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Prism and Verizon surveillance discussion thread

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

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Triple Zero

Quote from: Junkenstein on August 19, 2013, 01:29:34 PM
NOTHING SUSPICIOUS HERE
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-23750289

QuoteThe police will be asked to justify the detention of a journalist's partner under terror laws, the chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee has said.

Keith Vaz said the full facts of David Miranda's nine-hour detention at Heathrow must be established quickly.

Mr Miranda's partner is the Guardian's Glenn Greenwald, who has written about US whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The Metropolitan Police confirmed Mr Miranda was held but has not explained why he was detained.

MOVE ALONG

Greenwald wrote about this on a more personal note :
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/18/david-miranda-detained-uk-nsa
Quote from: GreenwaldThis is obviously a rather profound escalation of their attacks on the news-gathering process and journalism. It's bad enough to prosecute and imprison sources. It's worse still to imprison journalists who report the truth. But to start detaining the family members and loved ones of journalists is simply despotic. Even the Mafia had ethical rules against targeting the family members of people they felt threatened by. But the UK puppets and their owners in the US national security state obviously are unconstrained by even those minimal scruples.

And please to note that Miranda was at the moment paid by the Guardian (or rather the trip was), so, they went there: bad move, bad move.

(paraphrasing some comments I've read on this story here)

QuoteDetaining partner of journalist: bad.

Detaining newspaper employee, possibly journalist: very bad.

Once journalists will feel that they are in danger of no longer being free to do their reporting this story will get a lot more attention than it does at the moment.

QuoteThere's a large measure of difference between detaining a private citizen (bad), and detaining somebody under the employ of a journalist organisation (far, far worse). One is harrassment, the other is political intimidation in an attempt to censor.

See the public might not really care enough (except that they do, across the political spectrum, across the globe), piss off the journalists however, and they'll make the public care. As far as I understand this thing is all over the news, even the Daily Mail.

QuoteIt's a mistake because targeting a journalist's family member is quite likely to piss the average journalist the fuck off. The Washington Press corps can make Obama's life fucking miserable if they so choose, and absolutely drown his agenda in press about Snowden, Greenwald, how and when the White House communicated with the UK about this, and a million other things.
They can make an oxygen-sucking scandal out of nothing. This could devour the rest of Obama's second term if it gets out of hand (and the Republicans decide there's more mileage in beating him up about it rather than supporting the security state).

The public does not have to care for this to be a huge negative for the gov't. The only people who need to care are precisely the ones most likely to--folks rather like Greenwald.

QuoteIt took nearly half a year of revelations before people began to care about Watergate. I figure that it would take that this time as well.
Ex-Soviet Bloc Sexual Attack Swede of Tomorrow™
e-prime disclaimer: let it seem fairly unclear I understand the apparent subjectivity of the above statements. maybe.

INFORMATION SO POWERFUL, YOU ACTUALLY NEED LESS.

The Good Reverend Roger

SWEET BABY JESUS!

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/britain-forced-guardian-destroy-copy-snowden-material-222933670.html

QuoteAfter further talks with the government, Rusbridger said, two "security experts" from Government Communications Headquarters, the British equivalent of the ultra-secretive U.S. National Security Agency, visited the Guardian's London offices.

In the building's basement, Rusbridger wrote, government officials watched as computers which contained material provided by Snowden were physically pulverized. "We can call off the black helicopters," Rusbridger says one of the officials joked.
" It's just that Depeche Mode were a bunch of optimistic loveburgers."
- TGRR, shaming himself forever, 7/8/2017

"Billy, when I say that ethics is our number one priority and safety is also our number one priority, you should take that to mean exactly what I said. Also quality. That's our number one priority as well. Don't look at me that way, you're in the corporate world now and this is how it works."
- TGRR, raising the bar at work.

Nephew Twiddleton

Quote from: The Good Reverend Roger on August 20, 2013, 05:02:42 AM
SWEET BABY JESUS!

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/britain-forced-guardian-destroy-copy-snowden-material-222933670.html

QuoteAfter further talks with the government, Rusbridger said, two "security experts" from Government Communications Headquarters, the British equivalent of the ultra-secretive U.S. National Security Agency, visited the Guardian's London offices.

In the building's basement, Rusbridger wrote, government officials watched as computers which contained material provided by Snowden were physically pulverized. "We can call off the black helicopters," Rusbridger says one of the officials joked.

...
Strange and Terrible Organ Laminator of Yesterday's Heavy Scene
Sentence or sentence fragment pending

Soy El Vaquero Peludo de Oro

TIM AM I, PRIMARY OF THE EXTRA-ATMOSPHERIC SIMIANS

tyrannosaurus vex

please tell me that was not the only copy of the data. surely, surely someone saw this coming and made about 10 million backup files to be released on usenet or bittorrent in the event that this very predictable thing happened.

if this was the only copy of the data, someone just greenlit an assassination.
Evil and Unfeeling Arse-Flenser From The City of the Damned.

Cain

Hey now, the Met say that Miranda's arrest was "legally and procedurally" legitimate.

I mean, what's suspicious about holding the partner of the journalist who helped break the PRISM revelations, and is an employee of the same newspaper company, for nine hours at an airport and, in his words, "questioning about my entire life"?  And informing the US before arresting him was just common courtesy - Miranda being an American citizen and all.

And just because the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, David Anderson QC, said that the detention time was unusual and that it is not the place of the police to assess proportionality of their actions doesn't mean they actually did anything wrong.

OK enough sarcasm for the morning, here is Alan Rusbridger talking about the destruction of Guardian computers:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/19/david-miranda-schedule7-danger-reporters

QuoteA little over two months ago I was contacted by a very senior government official claiming to represent the views of the prime minister. There followed two meetings in which he demanded the return or destruction of all the material we were working on. The tone was steely, if cordial, but there was an implicit threat that others within government and Whitehall favoured a far more draconian approach.

The mood toughened just over a month ago, when I received a phone call from the centre of government telling me: "You've had your fun. Now we want the stuff back." There followed further meetings with shadowy Whitehall figures. The demand was the same: hand the Snowden material back or destroy it. I explained that we could not research and report on this subject if we complied with this request. The man from Whitehall looked mystified. "You've had your debate. There's no need to write any more."

During one of these meetings I asked directly whether the government would move to close down the Guardian's reporting through a legal route – by going to court to force the surrender of the material on which we were working. The official confirmed that, in the absence of handover or destruction, this was indeed the government's intention. Prior restraint, near impossible in the US, was now explicitly and imminently on the table in the UK. But my experience over WikiLeaks – the thumb drive and the first amendment – had already prepared me for this moment. I explained to the man from Whitehall about the nature of international collaborations and the way in which, these days, media organisations could take advantage of the most permissive legal environments. Bluntly, we did not have to do our reporting from London. Already most of the NSA stories were being reported and edited out of New York. And had it occurred to him that Greenwald lived in Brazil?

QuoteThe man was unmoved. And so one of the more bizarre moments in the Guardian's long history occurred – with two GCHQ security experts overseeing the destruction of hard drives in the Guardian's basement just to make sure there was nothing in the mangled bits of metal which could possibly be of any interest to passing Chinese agents. "We can call off the black helicopters," joked one as we swept up the remains of a MacBook Pro.

Whitehall was satisfied, but it felt like a peculiarly pointless piece of symbolism that understood nothing about the digital age. We will continue to do patient, painstaking reporting on the Snowden documents, we just won't do it in London. The seizure of Miranda's laptop, phones, hard drives and camera will similarly have no effect on Greenwald's work.

Cain

The Feds are considering going after the founder of Lavabit even though he shut down his company:

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130816/14533924213/feds-threaten-to-arrest-lavabit-founder-shutting-down-his-service.shtml

QuoteThe saga of Lavabit founder Ladar Levison is getting even more ridiculous, as he explains that the government has threatened him with criminal charges for his decision to shut down the business, rather than agree to some mysterious court order. The feds are apparently arguing that the act of shutting down the business, itself, was a violation of the order.

So, you can cooperate with the NSA, or go out of business, or go go to jail.  Only, you can't really, as going out of business apparently violates some national security directive.  So, in reality, you can comply with the NSA, or go to jail.

This sounds like an Ayn Rand fever dream.

Junkenstein

Lost for words.

Do these people seriously not understand technology to this degree? "I've smashed your laptop" = "It's over" logic will surely get someone fired.  Or promoted. Or left in a suitcase somewhere public.

Will have a read around and see how stupid this has become.
Nine naked Men just walking down the road will cause a heap of trouble for all concerned.

Junkenstein

#397
Related:
http://www.buzzfeed.com/justinesharrock/what-is-that-box-when-the-nsa-shows-up-at-your-internet-comp

QuoteI am in a little bit of a different situation than large companies. I don't have a board of directors to answer to. A number of [larger] companies are getting paid for the information. If you go establish a tap on Google's network, they will charge X amount per month. Usually the government pays it.
Nine naked Men just walking down the road will cause a heap of trouble for all concerned.

Triple Zero

Quote from: V3X on August 20, 2013, 06:21:57 AM
please tell me that was not the only copy of the data. surely, surely someone saw this coming and made about 10 million backup files to be released on usenet or bittorrent in the event that this very predictable thing happened.

In his very first interview, Snowden made it pretty clear that this is in fact the case.

Quoteif this was the only copy of the data, someone just greenlit an assassination.

I'm not sure if I follow? Assassination of who?
Ex-Soviet Bloc Sexual Attack Swede of Tomorrow™
e-prime disclaimer: let it seem fairly unclear I understand the apparent subjectivity of the above statements. maybe.

INFORMATION SO POWERFUL, YOU ACTUALLY NEED LESS.

Triple Zero

So, now, journalists, all over the world, are never going to let this fucking go. Right?
Ex-Soviet Bloc Sexual Attack Swede of Tomorrow™
e-prime disclaimer: let it seem fairly unclear I understand the apparent subjectivity of the above statements. maybe.

INFORMATION SO POWERFUL, YOU ACTUALLY NEED LESS.

Junkenstein

#400
Quote from: Triple Zero on August 20, 2013, 10:30:36 AM
So, now, journalists, all over the world, are never going to let this fucking go. Right?

Well I'm yet to find much from the BBC regarding the visit and destruction. Not entirely unsurprising from a state broadcaster.

I think the UK media is going to have a quick secret gathering shortly and work out a nice compromise.

Leveson goes away and it's business as normal. Or we could publicise the shit out of this and get Labour back in. Tit-for-tat, establishment edition. We've all had a little flex of the muscles, let's get back to reporting about celebs and shite.

ETA - Just had a flick around most major UK outlets. Total silence on this as far as I can see, apart from the Guardian. Some noise about Miranda, but overall - nothing.

Important news today:
Child has name and here is photo of child
Egypt is bad
Here's a shit joke from Edinburgh fringe.

Seriously.

Nine naked Men just walking down the road will cause a heap of trouble for all concerned.

Cain

Yeah, the UK press is being exceptionally quiet on this.  I wonder if that's because it has only so far been mentioned in Rusbridger's editorial, and the circumstances are hazy, or because a D-note has been issued, due to the "national security" tinge to the story.

Also, here's Obama, rubbing your nose in it:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/08/19/obama-administration-asks-supreme-court-to-allow-warrantless-cellphone-searches/?print=1

QuoteIf the police arrest you, do they need a warrant to rifle through your cellphone? Courts have been split on the question. Last week the Obama administration asked the Supreme Court to resolve the issue and rule that the Fourth Amendment allows warrantless cellphone searches.

Triple Zero

#402
I had a quick look at Dutch news sites, it's front-page on each of the newspapers' sites,.  either the Miranda or the data-destruction story, or both. It was a main headline on one of them (though while typing this something else replaced it, but nu.nl does that throughout the day), and a smaller front page item on the others.  the Dutch TV news doesn't seem to mention it (it's there but not on the front page)

I'm not really sure how to interpret this though, I don't usually use news websites that way.

Just watched the 12 o'clock news, and they didn't mention the destruction thing. They did have something about Manning's trial, and  a few seconds on photo of the child.

Miranda's detainment, if they covered it, would've been yesterday's news? I dunno I gotta ask some friends who actually expose themselves to mainstream news how much it was covered.
Ex-Soviet Bloc Sexual Attack Swede of Tomorrow™
e-prime disclaimer: let it seem fairly unclear I understand the apparent subjectivity of the above statements. maybe.

INFORMATION SO POWERFUL, YOU ACTUALLY NEED LESS.

The Good Reverend Roger

Quote from: Triple Zero on August 20, 2013, 10:30:36 AM
So, now, journalists, all over the world, are never going to let this fucking go. Right?

:lulz:

Maybe.

" It's just that Depeche Mode were a bunch of optimistic loveburgers."
- TGRR, shaming himself forever, 7/8/2017

"Billy, when I say that ethics is our number one priority and safety is also our number one priority, you should take that to mean exactly what I said. Also quality. That's our number one priority as well. Don't look at me that way, you're in the corporate world now and this is how it works."
- TGRR, raising the bar at work.

Faust

Now If I wanted to be a pesky pain in the arse journalist, and those machines really couldn't be recovered,

I would accuse the government of covering up vital evidence destined for operation YewTree.
Sleepless nights at the chateau