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Also, i dont think discordia attracts any more sociopaths than say, atheism or satanism.

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Prism and Verizon surveillance discussion thread

Started by Junkenstein, June 06, 2013, 02:19:29 PM

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Cain

https://www.aclu.org/national-security-technology-and-liberty/court-rules-no-suspicion-needed-laptop-searches-border

QuoteA federal court today dismissed a lawsuit arguing that the government should not be able to search and copy people's laptops, cell phones, and other devices at border checkpoints without reasonable suspicion. An appeal is being considered. Government documents show that thousands of innocent American citizens are searched when they return from trips abroad.

What is especially funny about that is said devices are almost certainly hacked while they're abroad anyway.

Cain

Bump:

http://securitywatch.pcmag.com/security/319544-what-it-s-like-when-the-fbi-asks-you-to-backdoor-your-software

QuoteAt a recent RSA Security Conference, Nico Sell was on stage announcing that her company—Wickr—was making drastic changes to ensure its users' security. She said that the company would switch from RSA encryption to elliptic curve encryption, and that the service wouldn't have a backdoor for anyone.

As she left the stage, before she'd even had a chance to take her microphone off, a man approached her and introduced himself as an agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He then proceeded to "casually" ask if she'd be willing to install a backdoor into Wickr that would allow the FBI to retrieve information.

Note: Wickr is a "free app that provides:

·military-grade encryption of text, picture, audio and video messages
·sender-based control over who can read messages, where and for how long
·best available privacy, anonymity and secure file shredding features
·security that is simple to use "

available for iPhones and similar.

Junkenstein

Mainly posting for reminder/reference tomorrow. If anyone's more up on this, please chime in

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-25770313

QuoteWhile acknowledging the SMS data of US residents may be "incidentally collected", the NSA added "privacy protections for US persons exist across the entire process".

"In addition, NSA actively works to remove extraneous data, to include that of innocent foreign citizens, as early as possible in the process."

The Guardian and Channel 4 also reported on a GCHQ document on the Dishfire programme that states it "collects pretty much everything it can" and outlines how the GCHQ analysts are able to search the database, with certain restrictions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dishfire

QuoteEach day, Dishfire collects the following amounts of data:
Geolocation data of more than than 76,000 text messages and other travel information[1]
Over 110,000 names, gathered from electronic business cards[1]
Over 800,000 financial transactions that are either gathered from text-to-text payments or from linking credit cards to phone users[1]
Details of 1.6 million border crossings based on the interception of network roaming alerts[1]
Over 5 million missed call alerts[1]
About 200 million text messages from around the world[3]

Main point of interest is again the cross border implications.
Nine naked Men just walking down the road will cause a heap of trouble for all concerned.

Cain

Just keep this in mind, while the talking heads blather on about how noble Obama is, how gracious and thoughtful in scaling back the US surveillance program:

QuoteNothing in this directive shall be construed to prevent me from exercising my constitutional authority, including as Commander in Chief, Chief Executive, and in the conduct of foreign affairs, as well as my statutory authority. Consistent with this principle, a recipient of this directive may at any time recommend to me, through the APNSA, a change to the policies and procedures contained in this directive.

In other words, in the very directive he used to "limit" surveillance, Obama asserted the right to change said policy whenever he feels like it.

Which, of course, was always going to be the case.  But ask yourself this: why put this in, then?  Perhaps to tell people who pay attention (you know, world leaders, major corporate partners of the NSA etc) what is really happening.  And why is the media not paying attention?

Cain

Well, the Senate finally knows who is responsible for the NSA leaks: . Vladmir Putin:

QuoteBut Mr. Rogers described a very different view of Mr. Snowden, as a man who, from the beginning, might have knowingly or unknowingly been directed by a foreign intelligence service. He said the mass of military data in the Snowden trove clearly had nothing to do with privacy or the reach of intelligence services, and he suggested that Mr. Snowden's possession of a "go bag" to get out of Hawaii, and his smooth entry into Hong Kong, indicated preplanning beyond his individual capacity.

Intelligence officials say they have no doubt that Chinese and Russian intelligence have obtained whatever information Mr. Snowden was carrying with him digitally. They also say it is possible that much of the data Mr. Snowden took is stored in an Internet cloud service.

As Joseph Cannon points out:

QuoteWhy do Feinstein and Rodgers toil so tirelessly on behalf of the spooks? It is unclear whether they have received blackmail threats from American intelligence over their deviant sexual history with waterfowl. No evidence of duck fucking has emerged. They may well have. We don't know at this stage.

Salty

 :lol:

"Preplanning beyond his individual capacity."

ORLY?
The world is a car and you're the crash test dummy.

Junkenstein

Let's keep the horrorshow rolling, shall we?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-25922569

QuoteUS and British spy agencies routinely try to gain access to personal data from Angry Birds and other mobile applications, a report says.

QuoteThe joint spying programme "effectively means that anyone using Google Maps on a smartphone is working in support of a GCHQ system" one 2008 document from the British intelligence agency is quoted as saying

QuoteOn Monday, the justice department announced it had reached agreement with five major internet firms over their request to share information about how they responded to orders from the NSA and other agencies.

Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook and LinkedIn had previously sued the US government over being able to disclose to the public more information on what they have released to intelligence agencies.

Under the compromise announced, the firms will be able to release:

the number of criminal-related orders from the government
the number of secret national security-related orders from government investigators, rounded to the nearest thousand
how many national security-related orders came from the foreign service intelligence and the number of customers those orders affected
whether those orders were for just email addresses or covered additional information
As part of the deal, the firms will delay releases of the number of national security orders by six months and promise they cannot reveal government surveillance of new technology or forms of communications they create for two years.

I'm not entirely sure as to the implications of that last part, but I doubt it's good. People forget about a lot of shit within 2 years.
Nine naked Men just walking down the road will cause a heap of trouble for all concerned.

tyrannosaurus vex

jesus.

Can people stop thumbing their noses at Linux yet?
Evil and Unfeeling Arse-Flenser From The City of the Damned.

Cain

Yeah, as much as linux douchebags piss me off, I'm coming around to the idea of installing it on one of my computers at the very least.

Also, Greenwald and Omidyar have finally unveiled their new media project: The Intercept.

So far, I'm not impressed.  Their big "breaking news" story is a rehashed Washington Post article from October, which itself is a rehash of certain documents that have historically shown the NSA provides assistance to CIA assassination programs.

Furthermore, the article urges for greater human assets on the ground...in other words, for more spies.  Because what's really wrong about an assassination program carried out by a vast and unaccountable secret intelligence apparatus is that they rely too much on technology.  This mirrors certain stuff coming out of the Pentagon which the War Nerd has mentioned before now, a certain influential anti-drone lobby, who are arguing for more boots on the ground under the cover of criticising the (appalling) loss of life due to drone attacks.

The Intercept's mission is apparently to "provide a platform to report on the documents previously provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden."  IOW, those critics who suggested Greenwald basically sold the treasure trove of NSA files to Omidyar were, alas, correct

Junkenstein

Well that's underwhelming. The intercept is apparently the first of many offerings so I'm holding out some hope that this is just gathering attention and momentum for later bigger stories.

Some hope, not much, but some.
Nine naked Men just walking down the road will cause a heap of trouble for all concerned.

Cain

Yeah.  I mean, if it were up to me, the idea would be "break something big and new", to secure links from all over the fucking internet and generate discussion, as well as set the ground for a reputation for new, groundbreaking and investigative journalism (which is meant to be the guiding ideal of the whole project).

This, alas, is entirely unsatisfying.  And proving Greenwald's critics (not the ones crying about spy data being released - the other ones) to have some justification for their reservations.

Junkenstein

#626
The strange thing for me is that I wouldn't have figured Greenwald & co as amateurs setting up their first blog. There must be a dozen decent investigative journalism sites where something like this would have bolted on nicely. As a standalone with less than impressive content it pretty much fails in all of it's intended areas. The only page with any kind of content are "Staff" (Photo and bio for everyone is more important than actual news).

I may be being overly harsh, but I expected better. If this isn't substantially better in a week or so I'd guess it's doomed to failure.

Also:
QuoteThe editorial independence of our journalists will be guaranteed.

Horrible feeling that this gets proven false by the end of the year.
Nine naked Men just walking down the road will cause a heap of trouble for all concerned.

Cain

I suppose part of the problem is that Greenwald is also releasing a book, in which he has promised to reveal more NSA secrets.  If he reveals them now, then he can hardly reveal them in his book, can he?  No-one will buy it.

Perverse incentives all around here.  It's a shame, as I like Marcy Wheeler and Jeremy Scahill.

Junkenstein

That explains quite a lot. Hard to have a best selling smash hit if everyone is already familiar with the content.

Which raises various other issues such as how ethical it is to commercialise this information for your own finincial gain. Even if he donates all the cash to charities it raises some serious questions as to how this information should be distributed and who therefore profits from it.

I can almost guarantee that any publisher would have given him a great deal as it will sell very well to certain demographics. When was the last time you heard about a publishing house doing something nice? Yeah, never.

Behold the path to serialised articles, sterile content and smug complacency (maybe harsh, but the "I'm writing a book" angle stinks) where we can all act surprised in a couple of years that this shit is still going on and is now far more intrusive.

Wheeler, Scahill and others I'm not as familiar with but hopes of quality from Greenwald are dropping fast.
Nine naked Men just walking down the road will cause a heap of trouble for all concerned.

Cain

Well, Greenwald's not a journalist by training anyway.  He's a lawyer, who used to blog, then got picked up by Salon.  While that makes him great to discuss civil liberties, it makes him...less strong on journalistic ethics.  And yes, it's a pretty skeezy thing to do.  He's basically monetized what should be public information.

Say what you like about Assange, but you can't accuse him of that.

Wheeler writes at emptywheel.net and does pretty good analysis of US government etc and Scahill is the man to talk to if you want to know anything about Blackwater.