5 digit know nothing
Footballguy
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Verizon required to give ALL call data to NSA (1 Viewer)
- Thread starter PlasmaDogPlasma
- Start date
timschochet
Footballguy
Could this story have been a whole lot of nothing all along? Politician Spock claimed that the NSA is spending 80 billion a year on PRISM. But it turns out they are spending 20 MILLION a year- rather a big diference:
http://www.zdnet.com/how-did-mainstream-media-get-the-nsa-prism-story-so-hopelessly-wrong-7000016822/
Summary: Last week's bombshell stories by The Guardian and The Washington Post accused some of the biggest names in tech of willingly working with the NSA to give up your data. It now appears that those stories misread the technical details and got the story wrong.
http://www.zdnet.com/how-did-mainstream-media-get-the-nsa-prism-story-so-hopelessly-wrong-7000016822/
Summary: Last week's bombshell stories by The Guardian and The Washington Post accused some of the biggest names in tech of willingly working with the NSA to give up your data. It now appears that those stories misread the technical details and got the story wrong.
timschochet
Footballguy
Here's the article:
Last week, The Guardian and The Washington Post got their hands on a big story about the National Security Agency and its alleged connection to a handful of giant tech companies.
The bombshell stories in both publications carried the by-lines of experienced reporters. The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald, a well-known political commentator who also holds a law degree, has been covering national security issues for nearly a decade, and the Post’s Barton Gellman is a Pulitzer Prize winner who has a distinguished record covering privacy and security issues.
But neither publication assigned an independent expert to vet the claims of their source, 29-year-old Edward Snowden, who had until recently worked at the NSA as a contractor for Booz Allen Hamilton. Snowden provided both publications with classified documents he had spirited out of the NSA. He also made claims that turn out to have been exaggerated.
hat absence of an independent tech check means both publications got the story wrong, as subsequent reporting by other journalists with experience in these topics has confirmed. These are not trivial details, nor is this a matter of semantics. We're not quibbling over words. If you don’t understand the technical workings of these surveillance programs, you can’t understand whether they’re working as intended, you can’t identify where the government has overstepped its bounds, and you can't intelligently debate the proper response. The fact that the government has maintained rigid secrecy compounds the problem.
Make no mistake about it: This is an important story. The documents that Snowden leaked provide important details about the scope of NSA surveillance. Some had been rumored but never seen before, such as The Guardian’s publication of a top secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court order obtained by the FBI compelling Verizon Business Network Services to turn over data about calls on its network.
The basic facts in that story aren’t news. We’ve known since at least 2006 that the U.S. security establishment is collecting details of phone calls and mining that data to identify calling patterns consistent with terrorist activity. Leslie Cauley of USA Today reported in May 2006 that the NSA was “secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth.”
Seeing one of those top secret orders in 2013 accomplishes two things: First, it indicates that the program has probably been ongoing. Second, it allows ordinary citizens for the first time to see the language of the order, which explicitly forbids recipients to “disclose to any other person that the FBI or NSA has sought or obtained tangible things under this order.”
The other set of documents is a PowerPoint presentation that describes the PRISM program. In their respective stories introducing PRISM, both the Guardian and the Post stated as fact that the NSA could directly access data on the servers of eight companies whose names you certainly know, and a ninth, PalTalk, which was little-known until its appearance in this slide deck.
The Post published its story a few minutes before the Guardian, and both hewed to the same story line, which was damning to the Internet providers named in the story.
The Guardian said:
The National Security Agency has obtained direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other US internet giants, according to a top secret document.
[...]
Companies are legally obliged to comply with requests for users' communications under US law, but the Prism program allows the intelligence services direct access to the companies' servers. The NSA document notes the operations have "assistance of communications providers in the US."
When the law was enacted, defenders of the FAA argued that a significant check on abuse would be the NSA's inability to obtain electronic communications without the consent of the telecom and internet companies that control the data. But the Prism program renders that consent unnecessary, as it allows the agency to directly and unilaterally seize the communications off the companies' servers. [emphasis added]
The Post made similar allegations in its initial story, with no qualifying statements:
The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies …
The technology companies, which participate knowingly in PRISM operations, include most of the dominant global players of Silicon Valley. They are listed on a roster that bears their logos in order of entry into the program: “Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple.” PalTalk, although much smaller, has hosted significant traffic during the Arab Spring and in the ongoing Syrian civil war.
Dropbox, the cloud storage and synchronization service, is described as “coming soon.” …
From inside a company's data stream the NSA is capable of pulling out anything it likes. [emphasis added]
Those allegations have turned out to be wildly inaccurate.
All of the companies involved have explicitly and unequivocally denied the allegations. And now the two news outlets have also begun back-pedaling.
The Post replaced the original version of its story with a heavily edited version the day after its initial publication, backing off on the accusation that the companies “participate knowngly” in any surveillance. (The Post has not disclosed those changes to its readers.)
In a follow-up story a few days later, the Post walked the story back even further:
One top-secret document obtained by The Post described it as “Collection directly from the servers of these U.S. Service Providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple.”
Intelligence community sources said that this description, although inaccurate from a technical perspective, matches the experience of analysts at the NSA. From their workstations anywhere in the world, government employees cleared for PRISM access may “task” the system and receive results from an Internet company without further interaction with the company’s staff.
[…]
According to a more precise description contained in a classified NSA inspector general’s report, also obtained by The Post, PRISM allows “collection managers [to send] content tasking instructions directly to equipment installed at company-controlled locations,” rather than directly to company servers. The companies cannot see the queries that are sent from the NSA to the systems installed on their premises, according to sources familiar with the PRISM process. [emphasis added]
We've published four stories so far. The only one about which there has been any question raised is the one that the … Washington Post also published, which is the PRISM story. Our story was written differently than the way the Post wrote theirs, which is why they’ve had to walk back theirs.
Now listen to how the story has changed. Originally, the Guardian story said the NSA was able to access any data it wanted from any of those servers, “directly and unilaterally.” Now, Greenwald is not so confident in that conclusion:
Our story was the following: We have … a document from the NSA that very clearly claims that they are collecting directly from the servers of these Internet giants. That's the exact language that this document used. We went to those Internet companies before publishing and asked them and they denied it. We put into the story very prominently that they denied it.
Our story is that there is a discrepancy between the relationship that the private sector and the government has in terms of what the NSA claims and what the technology companies claim. What is definitely true, and follow-up reporting by the New York Times has proven this, is that there have been all kinds of negotiations about back door access, they have agreements in all sorts of ways to share data with the government. I don't think anybody knows at this point exactly what the nature of those arrangements are.
The reason we published our story and presented it as this discrepancy is because whatever the tech companies and the government are doing should be done in public. We should know what agreements they've reached. We should know what the government has asked for and what they're negotiating with now in terms of access. What we do know for sure is that the government has a program that targets the communication over these companies that huge numbers of people around the world use to communicate with one another. And we think there should be accountability and transparency for whatever those exact agreements are. [emphasis added]
Got that? It’s no longer an established fact, as originally presented, that the NSA can "directly and unilaterally seize the communications off the companies' servers," as The Guardian put it, or “pull out anything it likes,” as the Post claimed originally.
In a story whose details match those that Wired reported earlier this week, the Post described a much more straightforward process that Google says it uses to respond to court orders:
When faced with a court order, the tech giant said, it uses surprisingly simple and low-tech methods, including the delivery of information by hand or by using relatively common techniques to transfer files from one computer to another.
“When required to comply with these requests, we deliver that information to the U.S. government — generally through secure FTP transfers and in person,” Google said in a statement.
That could include putting data onto a memory disk or external hard drive, or printing out the requested information for a federal official, Google said. FTP, or file transfer protocol, is a popular method for exchanging information between servers with an extra layer of security.
[…]
Officials and former staffers at the tech companies said it would be difficult for the government to place equipment on their servers or directly access them in secret. Too many engineers would know, they say.
Indeed, that is a thoroughly believable description of a process that is all too common in the post-9/11 world.
The original stories make it sound as though the tech companies involved are eagerly turning over unrestricted access to data about their customers. The vehemence of the denials makes it clear that no such eagerness exists.
We know that the FBI can go to any tech company in the U.S. and demand information. We don’t know how often they do that, or how much data the companies deliver in response, or whether the requests are overly broad. Google has asked the U.S. for permission to disclose those numbers, saying that the actual figure would make it clear that the “direct access” allegations are wrong:
Assertions in the press that our compliance with these requests gives the U.S. government unfettered access to our users’ data are simply untrue. However, government nondisclosure obligations regarding the number of FISA national security requests that Google receives, as well as the number of accounts covered by those requests, fuel that speculation.
We therefore ask you to help make it possible for Google to publish in our Transparency Report aggregate numbers of national security requests, including FISA disclosures — in terms of both the number we receive and their scope. Google’s numbers would clearly show that our compliance with these requests falls far short of the claims being made. Google has nothing to hide.
Microsoft and Facebook have joined in that request.
Based on other reports, it’s likely that the NSA has been systematically gathering and mining data by tapping into switches at Tier-1 providers on the Internet backbone. It’s been supplementing that data collection with more targeted data requests from Internet providers like Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google.
But it can’t just grab whatever it wants from those services. The government needs to present a warrant in the case of American citizens suspected of domestic crimes (if you’re not a U.S. citizen and you’re not in the United States, sorry, you’re not protected by our Fourth Amendment). For investigations related to possible terrorist activities, the FBI can use a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) order or a national security letter, which doesn't require a warrant. The company served with that document either challenges the order or delivers the requested documents and data.
nd as a report in the New York Times today makes clear, those companies do push back. The Times describes Yahoo's attempts to refuse a warrantless request for data, which was turned down by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, as well as similar actions from other companies named in the PRISM presentation.
The judges disagreed. That left Yahoo two choices: Hand over the data or break the law.
So Yahoo became part of the National Security Agency’s secret Internet surveillance program, Prism, according to leaked N.S.A. documents, as did seven other Internet companies.
[...]
Google filed a challenge this year against 19 National Security Letters in the same federal court, and in May, Judge Illston ruled against the company. Google was not identified in the case, but its involvement was confirmed by a person briefed on the case.
In 2011, Twitter successfully challenged a silence order on a National Security Letter related to WikiLeaks members.
The system described in the PRISM presentation appears to be an automated way to process those FBI and NSA requests. It's clearly not an open doorway into any of those companies' servers, as The Guardian and the Post originally alleged.
The nine companies listed in the PRISM slide deck are there because they offer widely used communication services, most of them free.
he nine companies listed in the PRISM slide deck are there because they offer widely used communication services, most of them free.
It’s logical that Microsoft and Yahoo would be first on the list. At the time of the 9/11 attacks and for years after, they were the two most popular providers of free webmail services. In fact, both services were directly tied to the 9/11 attacks, as CBS News reported in 2009:
In the days following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, alleged al Qaeda operations mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed intended to use his free Hotmail account to direct a U.S.-based operative to carry out an attack, according to a guilty plea agreement filed by Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri in federal court.
[…]
Al-Marri sent e-mails to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's Hotmail account… Al-Marri initially tried to use a Yahoo e-mail account to contact Mohammed, but it failed to go through. So he switched to Hotmail as well. When al-Marri arrived in the United States, he created five new e-mail accounts to communicate with Mohammed…
In late 2007 and early 2008, when the PRISM presentation claims that the program began adding data collected from Microsoft and Yahoo, those two companies were still the kings of free email. Google’s Gmail had been an invitation-only service until February 2007, and it would be another two years before it was a major competitor of Microsoft and Yahoo. Coincidentally, that’s when it appears on the PRISM timeline slide.
The botched reporting by the Guardian and the Post means that millions of readers directed their anger at a handful of big companies that were unfairly accused of selling out their customers to the national security apparatus. The reality is that if NSA surveillance is indeed overstepping its bounds, those companies are victims, not willing participants.
Last week, The Guardian and The Washington Post got their hands on a big story about the National Security Agency and its alleged connection to a handful of giant tech companies.
The bombshell stories in both publications carried the by-lines of experienced reporters. The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald, a well-known political commentator who also holds a law degree, has been covering national security issues for nearly a decade, and the Post’s Barton Gellman is a Pulitzer Prize winner who has a distinguished record covering privacy and security issues.
But neither publication assigned an independent expert to vet the claims of their source, 29-year-old Edward Snowden, who had until recently worked at the NSA as a contractor for Booz Allen Hamilton. Snowden provided both publications with classified documents he had spirited out of the NSA. He also made claims that turn out to have been exaggerated.
hat absence of an independent tech check means both publications got the story wrong, as subsequent reporting by other journalists with experience in these topics has confirmed. These are not trivial details, nor is this a matter of semantics. We're not quibbling over words. If you don’t understand the technical workings of these surveillance programs, you can’t understand whether they’re working as intended, you can’t identify where the government has overstepped its bounds, and you can't intelligently debate the proper response. The fact that the government has maintained rigid secrecy compounds the problem.
Make no mistake about it: This is an important story. The documents that Snowden leaked provide important details about the scope of NSA surveillance. Some had been rumored but never seen before, such as The Guardian’s publication of a top secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court order obtained by the FBI compelling Verizon Business Network Services to turn over data about calls on its network.
The basic facts in that story aren’t news. We’ve known since at least 2006 that the U.S. security establishment is collecting details of phone calls and mining that data to identify calling patterns consistent with terrorist activity. Leslie Cauley of USA Today reported in May 2006 that the NSA was “secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth.”
Seeing one of those top secret orders in 2013 accomplishes two things: First, it indicates that the program has probably been ongoing. Second, it allows ordinary citizens for the first time to see the language of the order, which explicitly forbids recipients to “disclose to any other person that the FBI or NSA has sought or obtained tangible things under this order.”
The other set of documents is a PowerPoint presentation that describes the PRISM program. In their respective stories introducing PRISM, both the Guardian and the Post stated as fact that the NSA could directly access data on the servers of eight companies whose names you certainly know, and a ninth, PalTalk, which was little-known until its appearance in this slide deck.
The Post published its story a few minutes before the Guardian, and both hewed to the same story line, which was damning to the Internet providers named in the story.
The Guardian said:
The National Security Agency has obtained direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other US internet giants, according to a top secret document.
[...]
Companies are legally obliged to comply with requests for users' communications under US law, but the Prism program allows the intelligence services direct access to the companies' servers. The NSA document notes the operations have "assistance of communications providers in the US."
When the law was enacted, defenders of the FAA argued that a significant check on abuse would be the NSA's inability to obtain electronic communications without the consent of the telecom and internet companies that control the data. But the Prism program renders that consent unnecessary, as it allows the agency to directly and unilaterally seize the communications off the companies' servers. [emphasis added]
The Post made similar allegations in its initial story, with no qualifying statements:
The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies …
The technology companies, which participate knowingly in PRISM operations, include most of the dominant global players of Silicon Valley. They are listed on a roster that bears their logos in order of entry into the program: “Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple.” PalTalk, although much smaller, has hosted significant traffic during the Arab Spring and in the ongoing Syrian civil war.
Dropbox, the cloud storage and synchronization service, is described as “coming soon.” …
From inside a company's data stream the NSA is capable of pulling out anything it likes. [emphasis added]
Those allegations have turned out to be wildly inaccurate.
All of the companies involved have explicitly and unequivocally denied the allegations. And now the two news outlets have also begun back-pedaling.
The Post replaced the original version of its story with a heavily edited version the day after its initial publication, backing off on the accusation that the companies “participate knowngly” in any surveillance. (The Post has not disclosed those changes to its readers.)
In a follow-up story a few days later, the Post walked the story back even further:
One top-secret document obtained by The Post described it as “Collection directly from the servers of these U.S. Service Providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple.”
Intelligence community sources said that this description, although inaccurate from a technical perspective, matches the experience of analysts at the NSA. From their workstations anywhere in the world, government employees cleared for PRISM access may “task” the system and receive results from an Internet company without further interaction with the company’s staff.
[…]
According to a more precise description contained in a classified NSA inspector general’s report, also obtained by The Post, PRISM allows “collection managers [to send] content tasking instructions directly to equipment installed at company-controlled locations,” rather than directly to company servers. The companies cannot see the queries that are sent from the NSA to the systems installed on their premises, according to sources familiar with the PRISM process. [emphasis added]
We've published four stories so far. The only one about which there has been any question raised is the one that the … Washington Post also published, which is the PRISM story. Our story was written differently than the way the Post wrote theirs, which is why they’ve had to walk back theirs.
Now listen to how the story has changed. Originally, the Guardian story said the NSA was able to access any data it wanted from any of those servers, “directly and unilaterally.” Now, Greenwald is not so confident in that conclusion:
Our story was the following: We have … a document from the NSA that very clearly claims that they are collecting directly from the servers of these Internet giants. That's the exact language that this document used. We went to those Internet companies before publishing and asked them and they denied it. We put into the story very prominently that they denied it.
Our story is that there is a discrepancy between the relationship that the private sector and the government has in terms of what the NSA claims and what the technology companies claim. What is definitely true, and follow-up reporting by the New York Times has proven this, is that there have been all kinds of negotiations about back door access, they have agreements in all sorts of ways to share data with the government. I don't think anybody knows at this point exactly what the nature of those arrangements are.
The reason we published our story and presented it as this discrepancy is because whatever the tech companies and the government are doing should be done in public. We should know what agreements they've reached. We should know what the government has asked for and what they're negotiating with now in terms of access. What we do know for sure is that the government has a program that targets the communication over these companies that huge numbers of people around the world use to communicate with one another. And we think there should be accountability and transparency for whatever those exact agreements are. [emphasis added]
Got that? It’s no longer an established fact, as originally presented, that the NSA can "directly and unilaterally seize the communications off the companies' servers," as The Guardian put it, or “pull out anything it likes,” as the Post claimed originally.
In a story whose details match those that Wired reported earlier this week, the Post described a much more straightforward process that Google says it uses to respond to court orders:
When faced with a court order, the tech giant said, it uses surprisingly simple and low-tech methods, including the delivery of information by hand or by using relatively common techniques to transfer files from one computer to another.
“When required to comply with these requests, we deliver that information to the U.S. government — generally through secure FTP transfers and in person,” Google said in a statement.
That could include putting data onto a memory disk or external hard drive, or printing out the requested information for a federal official, Google said. FTP, or file transfer protocol, is a popular method for exchanging information between servers with an extra layer of security.
[…]
Officials and former staffers at the tech companies said it would be difficult for the government to place equipment on their servers or directly access them in secret. Too many engineers would know, they say.
Indeed, that is a thoroughly believable description of a process that is all too common in the post-9/11 world.
The original stories make it sound as though the tech companies involved are eagerly turning over unrestricted access to data about their customers. The vehemence of the denials makes it clear that no such eagerness exists.
We know that the FBI can go to any tech company in the U.S. and demand information. We don’t know how often they do that, or how much data the companies deliver in response, or whether the requests are overly broad. Google has asked the U.S. for permission to disclose those numbers, saying that the actual figure would make it clear that the “direct access” allegations are wrong:
Assertions in the press that our compliance with these requests gives the U.S. government unfettered access to our users’ data are simply untrue. However, government nondisclosure obligations regarding the number of FISA national security requests that Google receives, as well as the number of accounts covered by those requests, fuel that speculation.
We therefore ask you to help make it possible for Google to publish in our Transparency Report aggregate numbers of national security requests, including FISA disclosures — in terms of both the number we receive and their scope. Google’s numbers would clearly show that our compliance with these requests falls far short of the claims being made. Google has nothing to hide.
Microsoft and Facebook have joined in that request.
Based on other reports, it’s likely that the NSA has been systematically gathering and mining data by tapping into switches at Tier-1 providers on the Internet backbone. It’s been supplementing that data collection with more targeted data requests from Internet providers like Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google.
But it can’t just grab whatever it wants from those services. The government needs to present a warrant in the case of American citizens suspected of domestic crimes (if you’re not a U.S. citizen and you’re not in the United States, sorry, you’re not protected by our Fourth Amendment). For investigations related to possible terrorist activities, the FBI can use a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) order or a national security letter, which doesn't require a warrant. The company served with that document either challenges the order or delivers the requested documents and data.
nd as a report in the New York Times today makes clear, those companies do push back. The Times describes Yahoo's attempts to refuse a warrantless request for data, which was turned down by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, as well as similar actions from other companies named in the PRISM presentation.
The judges disagreed. That left Yahoo two choices: Hand over the data or break the law.
So Yahoo became part of the National Security Agency’s secret Internet surveillance program, Prism, according to leaked N.S.A. documents, as did seven other Internet companies.
[...]
Google filed a challenge this year against 19 National Security Letters in the same federal court, and in May, Judge Illston ruled against the company. Google was not identified in the case, but its involvement was confirmed by a person briefed on the case.
In 2011, Twitter successfully challenged a silence order on a National Security Letter related to WikiLeaks members.
The system described in the PRISM presentation appears to be an automated way to process those FBI and NSA requests. It's clearly not an open doorway into any of those companies' servers, as The Guardian and the Post originally alleged.
The nine companies listed in the PRISM slide deck are there because they offer widely used communication services, most of them free.
he nine companies listed in the PRISM slide deck are there because they offer widely used communication services, most of them free.
It’s logical that Microsoft and Yahoo would be first on the list. At the time of the 9/11 attacks and for years after, they were the two most popular providers of free webmail services. In fact, both services were directly tied to the 9/11 attacks, as CBS News reported in 2009:
In the days following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, alleged al Qaeda operations mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed intended to use his free Hotmail account to direct a U.S.-based operative to carry out an attack, according to a guilty plea agreement filed by Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri in federal court.
[…]
Al-Marri sent e-mails to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's Hotmail account… Al-Marri initially tried to use a Yahoo e-mail account to contact Mohammed, but it failed to go through. So he switched to Hotmail as well. When al-Marri arrived in the United States, he created five new e-mail accounts to communicate with Mohammed…
In late 2007 and early 2008, when the PRISM presentation claims that the program began adding data collected from Microsoft and Yahoo, those two companies were still the kings of free email. Google’s Gmail had been an invitation-only service until February 2007, and it would be another two years before it was a major competitor of Microsoft and Yahoo. Coincidentally, that’s when it appears on the PRISM timeline slide.
The botched reporting by the Guardian and the Post means that millions of readers directed their anger at a handful of big companies that were unfairly accused of selling out their customers to the national security apparatus. The reality is that if NSA surveillance is indeed overstepping its bounds, those companies are victims, not willing participants.
jonessed
Footballguy
Just earlier today you claimed nobody could possibly know because it's classified.
timschochet
Footballguy
The above article is long but well worth reading. Although it still suggests that the NSA MAY have overstepped it's bounds, it's pretty clear that nearly everything we have heard so far has been a gross exaggeration of the actual facts. As one person commented:
PRISM will live on in the conspiracist's mind. That "$20M" was the smoking gun all along that should have told us that it couldn't be much of a secret police state.
PRISM will live on in the conspiracist's mind. That "$20M" was the smoking gun all along that should have told us that it couldn't be much of a secret police state.
timschochet
Footballguy
jonessed
Footballguy
A lot of people claim to know. Why are these guys more trustworthy than anyone else? How did they get their hands on top secret information?
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timschochet
Footballguy
According to them, from Eric Snowden. One of the documents he gave to the Guardian was a Power Point presentation (it's linked above) which gives the dates that each service provider gave information and then says very clearly : Prism Program= 20 million per year.
timschochet
Footballguy
Yes. But don't you think 20 million is a lot different from 80 billion? And are you willing to accept the possibility that this story has been grossly exaggerated?
jonessed
Footballguy
$20M wouldn't even cover a weeks worth of the storage capacity they would need simply to cover what they have already admitted to. This is an NSA program. I have no idea how they sort out their cost centers, but that article is grasping at straws. I would suggest sobering up before you defend it.
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timschochet
Footballguy
We report. You decide.
5 digit know nothing
Footballguy
I don't think Tim understands the technology enough to have a reliable opinion.
Nothing in that article contradicts the assertion that the NSA was allowed to park their equipment on T1 backbones and packet sniff every piece of data inbound and outbound from every port of the providers' servers, probably capturing it all in real time and then picking and choosing what to permanently store (for 5 years someone had mentioned). Anyone else caught doing this would be considered highly illegal.
When they needed information (from years in the past, not accessible during the period they had been running) they would directly go to the providers and request it.
Nothing in that article contradicts the assertion that the NSA was allowed to park their equipment on T1 backbones and packet sniff every piece of data inbound and outbound from every port of the providers' servers, probably capturing it all in real time and then picking and choosing what to permanently store (for 5 years someone had mentioned). Anyone else caught doing this would be considered highly illegal.
When they needed information (from years in the past, not accessible during the period they had been running) they would directly go to the providers and request it.
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Politician Spock
Footballguy
The truth is probably somewhere in between.
Just for referrence, the half way point between $80 billion that Forbes reported in February 2012, and the $20 million ZDNet reported this week is $39.99 billion.
Just for referrence, the half way point between $80 billion that Forbes reported in February 2012, and the $20 million ZDNet reported this week is $39.99 billion.
Politician Spock
Footballguy
Victims tend to over exaggerate. That doesn't mean they're not victims.
The article even says what those who disagree with you have been saying:
The author also ended the article with this:
The intent of the author to write this article is to defend the tech companies from what is going on, NOT JUSTIFY WHAT THE GOVERNMENT IS DOING! He clearly is opposed to what the government is doing in secret, but does not want the tech companies involved to get a black eye for the over exaggerations being reported by victims.
Which by the way, the $80 billion that was reported was not reported by a victim. It was reported by Forbes, nearly a year and a half ago, before anyone heard of the PRISM program. If the $80 billion isn't all going to PRISM, it's going somewhere, and the Patriot Act allows for any number of programs to do this. It doesn't limit it to just one program. PRISM is the only program we've learned about... so far. Where is the rest of that $80 billion that Forbes reported the NSA is spending on these types of programs going?
But back to the article's intent for writing the article. I agree with him that the tech companies are probably victims of government behavior as much as the people are. We shouldn't be lumping them together with the criminal... the government.
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Psychopav
Help us, Joebi-Wan Brynobi, you're our only ho
When comes the shaking man
A nation in his eyes
Striped with blood and emblazed tattoo
Streaking cathedral spire
They say
he has no brain
They say
he has no mood
They say
he was born again
They say
look at him climb
They say 'Jump'
They say
he has two gods
They say
he has no fear
They say
he has no eyes
They say
he has no mouth
They say hey that's really something
They feel he should get some time
I say he should watch his ###
My friend don't listen to the crowd
They say 'Jump'
Got to believe somebody
Got to believe
A nation in his eyes
Striped with blood and emblazed tattoo
Streaking cathedral spire
They say
he has no brain
They say
he has no mood
They say
he was born again
They say
look at him climb
They say 'Jump'
They say
he has two gods
They say
he has no fear
They say
he has no eyes
They say
he has no mouth
They say hey that's really something
They feel he should get some time
I say he should watch his ###
My friend don't listen to the crowd
They say 'Jump'
Got to believe somebody
Got to believe
Politician Spock
Footballguy
Maybe it was Fox News hacking in to CBS, and trying to find more juicy tidbits about Benghazi that they hadn't found yet. They hacked into their own computers so that no one would suspect them to be doing it to CBS. That's basic "Cover Up 101" tactics. Obviously what was done to CBS was done by Fox. No reason to the think the government did it. None at all.
As jonessed pointed out, $20 million wouldn't even cover a small fraction of the capacity required to run the operation they have already admitted to running. So that number cannot be correct.
On the flip side, all that article was was an opinion piece by, from everything I can gather, a tech blogger. He doesn't have any more information than we do and doesn't "know" anything that the other media outlets do not as Tim seemed to think last night.
On the flip side, all that article was was an opinion piece by, from everything I can gather, a tech blogger. He doesn't have any more information than we do and doesn't "know" anything that the other media outlets do not as Tim seemed to think last night.
It was her home computer and her CBS issued laptop over her home network. She hasn't used her home network since January because she knew someone was accessing it.I feel sick.
timschochet
Footballguy
I agree with some ofyour points here, and I made ta similar distinction myself last night. But I still think the discrepancy in spending was noteworthy and suggests that this program may not be worthy of the magnified attention it is currently receiving.
timschochet
Footballguy
The CBS story is interesting, though as yet inconclusive. But what does it have to do with the NSA?
Politician Spock
Footballguy
Even if the government only spent $1 to do what they are doing, THEY SHOULDN'T BE DOING IT!!!
The cost to the taxpayers is no more THE reason people are opposed to it than the intent of the government is. Whatever the cost, and/or whatever the intent, it's wrong!!!
Politician Spock
Footballguy
timschochet
Footballguy
Well it was brought up in this thread so I figured at least somebody is making that connection.
timschochet
Footballguy
Go back through this thread and read the number of posts making claims which are completely paranoid about what could happen and what is happening. Those are the people I am arguing against not you. I realize that you are opposed to this out of principle first and last and I respect that, though I'd like you to accept the fact that your position, like mine, is not objective, and that well meaning people can disagree here.
Politician Spock
Footballguy
The Snowden information broke after the thread was created, which revealed the issue extends to many tech companies far beyond just Verizon (and Verizon was the original subject of the thread). So I don't see why bringing up what is occuring in government agencies beyond just the NSA is an issue. Given the DOJ/journalists, IRS/political groups, FBI/veterans, CIA/State Dept, etc, etc... reflect a similar behavior to the NSA/tech companies issue, it seems pretty appropriate to discuss them here. I don't think anyone feels the thread has been trainwrecked by not sticking to Verizon and the NSA.
Politician Spock
Footballguy
People have brought up many examples of what could happen and what is happening. They are examples. Examples are not THE issue at hand. You however get laser focused on examples, and they become THE issue of your posts.
Numerous times you've said if certain examples are true, then you would not be in support of what the government is doing. You've said that regarding the FBI/veterans issue. You've said that regarding the NSA/tech sharing classified information as a "benefit". You've even gone so far as to state numerous times that you'll stop arguing about this until you learn more about those issues. Yet you come back time and time and time again, with a laser focus to denounce an example of why people have expressed concern. All you are doing is targeting examples, and to do it you have to ingore examples that you yourself have stated you are concerned about.
Stop looking at this piece by piece by piece, and look at the overall picture here. You can't look at the overall picture and be okay with it... EVEN YOU!!!!
timschochet
Footballguy
My whole point is that I don't see any overall picture. As of yet there are no dots to connect. That's been my argument all along.
timschochet
Footballguy
I don't care if the thread is trainwrecked. I just don't see any connection, unless you believe that the government is monolithic, and this is all part of some grand design to clamp down on our liberties. Do you believe that?
Politician Spock
Footballguy
That's because you don't understand that it's not the burden of the people to show why the government shouldn't be doing this. It's the burden of the government to show why it needs to before it does. That is the purpose of the 4th amendment.
Without that understanding, you're looking to connect dots to find understanding, when all it takes is the fact that dots exist for it to be wrong.
Politician Spock
Footballguy
One does not have to believe the government is engaging in a grand scheme to believe government behavior is pretty consistent accross all of its agencies. It's consistent because human behavior is consistent. Grand schemes are not a contigency for consistent beahvior to exist.
Once again, please stop with your incessant assumption that people must be believing in government grand schemes to hold the opinion they hold. It's incredibly closed minded of you... or a sign of ignorance. I don't care which. I'm sick of it.
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timschochet
Footballguy
Well, we're just not going to agree on that, Politician Spock. I say the dots do have to connect to be wrong. But whatever: here are two commentaries which do NOT represent my position, but which I think are worth reading:
A Washington Post article which describes everything we know so far- not supposition, not conjecture, just the facts:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/06/12/heres-everything-we-know-about-prism-to-date/
A Philadelphia Inquirer editorial which contains reasonable questions that we should be asking about this program. Again, no conjecture here, just stating very rational questions and concerns:
http://articles.philly.com/2013-06-14/news/39978353_1_oversight-government-employee-data
A Washington Post article which describes everything we know so far- not supposition, not conjecture, just the facts:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/06/12/heres-everything-we-know-about-prism-to-date/
A Philadelphia Inquirer editorial which contains reasonable questions that we should be asking about this program. Again, no conjecture here, just stating very rational questions and concerns:
http://articles.philly.com/2013-06-14/news/39978353_1_oversight-government-employee-data
timschochet
Footballguy
Oh please. I've never made that assumption for everyone. But if someone is going to post the CBS story in this thread and comment that "I'm sick to my stomach", its reasonable to assume that the implication is that there's some connection between that action and what the NSA is doing.
One does not have to believe the government is engaging in a grand scheme to believe government behavior is pretty consistent accross all of its agencies. It's consistent because human behavior is consistent. Grand schemes are not a contigency for consistent beahvior to exist.
Once again, please stop with your incessant assumption that people must be believing in government grand schemes to hold the opinion they hold. It's incredibly closed minded of you... or a sign of ignorance. I don't care which. I'm sick of it.
And frankly, I don't care if you're sick of it or not. So long as people are going to assert that this is all some big government conspiracy, I'm going to question that. And despite your claims that they haven't done so, it's all over this thread. It's implicit in most of the arguments against this program, the only exceptions being yours and Rich Conway's.
5 digit know nothing
Footballguy
So if paranoid is one end of the extreme is gullible at the other end?
timschochet
Footballguy
Well you asked earlier how I could justify Feinstein as a patriot. You just posted evidence. When a lot of these guys left, she stayed.
The exodus of colleagues exasperated Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who spent a grueling week answering colleagues’ and media questions about the program. “It’s hard to get this story out. Even now we have this big briefing — we’ve got Alexander, we’ve got the FBI, we’ve got the Justice Department, we have the FISA Court there, we have Clapper there — and people are leaving,” she said.
Read more: http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/305765-senators-skip-classified-briefing-on-nsa-snooping-to-catch-flights-home#ixzz2WIoorRZ6Follow us: @thehill on Twitter | TheHill on Facebook
timschochet
Footballguy
5 digit know nothing
Footballguy
You could write a novel called Gullible's Travels.
Politician Spock
Footballguy
It's not reasonable to assume that. No one said it had anything to do with the NSA. if your reason to believe there is an implied connection between that and the NSA is because of the comment "I'm sick to my stomach", I highly question your ability to reason. Which would go far in explaining a lot of what you've posted here.Oh please. I've never made that assumption for everyone. But if someone is going to post the CBS story in this thread and comment that "I'm sick to my stomach", its reasonable to assume that the implication is that there's some connection between that action and what the NSA is doing.
One does not have to believe the government is engaging in a grand scheme to believe government behavior is pretty consistent accross all of its agencies. It's consistent because human behavior is consistent. Grand schemes are not a contigency for consistent beahvior to exist.
Once again, please stop with your incessant assumption that people must be believing in government grand schemes to hold the opinion they hold. It's incredibly closed minded of you... or a sign of ignorance. I don't care which. I'm sick of it.
And frankly, I don't care if you're sick of it or not. So long as people are going to assert that this is all some big government conspiracy, I'm going to question that. And despite your claims that they haven't done so, it's all over this thread. It's implicit in most of the arguments against this program, the only exceptions being yours and Rich Conway's.
It's pretty clear Slapdash believes our government is a plutocracy. A plutocracy is NOT some big government conspiracy. I agree with him to some degree. In fact a great degree, especially in the respect of how our government rules the rest of the world because of our "wealth". Slapdash, Rich and I represent the majority of responses to you, and in many of your responses to us, or responses to points we've brought up and/or argued, you respond by going off on the conspiracy/grand scheme tangent, of which none of us believe in. Yes, there are conspiracy theorists out there. They dominate many internet forums, and as I've said before, your arguments are VERY appropriate to be posted there. To post them here over and over and over again, and to say they are directed at those here who have said it, while ignoring that you are directing them to the group of people who are debating with you and do NOT hold to conspiracy theories is disingenous.
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Tim... there is something you don't understand about this whole thing. Yes people are paranoid - I prefer to use the word suspicious, but we'll go with paranoid if that makes you feel better. And that paranoia is not unjustified or coming out of left field or stemming from some black helicopter fearing whackos. It is based on our government's actions.
I'm going to go ahead and say it. I think that the NSA or some equivalent government agency are the ones who hacked into Sharyl Attkisson's computers and home network. You want to know why I think this? Sure... it's not based on any evidence. It could have been Anonymous for some unknown reason. But I have this thought in my head that it is a logical conclusion that this was the government. That thought is based on a logical method of connecting the dots in my head. It's based on the fact that the NSA has recently targeted the AP and FoxNews reporters under very similar circumstances. It's based on the fact that we are finding out that secret courts are obtaining secret warrants to search phone records and online data of private citizens. It's based on what Edward Snowden has revealed about the programs and exactly the extent and the capabilities of our government to collect and use data. It's based on the fact that the government has been collecting and storing all of our phone records and online activity for years in secret. And I am not the only one who is possessed with this paranoia. And if I were a betting person, I would put my money on the fact that Sharyl Attkisson suspects that the government hacked into her computers and home network.
And these thoughts are exactly why this whole program is bad. You can't see the bad. I'm going to lay it out for you. Just that thought in my head - the paranoia is what is so patently wrong with this program and the way it has been executed. That paranoia, which I am not alone in feeling, has the ability to influence behavior due to the mere existence of it and it's activities that we know about thus far.
That paranoia has the ability to influence the behavior of journalists. How many journalists out there may now be timid to take a story or report on it in a certain way because they fear a secret court will issue a secret warrant and dig into their entire lives trying to expose some wrongdoing? This strikes at the very core of freedom of the press.
That paranoia has the ability to influence the behavior of private citizens. How many people may think twice about contacting a certain organization or joining a certain movement or posting their individual thoughts on a website knowing the government is searching and storing that information? This strikes at the very core of freedom of speech and freedom of association and freedom of assembly.
The fact that this paranoia exists is entirely what is wrong with it. It doesn't matter if the government actually uses the program to harm anyone. IT DOESN'T MATTER. We were not meant to live in a country where we should be suspicious that the government is watching us. We were not meant to live in a country where we had to fear the repercussions of free speech, of association, or of our press to report the news. This program and the government's recent actions strike at the core of the principles upon which this country was founded. THAT is what is wrong with it. And this scenario is why the Fourth Amendment exists.
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Bottomfeeder Sports
Footballguy
breathless exaggeration of threats for political purposes - Yep, the exaggerated threat of terrorism is what allows the political process create such programs.When I express the fear that populism is poisoning us, this is exactly what I am talking about. The "populist" position is and has been that there is no cost that is too much to stop terrorism. That is the threat.Questioning the legitimacy of our government is the poisoning of patriotism. - America - Love it or leave it!Because Americans have fought and died for this country, and to turn on her in this way is noxious. - Spitting on the graves of war heroes.It is dishonest. - All of these claims are dishonest. And the notion of painting opposition in this manner in "nuanced" is beyond ridiculous.Because this is still the "last best hope of earth," not a police state. - It is up to us to determine what this country will be. If we are so scared of exaggerated threats that we are willing to dismiss our rights for security we will one way or another be heading towards that "police state". Where we are on that path, that "slippery slope" is irrelevant to the point that we will get there when the default position is to surrender the rights and shout down anyone that suggest we give pause.timschochet said:
Bottomfeeder Sports
Footballguy
Again. How can your instincts be that you are OK with this when you are allowed to know nothing about it?
Bottomfeeder Sports
Footballguy
Because technology makes it possible to invade our privacy without actually physically touching us doesn't mean they are not touching us.
I wish Tim could see my thoughts on these sorts of topics prior to the past few weeks. I've historically not been a fan of the press. I feel they go too far to get bombshell stories. I feel like they have put our military and intelligence agents in danger in certain stories they have posted - including the AP article about the thwarted bomb plot that sparked a lot of this. I hate Julian Assange. I've supported the drone program, thinking it was a good way to avoid casualties. (Although I was always vehemently against the Patriot Act). In general I gave the government the benefit of the doubt. I'm not some bunker diving whacko.
I've done a complete 180. What our government is doing is seriously messed up. And all the people I thought were whackos and just "paranoid" - well now I think they were right.
I've done a complete 180. What our government is doing is seriously messed up. And all the people I thought were whackos and just "paranoid" - well now I think they were right.
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Bottomfeeder Sports
Footballguy
Of course we are much more aware of our individual rights than we were in the past. The founding fathers had no clue to the true extent that their ideas and ideals meant. And we are ever so slowly figuring out them out ourselves.Of course you believe that gay marriage will mark the end of the civil rights movement because there must not be anything left to fight for.
timschochet
Footballguy
At work now Nikki. Your posts are interesting. I will respond later.
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