MS Handed NSA Access To Encrypted Chat & Email 379
kaptink writes with the latest revelation from Edward Snowden: "Microsoft helped the NSA to circumvent its encryption to address concerns that the agency would be unable to intercept web chats on the new Outlook.com portal. The agency already had pre-encryption stage access to email on Outlook.com, including Hotmail. The company worked with the FBI this year to allow the NSA easier access via Prism to its cloud storage service SkyDrive, which now has more than 250 million users worldwide. Microsoft also worked with the FBI's Data Intercept Unit to 'understand' potential issues with a feature in Outlook.com that allows users to create email aliases. Skype, which was bought by Microsoft in October 2011, worked with intelligence agencies last year to allow Prism to collect video of conversations as well as audio. Material collected through Prism is routinely shared with the FBI and CIA, with one NSA document describing the program as a 'team sport.'"
Xbox One (Score:5, Insightful)
All this and now they want to put an always (or nearly) on mic and camera in my home?
Re:Xbox One (Score:5, Funny)
All this and now they want to put an always (or nearly) on mic and camera in my home?
Not to worry. The NSA puts careful safeguards on the data: For all persons known to be US citizens, a software filter converts their in-home images into stick figures before saving.
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Hey, why does that stick figure have three le... ewww.
Let's look in the mirror (Score:4, Insightful)
At what point do we call it a corporate-fascist police state?
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For anyone that doesn't have their head buried in the sand, absolutely no later than about a decade ago.
It's been the truth for longer than that, but a 10 years or so ago was when they gave up even token efforts to pretend otherwise.
Re:Let's look in the mirror (Score:5, Insightful)
More accurately, 11 years 303 days 8 hours and 38 minutes ago.
Re:Let's look in the mirror (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Let's look in the mirror (Score:4, Interesting)
I think Barbara Lee would be an interesting candidate for the Democrats. Of course she will need a running mate. I think one of the "Pauls" might make an interesting choice. I had long thought a R (Paul [wikipedia.org] (P) /Paul [wikipedia.org] (VP) ) ticket would blend the mutual gravitas and seriousness of the ticket and make it approachable by more voters. With Ron getting too old to run that frees someone to run with Barbara. There might be someone better, but it would be an interesting choice.
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Never, because that would be an instance of Godwin's law, causing the discussion to shut down. Of course, it is absolutely impossible for any civilization to actually approach such a situation.
The big question in my mind, is when do things become so bad, that people wish that they were only dealing with the Nazis. And, will we get there? And How soon?
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Well as far as I know we haven't systematically started killing a whole race. But give us time, we're working on it.
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So, we are already trying to eliminate the Arabs. Perhaps not as blatantly as the Nazis, but we've killed about as many as they did.
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That happened a good 20 years ago. Details escape me, but it was basically Boeing and the American intelligence agencies vs. Airbus and the Euro agencies. Over a big sale to the Arabs IIRC.
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I think this might be what you are looking for.
Why We Spy on Our Allies [cryptome.org]
Boeing Called A Target Of French Spy Effort [nwsource.com]
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Re:Let's look in the mirror (Score:4, Informative)
So yeah, Obama deserves blame as much as anybody. Let's be honest, it's not something Bush decided to do; the NSA came to him and said, "hey, this is a great idea." They would have done the same thing to Obama, and he would have approved it, too.
Re:Let's look in the mirror (Score:5, Insightful)
Obama's culpability isn't in starting it. His is distinct, in that he campaigned against these kinds of things, and has done the exact opposite, expanded each and every one of GWB's programs. If you thought GWB was evil, then what are you thinking about Obama?
And please, do not justify bad behavior by pointing to other bad behavior. Do not even distract from what is going on by saying "it isn't Obama's fault", when he's had five years to end this and he has only expanded it. It is just as much Obama's fault as it is GWB, Clinton, GHWB, Reagan, Carter, Ford, Nixon, Johnson, Kennedy ....
EACH has built on the previous, without exception. -- why I am a Libertarian
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2+2=5
There are FOUR lights!
Public Service Announcement (Score:5, Informative)
http://cryptome.org/2012/07/gent-forum-spies.htm [cryptome.org]
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Umm... I thought that was the way government jobs usually work....
Hilarious considering the Microsoft marketing (Score:5, Insightful)
http://www.theverge.com/2013/2/7/3962794/microsoft-revives-anti-google-scroogled-campaign-to-attack-gmail [theverge.com]
Re:Hilarious considering the Microsoft marketing (Score:5, Funny)
Microsoft: (Violating) your privacy is our priority(, because who doesn't love a police state).
Re:Hilarious considering the Microsoft marketing (Score:5, Insightful)
One of the things that has bugged (oops) me about the NSA news is the assumption that non-US citizens aren't entitled to privacy. Here the NSA doesn't even need a warrant if it guesses (50%+1) that one of the people communicating is non-US. Why any foreign company would want to use a product from a company that can be forced to feed all info to the NSA is beyond my ability to understand but, then again, those paying for the privilege of using Microsoft products have always been a mystery to me.
Re:Hilarious considering the Microsoft marketing (Score:5, Interesting)
The NSA doesn't need any warrant at all if GCHQ does the work. Which it does. So don't worry, US citizens aren't entitled to privacy either.
Re:Hilarious considering the Microsoft marketing (Score:5, Insightful)
But it is not just Microsoft. It is amazon cloud services. It is Google. It is any web based service that has servers in the US. It is any telco any where in the world that has a US telco as a partner.
What has surprised me is that no-one is talking of the harm this is (or should be) doing to US web brands. Especially in Europe given their privacy laws.
I have stopped using Google for search, and am looking for a non-US hosting provider for my web site. Not because I have anything to hide, but because if more people did this the corporations that are co-operating with the NSA, and the shareholders that own then, might then develop some balls.
Re:Hilarious considering the Microsoft marketing (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, but Google it reading your email to sell you stuff. That's evil.
Microsoft is reading your email to potentially arrest you; but innocent people, of course, have nothing to worry about. That's noble.
So the only hilarity here is how much better MS is at looking out for their users!
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Uh... I'm fairly certain google is doing the exact same thing as Microsoft.
Tired (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm getting a bit tired of news like this. Can we just conclude that the NSA listens to and collects as much data as it can from the US's allies as well as their enemies? And that the US's allies probably have known that for a long time but now Snowden has reveiled it they have to act surprised and angry so their citizens don't panick?
Re:Tired (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm getting a bit tired of news like this.
That's the danger in fighting a bureaucracy that's overstepped its bounds: Bureaucracies don't get tired. Outraged private citizens do.
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Governments have been tapping phone lines since the 1800s. Why should I suddenly be shocked and dismayed that they are tapping the modern equivalent.
It's like the stupidity over drones. Police agencies have been flying helicopters since the helicopters were invented but suddenly if it's unmanned OMGZ POLICE STATE!
Re:Tired (Score:5, Informative)
not me (Score:5, Insightful)
With all respect, I don't want to stop hearing these news. Because I want *confirmation* of every single thing that the US has done against people's freedom. I don't want to be considered a tinfoil hat paranoid anymore. I want proof, so no one can neglect later, about how fascist he US has become. And just because it was suspected, it doesn't mean that it is ok and we can just keep going with our lives as if nothing had happened. I want to see people resign, and I want to see people get spit at publicly, and ideally --even if it's never gonna happen-- I'd like to see people going to jail not only for having violated the most basic human rights, but for trying to brainwash the uneducated into believing that this is the correct approach to protect US's national security.
Important? (Score:3)
I'm getting a bit tired of news like this...
Slashdot is the hangout for exceptionally smart people, a lot of whom think that this situation presents a grave danger.
Granted, you don't have to agree with a lot of exceptionally smart people, but to ask them to stop worrying over something they think is important?
And note that you, yourself can avoid reading this type of news simply by not clicking on the article.
So you're saying that we should stop discussing this, for your personal convenience?
I am at a loss for [printable] words.
This shows why encryption can't win (Score:2)
Because only people who are tech-savvy enough to run it for themselves can benefit. Letting someone else handle it for you doesn't work.
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Because only people who are tech-savvy enough to run it for themselves can benefit. Letting someone else handle it for you doesn't work.
hmm? it shows that encryption can win.
encryption that's provided by others is useless, that's the point. encryption works so they have to go through the people who hold the keys.
it's a big fucking loss for MS though. big companies can't trust them with shit now, they can't know if USA prefers their competitor to them for political reasons, so they have no idea if all their research would be going to their competitor straight away... which is sort of funny considering that USA has bitched about the chinese d
I, for one, (Score:5, Funny)
welcome our email and chat reading overlords and I dare them to decrypt my ROT13 encoded emails...suckers.
If it's good enough for SCO, it's good to go.
Worth a look (Score:5, Informative)
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Let the blackmailing games begin. Snooping all the information means that any people with access to that (and that means at least 5 millon [salon.com]) can use them for blackmailing anyone, foreigners and americans, from the lowest employee to Obama (as point the video). Give them enough power, and they will have power over you. Any chain is weak as if even the strong links can be blackmailed.
Re:Worth a look (Score:4)
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This is going to lead to serious Lawsuits!!! (Score:5, Interesting)
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I think it would be naive to conclude that only Microsoft is providing this access to the US government. I would look at foreign sites to escape from the NSA (and perhaps we instead perused by that host country's intelligence service instead).
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Re:This is going to lead to serious Lawsuits!!! (Score:4, Insightful)
Except once the floodgates are opened the government will grant them retroactive immunity.
Law? What law?
well.. thing is.. american government can't grant them immunity for breaking the law abroad. or they can, but the other governments aren't likely to accept that - and since MS unlike NSA operatives has to keep operating(to generate profit) abroad.
think about it, would american government accept that snowden has immunity because hong kong would say so? fuck no. so why should it go the other way when the culprit is MS?
Re:This is going to lead to serious Lawsuits!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Why? How many people do you think are going to care enough to switch to another chat client? Chances are if they're using Skype in the first place, they don't care about that kind of thing.
Once there is solid evidence that the NSA has worked with US Government agencies to install and exploit backdoors, and this looks like pretty good evidence, there is no direction but down. It's common knowledge that the NSA is very open and communicative with the corporate sector.
If you're a foreign corporation out of Taiwan or Brazil or Wherever, passing even day-to-day information using Microsoft products becomes risky. How can you be sure that your data isn't getting dumped into some NSA system and then made available to co-conspirators?
The NSA isn't getting this access for free. If they're coercing corporations like Yahoo to comply with broad destruction of civil liberties, some of those corporations have sold out and traded for the stolen R&D of other companies, or huge tax breaks. That's where the real story is, and one we probably won't ever get to read.
In any case, if you're a foreign corporation or government, using ANY Microsoft product just become a giant liability. Given that was already practically the case after Stuxnet, but now you'd have to be a complete fool to trust Microsoft with any of your data and expect it to remain private.
Makes one wonder.. (Score:5, Interesting)
.. if Microsoft bought Skype in order to provide access, and if any $ changed hands.
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Why do you think eBay bought them? It helped connect Skype and PayPal accounts together. There is really no other logical reason why an auction / wire transfer service would be interested in video chat.
Re:Makes one wonder.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Why do you think eBay bought them? It helped connect Skype and PayPal accounts together. There is really no other logical reason why an auction / wire transfer service would be interested in video chat.
Wait, what? You believe that?
I've never known skype or video chat to be useful or used at all with ebay shoppers.
The price eBay payed was so astronomical that it could only have been with back-door funding from the Government.
The point was to get Skype out of Estonian hands because there was no reliable way for the NSA to tap into it. Even if they managed to break the encryption they couldn't handle the peer-to-peer routing. It was something they had to either shut down, or buy up.
Ebay turned out to be an incompetent partner, so the government stepped up to the only company that was interested, and I suspect they paid for the Microsoft purchase from ebay, and paid for asure in the process.
Business model for the free stuff (Score:2)
On top of advertising, they get to charge the federal government to snoop on us:
What the government pays to snoop on you [usatoday.com]
Every wonder how some of these startups were actually making money? I think we have stumbled upon their business model.
Free kick in the nards!!! (Score:3)
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if you're not doing anything wrong, you don't have anything to worry about.
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You just don't like it when the tin foil hat brigade is right, first you ridicule them for years then give them a kick in the nuts for saying "I told you so?" Besides, the only thing Americans are crying about is that they're spying on their own not the 6.7 billion other people on the planet so I'll continue to assume that the NSA wants to read my mail. In fact, I should probably assume that every other country in the world would like to read my email even if ours doesn't - which is by no means certain. Tha
What's that painful cramp between your ears? (Score:5, Insightful)
The vendors say they obey the law, respond only to direct requests for information, review those carefully, and then decided what data to release.
But how is that possible if the data is being hoovered? Would the "direct request" be something on the order of, "gives me all your data -- all of it, on everyone", in which case, that thoughtful review and careful decision is a MEANINGLESS exercise.
When the state has ultimate power, it drains the normal meanings of words. Even saying something like, "we are a nation of laws, not men" is meaningless in the face of such categorical activity. When the government is that intrusive, what's legal is whatever it wants it to be.
That's the problem. If I were a plucky startup, I would be busy getting together a technical response to this. Clearly, everyone needs to be able to encrypt everything BEFORE it gets into the hands of any information provider.
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The vendors say they obey the law, respond only to direct requests for information, review those carefully, and then decided what data to release.
You have to be careful with this kind of wording.....when they say they review them carefully, they aren't reviewing to see if it's a violation of someone's privacy, or if the request is really valid.
All they are reviewing is to make sure releasing the info won't get them sued. They're not thinking of the end user in that case.
Scroogled again! (Score:5, Funny)
Terms of Service (Score:5, Interesting)
Interpreting the lawyer-fied terms of service reveals that Microsoft has been hinting at this kind of thing for a while. That's fun. http://tosdr.org/#microsoft [tosdr.org]
Well (Score:2)
Since my MS live account is generally only used to catch spam... I wonder how much this is costing me in tax dollars.
Bing'd: New term for the American lexicon! (Score:5, Funny)
Bing'd: getting caught by law enforcement thanks to the ever helpful and ever present folks of the SS.....I mean MS.
(i.e. My neighbor got bing'd for skyping to a friend that he was he was still watering his lawn despite the water ration.)
The American Public: Snowden is not a traitor (Score:5, Informative)
Since slashdot refuses to accept my submission on this, or anything else relating to this guy, I'll just leave this here:
The American Public: Edward Snowden is not a traitor
A new poll released Wednesday by Qunnipiac University finds that the vast majority of Americans thing that Edward Snowden is a whistle-blower, not a traitor. A mere 34% think he is a traitor 45% percent think the government’s anti-terrorism efforts go too far restricting civil liberties, a reversal from a January 10, 2010, survey.
"The fact that there is little difference now along party lines about the overall anti- terrorism effort and civil liberties and about Snowden is in itself unusual in a country sharply divided along political lines about almost everything. Moreover, the verdict that Snowden is not a traitor goes against almost the unified view of the nation's political establishment." — Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute.
http://www.quinnipiac.edu/institutes-and-centers/polling-institute/national/release-detail?ReleaseID=1919 [quinnipiac.edu]
Evidence confirms NSA tapping fiberoptic cables (Score:5, Informative)
Since everyone like that one, here's another for you:
New evidence released by the Washington Post confirms that the NSA is tapping major fiberoptic cables as well as has direct access to the internal servers of Google, Apple, etc... despite their claim to the contrary. It seems that room 641A http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A [wikipedia.org] is not just a conspiracy theory after all...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/the-nsa-slide-you-havent-seen/2013/07/10/32801426-e8e6-11e2-aa9f-c03a72e2d342_story.html [washingtonpost.com]
Re:The American Public: Snowden is not a traitor (Score:4)
Thanks for the link. I think the following article is also worth bringing to Slashdot's attention:
"Snowden: I never gave any information to Chinese or Russian governments" [2013-07-10] [guardian.co.uk]
It seems The New York Times is participating in the US federal government's anti-whistleblower smear campaign by publishing such unsubstantiated bullshit.
As Dick Cheney might say: (Score:3)
"So? What are you going to do about it?"
The answer is that you'll do nothing. You won't dare elect anyone who will dismantle the system because you're afraid that you'll be put on a "list."
Why don't you people just stop whining about this? Just sit back and relax. Eat the bread and watch the circus.
Time to ditch Skype (Score:4, Insightful)
This is exactly what I feared when I read that Microsoft bought Skype. It was an eye-widening moment and now my fears have proven true.
Anyone who isn't rushing to start running their own XMPP server and get all their friends and family moved over to it is insane.
And nobody will care. (Score:5, Interesting)
Aside from the EFF and half the Slashdot population, nobody will do a damn thing.
BigPond/Telstra and NSA (Score:4, Informative)
Telstra is currently moving all their customers email hosting to Microsoft.
For our US "allies" - that's Australia's largest ISP.
Re:Burying the lede (Score:5, Informative)
Targeting US citizens does require an individual warrant, but the NSA is able to collect Americans' communications without a warrant if the target is a foreign national located overseas.
... only once the target has been confidently identified as an American, and if they're communicating with someone who has not been confidently identified as an American the communications are presumably still available. Snowden described "the widest possible aperture".
Re:Burying the lede (Score:5, Insightful)
Written communication by an American cannot possibly be distinguished from written communication by a foreigner. Grammar? 2nd languages? How are they able to tell who's who?
If they accidentally targeted even one American, they've just breached the constitution and are in violation of US laws that came before their grandfathers making them criminals. Why has nobody in the government been arrested over this?
Because they think they can get away with anything. Scary stuff.
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Written communication by an American cannot possibly be distinguished from written communication by a foreigner. Grammar? 2nd languages? How are they able to tell who's who?
If they accidentally targeted even one American, they've just breached the constitution and are in violation of US laws that came before their grandfathers making them criminals. Why has nobody in the government been arrested over this?
Because they think they can get away with anything. Scary stuff.
You have to prove that they're doing it. And you can't do that because the information is classified.
Re:Burying the lede (Score:5, Insightful)
In the modern world, "secure in their papers" doesn't mean anything, almost all communication is not via "papers", but rather are digital substitutes (sic) for paper. We are no longer secure in our papers, when we cannot trust that our effects are ours, if we happen to store them in an online vault.
What is worse, is that while we are unable to keep secrets from government, government feels perfectly fine trying to keep secrets from "we the people" that supposedly form it.
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Id rather have infinite fame like Joan of Ark, than infinite fame like Stalin/Hitler/PolPot.
When will the average guy/pleb have more guts and take down evil leaders when in the inside circles, humans either are too eager to be sheep, or too eager to be Kings. We need to grow up as a human race and take down evil, drown it at birth if need be.
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You have to prove that they're doing it. And you can't do that because the information is classified.
Have to? Negative. We could call a vote of no confidence in congress. We could DEMAND all government actions be made public record. However, this would require us to be as American as our founders...
American? Negative. I am a meat popsicle.
No confidence vote? Wrong system (Score:4, Informative)
Have to? Negative. We could call a vote of no confidence in congress. We could DEMAND all government actions be made public record. However, this would require us to be as American as our founders...
Hate to be your missing middle school Social Studies/Civics teacher, but there is no such thing as a "no confidence vote" in a congressional-type system. You are calling for something that exists in parliamentary systems, such as the UK, Canada, Australia, where a no confidence vote can "bring down the government". At least in theory.
Not in the USA. Even if the US Congress, especially the gerrymandered-for-permanence House, were not so bought off that your vote for Party A's vs Party B's candidate had any real meaning, you only get to make that choice every 2 years for the House and 6 for any given Senate seat. There are no do-overs, no recalls, for the US Congress. In practice, no impeachments of Representatives or Senators. Sanctions (e.g. Charlie Rangel) that mean nothing.
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I would allege that the mere possibility is enough of a chilling effect on my free speech rights to let me argue that classifying the information in question is itself unconstitutional as impeding my right to petition the government to stop the bullshit.
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They can.
Because PRISM is classified, you cannot subpoena them to prove they did it.
I would rather someone try the motion that my constitutional rights trump state secrets, and allege that anything preventing me from litigating to protect them is itself unconstitutional.
I might even cite that the mere plausibility of such a hypothetical case is itself an unconstitutional chilling effect which would give me standing based on real damage caused by a hypothetical that cannot be disproven.
Re:Burying the lede (Score:4, Insightful)
I doubt that they have breached the Constitution since it is bigger than you probably think
You doubt that they have breached the constitution because you are a pro-government stooge. You're literally just an object to be ridiculed here. You might as well go somewhere where people are on the fence about issues such as these and try to brainwash them, because most people on Slashdot likely think you're just a joke.
otherwise they wouldn't bother going to the courts, and ignore the FISA courts orders.
They don't even need to ignore the FISA court orders; the court will give them practically anything they want, and have rubberstamped sweeping warrants in the past.
Re:Burying the lede (Score:4, Insightful)
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One of the most horrific things that the Bush Administration did post 9/11 was declare that, in effect, you cease to be an American Citizen once you leave the confines of the USA.
If you would, please expand on that. I don't think that is correct, at least not at face value.
If I had nothing better to do with my time, I'd dig out exact details. Most of the readily-available discussion of this is found on left-leaning websites, and I don't like using biased sources. However, recent attempts to expand that declaration by the Obama administration make references to the original declaration which can be pursued by anyone who's interested.
Here are 2 of the more objective items I dredged up.
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/R42337.pdf [fas.org]
Salon, of course, is more sensationalist, but here
Re:Burying the lede (Score:5, Interesting)
Targeting US citizens does require an individual warrant,
They don't have to target anyone because they simply record all communications. Thus neatly bypassing the need for warrants etc. The NSA has been caught lying about this stuff already. I see no reason to believe their denials now.
Re:Burying the lede (Score:5, Funny)
By recording the communications without a warrant they are targeting everyone without a warrant. How about passing a law that states you go to jail for violating the constitution and then hitting the NSA with 313 million counts of it?
In the name of terrorism however, this will never happen.
Re:Burying the lede (Score:5, Insightful)
The bottom line is they've still collected information on US citizens that they can't constitutionally posses without a warrant. Whatever their intent is is irrelevant as they cannot constitutionally have the information in the first place.
Re:Burying the lede (Score:4, Insightful)
Targeting US citizens does require an individual warrant
Right, and how do they determine if the person is a US citizen or not? They have a program (Prism) to analyze various things they know about that person, and if the person is 51% or more likely to be foreign, then they tap them. So it's like a coin toss, plus 1%. This is according to James Clapper. From here [nytimes.com]:
The government knows that it regularly obtains Americans’ protected communications. The Washington Post reported that Prism is designed to produce at least 51 percent confidence in a target’s “foreignness” — as John Oliver of “The Daily Show” put it, “a coin flip plus 1 percent.” By turning a blind eye to the fact that 49-plus percent of the communications might be purely among Americans, the N.S.A. has intentionally acquired information it is not allowed to have, even under the terrifyingly broad auspices of the FISA Amendments Act.
Re:Burying the lede (Score:5, Interesting)
The government knows that it regularly obtains Americans’ protected communications. The Washington Post reported that Prism is designed to produce at least 51 percent confidence in a target’s “foreignness” — as John Oliver of “The Daily Show” put it, “a coin flip plus 1 percent.” By turning a blind eye to the fact that 49-plus percent of the communications might be purely among Americans, the N.S.A. has intentionally acquired information it is not allowed to have, even under the terrifyingly broad auspices of the FISA Amendments Act.
"Tap them", indeed, and then some. This latest round of revelations by the whistlblower Snowden details how Microsofts cloud service SkyDrive pipes directly into Prism. Skydrive has a nasty little feature, turned on by default (and turned on again on any upgrade if you decided to turn it off) that allows remote access to all the contents of all hard drives connected to your computer. Yes, thats right, everything *outside* your Skydrive folder. If your a non US citizen then your hard drive is now potentially imaged by prism, if your a US citizen living in the US you have a coin toss +1% chance of the same. Even if it is turned off how can you know they cant remotely image your computer - you cant, because Microsoft (and google, and yahoo...) just a few weeks ago all assured us they only reluctantly respond to court orders. Snowden has blown the whistle on them there lies, at least in Micrisifts case. Interesting to see if Google did backflips like MS has to give all the three letter agencies direct access to our private data.
Re:Burying the lede (Score:5, Interesting)
Targeting US citizens does require an individual warrant, but the NSA is able to collect Americans' communications without a warrant if the target is a foreign national located overseas.
I notice you carefully decided not to quote the first sentence of that paragraph:
Blanket orders from the secret surveillance court allow these communications to be collected without an individual warrant if the NSA operative has a 51% belief that the target is not a US citizen and is not on US soil at the time.
Why did you leave that out?
51% Believe? How the hell do you measure that?
The way I read it is any half assed idle speculation is sufficient to avoid even asking for a warrant at any time.
Is there anyone left on planet earth who still believes the Meta Data Only nonsense?
Did the NSA buy Skype for Microsoft? Did the NSA demand the routing of all conversations through Microsoft's own servers, instead
of the distributed nodes used in the original Skype design?
Where is Microsoft actually hosting their Skype servers? Are they using "overseas" Asure data centers [wordpress.com] so that the 51% can be met?
Re:Burying the lede (Score:4, Insightful)
Blanket orders from the secret surveillance court allow these communications to be collected without an individual warrant if the NSA operative has a 51% belief that the target is not a US citizen and is not on US soil at the time.
51% Believe? How the hell do you measure that?
I think we all know the answer to that question.
The absence of information is interpreted against you (unknowns are assumed to be outside of US by default). So unless you find NSA's complaint department and come in there with a proof that you are, in fact, in US, they can assume you are not.
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Did the NSA buy Skype for Microsoft?
No, but the NSA probably paid MS more in tax payer dollars for access to that information than skype cost to buy for MS.
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Did the NSA buy Skype for Microsoft?
No, but the NSA probably paid MS more in tax payer dollars for access to that information than skype cost to buy for MS.
You don't know that the NSA didn't funnel the money, either directly of embedded in contracts, or repay it via tax rebates.
Microsoft had no need of Skype. (Neither did Ebay, but they were too incompetent to do the government's bidding).
Almost their first major change was the routing of all calls through microsoft's servers. That was un-necessary from a
service perspective, and actually not desirable for either Microsoft or the end user.
Then presto-chango there are Asure datacenters sprouting all over the
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You left out a few steps in your proof. Starting from what I said:
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Oh please. Working with a company to lay out how you would tap their technology isn't in of itself anything new. This report might as well say:
Shocking Report: Verizon Works With Law Enforcement on How to Tap Phones!"
The government has been tapping phones since the 1800s. Should we be *shocked* that they would also want to tap Skype phone calls?
Slashdot always whines that lawmakers feel the need to make special laws for old things e.g. "Stealing using a computer!? Isn't that just stealing, why create a
Re:Privacy as a sport (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Privacy as a sport (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Privacy as a sport (Score:5, Insightful)
I would view this action from them as illegal anyways.
It doesn't matter if the server is in USA or where.. MS is here, in Finland, selling and marketing this service to me. so they should adhere to our laws about our data. They don't(shouldn't) get out of the data protection and privacy responsibilities by outsourcing some of their work to USA - and if they do that is a dangerous precedent because then you could just dump all our laws about it while they go and put a proxy in some Zimbanaomiland - on principal level that's what they're doing.
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Should we be *shocked* that they would also want to tap Skype phone calls?
Should we be shocked that they would want to? No, not really. Should we be shocked that they actively are, without a warrant? Sort of, yeah.
Re:Privacy as a sport (Score:5, Interesting)
That isn't what the article is about. It is about Microsoft intentionally using a crippled encryption system to encourage a false sense of security and about some further specifics about Microsoft's cooperation with the PRISM blanket surveillance system. Basically more details about how Microsoft completely fucks over their customers and essentially acts as a branch of the NSA.
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