NSA taps in to Google, Skype and others

Looks like Edward Snowden is this story's Bradley Manning:

Peter King, the Republican chairman of the House of Representatives counter-terrorism and intelligence subcommittee, has called for Snowden to be extradited from Hong Kong and prosecuted.
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A bit of context from the horse's mouth:
"A lot of people in 2008 voted for Obama. I did not vote for him. I voted for a third party. But I believed in Obama's promises. I was going to disclose it [but waited because of his election]. He continued with the policies of his predecessor."
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/blo...n-revealed-as-nsa-whistleblower-reaction-live
 
Robert said:
Looks like Edward Snowden is this story's Bradley Manning:
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I'm not sure they're really on the same level. Manning provided us evidence of actual war crimes. Snowden merely provided us with secrets that were otherwise court approved. In other words, there appears to be no illegal activity or any crime involved with the NSA, Snowden simply didn't like the policy and took matters into his own hands. Not only that, I don't think the fact that the NSA could do any of that was secret - FISA and the Patriot Act made it clear that they could (which is why so many people opposed those acts to begin with). So I don't really see him as a whistle blower, I see him as someone who's telling us what we already should have known - except that HE committed a crime to do so. And on top of that, he chose to move to China which is somewhat questionable if privacy is that important to you.
 
Glaucus said:
I'm not sure they're really on the same level.
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Of course not. Analogies seldom, if ever, are.
I was merely attempting to highlight the "shoot-the-messenger" similarities between the two situations.

That said:

So I don't really see him as a whistle blower, I see him as someone who's telling us what we already should have known...
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You seem to be implying that the two are somehow mutually exclusive.

HE committed a crime to do so. And on top of that, he chose to move to China which is somewhat questionable if privacy is that important to you.
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Your comments imply that you think Snowden was wrong to reveal this. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised at this, given your increasing drift towards apparently authoritarian and right wing viewpoints. Suffice to say, given the little I've been able to glean about this story so far, I take a different view.
 
Robert said:
Your comments imply that you think Snowden was wrong to reveal this. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised at this, given your increasing drift towards apparently authoritarian and right wing viewpoints. Suffice to say, given the little I've been able to glean about this story so far, I take a different view.
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Well, I'd say my view is that there are a lot of people alarmed about something that I feel that I knew about for many years. I'm just not surprised about anything that I've seen and kinda expected it. Knowing specific details about the NSA's daily business doesn't really change that.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) was enacted in 1978 under Jimmy Carter. A controversial book about the NSA was published in 1982, The Puzzle Palace. Amendments to FISA were made in 2001, 2007 & 2008 and an update to The Puzzle Palace was made in 2001. On top of that, within the last few months US courts ruled that the FBI does NOT need a warrant to snoop on your emails. The basic trend since at least the late 70s is that the NSA has all access to all electronic communications. And I'm pretty certain all Western governments do the same thing when it comes to national security.

The fact is that we've been snooped on by the government for our entire lives, why are people acting as if it's something that just started happening last week? And I don't think I'm taking on an authoritarian or right wing view, I try to keep things balanced. And I also understand that balance isn't easy and it requires contradiction and seeing things in shades of grey instead of black and white. I don't want to live in a world where we have 0% privacy or 100% privacy. The balance is somewhere in the middle.
 
@Mike:

I'm just not surprised about anything that I've seen and kinda expected it.
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I'd be astonished if there's a single poster on this board completely surprised by it so I see that as a bit of a straw man.

In so far as surveillance goes, I'm more or less in agreement with you and I said as much on a recent thread; the increasing documentation of every aspect of our lives is inevitable and trying to prevent it is not only futile but, in my opinion, a misguided conduit for the understandable alarm it causes.

On the other hand, drawing the public's attention to this fact is absolutely essential and if you mean that the general public of the world should have already known that Facebook, Google, Microsoft, etc, were all complicit in handing user data over to government authorities, I think you're being unfair.
 
Klein’s testimony and documents form the basis of the ongoing Jewel v. NSA court case originally filed in 2008, which alleges “an illegal and unconstitutional program of dragnet communications surveillance conducted by the National Security Agency (the ‘N.S.A.’) and other defendants in concert with major telecommunications companies.” A similar case against the telecommunications company, Hepting v. AT&T, was dismissed following the passage of retroactive immunity for telecom companies in the 2008 renewal of the FISA.

http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2013/06/10/2133201/blarney-online-surveillance/

blarney...:confused:

2.​
deceptive or misleading talk; nonsense; hooey:




 
Robert said:
On the other hand, drawing the public's attention to this fact is absolutely essential and if you mean that the general public of the world should have already known that Facebook, Google, Microsoft, etc, were all complicit in handing user data over to government authorities, I think you're being unfair.
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Well there's lots of controversy here. The companies admit to having signed up to PRISM but not to giving the NSA a back door access to their servers. I imagine the details will eventually come out. From what I've read the NSA needs to make specific requests for access.

My thinking on this is that if the NSA did have full back door access we'd have seen a leak about this already from one of these companies instead of the NSA itself. In fact, all we got as evidence here is a really bad power point presentation.

btw: As an aside, this talk about the NSA reminds me of my cryptography professor talking about how the NSA tried to hire him many years ago. For his interview they gave him a tour of the facilities. Marines on guard were everywhere, and when ever he'd enter a room they'd have to warn the people inside so that they could cover up their desk with a blanket so no visitors could see what they were working on. He declined the position, he told us, due to political reasons.
 
Glaucus said:
In fact, all we got as evidence here is a really bad power point presentation.
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Along with a whole pile of circumstantial non-denials, evasions, "no laws were broken", "essential to prevent terrorism" and other assorted obfuscations of varying transparency from both the UK and US governments.

But once again, that's to miss the real point; the public at large should be aware that nothing they put online or say on the 'phone is really private and if it takes someone like Eric Snowden risking his freedom to slap that into some of them, my initial reaction is that he's performed a brave and honourable service to the greater good. (Of course, I know nothing of his actual motivations but, superficially at least, they appear honourable.)
 
But once again, that's to miss the real point; the public at large should be aware that nothing they put online or say on the 'phone is really private and if it takes someone like Eric Snowden risking his freedom to slap that into some of them, my initial reaction is that he's performed a brave and honourable service to the greater good.
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Sure, but I would have thought that the RIAA and the MPAA should have done that long ago.
 
Robert said:
On the other hand, drawing the public's attention to this fact is absolutely essential and if you mean that the general public of the world should have already known that Facebook, Google, Microsoft, etc, were all complicit in handing user data over to government authorities, I think you're being unfair.
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Private companies have been compiling scary databases of all our comings and goings and preferences etc as part of their normal business and that's sobering enough. Since 911 and Homeland Security started bringing things together in "fusion centers" (which replaced the old Total Information Awareness - remember the logo?
IAO-logo.png
) it has amped the problem several degrees of magnitude - and while private companies can misuse your information to destroy your credit rating or pester you with stupid ads, they still don't have the authority to lock you up or kill without asking permission of the government. On the other hand, the President and a couple of other guys meeting in a room DO have that authority and they don't even need to tell anyone why they made the decision or even if they did.

Scientia est Potentia
 
http://www.businessinsider.com/israelis-bugged-the-us-for-the-nsa-2013-6

Klein, an engineer, discovered the "secret room" at AT&T central office in San Francisco, through which the NSA actively "*vacuumed up Internet and phone-call data from ordinary Americans with the cooperation of AT&T" through the wiretapping rooms, emphasizing that "much of the data sent through AT&T to the NSA was purely domestic."
NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake corroborated Klein's assertions, testifying that while the NSA is using Israeli-made NARUS hardware to "seize and save all personal electronic communications."
Both Verint and Narus were founded in Israel in the 1990s. Both provide monitoring and intercept capabilities to service providers and government organizations, promoting claims that their equipment can access and retain large amounts of information on a vast number of targets.
From Robert Poe of Wired:
Narus' product, the Semantic Traffic Analyzer, is a software application that runs on standard IBM or Dell servers using the Linux operating system. It's renowned within certain circles for its ability to inspect traffic in real time on high-bandwidth pipes, identifying packets of interest as they race by at up to 10 Gbps.​
"*Anything that comes through (an internet protocol network), we can record," Steve Bannerman, marketing vice president of Narus, a Mountain View, California company, said. "We can reconstruct all of their e-mails along with attachments, see what web pages they clicked on, we can reconstruct their (voice over internet protocol) calls."
With a telecom wiretap the NSA only needs companies like Microsoft, Google, and Apple to passively participate while the agency to intercepts, stores, and analyzes their communication data. The indirect nature of the agreement would provide tech giants with plausible deniability.
And having a foreign contractor bug the telecom grid would mean that the NSA gained access to most of the domestic traffic flowing through the U.S. without technically doing it themselves.
This would provide the NSA, whose official mission is to spy on foreign communications, with plausible deniability regarding domestic snooping.


Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/israelis-bugged-the-us-for-the-nsa-2013-6#ixzz2VwU9I9rC
 
Robert said:
But once again, that's to miss the real point; the public at large should be aware that nothing they put online or say on the 'phone is really private and if it takes someone like Eric Snowden risking his freedom to slap that into some of them,...
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Plus, if it's no big deal and everyone kind of knew anyway, why heated rhetoric and threats uttered against Snowden? If he said that the sun was hot, would people be arguing about it? Maybe a cynical bunch of people on an internet forum are already hip to the surveillance state, but maybe there are still a lot of people who innocently believe otherwise.
 
robert l. bentham said:
And having a foreign contractor bug the telecom grid would mean that the NSA gained access to most of the domestic traffic flowing through the U.S. without technically doing it themselves.
This would provide the NSA, whose official mission is to spy on foreign communications, with plausible deniability regarding domestic snooping.
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It also, potentially, provides a foreign contractor access to internet communications within the US. Think how useful that could be if you were conducting information operations against government and media targets, how you could disrupt boycotts and divestment campaigns and interfere with people trying to report things you don't want reported inside the wealthiest and most overwhelming military power on the planet.
 
faethor said:
Buy some stocks early or initiate a hostile take over?
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early is ur best bet for money... take over would take too much time and you might have a bout of conscience before the profit taking is over...and well... that won't work if you got money on ur mind and ur mind on money...:D life is fraught with peril my friends...
 
Booz Allen issued a statement on Tuesday saying that Snowden had been fired for "violations of the firm's code of ethics".
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Exquisite bit of Newspeak.
 
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