skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We lack the budget because that's the government we voted for. And the reason we don't spend a third of our budget on defense is not because we can't but because we don't want to.

I'm glad we don't have a mass-surveillance system and I would like to keep it that way. I don't get this attitude of "we're no better so who cares". What the US government does in the US is their business and what ours does here is our business, but when a foreign government starts spying on me that pisses me off. I wonder what your reaction would be if it was China reading your emails.
The real story in the NSA scandal is the collapse of journalism
PRISM: "Collection directly from the servers"
> This differentiation between 'having data' and 'analysing data' is not one we'd generally make in the IT world - because if they already have the boxes in their possession, how do we know they are getting the right permission before they open the boxes? How is any oversight possible in that situation?

I don't think it is possible: that's precisely why it's not a distinction made in the IT world: we don't have the apparatus of courts and judges. In the IT world, the primary issue is about security. You have a walled garden and you don't want to let bad people in. Logistics is secondary. Whereas in the IC world, logistics appears to be the harder problem, and keeping the bad people out is already solved to their satisfaction. The challenge is to make sure everyone who needs the data has it.
Thinking about 9/11 and being concerned about 9/11 is not the same as using it as a rhetorical device four times in the first four paragraphs of the introduction. He's writing to a military audience, not to an audience who is unaware of 9/11's significance and how it may compare to Pearl Harbor
The interesting thing here is that Greenwald is sending a signal that he has more information than he has released.

Which puts everyone on all sides on notice that they should step carefully with their statements.
I'm amazed it makes due with so little. But the level of donations also goes to show you how little people care about its mission (which is unfortunate), slacktivists on HN and Reddit aside.
Do you have friends who lost friends in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars? What do you tell them? The wars made us less safe. What do you tell your kids who have to pay for them?

Look, I'm not saying don't act. Sometimes military action is the best option. Just keep your eyes open. Sometimes invading countries that want to be left alone, or increased authoritarianism at home isn't the best idea.
Obama defends NSA spying program as new Prism details emerge
Yeah I know. To do what the parent comment is asking, there can't be any US data-centers. That's not realistic.
"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=A6e7...
From Glenn Greenwald's twitter, https://twitter.com/ggreenwald:

Allow me to quote from the NSA document we just
published defining PRISM: "COLLECTION DIRECTLY
FROM THE SERVERS"

Our story was written *from the start* to say NSA
claimed this, telecoms deny-we wanted them to have
to work it out *in public* what they do

We reported - accurately - what the NSA claims. We
reported - accurately - what the companies claim. It
conflicts. That's why we reported it

Just one more time: NSA on PRISM: "Collection directly
from the servers of these US service providers:
Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook.."
To Eric Schmidt: You have ZERO credibility in this issue.
and this "Collection directly from the servers of these US service providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook.."
If you've played with the new Google Maps, this is exactly wrong. I find the new maps actually encourages exploration. Everytime you click on the map, new stuff appears, along with photos on the bottom.

It's like web surfing or hunting through Wikipedia. Each click changes the map and exposes you to more stuff. What's true is that a search will spotlight the things most relevant to you ("coffee"), but that means the highly related coffee joints by you, your friends, zagat, are slightly bigger on the map, it does not eliminate the other coffee joints, just visually ranks them differently (smaller, or just a small dot)

Compared to the old google maps, where a search for coffee would return hundreds of little red dots that you'd have to click on before you could even see what they were, the new maps is far better because it shows more information up front, and clicking the lower ranked stuff is done better,

I've spent hours just exploring stuff on the new maps, finding places I never knew about by clicking new stuff as it appears on the map.
Any of you who have been reading Declan McCullagh's reporting regarding online privacy and civil liberties know he's the last person you'd expect to find writing a takedown of the WaPo NSA story. He's also a frequent commenter on HN.
This tool can also help relatives of deceased one to take over accounts (that are rightfully theirs).

Nobody goes and says - give us power to do evil. A tool by itself is devoid of morality.
"We reported - wrongly - what was actually happening in the real world."

The lede on Greenwald's story:

The National Security Agency has obtained direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other US internet giants, according to a top secret document obtained by the Guardian.

Then, just 1 graf later:

The Guardian has verified the authenticity of the document [...]

Later:

The NSA access was enabled by changes to US surveillance law introduced under President Bush and renewed under Obama in December 2012.

The access. Was enabled. No qualifications given.

Next graf:

The program facilitates extensive, in-depth surveillance on live communications and stored information.

The program now exists. The article no longer reports on the contents of a document, but rather on "the program" itself. Is he talking about PRISM, or about the change to FISA law? It's not clear. But it's clear here:

The participation of the internet companies in Prism will add to the debate, ignited by the Verizon revelation, about the scale of surveillance by the intelligence services.

Greenwald has now reified the program and the participation of the listed service providers.

He seems to go back to reporting on the document here:

Some of the world's largest internet brands are claimed to be part of the information-sharing program since its introduction in 2007.

But in fact, the "claim" he's referring to is the calendar date of the start of participation. Next graf:

It was followed by Yahoo in 2008; Google, Facebook and PalTalk in 2009; YouTube in 2010; Skype and AOL in 2011; and finally Apple, which joined the program in 2012. The program is continuing to expand, with other providers due to come online.

It is followed. It is continuing to expand. Not, "the document claims". Words mean things, as Greenwald knows very well.

The extent and nature of the data collected from each company varies.

Again: by this point in the article, the collection is happening, the way his interpretation of the leaked slide deck says it is.

A chart prepared by the NSA, contained within the top-secret document obtained by the Guardian, underscores the breadth of the data it is able to obtain: email, video and voice chat, videos, photos, voice-over-IP (Skype, for example) chats, file transfers, social networking details, and more.

It is able to obtain. Not "claims" to be able to obtain.

Greenwald can't now hide from what he actually wrote, and his attempt to do so is telling.
Properties of the world can still be problems to be solved. Gravity is a problem solved by rockets. What is the solution to the gravity of human avarice?
We should get rid of time zones entirely. They cause problems to no end while providing no real benefit. People would get used to the fact that the sun usually rises at 11PM in New Delhi, for example.
Not the same guy at all...
So I have question I'm sure someone here is smart enough to answer- simply put, does ASI affect compilation speed?

In my head I would imagine that a compiler would expect to find semicolons as statement terminators but would have to reprocess a block if validation failed and try to figure out where the semicolons should be, and therefore ASI would slow down compilation (vs a file with all semicolons in place).
Yeah, that attitude in the u.s. scares me; the labels we put on noncitizens. Those labels, I believe enabled our compliant media to sell that idiotic Iraq war to the public. I don't recall them tracking the Iraqi civilian deaths at all. I mean, after all, they weren't born in the u.s. so who cares, right?
The whole problem with PRISM is that the government potentially can tunnel into company servers and take what they like, and that is being disputed by the accused companies.

I'm not sure what is rumored or not, or what is true or not. My point is that they deny involvement in PRISM, and by PRISM I mean the program that alleges access to company servers.
I guess if you have an array of characters and you want to insert into the middle, you could promote the array into a rope as follows:

1. break the array into two extents (start address / length pairs)
2. make a rope out of those two extents
3. do the insert on the resulting rope

this assumes that you're okay with starting with an array of characters and ending up with a rope.

ISTR this pattern was common-ish in erlang last time I looked at erlang, but they call ropes (of bytes) "iolists", and support for iolists goes all the way down into the standard library.
Wow! Just waiting for "directly doesn't mean direct access" excuse. He has posted the slide, and considering what happened with Verizon I am likely to believe that Google, Facebook and "we care about your privacy" Microsoft have given them just as much as Verizon. Or a lot, one way or another.

On another topic, oh to be a fly in the wall when Mr US Citizen Greenwald passes through JFK customs.
ChatSecure and IM+ both support OTR instant-messaging on the iphone, so depending on what you mean by "like that"... yes. ChatSecure is opensource too fwiw: https://github.com/chrisballinger/Off-the-Record-iOS
No, the terrorists were trying to protect their children, whom the "troops" were heroically murdering.

Do you not know about the drone "signature strikes" that bomb randomly in Yemen and Pakistan, followed by targeted strikes against first responders?

And do you not know that all it takes to become a "terrorist" is to be male, medium age, and killed in such a strike? Unless proven innocent?

Or are you under the delusion that you have to actually join AlQaeda for the US government to count you as a terrorist?
command+shift+{

command+shift+}

?
If you'll shift your attention to being opinionated about politics and taking sides "for" and "against" - your valuable skills will stop growing.

Just keep doing what you love and things will resolve.
World is not broken.
Most of the reinvent-the-wheel functionality that Java implements exists to make up for deficiencies in Windows as an OS.
This is evil because if Schmidt knew anything he would be sworn to secrecy under penalty of prison and fine.
I am not sure what your point is here, unless it is to argue that communists are morally equivalent to terrorists.

Also, a question: do you think there is anyone online reading HN that has not already heard this line of argument, that both governments and terrorists kill children?

Finally, not that I think it's necessary to rebut your post point by point, but: I'm not ok with the USG doing anything to protect my kids. But I am just fine with them going after actual terrorists.
Sigh. I guess humor is the only way to deal with this.

That and donating to the EFF. Link for the lazy https://supporters.eff.org/donate
NSA Backdoor as a Service
Not convinced by this. If you compare Maps to Search like they did, it seems like the new maps is exactly what I'd want.

Search doesn't only show you sites you've visited in the past. If that was it's only metric for displaying results you'd never be able to search in the first place. Obviously that's a little extreme, but Maps will have the same requirements as Search; they need to help you find what you want to find. If you they don't, people will slowly stop using them. If they don't show me the pizza place I want, I'm going to get frustrated, and next time I'll just jump straight to GrubHub instead.
Not really, no. It's not clear what's happening yet. The Washington Post has backed down somewhat, but additional information from other sources, as well as the initial document which was only partially leaked previously, is still coming out which appears to further contradict the denials.
> One reason that police are required to obtain warrants and follow certain arcane procedures is to ensure that it is not people which are being investigated, but crimes.

The perfect crime is one no one knows, including oneself, or will ever know, occured.

Big data scraping everything and archiving data (forever?)
violates this semi-golden rule. Everyone now has a rap sheet. We're all criminals and at anytime may be prosecuted, found lawfully guilty and punished up to the full extent of sentencing guidelines.

Corrections Corporation of America(CCA)`Equal Opportunity Enslaver' needs a new logo of a full spectrum rainbow entering a clear glass prism and a coherent light beam exiting into a jail cell.

"See Clearly Jail Quickly(tm)"
Being a pleb is a mindset established over time. I think I'd have had to be raised differently to be drawn to high stakes action.
> 'Not subject to American law' - the next desirable IT feature

We have seen in the past how the US Government overreaches to take down any website no matter where it's hosted. If you want to be "not subject to American law" you need to build an .onion torsite.
And if I am travelling from New Delhi to London, how would I know/sync what time the sun rises/sets?
Of course. Who in their mind would support the shit NSA does.
The only major market only served by US companies at the moment is search and possibly videochats, in all other markets, there are already European service providers (think United Internet or even DailyMotion). But then search is also a field where it takes considerable investments to build an independent solution – nevertheless it will be interesting to see how long it takes for one to pop up.
THEY SAY THESE THINGS BECAUSE THEIR CO-WORKERS HIDE THE TRUTH FROM THEM, BY LAW
> Nobody said they have access to Google servers

What are you talking about? Almost every story reporting on this originally said that. The Washington Post backed down, but the originating reporter is still quoting some NSA source(s) as saying it:

'Just one more time: NSA on PRISM: "Collection directly from the servers of these US service providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook.."'[1]

[1] https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/343423727066824705
> FWIW, I believe them when they say they aren't giving direct access to their servers to the government.

What have they done to earn your trust so that you believe them?

In matters of espionage and mass surveillance, I expect lying to be the default response for the government and corporate players involved.
Could a possible explanation be that the feds have unauthorized access?
I find that I like I2p quite a bit, but I'm not as fond of the reference implementation. It's in Java, which makes running it on small systems more difficult, and it routes traffic by default.

Routing by default GREATLY improves the network, but may be undesirable/unrequested behavior by people.
That is not PRISM though, PRISM is about the existence of backdoors that allow direct access to company servers.
Why make it above the table like that? The NSA has all the data they need to blackmail and intimidate these people at the very least.

I wonder what Sergey thinks of all this.
That's a very good point - in the last months the world listened in on Americans debating whether drones can be used against Americans or just against us foreigners, as if we are worth less. Now we learn that the American government speculates that maybe foreigners don't deserve the same degree of privacy.
Unlike the victims of al-Qaeda, the casualties of those two wars signed up for the risks. (I could have been one of them if eyesight hadn't kept me out of the military.)

We disagree on whether these wars "made us safer", and I'll also note the effort to quarantine Saddam (the no-fly zone et. al.) prior to the 2nd war wasn't cheap, in lives or treasure.

If the Taliban controlling Afghanistan at the time "wanted to be left alone", they could have delivered Osama and company to us as we demanded. To the extent they weren't complicit and supporting al-Qaeda, they violated Niven's Law 1b: "Never stand next to someone who is throwing shit at an armed man."

And I think the peoples of Iran and Kuwait would find it extremely curious to describe Iraq under Saddam as a country "that wanted to be left alone".
Just got off my lazy butt and added a recurring donation equal to 1% of my monthly income. Will you do the same?
edit: doh, I misread the tweet. Looking over the new slides at that story just posted http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/08/nsa-surveillance...

edit: It's just one new slide (http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/20...) which says "directly from the servers"...but since Google is ostensibly arguing that the slides are poorly worded, hopefully the Guardian believes the other unreleased slides elaborate? The blog post ends with "A far fuller picture of the exact operation of Prism, and the other surveillance operations brought to light, is expected to emerge in the coming weeks and months...", which means that they will be releasing bombshell by bombshell, or that they think other revelations will be independently reported?

(original comment below:)

I immensely respect Greenwald, but he's setting up presumptions for his reporting that make it unassailable, no matter what the facts are.

1. Our reporting is accurate.

2. The fact that the companies involved deny it is proof that our reporting is accurate, because our reporting said that they would deny the report.

3. Therefore, our reporting is accurate.

It's possible that the reporting is accurate on its face, but the most relevant details (i.e. the ones that would separate this from, egregiously and surprisingly evil to, well, just more of the same) were not reported correctly. Has either the Guardian or the WaPo released the entire slide set?
Haha, sometimes the US-European disconnect is very cute. I mean no offense, but checks went out of use in my country like 20 years ago. (Anectodally, they can still be cashed, for a service fee of $30 or so). Oh, and mailing something to the US would alone be more than PayPal's cut.
I wonder how China is thinking as it actively pushes its own web titans and forbids the entrance of Facebook and Google and the like within its national borders.
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Someone needs to write a Javascript version.
Bernie Madoff didn't have direct access to his victims' accounts. They willingly gave him the money.
maybe some prisoners of Guantanamo could be proofs of this
Actually, if companies like Facebook and Google are taking part in this (like many people assure) they probably have developed code like this for their services.

I wonder how those developers feel.
What makes a good engineering culture
Look this article is ridiculous. I'm embarrassed with everyone that thinks this is some sort of conspiracy to hand over information to the government without process.

Both Google and Facebook hand over data for INDIVIDUALS when the government issues a lawful request (such as by subpoena or warrant). Subpoena's do not have judicial review the way warrants do, but they are not OPTIONAL. A company MUST comply under US laws if the government issues a lawful request.

Both Facebook and Google have lawyers on staff that carefully vet requests.

If you have an issue with how our F'in government asks for too much information, then take issue with our laws. You cannot fault Google or Facebook for obeying laws that you, through your representatives, put in place.

I am fully in support with restricting the power of the state to compel private information from corporations, but I certainly won't blame a corporation for obeying the law.

Now, let us tackle the issue of the so called "red carpet" rolled out for the government. When the government requests information Google and Facebook can send them the information on disk, on paper, on anything for that matter. The issue is that they want to keep YOUR information as secure as possible while handing it to the state. They want the state to have access to it, but NOT any third party.

How secure will your information be if they don't set up a secure drop for the government? Do you want them to set up one-off FTP sites? Do you want them to put the information on disk for hand over? We've already discussed that direct access to the source servers is a bad idea.

Do you see what I'm saying? This fucking author doesn't use his brain for two seconds. What options do Google and Facebook have to obey the law, and to keep your data as secure as possible from third parties.

Some people just want to cry wolf at every turn. And then when we really need to raise a fuss (like when Google removes XMPP support from messaging) we get no traction with the public, because the community just looks like a bunch of whiners.
How to get laid easily
this is the easest way i have seen on the internet to learn how to get laid within days.
That's not what he's claiming.

He explicitly states in those tweets that he reported the claims of both sides, which he was fully aware were in conflict, in the hopes that the truth of the reality would come out.
Nice! Do you know how much of a cut Flattr takes? Wikipedia suggests 10%, which is just too much.

Hey, EFF, if you ever read this: An option for being sent an email monthly with a link to a one-click payment of the same amount as last month would get people like me donating!
Wow, you're really going to still quote that out of context. Literally the next sentence out of his mouth was a warning that Google is subject to the PATRIOT Act and you should be careful what you use it for:

"But if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines, including Google, do retain this information for some time. And it’s important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act. It is possible that that information could be made available to the authorities."
My physics are a bit crap lately but aren't there some cheaper and low tech solutions to the problem. If you got the mirrors and the heat won't some kind of sterling engine with the cooling element dug in the earth have substantially lower costs?