mrbluze writes:
"Edward Snowden's testimony to the European Parliament is online, in which he details how the NSA has pressured first world nations to make laws that allow mass surveillance:
One of the foremost activities of the NSA's FAD, or Foreign Affairs Division, is to pressure or incentivize EU member states to change their laws to enable mass surveillance. Lawyers from the NSA, as well as the UK's GCHQ, work very hard to search for loopholes in laws and constitutional protections that they can use to justify indiscriminate, dragnet surveillance operations that were at best unwittingly authorized by lawmakers. These efforts to interpret new powers out of vague laws is an intentional strategy to avoid public opposition and lawmakers' insistence that legal limits be respected, effects the GCHQ internally described in its own documents as "damaging public debate." ...
Once the NSA has successfully subverted or helped repeal legal restrictions against unconstitutional mass surveillance in partner states, it encourages partners to perform 'access operations.' Access operations are efforts to gain access to the bulk communications of all major telecommunications providers in their jurisdictions, normally beginning with those that handle the greatest volume of communications. Sometimes the NSA provides consultation, technology, or even the physical hardware itself for partners to 'ingest' these massive amounts of data in a manner that allows processing, and it does not take long to access everything. Even in a country the size of the United States, gaining access to the circuits of as few as three companies can provide access to the majority of citizens' communications. In the UK, Verizon, British Telecommunications, Vodafone, Global Crossing, Level 3, Viatel, and Interoute all cooperate with the GCHQ, to include cooperation beyond what is legally required.
Many other points were made, including that whistle-blowing has become more difficult since his revalations, that the espionage is largely economic, and that there are many more revelations yet to be made."
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 09 2014, @11:47AM
gives new meaning to "a honest days work".
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bucc5062 on Sunday March 09 2014, @12:04PM
With all this need to gather large amounts of data, I wonder how much is really being missed that would truly be helpful to governments around the world. Here we have this agency collecting all this data from ordinary citizens in the hopes that it can help catch bad guys while just the other day, two men with altered passports got on a plane that disappeared in the night.
After a while I feel it becomes almost easy to hide in the weeds, for agencies like the NSA make everyone weeds. As has been stated numerous times, while they claim to have stopped terror events, terror events continue and it is simpler to see that they either do nothing to stop plots, or they just don't know about them, because the people hide in plain sight.
The more things change, the more they look the same
(Score: 5, Interesting) by AnythingGoes on Sunday March 09 2014, @12:19PM
Even if the NSA did intercept and know that there were 2 stolen passports on the plane, they would not do anything because:
1. The passengers are not traveling to or from the US
2. If they continue covert surveillance, they might get more information on the sellers and buyers which may be put to better use later (when someone is trying to do something that is detrimental to NSA interests).
3. In any case, why compromise the data collection method as it would be more useful for a later time..
Don't assume that these agencies are not aware, even if they are not doing anything...
(Score: 4, Interesting) by c0lo on Sunday March 09 2014, @06:26PM
So, it is NSA job to spy on (possibly) all the nations in this world, but only for the US benefit. Seems fair?
If this would be true, one has to wonder: had bad it should be the NSA to pass the information? At what percentage from the deaths of 9/11 NSA should choose to pass the information about something nasty?
Currently, about 10% (290 passengers vs 2,977 deaths in 9/11) would fall under the threshold, isn't it?
(Score: 1) by AnythingGoes on Sunday March 09 2014, @08:22PM
Remember, Pearl Harbor was allowed to happen because the intelligence about code breaking Japanese ciphers was deemed to be important, even though the Navy might have gotten a few hours notice before the bombs started falling.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by c0lo on Sunday March 09 2014, @08:30PM
Assume that NSA knew about (which I don't think is a valid assumption, but anyway)...
in the context of your example and knowing the entire world nows NSA is intercepting the communications left, right and center (not a secret anymore), two questions:
1. is US at war with Malaysia so that the information could not be passed via diplomatic means?
2. wouldn't actually it be a good PR move from NSA to pass this information? I mean, c'mon, it would be a perfect example for: "See, we are a good guy"
(Score: 2, Informative) by AnythingGoes on Sunday March 09 2014, @09:06PM
At which point Malaysia asks - how do you know what my internal database shows about the passport on which a person is travelling?
The furore over finding out that Singapore and Australia were facilitating eavesdropping on Internet activity is still quite recent. I think USA saying anything would not be a good PR move, rather it would be a big vindication that the USA has been eavesdropping on those countries and causing diplomatic tension. Remember, this was one of the countries that the Sep 11 terrorists met together before they landed in the USA.
Note, I am not saying that NSA definitely knows, I am only saying that absence of any information does not mean that they are not aware and actively monitoring .
(Score: 3, Insightful) by c0lo on Sunday March 09 2014, @09:19PM
When the info is passed by diplomatic channels (which may be highly inefficient in terms of speed), one just doesn't ask "How do you know?". It's simply... un-diplomatic; do it and you are likely stem such useful "tips" for the future.
That is not news, we all know that (this is not to say that I understand or, even more, accept it).
But... take it this way: when they do spy on most of the world for the benefit of the very-very few (not even for the benefit of entire US population), one shouldn't wonder most of this planet don't accept those actions as "A good thing"™
(Score: 2, Informative) by fleg on Sunday March 09 2014, @10:37PM
"Pearl Harbor was allowed to happen"
that would appear to be a conspiracy theory [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 5, Interesting) by dublet on Sunday March 09 2014, @12:24PM
How about we look at an example of a recent "terror attack" in the UK. The murder of a soldier in Woolwich, London [wikipedia.org]. Turns out, the two guys who did this were known to the UK intelligence agencies [bbc.co.uk]. Not just that, MI5 tried to recruit them [blogspot.co.uk].
In fact, if you go down the long history of MI6, MI6 and the like, you find that as a whole, they've accomplished nothing, if not made things worse. GCHQ was last useful when they were called the Government Code and Cypher School and did code cracking for WW2. The real state secret is that spies aren't very good [bbc.co.uk].
Humm.. there seem to be a few helicopters around today. Hang on, there's someone at the doorNO CARRIER
"If anyone needs me, I'm in the angry dome. [dublet.org]"
(Score: 1) by lothmordor on Tuesday March 11 2014, @02:27PM
It's all about control, but specifically information asymmetry. Whenever one party has more data on the other, there is room for abuse.
You're right, we'll all weeds. Just the tallest get knocked down first.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by BsAtHome on Sunday March 09 2014, @01:27PM
Of course the agencies are performing this all-out operation to get to an economic advantage and the NSA is not alone in that sense. Economic edge has always been the only reasonable explanation to perform such pervasive intrusion in all communications. Not only governments and departments, but the general "competitor", being who ever, doing what ever and residing where ever, are of interest. If not directly to compete against, then as leverage using some form of blackmail to get a backroom deal done.
There are several ways to counter the problem: 1) revolution; go onto the street and destroy the facilities. 2) complete data overload; send them your (garbled) information by snail mail.
Does anyone has the NSA address where I can send my USB sticks with all my porn on them (encrypted, of course)?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 09 2014, @01:48PM
Or just a few megabytes of /dev/random as an ostensibly PGP encrypted block.
More seriously, if the NSA is moving towards analysis of trends, rather than particulars, metadata would be more helpful to them than oceans of plaintext. The metadata reveals a lot of relationship, and network analysis is where they're hot.
What this means for domestic dissidents is probably rather bad news.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Sunday March 09 2014, @02:57PM
And then they ask you for the key and threaten you with jail if you don't give it to them ... I don't think they will accept the answer "that's only random noise" in that case.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 5, Informative) by infodragon on Sunday March 09 2014, @03:29PM
Ladar Levison at LPAC 2013 [youtube.com]
Listen very carefully to the political commentary in the video and below.
From the article
We sure are getting change. However it's nothing new, just more of it and more public.
Don't settle for shampoo, demand real poo!
(Score: 1) by mrbluze on Sunday March 09 2014, @06:38PM
It really is a worry that they will try any dirty trick in the book to get what they want.
Do it yourself, 'cause no one else will do it yourself.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by infodragon on Sunday March 09 2014, @07:01PM
What is more of a worry is that this is nothing new. Politicians have done this since the beginning of politics and the citizens are not responding with the power they have! History is repeating itself and unfortunately the masses are incurably ignorant.
Don't settle for shampoo, demand real poo!
(Score: 5, Insightful) by naubol on Sunday March 09 2014, @04:23PM
End-to-end email encryption.
As Snowden points out in the article, if most modern communications are strongly encrypted end-to-end (I imagine he's alluding to a diffie-hellman key exchange), it is prohibitively costly for the NSA to compromise enough end points to do mass surveillance.
I am not entirely up on the difficulties with propogating this technology, but I feel like it should be done. Surely, a business could encrypt it's emails end-to-end for inter-organizational communication. With many such seeds planted, we could get a system off the ground?
I suppose there are many barriers, such as Gmail is still able to access the clear data and could end up cooperating with the NSA. And, it might be non-trivial for the average home user to setup a private/public key that isn't known to the ISP.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by melikamp on Sunday March 09 2014, @07:29PM
One of the most troubling aspects of the mass surveillance, like that carried out by NSA, is they can see who is talking to whom, and how often. Encrypting the content makes no difference for that. For the purposes of harassing political dissenters, just knowing who they are and who their friends are is quite sufficient.
It is futile to wait for a technological solution to this problem. Sure, we could conceivably build a distributed Internet messaging system with Tor-like onion routing, but it would be slower, less reliable, and harder to use than the conventional email. So only geeks will use it, and it will do nothing to protect 99.9% of the public.
Only a legislative solution has a chance of having consequences of any volume. Rather than requiring communications providers to keep logs (a practice suited only for a police state), we should require them to purge all logs as soon as they derive statistical data from them, so in effect almost instantly. And the stats may only be collected in a way that leaves no hope to make an inference about communications of a person, small business, or household. Only with a court order may the law enforcement start preserving logs of any kind, and they must not preserve any more than is required for the case, and all non-pertinent logs must the purged the instant the case is closed, while the pertinent ones may be kept for a substantial period of time.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by gringer on Monday March 10 2014, @01:06AM
I'm going to fill this out for both of you....
Your post advocates a
(X) technical (X) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting mass surveillance. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spiers can easily use it to harvest personal information
(X) Web searches and other legitimate Internet uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
(X) It will stop surveillance for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(X) Users of the Internet will not put up with it
(X) Google will not put up with it
(X) The NSA will not put up with it
(X) Requires too much cooperation from spy agencies
(X) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(X) Many companies cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential clients
( ) Spy agencies don't care about invalid metadata in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
(X) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(X) Lack of centrally controlling authority for surveillance
(X) Surveillance carried out by foreign countries
(X) Ease of analysing communication metadata
( ) Asshats
(X) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
(X) Huge existing software investment in HTTPS
(X) Susceptibility of protocols other than HTTPS to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(X) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(X) Eternal arms race involved in all blocking approaches
(X) Extreme profitability of surveillance
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
(X) Technically illiterate politicians
(X) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spy agencies
(X) Dishonesty on the part of spy agencies themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
(X) Google
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
(X) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) HTTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Information should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time computer accounts are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my SoylentNews posts
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
[modifications welcome]
(Score: 1) by naubol on Monday March 10 2014, @11:53PM
You made me laugh, but I'm curious if you have any notions that could appear to be solutions in the right light?