Hacker News Reader

A lot of people— sometimes the most technically competent ones— were busily telling them that wholesale surveillance was infeasible... greatly underestimating the available funding and ingenuity.

So it was easy to imagine that only a few things were being intercepted: Communications be an amorphous "bad people". A distant problem for someone else.

In the mean time digital communications devices, cloud services, social media, etc. have become increasingly central to our lives— mediating more and more of our most private communications and storing our most trusted data. Most of it has built on an architectural house of cards which provides little systemic security beyond "hasn't screwed you yet".

The fact that this is happening to _everyone_, that the data is being correlated and stored— perhaps forever— that the argued legal basis of the program itself is cloaked in secrecy, that the public has been denied the ability to question something that potentially impacts the entire world, that the leaders of technology companies that we trust with our most personal data are either clueless or lying— as they make claims that appear to contradict the whitehouse.

And now it's becoming clear enough that its harder to say "well, maybe it isn't really happening" (even as you say "which may ver well be fake!)or "the black box rooms are for someone else" and so instead of ignoring it people are being forced to process the information. Some of them feel violated and upset. "Hasn't screwed you yet" is starting to look a little too weak once considered in the sunshine.

The fact is there are almost no facts. The NSA is allegedly putting some stuff in a database. That's essentially the "facts." We don't know what, or how, or really understand the scope. We don't know if it's real time or archival. There are ZERO technical details.

The only thing that concerns me is that the NSA is actually somewhat incompetent, as those three PowerPoint slides make it seem like the kind of security strategy developed by a 12 year old kid.

I would have assumed that the NSA wouldn't need to ask Facebook or Google to participate. I just assumed that they could get access to any encryption keys necessary through any number of ways, and syphon off the data wholesale at the ISP level. These aren't exactly "secure" organizations. Gmail accounts routinely get hacked by 15 year old Chinese kids trying to steal WoW passwords. I would hope the NSA could do much better.

> The NSA is allegedly putting some stuff in a database.

William Binney, who was at the NSA for 30 years, and who designed big pieces of the infrastructure we're talking about, quit and blew the whistle. If I understand him correctly, every type of electronic communications people use -- email, phone, SMS, IM, fax -- are all stored forever.

There are a million interviews like this: http://youtu.be/TuET0kpHoyM

Edit: and, it seems that Snowden wanted the Washington Post and the Guardian to release all 41 slides, but neither paper had the courage to do it. I'd like to know what was on the other slides. If they had nothing of interest, why were they withheld?

A lot of people— sometimes the most technically competent ones— were busily telling them that wholesale surveillance was infeasible... greatly underestimating the available funding and ingenuity.

The fact that this is happening to _everyone_...

Has this actually changed? Is there any evidence that a U.S. citizen's gmail account, or skype calls, or yahoo searches, or facebook information, has been obtained without a court ordered warrant?

I'm not a U.S. citizen and have always assumed that anything I put on these companies' servers can be read by the U.S. government at will. But if you're a citizen of the land of the free and the home of the brave, I haven't seen anything come out that actually showed your cloud data is being accessed without probable cause being shown, the way it always has been.

> I'm not a U.S. citizen and have always assumed that anything I put on these companies' servers can be read by the U.S. government at will.

Why are you ok with that?

Firstly, I feel like assuming the government has the ability to monitor your communications and acting accordingly is better than assuming they can't and getting worried when it turns out they do.

Secondly, I have zero power to change how the U.S. conducts it's business in this regard so I'm not going to expend energy fighting it, I just take it into account and try not to use these services in a way that I wouldn't want to be discovered.

Thirdly, I do agree that the government (U.S. or mine) should be allowed to get information on me if they show probable cause. I strongly support that. And if I accept people might look at my stuff, then it doesn't really matter in the end why they are doing it- I should still plan accordingly. The Government could very well have probable cause to investigate me even when I've done nothing wrong.

We have the technology to keep what we do online anonymous. Even if the government had no power to check this, stuff like the AOL search data debacle shows there is always a non zero possibility someone could be looking at your unprotected data. If you're worried about that, you should protect your data. That's the only real solution. I agree with people who fight against illegitimate or non transparent ways people try and access that data- but that's not what I rely on to keep my privacy.

The NSA tried to force twitter the list of all the people who subscribed to wikileaks. Twitter refused, but similar requests to gmail etc were being done and probably were'nt refused.

You really believe that the NSA can't get into Twitter's servers if they want to? They just plant someone in security.

What's the easiest way to get into every consumer internet service? Just get someone there on the payroll. That's how it's always been done.

Part of the problem is defining wholesale surveillance. I don't think we are to the point of having everything stored by the NSA (in terms of all content we produce, send, or exchange). I think it is quite likely that the NSA does in fact store their most interesting subset of broad data (cdrs etc) along with a narrower subset of content. If that isn't wholesale surveillance, then we aren't to that level yet.

But in the end what I have said for a while is that it doesn't matter. The NSA doesn't need to store your Facebook stuff on their servers because Facebook is doing it for them. The scary thing is that the interesting subset that the NSA has to pipe back is a small fraction of what they can go through if they ever decide to make you a target of an investigation, so in that sense we are under wholesale surveillance and the NSA is just controlling a very small piece.

data is being correlated and stored

I'm thinking that the volume of data that they would have to store would be reflected in disk drive sales. In other words, it's probably large enough that it would have distorted the market price for hard drives.

Threads like these might as well be generated by an algorithm.

>NSA news >Why is everybody so surprised!? comment

Like clockwork. Let me ask you, though. Do you really think that people only "suddenly" care (with the implication of ignorance or a contradiction on their part) or is it possible that there are nuanced differences between all of the things you casually reference as common knowledge and the current NSA news? I mean, there is speculation and there is confirmation. There are hunches and there are reputable sources. There is pointing somebody to the Room 641A Wikipedia page and there is telling somebody, "hey, look, this guy who was a part of the NSA is not only confirming this, but has sacrificed his career to give us even more information about it."

The public unconscious may have assumed that this was going on, clusters of people may have known, but you're underestimating how people compartmentalize this kind of knowledge. So when we have an event that brings a lot of this knowledge together and to the forefront and gives us something we can point to and talk about (even if it's only a story or a face at this point), I don't think we should pass up the opportunity to develop a louder voice about all of this rather than being cynical AGAIN just because we can't resist putting down public outcry.

What's your question? How someone could possibly dare to care about something they did not care about before? How being pummeled 24/7 with reports about terrists and nucular mushroom clouds could possibly have lead to an atmosphere in which questioning the NSA was not an issue, what with starting wars all over the place and what not?

And what's with "being surprised" somehow being the only time where people to be allowed to discuss things? What's with that "argument" showing up all the time? If that's the only criticism you have, you have none, are you aware of that?

You're a cat.

It is a rhetorical tactic of whisking the issue away. Hey guys, this is old news, lets not talk about it.

The difference now is two issues:

(1) Previously, various official sources have denied this sort of thing was happening. As a specific example, Congress has asked and been told that universal surveillance of US citizens was not occurring, and the plain-text meaning of the law makes universal surveillance of US citizens illegal. (Now we are told that this is contradicted by a secret legal opinion.)

(2) Frog boiling. You can argue that at every point along the way the difference from the previous point is not big enough to cause an outcry. But there is a fallacy in this reasoning: at some point the aggregate IS enough to cause an outcry. Right now, there is an outcry among the media (partly exacerbated because these stories about leaks are contemporaneous with cases of prosecuting the media for leaks), perhaps it will spread to politicians and the citizenry.

(1) The FBI has just recently acknowledged that all (including all U.S. citizens') electronic communications are tapped - the NSA is/was not allowed to eavesdrop on U.S. citizens (with exceptions now seemingly the rule).

(2) You do know that Friedrich Goltz, the creator of the "Boiling Frog" experiment had the brains of the frogs removed, only then these did not jump out of the heating water - I hope you're using the reference to this experiment intentionally that way

What I'm about to say is absolutely nuts, but it could be that this is something the NSA leaked intentionally and the media is running with it for reasons we are not aware of. Despite twitter and the like, the mainstream media is still largely in control of what occupies the "news" and therefore what the otherwise apathetic public is concerned about.

Ok, I'll bite. What sort of hypothetical could warrant such an action, intentionally leaking this story?

Do they want to reassure us of their best efforts in protecting us from terrorism?

I can't imagine a scenario existing where the tables might eventually turn & those who were once appalled & angry that the NSA was so into everything change their minds and become reassured that the gov't is actually on their game & has the means to get some outrageous terrorist threat we couldn't have imagined under control again because of their broad wiretapping capabilities.

Security reassurance is something I hadn't thought of, but I think you are right that this leak goes way too far for that to work. I don't believe this either...but if I wore a tinfoil-hat I would point out that:

1) The NSA "leak" is not really news because it was reported in 2006[1].

2) "Bad" publicity from it is the beginning of Obama's 2nd term downfall which is happening too soon in his 2nd term for us to be angry enough to elect a Libertarian 2016. It'll be an opportune time to usher in an all-talk small government Republican in 2016 to maintain Red State vs. Blue State illusion. Even if the Repub doesn't win, it'll look like the election was a close ideological fight, which is all that matters in the eyes of the public. Of course, all 2016 candidates will continue to support the NSA oversight regardless of what they say during their campaign, so it won't matter whether red or blue gets the oval office.

Like I said... science fiction.

[1]http://yahoo.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-05-10-nsa_x.h...

It's reaching considerably, but the only two reasons that could be true is if the truth is considerably worse (or will be) and the NSA is getting the world used to the idea of pervasive surveillance inch-by-inch (unlikely), or it's not as bad as it's being made out to be and they're framing reality in terms of a more dire alternative. An example of the latter would be that infamous daughter's letter home to parents. [1]

The reality is probably that the unauthorized leak is just that, an unauthorized leak and a lot of people internally are pissed as hell.

The surveillance apparatus in the US and other places is probably more developed than we know about and probably getting more sophisticated.

[1] http://www.snopes.com/college/pranks/letter.asp

> What I'm about to say is absolutely nuts, but it could be that this is something the NSA leaked intentionally

I had a similar thought this morning, not necessarily about the NSA leaking this on purpose, but about how they could turn this into their own advantage. You can already see that Obama has gone on record saying that "we cannot fight against terror without giving away some of our freedoms" (or something very similar to this, I'm too lazy to search for the exact quote), a statement which he couldn't have made before this scandal.

What's really more disconcerting are all those comments (reasonably highly voted) coming from what seem to be genuine American citizens saying something very similar to what Obama is saying: "We can't fight terrorism if we don't let the Government go through our stuff".

A little bit OT, I'm surprised nobody has yet made a parallel between present-days United States and the end times of the Roman Republic. You just have to replace today's "terrorists" with the "Barbarians/Germans" of that time and Julius Caesar with today's over-reaching Government. The bad news is that for all of Brutus's and Cicero's efforts Caesar was followed by future emperor Augustus and the end of the Roman Republic.

We're definitely not immune to collapse. Nuclear weapons just make things a collapse more sticky. Society needs a scapegoat to channel it's inherent violence (ie the Communists of the 50s, the "Barbarians" of Europe as you mentioned & the Terrorists of today) It's not a coincidence. Check out professor Rene Girard[1] from of Stanford if you haven't heard of him. The people who run this show know exactly what they are doing.

[1]http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=rene+girard+scap...

Did you even read the article/mail? The author makes a lucid argument which you totally fail to address:

> And so—before the capability was made public, it _likely_ wouldn't

> have been used against mere political nuisances, at least not without

> the additional cost of creating a solid pretext for the resulting

> intelligence. But now this deterrent is gone: the burden of utter secrecy

> is reduced. And if these programs are not eliminated, greatly curtailed,

> or made moot, we can expect them to be employed much more freely.

Already this is scrolling off the news. It's a safe bet that the vast majority of voters either don't care or don't feel they can change it. If they do try to change it, they put themselves at risk. The surveillance will continue and become more pervasive. As before, if you don't have anything to hide you have nothing to fear, until you do.

How indeed, but people smoke and stuff their mouths full of unhealthy food even if they know it can kill them. Humans aren't always 100% rational beings. When they suddenly get cancer (ie actual proof) they wake up.

Also, this isn't just about the NSA but also about FBI, and that order certainly isn't fake.

>Why do people seem to suddenly care? You can't say it's because, "We have more information," because we really don't. People suddenly care about privacy?

Now, I don't have my finger on the pulse of the everyman... not by a longshot. But within my own echo chamber? all those things were pretty big deals. As you said, nobody else cared, yeah. But they were a big deal to the news I read.

My question to you, is "Does anyone care about this?" I mean, I know I care, and I know my own echo chamber is all shook up, but if my "media bubble" mattered? we'd have been on IPv6 a decade ago.

So yeah. what does Fox news have to say about this? Hm. Looking, it's got something about how Ron Paul is worked up, but the other bits there seem to be about how much jailtime the whistleblower is getting. There's a neutral to positive article about what the NSA does.

Go to npr.org, for the mainstream left, and there's an opinion piece calling Obama "big brother" - so I guess that's something?

We'll see how long the stories last. But yeah... I think you are mistaking your own media bubble for the world as a whole. My guess? The average Facebook user is going to shrug and keep using facebook.

Hell, this is going to be a big deal for me (as most of my customers also live in the same media bubble or echo chamber or whatever you want to call it as I do.) - I don't have any real response, either. (I've been talking about setting up customer portals where you can see all log data I have about you... but that's hard to do well enough that I can honestly say "This is ALL the data I have about you," and it's not like I don't have a whole bunch of other work to do, and really? as a VPS provider, well, most of what I log is access to your serial console and the like. Really, everything the NSA would want would be within your VPS. Well, that and the ip -> billing data mapping, but I think you know I'm keeping that.)

> You send data in plaintext and are surprised that the NSA might be reading/logging it?

I live in Europe, it's true, but even so I would expect my Government not to enter my house without a proper warrant, even though I've only locked the door once when I left for office this morning. And when I'm mentioning "proper warrant" I'm thinking about Stalin's "Great Purge", which did use the Soviet legal system of the time that I find no worse than today's "secret courts". A parody of justice is not justice.

It's not because we have more information, it's that THEY have a lot more information. The amount of our lives that we divulge to or involve the internet has shot up exponentially, certainly since the 1990s but when you think about it, even since, say 2000-2005.