Microsoft's Cooperation With NSA Either Voluntary, Or Reveals New Legal Tactic 193
holy_calamity writes "When Microsoft re-engineered its online services to assist NSA surveillance programs, the company was either acting voluntarily, or under a new kind of court order, reports MIT Technology Review. Existing laws were believed to shelter companies from being forced to modify their systems to aid surveillance, but experts say the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court may now have a new interpretation. Microsoft's statement about its cooperation with NSA surveillance doesn't make it clear whether it acted under legal duress, or simply decided that to helping out voluntarily was in its best interest."
US considered hostile (Score:5, Informative)
Don't use US services.
Don't use Microsoft (Score:3, Insightful)
Remember Microsoft already own a back door into every windows box - they call it "software update" - com patch Tuesday maybe you get something different from everyone else should the NSA want a peek - that's the problem with closed source code - who do you trust?
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they call it "software update"
Feel free to turn it off if you fear the NSA is going to send you a custom payload.
that's the problem with closed source code - who do you trust?
And in open source land I have to trust the repo maintainers. Could they be infiltrated by the NSA, could they also forward me something different from everyone else when do an apt-get update... I think they could.
Am I more or less likely to know the NSA is doing this? Hard to say... Red Hat, Canonical, etc are corporations just like
This will backfire bad (Score:4, Interesting)
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Don't use US services.
Just US services? What about US closed source OSes? Flashback to 1999 and the _NSAKEY discovery. [slashdot.org] Microsoft denied speculations that _NSAKEY meant exactly what it sounds like. Everyone mostly believed it. If you didn't you were a tin foil hat conspiracy nut.
The demise of an empire (Score:5, Insightful)
As an American, as an American who loves my country, I need to have the courage to face the reality --- that my country has ceased to be the land of the free, the home of the braves, but has turned into an empire which is moving towards oblivion
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* Offer valid untill Sept, 11, 2001
Everything has an expiration date, need to read the fine print to find them.
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Sorry, but the turning point, if there is *one* most significant turning point, was the Civil War, where both sides massively increased the control of the central government over the populace. A secondary turning point was the passage of the income tax, where the power of the states was drastically reduced, because the federal money started collecting significan taxes directly. There are many others. The violent suppression of competing currencies is one. A really early one was the "Alien and Sedition a
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A secondary turning point was the passage of the income tax, where the power of the states was drastically reduced, because the federal money started collecting significan taxes directly. There are many others. [snip] Direct election of Senators, however, was another major turning point. Again this increased the power of the federal government relative to the state governments.
Umm, you do realize that the federal income tax and popular election on senators were both put into effect by Constitutional amendment, right?
And the passage of a Constitutional amendment requires [wikipedia.org] 3/4 of states to vote for it, correct?
In other words, you may be right that an increase in federal power has caused many problems. But some of the examples you bring up are cases where the states clearly -- and by a great supermajority -- decided that they wanted the federal government to have this power. So
Re:The demise of an empire (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, as a German who knows the USA well: No it hasn't.
A very small group of people are like that. Most Americans aren't. They have just become apathetic in the face of an imaginary "insurmountable reality".
That is the art of intelligence agencies and social engineering (and churches btw.). It's all in your head... but to *you* it's hard reality. And that's all that counts.
Our Nazis also were just a small group of very loud and very confident assholes, and a huge apathetic mass around them.
So the war is fought in your heads. Starting with your own and those of your friends. All it actually really takes to change everything and take everything evil down, is changing your beliefs (and making sure they're not delusional) and having enough public confidence to make others change theirs too.
The rest is a result of the self-fulfilling prophecy.
The evil ones got in power that way... and they get out of power that way.
I think you and most Americans still actually are "land of the free, home of the brave" Americans. And from now on, you will trust yourselves again.
Deal?
Re:The demise of an empire (Score:5)
Thank you, for this.
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That's a popular German fiction. In fact, the Nazis were democratically elected and hugely popular.
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Not quite. Hitler wasn't elected chancellor, he was appointed by the (mostly senile) president as the idiot chosen to be controlled from the backstage by a group of bigger idiots who thought it'd be a good idea.
(The Naxi party had been slowly rising in successive parliamentary elections - they happened every few months - at the time this happened. It had seen greater growth before.)
As for hugely popular, that is a matter that is still debated.
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The NSDAP did not win a majority in 1933. They had 43.9% of the popular vote. The other parties were too fragmented to build a grand coalition to keep Hitler out of power. As for popular support, Hitler played a Hi-Low game. He sought support from wealthy industrialists who were terrified of the communists and saw the NSDAP as the best insurance policy against Bolshevism. Other party leaders, such as Ernst Röhm, played the to the working masses, promising much the same things that the Communists were p
No different... (Score:5, Interesting)
...from the US today, or actually WORSE in the US today: You can democratically elect one of two parties that both continue on the same path.
I know that's a cheap comment to make (and I too am from Germany lived and worked in the US for many years - and loved it), but wouldn't you say there's more than just a grain of truth? How I too celebrated when Obama was elected! How very stupid of me.
CBC Documentary (Score:2)
The CBC did a good documentary describing how Hitler got into power how he manipulated the German population into supporting him. The series is called "Love, Hate and Propaganda":
http://www.cbc.ca/documentaries/lovehatepropaganda/episode-guide.html [www.cbc.ca]
It is available on DVD and as to alternative online sources, I haven't looked.
Re:The demise of an empire (Score:5, Insightful)
Deal?
Counter deal from an American living in Germany:
We Americans will work on this with the rest of Europe. When the U.S. does something stupid... say like forcing presidential planes to be put in danger and then searched [slashdot.org], you slap the living shit out of the people requesting it and hold them up high so we can make examples of them.
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As an American, as an American who loves my country, I need to have the courage to face the reality --- that my country has ceased to be the land of the free, the home of the braves, but has turned into an empire which is moving towards oblivion.
This is a genuine question - not rhetorical... and not just to you.
How did the self-perception of the US as "land of the free" and not being a European-style empire ever jive with the possession of overseas territories without equal voting rights?
As an outsider, it seemed that the principles on which the US was founded could not be easily reconciled once it started picking up its own "colonies".
Re:The demise of an empire (Score:5, Interesting)
Not to be too glib, but the braves died out long ago under the watch of Andrew Jackson.
I have a serious question for you: why do you love your country? I can understand why one could love the ideals that your country was founded upon as they are beautiful. I can understanding wanting to get involved in politics to try and steer the country in a direction that you think is better than where it is now. Why a love of country, especially a country that has been doing immoral things for quite some time?
The last moral war the US fought, in my estimation, was World War II. It was declared by Congress, and the entire nation sacrificed for it. There was a draft. People left their comfortable jobs and went off to defend the world against tyranny, oppression, and genocide. There was a defined end goal.
Korea certainly did not fit that bill. Our entrance into Vietnam was based on lies. Beruit was Reagan trying to take the focus off Iran-Contra. The First Iraq War was based on lies and oil. Afghanistan was perhaps justified (though by no means moral, in my estimation). The Second Iraq War was also based on lies and oil.
The CIA has a track record of overthrowing democratically elected leaders if they judge them not in the best interests of the US. Remember the Iraninan hostage crisis? That was a response to the CIA reinstalling the Shah. Remember Saddam Hussein? The US put him in power.
Ever since the creation of the NSA and Hoover's reign at the FBI there has been spying on American citizens. Do not think that PRISM is new. The intelligence agencies have been making incremental gains towards it since the Red Scare. The biggest gain of all was convincing the public that CALEA compliance was important (that is, remote, digitally tappable equipment providing both voice and data flowing over the lines).
So, given all of that, why do you love your country?
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Last time I checked, the Korean war was the result of a North Korean invasion of South Korea, not some random US expansionist move.
Due to partitioning and started not long after (Score:4, Interesting)
It can be argued (and is frequently) that the arbitrary line on the map drawn in the Pentagon was the major cause, but either way it was the only reason for US involvement. So there's the "random expansionist" bit, more random than expansionist and really more about making sure that Russia didn't get much of Japan than anything about Korea.
I suspect the border on the north of North Korea is also a bit arbitrary since there is a Chinese province there that was almost exclusively populated with ethnic Koreans until around the 1960s.
Re:The demise of an empire (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, there's that Constitution thing. The ideals in it are pretty darn good. The implementation leaves much to be desired.
In our defense: fuck the Boomers. We were lied to.
There was a long road getting from throwing out a king just to replace an aristocracy across an ocean with a local one to when our grandparents smashed totalitarianism, then came home and took to the streets to make real that "all men are created equal" line.
But the fact that we traveled that road, the fact that we thought it was worth traveling at all, was the proof of the nobility of the American spirit. We weren't good because we were always good: we were good because we were always getting better.
Our grandparents made some mighty big steps. But their kids. Our parents. Fuck. And by the time we were old enough to get out of their suburban lie factories and participate in the economy and the government...boom. Towers, war, economic collapse, surveillance state.
You want to know why I love my country? Because Thomas Jefferson, Mark Twain, Harriet Tubman, Teddy Roosevelt, Chuck Yeager, Martin Luther King, Elvis Presley and Neil Fucking Armstrong, that's why.
You know why I'm mad as hell about it right now? Because the entire generation born between 1946 and 1964.
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Please tell me: when was it ever that ideal place? When Japanese-Americans were interned? When Nixon spied on his political opponents? When we had separate-but-equal? When McCarthyism was rampant? Annoying and stupid as the NSA surveillance is, it's nothing new, and it nowhere near as bad as many of the things that happened in the past. And it will get addressed.
Re:The demise of an empire (Score:4)
As an American, as an American who loves my country, I need to have the courage to face the reality --- that my country has ceased to be the land of the free, the home of the braves, but has turned into an empire which is moving towards oblivion
I think part of the problem here in the US is the increasing polarization and narrow-mindedness of politics and and the political process. For example, I personally know someone who said they agreed with most of the platform of a Democratic candidate, but simply could not vote for that person because the candidate supported abortion rights. (Guys, until we get a uterus, it's none of our business and unless it's your uterus, it still none of your business.) Another is the Tea Party that wants austerity at all costs ("fuck the poor" they chant from their Medicare-paid electric wheel chairs - okay, I'm paraphrasing). Can't let illegal immigrants get citizenship, even if it would add $11 Trillion to the tax rolls over a decade, because we have to punish them for sneaking into our country to cut our lawns and pick our fruit.
I understand that everyone has causes that are important to them, and some are more important than others, but "We The People" and especially our Representatives, would be better off if we focused on what's important for the Country, State, City, Individual - in that order. We are stronger as a whole of disparate parts working together, than as individuals just out for ourselves, as are our hopes and ideals.
Give me your tired, your poor
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free
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WRONG. Until the law is changed to reflect male choice in the matter, you are wrong. Its not jsut a woman's body issue if the man is forced to pay for a child he doesnt want. Everyone worries about forcing women to have kids they may not want, but never say a goddman thing about the men we jail for missing child support payments. We put people in jail for DEBT. Men should have at least SOM
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Its not jsut a woman's body issue if the man is forced to pay for a child he doesnt want.
This is rather like saying we live in a world where if you plant a seed in someones garden that creates a legal obligation where youI have to help pay for the watering and care of the plant. You are well aware of this potential obligation in advance. Its been law for a while now after all, and its no secret or surprise.
The owner of the garden,should they decide to remove the plant, absolves you of any responsibility f
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What's that?! Are you trying to suggest that the Atlanta Braves have moved to Canada????
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It was doomed from way before that. I'd say the genocide of the people of the nations that already lived there along with the fact that it was built on the backs of slaves was the beginning of all that is wrong there now.
Are terrorists really that dumb??? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm sorry, but I'm not buying the primary argument here — that this level of surveillance is necessary in order to catch terrorists. (Never mind that it took this scandal leaking for Obama to actually say "terrorists" [usnews.com].)
Are terrorists actually stupid enough to communicate using public services like this? You'd think that, at the very least, they'd be using Tor [wikipedia.org], or their own private equivalents. More likely than not, they're not even communicating electronically; Bin Laden communicated with the outside world through a very non-electronic trusted courier.
It seems to me that their argument is a red herring — that their real purpose is surveilling us, for partisan/corrupt purposes. Witness the harassment of Tea Party groups by the IRS, journalists by the Attorney General, and the NYPD's abuse of that data [courierpress.com].
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Hate to break it to you, but all parties have pulled that kind of crap. FWIW, I do in fact remember Nixon and Watergate, just as one example.
Your partisanship is showing....
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Re:US considered hostile (Score:4, Insightful)
I doubt perfect forward secrecy will help very much when the NSA could just create a validly signed certificate to perform man-in-the-middle attacks on a routine basis. All they need to do is exploit one of your default 'trusted' CAs and you're done.
I'm sure US authorities have already rolled up into Verisign and demanded a copy of their private keys. Even if Snowden doesn't reveal this, given the other unconstitutional actions taken by the US, I have to assume this has already happened.
The system we have is built on trust. We've now learned we cannot trust the US government. The entire system has been broken. We have to rethink it.
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Microsoft is a business. (Score:3)
I don't see what the NSA/FISA has to offer in return, so its probably being done due to a threat, and at that point you have to wonder what other companies are also doing for the same reason.
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oh they do get to bill them for the surveillance.
but the point is more about that they can be told to do it without mentioning there is a court order.
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I don't see what the NSA/FISA has to offer in return, so its probably being done due to a threat, and at that point you have to wonder what other companies are also doing for the same reason.
In exchange, they get their share of stolen data in order to compete against other (probably mostly foreign) companies. That data can be used to win orders in a bidding competition, for example, and to get previews of planned production models and other strategic information. Don't think for a second that MS would not offer their eager help for that kind of intel.
See http://cryptome.org/echelon-ep-fin.htm [cryptome.org] for reference. Bit old, though.
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I don't see what the NSA/FISA has to offer in return
Intelligence on non-US competitors, intelligence on the EU commissioner of competition and so forth. There is plenty of very high financial and strategic value that the NSA could offer in return. Whether doing so would be legal or not is a different story altogether, but it's not like the NSA allow pesky little details as legality get in their way.
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I always thought it was odd that after the DoJ kicking MS's ass in court that the incoming Bush administration would pretty much let them off scott-free.
Pretty good guess as to why now.
I have to get off my lazy butt and get Linux on this notebook now...
Re:Microsoft is a business. (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, put Linux on it.
For your reading amusement during the installation:
http://www.redhat.com/workshop/defense/agenda/
Panelists:
Neil Ziring: Technical Director, NSA Information Assurance Directorate
Al Holt: Technical Director, NTOC, NSA
Terry Sherryl: DISA FSO
David A. Waltermire: Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP) Architect, NIST
It's weird that no one on /. seems to be curious if a corporation that is a leading contributor of OSS sofware with over a billion in revenues each year and a cozy relationship to the US defense sector has been pressured, like Microsoft, to put in backdoors/exploitable vulnerabilites into the Linux kernel or any of their other products. Yes, it's open source, but who audits the code? Supposedly each commit is signed off by another kernel dev. However, in most cases you have one developer signing off on commits of another developer from the same organization. Most times its just rubber-stamp procedure. Given that Linux is used across the world, it seems highly unlikely that the US government would only put pressure on proprietary software and services companies to comply with its demands to make their products easier for them to bypass?
Re: RedHat != Linux (Score:3)
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They do go out of their way to please regulators and governmental agencies that can interfere with their business. The USA still has extensive regulations on the export of encryption technologies, regulations that could require compliance reviews and delay major commercial releases by months or force expensive splitting off of encryption technologies as separate packages requiring expensive, separate registration to download. This has occurred repeatedly with older technologies, such as the "3DES" and other
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What could have the US gov done to M$? Take it to court 'again' and 'win' - shattering M$ down to a few MS branded product ranges as punishment?
A massive ramping up of strange issues with taxes, people in the company, new gov/mil formats open to other US brands on the desktop?
Setting standards reducing MS to just a desktop OS with a larger non MS application product pool been supported?
Lock MS out of
All very late to been
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NSA to Microsoft: "Now I'm not sayin' nothing, but contracts fall through and audits happen... Youse could really use some insurance."
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Let's tally (Score:5, Insightful)
Nowadays anything and everything that are related to NSA has been condemned to death by a million cuts.
But we do need to tally up what has actually transpired to the American society BEFORE Mr. Edward Snowden decided to break his silence of the terrible truth ...
The American society before the Snowden era was already a very damaged and trouble society.
The United States of America, as a nation, has already become very heavily debt-ridden, and that the rights of the average Americans has already been greatly reduced by patent-trolls and the copyright-MAFIAA-trolls.
Taken as a whole, NSA is but one of the many players with the nefarous intentions to decimate the Rights of the average Americans as guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States of America.
I am not defending NSA, but I have to be fair.
It ***IS*** the system itself, which the government of the United States of America is but a part of it, that is behind the destruction of the Spirit of Americana.
They allowed, hmm... no, they ENCOURAGED the HUMONGOUS CORPORATIONS to encroach into our rights (via patents and copyrights), and they actively fanned phobia against "gun violence" / "terrorism" in order to expediting the destruction of the Bill of Rights.
But the most important aspect of all is this --- that the American people have failed to rise up against the system.
We have become a people who no longer care about our own Constitutions.
Instead of being proud Americans who will fight for liberty and justice for all, we have become the timid Americans who will sacrifice anyting in order to secure a place inside the "safety cocoon" prepared for us, by our Great Leader.
The true "1984" had arrived, and it had arrived 29 years later than as was promised.
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The USGov is a huge client (Score:3)
Missed an option. (Score:5, Interesting)
It could be 'voluntary' complience, with the quotemarks. The classic offer-you-can't-refuse approach. Perhaps a government representative just explained that one way or another the NSA was going to get total access, but if MS (or any other company) complied now they could at least deign the taps in a way suited to their infrastructure, whereas resisting the request would result - after a couple of sessions of congress - in a new law mandating an NSA-designed system be installed and probably break half their well-designed systems by forcing centralisation.
In the UK we used the same approach to compel ISPs to install anti-child-porn filters: The government never actually passed a law mandating ISPs install filtering, they just made it quite clear that they would pass a law if the industry didn't collectively do so 'voluntarily.' This suits the govermnent very well, because it means the filtering list can be maintained by the IWF, an ultra-secretive unaccoutable non-governmental organisation with all the procedural transparency of a lead brick. If they screw up and block wikipedia, no government department gets the blame and no embarassing enquery is launched.
I'm expecting exactly the same tactic will be used within a few years to pressure ISPs into blocking regular adult pornography too - there's already a major tabloid and a couple of MPs campaigning for it. To protect the children, of course.
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If you were willing to assume Bill Gates was against it (could be, who knows) then you could assume that it's because they have him and his baby by the nuts. Remember, they were convicted of abusing their monopoly position once, and then let off with a handslap. The deal was altered, pray it is not altered further.
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Need to work out timing issues - it's not clear how long this has been going on, and Gates hasn't been in charge at MS for a long time now.
If it dates back as far as the antitrust trial, then it is quite plausible that some strings may have been pulled in exchange for cooperation. It might explain why the very harsh sanctions were overturned on appeal and replaced with just a slap-on-the-wrist. But this is just groundless speculation - those events were prior to 9/11, before there even was a DHS, and back w
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Need to work out timing issues - it's not clear how long this has been going on, and Gates hasn't been in charge at MS for a long time now.
I say unto thee: NSAKEY.
filleted Microfiche the order of the day.... (Score:2, Interesting)
Although apples taste nice, the fact of the matter is that microsoft is only one (albeit a big fish) of a number of companies who have bent-over-backwards for the NSA/CIA/MOSSAD.
Google`s Brin is ex-israeli army, Facebook`s Zuckerburger has undisclosed interests in israel (a foreign entity), and Akamai was founded by an israeli-commando?
Hold up, lemme get this write....... The "mines" of the vast majority of private personal data are afilliated with israel? Can this be true? If so, what sort of proportions a
Possible answer (Score:5, Informative)
Remember "national security letters" that were created as part of the "USA Patriot Act"? These were the special kind of fake warrants that were never approved by any judge, but any person or organization who got one wasn't allowed to tell anyone about, including a court of law (preventing anyone from saying "Hey, Fourth Amendment anyone?"). That would explain everything: why FISA didn't stop it, why the companies are cooperating with the NSA, and why they aren't including references to such things in their privacy policies.
Bless you, former senator Russ Feingold, for having the guts to stand up for the Constitution when the entire rest of the Senate ignored it.
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What choice do they have? (Score:2)
What do you expect Microsoft to do if the NSA come knocking with a request for information? Say no? You either provide it to them or your company will get severely fined with possible additional legal action taken against it.
Doesn't make it right. Doesn't make it "land of the free". But fuck if Google wouldn't have to deal with the same shit if the NSA came to them (and no doubt they already have). It's just because Microsoft didn't want to make a big fuss for no reason that people are jumping over them.
Hav
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What do you expect Microsoft to do if the NSA come knocking with a request for information? Say no? You either provide it to them or your company will get severely fined with possible additional legal action taken against it.
Ask to see the warrant signed by a judge specifying the individual and information they are requesting the information for?
Say no when they can't produce that information?
Take the government to court when they demand you do something unconstitutional?
In other words, obey the law of the
Re:What choice do they have? (Score:4, Insightful)
Who says they didn't ask for the warrant? Do you know for sure how the requests went down? Also, what makes them illegal orders? If the courts uphold them, they aren't illegal (they might be immoral, but that's another story).
Google's just better at the PR in these cases. But in the end, both companies (indeed, most companies) look out for themselves. They probably know it's not worth fighting the Unites States fucking Government unless you're pretty damn sure it's worth it.
Re:What choice do they have? (Score:5, Informative)
"If the courts uphold them, they aren't illegal"
This is unfortunately a common misunderstanding.
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That's nice in theory. But in reality what is enforced is the law. The United States has a constitution which is mostly enforced and almost universally respected. Other countries have had constitutions which are mostly ignored.
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But "if the courts uphold them" (what GP said) != "any statute passed by legislators" (what you quoted). You're talking about legislature, GP is talking about courts, and they are of course very different. If the court system, including the Supreme Court, passes judgement and says a law is enforceable, then indeed we can conclude that it is officially constitutional per our legal system. Your quote is not on topic to this point.
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No, I am talking about the validity of laws, and you seem to be (willfully?) avoiding the point. The unconstitutionality of a law is a result of its conflict with a higher law, not of any pronouncement from a court. The court, should it work correctly, will refuse to enforce unconstitutional laws when that issue is brought before it, however should it fail to perform that duty the law remains unconstitutional nonetheless. It is void from the moment the legislature passes it and no one has any legal obligati
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Other companies - sadly only a handful - have fought these illegal orders
And look where it got them. Forget not the story of Qwest. The moral, to me, is that you are not permitted to succeed past a certain point in the USA if you are not willing to violate the constitution.
Re:What choice do they have? (Score:4, Interesting)
It's worse than that. Joseph Nacchio at Qwest did resist and is now in prison. Given the secrecy and that Qwest is the only company to have publicly resisted, he certainly looks like a political prisoner, visibly targetted pour encourager les autres. Key evidence was suppressed on "national security" grounds. This was even before the "patriot" act. A couple of links:
Are you all FUCKING INSANE? (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-collaboration-user-data [guardian.co.uk]
"Microsoft has collaborated closely with US intelligence services to allow usersâ(TM) communications to be intercepted, including helping the National Security Agency to circumvent the companyâ(TM)s own encryption, according to top-secret documents obtained by the Guardian.
The files provided by Edward Snowden illustrate the scale of co-operation between Silicon Valley and the intelligence agencies over the last three years. They also shed new light on the workings of the top-secret Prism program, which was disclosed by the Guardian and the Washington Post last month.
The documents show that:
* 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 FBIâ(TM)s Data Intercept Unit to âoeunderstandâ potential issues with a feature in Outlook.com that allows users to create email aliases;
* In July last year, nine months after Microsoft bought Skype, the NSA boasted that a new capability had tripled the amount of Skype video calls being collected through Prism;
* Material collected through Prism is routinely shared with the FBI and CIA, with one NSA document describing the program as a âoeteam sportâ."
And you STILL want to do business with them? You STILL want to trust their OS with your personal files and/or communications?
What more do you need?
Re:Are you all FUCKING INSANE? (Score:4)
And you STILL want to do business with them? You STILL want to trust their OS with your personal files and/or communications?
It really doesn't matter in what manner the three letter agencies are collecting their information, from the browser, from the SSL socket (pre encryption) or directly from the OS. Google, Facebook, you name it, they'll all have to comply with a national security letter. Oracle would too, and anyone running a Linux based service, the "OS from hell" argument is moot at this point. Nice try though.
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So the option left is running open source software on your computer with local strong encryption and pray that the chips don't have nasty microcode in them.
I'm already there :)
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And you STILL want to do business with them? You STILL want to trust their OS with your personal files and/or communications?
It's pretty hard to buy a laptop without "doing business" with them. And I'm sure the NSA can get in my Linux box with little effort, too.
If MS's poorly designed, feature-poor, buggy, user-hostile OS doesn't make folks change OSes I don't think anything will. The only thing keeping Windows on this notebook is laziness, and except for the Patch Tuesday bullshit W7 is almost tolerable.
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I'm running kubuntu on the tower. When a patch notification comes in, one click and it's done. No lengthy reboots with "configuring patches, do not turn off your computer." No reopening all the apps that were open after it reboots, no hunting for where I was on that document I was working on when the patch notice comes through.
See ... the NSA really CAN get in. Now go back and rebuild your whole system from manually inspected source code, using a toolchain built from manually inspected source code, compiled with a compiler built from manually inspected source code.
Frequency hopping rates (Score:2)
Wasn't the frequency hopping rate in cell phone standards lowered to make surveillance more easy? AFAIK this happened far more than a decade ago.
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That sounds unlikely. If you know where the signal is going to hop, it is trivial to follow. I have not heard of a standard that picks the next frequency in a cryptographically secure way, but I am prepared to be surprised of course.
Voluntary? (Score:2)
Does anyone remember? (Score:2)
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Don't forget about the BSDs.
Skype! (Score:5, Interesting)
If the companies gave a fuck (Score:2)
They would all release the letters to the public all at once. What's the gov gonna do jail all of them?
MS vs. DOJ settled immediately after 9/11.. Duh... (Score:3)
Haven't you people been paying attention?
Microsoft vs. DOJ was settled almost immediately after 9/11, from wikipedia "On November 2, 2001, the DOJ reached an agreement with Microsoft to settle the case". That's just enough time for the dust to settle, and for MS and the DOJ to wrangle a deal over permitting the government "backdoor access" to everything on your computer.
Why do you think the US government permitted a convicted monopolist to continue without any punishment?
The US DOJ had won the case, and like Aaron Schwartz, they were attempting to squeeze everything that's important to them from the convicted parth.
Sure, they were ordered to go along with the consent decree, but that's not a real punishment, like the rest of us were expecting.
Remember those NSA keys that were found in the release of Windows that included debugging symbols?...
They were there in MS Windows even BEFORE 9/11....Look it up here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSAKEY [wikipedia.org]
Don't you people pay attention?
Re:MS vs. DOJ settled immediately after 9/11.. Duh (Score:4, Informative)
Sorry for all you conspiracy theorists, but:
Correlation does not imply causation.
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"Conspiracy theorist" is no longer a negative. Turns out a lot of conspiracy theory has been right all along. And even if not all of it is right, it has been demonstrated that the public trust has been completely compromised and so EVERYTHING the government does requires suspicion and scrutiny. It's much more convenient to try to think about other things or to just turn on the TV to see what else is on, but if you think that way -- if you're intentionally "protecting your sanity" by avoiding knowing the
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Looking at the evidence means examining the facts to determine if a direct causal chain exists. Police are looking for evidence such as photographs taken at the time of the robbery showing pictures of an individual holding a gun or stuffing a pillowcase with money.
The police are NOT looking at coincidences like Joe was not at work at the same time the bank robbery occurred.
There is a BIG difference between correlation and causation. You can use correlation to rule out a hypothesis. However you cannot use it
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"....today they monitor everything and everyone. Politicians, organizations, companies, private individuals, even friends in allied countries. In 1985, their long-term goal was "total hearability", i.e. the capability to listen in on all communication around the world.""
Fun reading back in http://it.slashdot.org/story/00/09/26/1836244/ex-nsa-analyst-warns-of-nsa-security-backdoors [slashdot.org]
Now we have the Snowden news to reflect:
Did the risk of a stock crash and very ba
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I don't think George sees such a thing as a crime, so I think the backdoors and dropping the penalties are probably not connected. See also the tobacco company cases and other Clinton leftovers where the penalties were made irrelevant.
Maybe you misunderstand my point... (Score:3)
I don't think it's 'conspiracy' what the government's doing, they're behaving like every person and corp. Simply using legal and financial tools to get what they want.
1) Telecoms granted immunity.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/10/supreme-court-telecoms-win-immunity [guardian.co.uk]
2) Quest CEO claims retaliation by NSA for refusal (old)
http://dailycaller.com/2013/06/13/jailed-qwest-ceo-claimed-that-nsa-retaliated-because-he-wouldnt-participate-in-spy-program/ [dailycaller.com]
Here's my point in relation to Microsoft: That
I'll parrot too (Score:2)
It's only because I believe it will be among the only more peaceful ways we can get things to straighten out.
For hundreds or even thousands of years, business has sought to enjoy favor and support of government. With the help of government, they can more easily monopolize and therefore make more profit. Today is no different... well... maybe a little different.
The thing is, we rely much more heavily on information than ever before. Sure, buying food and other tangibles haven't exactly gone out of style,
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No more than people who report tornadoes are harming the trailer parks that get hit. He's not the damage. He's telling you about the damage.
Summary of new interpretation (Score:2)
Here is a concise summary of the new FISC interpretation.
"Lubricant optional."
First the manufacturing sector was killed. (Score:2)
Unregulated free tarde with repressive low wage regimes meant the American blue color workers never stand a chance.
Now the surveillance system will kill off the American software industry.
Heck of a job, Congress.
What happens to a company that deals in trust (Score:3)
Today, I've uninstalled Skype. And every single one of my colleagues. If trust is all you have as a company, and something like this happens, then you can go bankrupt for all I care.
FISA Court == making it up as we go along (Score:2)
What a joke that gang of brown nosing syncophants is. But thats not even the real problem, since another group of equally obsequious assholes would undoubtedly take their place,
People who GET that high up in the power hierarchy by definition through attrition of anyone else at the hands of various gatekeepers are excellent at figuring out what are the unspoken requirements being put upon them by forces bigger than they are. Then they comply and between the figuring out and the complying not even a shard of
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Kinda puts the whole uproar over Huwaei equipment into perspective doesn't it?
Yes, it does. NSA had proof-positive that running Huawei equipment was a bad idea, because they knew beyond any shadow of a doubt that it was possible to build in back doors.
This is not hypocritical. Hypocritical is when they say "if you don't have anything to hide, you have nothing to worry about" when they themselves are breaking the law to spy on us (and others) and then hiding the fact, albeit not very well at this point. But when they say "there could be back doors in that equipment so we shouldn't use
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It's not so much that Huwaei has backdoors in it's products ... it doesn't have the preferred backdoors.
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