NSA Chief Keith Alexander Takes His PRISM Pitch To YouTube 165
Daniel_Stuckey writes "There's definitely something strange about the video's attempt at looking/sounding like a NOVA episode. Alexander, who defended the agency at Black Hat this summer and recently announced his retirement next year, takes care to emphasize the agency's privacy compliance precautions and oversight. 'We have not had any willful or knowing violations in those programs,' he says referring to sections 215 and 702 of the Patriot Act, which relate to the telephone metadata and PRISM programs respectively. 'There have been [violations] in other programs, but not in those two.'"
Re:Have they not worked it out yet? (Score:0, Interesting)
Ok except the old people who get all their news from the TV. They'd believe it's all a good thing, for king and country and so on. But except for that...
Re:Willful or knowing violations (Score:5, Interesting)
So, just involuntary and ignorant violations, then.
I see what you did here and more people should be doing this, listen to what words he uses and then think, "why is he using these words and could he be trying to sidestep the truth with the use of selected words."
Because that's that he is doing!
Re:Assertion without evidence - dismiss without it (Score:3, Interesting)
Don't forget that they've been hard at work redefining everything from "what torture is" to "what does or does not count as a violation of the law".
You're not violating anything if you've forced people to rewrite the rules for you.
Except people, but it's quite obvious they've never cared about those.
It will take more than that.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:He lied ... (Score:5, Interesting)
. . . because the NSA has collected enough poop on every member of Congress and blackmailed them. J. Edgar Hoover did this back in his days, as well.
Congress is afraid of the NSA.
The entire program is a violation (Score:3, Interesting)
How about that for starters? It's about time to end martial law after 9/11!
The patriot act is about as patriotic as the Federal reserve is federal...
I've worked it out... (Score:5, Interesting)
What makes you so sure?
That they are STILL trying to hide something BIG? Years in the telecom and ISP business, NSA-watching since the Internet went global and way before. I am one of those people who might have become a spook, though I am glad I did not [breakfornews.com]. From its all-to-brief brief mention in David Kahn's The Codebreakers [1967] [wikipedia.org] which I carried around as a kid like some overstuffed bible, my interest was piqued by James Bamford's Puzzle Palace [1982] [wikipedia.org] which introduced the world to the topic of the 'piggyback slurp' and laid out directly NSA's intentions to tap the world. The whole world -- Charter be damned -- from the start.
A few anecdotes from good friends in the telecommunications trade who alluded to special cordoned-off spaces within AT&T's Magens Point cable terminus in St. Thomas US Virgin Islands, drunken conversation in bars with reminders not to speak of such things... a rather suspicious 'underwater landslide' fiber outage between St. Thomas and Puerto Rico c.1995, which I suspected at the time might involve a submarine because a telco friend noticed that after all his voice circuits were back there was an eyebrow-raising 'unusually long period' before the data circuits came up, even though they were physically interspersed and not supposed to be broken out at the carrier level... circumstantial stuff, sure. Pure speculation is as fascinating as the real thing.
Since then, revelations about Room 614A and Hepting vs. AT&T [eff.org], the little mouse who could have roared all the way to the Supreme Court, had they not declined to hear the case.
I'm not talking about individual stakeouts or FISA warrants or occasional 'oopsies' of a few domestic intercepts. I'm discussing large scale Tier 1 total interception of data with selective routing and forwarding of target traffic onto side channels via 'dark' or leased fiber on a scale that is approaching 'total'. This includes voice too: terrestrially trunked cell calls and landline (there is practically no difference these days, it's all turkeyfart compressed).
Which is why I posted here back in June my theory that PRISM slides were made as part of a limited hang-out [slashdot.org]. I came to this conclusion because I found the allegation that Internet service providers named grant direct back-doors to NSA to be preposterous (and still do, too much risk of exposure by now). The purpose of the hang-out was for Google and company to discredit the allegations honesty to relegate it to 'hoax' status... and provide a topic that diverts attention away from the total-tap-slurp operation.
Steve Gibson of Gibson Research has come up with another theory that I find interesting, it may fit Occam's Razor better than my own. He presented it recently in Security Now #408: The State of Surveillance [grc.com], audio and full transcript available. GOOD STUFF. His angle is that "direct access to their servers" means all unencrypted SMTP-mail and HTTP from tap points directly upstream. It is all about fiber and taps. Taps are about splitting light... and that is what prisms do.
If you have a good traffic tap and encrypted intercepts, add a bit of coercion for the providers to divulge their private SSL keys and they can replay the past SSL sessions they have gathered.
It is time for everyone to learn about and implement Perfect Forward Secrecy [qualys.com].
Thar be dragins in our midst. Slay them.
NSA and the Desolation of Smaug [slashdot.org]
Re:He lied ... (Score:5, Interesting)
You poor, clueless fool. A Constitutional Congress is the LAST THING we need right now. If one were convened, who in HELL do you think will actually sit at the table, to author the freaking documents? Do you really want representatives of RIAA to help author, then vote, on a new constitution? Think - that's what God gave you all that gray matter inside your skull for.
What we NEED, is to get rid of all those judges who believe the Constitution to be a "living document". We NEED a lot more real conservatives in judge positions. And, by "conservative", I certainly DO NOT MEAN neoconservatives, corporate lobbyists, or representatives of the military industrial complex. I mean, real, actual conservatives. There are so few of them left today.