25 ms·

Stellar Wind (code name)

404 points by bascule 13y ago

coherentpony 13y ago
Can we please stop with the politics/outrage posts? If I wanted to see articles recycled from /r/politics, I would read reddit.
- Tangaroa 13y ago
  This one actually has techie relevance, but I hear what you're saying. The political links and their duplicates and their duplicates are drowning out the technology posts, even on /classic.
darxius 13y ago
I wonder if this means we'll see the rise of huge botnets and networks calling each other and using flagged words just to saturate the data the NSA is picking up.
micah94 13y ago
Thanks for the reminder. I almost forgot.
caycep 13y ago
The whole "pizza case" phenomenon is hilarious. ironic but hilarious. I'm sure there are tons of ethical implications, and the NSA has its share of shady activities, but part of it seems to be akin to that final scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark when the government loses the powerful, dangerous artifact in some nameless Army warehouse filled with tons of beef jerky or whatever it was.
- sharkweek 13y ago
  the pizza case thing reminds me of the scene in Arrested Development "Nope... you're looking at balls" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsgOzLdWdgU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsgOzLdWdgU
voxmatt 13y ago
I'm glad someone posted this. My immediate thought after reading the breaking news about the massive phone surveillance was, "wait, did people not think this was happening?" I'm really not a conspiracy nut, but that Wired article and the NYTimes reporting made it pretty clear that the Gov't is pretty much collecting everything they can get their hands on. Glad to finally see some outrage though. Legitimate question: what's new about what is breaking in the news right now? Merely confirmation that the NSA is conducting indiscriminate phone-taps?
- addflip 13y ago
  Legitimate question: what's new about what is breaking in the news right now? Exactly! I was wondering the same thing.
  - roc 13y ago
    Official documentation, plus the notion that a Judge actually signed off on this nonsense?
  - knowtheory 13y ago
    The Guardian posted the FISA court order up on DocumentCloud. Check it out: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2013/jun/06/verizon-telephone-data-court-order http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2013/jun/06/veri...
- tomchristie 13y ago
  Journalist Glenn Greenwald obtained documents from a leak that confirm the NSA has secretly been requiring Verizon (and presumably the same for other networks) to provide the complete information (location, duration, id) of every single call, national or international, on an ongoing daily basis. There is no discrimination - this is everybody, all the time. That's kind of a big deal. It's also pretty damn brave of whoever leaked the document. His original article is here... http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone-records-verizon-court-order http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone-record...
Swizec 13y ago
Sometimes I wonder what I'd have to write online to get a knock on the door. Then I remember I still want to visit the US some time. It pretty much kills all the best ideas.
- roc 13y ago
  Last we had a news story, the bar was as low as: "Free this week, for quick gossip/prep before I go and destroy America?"
- pekk 13y ago
  Unless the best ideas involve terrorist groups, that's your problem
hanifvirani 13y ago
The worst thing is that people will talk about all this for a few days and then go back to living their lives. I hope I am wrong though.
js2 13y ago
M-x spook http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Mail-Amusements.html http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Mai...
chm 13y ago
I've always wondered, as a Canadian whose communications are most assuredly intercepted by the US gov., why such spying is not considered an act of war? If I go to the US and "physically" spy, I'll get prosecuted, won't I? To be clear: I don't want to go to war.
- bgilroy26 13y ago
  You're right, with one big caveat. All international slights are weighed against the cost of losing the offending country as a trade partner. This is how most peace is maintained these days.
  - Pxtl 13y ago
    I assume this is how China can functionally be running an active and violent war of hacking with no repercussions.
    - X-Istence 13y ago
      As if the US doesn't do the same thing ...
    - Gigablah 13y ago
      Violent? How so?
tjoff 13y ago
You do know that the internet exists outside of the US, right?
- __xtrimsky 13y ago
  Are you sure ? I thought they had only minitel.
- bascule 13y ago
  Yes, you know that the Internet that exists outside the US is connected to the US, right? Which belies one of the most insidious parts of Stellar Wind... that the NSA could've just tapped the cables which link the US to other countries, but they chose to spy directly on US citizens as well.
- chaz 13y ago
  The NSA's charter is to monitor foreign communications and intelligence, so yes, the whole point of what they're doing is because the internet exists outside of the US.
- lostlogin 13y ago
  Yeah, but they've got their claws in down here with their ping-pong ball monitoring centre in Waihopai. Echelon, we in whether we like it or not - New Zealand is the lapdog I'm part of. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON
B-Con 13y ago
It is interesting what the media and public choose to be concerned by. 15 years ago I would've guessed that this sort of wide-spread operation would never have been tolerated by either. Post 9/11, it was surely scandalous when ATT got caught providing taps, but honestly, it didn't seem that anyone cared that much. Not enough to put strong pressure on the government to, you know, stop. At this point, I'm convinced that almost nobody actually cares. (I'm talking about practical concern, not just a vague sense of "I don't approve".) Interestingly, this has roughly coincided with the growth of cloud services. When using a cloud service, there is some level of conscious acceptance that someone else is processing your data and can see what you're doing, and you're more-or-less OK with it. I wouldn't have guessed that people would be so eager to use cloud services whole-sale. I think that at this point, people tend to assume that anything that leaves their computer will/can be inspected, and for the large part they're OK with it.
- nsxwolf 13y ago
  I don't know what could possibly done. If the legislature or courts got involved and told the NSA to stop, they'd just say "Ok, sure" and then continue on in secret.
  - sfx 13y ago
    They could cut their funding and/or use the data center for parts. That data center alone costs billions to build, it makes me uneasy knowing my tax dollars goes to abuses of power like this.
brown9-2 13y ago
It's useful when discussing this topic to break the word "spy" down into more discrete terms to understand exactly what we are discussing. I found this article to be useful in differentiating the various terms: On its face, the document suggests that the U.S. government regularly collects and stores all domestic telephone records. I use the caveat because there are several ways to interpret it, assuming it is real. (It looks real.) A few definitions: to "collect" means to gather and store; to "analyze" means that a computer or human actually does something with the records; to "intercept" means that a computer or human actually listens to or records calls. ... The NSA, under the FISA Amendments Act, is able to analyze metadata, like incoming and outgoing call records, so long as the Attorney General certifies that a particular set of information is useful for reasons of national security. Then, the NSA asks the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to order that a company comply. As that bill was being ironed out, this step was requested by private companies because they wanted protection from lawsuits in case innocents — or millions of innocents — found that the NSA had gathered their call information. My own understanding is that the NSA routinely collects millions of domestic-to-domestic phone records. It does not do anything with them unless there is a need to search through them for lawful purposes. That is, an analyst at the NSA cannot legally simply perform random searches through the stored data. He or she needs to have a reason, usually some intelligence tip. That would allow him or her to segregate the part of the data that's necessary to analyze, and proceed from there. In a way, it makes sense for the NSA to collect all telephone records because it can't know in advance what sections or slices it might need in the future. It does not follow that simply because the NSA collects data that it is legal for the NSA to use the data for foreign intelligence or counter-terrorism analysis. http://theweek.com/article/index/245228/the-fbi-collects-all-telephone-records http://theweek.com/article/index/245228/the-fbi-collects-all... This is written specifically about the telephone call metadata, but being able to differentiate exactly what is collected about Internet traffic would also aid this discussion. Unfortunately this would only be possible if the government was more transparent about what is being collected.
- Ziomislaw 13y ago
  is the 'reason' even verified? is that not just a pretty way of saying "they can't browse through the data, unless they have a reason - any reason will do - feel secure:) "
Casseres 13y ago
Stuff like this does not surprise me. Well, actually it does. It makes me question my assumption that the U.S. government has been doing stuff like this all along. If this leak is legitimate, then one can reason that the NSA didn't just acquire all of this data by itself in the past, but that they asked permission for it in the present.
JPKab 13y ago
My brother worked for years in the intelligence community. One of the common stereotypes within the IC regards the fact that Mormons are heavily overrepresented, for various reasons that involve foreign language skills from mission trips, a reputation for respecting authority, abstinence from drugs/alcohol, family connections, ease of gaining security clearances, etc. The stereotype in the IC regarding Mormons is they never "question." The dozens of friends I have that work in the IC say that the stereotype is accurate. Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/11-surprising-things-you-didnt-know-about-mormons-2011-6?op=1 http://www.businessinsider.com/11-surprising-things-you-didn... " The apparent incorruptibility of Mormons' moral righteousness make them ideal candidates for the nation's law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Mormons are disproportionately represented in the CIA. A recruiter told the Salt Lake Tribune that returned Mormon missionaries are valued for their foreign language skills, abstinence from drugs and alcohol, and respect for authority " I wonder if this has bearings on constructing the new data center in Utah?
- batbomb 13y ago
  Nuclear physics and nuclear energy as well. The data center in Utah has more to do with cheap land, low cost, and low likelihood of natural disaster.
  - SoftwareMaven 13y ago
    That is the reason for the monstrosity across the valley. As far as I know, there won't be a large local contingent working on the data.
  - regehr 13y ago
    A major natural disaster is a certainty in the SLC area: we're surrounded by active faults.
- rollo_tommasi 13y ago
  It also has a bearing on the sorry state of U.S. human intelligence, since Mormons make terrible interlocutors with foreign informants.
alexvr 13y ago
Does anyone know how they do this, technically, and to what extent? Does Google just feed them billions of emails, or what? Do they type my name into a form on Amazon.com to get SSH access my EC2 server? And how the hell do they see my finances? Do all of those terms of service agreements say, "By the way, we give your private information to the government without question" ??? At first I thought it didn't matter that they can see what I do, because if I store a movie of my underground lair with nukes and a few F-22s in Google Drive, they can't use the evidence against me in court unless they get a warrant. But let's be real: if you've got a movie of yourself shooting some guy in the face in Google Drive, they're going to find a way to get that warrant before you delete the movie. And they'll have a copy of it to show the judge. You don't even know they've seen your not-so-secret stuff. The fact that they do this in a clandestine manner effectively makes it unconstitutional since the warrant protection is easy for them to circumvent.
- lolcraft 13y ago
  The CIA doesn't ask for judicial warrants, and doesn't have to. Extrajudicial murder is legal. Al-Awlaki was murdered on suspicion that there was an imminent threat to US persons. No warrant obtained. Al-Awlaki's son was murdered, again without warrant, because of complicated reasons that boil down to his last name being Awlaki. Any of those videos by themselves would be enough for you to be included on the kill list, and executed. No court would have to be involved. You could also be executed by mistake, like Awlaki's son, or many Yemeni children that were so. Or being kidnapped in Italy by CIA agents into a plane, and imprisoned without trial. Or you could be an Al-Jazeera journalist, being arrested by the Pakistani army, then imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay for six years without any crime charged against you, like Sami al-Hajj. It's all fair game. Oh, don't forget that you could lose your job as a politician because you hired a prostitute, and the Mormon CIA doesn't like that. Definitely fair.
  - anonymous 13y ago
    So it's like the KGB, but worse (the KGB didn't kill careers because you had sex). Living in a country from the former communist bloc, I can tell you what the endgame looks like. It looks like 60% of the population willingly collaborating with the security service and writing reports for them. If I were American, the first thing I'd do is convert to mormonism.
TallGuyShort 13y ago
>> "According to Mueller, approximately 99 percent of the cases led nowhere, but "it's that other 1% that we've got to be concerned about"" No, it's the 99% of cases that were completely unwarranted in the first place that we've actually got to be concerned about.
kunai 13y ago
What is truly a scary thought is if the vast, mindless mass of people easily swayed by consumerism, advertisement and buzz, talk about this for about two weeks and then forget the whole thing, screaming "We have NOTHING to hide!" as a logically flawed and incredibly poor excuse. The entire premise that democracy would work is flawed. Take Turkey. A ravaged, torn, depressed state, brought back to life by a fucking dictator, Kemal Ataturk. And now? Riots and revolution are taking place on the streets of Istanbul. I'm not saying dictatorship is the best idea, but a good, conservatively Green or Green Libertarian government is the only path to resolution. But since the United States mass public is uneducated and apathetic (unlike how it used to be 300 years ago, and also markedly unlike quite a few in Europe who actually give a fuck about their rights), don't expect it to happen any time soon. And for those who think this is elitism: We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are, One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. - Tennyson
- rayiner 13y ago
  > What is truly a scary thought is if the vast, mindless mass of people... This is why privacy advocates (and libertarians more generally), can't get more popular traction: the incredibly derisive and arrogant tone with which they address their fellow citizens, and their flippant, dismissive attitude towards democracy. Why should I listen to the opinions of someone who calls my parents, most of my friends, my in-laws, my wife, etc, "mindless"? Just because they have different priorities and care about different issues, or (gasp!) have different ideas about the appropriate boundaries of police surveillance?
  - kiba 13y ago
    Why should I listen to the opinions of someone who calls my parents, most of my friends, my in-laws, my wife, etc, "mindless"? Just because they have different priorities and care about different issues, or (gasp!) have different ideas about the appropriate boundaries of police surveillance? It is not that you are mindless, it is that we are too dumb to contain the sums of human knowledge within our head. Individually, we can be great at disciplines that we specialize in. But expecting us to decide competent government officials to represent us? That's impossible.
clarkston 13y ago
Introducing the World's First Private Cloud Appliance. http://www.starkitsystems.com/ http://www.starkitsystems.com/
- brightghost 13y ago
  ...isn't this at least the world's third or fourth private cloud appliance?
- gohrt 13y ago
  Their homepage is a video showing a paragraph of text, one line at a time. No, thanks.
- JackFr 13y ago
  Disappointing. I was hoping for more IronMan, like http://www.tonystarkitsystems.com http://www.tonystarkitsystems.com.
samstave 13y ago
Reddit's /r/conspiracy hasa pretty good post on the matter as well: http://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/1fs228/this_is_now_confirmed_fact_the_nsa_is_tracking/ http://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/1fs228/this_is_n...
willholloway 13y ago
Inevitably complete electronic surveillance of communications will be used for insider trading, implicating enemies/competitors in crimes, and suppression of journalists and politically unfavorable activists. Giant corporations competing for market share need to consider the operational security implications of bribable government employees having access to their trade secrets and strategies. The recent case of the NYC cop that was planning on kidnapping and eating women would be chilling enough, but becomes even more horrifying when you learn that he was using law enforcement databases to stalk potential victims. No human or group of humans can be trusted with total information awareness.
- finnh 13y ago
  Exactly. Just look at the Spitzer thing - outed for political reasons based on data collected "because of the terrorists". And do those who say "if you've got nothing to hide, it's not a problem," I ask the classic question: "so, why do you own curtains?"
grandalf 13y ago
I'd like to know what kinds of criminals this stuff is really being used to catch, since it's clearly not being used to fight terrorism.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- stray 13y ago
  Dissidents.
RoboTeddy 13y ago
Also see this NY Times documentary short, "The Program": 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... It features William Binney, who apparently is one of the better mathematical minds the NSA has ever had. He quit over the NSA's actions in 2001.
ck2 13y ago
On December 15th 2005, Barack Obama viciously denounced this and the Patriot Act. Which he now supports in the fullest.
- jbooth 13y ago
  Yeah, he deserves some big hypocrisy points on that. But where are the Republicans on this issue? After what feels like about 300 years of them calling Obama a fascist who's trying to turn America into the USSR every day, what do we hear from them when soviet-type stuff actually happens on his watch? Nothing. They're too busy with Benghazi and other non-scandals.
  - anigbrowl 13y ago
    Who do you think put the Patriot act into place to begin with? At the time the GOP not only held the White House, but both houses of Congress. Among the first things they did on obtaining legislative control in late 1994 was start work on rewriting immigration law - resulting legislation so draconian that experienced criminal lawyers are often floored by its provisions when they have occasion to study it. For example, an alien with a criminal record who is unable to prove their right to be present in the US on the spot can be detained incommunicado for six months before being entitled to any kind of hearing. This is a step forward; until a few months ago, the government was able to detain said alien indefinitely: http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=972155883341975337&hl=en&as_sdt=2&as_vis=1&oi=scholarr http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=9721558833419753... Bear in mind that the President is sworn to uphold the laws as they are, even when he disagrees with them; his powers are far more circumscribed by Congress than most people appreciate, viz. Obama's oft-repeated desire to close Guantanamo, which has gone nowhere because Congress won't authorize funds for setting up detention facilities on the mainland. It's not so much the case that Obama wants to know who you were calling last Tuesday as that he's supposed to maximize the government's legislated powers to defend the US from attack. If he ordered the NSA to suspend this sort of intelligence-gathering and subsequently a terrorist attack took place that could supposedly have been prevented, he'd be impeached. The whole Benghazi thing is arguably an effort to build momentum for impeachment, IMHO - if the GOP gained supermajority control of the Senate the current House would draft articles of impeachment in a heartbeat.
WestCoastJustin 13y ago
There is a interesting talk on youtube [1] by William Binney (a former U.S. intelligence official turn whistle blower) [2], where he talks about the tech behind ThinThread [3]. He describes how ThinThread uses Latent semantic indexing [4] to pull together all this metadata into a type of fingerprint. There are various reports (see google) that Stellar Wind was based on a component of the ThinThread capability or that Stellar Wind was an off shoot of ThinThread. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxnp2Sz59p8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxnp2Sz59p8 [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Binney_%28U.S._intelligence_official%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Binney_%28U.S._intellig... [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThinThread http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThinThread [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_semantic_indexing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_semantic_indexing
- epoxyhockey 13y ago
  Note that Binney resigned on October 31, 2001. While he may have been privy to planned initiatives, his knowledge is now 12 years old. We don't know what new tech has been developed since then.
daniel-cussen 13y ago
This is probably why US bandwidth hasn't increased in ten years. Telecoms didn't want it to, obviously, but more importantly, the US government didn't want it to either, because more bandwidth increases the amount of information they have to store to have a carbon copy of everything.
- maxerickson 13y ago
  Individual connections haven't gotten a great deal faster, but more people have higher speed connections and they are using them more. Traffic has increased by some enormous factor in the last 10 years (picking conservatively from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_traffic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_traffic easily gets a factor of 20 or 30).
  - daniel-cussen 13y ago
    True, but it was planned in the nineties to go up by much more than that, and it could have increased faster than storage technology increased in density.
Keyframe 13y ago
I'd really like to know more about this from tech and logistics aspect of it! Imagine the challenges!
Sharlin 13y ago
I'm eerily reminded of Deus Ex and the Aquinas Router. The main difference is that it was located in Nevada, not Utah... And that the NSA probably does not have a human-level general artificial intelligence developet yet. Although one never knows.
jackcviers3 13y ago
All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke "The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him." -- Nuremberg Principle IV Those that perform traitorous deeds to prevent traitorous deeds are traitors to their nation and themselves. -- Me

404 points by bascule 13y ago

Can we please stop with the politics/outrage posts? If I wanted to see articles recycled from /r/politics, I would read reddit.

Tangaroa 13y ago
This one actually has techie relevance, but I hear what you're saying. The political links and their duplicates and their duplicates are drowning out the technology posts, even on /classic.

darxius 13y ago

I wonder if this means we'll see the rise of huge botnets and networks calling each other and using flagged words just to saturate the data the NSA is picking up.

micah94 13y ago

Thanks for the reminder. I almost forgot.

caycep 13y ago

The whole "pizza case" phenomenon is hilarious. ironic but hilarious. I'm sure there are tons of ethical implications, and the NSA has its share of shady activities, but part of it seems to be akin to that final scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark when the government loses the powerful, dangerous artifact in some nameless Army warehouse filled with tons of beef jerky or whatever it was.

sharkweek 13y ago
the pizza case thing reminds me of the scene in Arrested Development "Nope... you're looking at balls" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsgOzLdWdgU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsgOzLdWdgU

voxmatt 13y ago

I'm glad someone posted this. My immediate thought after reading the breaking news about the massive phone surveillance was, "wait, did people not think this was happening?" I'm really not a conspiracy nut, but that Wired article and the NYTimes reporting made it pretty clear that the Gov't is pretty much collecting everything they can get their hands on. Glad to finally see some outrage though. Legitimate question: what's new about what is breaking in the news right now? Merely confirmation that the NSA is conducting indiscriminate phone-taps?

addflip 13y ago
Legitimate question: what's new about what is breaking in the news right now? Exactly! I was wondering the same thing.
- roc 13y ago
  Official documentation, plus the notion that a Judge actually signed off on this nonsense?
- knowtheory 13y ago
  The Guardian posted the FISA court order up on DocumentCloud. Check it out: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2013/jun/06/verizon-telephone-data-court-order http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2013/jun/06/veri...
tomchristie 13y ago
Journalist Glenn Greenwald obtained documents from a leak that confirm the NSA has secretly been requiring Verizon (and presumably the same for other networks) to provide the complete information (location, duration, id) of every single call, national or international, on an ongoing daily basis. There is no discrimination - this is everybody, all the time. That's kind of a big deal. It's also pretty damn brave of whoever leaked the document. His original article is here... http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone-records-verizon-court-order http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone-record...

Swizec 13y ago

Sometimes I wonder what I'd have to write online to get a knock on the door. Then I remember I still want to visit the US some time. It pretty much kills all the best ideas.

roc 13y ago
Last we had a news story, the bar was as low as: "Free this week, for quick gossip/prep before I go and destroy America?"
pekk 13y ago
Unless the best ideas involve terrorist groups, that's your problem

hanifvirani 13y ago

The worst thing is that people will talk about all this for a few days and then go back to living their lives. I hope I am wrong though.

js2 13y ago

M-x spook http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Mail-Amusements.html http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Mai...

chm 13y ago

I've always wondered, as a Canadian whose communications are most assuredly intercepted by the US gov., why such spying is not considered an act of war? If I go to the US and "physically" spy, I'll get prosecuted, won't I? To be clear: I don't want to go to war.

bgilroy26 13y ago
You're right, with one big caveat. All international slights are weighed against the cost of losing the offending country as a trade partner. This is how most peace is maintained these days.
- Pxtl 13y ago
  I assume this is how China can functionally be running an active and violent war of hacking with no repercussions.
  - X-Istence 13y ago
    As if the US doesn't do the same thing ...
  - Gigablah 13y ago
    Violent? How so?

tjoff 13y ago

You do know that the internet exists outside of the US, right?

__xtrimsky 13y ago
Are you sure ? I thought they had only minitel.
bascule 13y ago
Yes, you know that the Internet that exists outside the US is connected to the US, right? Which belies one of the most insidious parts of Stellar Wind... that the NSA could've just tapped the cables which link the US to other countries, but they chose to spy directly on US citizens as well.
chaz 13y ago
The NSA's charter is to monitor foreign communications and intelligence, so yes, the whole point of what they're doing is because the internet exists outside of the US.
lostlogin 13y ago
Yeah, but they've got their claws in down here with their ping-pong ball monitoring centre in Waihopai. Echelon, we in whether we like it or not - New Zealand is the lapdog I'm part of. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON

B-Con 13y ago

It is interesting what the media and public choose to be concerned by. 15 years ago I would've guessed that this sort of wide-spread operation would never have been tolerated by either. Post 9/11, it was surely scandalous when ATT got caught providing taps, but honestly, it didn't seem that anyone cared that much. Not enough to put strong pressure on the government to, you know, stop. At this point, I'm convinced that almost nobody actually cares. (I'm talking about practical concern, not just a vague sense of "I don't approve".) Interestingly, this has roughly coincided with the growth of cloud services. When using a cloud service, there is some level of conscious acceptance that someone else is processing your data and can see what you're doing, and you're more-or-less OK with it. I wouldn't have guessed that people would be so eager to use cloud services whole-sale. I think that at this point, people tend to assume that anything that leaves their computer will/can be inspected, and for the large part they're OK with it.

nsxwolf 13y ago
I don't know what could possibly done. If the legislature or courts got involved and told the NSA to stop, they'd just say "Ok, sure" and then continue on in secret.
- sfx 13y ago
  They could cut their funding and/or use the data center for parts. That data center alone costs billions to build, it makes me uneasy knowing my tax dollars goes to abuses of power like this.

brown9-2 13y ago

It's useful when discussing this topic to break the word "spy" down into more discrete terms to understand exactly what we are discussing. I found this article to be useful in differentiating the various terms: On its face, the document suggests that the U.S. government regularly collects and stores all domestic telephone records. I use the caveat because there are several ways to interpret it, assuming it is real. (It looks real.) A few definitions: to "collect" means to gather and store; to "analyze" means that a computer or human actually does something with the records; to "intercept" means that a computer or human actually listens to or records calls. ... The NSA, under the FISA Amendments Act, is able to analyze metadata, like incoming and outgoing call records, so long as the Attorney General certifies that a particular set of information is useful for reasons of national security. Then, the NSA asks the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to order that a company comply. As that bill was being ironed out, this step was requested by private companies because they wanted protection from lawsuits in case innocents — or millions of innocents — found that the NSA had gathered their call information. My own understanding is that the NSA routinely collects millions of domestic-to-domestic phone records. It does not do anything with them unless there is a need to search through them for lawful purposes. That is, an analyst at the NSA cannot legally simply perform random searches through the stored data. He or she needs to have a reason, usually some intelligence tip. That would allow him or her to segregate the part of the data that's necessary to analyze, and proceed from there. In a way, it makes sense for the NSA to collect all telephone records because it can't know in advance what sections or slices it might need in the future. It does not follow that simply because the NSA collects data that it is legal for the NSA to use the data for foreign intelligence or counter-terrorism analysis. http://theweek.com/article/index/245228/the-fbi-collects-all-telephone-records http://theweek.com/article/index/245228/the-fbi-collects-all... This is written specifically about the telephone call metadata, but being able to differentiate exactly what is collected about Internet traffic would also aid this discussion. Unfortunately this would only be possible if the government was more transparent about what is being collected.

Ziomislaw 13y ago
is the 'reason' even verified? is that not just a pretty way of saying "they can't browse through the data, unless they have a reason - any reason will do - feel secure:) "

Casseres 13y ago

Stuff like this does not surprise me. Well, actually it does. It makes me question my assumption that the U.S. government has been doing stuff like this all along. If this leak is legitimate, then one can reason that the NSA didn't just acquire all of this data by itself in the past, but that they asked permission for it in the present.

JPKab 13y ago

My brother worked for years in the intelligence community. One of the common stereotypes within the IC regards the fact that Mormons are heavily overrepresented, for various reasons that involve foreign language skills from mission trips, a reputation for respecting authority, abstinence from drugs/alcohol, family connections, ease of gaining security clearances, etc. The stereotype in the IC regarding Mormons is they never "question." The dozens of friends I have that work in the IC say that the stereotype is accurate. Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/11-surprising-things-you-didnt-know-about-mormons-2011-6?op=1 http://www.businessinsider.com/11-surprising-things-you-didn... " The apparent incorruptibility of Mormons' moral righteousness make them ideal candidates for the nation's law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Mormons are disproportionately represented in the CIA. A recruiter told the Salt Lake Tribune that returned Mormon missionaries are valued for their foreign language skills, abstinence from drugs and alcohol, and respect for authority " I wonder if this has bearings on constructing the new data center in Utah?

batbomb 13y ago
Nuclear physics and nuclear energy as well. The data center in Utah has more to do with cheap land, low cost, and low likelihood of natural disaster.
- SoftwareMaven 13y ago
  That is the reason for the monstrosity across the valley. As far as I know, there won't be a large local contingent working on the data.
- regehr 13y ago
  A major natural disaster is a certainty in the SLC area: we're surrounded by active faults.
rollo_tommasi 13y ago
It also has a bearing on the sorry state of U.S. human intelligence, since Mormons make terrible interlocutors with foreign informants.

alexvr 13y ago

Does anyone know how they do this, technically, and to what extent? Does Google just feed them billions of emails, or what? Do they type my name into a form on Amazon.com to get SSH access my EC2 server? And how the hell do they see my finances? Do all of those terms of service agreements say, "By the way, we give your private information to the government without question" ??? At first I thought it didn't matter that they can see what I do, because if I store a movie of my underground lair with nukes and a few F-22s in Google Drive, they can't use the evidence against me in court unless they get a warrant. But let's be real: if you've got a movie of yourself shooting some guy in the face in Google Drive, they're going to find a way to get that warrant before you delete the movie. And they'll have a copy of it to show the judge. You don't even know they've seen your not-so-secret stuff. The fact that they do this in a clandestine manner effectively makes it unconstitutional since the warrant protection is easy for them to circumvent.

lolcraft 13y ago
The CIA doesn't ask for judicial warrants, and doesn't have to. Extrajudicial murder is legal. Al-Awlaki was murdered on suspicion that there was an imminent threat to US persons. No warrant obtained. Al-Awlaki's son was murdered, again without warrant, because of complicated reasons that boil down to his last name being Awlaki. Any of those videos by themselves would be enough for you to be included on the kill list, and executed. No court would have to be involved. You could also be executed by mistake, like Awlaki's son, or many Yemeni children that were so. Or being kidnapped in Italy by CIA agents into a plane, and imprisoned without trial. Or you could be an Al-Jazeera journalist, being arrested by the Pakistani army, then imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay for six years without any crime charged against you, like Sami al-Hajj. It's all fair game. Oh, don't forget that you could lose your job as a politician because you hired a prostitute, and the Mormon CIA doesn't like that. Definitely fair.
- anonymous 13y ago
  So it's like the KGB, but worse (the KGB didn't kill careers because you had sex). Living in a country from the former communist bloc, I can tell you what the endgame looks like. It looks like 60% of the population willingly collaborating with the security service and writing reports for them. If I were American, the first thing I'd do is convert to mormonism.

TallGuyShort 13y ago

>> "According to Mueller, approximately 99 percent of the cases led nowhere, but "it's that other 1% that we've got to be concerned about"" No, it's the 99% of cases that were completely unwarranted in the first place that we've actually got to be concerned about.

kunai 13y ago

What is truly a scary thought is if the vast, mindless mass of people easily swayed by consumerism, advertisement and buzz, talk about this for about two weeks and then forget the whole thing, screaming "We have NOTHING to hide!" as a logically flawed and incredibly poor excuse. The entire premise that democracy would work is flawed. Take Turkey. A ravaged, torn, depressed state, brought back to life by a fucking dictator, Kemal Ataturk. And now? Riots and revolution are taking place on the streets of Istanbul. I'm not saying dictatorship is the best idea, but a good, conservatively Green or Green Libertarian government is the only path to resolution. But since the United States mass public is uneducated and apathetic (unlike how it used to be 300 years ago, and also markedly unlike quite a few in Europe who actually give a fuck about their rights), don't expect it to happen any time soon. And for those who think this is elitism: We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are, One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. - Tennyson

rayiner 13y ago
> What is truly a scary thought is if the vast, mindless mass of people... This is why privacy advocates (and libertarians more generally), can't get more popular traction: the incredibly derisive and arrogant tone with which they address their fellow citizens, and their flippant, dismissive attitude towards democracy. Why should I listen to the opinions of someone who calls my parents, most of my friends, my in-laws, my wife, etc, "mindless"? Just because they have different priorities and care about different issues, or (gasp!) have different ideas about the appropriate boundaries of police surveillance?
- kiba 13y ago
  Why should I listen to the opinions of someone who calls my parents, most of my friends, my in-laws, my wife, etc, "mindless"? Just because they have different priorities and care about different issues, or (gasp!) have different ideas about the appropriate boundaries of police surveillance? It is not that you are mindless, it is that we are too dumb to contain the sums of human knowledge within our head. Individually, we can be great at disciplines that we specialize in. But expecting us to decide competent government officials to represent us? That's impossible.

clarkston 13y ago

Introducing the World's First Private Cloud Appliance. http://www.starkitsystems.com/ http://www.starkitsystems.com/

brightghost 13y ago
...isn't this at least the world's third or fourth private cloud appliance?
gohrt 13y ago
Their homepage is a video showing a paragraph of text, one line at a time. No, thanks.
JackFr 13y ago
Disappointing. I was hoping for more IronMan, like http://www.tonystarkitsystems.com http://www.tonystarkitsystems.com.

samstave 13y ago

Reddit's /r/conspiracy hasa pretty good post on the matter as well: http://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/1fs228/this_is_now_confirmed_fact_the_nsa_is_tracking/ http://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/1fs228/this_is_n...

willholloway 13y ago

Inevitably complete electronic surveillance of communications will be used for insider trading, implicating enemies/competitors in crimes, and suppression of journalists and politically unfavorable activists. Giant corporations competing for market share need to consider the operational security implications of bribable government employees having access to their trade secrets and strategies. The recent case of the NYC cop that was planning on kidnapping and eating women would be chilling enough, but becomes even more horrifying when you learn that he was using law enforcement databases to stalk potential victims. No human or group of humans can be trusted with total information awareness.

finnh 13y ago
Exactly. Just look at the Spitzer thing - outed for political reasons based on data collected "because of the terrorists". And do those who say "if you've got nothing to hide, it's not a problem," I ask the classic question: "so, why do you own curtains?"

grandalf 13y ago

I'd like to know what kinds of criminals this stuff is really being used to catch, since it's clearly not being used to fight terrorism.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
stray 13y ago
Dissidents.

RoboTeddy 13y ago

Also see this NY Times documentary short, "The Program": 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... It features William Binney, who apparently is one of the better mathematical minds the NSA has ever had. He quit over the NSA's actions in 2001.

ck2 13y ago

On December 15th 2005, Barack Obama viciously denounced this and the Patriot Act. Which he now supports in the fullest.

jbooth 13y ago
Yeah, he deserves some big hypocrisy points on that. But where are the Republicans on this issue? After what feels like about 300 years of them calling Obama a fascist who's trying to turn America into the USSR every day, what do we hear from them when soviet-type stuff actually happens on his watch? Nothing. They're too busy with Benghazi and other non-scandals.
- anigbrowl 13y ago
  Who do you think put the Patriot act into place to begin with? At the time the GOP not only held the White House, but both houses of Congress. Among the first things they did on obtaining legislative control in late 1994 was start work on rewriting immigration law - resulting legislation so draconian that experienced criminal lawyers are often floored by its provisions when they have occasion to study it. For example, an alien with a criminal record who is unable to prove their right to be present in the US on the spot can be detained incommunicado for six months before being entitled to any kind of hearing. This is a step forward; until a few months ago, the government was able to detain said alien indefinitely: http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=972155883341975337&hl=en&as_sdt=2&as_vis=1&oi=scholarr http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=9721558833419753... Bear in mind that the President is sworn to uphold the laws as they are, even when he disagrees with them; his powers are far more circumscribed by Congress than most people appreciate, viz. Obama's oft-repeated desire to close Guantanamo, which has gone nowhere because Congress won't authorize funds for setting up detention facilities on the mainland. It's not so much the case that Obama wants to know who you were calling last Tuesday as that he's supposed to maximize the government's legislated powers to defend the US from attack. If he ordered the NSA to suspend this sort of intelligence-gathering and subsequently a terrorist attack took place that could supposedly have been prevented, he'd be impeached. The whole Benghazi thing is arguably an effort to build momentum for impeachment, IMHO - if the GOP gained supermajority control of the Senate the current House would draft articles of impeachment in a heartbeat.

WestCoastJustin 13y ago

There is a interesting talk on youtube [1] by William Binney (a former U.S. intelligence official turn whistle blower) [2], where he talks about the tech behind ThinThread [3]. He describes how ThinThread uses Latent semantic indexing [4] to pull together all this metadata into a type of fingerprint. There are various reports (see google) that Stellar Wind was based on a component of the ThinThread capability or that Stellar Wind was an off shoot of ThinThread. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxnp2Sz59p8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxnp2Sz59p8 [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Binney_%28U.S._intelligence_official%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Binney_%28U.S._intellig... [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThinThread http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThinThread [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_semantic_indexing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_semantic_indexing

epoxyhockey 13y ago
Note that Binney resigned on October 31, 2001. While he may have been privy to planned initiatives, his knowledge is now 12 years old. We don't know what new tech has been developed since then.

daniel-cussen 13y ago

This is probably why US bandwidth hasn't increased in ten years. Telecoms didn't want it to, obviously, but more importantly, the US government didn't want it to either, because more bandwidth increases the amount of information they have to store to have a carbon copy of everything.

maxerickson 13y ago
Individual connections haven't gotten a great deal faster, but more people have higher speed connections and they are using them more. Traffic has increased by some enormous factor in the last 10 years (picking conservatively from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_traffic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_traffic easily gets a factor of 20 or 30).
- daniel-cussen 13y ago
  True, but it was planned in the nineties to go up by much more than that, and it could have increased faster than storage technology increased in density.

Keyframe 13y ago

I'd really like to know more about this from tech and logistics aspect of it! Imagine the challenges!

Sharlin 13y ago

I'm eerily reminded of Deus Ex and the Aquinas Router. The main difference is that it was located in Nevada, not Utah... And that the NSA probably does not have a human-level general artificial intelligence developet yet. Although one never knows.

jackcviers3 13y ago

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke "The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him." -- Nuremberg Principle IV Those that perform traitorous deeds to prevent traitorous deeds are traitors to their nation and themselves. -- Me