tentative8e8op posted:

I wasn't able to find anything about a new NSA leaker, but last month a State Department employee wrote an interesting article in the Washington Post

tentative8e8op posted:

A corporation I'm doing business with is not the same as military and law enforcement intelligence agencies who have agreements with many corporations, who sends literal spies into corporations to sneak data out without notice, who maliciously hack into said corporations to steal information, and who will file secret orders in a secret court under a secret interpretation of a vague law to obtain any records. Their invasion of privacy occurs when information is outright taken by a fourth party with and for identifying information and content, especially when such data is taken illegally.

tentative8e8op posted:

I'm sure it'd be simple to break into my home when I'm away at work, would you consider my diaries, journals and sketchpads to be private? I do.

tentative8e8op posted:

I don't think we're in so dystopian a situation as to have no expectation of privacy, I just feel America's intelligence and law enforcement culture needs to be reigned in.

ShadowHawk posted:

There is a major difference between plugging a splitter into a datacenter and hacking every individual email server or desktop computer/phone in the country. The former exposes the attack to everyone, and when software exploits are done en masse they can be quickly detected and fixed (think about what happens when a code-red style computer virus gets into the wild). The NSA likely has exploits for every system out there, but just like antibiotics if they try to use them on everything they'll lose their effectiveness. The NSA doesn't have an infinite supply of these things.

ShadowHawk posted:

Encryption is the difference between the NSA knowing that I emailed a private confession to my mistress and the NSA knowing that I sent an email on the same day some other gmail user received one.

ShadowHawk posted:

The mail servers can act as this intermediary. If email were encrypted properly the NSA couldn't know that an email sent was the same as one received. "Gets 12 emails from gmail a day" is a lot less of a privacy leak than "Gets 2 emails from his wife, 7 emails from his mistress, 0 emails from his kids, and 3 emails from a therapist".

ShadowHawk posted:

The only way to get the latter is to directly hack into the mail server or sending computer -- and, as above, the NSA can't do that to every single one out there without risking losing their means of doing so.

Kobayashi posted:

This is a good example. I don't think you're trying to claim that e-commerce is fundamentally flawed.

Kobayashi posted:

Encryption works. It makes mass, indiscriminate surveillance impossible.

Kobayashi posted:

Well-designed encrypted communication protocols do not leak that kind of metadata. It's not merely about encrypting the actual voice communication, but also about minimizing metadata leakage. Granted this is insanely complicated, and literally every secure communication service makes different tradeoffs, but if we talk about asynchronous communication (like email or IM), then the metadata leakage becomes less of a problem.

Paul MaudDib posted:

That's quite a claim. Even Tor has constant metadata leaks, and it's designed from the ground up for anonymity. That's true even when you're dealing with only things designed from the ground up to operate anonymously (i.e. .onion sites), and once you start transporting another insecure protocol over it there's an even higher chance of leakage.

SubG posted:

In public places you have no general expectation of privacy. If you wear a mask you might end up preventing a random stranger from photographing your face as you walk down the street. But if you're wearing a paper mask and the wind blows it off and that stranger photographs you, de jure you have not had your privacy violated because you had no reasonable expectation of privacy in the first place. If it turns out that there were a bunch of spooks in the bushes waving fans around to help the wind dislodge your mask that might be a separate, again de jure, issue but that doesn't change the fact that, because you were in public, you had no general reasonable expectation of privacy.

Snak posted:

Emails, on the other hand, should be private.

SubG posted:

I agree that this is how I would wish it to be, but that is not how e.g. Google looks at the subject, and the latter almost certainly has a greater impact on privacy in the real world than the former.

SubG posted:

I agree that this is how I would wish it to be, but that is not how e.g. Google looks at the subject, and the latter almost certainly has a greater impact on privacy in the real world than the former.

Aleksei Vasiliev posted:

Google's view is that if you sent an email to a user of Google Mail, you should not be surprised if Google's servers look at it. This is accurate. The alternative is making spamblocking illegal unless it's clientside and run by the recipient (inherently less accurate than serverside).

google's terms of service posted:

Our automated systems analyze your content (including emails) to provide you personally relevant product features, such as customized search results, tailored advertising, and spam and malware detection. This analysis occurs as the content is sent, received, and when it is stored.

Snak posted:

And that's something I respect. If I use a service and I agree to some terms of service and don't read the closely enough, I don't really have a right to say my privacy is being violated. In that case, what happened was I didn't undestand my privacy, and that's on me. However, if I were to create software that actually facilitated my privacy, there is a strong indication that the current NSA behavior would not respect my legitimate privacy and would use any means necisarry to countermand it. The is a strong likelyhood that any serious attempts at establishing privacy will cause me to be labled and extremist.

SubG posted:

Or they target for compromise the individuals for whom they can't obtain information via other methods. Again, this is literally something which we know they have both the methods and inclination to do per the Snowden disclosures. This is a thing that they are apparently capable of, and in fact have done, at scale and on an effectively automated (e.g. click-to-compromise) basis with very high success rates.

I mean if you want to imagine some cool cyberpunk future where everyone encrypts everything than yeah, the exact methods and programmes that the NSA has in place wouldn't be effective. But that's not the world we're living in. In the real world what we know is that using encryption is something that the NSA will use as evidence, in and of itself, for targeting the individual for additional surveillance. If everyone everywhere used encryption for everything at all times this policy wouldn't work. But it isn't as if they'd just throw up their hands and say `well, they won'. They'd use the other technologies and methods they've already developed for dealing with this, and they'd presumably develop new ones.

quote:

So in purely practical terms `just use encryption' doesn't work because we know they've got a gameplan for that, and in ideological (or however you want to say it) terms it doesn't work because a universal shift toward encryption would just produce a universal shift in surveillance technology just like every other drat advance in communication technology. Which has in the end, every time, resulted in greater capacity for information collection and surveillance.

I mean I'm not saying don't use encryption. Do. But, as I said before, the threat model using encryption protects you from is your neighbor's kid who's good with computers, not the loving NSA.

ShadowHawk posted:

That's why Snowden and the like have been suggesting the solution is systems that encrypt by default in a human-usable way. Using encryption on such a service doesn't set you apart, and either forces the NSA to use mass exploits or try to find targets on some other service.

I don't see why such a system is in principle impossible, we just haven't (until now) had particularly strong incentives to build one.

The threat to protect us from isn't targeted surveillance, it's mass surveillance. That's why we need mass encryption systems.

Winkle-Daddy posted:

Your entire point rests on conflating mass surveillance with targeted surveillance.

JeffersonClay posted:

Surveillance by corporations in the free market is less onerous than surveillance by the state. That's the argument, right?

JeffersonClay posted:

Surveillance by corporations in the free market is less onerous than surveillance by the state. That's the argument, right?

Thanqol posted:

Google can't arrest you.

SubG posted:

They can certainly analyse your data and turn the data over to the authorities who can arrest you though.

But beyond that, this line of argument appears to be predicated on the idea that there is no harm in the violation of privacy in and of itself. That is, it only matters if there is some other consequence (e.g., if you are arrested as a result of the privacy violation). Is that your position?

SubG posted:

They can certainly analyse your data and turn the data over to the authorities who can arrest you though.

But beyond that, this line of argument appears to be predicated on the idea that there is no harm in the violation of privacy in and of itself. That is, it only matters if there is some other consequence (e.g., if you are arrested as a result of the privacy violation). Is that your position?

XK posted:

I honestly can't tell what you are arguing for. You seem to be suggesting everyone just give up and don't bother trying to keep anything private because NSA will magic away any attempts at privacy anyway.

Thanqol posted:

E: I'm theoretically fine with mass surveillance, what I'm not fine with is the criminal, hostile and secretive way that the NSA has been going about it, including its willingness to compromise civilian systems for its own advantage.

SubG posted:

Criminal? What criminal activity are you talking about? And are you arguing that if it isn't criminal then it's okay? I'm actually asking here.

quote:

Also, you either didn't answer my question or I'm failing to understand your response as an answer to it: do you believe that there's no harm in violation of privacy in and of itself, absent some other overt harm (e.g. getting arrested as a result of the privacy violation)?

As is probably already apparent I consider the violation of privacy to be an inherent harm, just like the violation of any other right; an evaluation of the quantitative level of harm in `real' terms (whatever those might be) is not necessary. I hasten to add that I'm not trying to suggest that quantitative harm is irrelevant, but I don't think that's all that's at stake here.

Thanqol posted:

Google can't arrest you.

Zand posted:

They can be compelled to provide their data to people that can though.

SubG posted:

This should not be surprising, as it is precisely the same path that e.g. random hackers-for-profit have taken; the fact that for example credit card numbers are characteristically encrypted in transport has posed no particular obstacle to the theft of credit card data---they just compromise either the consumer-end by getting malware onto your PC, or compromise the server end and grab the data in bulk. This is not a process that involves a lot of leet hacker skills or whatever the gently caress, it is something that is literally more fire-and-forget than keeping the target machines up to date is. That's the problem.

SubG posted:

So ubiquitous shrinkware encryption is almost certainly broken due to implementation fuckups even if it isn't compromised by active subversion via some other means. And finally while you and I might care about this, people in aggregate do not. Information security cannot, on a mass scale, convince people not to click on bullshit email attachments and cannot, on a mass scale, convince software companies to produce software that prevents or prohibits this sort of silly behaviour. More than a quarter of the world is still using XP. Draw me the line that connects this present to your magnificent cryptofuture.

SubG posted:

And beyond all of that, I'd be willing to bet even people with comparatively sophisticated understanding of privacy issues compared to the general population (like I expect most of the readers of this thread are, in that they've thought about the subject at all) probably don't understand all of the privacy agreements they've made, implicitly or explicitly, with all of the third parties who right now have their data. If I asked you to enumerate all of the personal data you've shared and with whom and what they are permitted to do with this data I'd be surprised if you got half of it. I can't prove this of course. Nobody can. That's kinda the point.

Thanqol posted:

Lying to congress repeatedly comes to mind, which was what did for Snowden in the first place.

Thanqol posted:

I'm not convinced mass surveillance is an inherent harm.

Thanqol posted:

Yes. And in order to be compelled to do that, there has to be a formal request made, preferably with a warrant.

SubG posted:

Can you cite particular examples?

And are you saying that if they didn't lie about it, it's okay? Again, I'm actually asking to try to get a feel for your position here.

quote:

I'm not saying that mass surveillance is an inherent harm, I'm saying that violation of privacy is an inherent harm, just like the violation of any other right. Surveillance may or may not violate privacy, and whether or not it is `mass' surveillance is not a good predictor.

quote:

You seem to have a misapprehension about the relationship between information sources like Google and information sinks like the NSA. From what is known in the public record this is not a particularly adversarial relationship.

quote:

And you really didn't address my earlier response on this point---the fact that Google can and does analyse user content and voluntarily discloses it to LEAs. The story I linked involves Google automatically scanning images for child pornography and turning in violators. So they presumably have some automated image analysis algorithm that flags content for review by human operators who then look at the content, decide if it's a violation, and then hand the data over to law enforcement if they think it is.

If this does not constitute a privacy violation, then it is difficult to see how a government agency running precisely the same algorithm, having content flagged in the same way, and then having a law enforcement official review the flagged content and possibly acting upon it would be a privacy violation. And to take that position would seem to imply that the proper locus of criminal investigations involving child pornography is not in law enforcement agencies but rather in privately run internet service companies. Which would seem to be a surprising result.

Thanqol posted:

James Clapper lies under oath to congress.

SubG posted:

Unless you're trying to make a narrow statutory/regulatory/Constitutional point here, I think you're missing the larger issue. If the same third party entity ends up in possession of the information from an individual privacy standpoint does it matter if the mechanism of the transfer was a sale, willing compliance with a request from a LEA, compelled compliance with a court order, or some sort of covert black bag super spy poo poo? My position is that, again purely from an individual privacy standpoint, the difference is de minimis.

SubG posted:

tentative8e8op posted:

I'm sure it'd be simple to break into my home when I'm away at work, would you consider my diaries, journals and sketchpads to be private? I do.

I think this is a bad model. If you're talking about a computer (or other information system) that's physically and logically segregated from the internet than that's one thing. But hook that computer up to the internet and start making data transfers that cross state and national boundaries, doing things like posting to this message board (presumably you don't consider this post, or yours, to be private), then I think the situation is meaningfully different.

tentative8e8op posted:

I'm sure it'd be simple to break into my home when I'm away at work, would you consider my diaries, journals and sketchpads to be private? I do. A nearly closed network, or data at rest on a storage server, being hackable does not mean all information within automatically loses any-and-all manners of privacy. What it means, to me, is that whomever breaks in to obtain or destroy such information is a criminal. Heck, even the Senate Intelligence Committee and Google consider their internal networks to be private.

SubG posted:

In public places you have no general expectation of privacy. If you wear a mask you might end up preventing a random stranger from photographing your face as you walk down the street. But if you're wearing a paper mask and the wind blows it off and that stranger photographs you, de jure you have not had your privacy violated because you had no reasonable expectation of privacy in the first place. If it turns out that there were a bunch of spooks in the bushes waving fans around to help the wind dislodge your mask that might be a separate, again de jure, issue but that doesn't change the fact that, because you were in public, you had no general reasonable expectation of privacy.

SubG posted:

I think we live in a surveillance state and we don't consider it dystopian because we've defined down dystopianism. And I say `we', not `you'; I don't feel particularly oppressed or twitchy or whatever.

But up above you make an implicit argument that there's not a privacy issue with corporate use of your data because you're willingly entering into an agreement with the corporation. I think that's really bunk. It has become effectively impossible to opt out of surveillance. You cannot travel on the roads without being the subject of surveillance of traffic cameras. You cannot travel by air without being subject to having your person searched---possibly by something as invasive as `full body scan'. You cannot use the internet or a phone without having your activities profiled in intricate detail. And so on. In order to avoid this `background' surveillance one would effectively have to become a crazy Luddite recluse. And that's just private poo poo. I don't even know how you'd expect to obtain or hold down a salaried job without leaving a giant surveillance footprint.

And beyond all of that, I'd be willing to bet even people with comparatively sophisticated understanding of privacy issues compared to the general population (like I expect most of the readers of this thread are, in that they've thought about the subject at all) probably don't understand all of the privacy agreements they've made, implicitly or explicitly, with all of the third parties who right now have their data. If I asked you to enumerate all of the personal data you've shared and with whom and what they are permitted to do with this data I'd be surprised if you got half of it. I can't prove this of course. Nobody can. That's kinda the point.

SubG posted:

No offense, but if you're trying to portray the NSA as some sort of rogue criminal agency and that's your citation that's some seriously weak poo poo. Because it doesn't suggest any of the activities of the agency were themselves criminal or whatever, you're just insinuating that something the director said in public about a classified programme was misleading. I mean I'm not going to defend either the agency or the director but that's a really loving weak argument.

SubG posted:

It is impossible to know for sure because of the nature of the problem, but from the publicly known data it appears that the ratio of undetected to detected/reported/remediated exploits could easily be on the order of millions to one. Exploits that deface or delete content or adversely affect performance are far more likely to be observed than ones that do not cause such effects. If a worm or virus took no other action than e.g. replacing an encryption library I suspect the detection rate would be close to zero. And if it was detected it isn't as if there would be a readme.txt that identified the exploit as the work of the NSA or whatever.

quote:

If they're monitoring all your email and phone traffic then even if it's encrypted and they can't read any of it or get access to the clear communications via some other means, they still know that she's your mistress.

Email addresses are not, and cannot (with public MTAs) be encrypted. So if everyone you communicate with is using the same mail service (so everything is delivered internally on the company's mail harness and never traverses public networks), and assuming the analyst looking at you has no visibility into their servers, then you might compel the analyst to use other methods. But if any of those presumptions aren't true---e.g. if you're using gmail and your mistress is on yahoo---then the fact that the content is encrypted won't prevent an analyst from being able to extract information about your social network from traffic analysis.

quote:

Or they target for compromise the individuals for whom they can't obtain information via other methods. Again, this is literally something which we know they have both the methods and inclination to do per the Snowden disclosures. This is a thing that they are apparently capable of, and in fact have done, at scale and on an effectively automated (e.g. click-to-compromise) basis with very high success rates.

I mean if you want to imagine some cool cyberpunk future where everyone encrypts everything than yeah, the exact methods and programmes that the NSA has in place wouldn't be effective. But that's not the world we're living in. In the real world what we know is that using encryption is something that the NSA will use as evidence, in and of itself, for targeting the individual for additional surveillance. If everyone everywhere used encryption for everything at all times this policy wouldn't work. But it isn't as if they'd just throw up their hands and say `well, they won'. They'd use the other technologies and methods they've already developed for dealing with this, and they'd presumably develop new ones.

ShadowHawk posted:

Millions to one is the exact point here. There are hundreds of millions of devices the NSA would need to be continuously launching viruses against (and having information from them sent back to them) if the data weren't laying unencrypted at rest in easily accessible locations. That sort of stuff is noticeable, particularly when it involves spontaneous outbound traffic to unknown places.

Paul MaudDib posted:

That's quite a claim. Even Tor has constant metadata leaks, and it's designed from the ground up for anonymity. That's true even when you're dealing with only things designed from the ground up to operate anonymously (i.e. .onion sites), and once you start transporting another insecure protocol over it there's an even higher chance of leakage.

SubG posted:

Manifestly false.

In addition to the purely factual error, it is a categorical error to expect encryption to protect against surveillance. Properly designed, implemented, and deployed encryption (so a strict minority of all encryption in general) will provide protection against recovery of the plaintext from the cyphertext. This impinges on the subject of surveillance at the periphery, but that's about the size of it. Encryption is important because it is quantifiable and evaluable, and it is comparatively easy to commodify than many of the other aspects of broader information security. But no, encryption doesn't make mass surveillance impossible. Strongly no. Encryption isn't a superpower.

SubG posted:

Right now today all shrinkware encryption will accomplish (in re NSA surveillance) is perhaps shifting you from your notional mass surveillance column on the ledger to the targeted surveillance column. (1) This poses no operational obstacle to the NSA for any reasonably imaginable rate of adoption of shrinkware encryption. If we wish to imagine some wild cyberpunk future where shrinkware encryption is used by everyone everywhere for everything then (2) the NSA will use the other methods at its disposal and, presumably, (3) develop new ones. All of which can, and per the Snowden disclosures, (4) already are being done at scale and in an automated fashion. Additionally, while ubiquitous encryption may offer some protection against eavesdropping in the traditional sense, (5) it does not pose an obstacle to broader surveillance and so encryption is not, and cannot, be a remedy to mass surveillance and it is an error to presume it can. Beyond that, encryption systems are complex and brittle and all of the incidental fuckups can be exploited---again at scale and in an automated fashion---by an adversary like the NSA. So ubiquitous shrinkware encryption is almost certainly broken due to implementation fuckups even if it isn't compromised by active subversion via some other means. And finally while you and I might care about this, people in aggregate do not. Information security cannot, on a mass scale, convince people not to click on bullshit email attachments and cannot, on a mass scale, convince software companies to produce software that prevents or prohibits this sort of silly behaviour. More than a quarter of the world is still using XP. Draw me the line that connects this present to your magnificent cryptofuture.

And leaving all that aside, if the NSA and other LEAs found themselves unable to get access to this kind of data due to technical difficulties, (6) there's every indication that you'd just see broadening of requirements under e.g. CALEA to mandate government access to this sort of data.

SubG posted:

Given what's known in the public record, the NSA has operated with the knowledge and consent of the executive branch, the Congress, and the courts.

tentative8e8op posted:

Yes, it matters a lot to me whether an intelligence agency follows established legal procedures or not.

tentative8e8op posted:

Please, do you have a problem with hacking into lawmakers' computers to destroy incriminating information, and point blank lying under oath about such actions? With lawlessly hacking into internal networks of American companies to collect mass customers' information in bulk? With actually implanting people into American companies to "guide" such companies policies? With actually implanting agents into American companies with an intent to take private and internal customer data without going through any courts? Do you not see how these processes are a lot worse than following legal procedures?

Do you not believe any of my examples are happening, or are you okay with them?

ShadowHawk posted:

Ok, how about the time they illegally put splitters on all the major backbone fiber installations in the country?

You know, the thing Congress had to make retroactively legal?

tentative8e8op posted:

I like how you cut out the rest of my paragraph for your response.

tentative8e8op posted:

You keep conflating corporate operational information with agencies who feel they've a right to ALL information everywhere regardless of legal procedures or privacy/publicity of such information, and you somehow feel anyone with any issues with this is a "crazy luddite recluse"

ShadowHawk posted:

Millions to one is the exact point here. There are hundreds of millions of devices the NSA would need to be continuously launching viruses against (and having information from them sent back to them) if the data weren't laying unencrypted at rest in easily accessible locations. That sort of stuff is noticeable, particularly when it involves spontaneous outbound traffic to unknown places.

Kobayashi posted:

Sorry, I thought I had sufficiently disclaimed my statement by adding that it was very difficult and involves a lot of tradeoffs. To be clear, I'm not claiming that there are perfectly secure, anonymous alternatives for digital communication. I was simply trying to say that newer communication protocols attempt to protect the metadata too.

Kobayashi posted:

OK, I think I see where the disconnect is here. I'm trying to argue that mass encryption makes passive surveillance infeasible.

Kobayashi posted:

2. From what I can tell, these techniques are reserved for high value targets. Interdiction and black bag jobs are expensive. Yes, they might the NSA might be able to physically compromise tens or perhaps hundreds of thousands of devices, but I see no evidence that they could ever physically compromise the billions of devices that are connected to the Internet.

Kobayashi posted:

3. I'm not entirely sure what you mean by this. If you're talking about new exploits, see above. If you're talking about the underlying encryption algorithms, then I go back to Snowden, who as repeatedly claimed that encryption works. There's no evidence the NSA has fundamentally broken the underlying math.

Thanqol posted:

Since you disregarded my entire post to nitpick a citation, I'll do the same for you. Would you go ahead and provide some citation for this point? Because it runs totally contrary to my understanding of this story.

Thanqol posted:

What I'm saying is that the NSA is a bad organisation. The incompetence and waste offends me far more than the thought of having my privacy violated. They suck at their jobs and their assigned task is stupid to begin with. They should be shut down and replaced with something of use to society.

SubG posted:

SubG posted:

`Metadata' here is semantically equivalent to `routing information', and on a public network like the internet routing information needs to be public or the traffic can't be routed.

SubG posted:

The NSA collects billions if not trillions of `metadata' records---so-and-so called or emailed or whatever the gently caress such-and-such and the call lasted so long or the email was this many bytes or whatever. From all of these they construct a very large, very elaborate graph in which endpoints are individuals (or maybe organisations) and the edges are individual communications. Just doing this gets them the structure of social networks. Adding in information about timing, direction and volume of traffic, and so on and gets them behaviour.

Using this analysis---all of which used data for which encryption never even entered into the picture---they identify the individual communications that they care enough about to even consider looking at the content. On the order of millions is probably an upper bound for this, and it wouldn't surprise me if it was substantially lower---independent of how we characterise their motivations, they have significant incentive to use quicker, less expensive processes to filter results so that the most expensive analysis is only done on the data that is most likely to yield actionable content (this, incidentally, is a general problem in data anaysis and is believed to be the reason Nigerian email scams are so unbelievable---so the scammers don't waste their time on anyone who's going to catch a clue and run off before they can be fleeced).

SubG posted:

Any solution to this fundamental architectural problem is necessarily massively less efficient (in terms of metrics like latency, bandwidth, and so on) and therefore could not even in principle be used for the vast majority of internet communications. This means that any solution, quote unquote, to the problem could only be used for communications where the security of the communication is worth the additional overhead. And that means that any use of the system is basically waving your hand and saying `this is the poo poo that needs intercepting!' And if you have something that you're trying to keep secret the most important thing you can do is avoid disclosing that you've got a secret in the first place.