Revealed: NSA collecting phone records of millions of Americans daily

The National Security Agency secretly obtained telephone and Internet records on millions of innocent Americans using a controversial law called the USA Patriot Act. Bernie was among a small minority of House members who voted against the law in 2001. Now that the secret is out about the staggering scope of the surveillance, he wants Congress to reconsider what it did. Under Bernie’s “Restore Our Privacy Act,” authorities would have to establish a reasonable suspicion based on specific information to secure court approval to monitor a specific suspect. “We can effectively combat terrorism without sacrificing the civil liberties and constitutional protections which make us a free nation,” he said. “I believe that most Americans do not want to live in an Orwellian society where everything you do is recorded."

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You know what? I don't care. PRISM can have my fucking Pandora playlist or what the fuck ever! They can watch me take a dump if they want to. I have nothing to hide (except maybe BIG BLACKIE....but thats another story.....makes my ass hurt thinking about it)!

 

So, basically it's saying they need to have warrants for that?

You don't recognize the potential for abuse and don't you see how they are just giving themselves more and more power. Who knows what else is being done...

 

I understand the reason for alarm of course. But I think PRISM is there to protect from Terrorists. They do use things of technology to activate cell groups and etc.

 

There are a lot of misconceptions going on.

First, Prism probably isn't an acronym for anything, so it shouldn't be capitalized.

Secondly, there's a lot of technical misinformation flying around. I don't blame anybody, because the media has really failed on this one. They haven't really been wanting to look into the technical details, but I'll try and bullet them, and elaborate as needed. I am not a conspiracy theorist, and most of this isn't conjecture.

1. What is prism?
Prism itself, as explained by the slides, is collection of user data from certain large tech firms. Facebook, Google, Microsoft (do you use windows? It is spyware by default.) etc. They did sometimes get warrants by a secret judge before handing the information over on Americans.

The warrants were issued in large bundles or the tech companies didn't ask.

2. Why prism matters?
Well it doesn't so much. The concerning news isn't that the company selling your personal information to dating websites and golf tee's somehow didn't value your privacy. It's really one of the first documents confirming what we already knew which was that the government is involved in ubiquitous metadata collection and deep packet inspection.

3. The government has always kept tabs...
I read this earlier in the thread. It also used to be difficult and targeted, and usually with a warrant.

4. But they said they had to have a warrant!

That is not how the metadata collection works. It's a dragnet, and if your connection passes through fiberoptics within the united states, you are in the dragnet. So by that I mean everyone here.

Laying fiber optics are governed by special rules like laying a highway or a water treatment plant. Some of those rules are helpful. Others facilitate metadata collection.

How do you think they decide who to get warrants for? The reasons the NSA choses to get those rubber stamp warrants, are they have triggered keywords and trends. So before they could get a warrant, your data has already been snared, analyzed by a computer looking for trends of that snare, and given to a couple guys to look at to determine if they want to get a warrant.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/20/fisa-court-nsa-without-warrant

Of if your foreign they'll do it anyway. If they haven't determined your ID yet you are assumed to be foreign. The internet works through routing, and much of that information through the states is routed through the governments dragnet.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJDCxzKmROY

5. About tor.
There's a lot of misinformation about this. Yes it was developed by the Navy, and no it is not a 'honeypot'. The feds operate some tor gateways, which do act as honeypots. But because of the way that Tor works, it will not fail unless all of the layers of the onion are honeypots. Since the connections vary so often, tor can be generally considered a way to be relatively anonymous online.

This is somewhat true against omega level threats (governments) doing passive analysis of traffic. If something tips their fancy, (like using an obfuscation protocol like tor, which does leave a footprint) they can use much more powerful tools with point to point confirmation which makes tor a much weaker protocol.

Furthermore, those of you who are talking about tor like it's fight club, tor is not a secret, it's obfuscation, and it is only strong when a lot of people use it.

And it's for obfuscation, not security. You should not be accessing your vanilla email or freaking facebook through it. I can open wireshark and sniff my exit nodes traffic with like two mouse clicks.

6. They're only going after bad guys right?

Yes, there is nothing to see here. Move along you reckless optimist.

7. Can I be anonymous?
Yeah. But depending on how anonymous you want to be, it can be tricky. I'll post details in the tech forums shortly.

8. What does all this mean?
I want you all to remember one thing. You deserve privacy even if you have nothing to hide.

And if you think you think you are never wrong in the eyes of an all seeing authority, this is from Supreme Court Justice Breyer

 

No offense ment but I find the above more of the techno-babble-justification rubbish the Internet is full of.

All modern governments are nothing more than corrupt self serving entities with way too much money and power. It's a fool that believes for even a nano-second that these corrupt governments have NOT ALREADY SPENT billions and created vast computer complexes that can decode, decrypt and unravel any little "toy-ish" software or computer in possession of the general public.... They've got probably between 20 to 100 years more advance computer systems and tech on anything currently available to the general public.

If you want to stop the spying... Get rid of the cell phone and the computer.Get in the habit of Internet cafes and using someone else's computer.

 

To me it is the details Snowden et al have not mentioned, and the reality of the situation. It might be your lack of understanding of computers that is the issue. It certainly was mine.

If you say so.

Ridiculous.

 

I don't see nothing wrong with this picture either:

 

How is the NSA/GCHQ profiting from spying?

 

They're not and that's not the point.

Reasoning:

... 'so lack of privacy is not an issue' is an extremely short-sighted view imo.

Just as it might seem unlikely that prisons would be in the hands of the private sector- that day is here. And we know that private sector motivation is profit, not justice or liberty.

 

Justification? Did you gloss over my post? It wasn't justification at all, It was a strong critique of the growth of the spy state. If I didn't elaborate on specific technical details I will provide more of them where I am able.

And the government doesn't have to be able to decrypt encrypted network traffic. They are a root certificate authority, as all nations are, and encrypted network traffic (TSL) isn't meant to be strong encryption anyway, it's needed to be decoded on the fly to another computer with a shared key. The point is that by the time the attacker would be able to see the traffic, the session will have expired and will be useless.

Strong encryption protocols, like disk encryption when properly implemented, cannot be defeated by traditional compute power. You can find flaws in the protocols through collisions which reduce the entropy in algothims making the encryption scheme obsolete, but it would take something like Tianhe-2 from now until far beyond the death of the universe to be able to break strong encryption protocols using brute force.

But yes, there are multiple ways to defeat a nation states observation capacity in theory. In practice if they wanted your information badly enough they would beat it out of you.

Public Internet has non existent security. Being within the same network with another computer makes all your traffic instantly vulnerable from two layers. The transport layer and the hardware (routing) layer.

That's optimistically assuming you have a public library with patched updated computers, and you never do anything which would compromise that anonymity. (like login to your email)

Now using somebody else computer on the otherhand, your close to being on to something there.

 

Furthermore, if you want to stop the spying, you should demand action, not tell people to retreat and use insecure methods to protect themselves.

 

I don't see nothing wrong with this picture either:

 

It was techno-babble justification. ie: Oh Tor can be this.. but it can't do that.. etc etc. Fact is this is no longer a Davd vs Goliath problem.. it's beyone even David vs Godzilla.

And either here in the UK or in America, at best there's going to be some blokes wearing a guy fawkes mask but otherwise no one is really going to lift a single finger to do anything. Soon it will be old news like wikileaks because most people don't give a toss unless it threatens loosing their toys.

 

Well, that was what the point seemed to be. What is the point then?

 

read post 151

 

That day started about 100 years or so ago - and even more so 40 years ago - but I get what you mean now.

 

So you're saying resistance is futile then? :biggrin:

I agree that people aren't as mad about this as they should be. I was hoping if there was some technical information that could clear things up, maybe they would get a little madder.

I thought you meant justification as in, 'it's okay because you don't understand the technology'

When in fact I was saying, "It's really bad, heres a little information about the technology.

Using public computers has many security implications.

1. It probably has a logger on the software or router level.
2. It has been used by a lot of people and almost certainly contains Spyware.
3. Anyone on a public network is at an ideal place to sniff your traffic.
4. If you reveal any public information that will be tied to an additional location you use by the tech companies in an attempt to make it a trusted location.

I also touched upon the security implications of tor and said it should not be considered suitable for an omega level threats. (governments) I did say omega level threats could be defeated. It requires some technical knowledge and some work.

I will go ahead and post today which ways in which that can be done. At the dragnet level, tor is reasonably secure, at the deep packet inspection level, it is much less so, and at investigative levels, should not be considered to be secure.

If it sounds like too much technobabble to you, then you should accept that you aren't willing to invest the time in learning how to protect yourself because you think the problem is too big.

 

The Internet cafes and all the public computers can be filled with enough viruses and spyware and have an MI6 spy watching over my shoulder. What they'll get from me is 5 minutes of me searching what's on sale at Boots.

The only other time I use the Internet is when I'm working trying to stay awake. (I work nights) And then it's pretty much this weird place and my knitters group. Otherwise I don't a cell phone or even a tele.

But I do have a telephone in my flat but I'm not a very chatty girl and I only use it to find out when to meet other's face to face. And now I meet most of my girlfriends when I go to pray. So this technical rubbish doesn't really enrich my life.

 

So, ummm, I haven't been on in a little bit and when I get on I see a post under my username that I did not make. Specifically, this one here. Here, we have a 16 page thread in response to something that I didn't post.

I don't know what's goin on, but that ain't cool.