skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I will go on record as standing with Google and its denials, even if that's an unpopular position right now.

Here are a few facts:

1. The New York Times article did not specifically cite PRISM, it only cited FISA, which was already largely known by the public. It is true that this could be because PRISM is allegedly justified under Section 702 of FISA, but they are not the same thing.[1] It would be most appropriate to say that one encompasses the other, but they have two separate protocols, and as of right now, only one was discussed by the Times.

2. Let's say the NYTimes article is about PRISM, and they simply didn't mention that acronym for whatever reason. If that is the case, the information leaked therein also makes it very clear that it is entirely possible for CEOs, chief officers, and other high ranking employees to be completely in the dark about it. The only people allowed to know about the requests for information are those who receive and analyze the requests. That's not a conspiracy theory - it's leaked right along with the rest of the information.[2] Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Dave Drummond, Yonaton Zunger, etc. might literally not know the extent of how far the government reaches in their companies.

3. It is unreasonable and unrealistic to expect the leaders of these named companies to stand together in righteous technological might against The Man. Nothing practical would be achieved by having Mark Zuckerberg or Larry Page penalized for what they said on record, in public against a government agency. Nothing would benefit the American people by having them put on trial or their companies sued for violating national security. The NSA designed a Catch-22 gag order that prevents those involved from even acknowledging the existence of government involvement or letter agencies, let alone detailing specific protocols or history.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Stop getting distracted from the real problem here. The threat to privacy is the NSA. The threat is our government(s). We have the power to fight it if we consolidate our focus with precision. We may feel wronged by the apparent lies of public figures but they had no choice, if they were even in the wrong. We cannot know what pressures were put upon them at this point in time.

Lay down your pitchforks and direct your anger and incredulity to your government, who ordered this - the public entity that made this legal and hidden and nearly impossible to speak out against. That is your real enemy.

[1]: http://www.theverge.com/2013/6/7/4407782/phone-spying-and-pr...

[2]: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/08/technology/tech-companies-...
U AV BIN WARNED
And yet people keep voting for them, which is the real problem. You think they're wrong, as do I, but ultimately that's a subjective opinion of ours. You can't show that the decision to follow a security posture you dislike is objectively flawed. This is why I think the long game is strengthening constitutional protections through amendment.
Racket?

http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Racket
I think it's incredibly important that more people understand this. It was a somewhat obfuscated fact in the New York Times article, but it's still incredibly important to acknowledge.
"According to the law" actually means "yes, we give the Government all access". Read this:

http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/07/doublespeak-denials-and-bro...;
> ... create the safe and free society we all want over the long term

I don't think you can have both. Freedom has to be paid for, and the only currency it'll take is blood. If we're unwilling to pay that price then I guess we won't have freedom.

Also, I'm not sure I'd want freedom regulated by Facebook, where bare breast in centuries old paintings are forbidden or jokes have to pass a censoring committee.
Aisle 9.

Right next to the military-industrial complex mix.
Do you really believe the U.S. government is "disappearing" people?
Effectively what these companies are trying to do via stronger and stronger denials is prove a negative... which of course is borderline useless. Regardless of the truth, to PROVE they were not involved is impossible.

For those companies called out but not involved (as the Post walks back its language), it has to be an exceptionally frustrating experience.
The point of my post is that these people are surrounded by other people to whom they have obligations. You can't respond to two words without considering the context of the paragraph! It should be obvious that even a so-called "successful" action comes with extreme stress on one's associates. It means subjecting other people to risk. This cannot be considered lightly.
> Lay down your pitchforks and direct your anger and incredulity to your government, who ordered this

It's also important to raise the awareness that our data isn't safe in Google's hands.
The people who are making these statements aren't just winging it. They wouldn't actually make the statements before finding out if there was any substance to it. Both statements stopped well short of actually denying that the government has been wholesale mining their users data, and called for policy changes from the federal government. What do you think they found out?
That doesn't even make any sense. Your house is your private space. Google's servers are someone else's private space. It's like leaving your business documents scattered around a Starbucks and depending on the honor system to ensure nobody reads them.
His point is basically this:

“All it takes for evil to succeed is for a few good men to do nothing...”

― Edmund Burke

That's so true. If they came out now, the country would be better for it. But they are deciding to be accomplices of the out of control and abusive government. I thought Google, at least, would be better than this, after the whole China situation.
"We will continue fighting aggressively to keep your information safe and secure." - ...Facebook
I love the guilty-until-proven-innocent angle of these personal attacks against CEOs and companies.

There is literally no evidence anyone could produce which would prove to anyone's satisfaction that (a) Google, Yahoo, Facebook, etc don't hand over every last shred of data they have to the NSA, the KGB, and whatever China's equivalent is, or that (b) the CEOs of the respective companies didn't personally sign off on every single violation of privacy while kicking puppies. Corporations can't have alibis. Mark Zuckerberg can't say, "Oh, I was in Cincinnati for the last 5 years, and I don't have cell coverage there, so I can't possibly have been involved."

I usually avoid defending billionaires, because they can dry their tears on their giant stacks of money, but so far this is just a he-said-she-said, and if all of the tech companies are saying they're innocent, it's the responsibility of the accusers to pony up some evidence they're guilty. Slide shows are one thing, but if you want to prove to me that the system does what you say it does, we need a document dump: millions of random emails, Facebook messages, whatever that have been illegally accessed through this system, which could plausibly not have been accessed without the kind of far reaching access that the tech giants are being accused of having provided.
In Defense of Alternative Education
> You cannot trust any electronic system.

You are in error sir.

Proofed(eg, OTP) or overwhelmingly messy crypto and mathematics is secure. Animal meatspace is not. Who watches the watchman? Something silicon.
Actual Reddit AMA link: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1fpbv1/i_was_one_of_th...;
The whole reason we even know about all this is because someone did have that courage.
It's not slander to assume that the law enforcement agency that raided him was acting on credible intelligence of illegal activity. They may be wrong, but I don't see how this is slander. I've made no specific accusations and if you are saying he's implicated in hacking a web site (the link you provided is dead) then that seems to corroborate my assumption.
The government has done irreparable harm to these companies, because even if they are telling the truth, they will never be able to prove it (like Obama could never prove he wasn't born in Kenya) Each new bit of evidence supporting their position will be met with just more questions. That's the problem with government spooks, their capabilities are boundless, anything the mind can imagine, and there's simply not way to erase doubt. Can the NSA break public key encryption? No? Are you 100% sure? Does the NSA have a fibre-tap on all cables? Are they running continuous keyword searches on transcribed conversations of every American, in real time? Can you prove they don't have some secret new $30 billion data center, paid for by the $60 billion in Iraq money that went "missing"?

10 years from now, people will still be talking about this.

We need to roll back the Patriot Act, period.
Interesting, he reaffirms the claim about "direct access", and he's talking as if he doesn't have any concerns at all.

Someone's credibility is going to suffer. Either he is making serious allegations too loosely, or the denials by the CEOs are wordplay (unlikley third option: the NSA has thoroughly owned these companies without them knowing it).

"We followed Wednesday's story about the NSA's bulk telephone record-gathering with one yesterday about the agency's direct access to the servers of the world's largest internet companies. I don't have time at the moment to address all of the fallout because - to borrow someone else's phrase - I'm Looking Forward to future revelations that are coming (and coming shortly), not Looking Backward to ones that have already come."
The NSA has traffic sniffers covering all the major fiber routes. They get a mole within a tech company that is properly placed to walk out with a copy of the private key, and all SSL traffic is effectively plain text from that point forward.
Exactly. Just because it's "illegal" doesn't mean it can't be done -- just as, just because what the government asks is "legal" (??!?) doesn't mean it has to be complied with.

"What will happen?" is an excellent question that is not even asked. Certainly not everything is an acceptable risk; if Larry Page seriously believe he would risk spending the rest of his life in prison for publishing national security letters, then sure, we'd all do the same.

But is this the case? How do we even know if nobody's testing it?

Besides, why can't Google or Facebook be a little creative, and (for example) declare that the only way they'll be able to send information is by fax...?

That's kind of what HN is doing (it will only accept DMCA requests via fax or regular mail).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5837367
Bellman-Ford deals with graphs in which the distance along a path is the sum of the distance of its component edges, but in this case the most natural path distance the product of the edge weights.

An instance of the problem corresponds to a directed graph that has one node for each currency and a directed edge between every pair of distinct currencies. The weight of the edge from currency A to currency B is the value in row A, column B of the exchange data table. For instance, the weight of the EUR→JPY edge is 131.7110. We define the value of a directed simple cycle in the graph to be the product of its edge weights. For instance, the value of the USD→EUR→BTC→USD cycle is 0.7779 * 0.01125* 115.65 = 1.01209651875. An arbitrage opportunity is then a directed simple cycle with value > 1.

I was stuck here until I came across the clever trick of using the logarithm, as pointed out on http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2282427/interesting-probl...

To apply Bellman-Ford to this problem we use the negative of the base-10 logarithm of each edge instead and use the sum of these new edge weights rather than the product in calculating the value of a cycle. (Any base will do, provided we use the same base for every edge.) For instance, the weight of the EUR→JPY edge is now considered to be -log(131.7110) =~ -2.1196, and thus the weight of the USD→EUR→BTC→USD cycle is now -log(0.7779) + -log(0.01125) + -log(115.65) =~ -0.00522. An arbitrage opportunity is then a directed simple cycle with negative weight, which can easily be detected by Bellman-Ford.
So, they only place the govement can't search is...documents in its own possession?
Walks And Walking - Top 5 Walking Trousers
Should High-Income "Appsters" Be Derided Or Thanked?
How was he able to remove the try/except clause in this final registration function? I might be missing something but he no longer handles errors (if username, email, or password are not in request.POST it looks like register will be called with too few variables).
> The implication that there is some central figure behind this giving these companies scripts to read meets the most common flaw of governmental conspiracy theories.

Isn't that the definition of a government conspiracy?
Zuckerberg Says Facebook Isn’t Giving Govt “Direct Access” Either
>How are they getting the DH keys without cooperation from at least one of the SSL endpoints involved?

One possibility is to actually compute discrete logarithms.

Does anyone know what elliptic curve parameters Gmail uses for key exchange? If the parameters are large, it is not feasible to break discrete logs using known methods, but while I'm usually wary of claims that the NSA is miles ahead of the academic research community, I could perhaps believe they have faster algorithms for e.g. some NIST curves.
a'a

Thanks, fixed. Looks like HN is over-escaping some values -- click the 'link' link to this post and see how the first line is over-escaped in the title bar?
Yeah, I have worded my question poorly, but the problem here is that simply moving is sometimes so difficult that it barely remains an option.

One important reason for that is that a lot of people who have enough skills and experience to be able to find a much better job elsewhere simply are not allowed -- or face extreme obstacles -- to move to that elsewhere. Visas, work permits, relocation expenses and other issues pile up quickly.

Adding to that other factors like age, family, lack of network in the new place (which is crucial when finding a job) etc, and you will see a quite different issue than you might be used to in terms of relocation.
The documents that are released by anonymous are hosted at:
http://thedocs.hostzi.com
It includes a 47 slide presentation also.
Wild speculation, but what about TLS key misappropriation? In other words, NSA has access not through official channels but somehow got private keys through hook and crook?

(I have to admit I do not fully understand PFS and the implications here.)
So You Still Don't Understand Hindley-Milner?
Entropy: How Password Strength is Measured
I know a lot of (iOS and other) developers who would kill for a chance to work for $50 an hour...
"cause the servers belong to the NSA,not Google!"
;)
"Direct access" is a phrase from the original report in The Guardian: "The National Security Agency had obtained direct access..." - first sentence of the report.

http://m.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-nsa...
If you're going to say your data not safe in Google's hands, then your data just isn't safe on the internet which I think is a needlessly extreme position to take. The OP is right, just focus your dissatisfaction on the government. It's not about is your data safe with Google; it's about your data safe with the government. If you can't trust your government, it doesn't matter where/who/what has your data. Yesterday it was Yahoo & myspace, today Google & Facebook, tomorrow who knows... the only constant is an abusive government. Fix that, then it won't matter what currently trendy company has your data.
> I enjoy how your response to Spooner's criticism of the Constitution is to declare that the Constitution permits these invasive acts

I declare it because it's true, at least as the law stands right now. The Constitution doesn't just say whatever you want it to say. The fact that the actions are "invasive" doesn't mean they're unconstitutional.

Did you know that a lawyer in a civil litigation can use the power of the courts, through a subpoena, to obtain nearly any information or force nearly anyone to testify as long as it's relevant to a litigation? And that subpoena is enforced through the threat of contempt of court? This is incredibly invasive, yet it's a basic feature of our court system. From an 1802 Evidence textbook: "It is the undoubted legal constitutional right of every subject of the realm who has a cause depending to call upon a fellow subject to testify what he may know of the matters in issue and every man is bound to make the discovery unless specially exempted and protected by law."

The balance that has been struck in our system is not one where the protection of "privacy" trumps all other concerns. Indeed, the scale is heavily tilted the other way: the government, especially pursuant to a court order, has broad powers to seek out information subject to specific protections (4th, 5th amendment).
No love for gitk?
> Probably best case scenario, they're still giving them the data wholesale in some way, and he's playing word games and semantics.

No, the best case scenario is he's telling the truth and Google only gives specific data in response to specific court orders that have been reviewed by their lawyers.

Normally I love reading the comments on HN, but I've just despaired over the last couple of days. People are assuming that out-of-context fragments from a Powerpoint presentation are 100% correct and when every single company gives a flat-out denial, then the companies must be lying or misleading or slippery.

The law does not require these companies to issue denials.
The government would never need access to Google's servers; it would never need a back door. A front door API would work just fine.

Some people have correctly pointed out that if Prism is considered 'law' (falling under any number of national security laws), then all Google is doing is complying with the law.

And in that case, what Drummond just said in no way actually denies participation in Prism or a similar program.
They just have to say "the governement does not have any kind of access to the data we host, in any other way than through a court order".

but i doubt they'd say that. they already seem to say they get very regular requests (which could be 10 or 100 000 or more) that are just "hey please give us that we need it".
The best hope for evidence would be engineering and construction documentation of the reporting mechanisms.
Courts have proven that they are a lousy place to change national security policy. Courts established the principle of keeping things secret for the sake of national security (even though it later turned out that the case establishing this had nothing to do with national security; the gov't just claimed it did to avoid liability for negligence). Whenever someone tries to challenge secret, warrantless infringements of privacy, the courts throw out the case as lacking jurisdiction: since no one can publicly acknowledge that you are being spied on, you can't sue the government for spying on you.

The only way to change the policy on this is in Congress. If you really want to make a difference, call your Congressman and yell at them for spying on you. Call them daily, call your Senator, call other people's Congressmen. It still might not help, but nothing Google or Twitter or Facebook can do is going to.
It's widely known and admitted that they have indirect access, by issuing warrants and being provided with slices of the data. You must be talking about some specific form of indirect access?
I used NX protocol some tiem ago. It use compression, differential messages, do the X protocol Async, and have a intelligent caching system. It's impressive better that any VNC! I connect to my Desktop (Download 2Mb ,Upload 512Kb connexion at these time) from the University, and was like using my Desktop in my house!

The bad point is that not support OpenGL, so 3d software can be used via NX.
There it is again, been seeing this script parroted refrain all day:

"direct access"

Anyone guess what this carefully crafted ambiguity is suppose to allow?
Remarkable to me that people consider Republicans the oppressors of freedom and the Democrats the liberators.
You know: the rule of law is more important than a lot of things (especially if these are done by minors). I have not understood what the 'hacker' did but IF it were trying to overstep due process, I would understand a very painful sentence.

The constitution is all about that: freedom and how the State handles the issues. Due process cannot be subverted without punishment even though doing so may have 'good consequences': the classical problem of the ends and the means.
Or, in the timeless words of Robert Oppenheimer:
"I am become Death, destroyer of worlds."

meaningless, irrelevant words.
PRISM(PRISON?), and now?
well, there's a lot of rattle and hum around the world about this prism stuff. people are talking, lying, denying and asking who and when and what and even why(heyhey!).

but i think the most important question now should be "what are we - the programmers, hackers, developers, coders - are going to do about this?".

accept it? ignore it? lament? write to our politicians? laugh about it? go on with our sh*tty weekend projects?

despite of all the talking and conspiracy mumbo jumbo it is fact that the worst case scenario is: "it is all true."

if it's all true it will not go away. on the contrary, if not stopped they are going to follow that road indefinitly. i wonder if there will be a world or even an internet in 5 or 10 years i'd still want to live in.

party on,
wayne
Except that he straight out said that they have received no bulk requests at all? Seriously...
Wohnungsräumung
Wohnungsräumung Wien , Wohnungsräumung
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9/11 was just convenient. It could have been anything large enough. The politicians in power were and are rotten to the core, all they needed was an opening. To quote the political axiom: never waste a good crisis (or tragedy). They rarely do.
Golang and Revel. Also, Perl with Mojolicious + DBIx::Class is hard to beat.
So I checked out some of the user profile of people who are flat out proposing that google is colluding with the government and is lying right now to the users and they don't believe any official word coming out from google.

Not only are their google+ profile very active, I am going to assume they are still using and most likely will be using google products (or products from other companies who has been implicated) months from now even if nothing changes.

The question is, lets say you are absolutely sure beyond any doubt that all these companies willfully (or unwillingly but now lying to you) shared data with the government. What do you do now?

Do you accept it as it is and carry on?
Do you stop using their service?
Or do you campaign to stop these companies and government from doing this (seems highly unlikely to be effective or verify)?
Kind of like this? http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/userdatarequests