skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't want any more fluff "no direct access" emails. I just want these questions to be answered with a YES/NO:

1. Is there any way that someone outside of Google, can get a copy of an email I sent from my gmail to my own gmail, without a warrant that specifies my exact gmail address?

2. If I delete my Google search history, is there any way for anyone to access this history, with or without a warrant?

3. If I make a Google search from an incognito window, is there any way for Google to connect it to my Google account via my IP address? I know I've done this in the past to prevent spambots from creating fake accounts. Can Google connect these dots if someone sends them an NSL?

If the answer to any of this is YES, I am going to have to rethink my entire online life.
> Why is everyone so suspicious of Google to begin with?

We live in a semi-authoritarian society. Anyone the authorities might want to use for their purposes is suspect. We _should_ be encrypting everything as a matter of principle and not relying on one huge point of failure like Google.
He said nothing about Google, which is the topic of the OP.
I deleted my post before I saw your reply. It just said "The CIA doesn't spy on American Citizens, that's what the NSA is for." My point being, why on earth would anybody be surprised that the CIA is spying on foreigners. That's the whole point of the CIA.

I deleted my original comment because this is a bottom of the page thread that I think takes away from the larger debate. But since there's a reply now, I'll add it back in.
BoA blocks $25k from Yoko Ono to Julian Assange
I'd have regular and periodic elections after the first one where the electorate could hold them accountable.
It is very possible that Google is lying.
Except for the single URL, there's nothing in there which couldn't work using an open, federated Github implementation.

Take the example of the StatusNet server I used to run own my VPS. I would go to Identi.ca or any other site, and to follow a user I'd just have to click on "Subscribe", fill in my handle (easy to automate) and then I'd be redirected to my own server, where I could with one click confirm the subscription.

The messages from that user would get POSTed to my StatusNet server, which would display them in my feed as if it was a local user.

Doing the same with forking, pull requests and bug reports is perfectly feasible; there's nothing inherently "closed" about an easy, consistent interface and workflow.
Might be a good candidate to port to asm.js or even just javascript, there are platforms without Java where this could be a valuable teaching tool.
"We put that in our transparency report "whenever possible". :)
It is very possible that Google is lying or, at best, bending the truth.
Some have suggested that instead of IPv6, everything will be tunneled over HTTP (or perhaps WebSocket or WebRTC) over multiple layers of IPv4 NAT.
I think his point is it would be extremely expensive. The leaked presentation claimed the cost of PRISM was only $20M.
How is voting (in the way you describe it) for the sake of voting and supporting a corrupt political system knowing it WILL NOT affect change your duty?

Your duty as a citizen is to support the other members of your society, whether it be by voting in politicians you think will lead the country towards better times for everyone or just following the laws and not interfering with the rights of others. The state and political structure is only a means of choosing organized leadership towards that end.

If voting inevitably leads to a government that blatantly disregards the overall interests of its society, what purpose does voting serve in your "duty as a citizen?"

I personally think that none of us have a right to complain for our own complacency is to blame, but I take issue with the idea that voting is somehow a citizen's duty, even if it's inevitable result is explicit support for violence and corruption.

(yes, "inevitable" is a gross exaggeration, although with these last two presidents it looks quite bleak)
I assume the government would require them to deny involvement, just like companies aren't (weren't?) allowed to discuss NSLs. Consequently, I view the denials as meaningless.
You're right, I hadn't considered that. Identifying individual students within public areas of the network was only possible through the schools ID system. Otherwise public access would be anyones guess as to who was using the computer.
What I Learned From Brennan Dunn's Consultancy Masterclass
The creators of Angry Birds would probably be aware if their software were an NSA-grade surveillance system rather than a cartoon physics game.

The question is: do they use a compiler written for the NSA by Ken Thompson?
It gets worse. Moments later, he says:

"if anybody in government wanted to go further than just that top-line data and wanted to, for example, listen to Jackie Calmes’s phone call, they’d have to go back to a federal judge and — and — and indicate why, in fact, they were doing further — further probing."

Great. So they can't listen to your phone call, unless they indicate why they want to listen to your phone call. I'm sure everyone involved in this program was cherry-picked to ensure that no one says "no" to any of these requests. Oh, and I'm sure all the logs (who asked who for permission, what the reasons were, which requests were granted or denied, etc.) are also conveniently "classified," which you should remember is different than "secret."
Trying to build out the next generation mobile platform? People never raise money for their current product.
IDK, if the gov't has core network switch access and is sniffing all of the packets, that's "back door" enough for my mind.

I'm wouldn't be surprised if none of these companies was involved, and it's just a case that the NSA is simply harvesting and processing all of their traffic for a net same result.
> I can't understand the repeated use of "direct access".

From the rest of your comment, I think that you understand it quite well.
I only write this to say that money for such activity is not a problem.
You IP might be the reason: Yandex in Russia-centric, so any outside requests seems weird to them.
It's for the government, gotta be CSV in EBCDIC.
yeah but what about Google's Irish branch?
In case you missed it, this is the program he acknowledged - Note the three Google products whose logos feature prominently in the leaked doc: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-n...
But sometimes you can, and the government is constitutionally mandated to defend the US and its people. You can't just cherry-pick the bits you like out of the Constitution while ignoring large chunks of it that you're not as comfortable with; for good or ill, it does invest the government with quite wide-ranging powers. congress is empowered to license mercenaries and assassins, for example, though its power to issue letters of marque and reprisal.
thats an interesting point. I'm not sure its all part of some large plan slowly in motion, more likely just monetizing parts of their infrastructure they already had.

what if my kids ask me what "stores" are.
I've got curious when you mentioned infrastructure and years to settle in the market, could you tell/elaborate your product?

Love your zen but do you socialize besides customers? If not is it a trait of yours or you just choose it as the needs of your startup?
I do agree with most of your points, but I wouldn't say that Bradley Manning was tortured. Suicide watch in prison is meant to keep the person alive, not to be nice. He was in solitary confinement for his own protection, (general population would have killed him, which would have been a far, far worse public relations fiasco) and then threatened to kill himself.

I would say that the restrictions placed on him were overly harsh, but people have tried to hang themselves with their clothes and blankets before.

Just to give another perspective - say you're in charge of the prison that Bradley Manning is held at. He's in a very fragile state of mind and is facing life without parole. If he gets treated too poorly, then it's your ass. But if you give him too much freedom, then he could use that opportunity to kill himself.

That being said, the US is not exceptional about this. But I'd much rather be in the US than many other countries if I were charged with terrorism.
Here is an interesting quote from his remarks that I think could actually be a worthwhile argument that gives some indication that there is serious concern to ensure that the systems are not abused.

> And by the way, with respect to my concerns about privacy issues, I will leave this office at some point, sometime in the last — next 3 1/2 years, and after that, I will be a private citizen. And I suspect that, you know, on — on a list of people who might be targeted, you know, so that somebody could read their emails or — or listen to their phone calls, I’d probably be pretty high on that list. So it’s not as if I don’t have a personal interest in making sure my privacy is protected.
Build the internet on top of some startup that decides to "pivot" and change their TOS and API every few months.

No thanks.
Watch this: http://youtu.be/oYNXVgYhPOc

The key phrase is "in the United States" so they just replicate the data outside the United States and you've got yourself a data 'black site' outside the jurisdiction of US law. No direct access. No laws broken. Open access to the NSA.
That doesn't mean doing ANYTHING becomes acceptable. There are lines that shouldn't be crossed. We can debate what those lines should be, but you're suggesting there are no lines.
Forgive me, as I don't have time at the moment to review the paper in detail, but none of what I see skimming through it really contradicts what I already believed. Knowing how the protocols work is not the same thing as knowing how to architect and manage large networks.

The "overlay" networks you speak of are already hamstrung by the shrinking ability to directly address endpoints on the Internet. IPv4's fundamental flaws when applied to billions of nodes cannot be papered over forever.
> So how do they do it if they don't have access to Google's servers?

So there's this protocol called SMTP...
Why not? Isn't it at least possible that even the successful detonation of a nuclear weapon would be preferable, from a societal net-quality-of-life perspective, than preventing said detonation, if the tactics necessary for preventing it were sufficiently extreme?
Entrepreneurial Roller Coaster: Breakdowns And Breakthroughs
I interpreted the repeated use of "direct access" as a response to the media reports yesterday that used that same phrase. My memory could be mistaken but I seem to recall hearing reporters use that phrase over and over. So it would stand to reason that Google and other companies would use the same phrase in their press releases. That would be a simple explanation of the consistent language. That said, I wish Congress would appoint a special prosecutor so that we can get to the bottom of all this.
+1 "direct access" is just a deceiving jargon that is being used by a bunch of corporate lawyers working in sync.
Word. I get that. I just thought the question sort of steered away from the main point of the parent comment, which was that if Google did have some sort of nefarious partnership that they would be legally obliged to deny it no matter what. My apologies, I'm probably just being a bit nitpicky.
They aren't listening. They are just recording them in case they want to listen later. Ohh, and they are listening... sometimes, like when there's a court order. Heck, I spoke with someone personally who used to work in one of their call screening centers. They sat in front of a computer all day and flagged snippets of calls, emails, and text that met certain requirements(e.g. words that would indicate a planned terrorist activity). It wasn't clear whether this was applied only to foreign or foreign and domestic conversations. Though most conversations were in english with a native accent.
http://www.google.com/transparencyreport&#x2F;
I implied no such thing. I've only stated that they are not publishing all that online for anyone to see. If that is wrong, link me to this data, please.
You're not allowed to talk about NSLs, i recommend you change your post. Whats really bad about NSLs is they last forever, even a decade after receiving one you still can't talk about it without risking prosecution. NSLs issued in 2002 have no bearings on any active case yet we can't talk about them publicly. This makes it really hard to have a public debate on their usage.
While I am not a fan of what's been going on in our security sector, and I don't think Obama is living up to the spirit in which he campaigned on this issue (amongst others), it's worth noting that there's an easy weasel way out here: collecting records that would have been generated anyway after the fact is not a "wiretap".

While I am uncomfortable with some of the choices around the wiretapping of the Fox News reporter, I was pleased to note that they had obtained a warrant in that case.
Please ... it will be binary format. Even the government isn't so wasteful to transmit data as xml. And if it did you could easily find where the servers were located by the 5 nuclear power plants needed to power such parsing.
OK, so you can read wikipedia, but does it make any sense? A single 65MW datacenter with only 100ksqft of machine room space can hold all of the data in the world? That's not even as much power as one of Facebook's facilities in Oregon.

Remember when IBM announced they'd built the largest filesystem in history? That was only 120PB. A YB is 10 million times bigger than that.

Consider also that a YB is 1000x the entire storage industry output from 2012. So under your theory there is a parallel hard disk drive industry consisting of at least 99% of all hard disk production on Earth.
O RLY?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center
Show HN: SDK for using multiple iPhones as one big screen
Have you ever actually tried to use one of those online?

Since pretty much every place I tried to use one on the Internet does address verification when processing the transaction, they simply don't work.
That's the frustrating state of the law. Gag orders make it very difficult to trust public communications like this. With secret, fairly unaccountable courts that statistically appear to rubber-stamp government requests, it's hard to discount the possibility of the NSA having, say, the authority to say "Google, you will post the following PR release now" as part of one of these orders.
Hm. And what is so crypto about them?
ya, 21, but that's not relevant to the point I'm trying to make.
Install Batarang for debugging scope issues. Don't be afraid of looking at the source, it's a great way to learn. Write some directives and then look at the ones provided by angular - and realise they're not cryptic.
Rotating an entire display is very common, but that's not what GP is talking about.
If you don't trust the government how can you trust google in a situation like this?
Big. But the NSA has been sucking in ridiculous amounts of data for many many years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnivore_(software)
Why is this at all likely?
don't trust the executive branch?: √

don't trust Congress?: √

don't trust what is called "due process and rule of law"?: √

I wonder what problems he thinks people will cause?
Petitions are ignored. Protests are relegated to "Free speech zones". People are taking on more debt than ever to live the "American Dream". Sounds like they have everything in control to me…
"Press reports that suggest that Google is providing open-ended access to our users’ data are false, period."

"Any suggestion that Google is disclosing information about our users’ Internet activity on such a scale is completely false."

Those sentences seems straightforward and unambiguous.
Do they spend billions of dollars, spy on American citizens, molest them before getting in their cars, and erode other rights?

If we spent the same amount of effort reducing car fatalities, we'd have so many more saved lives.
>and are squashing dissidents

They're squashing insiders who betrayed the government that trusted them with sensitive data. Sometimes that betrayal is the right and noble thing to do, but whistleblowers are ultimately people who were placed in a position of trust and violated that trust.

If the US Government were pursuing nonviolent dissenters who aren't also government employees that'd be a different story.
According to the Wired story on it, it's four 25,000 square foot data center buildings[1]. That's smaller than one of Apple's smaller data centers. Apple's Oregon one is going to be 500,000 square feet.

It's not going to be able to hold more than an average size datacenter, and there are a lot of data centers out there, each holding more data that would have to be copied. The NSA has huge capabilities, but they're not nearly there yet. Most of what we should be worried about is their legal capabilities.

edit: it's also worth noting that the wikipedia article's source is the wired article, and all the wired article says is that a DoD report says that they need to start designing their network to handle yottabytes, which isn't even related to the NSA's data center. Wired then does some interpolation by using "yottabyte" to make the requirements of the data center sound big, but they never say that it was designed to handle that level of data or that it will ever be able to handle that level of data (in fact, they never even cite any level of data that it was designed to handle). But the Wikipedia article cites the Wired article, and suddenly it's become "a data storage facility for the United States Intelligence Community that is designed to store data on the scale of yottabytes".

[1] http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/al...

[2] http://appleinsider.com/articles/12/08/16/apples_oregon_data...
> It just smells of being rehearsed, and carefully coordinated to select such language.

Next time, hopefully they'll make it less clear so that you have to translate the company-specific jargon and feel better that it's spontaneous and careless. </sarcasm>
Noonan hasn't woken up; it's her same trash as always. She conveniently ignores that these groups were going for non-profit status. They were not being prosecuted. They were trying to forgo taxes when quite possibly under the law they do not qualify for tax exempt status. Besides the IRS has given non-profit status to more than twice as many conservative groups as liberal groups recently. http://www.taxanalysts.com/www/features.nsf/Articles/D2A6C73...
AngularJS + SVG = awesomeness
My new article about using AngularJS to update SVG on the fly in the browser is up on DailyJS.
havent seen this cinderella story before....
How so "not really a loophole"?

Congress had the opportunity with the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 to authorize the NSA to conduct dragnet operations to identify US citizens of interest. They very explicitly did not do so, and identified that as the line that the NSA was not to cross.

The scenario that I outline has them getting around the issue by having UK analysts conduct that dragnet operation, and then coming back with a list of US citizens that the NSA should look into. Those citizens would then be targeted by a national security letter or by a FISA court warrant.

This would effectively be a dragnet operation of the kind considered and explicitly rejected by Congress as being permissible, being justified under the reasoning, "Well, we weren't the ones who did it!" Yes, I know that as a lawyer your idea of a loophole is different than mine, but in my eyes, and the eyes of most Americans, that's a loophole.

Now is it happening? My honest suspicion is that it is, for the simple reason that it is hard to filter these data streams, and the raw is more useful. Thus unless they have specific cause to do otherwise, the UK gets broad access. If that happens, then every other part of my scenario fits within the interests of those involves, and so is certainly happening. The UK will follow data trails, and if they lead to US citizens will notify the US. The US, upon hearing such notification, will certainly act on the tips.

Assuming that it is happening, what will the response be? My sense is that the national security consensus from both parties in the USA would basically wind up saying, "You shouldn't have done that, here is a law making sure you won't get into trouble for having done that, now please protect us and try not to get in the news based on how you do it."

Based on past interactions I would bet that you're OK with that consensus position. As will not surprise you, I'm not OK with it.
"better subversion comes through acting normal and engaging people closer to their own terms."

But the "better subversives" need someone to point to, to say "you think what I'm suggesting is unreasonable and difficult? What about this guy's suggestions?"

It's called shifting the Overton window; the people who do it generally aren't widely liked (or likable), but if we all stayed closer to the center, we wouldn't get nearly as much movement as we'd like.
It's exactly the kind of denial you'd expect them to issue if they were legally required to deny any involvement.
Of course it is, but in this conversation that is moving the goalposts. And if we had to address every possibility, very little progress would ever be made in any discussion.
Now who is missing the point. If we completely ignored 9-11 and spent all of that money on traffic fatality prevention, we'd have saved thousands and thousands of more lives without molesting everyone that gets onto a plane.
I'm not quite sure how you came to that conclusion, to me it reads like the opposite of slick lawyer talk, it's pretty unambiguous:

"No direct access", "No backdoors".

"Press reports that suggest that Google is providing open-ended access to our users’ data are false, period".
Well, I guess he will have to find a proper way to prove it, because if you are satisfied with just a blog post maybe you should think again.
> BTW, if you run a company outside of America you'd be crazy to rely on Google since the US could be reading your emails for corporate espionage purposes.

The US could be spying on activities, including email transmissions, that happen wholly outside of the US, as well.

The only reason PRISM, et al., are newsworthy is that there are expectations and widely-perceived legal/constitutional limitations of US government domestic surveillance that don't exist for foreign surveillance.
Okay, HN, how can Google provide a compelling denial that they're not participating in PRISM as described in the leak?

If we're to be a country where innocence is presumed and guilt is proven, we must consider what Larry Page would write in the case that Google is not supplying any sort of un-warranted feed to NSA. Would it be any different?
"...represent only small encroachments of people’s privacy."

This is pretty much how it starts. First the people accept small encroachments, then they're asked to accept slightly larger encroachments.

Eventually there is no privacy left.
Moles at Major US Providers May Be Granting Direct, Live Access to the NSA, FBI
Linux namespaces allows namespacing almost any subsystem, although I don't know what FreeBSD offers w.r.t that.
Accountable for what? A couple of days ago nobody even had a reason to complain.
Live atmospheric pressure API: 300,000 daily Android sensor measurements