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

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

Revealed: Photo of WikiLeaks source Pfc. Bradley Manning dressed as a woman released — as he claims gender ID disorder put pressure on him

The army released this photo after the court ruling. Disgusting. I mean.. why?

x-post re NSA:

So, if we're talking largely about mistakes, what's the basis for the controversy? A few things, actually.

First, the public was told that these violations weren't occurring. The incidents may have been mostly inadvertent, but they were more common than we thought.

Second, the sheer number of the occurrences is striking. The NSA audit obtained by Gellman counted 2,776 incidents, most of which were unintended, over a one-year period, of "unauthorized collection, storage, access to or distribution of legally protected communications." The ACLU's Jameel Jaffer said the raw total was "jaw-dropping."

http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2013/08/16/20050583-every-now-and-then-there-may-be-a-mistake

Very nice piece by Charlie Stross: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/08/snowden-leaks-the-real-take-ho.html

We human beings are primates. We have a deeply ingrained set of cultural and interpersonal behavioural rules which we violate only at social cost. One of these rules, essential for a tribal organism, is bilaterality: loyalty is a two-way street. (Another is hierarchicality: yield to the boss.) Such rules are not iron-bound or immutable — we're not robots — but our new hive superorganism employers don't obey them instinctively, and apes and monkeys and hominids tend to revert to tit for tat quite easily when unsure of their relative status. Perceived slights result in retaliation, and blundering, human-blind organizations can slight or bruise an employee's ego without even noticing. And slighted or bruised employees who lack instinctive loyalty because the culture they come from has spent generations systematically destroying social hierarchies and undermining their sense of belonging are much more likely to start thinking the unthinkable.

Edward Snowden is 30: he was born in 1983. Generation Y started in 1980-82. I think he's a sign of things to come.

PS: Bradley Manning is 25.

http://investigations.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/08/13/20008036-lavabitcom-owner-i-could-be-arrested-for-resisting-surveillance-order

"Because the government has barred Lavabit from disclosing the nature of its demands, we still don't know what information the government is seeking, or why it's seeking it," said Ben Wizner, a national security lawyer for the ACLU. "It's hard to have a debate about the reasonableness of the government's actions — or Lavabit's response, for that matter — when we don't know what we're debating."

[...]

Levison said he has been "threatened with arrest multiple times over the past six weeks," but that he was making a stand on principle: "I think it's important to point out that what prompted me to shut down my service wasn't access to one person's data. It was about protecting the privacy of all my users."

that is some early branding for generation y.

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130815/17545424195/aclu-coordinating-ed-snowdens-defense.shtml

What did the Prez and Feinstein know about the privacy audit and when did they know it? Maybe nothing till today...

He might not have known about the extent of the NSA’s privacy problems until this week.

It’s not as far-fetched as it sounds. We know that Diane Feinstein (D-Calif.), the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, only learned about the NSA privacy audit when The Washington Post asked her staff about it. And the chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has admitted that the court has limited ability to police NSA misconduct.

Moreover, an internal NSA document Edward Snowden provided to The Washington Post advises NSA analysts that “while we do want to provide our FAA overseers with the information they need, we DO NOT want to give them any extraneous information.” The “overseers” are the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Justice. The NSA may not have been giving the full story to the attorney general and the director of national intelligence. And they, in turn, might have had reasons to keep some details about the extent of NSA abuses to themselves.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/08/16/did-president-obama-know-about-the-nsas-privacy-problems/

http://archive.is/KtnuJ

That demands a firing

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/18/david-miranda-detained-uk-nsa

nice ominous end to that one.

to that post, not the detention.

How crazy is it though? Is this a prime example of the UK being a lapdog of the US? It's inexcusable.

I thought it was already obvious. The US does the same thing in Canada. Shame on our governments.

Everyone should be outraged by this. That ominous tone is obviously necessary.

Speaking in terms of 'mafia', 'fascism' and 'police state'/'Staatspolizei' are obviously what it is going to take.

I am reminded of what John Stuart Mill said about the unfortunate fact of taking on a radical viewpoint in order to have even a small or noticeable effect in society.

Wiki on the 5iv3 3y35: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UKUSA_Agreement

You in cryptography c21m5on?

It took Greenwald's partner's arrest for Sully to awaken:

In this respect, I can say this to David Cameron. Thank you for clearing the air on these matters of surveillance. You have now demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt that these anti-terror provisions are capable of rank abuse. Unless some other facts emerge, there is really no difference in kind between you and Vladimir Putin. You have used police powers granted for anti-terrorism and deployed them to target and intimidate journalists deemed enemies of the state.

You have proven that these laws can be hideously abused. Which means they must be repealed. You have broken the trust that enables any such legislation to survive in a democracy. By so doing, you have attacked British democracy itself. What on earth do you have to say for yourself? And were you, in any way, encouraged by the US administration to do such a thing?

You in cryptography c21m5on?

― touch. zing touch. you've almost convinced me I'm real (Sufjan Grafton), Sunday, August 18, 2013 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

You?

No. In photonics so don't know anything much about crypto but have sat through some interesting talks, particularly on rng stuff. So I guess I have an interest as well.

The combo of your dn and presence on this thread made me suspect it was your field.

I'm in web development and self-taught myself CS concepts.

I'm actually planning on getting another degree, but this time in CS.

Photonics looks so interesting. What type of work do you do on that? Like fiber optics stuff?

I half expected the article at the BBC to be all "man loses couple of hours and some of his stuff at airport, acts like it's a big deal or something" about this, but it isn't - http://bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-23750289 - it's on the mobile news front page, even.

I believe it is the second time the UK does something like this to a Brazilian citizen.

Greenwald says he’s going “to write much more aggressively than before, I’m going to publish many more documents than before.”

He added: “I’m going to publish many more things about England, as well. I have many documents about the system of espionage of England, and now my focus will be there, too. “

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/partner-of-journalist-at-center-of-nsa-leak-detained-for-about-9-hours-at-heathrow-airport/2013/08/18/b1d81ea4-086b-11e3-89fe-abb4a5067014_story.html

the terrorism act has been used to intimidate evident nonterrorists for years, maybe that bampot sullivan has been out of the country too long to notice

anyway it's nice that some mnstrm people give a shit about this latest disgrace, but it's still only epiphenomenal to the enduring national disgrace that is the uk's fealty to the american security state, which isn't going to change anytime soon

UK backchannels to US: "Damn it, you said there weren't any hornets in that nest!"

The current UK Home Secretary is not just an oxygen thief, she's a toadying, sack-of-shit oxygen thief.

current

may is a worthless piece of shit but so were blunkett, reid etc

Juan Cole on how to turn a democracy into a STASI authoritarian state in 10 easy steps:

http://www.juancole.com/2013/08/greenwald-terrorist-dictatorship.html

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/19/david-miranda-interview-detention-heathrow

"It is clear why those took me. It's because I'm Glenn's partner. Because I went to Berlin. Because Laura lives there. So they think I have a big connection," he said. "But I don't have a role. I don't look at documents. I don't even know if it was documents that I was carrying. It could have been for the movie that Laura is working on."

The White House on Monday insisted that it was not involved in the decision to detain Miranda, though a spokesman said US officials had been given a "heads up" by British officials beforehand.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/19/david-miranda-schedule7-danger-reporters

The mood toughened just over a month ago, when I received a phone call from the centre of government telling me: "You've had your fun. Now we want the stuff back." There followed further meetings with shadowy Whitehall figures. The demand was the same: hand the Snowden material back or destroy it. I explained that we could not research and report on this subject if we complied with this request. The man from Whitehall looked mystified. "You've had your debate. There's no need to write any more."

so we can credit Miranda now for not being used, perhaps, in the absence of evidence that he's a stooge

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/08/19/obama-administration-asks-supreme-court-to-allow-warrantless-cellphone-searches/?tid=pm_business_pop

In which Jeffrey Toobin loses his mind.

an embedded maroon

seriously, that fuckin guy

And it is simply grotesque that Snowden compares these thousands of government workers—all doing their jobs to protect the United States—to the Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg.

It took an extra 12 years after it was announced, but irony is finally really dead.

dzhozef tsnowaev

srsly i

does it seem likely that russia and china didn't know any of this stuff? given the scale of the program and the number of people involved, that they have been taken aback by what he has released?

or that the rest of the information he has would be some incredible treasure trove

groklaw dude freaks out, leaves Internet http://goo.gl/HGCvf9

Hilarious that he goes on and on about privacy and then endorses trusting your email encryption to a third party. GPG exists, dude.

*she, sorry

PJ's heart is in the right place, but she really needs to explore her options. It's understandable that GPG is, from a practical standpoint, too 'complex' for the regular Joe, but she could do her part in helping spread the word about it.

Because, unfortunately, if only PJ uses GPG it won't make enough of a difference. Her users/those who email her need to use GPG and at the moment the average user would not take the time to learn how to set it up.

Kolab is also a bad option. Switzerland's gov't logs emails, as well, and is probably worse than the US.