Prism and Verizon surveillance discussion thread

[Telarus]

Shit, that's a lot of data to visualize. I'm impressed with their methods, but horrified by the connotations.

[Cain]

The capability codenamed Quantum raises that capability to an even more disturbing level:

While Google is redirecting searches for kiddie porn to counseling sites, the NSA has developed a similar ability. The agency already controls a set of servers codenamed Quantum that sit on the Internet's backbone. Their job is to redirect "targets" away from their intended destinations to websites of the NSA's choice. The idea is: you type in the website you want and end up somewhere less disturbing to the agency. While at present this technology may be aimed at sending would-be online jihadis to more moderate Islamic material, in the future it could, for instance, be repurposed to redirect people seeking news to an Al-Jazeera lookalike site with altered content that fits the government's version of events.

Van Buren is discussing this in the larger context of "disappearing" data, stories and people in the future:

The future for whistleblowers is grim. At a time not so far distant, when just about everything is digital, when much of the world's Internet traffic flows directly through the United States or allied countries, or through the infrastructure of American companies abroad, when search engines can find just about anything online in fractions of a second, when the Patriot Act and secret rulings by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court make Google and similar tech giants tools of the national security state (assuming organizations like the NSA don't simply take over the search business directly), and when the sophisticated technology can either block, alter, or delete digital material at the push of a button, the memory hole is no longer fiction.

Leaked revelations will be as pointless as dusty old books in some attic if no one knows about them. Go ahead and publish whatever you want. The First Amendment allows you to do that. But what's the point if no one will be able to read it? You might more profitably stand on a street corner and shout at passers by. In at least one easy-enough-to-imagine future, a set of Snowden-like revelations will be blocked or deleted as fast as anyone can (re)post them.

The ever-developing technology of search, turned 180 degrees, will be able to disappear things in a major way. The Internet is a vast place, but not infinite. It is increasingly being centralized in the hands of a few companies under the control of a few governments, with the US sitting on the major transit routes across the Internet's backbone.

About now you should feel a chill. We're watching, in real time, as 1984 turns from a futuristic fantasy long past into an instructional manual. There will be no need to kill a future Edward Snowden. He will already be dead.

[Cain]

Well, the NRO seems to at least understand it's role in the global surveillance system pretty well:



The Register:

The NRO are totally embracing their menacing Big Brother persona and putting it out there for world+dog to see, having launched a bunch of satellites and a mysterious payload on a spacecraft yesterday – complete with the logo of a creepy octopus sucking the life out of our world.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) tweeted pictures of an Atlas 5 rocket bearing the NROL-39 getting ready for launch yesterday, which it said was carrying a "classified NRO payload" along with some cubesats.

The NRO is the agency in charge of designing, building, launching and maintaining America's spy satellites. The DNI said that its latest rocket would carry a dozen mini satellites co-funded by NASA as well as its unknown primary payload.

The DNI did not say just why the NRO thought that a good logo for its spy-craft would be a hugely evil-looking octopus with its tentacles wrapped around the Earth and the inscription "Nothing is beyond our reach".

via Cryptogon

[Junkenstein]

Staying classy.

Comments pointed to this one too:

[Cain]

As they should:

The Information Awareness Office (IAO) was established by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in January 2002 to bring together several DARPA projects focused on applying surveillance and information technology to track and monitor terrorists and other asymmetric threats to U.S. national security, by achieving Total Information Awareness (TIA).[4][5]

This was achieved by creating enormous computer databases to gather and store the personal information of everyone in the United States, including personal e-mails, social networks, credit card records, phone calls, medical records, and numerous other sources, without any requirement for a search warrant.[6] This information was then analyzed to look for suspicious activities, connections between individuals, and "threats".[7] Additionally, the program included funding for biometric surveillance technologies that could identify and track individuals using surveillance cameras, and other methods.[7]

Following public criticism that the development and deployment of this technology could potentially lead to a mass surveillance system, the IAO was defunded by Congress in 2003. However, several IAO projects continued to be funded and merely run under different names, as revealed by Edward Snowden during the course of the 2013 mass surveillance disclosures.

[LMNO]

In all seriousness, it seems possible that old fashioned hard-copy printing presses may make a comeback in disseminating subversive content.  It may not spread as widely or as quickly, but I can see, much like vinyl records, the "analog" nature of the media may add cache or "authenticity".

[Q. G. Pennyworth]

If the Arab Spring was any indication of how the future looks, I'd expect to see more ham radio, fax, and dial-up modem use. Printed stuff is great, but it doesn't move fast enough. Unless you're dealing with a global government, you should be able to get your content over the border to sympathetic groups and have them spread it for you, like the tweeting on behalf of Egyptian protesters that was going on.

[LMNO]

Wasn't there also talk a while back about a "darknet" that eschewed normal data hubs?

[Junkenstein]

Wasn't there also talk a while back about a "darknet" that eschewed normal data hubs?

There was, but I can't see how it wouldn't also be able to be compromised. I'd suspect it'd be a priority if it had any kind of success.

As an aside, whoever designs these logo must piss themselves laughing. I want that job.

[Trivial]

  This is a fun one.

[Cain]

NSA infiltrated World of Warcraft.

Not even joking.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/09/nsa-spies-online-games-world-warcraft-second-life?CMP=twt_gu

To the National Security Agency analyst writing a briefing to his superiors, the situation was clear: their current surveillance efforts were lacking something. The agency's impressive arsenal of cable taps and sophisticated hacking attacks was not enough. What it really needed was a horde of undercover Orcs.

That vision of spycraft sparked a concerted drive by the NSA and its UK sister agency GCHQ to infiltrate the massive communities playing online games, according to secret documents disclosed by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The files were obtained by the Guardian and are being published on Monday in partnership with the New York Times and ProPublica.

The agencies, the documents show, have built mass-collection capabilities against the Xbox Live console network, which has more than 48 million players. Real-life agents have been deployed into virtual realms, from those Orc hordes in World of Warcraft to the human avatars of Second Life. There were attempts, too, to recruit potential informants from the games' tech-friendly users.

Online gaming is big business, attracting tens of millions of users worldwide who inhabit their digital worlds as make-believe characters, living and competing with the avatars of other players. What the intelligence agencies feared, however, was that among these clans of elves and goblins, terrorists were lurking.

The NSA document, written in 2008 and titled Exploiting Terrorist Use of Games & Virtual Environments, stressed the risk of leaving games communities under-monitored, describing them as a "target-rich communications network" where intelligence targets could "hide in plain sight".

Games, the analyst wrote, "are an opportunity!". According to the briefing notes, so many different US intelligence agents were conducting operations inside games that a "deconfliction" group was required to ensure they weren't spying on, or interfering with, each other.

[Junkenstein]

SOLID GOLD.

I can't stop laughing again.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

NSA getting paid to play WoW.



Whichever geek thought THAT up deserves the neverending gratitude of his fellows.

[Junkenstein]

NSA getting paid to play WoW.



Whichever geek thought THAT up deserves the neverending gratitude of his fellows.

Well, what do you really think the top 1% of players actually did for a living?

Now you know.

Just imagine the conversations going on now:

"Boss, this new PS4 is totally connected and therefore terrorists"
"GET ON IT"
"Yes Boss"

Is there much actual evidence for terrorists actually using in-game communications for things? Like many other methods it certainly seems possible but I doubt it actually occurs with any kind of frequency. Or occurs in a way that is easy to distinguish a terrorist from a 12 year old.

[Cain]

The article goes to great lengths to show that there is, in fact, absolutely no evidence at all of terrorists using online games to communicate, despite the threat being constantly highlighted in NSA analysis.