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

U.S. Willing to Hold Talks if Snowden Pleads Guilty
By STEVE KENNY NY Times
Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. did not specify the guilty pleas the Justice Department would expect before it would open talks with Mr. Snowden's lawyers.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/25/us/on-childrens-website-nsa-puts-a-furry-smiley-face-on-its-mission.html

http://images3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20090819011825/lossimpson/es/images/9/9c/Poochie.png

http://ia.media-imdb.com/images/M/MV5BMTM4ODYwNDY3NF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwMjYxNjEzMQ@@._V1_SY317_CR6,0,214,317_.jpg

Talking about that for years over here:

Kids section of websites by professionally paranoid or otherwise creepy organizations

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-intelligence-director-calls-on-snowden-to-return-nsa-documents/2014/01/29/7bd9c9ee-88f7-11e3-833c-33098f9e5267_story.html?hpid=z1

Clapper focused his opening remarks on Snowden, delivering a blistering stream of criticism in which he described the former contractor for the National Security Agency as a hypocrite who has severely undermined U.S. security.

Clapper said the documents exposed by Snowden have bolstered adversaries, caused allies to curtail cooperation with the United States, enabled terrorist groups to alter the ways they communicate, and put lives of U.S. intelligence operatives at risk.

versus Senator Wyden

At one point, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) decried what he described as a “culture of misinformation” among U.S. intelligence officials, cataloguing misstatements and falsehoods that had been exposed by Snowden.

http://pando.com/2014/02/04/the-first-congressman-to-battle-the-nsa-is-dead-no-one-noticed-no-one-cares/

Meanwhile Mike Rogers reminds us why we need a Bill of Rights in the first place.

He and Clapper have deleted the first and 4th amendments now

he's gonna force the issue- on principle

Surely the Bill of Rights was never intended to tie the government's hands.

it's not a suicide pact, u kno

it would genuinely shock me if GG actually got arrested.

we track 'em, you whack 'em

Should there be a thread for the intercept

That article's great

so Snowden 'web crawled' the data away from the NSA

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2014/02/09

I'm sure that Sunday Times article wd be even funnier if i understood it.

wget the planet

When inserted with Mr. Snowden’s passwords, the web crawler became especially powerful.

'when he spoke his incantation the crawler grew 3 sizes from computer magic'

http://gadgets.ndtv.com/internet/news/the-day-the-internet-didnt-fight-back-482493?site=classic

All was not lost. By late Tuesday, some 70,000 calls had been placed to legislators and roughly 150,000 people had sent their representatives an email. But on privacy forums and Reddit, significant discussions failed to materialize.

bcz even if a quarter of a million people contact their representatives, it doesn't really matter if no one on reddit is into it

protest will always be pooh-poohed henceforth unless we throw our bodies in the gears of the machine

Sites like Tumblr, Mozilla and DuckDuckGo, which were listed as organizers, did nothing to their homepages

The eight major technology companies — Google, Microsoft, Facebook, AOL, Apple, Twitter, Yahoo and LinkedIn — that joined forces in December in a public campaign to “reform government surveillance” only participated Tuesday insofar as having a joint website flash the protest banner.

No DuckDuckGo, and no AOL=no credibility with lawmakers

it's exceedingly well stage managed by one side or the other these days. xp

Snowden elected rector of University of Glasgow...

fresh at the intercept

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/article/2014/02/18/snowden-docs-reveal-covert-surveillance-and-pressure-tactics-aimed-at-wikileaks-and-its-supporters/

Illustrating how far afield the NSA deviates from its self-proclaimed focus on terrorism and national security, these documents reveal that the agency considered using its sweeping surveillance system against Pirate Bay, which has been accused of facilitating copyright violations. The agency also approved surveillance of the foreign “branches” of hacktivist groups, mentioning Anonymous by name.

The documents call into question the Obama administration’s repeated insistence that U.S. citizens are not being caught up in the sweeping surveillance dragnet being cast by the NSA. Under the broad rationale considered by the agency, for example, any communication with a group designated as a “malicious foreign actor,” such as WikiLeaks and Anonymous, would be considered fair game for surveillance.

Julian Sanchez, a research fellow at the Cato Institute who specializes in surveillance issues, says the revelations shed a disturbing light on the NSA’s willingness to sweep up American citizens in its surveillance net.

“All the reassurances Americans heard that the broad authorities of the FISA Amendments Act could only be used to ‘target’ foreigners seem a bit more hollow,” Sanchez says, “when you realize that the ‘foreign target’ can be an entire Web site or online forum used by thousands if not millions of Americans.”

can't believe glenn hasn't been running with 'the snowden files' as a term its gold jerry

After having read The Puzzle Palace years ago, before Snowden's leaks, I'm convinced that the NSA as an institution feels entitled to sweep up every electronic signal on earth, regardless of its origins and minor distinctions like US citizenship seem totally irrelevant to the job. And if no one ever punishes them for breaking the law, they are obviously correct in that belief.

skypes into SXSW via 7 proxy servers

https://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security/coming-soon-virtual-conversation-edward-snowden

they are prepared for ~1 million connections

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/innovations/wp/2014/03/10/edward-snowden-theyre-setting-fire-to-the-future-of-the-internet/?hpid=z3

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/03/07/snowden-i-raised-nsa-concerns-internally-over-10-times-before-going-rogue/

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-surveillance-program-reaches-into-the-past-to-retrieve-replay-phone-calls/2014/03/18/226d2646-ade9-11e3-a49e-76adc9210f19_story.html

By Barton Gellman and Ashkan Soltani, Published: March 18
The National Security Agency has built a surveillance system capable of recording “100 percent” of a foreign country’s telephone calls, enabling the agency to rewind and review conversations as long as a month after they take place, according to people with direct knowledge of the effort and documents supplied by former contractor Edward Snowden.

A senior manager for the program compares it to a time machine — one that can replay the voices from any call without requiring that a person be identified in advance for surveillance.

The voice interception program, called MYSTIC, began in 2009. Its RETRO tool, short for “retrospective retrieval,” and related projects reached full capacity against the first target nation in 2011. Planning documents two years later anticipated similar operations elsewhere.

In the initial deployment, collection systems are recording “every single” conversation nationwide, storing billions of them in a 30-day rolling buffer that clears the oldest calls as new ones arrive, according to a classified summary.

At the request of U.S. officials, The Washington Post is withholding details that could be used to identify the country where the system is being employed or other countries where its use was envisioned.

Hmmmmmm. I wonder where?

http://i.imgur.com/BHWjc1x.jpg

lol

SORRY MORDY

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/15/business/media/coverage-of-snowden-and-boston-attack-win-pulitzer-prizes.html

lol @ this guy

(CNN) -- Months after accepting asylum in Russia, fugitive U.S. intelligence leaker Edward Snowden on Thursday asked Russian President Vladimir Putin about Moscow's own surveillance practices.

"Does Russia intercept, store or analyze in any way the communications of millions of individuals?" Snowden asked in English via a video link during Putin's annual question-and-answer program, which was broadcast on state television. "And do you believe that simply increasing the effectiveness of intelligence or law enforcement investigations can justify placing societies, rather than their subjects, under surveillance?"

http://www.cnn.com/2014/04/17/world/europe/russia-snowden-putin/

Putin, a former intelligence agent, noted that his questioner, a former National Security Agency contractor, shares that background. "So, we can speak in professional language," he said.

lol

This is a song my band just wrote about the NSA.

http://thedustbunnies.bandcamp.com/track/honey-demo

Brian Williams of NBC got to interview Snowden. Interview next week.

This is disturbing.

is it just me or does this make it worse?
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/29/us/politics/snowden-says-he-was-a-spy-not-just-an-analyst.html

like it's not that he was an employee who saw things that upset him and he blew a whistle. acc to his account he was actually a part of the US security/espionage infrastructure and betrayed that confidence.

"make it worse"

"a part of the US security/espionage infrastructure and betrayed that confidence"

Make what worse? You still think his actions were worse than the NSA's? One can be a whistleblower against unconstitutional behavior in any government job

no, not worse than the NSA's. worse in that it makes my opinion of him lower.

The House even voted last week to curb some of the NSA's domestic bulk-data collection spying program.

Like with Greenwald one does not have like a person, to recognize that they have done some good things

he was actually a part of the US security/espionage infrastructure and betrayed that confidence.

― Mordy, Wednesday, May 28, 2014 4:41 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

he's always said he put the constitution above the loyalty oath.

"he was actually a part of the US security/espionage infrastructure and betrayed that confidence."

you mean like the way the US security apparatus has betrayed the confidence of its own citizens?

dnftt

Brian Williams interview about to start.

betraying the criminal American state is about the most awesome thing anyone can do.

it's always really hard to hear politicians speak out against snowden. it's like, obviously i don't give a fuck what you think about the guy who made your job / lying to me more difficult.