WA Post Publishes 4 More Slides On Data Collection From Google, Et Al 180
anagama writes "Lots of new program names, flowcharts, and detail in four previously unreleased PRISM slides published by the Washington Post today. These slides provide some additional detail about PRISM and outline how the NSA gets information from those nine well known internet companies. Apparently, the collection is done by the FBI using its own equipment on the various companies' premises and then passed to the NSA where it is filtered and sorted."
As a concerned Canadian (Score:5, Insightful)
I've already quit Google. Now how about you?
Well that validates the 'weasel word' disclaimers. (Score:5, Insightful)
Google et al. said something, IIRC, like 'we do not collect and pass on any info to the NSA'. Technically true, but also completely irrelevant to whether or not the NSA was actually collecting data.
Asking corps or government about what they do and don't collect is like asking a genie for a wish: one must phrase the question perfectly, or they'll twist it any way they can in order to answer what you asked, but not what you really wanted to know.
Re:confusion (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, I'm glad they're leaking these a bit at a time - in some cases, it's exposing the denials as BS. For example, we've known about the FBI CALEA infrastructure for years. The fact that it's being used to wholesale grab information and pass it to the NSA shows the hair splitting that's going on in the denials.
And actually, the FBI probably does have some CALEA hooks into providers. Google Voice and Skype are almost certainly set up to handle requests, even as the FBI is attempting to get CALEA formally expanded. That's likely not being handled at the ISP level. Further evidence of that? Microsoft wanted to provide statistics about how many requests they get for each service, and the government said "no". The "unnamed sources" complaint from inside Microsoft is that the government doesn't want people to know the extent to which Skype is being targeted.
Illegal power without Constitutional authority (Score:5, Insightful)
This is an unconstitutional power that the USA federal government usurped from the people, it doesn't actually matter how they grab most of it, however what does matter is that they do and it looks like it's not going to stop until the system crashes and there is no more money to run it.
Encrypt your communications, encrypt everything you can. Use self signed certificates, by the way, avoid Certificate Authorities, AFAIC they only make it easier to create a MITM attack, not harder. They can confirm to your device that a certificate is valid even if it is not the certificate that you want to use. Of-course if you use CAs do not let them generate your keys for you.
At this point the behaviour of browsers to treat self-signed certificates as worse than plain text should be suspect to everybody, there is no rational explanation to that sort of attitude except: we don't want you to use certificates that authorities can't revoke and replace.
Re:And how do we know these are legit? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:And how do we know these are legit? (Score:5, Insightful)
That would explain why Biden called Correa for a personal chat, the White House is orchestrating a smear campaign directed not at the content, but at Snowden and Greenwald, and it's pursing Snowden to the ends of the earth to bring him back for "trial" (he has been indicted you know). That all points to the obvious conclusion that Snowden photoshopped some slides? Are you daft?
Lies and very very serious problems (Score:4, Insightful)
Lies, Facebook in particular lied about this, even as Obama was confirming it and claiming a [non-existent] warrant is needed to access this data:
"The search request, known as a “tasking,” can be sent to multiple sources — for example, to a private company and to an NSA access point that taps into the Internet’s main gateway switches. A tasking for Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple and other providers is routed to equipment installed at each company. This equipment, maintained by the FBI, passes the NSA request to a private company’s system. Depending on the company, a tasking may return e-mails, attachments, address books, calendars, files stored in the cloud, text or audio or video chats and “metadata” that identify the locations, devices used and other information about a target."
I don't care about the pathetic protections put in place for Americams, I'm not American. I care that these services hand my data to a military structure that works against me. Worse they inevitably turn America into a dictatorship.
"Before an analyst may conduct live surveillance using PRISM, a second analyst in his subject area must concur. "
So any boss that oversees 2 analysts can spy on Americans, simply because he can order 2 of them to concur. And the big boss, General Alexander can even waive this, because its HIS policy not law, i.e. no protections at all.
You want to fix this? Well try running for President and sacking the NSA chief. He'll have record of every mistake you've made, detailed knowledge of who backs you, the campaign team, private communications, strategies, everything. They've made a dictator and people like Dianne Feinstein are so stupid and incompetent they can't see why they've done so much damage.
Completely flipping the system in secret, the system that's kept the US a democracy for the longest time any democracy has survived so far. Those little shits just threw it away.
Re:And how do we know these are legit? (Score:3, Insightful)
Dan Rather showed what he knew to be a fake memo to smear Bush during an election. Even with overwhelming evidence that he lied Rather continued to state that the memo was true. He finally lost his job due to this.
NBC doctored audio to show Gerorge Zimmerman is a racist, once the full audio came out their trick was shown to be an outright lie.
The CNN woman that moderated the debate between Romney and Obama outright lied in the middle of the debate to protect Obama, a week later she admitted to lying, she was congratulated as a hero in CNN.
This week, MSNBC did a story how the "star witness" in the Zimmerman trial did a great job and it was such a slam dunk that Zimmerman will obviously be found guilty, this should be confusing to anyone that listened to what that witness said because the opposite is true.
ABC for their top story a week ago told about thunderstorms in DC, the same time as the NSA information was coming out and heraings about it were going on in the Senate, but the important story was a storm in DC.
Not sure why you would assume any mainstream media would be honest at any time anymore. There is no news outlets in the USA anymore, if you think there are you are biased and found one that only reports stories you think are true.
Re:confusion (Score:2, Insightful)
We know we're being watched isnt that enough? Who cares what they call all their programs and who they belong to. They have access to our personal computers, to every chat or email you send. Who cares about semantics?
Re:As a concerned Canadian (Score:4, Insightful)
The real problem here is not the companies, it's the government.
Oh please, the companies write the rules for the government to enforce. The problem here is us. We let them do it. And only dangerous people should be in prison.
LOL (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:As a concerned Canadian (Score:4, Insightful)
You've quit on Google, but Google hasn't quit on you.
Re:confusion (Score:5, Insightful)
Sometimes I have to wonder if this lack of concern isn't all our fault.
Before Snowden:
Wild-haired man: The gub'ment be spying on us! The NSA, the CIA, the FBI; they all are reading our emails, monitoring our online chat and seeing all the websites we go to! And all of them telecom and internet companiers are involved too!
Common citizen: Oh, you wacky nutcase; you've been going on for years about this. Where's your proof of this great conspiracy, huh? They aren't spying on us! This is America and that sort of thing doesn't happen here!
After Snowden: /somebody/ a while ago. Anyway, it's been going on forever and the only thing different now is that its out in the open, so why make a fuss about it now?
Wild-haired man: The gub'ment be spying on us! They see everything you do online, everything! And the big internet and telecom companies are in cahoots with them! And look, now I got irrefutable proof!
Common citizen: Well, of course they were spying on us. Hasn't this been known for years? I remember hearing about it from
It's sort of like crying wolf, except the warnings were always true. Instead of making people disregard you, it instead acclimatizes them to the threat to the point where it doesn't seem dangerous anymore (also seen in sci-fi movies where the aliens use conspiracy theories to make people ignore the threat of a coming alien invasion).
Perhaps we should dub this tactic "Snowden's Law"?
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: Illegal power without Constitutional authority (Score:4, Insightful)
How long before we find out that CAs are part of the whole spying industry also?
There is very high likelihood that they are . Verisign was founded by a group of ex CIA/FBI directors back in the 90's, who resigned to start Verisign. This happened after the Clipper chip program got canned. (The US government wanted to build a legal backdoor into every computer running the Clipper cryptographic system.)
Its the same reason that they bought Thawte from Mark Shuttleworth for about a $1 billion dollars. He controlled a significant amount of HTTPS encryopted HTTPS traffic via his start-up.
I suspect that Most HTTPS traffic can be decrypted on the fly by the US spy organisations.