skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Really? You don't think of information in your Gmail or Google Drive as personal "papers or effects"? Would you be fine with a Google employee reading through your email or your spreadsheets in order to figure out whether you were working on a product that might compete with one of Google's, or maybe because they ran across your profile on a dating site and wanted to check up on you? If so, I think you're unusual.

In a world where important documents are increasingly electronic, and electronic stuff is increasingly routinely backed up, transmitted through, or just stored on remote servers, people's personal papers will be increasingly in the possession of others.

I won't argue that it's impossible to read the Constitution so that it becomes a set of meaningless restrictions on outdated technologies--legal text is never deterministic and always subject to multiple interpretations--but it's certainly not unreasonable for somebody to have "read the document very carefully" and found it more robust and relevant than you do.
Google's statement was strong enough to rule out the possibility that either the CEO or chief legal counsel was aware of the existence of NSLs or warrants that are nearly as broad as what Verizon received. Therefore, while they can't say one way or the other whether they receive NSLs, it is a safe inference that Google has not received broad NSLs.
Excellent tool! A good complement for QuickSilver.

Bonus: the cat is absolutely cute :)
1) They didn't, and
2) Even if they had, unclear, inaccurate, or misleading information regarding Google's degree of cooperation or the mechanics of acquiring tha data in a document prepared for consumers of the data for which information on the details of collection was not essential actually makes quite a lot of sense in a highly classified program (whether its classified for appropriate, security related reasons, or for political reasons.)

Consumers of the data need to know where it comes from and its scope, they don't necessarily need to know whether its acquired through cooperation or coercion or infiltration of the providers.
How do you manage electricity for your computers?
Thanks for the response. My lazy regex makes me feel bad.
1) GPS/GSM built into phone hardware

2) He said they destroy all records in their operation, but of course UPS/FedEx/USPS/Etc will maintain records
I agree with you!

I feel these statements are for the fans of these companies that want to hear it to believe it and quick to dismiss it.

Personally: I got in trouble with Google in 08' and yet I still use their products even assuming that I am probably monitored or easily creating a gov profile that can easily be subpoenaed (or given just b/c they may not like me).
> 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.

Right, but government-hired contractors are not 'the government'. So while this could be true, users' data could still be being intercepted.
To get a list of all known codes see:
http://masswerk.at/status
Not even the ram of the crypto module doing the work!
This makes no sense. You can be profitable, and still would like to raise money from the public stock market to pursue activities that are more expensive than what your currently profitability can sustain, like expanding the business globally, or enter in new markets, or build new products. It's about business and the business it's about money, so there's nothing else that an IPO provides except immediate liquidity. The side effects are bad, like sustaining lots of bureaucracy because of the heavily regulated public stock market, or exposing your company.
Classifying such things as right wing is part of the problem. "Left wing" governments are just as capable of all sorts of statist, authoritarian activity.
But saying it is right wing annoys right wing people who are liberal, saying it is left wing annoys left wing folk.

Politics is more than a left right axis.
Those rules are all statutory. There is no Constitutional protection for those documents.
Like someone in the other thread about Pages blogpost asked: What could Zuck say more to convince you otherwise?

He says explicitly Facebook is not providing information or metadata "in bulk", which seems to contradict the Guardian article ("direct access").
With the creepy similarities, why do I get the feeling that it's these collective companies way of saying "Yes, they're monitoring you but we just can't say anything..."
I want them to say not only 'direct' access but also no third parties between them and the government. None have said that...
Well in that case, these latest revelations just serve as a reminder to everyone that they shouldn't be using cloud services at all. And that's a threat to Silicon Valley.
I'm now just confused. If I understand it correctly, the government has publicly acknowledged the program and tried to explain how it's "limited and legal," but extant nonetheless. Now the companies are all uniformly denying it. The options:

- The companies are lying.

- The government has infiltrated these companies and developed backdoor access the executive team is unaware of.

- The government is intercepting traffic en-route and doesn't need cooperation of the companies.

- The government is confused on their talking about about what they're confirming here and PRISM has been misinterpreted by the press.

#1 is possible, but implies that there exists a National Security Letter-like mechanism that can coerce this kind of public behavior. I find that unlikely but certainly not impossible; that would definitely be a concerning outcome.

I think #2 is unlikely. There's an interesting passage in the original Washington Post article, though, about how they want to be careful to protect the identities of the cooperating companies so as to not "damage their sources". A simple reading of this is that the companies might pull out if they're publicly exposed as cooperating. However, since they appear capable of coercing cooperating anyway, a slightly more tin-foil-hat reading is that their access is less straightforward than asking Page and Zuckerberg for help.

#3 is probably happening regardless of whatever cooperation the companies are providing. However, if that's the extent of PRISM I think it says interesting things about the likelihood that RSA has fallen. Is that likely? I have no idea. It wouldn't be unprecedented compared to what the NSA and its predecessors have done historically, though. It's worth noting that the NSA hasn't approved asymmetric crypto for protecting classified data. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_Suite_B_Cryptography)
>>> tap a padlock icon on your cellphone and suddenly anything your phone does is encrypted and only the receiving party can decrypt it.

Or so you think until it turns out an amendment to 2000-page farm appropriation bill actually mandated a government backdoor to be installed into any phone legally sold in the US, and 100% of US providers implemented in 5 years ago. And this backdoor is accessible without warrant since you communicate over public airwaves so you have no expectation of privacy.
> Like, tap a padlock icon on your cellphone and suddenly anything your phone does is encrypted

Not good enough: you have to think of activating it. And even if you do, most traffic will still be unencrypted, making it easier for spies to tell who may have something to hide, and when they do.

To have real good, actual privacy, everything should be encrypted by default, the internet itself should be a giant scrambling overlay network such as Tor, and people should have symmetric bandwidth to encourage decentralization —no more need for YouTube.

I don't see it happen in the following decades.
Redefining Intelligence: Q&A With Scott Barry Kaufman
LOL is it me or Google's and Facebook's statements are very similar: https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10100828955847631
Here is a link to the website for those who haven't heard of it:

https://www.rescuetime.com&#x2F;
The phrase "direct access" was used in the original Guardian article that made the accusation and was a core part of the accusation, hence it's not surprising it's been used in the denial.
I am in love with the idea of this tool. Can't wait to try it.
> Would you be fine with a Google employee reading through your email or your spreadsheets in order to figure out whether you were working on a product that might compete with one of Google's, or maybe because they ran across your profile on a dating site and wanted to check up on you?

Wouldn't I be pretty stupid if I had a problem with these things, yet still uploaded these documents in clear text to Google's servers where absolutely nothing stopped Google from doing these things? Especially when they tell me point blank that they do indeed sift through the documents (for ad targeting)?
Totally integrated corporate-state repression of dissent

what could go wrong? http://s3.amazonaws.com/dk-production/images/14030/large/Occ...
How many of these P2P overlay networks could run without a centralized head/mapping server? BitTorrent has drastically reduced the size of theirs, but it still needs a mapping of other hosts somewhere. Same thing for Skype. I don't want to sign up for an internet where every connection needs a 'head' in order to determine how to traverse the overlay network.

It's probably also not a coincidence that Skype and Bittorrent are two of the hardest protocols to 'control' inside the network. This sounds good from a 'the internet should be a free democracy' standpoint but bad from a 'let's guarantee the performance of the application' standpoint. In terms of visibility into what is happening, being transferred, and where connections terminate there are more productive rather than draconian reasons for understanding those things.

Today with virtual hosting if the website next to you decides to host illegal content, the entire IP is taken down collateral damages or not. Well, that's part of your choice in choosing a provider as an end host. If the entire next generation internet and application space is based on overlays and other nebulous architectures, much of those same problems are going to exist to larger scales, including at transit points. Except it won't be as optional as changing hosting providers.

Since you've got BGP experience - think about the fun in troubleshooting eBGP neighbor problems when every connection is a GRE tunnel that may actually be tunneling through another BGP AS, which itself may be tunneled again. GRE tunnels are great immediate bandaids and generally awful long term solutions for enterprise networks to say the least. But the application guy gets his green light and thinks everything is great.
As someone who just went through an IPO at a tech company, congratz Twilio, its a huge achievement! Enjoy it!
Can one restart a level but skip the help dialog?
Remember Last.FM?
How should he phrased his FB post differently?
Full disk encryption is the way to go.

Having several tools for encrypting the logs, then the email, then the web browser history, and so, is not safe. Better to protect the full drive, and for everything.
Excuse me if I have this muddled, but being a Top Secret program, wouldn't those Congressmen be bound to silence on the matter anyway?

Assuming you found one who bucked the trend and wasn't bankrupt of responsibility already, what could he actually do?
Yeah, I'm wondering if "someone down the chain in Gmail got NSL'd" is a possibility or not. I'm not familiar with Google's org chart nor do I know if NSLs are even flexible enough to accomplish such a thing.

If it is possible though, there could perhaps be an NSL that covers "just gmail" that is otherwise as broad as the Verizon one.

The notion that a CEO could be unaware of something like that happening is incredibly disturbing though. I hope that is not possible.
I wound up being held accountable for a small amount because I missed a deadline in the follow-up paperwork. So yes, it happens, but only when it doesn't matter much.
Pick your explanation:

* They need to justify all of their equipment and training so they make copious use of it.

* They don't know if the person is armed or not, so better safe than sorry when it comes to the lives of agents.

* "It's just standard procedure."

... etc
>>..another possibility is that they want people to notice the similarities and become more upset about PRISM.

Ah, that makes sense, if they are under a gag order, but yet want to subtly convey that they are under a gag order! It would be a brilliant way of circumventing it.
One dead in shooting at Southern California college
Thanks partner. Lot of work before we get there - looking forward to the next leg of the mountain.
Everyone please also go read Mark Zuckerberg's response:

https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10100828955847631

Now look at it side-by-side with Larry Page's response. Anyone with half a brain should be scared by this. It really scares me as well. I put more of my trust in Google, and perhaps even Facebook then I place in the Government, or the phone companies, or others. However, these definitely look like they are created from the same template. Very worrying coming from Page and Zuckerberg like this at the exact same time. I just hope there really isn't a man behind the curtain pulling the strings of such powerful figures in technology today.

Does anyone know if there could have been a meeting between these CEOs to decide how they were going to respond. Perhaps they all decided to make their responses uniform together, instead of some external source telling them what to do.
Why do you need a mole? Just have someone dig up the street, and intercept the fiber optic cable.

I mean you still need to deal with private keys but the NSA might have the certificate authorities wrapped around their fingers.
Hi there -- I do have plans for a Kickstarter, with some very interesting ideas on things that will be offered. Won't get into too much detail, but it will be awesome I can assure you :) I need to find a helper / partner before I can get to that stage though. Check my comment above for details.

If you are interested in donating NOW which really helps server fees and other overhead, you are certainly welcome to do so and it is much appreciated. https://ark-os.org/donate
I've done basically this (technically RFB is the protocol VNC uses, but whatever). The team I was on makes an auditing tool that records RFB traffic, transcodes it into MPEG video and also does real-time compositing in RFB. Initially it was just static boxes to obscure stuff, but we started doing messaging as well, until eventually we had a library to write arbitrary strings to the screen. I always wanted to extend it to accept user input as well, but that ventured into X territory too much.

It's worth pointing out that adding new data to an existing RFB stream with any kind of speed is stupid hard. The server has the ability to send one of about 11 types of message, from simple - a bitmap or RLE - to stupid - hextile and tight are popular. The only way we found was to parse every message, update a frame buffer, then re-encode the updated framebuffer. Not to mention all of the clients and servers have slightly different implementations, so even though you should be able to implement a subset of the spec, you end up implementing the whole spec, plus kludges for every popular client and server. Particularly egregious is Jolly's Fast VNC, which is probably the best Mac VNC client, but it actively rejects servers which are within spec to accommodate one particular server the dev targeted.

/rant

If you want to see the actual RFB spec: http://www.realvnc.com/docs/rfbproto.pdf
Don't forget that this page isn't exactly new. Around since March 2012.
(See: https://plus.google.com/u/0/113952620110664554186/posts/bak1... )
Totally integrated corporate-state repression of dissent. What could go wrong?

http://s3.amazonaws.com/dk-production/images/14030/large/Occ...
He didn't pay for first-class service and yet obtained it. The times he was found-out, he covered his tracks by lying. Seems pretty clear to me it's theft of services.
Facebook CIA program
Right. But if you look at the slide why would companies slowly get "added" rather than just implicitly be being spied upon?

I mean Apple only got added in 2011. If what you're saying is true then what does this date refer to?
UPDATE! - I am presently looking for someone in the Montreal area who might be willing to help on this project and perhaps a future Kickstarter. Must know your way around Python (experience with Go would also be a plus). If anyone reading this matches these criteria, or you know someone who does, please shoot me a message via Twitter handle @jcookcc.
One thing that has bothered me is that neither the Guardian or the Washington Post (someone kindly post the link if I've missed it) has posted more than just a few slides of this 41-slide presentation. I understand the leaker may want as few of slides as possible shown due to the danger of them being watermarked, but the few slides posted so far alone seem to lack important context.

Secondly, in defense of the companies, at least Google and Facebook, they've put up real people (Zuckerberg and Page) behind these assertions. In the case of the leaker, we just know that he/she is a career intelligence official...which could mean many things.

No, I'm not saying that leakers should be distrusted until they identify themselves...I'm saying when the evidence that the leaker has given is heavily redacted, then it's hard to know what assertions the responding companies have to actually lie about.

In other words, it could be the case that we shouldn't believe anyone so far.
About this direct access phrase, I read a post earlier today (linked from a comment on HN but can't find it now...) that described a hypothetical system offered by facebook to intelligence agencies, this system would allow the user to search for a person and then accept a EULA before being given access to personal information. If this system were to automate the submission and acceptance of a subpoena, would the system then be classed as having given indirect access through the correct "legal channels"?
We still haven't figured out a way around rubber hose decryption, and the sad truth is that we're more likely to draw attention to ourselves by encrypting everything in personal email than we are by trying to fly under the radar.

I'm still terrified of a second McCarthyism.
They have good lawyers who come to similar conclusions how to formulate these statements from a legal and PR perspective.
The question is not "how should" but rather "how could".

And the answer is "a myriad of different phrasings could have expressed the same content. English, even encumbered by lawyers, is like that.".
You should read about Roe v. Wade, rayiner
Whoops The Internship is Accidentally Pretty Damn Bleak–for a Google Commercial
I hope someone can find out if possibly these CEOs met yesterday. Perhaps they decided to try and come up with a uniform and consistent way to respond to this situation, and there wasn't some external source actually able to tell them all what to say. If there is not some kind of explanation such as this I am going to have to rethink how much trust I can have in such huge companies with no real clue about who is really controlling the show.
But it doesn't though. It's not like _not voting_ is doing anything to change the system. You're not legally required to vote, so even by just staying home, you're still part of the system. You're still a part of the game, even on the sidelines.
I have also been skeptical of the carefully worded releases, but looking at the PRISM slides more carefully just now, nothing on them necessarily indicates that the target companies actually know what is happening. Perhaps PRISM is based on partnering with backbone providers to suck data straight off the pipe, and the "Dates When PRISM Collection Began" refer to dates when they completed software to scope out information specifically destined for or leaving the services of each "provider".

This is just a possibility - I tend to believe the companies are simply lying. But it is possible.
Tired of minimalism
#3 doesn't necessarily require breaking RSA, just TLS (via fake certificates or something else). Breaking RSA would be pretty interesting though.
Oh God, who cares how well-designed the ppt slides are?
I hate to tell you this, but the government has never been concerned enough with overhead to not use something like XML. Frankly its probably tab deliminated ASCII.
We'd be lucky to see a binary protocol.
>Good example of a franchise...

Harley Davidson is a very successful example of a franchised dealership structure. He seems to have skipped that for some reason. Though I don't know enough about the company to know whether or not its a good case study, HD is very much a one of a kind company in many regards.
Also it would be pretty easy to figure out who you are based on who you're calling.
Well the original comment was a bit of a joke. As many of you say that twitter info is public I do not agree. Twitter knows what i search, knows where I am all the time and what I feel about it. Knows with what I interact. I never said that I liked "kittens" but it has that information as google does.
And yet this still misses more important issues. While it is fantastic that Google does not give the USG a free pass to the whole enchilada, Google still collects and stores this data, and gives it when compelled, if they truly had the users best interests in mind they would reduce the data collected to only what they MUST have to do what they do, and not use Vacuum cleaner like methods to get and keep everything they can, if Google did not keep it, the USG would not want it. So the best way for Google to be a part of the solution would be to reduce what they intake and keep, burn the rest.
A politician promises something, then violates the promise after being elected. Shocking!
I assume they can but it would be a risky strategy. If google security found a breach where customer data was being leaked then they might disclose publicly before they can be informed that it is a national security issue.
| While you never know who's armed and who's not

This may be true, but if the person has no history of violence, isn't wanted for a violent offence, has no registered firearms, and is not known to have any radical anti-government / Michigan Militia-type views, then there is probably no reason for such an armed assault.

| in these cases they're probably just as worried
| about the destruction of evidence

So a group of men armed with assault rifles is necessary to prevent destruction of evidence, because a couple of agents armed with handguns would have encouraged resistance?
> But if you look at the slide why would companies slowly get "added" rather than just implicitly be being spied upon?

Well, if they are intercepting data through backbones, and much of that data is encrypted, they need to defeat the encryption in a durable way to get a clear feed. While I don't suggest that this is what was going on, if it was, there would be know reason that each provider would necessarily be broken at the same time; there would likely both be prioritization of resources directed at each provider, differences in the security of each provider, and chance involved as to when each was broken.
One explanation is a coordinated call for transparency. The last paragraph certainly has greater weight when sung in chorus. If you look at the releases of the EFF and Google over the last 48 hours there seems to be a growing plea for this.
The key to the question was "indiscriminately." Does the government have the right to require to doorman to keep tabs on everyone without probable cause.

[edit typo]