US Mining Data Directly From 9 Silicon Valley Companies 404
Rick Zeman writes "Hot on the heels of Verizon's massive data dump to NSA comes news of 'PRISM' where The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person's movements and contacts over time. This program, established in 2007, includes major companies such as Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook...and more."
Money quote... (Score:5, Interesting)
....from last paragraph:
Firsthand experience with these systems, and horror at their capabilities, is what drove a career intelligence officer to provide PowerPoint slides about PRISM and supporting materials to The Washington Post in order to expose what he believes to be a gross intrusion on privacy. “They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type,” the officer said.
Re:land of the free... (Score:5, Interesting)
There are some surprising aspects of it.
An internal presentation on the Silicon Valley operation, intended for senior analysts in the NSA’s Signals Intelligence Directorate, described the new tool as the most prolific contributor to the President’s Daily Brief, which cited PRISM data in 1,477 articles last year.
The PRISM program is not a dragnet, exactly. From inside a company’s data stream the NSA is capable of pulling out anything it likes, but under current rules the agency does not try to collect it all.
Analysts who use the system from a Web portal at Fort Meade key in “selectors,” or search terms, that are designed to produce at least 51 percent confidence in a target’s “foreignness.” That is not a very stringent test. Training materials obtained by the Post instruct new analysts to submit accidentally collected U.S. content for a quarterly report, “but it’s nothing to worry about.”
Re:Money quote... (Score:4, Interesting)
not if the text box you're typing into is running an inserted javascript routine that tracks keystrokes..
Or not (Score:3, Interesting)
Apple, Google, and Facebook [allthingsd.com] have all denied involvement in this. While this does not entirely preclude their involvement, these three companies, much like the government, tend to keep their mouths shut when they're caught with their pants down. Their denial, therefore, should carry at least some weight.
The usual justification (Score:5, Interesting)
NSA reporting increasingly relies on PRISM” as its leading source of raw material, accounting for nearly 1 in 7 intelligence reports.
But are those reports anything useful? Data is cheap, especially these days. Finding useful information is as difficult as ever, perhaps more so because of the flood of data. It wasn't a lack of data that kept 9/11 from being prevented, it was the failure of FBI headquarters to listen to their own field offices.
My prediction is that, even though these programs are now being widely reported on, there will be crickets chirping after it's asked what useful information they have obtained. I won't believe it's because that information is sensitive, as government never fails to crow about the wonderful things they've done.
Just to make my position clear, I don't think these programs are justifiable no matter what useful information is collected. However, a failure to collect useful information adds insult to injury, and renders moot any debate about whether this is an acceptable tradeoff.
Overwhelming (Score:5, Interesting)
You know, I (and everyone else) should be outraged at what is not only an invasion of privacy (citizens or not), but also a use of taxpayer money.
And, yet, all I can do is sigh. PRISM, Verizon, NSA, TSA, IRS, HLS, I just find it all overwhelming and disheartening. Sure, I could e-mail/call/mail my congressman or representative, but the cynicism I've gained over this past decade of political bullshit just tells me that my Congressman is already well aware of whatever is happening and is quite happy with the situation, no matter their party. (I see lots of scrutiny from the GOP, but not a single bill from the "we've voted to repeal Obamacare 37 times" House trying to rein in the President's actions or the actions of the various 3-letter organizations.) I'll do research every time I go to vote but I know that I'm in the minority that does so, while the voting population at large will blindly follow that D or R regardless of the candidates' viability, platforms, or intelligence, so it all seems for naught. I encourage my relatives to vote third party, but none of them heed my pleas to actually research who they vote for. (I have no circle of friends in which to do the same.) For all the abuse and impropriety of this, I just can't see a way to affect change.
I'm not even mad about this, though I should be. I'm just depressed. Circus and bread, indeed.
(Actually, if I adjust my tin-foil hat slightly, I wonder if all of this isn't coming out at the same time to be just that: overwhelming, numbing the average American, so that they just give up and don't raise hell about it.)
Re:Is I also said on Ars... (Score:5, Interesting)
So fake or not, it is vital that people protest en masse about this. That sends the message that such erosion of democracy cannot and will not be tolerated. And if it turns out to be a fake, then you can all breathe a small sign of relief. After all, protesting really doesn't take that much effort.
Been assuming it for years (Score:5, Interesting)
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2290782&threshold=0&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=36643606 [slashdot.org]
Interesting AC reply there to my post. Think of it this way. Our posts now are essentially programming an AI that will likely exist in a few decades emerging from all this collected surveillance data. What do we want to teach this sentient creature by our words and deeds? Thus my sig on the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity. As well as my other writings.
Re:The EU is going to be PISSED. (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah nobody likes competition :P (the EU Data Storage Directive in case you don't know what some of it is called over here. Amateurish in comparison but everyone has to start somewhere right?). And of course the EU and the US trade a lot of this stuff because they can outsource even more illegal stuff that way (EU sources in the US and US sources in the EU).
Did Machiavelli dedicate a chapter to the binary propensities of the human mind? It sure crops up a lot, even muslims love playing good cop/bad cop.
Re:land of the free... (Score:4, Interesting)
That's only partially true -- there's no way to encrypt or hide the recipient of the email. Do you want the government to know if you're talking to the "wrong" people?
Re:land of the free... (Score:4, Interesting)
...both of which could of course also be explained perfectly without the need to complicate it with a large-scale conspiracy.
Google is very much a company of engineers, and from an idealistic engineering perspective, an open and federated architecture like XMPP is nice. But from a business perspective, and with the market penetration and data mining business model that Google has, it can easily be argued that it is not in their interest to open up their platforms like that. That notwithstanding, I suspect the explanation could simply be that it became an unnecessary restraint to the way they wanted to develop their services -- a cost with unclear benefits.
The same goes for "do not track" -- there may be financial benefits in tracking your users, so why not do it if you can? It's what to be expected.
Of course the intelligence agencies of developed countries (to which I include China) want to monitor as much as they can, and they probably are to a large extent, but that doesn't mean everything that happens in this world is centred around that.
Re:land of the free... (Score:5, Interesting)
Well there haven't been enough foreign generated terrorist attacks on the US to use them as a justification for all this paranoia and rape of personal privacy. Therefore they have to concentrate on home grown terrorists - encouraging them where necessary to cross the line - to justify it all.
At the moment the only thing offering us any privacy seems to be the limits placed by technology on maintaining the data and analyzing/searching it. The 1m sq foot data center in Utah and the 600k sq foot one in Maryland would seem to be the next step in resolving the issue of handling the volume.
The thing that gets me is all these stories about the agreement with Verizon that leaked. That agreement is pretty much useless unless all the other cellphone and Internet providers have also made the same agreement, otherwise what happens with a Verizon customer calls a Bell customer? The NSA only gets half the data? I can't see them as able to accept that.