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Facebook: "We do not provide any government organization with direct access to Facebook servers." Yahoo: "We do not provide the government with direct access t

by ig1 13y ago

Facebook: "We do not provide any government organization with direct access to Facebook servers." Yahoo: "We do not provide the government with direct access to our servers" AOL: "nor do we provide any government agency with access to our servers." Paltalk: "Paltalk does not provide any government agency with direct access to its servers" Apple: "We do not provide any government agency with direct access to our servers"

elchief 13y ago
"we do however give them a data dump every minute"
lawdawg 13y ago
And if they didn't say that, everyone on HN would be whining about why they didn't deny "direct access" when that was the headline accusation. Can't win with you guys.
- ig1 13y ago
  It's not the phrase "direct access" (which they could reasonably use given it was used in the original leak story), but rather the construction of the whole sentence. There are millions of ways you could phrase the response (Dropbox and Microsoft used completely different language), the chance that these five came up with the phrasing used independently seems fairly low. Especially as the statements weren't all given to a single reporter (who could have phrased the question in a particular way) but rather to a variety of different news sources. It could still be completely innocent, they could all have cribbed off whoever did the first denial or they could have discussed it beforehand and co-ordinated messages without there having been any government involvement. It is however something that needs explaining.
  - leoc 13y ago
    > they could have discussed it beforehand and co-ordinated messages without there having been any government involvement These are after all companies several (all?) of whom have co-ordinated illegal no-hire compacts in the past: it's not far-fetched to think they'd work together on a PR response to this. Which isn't necessarily to rule out a more sinister explanation of course.
  - twelvechairs 13y ago
    It is the phrase 'direct access'. It basically makes the whole sentence meaningless (i.e. whatever the truth is, the statement is defensible).
  - DannyBee 13y ago
    There are millions of ways to deny things. This is the most clear and direct way I accused you of doing X You could say "you know, my brother and I, we once, 30 years ago blah blah blah blah blah blah but X, X never happened". Most people, however, will just say "No, i don't do X". They were accused, point blank, of providing direct access to their servers. They said "we do not provide direct access to their servers". But please, see a conspiracy here because people are trying to be as direct and clear.
    - eatitraw 13y ago
      I accused you of doing X on mondays. You could say "You know, in fact, I do X, but on tuesdays". Most hypocrites however will take your question as literally as possible and will just say: "No, I don't do X on mondays". You see, people don't want to know if government has direct access(ok, they want, but it is not their primary concern), they want to know what happened. It simply doesn't matter if google uploads data to government servers or government gets data from google servers by "directly accessing" them. I would even guess that the latter is simpler to implement and maintain. I don't mean that google is happy to hand user data to government - they probably aren't - I want to know how many data governments gets.
      - DannyBee 13y ago
        "You see, people don't want to know if government has direct access(ok, they want, but it is not their primary concern), they want to know what happened. " The companies are saying they have no idea. They literally said "we've never heard of this program". What more do you want? The claim the newspapers made, in line 1, was, "the government has direct access". The denial made was "the government does not have direct access". If they want to publish a different claim, i'm sure a different denial will be written. If you want to know what happened, why are you asking GOogle? Go ask the NSA
    - ig1 13y ago
      No it isn't. You can run it through plagiarism software which is specifically designed to take into account scenarios like your suggest and it'll be flagged. For example why do they all use the word "provide" there are hundreds of synonyms that work just as well ("given", "enabled", "allowed", "have", etc.). They weren't accused of "providing" the access, it's a word they've chosen to use. The specific accusation was about the NSA, why are the denials using "government agencies" or synonyms rather than NSA. There might be perfectly valid reasons, but the chance that they'd all make the same decision to use it independently ? Why are they all in current tense rather than "we have never x" ? If there were on or two similarities it might be coincidence, but we're talking about dozens of grammatically and phrasing choices.
  - kahirsch 13y ago
    Who says they did it independently? I'm sure the people who wrote each statement read the others that had been previously released.
  - espeed 13y ago
    Here's an example of how a government agency could get indirect access to phone data... Amdocs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdocs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdocs) provides billing services and customer support for most of the major phone companies so it has access to all of the transactional data on your billing statement. If a government agency had access to the Amdocs data, it would have access to the phone data through an indirect channel.
- mikeash 13y ago
  Are you complaining that they can't win when it comes to the right PR spin on a massive spying program?
  - chc 13y ago
    I think lawdawg is saying there's no reasonable way they can deny participating in a massive spying program without somebody saying it sounds dodgy. And it is kind of true: "We do not provide any government agency with direct access to our servers" is the clearest construction I can imagine for denying involvement, but they get called out for it anyway.
    - mikeash 13y ago
      That's only because the facts suggest that they are involved. It is very hard to state an obvious lie without sounding dodgy. That's hardly our fault.
- ryguytilidie 13y ago
  Commits massive domestic spying operation, people complain. "Can't win with you guys." I mean, not much more you can do than just laugh at shit like this. Yeah man, everyone here is so unreasonable with their standard of "I don't like when companies blatantly lie" how hypocritical of them?
stfu 13y ago
Love it how they got played. I hope they appreciate the way the administration let them look and lie their customers in the face. Wish I had been a fly on the wall when they where instructed on what to say and how to phrase it. It is certainly no accident that they came out on the same day, with the same phrasing, etc
- wavefunction 13y ago
  You're supposed to love it and feel clever. Meanwhile the machine marches on.
- leoc 13y ago
  But Clapper's statement predates the tech companies' response, no?
ccera 13y ago
Those statements are probably true. The NSA has probably subcontracted the operation out to a private corporation. So Facebook, Google, et al, don't deal directly with the government, they deal with the private company.
- Sven7 13y ago
  Or the govt believes the program exists when it really doesn't ;) and don't tell me that hasn't happened before.
runn1ng 13y ago
That is very creepy and suspicious indeed.
est 13y ago
The Chinese security bureau didn't have "direct acces to servers" as well, instead, they install black boxs in every IDC which mirror router traffic to an unknown destination. There's also shit ton of papers on Chines academia on how to reconstruct and rapid classify packets from raw IP dumps Edit: THIS -> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5843442 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5843442 Beam splitters, or 分光 as called in Chinese.
- Lost_BiomedE 13y ago
  At least this would be a good explanation on why we ended up with the obviously sub-optimal duopoly in internet access/providers.
- pyvpx 13y ago
  do you have any good tips/links/search terms to find this tonnage of papers? I'm curious.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
papaf 13y ago
In at least two cases, at Google and Facebook, one of the plans discussed was to build separate, secure portals, like a digital version of the secure physical rooms that have long existed for classified information, in some instances on company servers. Through these online rooms, the government would request data, companies would deposit it and the government would retrieve it, people briefed on the discussions said. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/08/technology/tech-companies-bristling-concede-to-government-surveillance-efforts.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/08/technology/tech-companies-...

by ig1 13y ago

elchief 13y ago

"we do however give them a data dump every minute"

lawdawg 13y ago

And if they didn't say that, everyone on HN would be whining about why they didn't deny "direct access" when that was the headline accusation. Can't win with you guys.

ig1 13y ago
It's not the phrase "direct access" (which they could reasonably use given it was used in the original leak story), but rather the construction of the whole sentence. There are millions of ways you could phrase the response (Dropbox and Microsoft used completely different language), the chance that these five came up with the phrasing used independently seems fairly low. Especially as the statements weren't all given to a single reporter (who could have phrased the question in a particular way) but rather to a variety of different news sources. It could still be completely innocent, they could all have cribbed off whoever did the first denial or they could have discussed it beforehand and co-ordinated messages without there having been any government involvement. It is however something that needs explaining.
- leoc 13y ago
  > they could have discussed it beforehand and co-ordinated messages without there having been any government involvement These are after all companies several (all?) of whom have co-ordinated illegal no-hire compacts in the past: it's not far-fetched to think they'd work together on a PR response to this. Which isn't necessarily to rule out a more sinister explanation of course.
- twelvechairs 13y ago
  It is the phrase 'direct access'. It basically makes the whole sentence meaningless (i.e. whatever the truth is, the statement is defensible).
- DannyBee 13y ago
  There are millions of ways to deny things. This is the most clear and direct way I accused you of doing X You could say "you know, my brother and I, we once, 30 years ago blah blah blah blah blah blah but X, X never happened". Most people, however, will just say "No, i don't do X". They were accused, point blank, of providing direct access to their servers. They said "we do not provide direct access to their servers". But please, see a conspiracy here because people are trying to be as direct and clear.
  - eatitraw 13y ago
    I accused you of doing X on mondays. You could say "You know, in fact, I do X, but on tuesdays". Most hypocrites however will take your question as literally as possible and will just say: "No, I don't do X on mondays". You see, people don't want to know if government has direct access(ok, they want, but it is not their primary concern), they want to know what happened. It simply doesn't matter if google uploads data to government servers or government gets data from google servers by "directly accessing" them. I would even guess that the latter is simpler to implement and maintain. I don't mean that google is happy to hand user data to government - they probably aren't - I want to know how many data governments gets.
    - DannyBee 13y ago
      "You see, people don't want to know if government has direct access(ok, they want, but it is not their primary concern), they want to know what happened. " The companies are saying they have no idea. They literally said "we've never heard of this program". What more do you want? The claim the newspapers made, in line 1, was, "the government has direct access". The denial made was "the government does not have direct access". If they want to publish a different claim, i'm sure a different denial will be written. If you want to know what happened, why are you asking GOogle? Go ask the NSA
  - ig1 13y ago
    No it isn't. You can run it through plagiarism software which is specifically designed to take into account scenarios like your suggest and it'll be flagged. For example why do they all use the word "provide" there are hundreds of synonyms that work just as well ("given", "enabled", "allowed", "have", etc.). They weren't accused of "providing" the access, it's a word they've chosen to use. The specific accusation was about the NSA, why are the denials using "government agencies" or synonyms rather than NSA. There might be perfectly valid reasons, but the chance that they'd all make the same decision to use it independently ? Why are they all in current tense rather than "we have never x" ? If there were on or two similarities it might be coincidence, but we're talking about dozens of grammatically and phrasing choices.
- kahirsch 13y ago
  Who says they did it independently? I'm sure the people who wrote each statement read the others that had been previously released.
- espeed 13y ago
  Here's an example of how a government agency could get indirect access to phone data... Amdocs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdocs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdocs) provides billing services and customer support for most of the major phone companies so it has access to all of the transactional data on your billing statement. If a government agency had access to the Amdocs data, it would have access to the phone data through an indirect channel.
mikeash 13y ago
Are you complaining that they can't win when it comes to the right PR spin on a massive spying program?
- chc 13y ago
  I think lawdawg is saying there's no reasonable way they can deny participating in a massive spying program without somebody saying it sounds dodgy. And it is kind of true: "We do not provide any government agency with direct access to our servers" is the clearest construction I can imagine for denying involvement, but they get called out for it anyway.
  - mikeash 13y ago
    That's only because the facts suggest that they are involved. It is very hard to state an obvious lie without sounding dodgy. That's hardly our fault.
ryguytilidie 13y ago
Commits massive domestic spying operation, people complain. "Can't win with you guys." I mean, not much more you can do than just laugh at shit like this. Yeah man, everyone here is so unreasonable with their standard of "I don't like when companies blatantly lie" how hypocritical of them?

stfu 13y ago

Love it how they got played. I hope they appreciate the way the administration let them look and lie their customers in the face. Wish I had been a fly on the wall when they where instructed on what to say and how to phrase it. It is certainly no accident that they came out on the same day, with the same phrasing, etc

wavefunction 13y ago
You're supposed to love it and feel clever. Meanwhile the machine marches on.
leoc 13y ago
But Clapper's statement predates the tech companies' response, no?

ccera 13y ago

Those statements are probably true. The NSA has probably subcontracted the operation out to a private corporation. So Facebook, Google, et al, don't deal directly with the government, they deal with the private company.

Sven7 13y ago
Or the govt believes the program exists when it really doesn't ;) and don't tell me that hasn't happened before.

runn1ng 13y ago

That is very creepy and suspicious indeed.

est 13y ago

The Chinese security bureau didn't have "direct acces to servers" as well, instead, they install black boxs in every IDC which mirror router traffic to an unknown destination. There's also shit ton of papers on Chines academia on how to reconstruct and rapid classify packets from raw IP dumps Edit: THIS -> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5843442 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5843442 Beam splitters, or 分光 as called in Chinese.

Lost_BiomedE 13y ago
At least this would be a good explanation on why we ended up with the obviously sub-optimal duopoly in internet access/providers.
pyvpx 13y ago
do you have any good tips/links/search terms to find this tonnage of papers? I'm curious.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

papaf 13y ago

In at least two cases, at Google and Facebook, one of the plans discussed was to build separate, secure portals, like a digital version of the secure physical rooms that have long existed for classified information, in some instances on company servers. Through these online rooms, the government would request data, companies would deposit it and the government would retrieve it, people briefed on the discussions said. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/08/technology/tech-companies-bristling-concede-to-government-surveillance-efforts.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/08/technology/tech-companies-...