Please to keep your Amurrica to yourselves.

[Dr. Paes]

PAES DOES NOT WANT.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/3203448/NZs-cyber-spies-win-new-powers

New cyber-monitoring measures have been quietly introduced giving police and Security Intelligence Service  officers the power to monitor all aspects of someone's online life.

The measures are the largest expansion of police and SIS surveillance capabilities for decades, and mean that all mobile calls and texts, email, internet surfing and online shopping, chatting and social networking can be monitored anywhere in New Zealand.

In preparation, technicians have been installing specialist spying devices and software inside all telephone exchanges, internet companies and even fibre-optic data networks between cities and towns, providing police and spy agencies with the capability to monitor almost all communications.
...

The measures are the consequence of a law, the 2004 Telecommunications (Interception Capability) Act, which gave internet and network companies until last year to install devices allowing automated access to internet and cellphone data.

Telecom, Vodafone and TelstraClear had earlier 2005 deadlines, and new cellphone provider 2degrees installed the interception equipment before launching last year.

Official papers obtained by the Star-Times show that, despite government claims that it was done for domestic reasons, the new New Zealand spying capabilities are part of a push by United States agencies to have standardised surveillance capabilities available for their use from governments worldwide.

[Jasper]

Oh, this is rich.

[Doktor Howl]

I fucking warned you.

[Remington]

If there was ever a time to study encryption, now is it.

[Dr. Paes]

I fucking warned you.

I believed you!

If there was ever a time to study encryption, now is it.

This. It's always been an interest, but I think I'm going to have to look into setting up some kind of proxy for private communications.
Work something out where they can see the message you send the bot and the message the bot sends but the two messages aren't connected.

[Doktor Howl]

If there was ever a time to study encryption, now is it.

If there was ever a time to spam the carnivore search term list all over the internet, now is it.

Drown the bastards in information.

[Dr. Paes]

If there was ever a time to study encryption, now is it.

If there was ever a time to spam the carnivore search term list all over the internet, now is it.

Drown the bastards in information.

Do we have a list we can trust as accurate?

[Remington]

If there was ever a time to study encryption, now is it.

If there was ever a time to spam the carnivore search term list all over the internet, now is it.

Drown the bastards in information.

Cory Doctorow's Little Brother contains lots of useful stuff like that. It's fiction, but all of the technologies in there are fully possible with today's technologies.

The nice thing about encryption is that the AES standard is available to everyone. I believe AES-128 and AES-256 are the standard for encrypting NSA top-secret information... and can be easily implemented for encrypting email/network connections.

[E.O.T.]

ASIDE FROM

          the scary

WHEN I THINK ABOUT

          this mega version of surveillance, I can only imagine there's a better part of two secret government storehouses (in the U.S. alone!!) filled to the ceiling with digital data documenting the endless hours of high school girls' conversations about boys, clothes and "as if"

[Doktor Howl]

ASIDE FROM

          the scary

WHEN I THINK ABOUT

          this mega version of surveillance, I can only imagine there's a better part of two secret government storehouses (in the U.S. alone!!) filled to the ceiling with digital data documenting the endless hours of high school girls' conversations about boys, clothes and "as if"

That's the beauty of it.

It's like having a wiretap warrant on an 80s party line.

[Remington]

Um.

They're already building the damn place.


http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/11/01/nsa-to-store-yottabytes-of-surveillance-data-in-utah-megarepository/

There's an interesting article in the current New York Review of books (predictably, a book review) detailing the history of the National Security Agency, that shadowy power-behind-the-power to which we surrender much of our privacy. That in itself is interesting, but I found the introduction a bit shocking: the NSA is constructing a datacenter in the Utah desert that they project will be storing yottabytes of surveillance data. And what is a yottabyte? I'm glad you asked.

There are a thousand gigabytes in a terabyte, a thousand terabytes in a petabyte, a thousand petabytes in an exabyte, a thousand exabytes in a zettabyte, and a thousand zettabytes in a yottabyte. In other words, a yottabyte is 1,000,000,000,000,000GB. Are you paranoid yet?

The more salient question is, of course, what are they storing that, by some estimates, is going take up thousands of times more space than all the world's known computers combined? Don't think they're going to say; they didn't grow to their currrent level of shadowy omniscience by disclosing things like that to the public. However, speculation isn't too hard on this topic. Now more than ever, surveillance is a data game. What with millions of phones being tapped and all data duplicated, constant recording of all radio traffic, 24-hour high definition video surveillance by satellite, there's terabytes at least of data coming in every day. And who knows when you'll have to sift through August 2007's overhead footage of Baghdad for heat signatures in order to confirm some other intelligence?

This proposed data center would take up more than one million square feet of prime Utah landscape, and burn through as much electricity per day as Salt Lake City.

Honestly, I have no idea how they could even begin to organize and datamine that much data.

[Kai]

yottabytes 

[Triple Zero]

YATTO BYTES!!!

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I am both horrified and amused by this apparent example of governmental cunning being taken all the way to the other side, into government idiocy and waste. 

"ALL YOUR DATA ARE BELONG TO US!"

"Oh shit, all this data stored in one place is as inscrutable as having not stored any of it at all  "

[Jasper]

yottabytes 

Hahahah.