skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The last part in each, the part about transparency, makes me think that it is possible they all decided to co-ordinate an intentional not secret message: they think there should be more transparency.
He (hacker) published pictures first and made video that was on FB page, but other Anon hacked page.

Here is full story with screenshots and video:
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/05/anonymous-rape-s...
No one gets carte blanch access. Even Googlers don't get carte blanch access.
SSL/TLS was broken once by breaking MD5. Now if the NSA can break SHA-1 using its numerous known weaknesses (there's a working attack on SHA-1 with 2^52 operations), they can pull off internet-wide MITMing.

It's safe to assume the NSA can easily do way more than 2 petaflops, and they have an exaflop goal, and that would be enough to run known attacks against DES, factor 1024bit RSA moduli ... and if they can compromise just one root CA (which uses 1024bit RSA) they can issue valid certifications of their own and MITM everyone, and none would be the wiser.

And all of this assuming the NSA relies on publicly known weaknesses in SSL/TLS. The matter of the fact is that they have very smart people with access to unlimited resources researching new vulns and actively exploiting them.
I wish the people who have knowledge of implementing these things would come forward with a leak of some sort. Surely, somewhere their are citizens of this type, right?
Nice work guys! How well does it work for precise real-time applications like music/video?
I don't believe he can be forced to lie. If he was in that situation, I imagine he would simply not respond.
Can you not see the full description on the site? It is pretty long (more than one screen even zoomed way out). I saved the full page in Chrome; here are the juicy excerpts:

Social Networks Analyst Job

Job Number:	90159304
Company Name:	SAIC
Job Location:	Washington, DC US
Job Category:	Information Technology

Social Networks Analyst Job
Social Networks Analyst (Job Number:327223)

Description:
SAIC is looking for an exceptional Analyst to join our technically deep and diverse team in Washington DC. You will be working in a dynamic, operational environment, in which the contractor support team works side-by-side with our government customers, supporting a system user base distributed globally.

Primary duties include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Assemble facts and information from a variety of data sources and work products made available by various federal intelligence agencies; these may include data contributed by, but not be limited to, ICE, CBP, NCTC, FBI, NCIS, DEA, DIA, NSA, and open source materials.

Qualifications:
TYPICAL EDUCATION AND EXPERIENCE:

•Candidate must possess an active TS/SCI at a minimum with the ability to pass a polygraph.

The following are desired but not required:
Familiarity with Palantir
"Each time a user interacts with the mobile phone operator network by initiating or receiving a call or a text message, the location of the connecting antenna is recorded"

CDMA allows multiple towers to handle network traffic. Implying there's only one tower handling the traffic seems flawed to me. I could be wrong though. This was the issue I was trying to bring up.
> So other governments have a backdoor to our government's backdoor

And we have a backdoor to their backdoor. It's fairly easy to assume that they -- state-sponsored intelligence agencies -- collude with each-other by offering access to each-other's data stores.

In a sense we are all foreign to each-other, and the USG may access American data through requests acting as foreign agencies.
Agreed...unlikely. But I will say this jokingly...if they were coordinating, they might not be using Verizon to do so. ;)
Sounds like everybody gets a hand in the cookie jar. Let's make a toast! https://secure.flickr.com/photos/whitehouse/5455525432/in/ph...
What do you consider to be "what they do"?
> Palantir

Isn't that basically their entire business model?
Establish Your Encrypted Channels Now
Can you also confirm that Palantir Prism didn't fork into PRISM?
Obama defends surveillance effort as 'trade-off' for security
That assumes you have an electable replacement in mind that will not cause worse problems.
Roe v. Wade was a pure exercise in legislating from the bench, and even many of its supporters will admit that.

O'Connor got it right in Casey when she distanced the right to abortion from the right to privacy: "That is because the liberty of the woman is at stake in a sense unique to the human condition and so unique to the law."

From Roe:
"The Constitution does not explicitly mention any right of privacy. In a line of decisions, however, going back perhaps as far as Union Pacific R. Co. v. Botsford, 141 U.S. 250, 251 (1891), the Court has recognized that a right of personal privacy, or a guarantee of certain areas or zones of privacy, does exist under the Constitution. In varying contexts, the Court or individual Justices have, indeed, found at least the roots of that right in the First Amendment, Stanley v. Georgia, 394 U.S. 557, 564 (1969); in the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 8-9 (1968), Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347, 350 (1967), Boyd v. United States, 116 U.S. 616 (1886), see Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438, 478 (1928) (Brandeis, J., dissenting); in the penumbras of the Bill of Rights."

That handwave-y language ("does not explicitly mention", "a right of personal privacy, or a guarantee of certain areas or zones of privacy", "at least the roots") doesn't exactly inspire confidence in the existence of a broad, fundamental right to privacy in the Constitution. Also, it uses "privacy" in a somewhat different sense than the surveillance debate. In Roe, it's used more like "liberty."
Without the key, they couldn't read it. Getting a CA on board doesn't give them that (that would only allow them to create an alternative key that software without pinning would accept), they would need to either be given the key by anyone that had it or factor it themselves.
Show HN: Made A Business Model Canvas for SaaS (v.03)
Ricin Suspect Was Tracked Via Mail Scanners
> Edit: It might not be obvious to some, but code names are always in all caps.

Nope https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_name#Famous_code_names
The presentation makes it seem they are harvesting the data. That would resolve any apparent contradiction. The biggest question is how? Surely google has noticed these man in the middle attacks. I think the guardian misinterpreted the word "provider".

Edit: it appears the NSA has google's ssl keys. That would explain all the talk about "direct access".
Obama Asked Intel Agencies to Draw Up List of Possible Cyber Targets Overseas
The US Chamber of Commerce is a non-governmental lobbying group. I would take anything you source from them with a grain of salt.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Chamber_of_Commer...
There's some undertone about having Drummond listed as the co-author.

When the chief legal officer co-authors a post with a ceo, it means that each word has been carefully chosen, because each of these statements carries serious consequences if they get it wrong.
Technical Implications of the NSA's Prism Program
> As to all the other stuff you said: Obama can't set tax rates unilaterally.

If you had been following "negotiations" with Congress (take late 2010 as an example) you'd know that the president basically did a song and dance where he started out pretending he wanted higher taxes and proceeded to leave things exactly the same.

He did not assert his strong position in that. If Congress literally did nothing, taxes would have been raised. He declined to fight for the tax-raising side of that argument and forfeited a superior negotiating position. If he really believed it in the beginning, he did not think highly enough of it to do what he could have.

Edit: removing trollish comment about Rand, because it's bad to flamebait. Let me just say that it was clear to me from your comment that you have been influenced by folks nearing the Rand side of the spectrum, and that you can cease to compare it with Rand but it still comes out awfully similar... Thus I don't hesitate to say, even after your objections, that the comment was very Randian, in the sense that it is Rand-like.
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. It requires the government to be simultaneously incredibly competent and incompetent. If the NSA was able to keep this project under wraps for so long with the number of people involved, I think they would be smart enough to at least slightly alter the words of their puppets, after all this is supposed to be the area of their expertise.
Except that that would be untrue, because there are perfectly legitimate reasons why the government would have access to data on a small scale - e.g. subpoenaing an individual's records in a specific criminal trial.
Chinese hacked Obama, McCain campaigns, took internal documents, officials say
This is one of the most reprehensible things I've heard in I don't even know how long.
What about Q1?
Again notice the words "direct access". What about indirect access?
As usual, Stallman was not only ahead of his time, but also swimming against the tide of conventional wisdom

I think that depends on what you call 'conventional wisdom'. The Patriot Act was widely criticsed from the first second it was introduced. Take a look at this NY Times article from 2001:

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/13/us/nation-challenged-congr...

Civil liberties advocates implored Congress to slow down and consider the legislation's impact, which they said could be a dangerous infringement on Americans' privacy and constitutional rights.

He was very, very far from being alone in his stance. It's just that those with power were not also the skeptical ones.
the article doesn't go on to explain more on how this could have happened, I would assume they run some tests on the specs, or some kind of simulations (I am obviously not an expert in making submarines) but considering they are so expensive, wow, amazing. Someone put a decimal in the wrong place and nobody noticed , what are the odds of that happening!
Things done in haste tend to look like this. It is almost absurd to think that every company mentioned somehow came up with the same statement by chance.
Twilio runs on cloud providers (Amazon and Rackspace, at least when I interviewed with them). Anyone can build what Twilio does, whether thats a group of devs in a co-working startup space, or a large telcom (NTT, AT&T, Verizon, Deutsche Telekom).

On the web, there are no longer barriers to entry.
We see Eglin's sockpuppets all the time on reddit, they are actually pretty easy to spot.
I use last.fm since 2009 and it seems like it's forgotten. The user experience is very sluggish.

So much possibilities and nothing done. Grooveshark proposes to recommend music based on your last.fm account but I don't think it does a very good job.
Well, consider a starter kit (install script to copy/paste) vs. being spoon fed (integration into other software to reduce installation to a simple product flag with optional configuration). A lot of people still prefer using JS libraries directly, specifically for development purposes instead of using a CDN.

At this moment I'm not entirely sure what your JS library does, but if it can be referenced locally, then it would be worthwhile to allow grabbing it via npm/nuget/similar package managers.
M. Dell's Advice to Entrepreneurs: "Be crazy and don't seek too much advice"
You seem to be suggesting one of two things. Either:

1) The heads of these companies had a conference call this morning and agreed on a 4-paragraph format, with specific points for each paragraph.

Or 2) The federal government instructed each company to respond today, with a 4-paragraph point-by-point, and then Larry and Mark obediently complied.

Ludicrous.
I'm sorry, but google's response was demagogical at best (what does 'direct access' even means!??!). In many countries the judiciary would already be in the case and the head of those companies (which didn't provide 'direct access' but there is obviously something happening) would have a lot of explanation to do.
> This doesn't follow.

You are mistakenly inferring the wrong general principles from special cases that are well-known because they are exceptions to, rather than illustrations of, the generally-applicable rules.

> If you are suing/being sued, your lawyer needs to know everything about your case to mount a proper offense/defense, but you still have an expectation of privacy.

That expectation of privacy is created by the (well established at the time of the Constitution) common law lawyer/client privilege, it is not a generally applicable privilege that applies to commercial relationships and creates an expectation of privacy within those relationships. So, yes, there is an expectation of privacy here which has significance under the fourth amendment, but it is not one which extends to other business relationships like those between a telephone customer and their carrier.

> Similarly, your doctor needs to know everything about your medical history in order to treat you, yet you have an expectation of privacy there as well.

Again, doctor/patient privilege is a special case (which is why we talk about "doctor/patient confidentiality" and "lawyer/client confidentiality" and not a general privilege attached to commercial exchanges.)
> “Apparently somebody in the calculations made a mistake in the very beginning and nobody paid attention to review the calculations,” he said.

Supporting the old software engineering folklore that the earlier a bug is introduced (and the later it is found) the harder and more expensive it is to fix.
Maybe the official responses by these major companies were about the same event were all reviewed by corporate lawyers who all hone in on very similar language and addressable points because it's a tricky statement to make and there are few ways to make it correctly?
Hm. At this point I think I'd set better than 50% odds that the PRISM Powerpoint is a fake. Which is not to say that there's nothing to it - there could be all sorts of things behind it (the phrase 'modified limited hangout' is one that springs to mind).
Isn't this service just taking advantage of the situation at hand? This is like offering a 'premium' burner phone, but burner phones aren't supposed to come with nice unlimited plans and etc.

You could get a Tracfone with some starter minutes for $10 and a 50 minute card for $10 with cash. The 50 minutes actually becomes 100 minutes due to Tracfone's 2x minutes promo.
http://www.tracfone.com/phones.jsp
Yes, this isn't 'unlimited' usage, but the whole point of a burner phone is to use it for one time communication, NOT for normal, regular comms over a 30 day period. You're just asking to be tracked if you did that anyway.

Seems like you would just be paying for a burner phone in a pretty box and pretty service when you could go out and buy one yourself.

Also, the burnerphone.us whois indicates that it was registered less than a month ago in May 2013.
Featuring this week on miApples - 'Magazine View'
I feel like it is a little unfair comparing the number of years someone is sentenced and going to jail for and the number of years someone could go to jail for if they are found guilty and receive the max sentence.

(Perhaps people don't think the hacker did anything that should be considered a crime worthy of a sentence that long, but that's a totally different argument)
You're wrong, it does not require that they be incredibly competent, not in the least.

It requires that they coordinated with the companies PR departments in the process of setting up the program. The companies asked: what if the shit hits the fan, or this comes out in the public, what do we say? And the government had a simple, boilerplate answer for it.

You wouldn't even have to work with the PR dept, just one single person. Either a special rep in PR for government matters, or just the CEO himself. It would take 5 minutes to put together a generalized script for the CEO to follow in the event this hit the public news.

This (the PR response) would be extraordinarily easy to coordinate, and it would take just one conversation at the point the program was signed on to by the companies.

And when this all became public, the company could also easily then call up the US Government and ask them what to do (and more than likely, the NSA could call them and tell them what to do).
Or toss the whole thing in a fire.
If they don't use the gear, they can't justify it.
It's hard for me to believe they could access to the data centers without Google's knowledge.

Isn't it more plausible that they're intercepting data flowing in and out of Google servers?
CEO's and public figures? Definitely, if the NSA and similar agencies had the power to label them as traitors and / or terrorists (with all due consequences) and/or destroy their companies.
I'm glad you pointed out that the government acknowledged the program. Obama himself did. If I had to guess, there was miscommunication in the government. Somebody ordered the CEO's to lie, and somebody acknowledged the program. I think this is also why the company's statements are nearly the same, they were either given a script or they are trying to send a message.
IVR Buddy - Get a free VoiP phone system
Sure thing, Larry.
So you won't be afraid to swear as such under oath nor sign a contract stipulating multibillion dollar penalties should this in any way prove to be a lie or deception, right?
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but you can admit to a gag order being placed on you. As in, FB and Google would be totally entitled to say "there is a gag order preventing us from going into this". So they don't need to convey anything.
Never forget: ToR is funded by the US government.
The airforce base has sock puppets?
Your target market seems to be the unwise and the gullible: even the purchase of one of these overpriced phones is made using a reasonably anonymous currency (e.g. tumbled Bitcoins) there is a still a record of delivery address.

Thus, these phones of yours are completely unsuitable for any sort of serious anti-Government whistleblowing, and probably inappropriate even for criminal communication, given the ease by which electronic records can be accessed by the various police authorities.

This is either a deliberate scam, or a really stupid business idea.
They're awfully precise about a limited set of things that did not happen.
My understanding is that MITM (but in a perfect way, using the leaked private key) is still required, if ephemeral Diffie-Hellman is involved. You can't just passively record the stream and decrypt it, since you don't know the exchanged DH secret.

The suggestion that the companies actually gave them the keys and this explains the "direct access" phrase makes a lot of sense!
Whatever your views on this are, I hope nobody is actually surprised. If I were a $CURRENT_MEDIA_BOOGIEMAN_SCAPEGOAT_THINKOFTHECHILDREN, I would definitely assume that the usgov has access to any "big data" on the general public and can get it anytime they want. My plans for world-domination won't be sent through gmail or sent in a private message on facebook, or an text-msg on VerizoNSA. I'd take the time to learn and use PGP.

Only regular citizens will be caught by this and... the whitehouse knows it. I only wish the general public could see HN now. Someone with lots of money,looks-at-Google, should buy like 2mins of commercial-time during the Super-bowl to talk about stuff like this.
This is absolutely crammed with weasel wording. With notes:

First, we have not joined [Maybe you didn't "join", but instead merely participated in?] any program that would give the U.S. government—or any other government—direct access [How about indirect access? What is "direct access", anyway?] to our servers [The reporting suggests the NSA provided some hardware. So I guess it's not your servers, huh?]. Indeed, the U.S. government does not have direct access [There's that weird term again] or a “back door” [With quotes. Nice.] to the information stored in our data centers. We had not heard of a program called PRISM until yesterday [This one is especially bad. Apparently the NSA didn't tell them the program was called 'PRISM'?]

Second, we provide user data to governments only in accordance with the law [Note that the government also claims this program is in accordance with the law]. Our legal team reviews each and every request [What's the scope of a request?], and frequently pushes back when requests are overly broad or don’t follow the correct process. Press reports that suggest that Google is providing open-ended access to our users’ data [Not what the reports are suggesting] are false, period. Until this week’s reports, we had never heard of the broad type of order that Verizon received—an order that appears to have required them to hand over millions of users’ call records [Which is wholly unrelated to PRISM and Google.]. We were very surprised to learn that such broad orders exist. Any suggestion that Google is disclosing information about our users’ Internet activity on such a scale is completely false [Such a scale being what, exactly? All of your users' data?].

Note what it doesn't answer:

Does Google provide data to the NSA?

Does the NSA have resources in Google data centers?

Does Google know what these reports about the NSA spying on our Google accounts are all about?

It really doesn't answer those. Lame.
What else should they say in your opinion?
It's not ludicrous at all that the companies were given basic PR instruction when they signed on, in the case of being asked about the program. In fact, that's exactly what would occur.

What's ludicruous is thinking the Feds are tapping every major telecom provider, but wouldn't do the same to Facebook / Google / Apple / Microsoft. These companies are collectively vastly more important than AT&T and Verizon, worth about a cool trillion dollars, and now make-up a huge portion of the data infrastructure for American consumers.

A spy is given instructions in case of interrogation by the enemy. Why wouldn't a $250 billion corporation be given instruction in case one of the largest spying systems in history hits the public news? It's absurd to think they wouldn't be.
Sorry, kind of have to throw "benefit of the doubt" out the window when dealing with "massive state-wide surveillance programs that have no transparent oversight."
You don't get to be CEO unless you can learn to lie & keep secrets.

OTOH, I'm more skeptical about the implementation side. Have you ever set up a feed between two different organizations that needs to transmit a massive amount of data in real-time? It's an immensely complicated undertaking requiring a whole team on both sides, with managers, engineers, techwriters, QA, and support staff. It seems a little unbelievable to me that one of them wouldn't spill the beans, particularly if asked to participate in a morally-questionable program.
Anyone find it interesting that "direct access to servers" keeps being mentioned when PRISM could almost be an in-joke for the kind of beam-splitting tech they were already using in Room 641A (and elsewhere) - i.e. they're not touching servers, they're just siphoning off a perfect copy of all network traffic
The last couple lines of his blog post seemed to convey, at least to me, that he was posting truth but perhaps not as much as he'd like.

"We post this information on our Transparency Report whenever possible... ...we understand that the U.S. and other governments need to take action to protect their citizens’ safety—including sometimes by using surveillance. But the level of secrecy around the current legal procedures undermines the freedoms we all cherish."