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Snowden releases information about Australian Intelligence gathering programs
- nwh 13y agoI thought we were clear of this shit.
- cheald 13y agoNot for a long time, I suspect.
- bigiain 13y ago-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Really? My immediate thoughts when Snowden's first revelations came to light were "I wonder just how much our local Australian government has rolled over and played lap-dog to every US intelligence request, no matter _how_ illegal or immoral?" I also have very little faith in the Australian civil rights movement - the US has some powerful, smart, and noisy civil rights activism - here I see very little that appears in any way effectual. Encrypt all the things… -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- iEYEARECAAYFAlHabm0ACgkQniy+nkMiY+13aQCgzAN24gQyZpyKZvw38qao2QN2 ryUAn0tLNaZWRMuExrQGHUMzgjB5ourZ =Sd2U -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
- gregsq 13y agoWell if your local job centre front desk can access your metadata with the nod of your supervisor upstairs, or if the upcoming referendum on local councils coming under federal auspices succeeds, and would allow as a consequence all levels of government to probe citizens metadata, I'm sure the NSA can. The furore over the NSA data hoovering and the fourth amendment has no parallel in Australia. The general citizenry is completely uninformed, complacent and lazily uninterested in these matters. http://m.heraldsun.com.au/news/law-order/victorians-private-phone-and-email-records-spied-on-by-councils-government-departments-and-other-organisations/story-fni0fee2-1226672826414 http://m.heraldsun.com.au/news/law-order/victorians-private-... http://powerhouse.theglobalmail.org/the-australian-government-snoop-patrol-once-every-two-minutes-247-anyones-data/#!prettyPhoto http://powerhouse.theglobalmail.org/the-australian-governmen...
- rhizome 13y agoYou thought wrong, and apparently there is more to come, so put on your seatbelt.
- ramblerman 13y agoI wonder what would cause you to say something so stupid. When you say "this shit" do you mean the negative image the USA is gaining from this? Why on earth would you prefer to remain in ignorant bliss about these happenings?
- nwh 13y agoNo, I thought that Australia was independent enough that we wouldn't be ferrying our data to the United States. It's a reasonably enough assumption.
- bigiain 13y agoI read that not as "stupid", but (perhaps incorrectly) as a fellow Australian finally admitting to themselves that we're fooling ourselves if we think we can point an laugh at USA's treatment of their citizens while hiding behind some expectation that our local government is treating us with any more respect. The sad thing is, our government is no better, out intelligence service is just as amoral and unaccountable, and our civil liberty movement is ineffectual to the point of being invisible. Perhaps "ignorant bliss" was preferable…
- robryan 13y agoActually it is likely worse than the US, the US government spying would generally stay US government only. Whereas ours in Australia is likely accessible by US agencies.
- krapp 13y agoNon-Americans are going to have to come to terms with the likelihood that their governments cooperate with the US not because of blackmail or coercion or fear, but because they agree with the justification for and procedures surrounding this kind of surveillance, and very much appreciate the US's willingness to throw billions of dollars into the pot to help it happen.
- talon88 13y agoI find the drip-feed of information a really interesting choice, though I'm curious of its efficacy versus the wikileaks style dump. It keeps the news alive for a longer period of time, sure, but it also means fewer eyes are looking over it and connecting the dots between various different pieces of the revealed information. Wouldn't it be better if everything was revealed at once, and the various investigative reporters out there all got to go through it independently and write up a cohesive summation of the results, instead of this two-three page exposé per day?
- ChrisAntaki 13y agoWould Breaking Bad be as good if every episode were released at once?
- nikcub 13y agothis isn't for the same reason, its because they learned from wikileaks that the publics ability to absorb information is limited. a lot of important issues were burried in the wikileaks' releases.
- ZirconCode 13y agoMaybe it's done in view of personal security? Maybe he doesn't want to make all his enemies at once.
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- acqq 13y agoIt's the info about what Wikipedia knows as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON As you can see in Wikipedia, a lot of it was known for many years (decades?) The new thing is that these topics got a bit more exposure mostly because of the thriller-like situation Snowden is in. The Australian journalists actually just "decoded" the references to Australia from the slides first time presented in Brazil some days ago.
- jayfuerstenberg 13y agoTime is a tool that Snowden is using well. By dumping everything at once he creates work for everybody else to scour through for the interesting bits. Instead by releasing bits at a time he lets us digest it all before moving on to the next info. As for enemies, yes, he may never leave the Moscow airport alive but I'm pretty sure he understands this. He's doing what he feel is right, not what is easiest on him.
- digitalengineer 13y agoI thought Snowden had already released everything and it was up to the media to decide what will be released when?
- hulksmash 13y agoI'm a bit confused too. From the article: "Classified US National Security Agency maps leaked by Mr Snowden and published by US journalist Glenn Greenwald in the Brazilian O Globo newspaper reveal the locations of dozens of US and allied signals intelligence collection sites that contribute to interception of telecommunications and internet traffic worldwide." It sounds like the Guardian released this information, but I'm not really sure.
- acqq 13y agoThe Australian journalists just "decoded" the references to Australia from the slides first time presented in Brazil's O Globo by Glenn Greenwald some days ago.
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- nodata 13y agoIsn't that nitpicking? Snowden released some information through the Guardian.
- ramblerman 13y agoRussia said it would grant him immunity under the condition there were no more leaks. So who is responsible for this leak is certainly relevant. That said I could imagine this is enough for Russia to make their case either way.
- toyg 13y agoI'm pretty sure Snowden has already refused asylum from Russia, he wouldn't be stuck in an airport otherwise.
- irollboozers 13y agoThis is now getting so entirely overwhelming. It's like you're on the beach getting repeatedly smashed by waves that get bigger and bigger. There's nothing you can do to fight it, stop it, or move, and it just keeps coming. I feel so helpless with every new leak.
- jaekwon 13y agoYou're far, far from alone. Relax and join the movement... it's going to be a long ride. --> http://goo.gl/lc7Fz http://goo.gl/lc7Fz
- hkmurakami 13y agowell if it's a tsunami situation we quite literally need to run for the hills. The question is, where are "the hills" and how do we get there in this situation? Or maybe we need to democratize the analogue of a submarine.
- jaekwon 13y agoTsunami situation verified. Relax, nobody on our side wants a violent revolution. The only hills you will find are the global enlightened community. You will initially get depressed as you see the injustice around you. You can deny what you see and go back to browsing Facebook. Or, you can embrace the movement. I've been traveling the rabbit hole and I assure you that the thing is manageable if you put your time into it. Here are some guidelines: - You already have local communities (hacker/creative spaces) that have members who are on top of the news and working to escape the system. Find them. - Find the commonality between libertarianism, anarcho-capitalism and anarcho-socialism. None of these ideologies are sufficient, but the conversations and debates are converging. - Learn history and social/economic sciences. The history of debt money, the collapse of rome, today's corporate power structures, etc. - Understand how the dollar works and how it's controlled and enforced. Support alternative currencies. - Support open hardware. The EFF is your friend. Learn more about encryption and understand the vulnerabilities online and offline. I could go on, share links, etc.
- jboy 13y agoTo me, much more concerning is Snowden's revelation that the British intelligence program 'Tempora' "saves everything": "Tempora is the first 'I save everything' approach ('full take') in the intelligence world. It sucks in all data, no matter what it is, and which rights are violated by it. ... Right now, the system is capable of saving three days' worth of traffic [...]. 'Full take' means that the system saves everything. If you send a data packet and if makes its way through the UK, we will get it."
- user24 13y agoeven more concerning when coupled with the fact that no UK news outlet is covering Tempora due to the D-Notice. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/17/defence-d-bbc-media-censor-surveillance-security http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/17/defence-d-bbc-me...
- grey-area 13y agoWorse than that, the BBC is running puff pieces like this one today telling us how GCHQ kept the lights on at the Olympic ceremony: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-23195283 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-23195283 Telling us how useful GCHQ is in the fight against terror without mentioning Tempora.
- DanBC 13y agoTo me there's something of the "if a tree falls in a forest" koan here. "If an agency caches the data but doesn't grep the data for anything related to me has my privacy been violated?" I would be a lot more worried if it was a US and not a UK agency. I would also be a lot more worried if it wasn't GCHQ, but was a police force. There are other databases in the UK that are a lot more concerning to me. All the stuff that supermarkets collect on people with loyalty cards[1], all the medical databases, the misuse of criminal records bureau checking. (These last two have real world examples of real world harm being done to individuals. But perhaps GCHQ's doesn't because it's secret and the information is shared with weird routes.) [1] Many years ago some friends and I had a loyalty card for "Ivor Trots". He only ever bought loo roll.
- ForFreedom 13y agoThis is... WOW..
- a2d9s22 13y agoI struggle to believe that GCHQ has the ability to store 3 or even 30 days worth of internet traffic flowing through the UK borders and also make reasonable sense of it all. It's such a mind boggling amount of data. I looked at some bandwidth graphs from places like LINX, which is just one of presumably many, and they are moving around a terrabyte a second - how can you possibly store, let alone sift through that kind of volume? 30 days at a terrabyte a second is nearly 3,000 petabytes of data. And that's just in one exchange. Is this kind of thing feasible? Facebook allegedly deals with 200PB of photo data - 3000PB is a lot more than that.
- femto 13y agoThree seconds of data at 1TB/s, will fit on the largest consumer hard drive (3TB). There are 3 x 86400 seconds in a day = 259200 seconds. Therefore three days' data requires 86400 drives. Cost of said drives is about $100 each, meaning the cost of disks to store 3 days of data is $8.64 million, which is negligible to the government. Even with multiple links at 1TB/s the problem is tractable.
- a2d9s22 13y agoI know, i did the numbers too - but it's still an almost unthinkable amount of data to try and make sense of. If we conservatively say that there are 5 others like linx, that's nearly half a million 3TB drives. And that's only for 3 days! edit: clarity
- Zigurd 13y ago> but it's still an almost unthinkable amount of data to try and make sense of. It's only money, and compared with keeping a division supplied in Afghanistan or putting an enormous reconnaissance satellite in space, it's an obvious winner in the minds of the people running the security apparatus.
- malandrew 13y agoStoring it really is the trivial and cheap part. There are other really hard problems to solve: (1) Where do you place collection points so you get a full take of not only international traffic (moving across your borders) and domestic traffic (all traffic within your borders but that doesn't leave your borders) (2) Since the number of collection points is limited, that means there is a lot of data that has to be recorded at select points. How do you record that data to disk in real time? (3) How do you avoid the duplication of packets that travel through multiple collection points. (4) Lastly, the most difficult problem is figuring out how to query all that data and not end up with a haystack. When you have millions and millions of pieces of communication from people with no involvement in the criminal activity, then all that communication becomes noise.
- speeder 13y agoThe same O Globo article reported a list of priority targets of the NSA and they are basically the BRIC ( interestingly the population here did not gave a shit about knowing US spies on them) also Iran andsome other powerful countries. North Korea,.Cuba, Venezuela or Afghanistan are not on the priority list, making clear that the "terrorism" is just a misdirection, and that PRISM true purpose still is.intelligence for potential.enemies.in a.conventional war.
- lightyoruichi 13y agoThis is funny, if you actually google the keyword X-Keyscore, you'll find job opportunities that matches the criteria of intelligence gathering. And if you look closely, you'll find out it's a company called Raytheon that's awarded the contract to execute these works. And they have main offices in these crucial locations, eg; Fort Meade, Australia etc. And that they do all these kind of intelligence works. And ironically, Raytheon's scientist was the dude who invented microwave. Edit: Found this post from Feb 27th. About X-Keyscore, http://www.nowtheendbegins.com/blog/?tag=xkeyscore http://www.nowtheendbegins.com/blog/?tag=xkeyscore and the interesting snippet. What happens next looks like a 21st-century data assembly line. At the NSA’s headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, a program called Xkeyscore processes all intercepted electronic signals before sending them to different “production lines” that deal with specific issues. Here, we find another array of code names. Pinwale is the main NSA database for recorded signals intercepts, the authors report. Within it, there are various keyword compartments, which the NSA calls “selectors.” Metadata (things like the “To” and “From” field on an e-mail) is stored in a database called Marina. It generally stays there for five years. In a database called Maui there is “finished reporting,” the transcripts and analysis of calls. (Metadata never goes here, the authors found.) As all this is happening, there are dozens of other NSA signals activity lines, called SIGADS, processing data. There’s Anchory, an all-source database for communications intelligence; Homebase, which lets NSA analysts coordinate their searches based on priorities set by the Director of National Intelligence; Airgap, which deals with missions that are a priority for the Department of Defense; Wrangler, an electronic intelligence line; Tinman, which handles air warning and surveillance; and more. Lest you get confused by this swirl of code names and acronyms, keep this image in mind of the NSA as a data-analysis factory. Based on my own reporting, the agency is collecting so much information every day that without a regimented, factory-like system, analysts would never have the chance to look at it all. Indeed, they don’t analyze much of it. Computers handle a chunk, but a lot of information remains stored for future analysis.