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Whatever
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Post by Whatever » Wed Jun 12, 2013 1:58 am

> Drolyt wrote:The US (and most other countries) has been pulling this shit since the industrial revolution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jinyiwei
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Guyr Adamantine
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Post by Guyr Adamantine » Wed Jun 12, 2013 2:33 am

> Drolyt wrote:

> > Surgo wrote:Five years ago I would have laughed, but nowadays it's really damn plausible.

> > erik wrote:Hell, I wouldn't have laughed 5 years ago even. We've been moving in this direction since 2001.

> You guys need to brush up on your history. The US (and most other countries) has been pulling this shit since the industrial revolution. Advances in IT make it easier, but just for one example the FBI was totally spying on Martin Luther King Jr of all people.

MLK was a "scary darkie" with ideas above his station, to the authorities. Of course they kept him under close watch.
Secrets within the government completely undermine the concept of democracy. How can there be representation of the people and their will when they have no idea what's going on?
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erik
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Post by erik » Wed Jun 12, 2013 2:45 am

> Drolyt wrote:

> > Surgo wrote:Five years ago I would have laughed, but nowadays it's really damn plausible.

> > erik wrote:Hell, I wouldn't have laughed 5 years ago even. We've been moving in this direction since 2001.

> You guys need to brush up on your history. The US (and most other countries) has been pulling this shit since the industrial revolution. Advances in IT make it easier, but just for one example the FBI was totally spying on Martin Luther King Jr of all people.

Spying on individuals yes. Spying on everyone, all the time? I think that was science fiction/tinfoil hat fare until this century.
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Drolyt
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Post by Drolyt » Wed Jun 12, 2013 2:54 am

> erik wrote:Spying on individuals yes. Spying on everyone, all the time? I think that was science fiction/tinfoil hat fare until this century.

That's just a matter of technology though. The government isn't really doing anything different, it just has greater capabilities. Seriously, Orwell saw it coming years ago, and he wasn't the first.
Last edited by Drolyt on Wed Jun 12, 2013 2:55 am, edited 2 times in total.
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DSMatticus
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Post by DSMatticus » Wed Jun 12, 2013 3:03 am

> Surgo wrote:I very easily believe everything reported about PRISM. Five years ago I would have laughed, but nowadays it's really damn plausible.

Then you are idiot, because the things originally reported about PRISM are being contradicted independently by everyone those claims are made about. Either you believe there is an illuminati-esque conspiracy between the government and every major content provider listed or you are a moron who doesn't even know what the original leak on PRISM actually said. I mean, you can believe in the massive illuminati-esque conspiracy. But I stand by my assertion that anyone who finds it very easy to do so because a libertarian told them so and has some powerpoints is an idiot, because they are.
PRISM is a program that exists. PRISM has a lot of information that goes through it. Those two statements are not the things that made the original leak interesting - Snowden (and/or the articles) made very specific claims about what PRISM was capable of and how it worked, and those claims are being denied. Not ignored, not handwaved, not shadily dodged, denied.
This is wholly separate from the issue that the NSA is collecting massive amounts of metadata (i.e., everyone's) from telecom companies. That is not PRISM. That is not Snowden. That is someone else and something else. This is wholly separate from the fact that the government has actual secret judges that provide the warrants/court orders the NSA uses to justify this. Snowden wasn't a clerk in a secret court, he was some sort of administrator of some sort of secret system and he made claims about that system. Those two things make me very uncomfortable, and they should make most everyone very uncomfortable, and they are both absolutely true. They have nothing to do with Snowden or the PRISM leak.
There is some truth in the PRISM leaks. But it's becoming increasingly clear there are falsehoods. And refusing to recognize that there are falsehoods isn't a display of intelligent world-weary cynicism, it's a display of gullibility.
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Whatever
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Post by Whatever » Wed Jun 12, 2013 12:58 pm

> Guyr Adamantine wrote:Secrets within the government completely undermine the concept of democracy. How can there be representation of the people and their will when they have no idea what's going on?

I know it's obnoxious when people pull the whole "we don't have a democracy, we have a republic" but the whole point is that we elect people to run the government for us, because having the people do all that directly is awful (see, for example, California's Proposition system). As long as there's a good internal system for keeping things in check (which it appears that there is not, so that's a problem), then we the people don't have to know every detail of every government program. Sometimes government secrecy is actually important, even outside of a national security context.
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sabs
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Post by sabs » Wed Jun 12, 2013 1:49 pm

What I have found interesting. The right wing folks seem to think of this Snowden guy as a hero, but Manning is still an evil evil man.
Nothing says Hypocracy like a conservative I guess.
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Guyr Adamantine
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Post by Guyr Adamantine » Wed Jun 12, 2013 3:24 pm

> Whatever wrote:

> > Guyr Adamantine wrote:Secrets within the government completely undermine the concept of democracy. How can there be representation of the people and their will when they have no idea what's going on?

> I know it's obnoxious when people pull the whole "we don't have a democracy, we have a republic" but the whole point is that we elect people to run the government for us, because having the people do all that directly is awful (see, for example, California's Proposition system). As long as there's a good internal system for keeping things in check (which it appears that there is not, so that's a problem), then we the people don't have to know every detail of every government program. Sometimes government secrecy is actually important, even outside of a national security context.

To which I answer: Fuck that. As soon as the doors are closed, people get complacent. See: Every scandal involving money ever.
When they hold the life the othes in their hands, people need to be held at a higher standard.
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Whatever
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Post by Whatever » Wed Jun 12, 2013 3:40 pm

And how exactly is that going to happen? We haven't held the government to a higher standard since Nixon.
Oh, except for sex scandals. We'll still hold people accountable for those.
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name_here
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Post by name_here » Thu Jun 13, 2013 1:58 pm

Snowden seems to be a pathological liar, so I would recommend not trusting anything not backed up by the leaked documents. I mean, the guy claimed to have access to information about every CIA office, which is laughable on the face of it.
As for NSA mass surveillance via tapping into ISPs, the Verizon-related leak makes me actually less inclined to believe that than I was beforehand. See, it's ordering Verizon to create and hand over a copy of their call records. If the NSA were tapping into the servers and wiring directly, the order would be entirely pointless because the NSA would already have that information and the actual associated calls.

> DSMatticus wrote:It's not just that everything you say is stupid, but that they are Gordian knots of stupid that leave me completely bewildered as to where to even begin. After hearing you speak Alexander the Great would stab you and triumphantly declare the puzzle solved.

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DSMatticus
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Post by DSMatticus » Thu Jun 13, 2013 11:27 pm

Yeah, fuck Snowden. All the reputable information about PRISM suggests it is a program the government uses to receive and database the information acquired from valid court orders (and not Verizon-esque court orders for "all the things," if the participating company's denials of just that are to be believed). It's exactly as scary (i.e. not at all) as the NSA emailing a court order to Google, and Google attaching the requested files in their reply.
Snowden is a lying douche who has successfully manufactured a controversy out of nothing. Fuck that man.
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Whatever
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Post by Whatever » Thu Jun 13, 2013 11:55 pm

You realized that he also leaked the Verizon court order that's already the basis for ACLU lawsuits against the NSA, right? That court order is 100% legit. Rumors of those programs have been floating around for years, but suits were dismissed in the past because the plaintiffs couldn't prove enough. Now, maybe they can.
But yeah, anything that he doesn't have evidence for, ignore. Ditto for anything the NSA says, though.
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DSMatticus
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Post by DSMatticus » Fri Jun 14, 2013 1:14 am

Actually, I did think the Verizon leak was a separate and still anonymous source, though it doesn't really force me to reconsider anything (Snowden is a lying douche, PRISM is a manufactured controversy, secret courts are stupid) and mostly just serves to confuse me as to why someone would destroy their own credibility with wildly inaccurate claims of domestic spying after finding completey accurate claims of domestic spying.
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name_here
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Post by name_here » Fri Jun 14, 2013 1:24 am

I don't think it's been explicitly confirmed by anyone that Snowden leaked the Verizon letter, and investigators have pointed out that there's basically no way he should have been able to get his hands on it.

> DSMatticus wrote:It's not just that everything you say is stupid, but that they are Gordian knots of stupid that leave me completely bewildered as to where to even begin. After hearing you speak Alexander the Great would stab you and triumphantly declare the puzzle solved.

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DSMatticus
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Post by DSMatticus » Fri Jun 14, 2013 1:41 am

The reporter behind the two leaks and the Snowden Hong Kong interview is the same dude (Glenn Greenwald). That's a pretty solid connection, if circumstantial.
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Username17
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Post by Username17 » Fri Jun 14, 2013 7:31 am

I must admit that I'm more than a little disturbed by the fact that courts secretly rubber stamp the collection of millions of phone calls lasting over a period of months. I am unable to imagine what the NSA could possibly be telling the courts that would legitimately justify the power the courts apparently routinely give them.
The FISA system has failed badly. It has failed everyone badly.
-Username17
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nockermensch
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Post by nockermensch » Fri Jun 14, 2013 5:03 pm

https://www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/spies-like-us
@ @ Nockermensch

> Koumei wrote:After all, in Firefox you keep tabs in your browser, but in SovietPutin's Russia, browser keeps tabs on you.

> Mord wrote:Chromatic Wolves are massively under-CRed. Its "Dood to stone" spell-like is a TPK waiting to happen if you run into it before anyone in the party has Dance of Sack or Shield of Farts.

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tussock
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Post by tussock » Sat Jun 15, 2013 12:08 am

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/e ... al_retweet
So when the NSA says they don't "wittingly" capture millions of American's phone data, what they mean to say is the process is fully automated and they capture every American's telephone "metadata" all the time and have done continuously for seven years now. That's an artful use of language, that is.
Now we know how they talk, it can be safely assumed that when the NSA says prism is not recording anyone's internet data from big companies, and those companies say they don't let NSA have any of your data, what they likely mean is all of everyone's internet communication "metadata" is recorded all the time and has been continuously for some number of years now.
Also, internal NSA training slides demonstrate backdoor access to everything, or at least internal google data access without the assistance or awareness of google staff.
The NSA also promises very hard that it doesn't look at your data unless you're within six degrees of separation of someone who they think might be a bit shady, and they totally don't need warrants for that anyway, because it's not data, it's metadata, and they already had a secret warrant to collect all of it all the time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center
That thing, it will be used. That's a extremely large amount of data storage. That is very much larger than just a few decades of phone calls. The NSA will totally record that I posted something on this website at this time, and likely quite a bit more for indexing purposes. Proxies? Nope, they recorded a time and packet metadata for the proxy traffic, and your traffic to the proxy, and that's a match.
PC, SJW, anti-fascist, not being a dick, or working on it, he/him.
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DSMatticus
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Post by DSMatticus » Sat Jun 15, 2013 1:58 am

> tussock wrote:Now we know how they talk, it can be safely assumed that when the NSA says prism is not recording anyone's internet data from big companies, and those companies say they don't let NSA have any of your data, what they likely mean is all of everyone's internet communication "metadata" is recorded all the time and has been continuously for some number of years now.

Every major company involved is independently denying this and several are publicly asking permission to be allowed to disclose the number and nature of the FISA requests they receive, because they believe that this will immediately disprove any such claims. These companies are begging the government to let them call you a liar to your face. You can go with the "it's a bluff, it's all a conspiracy!" route, but let's be clear: that does make you a dumbass, because at that point you are going full illuminati tinfoil hat nutjob 'everyone is on it' based on the word of someone whose bullshit:honesty ratio is frankly quite fucking terrible ("I could access all the CIA offices, promise!").

> tussock wrote:Also, internal NSA training slides demonstrate backdoor access to everything, or at least internal google data access without the assistance or awareness of google staff.

Absolutely untrue. Everything in the slides is consistent with what the official stance on PRISM is (and what companies claim is their experience working with the NSA) - a multiorganizational system for sending requests for, receiving, and databasing the information acquired from court orders to these companies. Keep in mind that the leaked documents are essentially a user's guide and brief explanation to what PRISM is - they do not reflect any real technical details of the system at all, they reflect a user's perspective. Edward Snowden was either unable to get his hands on, or unwilling to leak, any meaningful technical details. Both of which are at odds with the image Snowden himself has tried to cultivate about being the sysadmin with privileged access and inside information. Because all he actually managed to come forward with was the powerpoint they show the new guy during training to let him know what the in-house software is and a Verizon court order (which is the only interesting part of it).
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Parthenon
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Post by Parthenon » Sat Jun 15, 2013 3:55 am

I thought that the American Government was routinely scanning every single phone line for mentions of specific phrases and had been for years? And they had been confining countless people for no reason without any chance of defence or release for years as well?
Is the level of routine spying and abuse of power somehow unknown to people?
Or is the internet somehow supposed to be magically immune to this?
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sabs
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Post by sabs » Sat Jun 15, 2013 8:07 am

> Parthenon wrote:I thought that the American Government was routinely scanning every single phone line for mentions of specific phrases and had been for years? And they had been confining countless people for no reason without any chance of defence or release for years as well?
> Is the level of routine spying and abuse of power somehow unknown to people?
> Or is the internet somehow supposed to be magically immune to this?

[sarcasm]
But those were BAD people.. who had it coming. They were not honest plucky people who never did nothing wrong.
[/sarcasm]
Mostly, Americans are awesome at the Nimby mentaliy
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tussock
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Post by tussock » Sat Jun 15, 2013 2:04 pm

DSMatticus doesn't understand packet sniffing, which is funny.
Dear Sir or Madam.
Companies have denied giving data access to the NSA. The NSA slides claim they can get the data without anyone giving it to them. These positions are compatible. You think A is denying B, but it isn't, it's denying something different.
When google says they don't know of any backdoor, that's what a backdoor is. An entry the normal users don't know about. Words meaning things again.
If it's something they don't normally use (which they don't by all accounts), it could just be a table of everyone's passwords to everything. The backdoor can just be the front door. You do, after all, send all your passwords over the internet, which they can totally grab (to decode if ever needed) on the way there.
And they still wouldn't have to count that as the data they're "not gathering", the same way they're not counting who you called on your phone (and where you were standing when you did that) as data.
PC, SJW, anti-fascist, not being a dick, or working on it, he/him.
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DSMatticus
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Post by DSMatticus » Sat Jun 15, 2013 2:27 pm

You're still being a dumbass - the idea that they have a massive super secret internet-wide wiretap or anything else is rather incompatible with the fact that they routinely issue court orders for information. From a secret court. Setting up a secret court to secretly issue totally unnecessary secret warrants for information they already secretly have is... really committing to the deception, I guess.
But mostly, I know you haven't actually read the Google denials (they are explicitly denying lots of things, of which the backdoor is only one) and you haven't actually read the NSA slides (because they do not say that, they say that the system is automated but not that the data collectible is arbitrary - that is purely a claim made by Snowden that he did not in anyway support with evidence). And I am unsure how to proceed when the sources I want to point you to so you will actually learn something about this topic are the ones you are confidently citing in defense of your position. I guess I could suggest you read them again, but it obviously didn't take the first time so I'm not particularly optimistic.
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sabs
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Post by sabs » Sat Jun 15, 2013 2:45 pm

Tussock is a crazy idiot. As for getting the password on the way. I use https always to connect to google mail. There is absolutely no way that it's not encrypted. You can't just sniff my password through the air. There are of course, other ways to get access to my password and my account. But, I also use 2 factor authentication on my google account. I have to have my authenticator app setup and running, or i can't get access to my account, even if I know my password.
So, if the NSA has all of my emails.. they're getting it through a backdoor direct access from google. Something that google is specifically denying exists.
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zugschef
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Post by zugschef » Sat Jun 15, 2013 3:40 pm

european intelligence attacks the provider's encrypted https-connections because they can't demand the information they seek. the nsa gets its information even before your provider gets it, proving that the leak must be with the companies whose services you were using.
Last edited by zugschef on Sat Jun 15, 2013 3:40 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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