7 ms·

Everyone should see this relevant NYT short about William Binney, a 30 year veteran crypto-mathematician for the NSA who designed the program that is now being

Everyone should see this relevant NYT short about William Binney, a 30 year veteran crypto-mathematician for the NSA who designed the program that is now being used by the NSA to spy on us all: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/opinion/the-national-security-agencys-domestic-spying-program.html http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/opinion/the-national-secur... His story was corroborated by Mark Klein, a former ATT employee who amassed evidence that the NSA was, with ATT's complicity, running a data-gathering node in room 641A of ATT's San Francisco building: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Klein http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Klein This is not some conspiracy theory. It's happening, and no one seems to care.

Retric 13y ago
I remember my father saying he updated some win16 code to win32 bit code which did this while working for AT&T. (Copy meta data for every call) At the time he said nobody would say what the code was supposed to do just that that they needed it to be updated. As such I suspect this type of "Passive spying" has probably been going on for a long time. As a side note there are plenty of legitimate reasons to have this metadata for some phone numbers over the past X days. I suspect the original choice was simptly to give them everything vs trying to support these types of lookups after the fact. PS: AT&T was for a while providing a lot of government services for free simply because they could not get billing correct and it was nobody's job to fix it. Which is why I think this could have easily stared as a hack to solve a technical problem vs. the sort of big brother spying that pops up.
- notdrunkatall 13y ago
  According to Binney, the NSA's been mining data illegally since shortly before 9/11.
  - DanBC 13y ago
    According to the EU parliament ECHELON was going on for a while. Monitoring of citizen phone calls was happening since at least the '90s. And that was the content of the calls, not just the addressing data. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON)
- IvyMike 13y ago
  I'm a little skeptical. Not because of the spying--that I fully believe. But I have a hard time believing that AT&T, the inventors of UNIX, would write large-scale software on pre-NT Windows. Maybe something got crossed in the retelling.
  - wtn 13y ago
    Alcatel-Lucent owns Bell Labs today.
    - IvyMike 13y ago
      I fail to see how this could be relevant.
      - kamaal 13y ago
        AT&T didn't invent Unix. A bunch of smart guys in a department owned AT&T invented the earliest versions of Unix. Unix of those days by any measure won't be much useful to do anything. Unix is a ecosystem developed over decades. Coming to using Windows NT, its likely some 'real manager' is running the show there. Whose only criteria for using a technology is having the ability to hire the cheapest resource on the market. If you were to go ask the person, he won't be able to list 5 differences between Windows and Unix.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
spodek 13y ago
> "This is not some conspiracy theory. It's happening, and no one seems to care." Do you ever feel like a frog recognizing the water is boiling and you don't know what to do? Or like you're looking at what Jefferson, Adams, Washington, and the other founders fought and wrote the Declaration and Constitution over, but everybody is acting like it's easier just to pay the stamp tax? Or both?
- smacktoward 13y ago
  Unlike the Founders, we have tools at our disposal to change things. We elect our own representatives. We are free to organize an opposition. We have a free press -- and in the age of easy and cheap online publishing, that's a power that anyone can exercise, not just media barons. We have lots of levers short of revolution that we can push on to move policy in directions more respectful of the rule of law. The only question is whether anyone cares enough to use them.
  - bobwaycott 13y ago
    Fairly serious question: You really think that actually has any significant probability of working in the US?
    - rayiner 13y ago
      Would it work if people tried? I bet it would. Will people try? No, because they don't care about this issue. The refrain of democracy being broken in America is getting old. It's not broken--you just don't like that the majority has a long list of issues it cares more about than privacy. We are getting the things people care about: legalized gay marriage, continued access to abortion, welfare spending, social services for the elderly. We're fighting the good fight on issues that aren't quite there yet: universal healthcare, etc. Democracy is alive and kicking in America.
      - brymaster 13y ago
        You're describing wedge issues that politicians use to get people to fight red vs blue. Anyone that has ever brought up the subject of privacy and domestic spying has been lambasted as a conspiracy nut.
dm2 13y ago
"This is not some conspiracy theory. It's happening, and no one seems to care." Maybe people are afraid. If you accuse the NSA of committing crimes that are only slightly unethical (wiretapping US citizens), then you're instantly on "the list" of arguably the most powerful organization in the world. Not only would the story just end up being, "oh well, greater good", but the NSA would just slightly back off of the monitoring, then make sure that future leaks such as this do not happen again. They are not an evil nor dark organization, just one with a very important mission, and when you have the real big picture on the table sometimes the unethical option is required to maintain dominance and security. Imagine having the responsibility of protecting a country that is the #1 target in the world, that has 300+ million people within its borders that have the potential to cause major harm to the country, its citizens, and its allies. The NSA doesn't have a choice but to do everything in its power to maintain information dominance over the world. The NSAs mission statement requires it to protect the US and provide foreign sigint. They're technically not allowed to spy on US citizens but what if it was absolutely required to protect the country? How many people are really qualified to make that decision?
- precisioncoder 13y ago
  Heh, so you're saying the US is too big to fail? Maybe it should be split up into smaller countries to avoid future problems of that sort...
- notdrunkatall 13y ago
  My ethical concerns about what the NSA's doing aside, this is still a democracy, and there are established channels which the NSA is, by law, required to go through in order to do things like this. They're called FISC courts, and FISA warrants are what they're supposed to acquire before spying on American citizens. We have that requirement for very good reasons, and it should neither be treated lightly nor circumvented at will by the Administration or any of its agencies. We're a democracy dammit, or have you forgotten what that actually means?
  - dm2 13y ago
    Our elected representatives might have decided that bypassing the FISC courts were acceptable. Is that not a democracy?
javajosh 13y ago
> This is not some conspiracy theory. It's happening, and no one seems to care. It's true that no-one seems to care. And what's more, if you do care others will look at you funny, like you're paranoid. "Why do you care so much about anonymity? You don't have anything to hide!" Literally the only argument that I've ever had luck with is to ask them whether they are okay with the police searching their house whenever they want. After all, you don't have anything to hide, right? This takes them aback. I ask them, so why do you think we need search warrants? And most people agree that we need them, but clearly they've not thought a lot about why we need them, or what life would be like without them. The odd thing about the situation is that we have a population which has it's head on pretty straight when it comes to search and seizure in the physical domain, and totally uncaring about whether these rules are applied to the digital domain. It's as if information on paper is some sacred thing, but information on disk platters is free for the taking. Very, very strange. My hope is that, like with pot legalization and gay marriage in many states, public awareness will crystalize and coalesce on the rational position. This is actually a very simple situation where there is unequal application of the 4th amendment depending on media of all things, and this is totally, completely insane.
- rayiner 13y ago
  The difference between search and seizure of things in your house and your digital information is that the things in your house are on your property. Your digital information is on someone else's property. I don't think you can accuse the public of not taking the "rational position" here. Indeed, I think technologists often take a romanticized position here, ignoring the mechanical nature of the systems in question. People rationally perceive that there is nothing private about who you call or what websites you visit (I mean, how well can Facebook track where you go?) This is quite different from say a conversation one might have in one's home, on one's own property, with the only parties to the conversation being those within one's circle of trust.
  - javajosh 13y ago
    The implication of your position is that we either have an electronically connected society, or we have an expectation of privacy, but not both. The nature of technology in general, and the internet in particular, involves the co-mingling of property on the site of some 3rd party for the benefit of all. Let us just talk about the content that I write, such as anything that I've written and left in Gmail drafts. The fact that Google hosts that data does not give them ownership of that data, nor does it confer the right to access that data for any reason. The data in my drafts folder is exactly the same as data in a paper journal that I have in my house, and is protected by exactly the same law, the 4th amendment. The details of it's representation, even it's physical location, are unimportant. Extending the 4th Amendment in this way is the only rational thing to do. The only reason why this is not the default is that the public is generally ignorant of both a) how these systems work and b) how they are systematically exploited by government. The reason the government wants access is because it is a convenient and cheap way to achieve some aspects of security. In the post-Bush era, exercising restraint on one's own power is no longer the "done" thing - just ask Cameron Ortiz.
samstave 13y ago
Thats the same building that Twitter HQ was in for years... and with the library of congress archiving all tweets - you think all this BS is unrelated?

Retric 13y ago

I remember my father saying he updated some win16 code to win32 bit code which did this while working for AT&T. (Copy meta data for every call) At the time he said nobody would say what the code was supposed to do just that that they needed it to be updated. As such I suspect this type of "Passive spying" has probably been going on for a long time. As a side note there are plenty of legitimate reasons to have this metadata for some phone numbers over the past X days. I suspect the original choice was simptly to give them everything vs trying to support these types of lookups after the fact. PS: AT&T was for a while providing a lot of government services for free simply because they could not get billing correct and it was nobody's job to fix it. Which is why I think this could have easily stared as a hack to solve a technical problem vs. the sort of big brother spying that pops up.

notdrunkatall 13y ago
According to Binney, the NSA's been mining data illegally since shortly before 9/11.
- DanBC 13y ago
  According to the EU parliament ECHELON was going on for a while. Monitoring of citizen phone calls was happening since at least the '90s. And that was the content of the calls, not just the addressing data. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON)
IvyMike 13y ago
I'm a little skeptical. Not because of the spying--that I fully believe. But I have a hard time believing that AT&T, the inventors of UNIX, would write large-scale software on pre-NT Windows. Maybe something got crossed in the retelling.
- wtn 13y ago
  Alcatel-Lucent owns Bell Labs today.
  - IvyMike 13y ago
    I fail to see how this could be relevant.
    - kamaal 13y ago
      AT&T didn't invent Unix. A bunch of smart guys in a department owned AT&T invented the earliest versions of Unix. Unix of those days by any measure won't be much useful to do anything. Unix is a ecosystem developed over decades. Coming to using Windows NT, its likely some 'real manager' is running the show there. Whose only criteria for using a technology is having the ability to hire the cheapest resource on the market. If you were to go ask the person, he won't be able to list 5 differences between Windows and Unix.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

spodek 13y ago

> "This is not some conspiracy theory. It's happening, and no one seems to care." Do you ever feel like a frog recognizing the water is boiling and you don't know what to do? Or like you're looking at what Jefferson, Adams, Washington, and the other founders fought and wrote the Declaration and Constitution over, but everybody is acting like it's easier just to pay the stamp tax? Or both?

smacktoward 13y ago
Unlike the Founders, we have tools at our disposal to change things. We elect our own representatives. We are free to organize an opposition. We have a free press -- and in the age of easy and cheap online publishing, that's a power that anyone can exercise, not just media barons. We have lots of levers short of revolution that we can push on to move policy in directions more respectful of the rule of law. The only question is whether anyone cares enough to use them.
- bobwaycott 13y ago
  Fairly serious question: You really think that actually has any significant probability of working in the US?
  - rayiner 13y ago
    Would it work if people tried? I bet it would. Will people try? No, because they don't care about this issue. The refrain of democracy being broken in America is getting old. It's not broken--you just don't like that the majority has a long list of issues it cares more about than privacy. We are getting the things people care about: legalized gay marriage, continued access to abortion, welfare spending, social services for the elderly. We're fighting the good fight on issues that aren't quite there yet: universal healthcare, etc. Democracy is alive and kicking in America.
    - brymaster 13y ago
      You're describing wedge issues that politicians use to get people to fight red vs blue. Anyone that has ever brought up the subject of privacy and domestic spying has been lambasted as a conspiracy nut.

dm2 13y ago

"This is not some conspiracy theory. It's happening, and no one seems to care." Maybe people are afraid. If you accuse the NSA of committing crimes that are only slightly unethical (wiretapping US citizens), then you're instantly on "the list" of arguably the most powerful organization in the world. Not only would the story just end up being, "oh well, greater good", but the NSA would just slightly back off of the monitoring, then make sure that future leaks such as this do not happen again. They are not an evil nor dark organization, just one with a very important mission, and when you have the real big picture on the table sometimes the unethical option is required to maintain dominance and security. Imagine having the responsibility of protecting a country that is the #1 target in the world, that has 300+ million people within its borders that have the potential to cause major harm to the country, its citizens, and its allies. The NSA doesn't have a choice but to do everything in its power to maintain information dominance over the world. The NSAs mission statement requires it to protect the US and provide foreign sigint. They're technically not allowed to spy on US citizens but what if it was absolutely required to protect the country? How many people are really qualified to make that decision?

precisioncoder 13y ago
Heh, so you're saying the US is too big to fail? Maybe it should be split up into smaller countries to avoid future problems of that sort...
notdrunkatall 13y ago
My ethical concerns about what the NSA's doing aside, this is still a democracy, and there are established channels which the NSA is, by law, required to go through in order to do things like this. They're called FISC courts, and FISA warrants are what they're supposed to acquire before spying on American citizens. We have that requirement for very good reasons, and it should neither be treated lightly nor circumvented at will by the Administration or any of its agencies. We're a democracy dammit, or have you forgotten what that actually means?
- dm2 13y ago
  Our elected representatives might have decided that bypassing the FISC courts were acceptable. Is that not a democracy?

javajosh 13y ago

> This is not some conspiracy theory. It's happening, and no one seems to care. It's true that no-one seems to care. And what's more, if you do care others will look at you funny, like you're paranoid. "Why do you care so much about anonymity? You don't have anything to hide!" Literally the only argument that I've ever had luck with is to ask them whether they are okay with the police searching their house whenever they want. After all, you don't have anything to hide, right? This takes them aback. I ask them, so why do you think we need search warrants? And most people agree that we need them, but clearly they've not thought a lot about why we need them, or what life would be like without them. The odd thing about the situation is that we have a population which has it's head on pretty straight when it comes to search and seizure in the physical domain, and totally uncaring about whether these rules are applied to the digital domain. It's as if information on paper is some sacred thing, but information on disk platters is free for the taking. Very, very strange. My hope is that, like with pot legalization and gay marriage in many states, public awareness will crystalize and coalesce on the rational position. This is actually a very simple situation where there is unequal application of the 4th amendment depending on media of all things, and this is totally, completely insane.

rayiner 13y ago
The difference between search and seizure of things in your house and your digital information is that the things in your house are on your property. Your digital information is on someone else's property. I don't think you can accuse the public of not taking the "rational position" here. Indeed, I think technologists often take a romanticized position here, ignoring the mechanical nature of the systems in question. People rationally perceive that there is nothing private about who you call or what websites you visit (I mean, how well can Facebook track where you go?) This is quite different from say a conversation one might have in one's home, on one's own property, with the only parties to the conversation being those within one's circle of trust.
- javajosh 13y ago
  The implication of your position is that we either have an electronically connected society, or we have an expectation of privacy, but not both. The nature of technology in general, and the internet in particular, involves the co-mingling of property on the site of some 3rd party for the benefit of all. Let us just talk about the content that I write, such as anything that I've written and left in Gmail drafts. The fact that Google hosts that data does not give them ownership of that data, nor does it confer the right to access that data for any reason. The data in my drafts folder is exactly the same as data in a paper journal that I have in my house, and is protected by exactly the same law, the 4th amendment. The details of it's representation, even it's physical location, are unimportant. Extending the 4th Amendment in this way is the only rational thing to do. The only reason why this is not the default is that the public is generally ignorant of both a) how these systems work and b) how they are systematically exploited by government. The reason the government wants access is because it is a convenient and cheap way to achieve some aspects of security. In the post-Bush era, exercising restraint on one's own power is no longer the "done" thing - just ask Cameron Ortiz.

samstave 13y ago

Thats the same building that Twitter HQ was in for years... and with the library of congress archiving all tweets - you think all this BS is unrelated?