omnibus PRISM/NSA/free Edward Snowden/encryption tutorial thread

ppl imagining he's morally conflicted is already a gain

i don't disagree but tbh i think on this and other civil liberties issues obama's basically got very little to gain from taking a stand on this. most democrats seem closer to the 'this is troubling' side than the 'this is an inexcusable outrage' side,

Depends! Dianne Feinstein's defenses align with what we would have called the Dem national security side of the Senate (i.e. Biden, and every other Senate Democrat [like Byrd and Sam Nunn in the ninetieswho would have defended the president]).

But the truth is that European countries will make it harder for the US to collect data on their users.

Correct. Because those same European countries are rushing to build their own Total Information Awareness systems.

"I welcome this debate, we just need to put the guy who started it in solitary confinement forever."

But the truth is that European countries will make it harder for the US to collect data on their users.
Correct. Because those same European countries are rushing to build their own Total Information Awareness systems.

― Elvis Telecom, Saturday, August 10, 2013 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Anyway, today's news: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/08/the-nsa-is-commandeering-the-internet/278572/

I want to hear more about this:

Already companies are taking their data and communications out of the US.

it's funny that he even feels the need to do this, it's not like he's going to appease anybody or win any more elections

Must be ego or vanity, I can't think of any other reason.

there's the remote strong possibility that he is ACTUALLY THIS GUY

otm

surely the more vain/egotistical option would just be to go "trust me, I got this" and not publically make appeals for limiting his own power...?

that was the last guy's brand

before history as much as before the voters which is why he still does this thinkyface stuff

http://www.eddysrun.com

via the Fandor film blog:

“How Laura Poitras Helped Snowden Spill His Secrets” is the straight-forward title of Peter Maass‘s cover story for this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine. It is, of course, an utterly riveting read, supplemented by Maass’s encrypted question-and-answer session with Snowden himself. Snowden: “We came to a point in the verification and vetting process where I discovered Laura was more suspicious of me than I was of her, and I’m famously paranoid.” And Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald recalls that when he met Poitras, “She insisted that I not take my cellphone, because of this ability the government has to remotely listen to cellphones even when they are turned off.”

You’ve likely heard that Laura Poitras has her reasons for being cautious. With each successive film—My Country, My Country, nominated for an Oscar in 2006, The Oath (2010), winner of several awards (Sundance, Peabody, MacArthur), and now the one on surveillance which she began in 2011—Poitras has been detained at airports with increasing frequency. One “security guy” told her, “You have a threat score that is off the Richter scale. You are at 400 out of 400.” In short, she’s come a long way from the San Francisco Art Institute and those classes with Ernie Gehr.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/magazine/laura-poitras-snowden.html

One “security guy” told her, “You have a threat score that is off the Richter scale. You are at 400 out of 400.”

this strikes me as kind of

something

being an Oscar nominee who's making a feature doc abt surveillance racks up pts i guess

Once she began working on her surveillance film in 2011, she raised her digital security to an even higher level. She cut down her use of a cellphone, which betrays not only who you are calling and when, but your location at any given point in time. She was careful about e-mailing sensitive documents or having sensitive conversations on the phone. She began using software that masked the Web sites she visited. After she was contacted by Snowden in 2013, she tightened her security yet another notch. In addition to encrypting any sensitive e-mails, she began using different computers for editing film, for communicating and for reading sensitive documents (the one for sensitive documents is air-gapped, meaning it has never been connected to the Internet).

These precautions might seem paranoid — Poitras describes them as “pretty extreme” — but the people she has interviewed for her film were targets of the sort of surveillance and seizure that she fears. William Binney, a former top N.S.A. official who publicly accused the agency of illegal surveillance, was at home one morning in 2007 when F.B.I. agents burst in and aimed their weapons at his wife, his son and himself. Binney was, at the moment the agent entered his bathroom and pointed a gun at his head, naked in the shower. His computers, disks and personal records were confiscated and have not yet been returned. Binney has not been charged with any crime.

“I’m not stopping what I’m doing, but I have left the country. I literally didn’t feel like I could protect my material in the United States, and this was before I was contacted by Snowden. If you promise someone you’re going to protect them as a source and you know the government is monitoring you or seizing your laptop, you can’t actually physically do it.”

lol @ http://killerapps.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/08/12/irony_alert_pentagon_now_fears_a_big_data_national_security_threat

Have any of you actually read the entire Poitras piece? I'm not done with it yet, but here is a Q&A with Snowden conducted by Peter Maass: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/magazine/snowden-maass-transcript.html

i did. slow day at the office.

For Americans who want to speak out against the NSA: http://nowaynsa.com

NSA copying emails directed to or originating from the US and Fourth Amendment stuff: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/11/nsa-internet-surveillance-email

http://news.yahoo.com/-dni-clapper-won%E2%80%99t-control-spying-review--white-house--194607489.html

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/08/obamas-reform-panel-to-be-led-by-clapper-who-denied-spying-to-congress/

i did. slow day at the office.

― BIG HOOS aka the denigrated boogeyman (BIG HOOS aka the steendriver), Tuesday, August 13, 2013 7:04 PM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I did too, though it was a fast day at the office (I was procrastinating). An amazing piece tbh.

clapper panel finds clapper guilty of loving america too much

http://www.mit.edu/newsoffice/2013/encryption-is-less-secure-than-we-thought-0814.html

In this case, rather than prior knowledge about the statistical frequency of the symbols used in a password, the attacker has prior knowledge about the probable noise characteristics of the environment: Phase noise with one set of parameters is more probable than phase noise with another set of parameters, which in turn is more probable than Brownian noise, and so on. Armed with these statistics, an attacker could infer the password stored on the card much more rapidly than was previously thought.

That is cool

Worrying presentation at Black Hat this year: http://breachattack.com

https://twitter.com/WikileaksTruck/status/367760668117565440/photo/1

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BRqMYRICAAAr2gj.jpg

^^^ manning, just now

manningsplain

sad, moving, hard to fully trust

the outpouring of grief from supporters on twitter when he said "i am sorry my actions hurt the united states" was overwhelming

the people who've called him hero didn't expect remorse, i guess

but, shit

poor kid

well, torture works sometimes

yeah, friend was just saying 'what, you don't think they would have broken you too?'

Morbs most likely otm. And if not, given the situation and what he is facing I can't blame him for saying sorry. If it takes 10-20 years off the sentence, what the hell does any of it matter anyway?

galileo did the same iirc

http://www.chronicle.su/news/dog-the-bounty-hunter-to-pursue-snowden-bounty/

And if it isn't obvious now... Gmail promises “no reasonable expectation” of privacy

this is going around this morning

Unfortunately for outrage junkies, there's just nothing here. First of all, Google's argument isn't even about Gmail users, who are covered by Google's unified privacy policy. Google's argument is about non-Gmail users who haven't signed Google's terms of service. It's right there in black and white — the heading for the section literally starts with the words "The Non-Gmail Plaintiffs."

From there, Google's argument starts broadly and moves towards the specific — that's where the "a person has no legitimate expectation of privacy in information he voluntarily turns over to third parties" line comes in. That's a quote from the 1979 Supreme Court case Smith v. Maryland, in which the court upheld what's called the "third-party doctrine," saying that once you involve a third party in communication, you lose legally enforceable privacy rights. (This is an extremely controversial notion, but for right now, it's the law.) Google's argument is that people who email Gmail users are necessarily involving Gmail's servers in the mix, kicking the third-party doctrine into effect. This is pretty basic stuff.

Then, in the very next paragraph, Google points out that email processing is a basic part of email itself, with citations to several state court decisions.

As numerous courts have held, the automated processing of email is so widely understood and accepted that the act of sending an email constitutes implied consent to automated processing as a matter of law.

And then, two paragraphs after the Smith v. Maryland quote, Google's lawyers spell out their exact argument in utterly simple terms:

Non-Gmail users who send emails to Gmail recipients must expect that their emails will be subjected to Google's normal processes as the email provider for their intended recipients.

Non-Gmail users. These words appear roughly 300 words after the Smith v. Maryland quote that's causing all the fuss, but it appears no one read that far.

http://www.theverge.com/2013/8/14/4621474/yes-gmail-users-have-an-expectation-of-privacy

The White House ✔ @whitehouse

Bo, stop trying to make fetch happen. pic.twitter.com/Ez6hWGFpFc

Milo P @milo_price

.@whitehouse ha ha ha so cute!! i feel bad about getting so wound up about the whole nsa thing now
3:42 PM - 13 Aug 2013

lol

young manning

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BRt6wK2CYAAVqNh.jpg

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-broke-privacy-rules-thousands-of-times-per-year-audit-finds/2013/08/15/3310e554-05ca-11e3-a07f-49ddc7417125_story.html?hpid=z1

Nothing to worry about here, that White House & NSA approved panel will fix everything

In one instance, the NSA decided that it need not report the unintended surveillance of Americans. A notable example in 2008 was the interception of a “large number” of calls placed from Washington when a programming error confused the U.S. area code 202 for 20, the international dialing code for Egypt, according to a “quality assurance” review that was not distributed to the NSA’s oversight staff.

Oops.

that part blows my mind

in their defense, that is super dumb and embarrassing and i wouldn't want to tell anyone about it either

http://arching.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/abnormal.png