient to US strategic and economic interests. This stifles political and economic diversity. The US exports bad economic policy and outcomes in areas like intellectual property and Internet infrastructure policy. We allow our rent-seekers to screw us, and then we impose our crap outcomes on the planet.

People around the world are right to chafe on principle, but also to shake off our crappy economic and technology policy influence.

They're going to, because as you suggest, the situation is fragile. It's only possible to garner enthusiastic compliance when the scheme is not properly understood. Now that it is understood, enthusiastic compliance is no longer common. People at every level drag their feet.

The clip are used in some of the NSA slides is heinous.

The original link has a login screen.

It is badly formatted with comic sans and clip art?

It's what everybody says: they have all the information in the world and yet they can't use it for anything positive, like promoting world peace or good looking corporate PPT.

So much data, they admit they are not able to catch up with that torrent. I wonder if they could anonymize it and allow the hacker community to come up with better algorithms. It's a more optimistic option rather than expecting that they 'll stop the snooping.

Hi! David here!

I decided Goliath was just too big and unstoppable, so I now I just follow him around and sharpen his sword.

Cheers!

Worst Idea Ever.

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