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Peter North posted:I liked this quote from the end of the House hearing Rape is OK if she doesn't remember it.
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Oct 30, 2013 08:17
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Aurubin posted:Alexander denied that it was the NSA directly spying on European countries, saying they got the info from their European counterparts. Quite frankly, I believe Alexander, at least partially. I don't know where to parse out where he's obfuscating, but I believe the foundations of his side. So, what, the people tapping Merkel's phone were actually a bunch of V-männer or something? That sounds ludicrous.
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Oct 30, 2013 12:22
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Elotana posted:At the end of the day it is naked imperialism. "Economic interests" and "political interests" are just another way of asserting that our status as a superpower is an end in itself, one that justifies any means whatsoever. And as with all imperialism, we're now we're seeing the first signs of blowback. Incidentally, the early defenses of the US spying program was that the US only used it for national security, unlike the Chinese who used it as an economic tool and for industrial espionage. That defense hasn't really held well.
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Oct 30, 2013 12:28
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V. Illych L. posted:So, what, the people tapping Merkel's phone were actually a bunch of V-männer or something? That sounds ludicrous. It's probably more of a hint that they bought the data from the UK, if anything. To comment on the people going "how do you know Germany isn't doing the same thing?": Obviously nobody knows how far the German government is going, but it's worth keeping in mind that any German government that is caught tapping a foreign allied leader's phone would suffer dramatic electoral consequences. Germans still remember the wiretapping extravaganza that was the STASI, and as a result privacy is a very big deal here. Immediately after the Snowden leaks there were widespread demonstrations, along with calls to block Obama's visit to Berlin and to offer Snowden asylum. The international consequences have been talked about ITT, but I can almost guarantee that Merkel's party would suffer in the next elections, and she herself would quite possibly have to face an impeachment process (Misstrauensvotum).
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Oct 30, 2013 14:25
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/world...a4dd_story.htmlquote:The National Security Agency has secretly broken into the main communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers around the world, according to documents obtained from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and interviews with knowledgeable officials. I feel very comfortable saying the NSA has no business engaging in full-take tapping domestic cables, especially not data links between the servers of massive, private companies.
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Oct 30, 2013 17:49
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efb...I'll leave the image, though.
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Oct 30, 2013 17:53
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Elotana posted:I feel very comfortable saying the NSA has no business engaging in full-take tapping domestic cables, especially not data links between the servers of massive, private companies. Inconceivable! The NSA said there was no direct access! In front of congress and everything! Inconceivable!
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Oct 30, 2013 17:57
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Elotana posted:http://www.washingtonpost.com/world...a4dd_story.html Arkane posted:efb...I'll leave the image, though. Was just going to post that. Best quote: The Article posted:Two engineers with close ties to Google exploded in profanity when they saw the drawing. “I hope you publish this,” one of them said.
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Oct 30, 2013 17:58
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SSL is dead, I give these revelations three unironic "Thanks Obama"s
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Oct 30, 2013 18:08
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Oh man, some of the articles from the past few months are hilarious in light of this. Too bad so many of these government officials were anonymous, huh? CNET CNET on June 7 posted:The National Security Agency has not obtained direct access to the systems of Apple, Google, Facebook, and other major Internet companies, CNET has learned. [...] additional lols quote:President Obama addressed the NSA's program during brief remarks in San Jose, Calif., this morning. But Obama's remarks merely offered a high-level summary of the Section 702 process: "With respect to the Internet and e-mails, this does not apply to U.S. citizens, and it does not apply to people living in the United States." Also kind of funny, Google's blog post from the same day, emphasis very much mine: quote:First, we have not joined any program that would give the U.S. government—or any other government—direct access to our servers. Indeed, the U.S. government does not have direct access or a “back door” to the information stored in our data centers. We had not heard of a program called PRISM until yesterday.
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Oct 30, 2013 18:13
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It seems pretty clear that MUSCULAR is some kind of a network-level data tap like a fiber optic splitter. The graphic is just noting that they can do anything they want once they're inside Google's datacenter. I think it's less plausible (although not implausible) that no one at Google was involved in this. Not the C-suite, certainly, you'd want them for plausible deniability anyway, but there had to be engineers and techs who noticed or should have noticed this. They don't appear to have highly tight integration because they were unsure of things like what triggers a mailbox migration. Additional slides here, dated March 14 2013: How the NSA's MUSCULAR program collects too much data from Yahoo and Google This gives an idea of the scale of the NSA collection. MUSCULAR is allocated 60gb of collection per day into the PINWALE database, and was expected to grow to 120gb per day in 2013. That also gives us a figure on their bandwidth usage, they are pulling an average of 5 mbps between all data centers. Which is peanuts, you could do that with cellular data modems. Also there's an interesting footnote at the bottom: quote:Past DO volume reduction efforts: Collectively this implies that overseas collections have been gaining significant momentum over the past year or two, under Obama's watch. Coincidentally that is also right after the FISC shot down this kind of collection from domestic servers (October 2011). So the NSA immediately did an end-run around their oversight. Articles like this make a lot more sense when you realize that a "transaction" is one of those NArchive files that contains a couple thousand mailboxes. They call it a "transaction" because it's being migrated between servers or data centers. quote:The issue arose in the context of a government application for reauthorization of 702 collection. After filing this application, the government—on May 2, 2011—wrote a letter of “clarification” describing how certain “upstream collection” of internet communications included what are called “transactions.” Upstream collection refers to collection by tapping the U.S. data pipeline, rather than by collecting from internet service providers. And “transactions,” as Judge Bates explains, “may contain a single, discrete communication, or multiple discrete communications, including communications that are neither to, from, nor about targeted facilities.” While it’s not entirely clear what a “transaction” is, think of it as a communications package—say, a snapshot of someone’s email inbox—in which the individual communications come bound together. While they can later be separated and disaggregated, the NSA cannot capture them separately. Moreover, these “transactions” turn out sometimes to include both purely domestic communications and communications involving U.S. persons not of foreign intelligence interest. It's also interesting to consider the article a month or two ago about how Google was enacting a crash program to get all its datacenter-to-datacenter links encrypted. Interesting timing. quote:Google’s encryption initiative, initially approved last year, was accelerated in June as the tech giant struggled to guard its reputation as a reliable steward of user information amid controversy about the NSA’s PRISM program, first reported in The Washington Post and the Guardian that month. PRISM obtains data from American technology companies, including Google, under various legal authorities. Paul MaudDib fucked around with this message at 20:11 on Oct 30, 2013 |
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Oct 30, 2013 18:39
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What is an "OAB"?
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Oct 30, 2013 18:50
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I'm pretty sure it's Offline Address Book.
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Oct 30, 2013 18:53
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The degree of overreach and brashness shown by the NSA is stunning. There are collaborative mechanisms in place already to get the information they want, whether it be intelligence-sharing agreements with communications companies or allied nations, and not in the Pakistan or Egypt sense: these are countries whose interests are aligned with ours, and not just for the sake of fighting the Cold War or international terror. When our country behaves in ways that we would disapprove of others reciprocating in the same fashion, something is wrong. I cannot fathom why they don't understand how this undermines our credibility and trustworthiness, and makes cooperation (with all its associated benefits) pointless. In other news: Business Insider on spying in the Vatican Excerpt from article posted:The report states that the American agency, recently embroiled in a number of scandals, is believed to have been intercepting calls within the Vatican before and during the Conclave. There are also suspicions that Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who would later be chosen as Pope Francis, was under surveillance for a number of years.
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Oct 30, 2013 19:24
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Paul MaudDib posted:I'm pretty sure it's Offline Address Book. Google was giving me "Overactive Bladder", so that's a relief.
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Oct 30, 2013 19:32
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I guess I skipped the part of yesterday's hearing where James Clapper felt it was necessary to rebut Jon Stewart.
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Oct 30, 2013 19:38
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Kid Gloves posted:Oh man, some of the articles from the past few months are hilarious in light of this. Too bad so many of these government officials were anonymous, huh? Lying Snowden exaggerated things claiming the NSA had direct access to any sort of data without judicial oversight! It's so glorious seeing the NSA's web of lies and talking points fall apart with each new article. They basically targeted big US tech companies since the tech companies serve as a centralized handy fishing spot for data mining.
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Oct 30, 2013 20:37
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I hope this forces the tech companies to take a more adversarial stance. Shut up I can dream
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Oct 30, 2013 20:39
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Elotana posted:I hope this forces the tech companies to take a more adversarial stance. I edited that post quite a bit above as I tried to suck all the information I could out of those slides, but one of those articles is interesting in hindsight. In September there was an article about how Google had accelerated plans to encrypt their datacenter-to-datacenter links as of June. That's right about the time the CEO was insisting he'd never heard of PRISM and there was no "backdoor" or "direct access". Could be coincidence or a PR move, but one completely hypothetical interpretation of that is that Snowden triggered some in-house digging and they found something. While Google must respond to lawful intercept orders or NSLs, they do not have to sit by and let the NSA open up backdoors and hack them. Too bad SSL is apparently not very effective.
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Oct 30, 2013 20:50
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In the meantime, the NSA will still have a permanent presence in the COs and Exchanges of Verizon, ATT, Comcast, Timewarner, Sprint etc. etc.
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Oct 30, 2013 20:50
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Paul MaudDib posted:Could be coincidence or a PR move, but one completely hypothetical interpretation of that is that Snowden triggered some in-house digging and they found something. While Google must respond to lawful intercept orders or NSLs, they do not have to sit by and let the NSA open up backdoors and hack them. Too bad SSL is apparently not very effective. It doesn't have to be an SSL vulnerability. It could be fiber splicing, and/or someone within Google could be working for the NSA.
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Oct 30, 2013 21:29
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iFederico posted:Incidentally, the early defenses of the US spying program was that the US only used it for national security, unlike the Chinese who used it as an economic tool and for industrial espionage. It would be pretty rich to hear the French complain about industrial espionage given that it's the field they continue to lead the world in, to the point that at one time GE executives were told not to fly with Air France lest they have their luggage rifled-through.
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Oct 30, 2013 21:59
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Dudes, everything is okquote:National Security Agency Director Keith Alexander on Wednesday denied knowledge of an agency program that reportedly tapped Google and Yahoo data centers around the world without the companies' knowledge.
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Oct 30, 2013 22:05
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"Not to my knowledge"? Have we succeeded in compartmentalizing the NSA like a resistance cell?
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Oct 30, 2013 22:27
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I can parse this!quote:Alexander added that the agency is "not authorized" to access the tech companies' data centers without going through a "court process," according to Politico. The Guardian reported earlier this year that the NSA's PRISM program allows the agency direct access to the servers of certain tech companies, including Google and Yahoo, that were required under U.S. law to comply with requests for users' communications. Remember this is a program focused on tapping cloud storage in concert with GCHQ. Presumably GCHQ handles traffic from American data centers as a courtesy while the NSA taps the rest. No court process required.
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Oct 30, 2013 23:02
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Farmer Crack-rear end posted:It doesn't have to be an SSL vulnerability. It could be fiber splicing, and/or someone within Google could be working for the NSA. The diagram seems to be saying that Google's internal traffic is not encrypted. I believe it is saying that the traffic in encrypted between the load balancers / front ends and the end users, but not between the front end servers and the internal services. Even if Google's internal traffic was encrypted, the way level 7 load balancing works the traffic would be decrypted and reencrypted on the load balancer which means that it would pass through memory there in plain text.
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Oct 30, 2013 23:37
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Arkane posted:efb...I'll leave the image, though. As a tribute to this fine, if tragic, work of art, there is now an  smiley for your amusement. Godspeed 
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Oct 30, 2013 23:38
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confused posted:The diagram seems to be saying that Google's internal traffic is not encrypted. I believe it is saying that the traffic in encrypted between the load balancers / front ends and the end users, but not between the front end servers and the internal services. Even if Google's internal traffic was encrypted, the way level 7 load balancing works the traffic would be decrypted and reencrypted on the load balancer which means that it would pass through memory there in plain text. You may be saying the same thing, but the impression that I got was that the NSA was intercepting Google data being sync'd/backed up between its various datacenters. 
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Oct 30, 2013 23:41
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Kobayashi posted:You may be saying the same thing, but the impression that I got was that the NSA was intercepting Google data being sync'd/backed up between its various datacenters. I'm not sure about the intercept point, but internal web services will be spread across many datacenters for availability and geolocation reasons. Internal datacenters within a region will likely have dedicated fiber links between them as well. So tapping the network either at the front end or at one of the links will pretty much give you everything if your internal traffic isn't encrypted. That would explain why Google is on an internal encryption binge if what someone else posted is accurate. However, my point with the load balancers is that if you have a compromised employee (well, group of employees, most likely), they could still tap all of the data even if the internal network is totally encrypted.
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Oct 30, 2013 23:49
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Farmer Crack-rear end posted:It doesn't have to be an SSL vulnerability. It could be fiber splicing, and/or someone within Google could be working for the NSA. I think the first WaPo article states that MUSCULAR comes from an unnamed service provider who allowed the NSA to split Google's fiber. What I mean is that it will be hard to secure their systems properly. From earlier releases, the NSA appears to either have fairly well broken SSL (aka TLS_RSA), or has a massive database of private keys (such that they consider "Decrypt all VPN traffic from Country X so I can identify users" to be a reasonable request for their system). If Google simply switches to SSL they reduce but do not eliminate their vulnerability. It depends on what kind of TLS they are using. If they can't just get the FISC to order Google to give up the key, or bribe some employee, the NSA certainly has the Key Recovery Service if needed, of course. Google is grade-A prime beef for the NSA, I really hope they have several full-time tinfoil hat wearers on staff right now. As far as they can go legally, it's clear they go much farther. Paul MaudDib fucked around with this message at 00:14 on Oct 31, 2013 |
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Oct 31, 2013 00:09
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Tanith posted:"Not to my knowledge"? Have we succeeded in compartmentalizing the NSA like a resistance cell? NSA is beginning to basically resemble the nefarious organizations from the Splinter Cell series? Farmer Crack-rear end posted:It doesn't have to be an SSL vulnerability. It could be fiber splicing, and/or someone within Google could be working for the NSA. Yeah SSL isn't a end to end encryption system assuming you could do a man in middle type attack at the internal data center lines behind the demarc.
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Oct 31, 2013 00:19
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Can-O-Raid posted:It would be pretty rich to hear the French complain about industrial espionage given that it's the field they continue to lead the world in, to the point that at one time GE executives were told not to fly with Air France lest they have their luggage rifled-through. Toplowtech fucked around with this message at 00:30 on Oct 31, 2013 |
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Oct 31, 2013 00:28
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All the spy words are in French, after all. Rendezvous, liaison, espionage...
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Oct 31, 2013 00:59
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OwlBot 2000 posted:All the spy words are in French, after all. Rendezvous, liaison, espionage... It's why spy is the sexiest profession.
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Oct 31, 2013 01:02
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etalian posted:NSA is beginning to basically resemble the nefarious organizations from the Splinter Cell series? Or any other technothriller antagonist, for that matter. I meant having Alexander insulated from enough details so that he can truthfully dodge things while under oath, but then again, apparently lying to congress is no big deal anyway.
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Oct 31, 2013 01:07
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Tanith posted:Or any other technothriller antagonist, for that matter. I meant having Alexander insulated from enough details so that he can truthfully dodge things while under oath, but then again, apparently lying to congress is no big deal anyway. Plus having the balls to claim the leaked information isn't accurate despite being covered in all the top secret stamps.
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Oct 31, 2013 01:43
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Broken Machine posted:As a tribute to this fine, if tragic, work of art, there is now an YOSPOS, bitch. Who says the FYAD lites were or are never good for anything?  
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Oct 31, 2013 02:30
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etalian posted:NSA is beginning to basically resemble the nefarious organizations from the Splinter Cell series? Yeah at this point I'm not entirely joking when I say I'm expecting the revelation of Alpha Protocol or some poo poo along those lines.
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Oct 31, 2013 04:14
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It seems to me that a lot of the official responses are denials of accusations based on a tiny incongruity in said accusations. "Did you spill that drink on the carpet?" "No. Absolutely not. Never." (I bumped into the table, and the kinetic force transfer resulted in the drink falling on the ground.) i am harry fucked around with this message at 04:21 on Oct 31, 2013 |
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Oct 31, 2013 04:16
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Mister Adequate posted:Yeah at this point I'm not entirely joking when I say I'm expecting the revelation of Alpha Protocol or some poo poo along those lines. While I loved Alpha Protocol, I'm not sure what you're referring to. What was the revelation again?
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Oct 31, 2013 04:31
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