Prism and Verizon surveillance discussion thread

[Cain]

Obama has cancelled his scheduled meeting with Putin, over Russia offering asylum to Snowden.

"Russia's disappointing decision to grant Edward Snowden temporary asylum was also a factor that we considered in assessing the current state of our bilateral relationship. Our cooperation on these issues remains a priority for the United States".

Pretty petty, but Obama has always struck me as somewhat vain, and no doubt sees Putin's move as a personal slight

[Junkenstein]

Petty is probably dead on. Putin's still going to be about after Obama exits the world stage. He's probably quite concious that his time in office is running out. That means time to make deals and consider the lucrative future. I'd guess there's more money in strained relations than honest communication.

It's a good thing I don't have any political power. If I was Obama here, I'd have gone and requested to meet with Snowden.

Can't take the thing seriously though, not like anything important is at stake.

[Reginald Ret]

Obama has cancelled his scheduled meeting with Putin, over Russia offering asylum to Snowden.

"Russia's disappointing decision to grant Edward Snowden temporary asylum was also a factor that we considered in assessing the current state of our bilateral relationship. Our cooperation on these issues remains a priority for the United States".

Pretty petty, but Obama has always struck me as somewhat vain, and no doubt sees Putin's move as a personal slight

When i first read a headline about that i thought it was because of the Russian anti-gay laws.
Then i read more and had a sad.

[Junkenstein]

Obama has cancelled his scheduled meeting with Putin, over Russia offering asylum to Snowden.

"Russia's disappointing decision to grant Edward Snowden temporary asylum was also a factor that we considered in assessing the current state of our bilateral relationship. Our cooperation on these issues remains a priority for the United States".

Pretty petty, but Obama has always struck me as somewhat vain, and no doubt sees Putin's move as a personal slight

When i first read a headline about that i thought it was because of the Russian anti-gay laws.
Then i read more and had a sad.

To be fair, if he wasn't using this law as an excuse he would have found something elses. The Anti-gay law stance seems to be a nice way to curry favour at home while not saying anything about the actual reason.

[Faust]

Not strictly related to Prism

The founder of Tor was arrested on trumped up charges. We will see now if my country makes the stupidest decision it has in a while.

http://www.rte.ie/news/2013/0808/467073-eric-eoin-marques-court/

[Cain]

He's not the founder of Tor.  He just owns a Tor hosting network, called Freedom Hosting.  The Tor Project have disavowed all knowledge of or links to Freedom Hosting.

Besides, US intelligence knows where to find the founders of Tor anyway, because it was originally sponsored by DARPA.

[Faust]

He's not the founder of Tor.  He just owns a Tor hosting network, called Freedom Hosting.  The Tor Project have disavowed all knowledge of or links to Freedom Hosting.

Besides, US intelligence knows where to find the founders of Tor anyway, because it was originally sponsored by DARPA.

I mixed him up so, You think this could be legit so?

[Cain]

Quite possibly, yes.  It's also likely related to the FBI exploit on flawed versions of the Tor browser that were unveiled recently.

[Faust]

Quite possibly, yes.  It's also likely related to the FBI exploit on flawed versions of the Tor browser that were unveiled recently.

Ah so thats how they got him, if he is running a child porn network he should be arrested and tried (not sure about extradited, he is an irish citizen committing a crime under irish law).

[Cain]

Yeah, I have a problem with that myself.  America's view of the internet and, it seems, all of Europe, as its personal playground is an annoying one, and given the leaps and bounds in reactionary methods that the US has been undergoing...well, everyone deserves a fair trial, is all I'm saying.

[Cain]

Adam Curtis, the BBC documentary maker, is having fun.

[Telarus]

Interesting.




Oh, didn't I call this in one of these surveillance threads?
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/08/us/broader-sifting-of-data-abroad-is-seen-by-nsa.html?_r=0

Hints of the surveillance appeared in a set of rules, leaked by Mr. Snowden, for how the N.S.A. may carry out the 2008 FISA law. One paragraph mentions that the agency "seeks to acquire communications about the target that are not to or from the target." The pages were posted online by the newspaper The Guardian on June 20, but the telltale paragraph, the only rule marked "Top Secret" amid 18 pages of restrictions, went largely overlooked amid other disclosures.

To conduct the surveillance, the N.S.A. is temporarily copying and then sifting through the contents of what is apparently most e-mails and other text-based communications that cross the border. The senior intelligence official, who, like other former and current government officials, spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the topic, said the N.S.A. makes a "clone of selected communication links" to gather the communications, but declined to specify details, like the volume of the data that passes through them.

Computer scientists said that it would be difficult to systematically search the contents of the communications without first gathering nearly all cross-border text-based data; fiber-optic networks work by breaking messages into tiny packets that flow at the speed of light over different pathways to their shared destination, so they would need to be captured and reassembled.

...

[P3nT4gR4m]

Anyone taking bets on how long it'll be before a prism security exploit hits the net... 

[Cain]

Interesting.




Oh, didn't I call this in one of these surveillance threads?
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/08/us/broader-sifting-of-data-abroad-is-seen-by-nsa.html?_r=0

Hints of the surveillance appeared in a set of rules, leaked by Mr. Snowden, for how the N.S.A. may carry out the 2008 FISA law. One paragraph mentions that the agency "seeks to acquire communications about the target that are not to or from the target." The pages were posted online by the newspaper The Guardian on June 20, but the telltale paragraph, the only rule marked "Top Secret" amid 18 pages of restrictions, went largely overlooked amid other disclosures.

To conduct the surveillance, the N.S.A. is temporarily copying and then sifting through the contents of what is apparently most e-mails and other text-based communications that cross the border. The senior intelligence official, who, like other former and current government officials, spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the topic, said the N.S.A. makes a "clone of selected communication links" to gather the communications, but declined to specify details, like the volume of the data that passes through them.

Computer scientists said that it would be difficult to systematically search the contents of the communications without first gathering nearly all cross-border text-based data; fiber-optic networks work by breaking messages into tiny packets that flow at the speed of light over different pathways to their shared destination, so they would need to be captured and reassembled.

...

You may well have.

I know I posted this Cryptogon link, which talks about the possibility.

My now familiar and broken-record-response to this thing is to go back to Room 641A last decade if you want a real thrill.

They have beam splitters installed at the peering points. NSA is getting everything. The end.

A more thorough explanation, for those who do not know what a beam splitter is, is provided by James Bamford:

At the AT&T facility on Folsom Street and the other locations, fiber-optic cables containing millions of communications enter the building and go into what's known as a beam-splitter.  This is a prism-type device that produces a duplicate, mirror image of the original communications.  The original beams, containing Internet data, continue on to wherever they were originally destined.  The duplicate beam goes into Room 641A, the NSA's secret room one floor below, a discovery made by another whistleblower, AT&T technician Mark Klein.  There the Narus equipment scans all the Internet traffic for "selectors" -- names, e-mail address, words, phrases, or other indicators that the NSA wants to know about.  Any message containing a selector is then retransmitted in full to the NSA for further analysis, as are the contents of phone calls selected.  With regard to targeted phone numbers, the agency supplies them to the company, which then gives the NSA access to monitor them.

The selectors are inserted by remote control into the Narus equipment by NSA analysts sitting at their desks at the agency's headquarters at Fort Meade in Maryland or at dozens of locations around the world.  What Snowden seemed to be saying in his interview is that as long as certain analysts have an e-mail address, for example, they can simply enter that information into the system and retrieve the content of the e-mails sent from and to that address.  There are, by his account, no judicial checks and balances to assure that the targeting of an American has been approved by a FISA court order and not just by NSA employees.  These claims by Snowden, and other revelations from the documents he released, should be investigated by either a select committee of Congress, such as the Church Committee, or an independent body, like the 9/11 Commission.

While UPSTREAM captures most of the telecommunications -- about 80 percent according to Binney -- there are still gaps in the coverage.  That is where the PRISM program comes in.  With PRISM, the NSA is able to go directly to the communications industry, including the major Internet companies, to get whatever they miss from UPSTREAM.  According to the top secret inspector general's report, the "NSA maintains relationships with over 100 U.S. companies," adding that the U.S. has the "home field advantage as the primary hub for worldwide telecommunications."

[Doktor Howl]

Holy crap.

http://firstread.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/08/09/19950803-snowden-revelations-force-obamas-hand-on-surveillance-program?lite

Of course, what Obama is saying he's going to actually DO is rebrand the spying, if you read the article.