skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I do not see where in James Clapper's statement there is a claim that Google, Apple or FB participated in PRISM.

That said, the only way I can square his statement with the facts is that when you collect information on EVERYONE, then you haven't targeted ANYONE in particular. Which is exactly what this warrant enables the FBI to do.

Also it should be noted that all denials have included the admission that companies are forced to comply with lawful requests. A request that comes complete with a warrant from a judge will be usually seen as lawful, even though there might be issues with the warrant. Thus a company could "only comply with lawful requests" and also turn over all of their data under a warrant like this.

That said, Google has been vocal enough in protesting government attempts to troll through its data that I am inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt on this one. But I think that we'll soon have more details.
Is someone implementing an NSA honeypot? like talking about bombings and terrorist attacks? I think is a good exercise to uncover this iniatives.
> it should never have been classified in the first place

The system is big with lots of moving cogs in it. The bigger it is the higher the chance one of the cogs will pull a Manning. They see the idiocy and waste. Classifying stuff that is shameful and sweeping it under the carpet works for a while, but soon enough someone will say fuck it, this is going against the principles of my country and my moral standards and they'll leak the shit out of it.

From their side, it is imperative to persecute and punish whistle-blowers, leakers as harshly as possible. In order to set examples.
How Congress unknowingly legalized PRISM in 2007
An accurate and unfortunate picture--consider how many similarly silly baubles and propaganda pieces (Darwin fish, anyone?) are sold to people on the other side of the aisle. People are dumb and silly and tacky regardless of ideology.

I'm being perfectly realistic. Every time the topic comes up here on HN--one of the more rational places of discussion I've encountered--we see the same strong anti-gun sentiment come out, very frequently with the caveat that it's okay for the .gov and .mil to be armed while the citizenry is not.

We can't at once both be outraged at the erosions of privacy and civil liberties and at the same time flabbergasted at the idea that people lack the faith in their government to grant them a monopoly on force.
it is a good idea. but indeed, there is a lot of mobile parts to configure right in this fay and age of spam to avoid problems. in the early days it was much easier to run a wacky mta configuration.
Both Ghosterly and NoScript have a built in ability to unbreak sites that have tight Google Analytics integration.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5182359

not sure if this applies to Chrome versions, but if you are using Chrome, and dont trust Google, im not really sure what you are thinking.
It hit a nerve about what this community cares about. That isn't that surprising, though, right? We also routinely have posts about the TSA, cryptography, and other security topics.
when google apps are free the fbi nsa et al read all your emails...
911 tech that locates cell phone users in buildings ready to go
more like a "serial denial of service"

but who's counting among friends, huh?
Was a Republic. I think it could be argued that the US is no longer fully governed by the Constitution. The only debate, in my opinion, is when the Republic died. When Nixon killed the last part of the gold standard, unleashing perpetual war, and nearly unlimited funding for the military industrial complex (including the NSA / CIA / FBI) by printing / Federal Reserve financing? The 1930s when FDR massively expanded the reach of the Federal Government? 2001 under Bush? 1913 with the founding of the Federal Reserve?
Just made a post about this very same thing (deleted it btw.) I'm not THAT interested in the NSA bs, and if I was I certainly wouldn't need a separate post for every news organization that covers the topic.
If you’re forced to lie you only say what you’re obliged to say. Normally when companies face PR crises they release full page press releases full of fluffy assurances and marketing speak.
I am sure he was briefed by DOJ on what words to exactly say in order to get off on some technicality (ah but it is not "collecting" it is ... "intercepting" LOL!).

On the other had, so he lied to Congress. What happens next? A slap on the wrist, public shaming? The public will forget about it as soon as the next major hurricane or tornado hits.
> I'm always surprised by how often people on HN talk about "should" versus "is."

Perhaps we make this distinction because it's an important one. It always surprises me when an engineer confuses the two. "But the courts say that the gov't can access your data if it's not on your property," is NOT a counter argument to the statement "The 4th amendment should extend to data." The conversation cannot move forward unless both sides understand the difference between "should" and "is".
Not true. Renouncement does substantially restrict your ability to re-enter the US, however.

http://www.irs.gov/Individuals/International-Taxpayers/Expat...

The rule you are talking about applied only to expatriation between 2004-2008 and then only if you spent more than 30 days per year in the US after relinquishing citizenship.
If encryption is your main requirement, you could try AnyLocker - http://anylockerapp.com

It's main selling point is that it encrypts all your data (notes, pictures) with SHA-256 before storing it on your device. Give it a try (Disclosure - i am the developer in the team that published this app)

Reviews/feedback always welcome...
Looks like HN readers are just fighting for karma with these posts :(
> It's important to remember that we still have a functioning democracy. If you -- Hacker News reader -- decided to run for congress tomorrow, you might not win, but you won't be killed, sabotaged, or secretly blocked. While some individual politicans may be corrupt, the system broadly is not.

If I, the Hacker News reader, decided to run for Congress tomorrow, I would run against an incumbent whose district has been gerrymandered to statistically guarantee his reelection and whose colleagues in the House can distribute nationally-raised money to in case that's not enough of a guarantee.

If I, the Hacker News reader, voted for a guy who spoke convincingly in favor of civil liberties and against warrantless wiretapping, I would have discovered that once he was elected, he had been lying to me all along.

If I, the Hacker News reader, ever gained enough power and influence to really affect things, who's to say I won't be found dead? For all the public knows, I could have been killed by any lone gunman, just like Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, or John or Bobby Kennedy. Then I just turn into a harmless, martyred caricature rather than as a living, thinking human being--nothing subversive there.

If we still have a functioning democracy, then try and convince the people that there's nothing to fear from these kinds of programs. If the NSA has nothing to hide, it has nothing to fear.
William Binney at the last HOPE conference talking about the NSA spying program:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqN59beaFMI
Five years later, the population of Iceland has exceeded that of the United States.
This article is likely not updated with the fourth company: Google, who recently lost their initial challenge.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57587003-38/judge-orders-g...

However,

> It wasn't a complete win for the Justice Department, however: Illston all but invited Google to try again, stressing that the company has only raised broad arguments, not ones "specific to the 19 NSLs at issue." She also reserved judgment on two of the 19 NSLs, saying she wanted the government to "provide further information" prior to making a decision.

and

> Illston, who is stepping down from her post in July, said another reason for her decision is her desire not to interfere while the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals is reviewing the constitutionality of NSLs in an unrelated case that she also oversaw.

So it seems that we'll have to wait for the Ninth Circuit to declare NSLs unconstitutional before deciding if Google's case counts as a loss.
Fuck, I love Schneier so much.

He even ended with a call to action.
I'm responding to someone that was indirectly saying:

- Dictatorships randomly enforce laws.
- The US Government is randomly enforcing laws.
- The US Government is therefore a dictatorship.
This comment really does an excellent job of articulating why this sort of surveillance is a bad thing. I find it really frustrating when people question why we'd want to prevent the government from having unlimited ability to spy on the citizenry - because it's been tried before countless times and it generally doesn't go so well. The fact that we're able to do it even more efficiently than ever should make people more concerned, not less.
DHS Watchdog: ‘Intuition and Hunch’ Are Enough to Search Your Gadgets at Border
BSD was encumbered by AT&T code & licenses and most definitely not open source until something like 1992 and BSD4.4-Lite (which really begat the open source *BSD releases) didn't come out until 1994.
What I mean is that because Salesforce:
1/ hits their sales target
2/ grows reasonably fast
3/ is the leader in SaaS for many large investors (like vanguard)
Salesforce has very high valuation, which allow them to acquire Company, raise money in very good conditions and keep growing. In Salesforce case, most of their products are very bad by Silicon Valley/standard standard, and yet, the Company is worth a lot of money.

As much as Salesforce is criticizing Oracle, Salesforce is behaving just like Oracle - with a cooler CEO (who is himself a former Oracle guy).
Yes; a democratic republic, to be precise.

Non-democratic republics include 18th-century USA, where only white male landowners could vote. Democratic non-republics include the UK, which is a monarchy. "Republicanism" and "democracy" are orthogonal concepts.
* Stop the wars

* Stop the spying

* Save the children

Blah blah ...

The terrorists will persist. Globe trotting capitalist crisis will persist.

Radical ideologies don't die, easily.The problem is Action <-> Reaction. You spit on me, I plot revenge.

What will happen after another deeply painful attack ?

Everyone usually just hand-waves and says "Do something !"

This is when american hypocrisy is updated to 11.0.

"I want to be comfortable ! They are the idiots, kill them ! I don't care who ! Don't tell me how, Just do it ! Don't bother me, I need to workout ! I want to bang this person you see ... "

So, faux laws are created, damage is done, lives are saved, movies are made, everyone feels icky about the new laws and then we get new presidents and new laws like new muffins.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
I find this especially interesting coupled with Cray's YarcData graph analytics hardware called Urika, which has 512 terabytes in memory. http://www.yarcdata.com/Products/
I have wondered about this. The gag orders are somewhat problematic but can they mandate that one actively lies about having received a NSL?

Suppose I put up on my startup's web page (http://www.efficito.com), "we have not received any NSL's and pledge to fight any we get." Suppose we always end press releases with such a promise.

Suppose we get one one day, so when we do, we change "We have not received" to "we cannot confirm or deny whether we have received." Close observers will note the shift and note we have moved from a flat denial to a refusal to disclose.

I have trouble imagining that such could be prohibited because if it is, it either ends up being a mandatory lie and compelled speech or it ends up being prior restraint even before the NSL is issued. Not sure I would risk my business on it though.
TMikkeren/FizzBuzzEnterpriseEdition
Yes, but you can still get a lot of storage for that kind of money.

2 billion USD in hard drives = 10 million 4 TB drives = 40 Exabytes = 6 GB per person in the world
This shouldn't even be a question. Are we going to ask how likely is that torture is going to work, too?

We shouldn't allow broad surveillance of everything you ever do or say online, and we shouldn't accept torture as a means of interrogation either. This is simply deciding about the kind of society we want to be.

Terrorists can be dealt with in other ways, too, and one of them would be trying to avoid creating blowback and radicalizing future generations of terrorists because of current actions.
I understand the issues with the specific topics, but how much new/unique value does having 28 submissions about the _same_ thing have?

This is one of those outrage things I take it?
China Buys Costa Rica for $1.5 Billion
Even if a machine can store 50 TB (say 5TB in subsequent years10 disks), to store 1 yottabyte (10^12 TB), you would need 210^10 machines, or 10 billion machines. And I can't even start to think of the datacenter network topology..
"So you're saying there's a chance..."

Haven't read it, but couldn't resist as it's an obvious conclusion.
Answer: Reports on surveillance of Americans fuel debate over privacy, security.

DURR!
I was going to ask you on FB, but then thought more people would probably care here. :P
By the numbers: The NSA's super-secret spy program, PRISM
You are outraged, check.
Because for the first time, there is documentary evidence of massive government spying on the United States population. Until this week it was all hearsay from whistleblowers and unnamed sources.

Because we care about individual rights and believe that no one should have access to our private communications without our permission.

Because we're at a critical juncture in world history, and one of the roads ahead leads to the unprecedented concentration of power in just a few hands.
That is the exact idea behind this [1].

[1] http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt
We're sure of Bradley Manning I guess.
I've just submitted a post on this. What you're referring to is called a warrant canary.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5837351
I don't understand why this has been downvoted as it doesn't violate any rule on HN. Even if I personally disagree with the comment, it explores a different point of view and it's a contribution to the discussion.

Downvoting to express disagreement is a plague that must be eradicated.
That's in my mind is the best strategy. Unfortunately, I had my fair share of busts when I thought I hired great people and turned out to be no more than mediocre. Looking back, I really don't think I could have decide any differently with having only couple of hours worth of interviews as my data. Nothing beats spending real time with the person.
"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Benjamin Franklin
I hope people in Silicon Valley have smartened about about Obama's speeches and won't fall for another emotional speech of his, trying to convince them how much this sort of illegal/unconstitutional broad spying is needed.

If he comes to you, might as well try to convince him yourselves, that he should stop doing this, not the other way around.
Put yourself in the spooks' position. You may know for a fact that parts of the story are simply inaccurate, but you're sworn not to reveal unclassified material without authorization, and you can't know for sure how good the criteria for classification are due to compartmentalization.

Only a few people, like the President and the DNI, are in a position to make those determinations, and they're in a somewhat similar double-bind insofar as selective declassification may later turn out to be a mistake. If you talk to a lot of conservatives, you soon find that when the administration increases transparency or answers a FOIA request with meaningful information, there are plenty of hawks ready to criticize the administration for compromising security, putting American lives at risk, and so on.
Might as well just manufacture your own hard drives if you want to play this game. Optimized for Accumulo, with built in hardware encryption.
Well I guess technically there is this pesky thing getting in the way called the Constitution. But they re-defined some terms, moved some things around, decided that 'search' probably occurs when a human looks at the data (LOL, founding fathers didn't know about databases ;-). So it is not just a technical challenge, given their budgets they can solve the technical side it seems.

Imagine also (and I've mentioned this before) there is no statute of limitations on historical data in case of warrant/nsl, so if warrant is every issued (and we know they are never denied) they can get _all_ your data from years and years back. Emails you sent 10 years ago to secret lovers, jokes about punching the president in the face when you were 13 years old, stuff like that. Make no mistake they will find stuff to blackmail, jail, or scare anyone into anything if they dig hard and long enough into everyone's past.

I suspect more of the people involved in this will decide to do what Manning did. They see the waste, the lies, wars on terror, wars on drugs. If anything, NSA and other XYZ agencies, love to hire patriotic people, and a fraction of a percent of them maybe still are and will say "fuck it, everyone needs to know about this".
yes you are write I was asking for comparison between ZURB's Foundation or Bootstrap, i searched a lot but didn't got satisfied answer as some are in favor of ZURB and other are in favor of Bootstrap
It appears most people, assuming its fresh out of college, would start out at GS-7 which at step 10 in the DC area would only be $54K. Assuming they were graduating with a Phd, they could be at GS-11 step 10 which would still only be 81K.

I understand the feeling of purpose but starting at half the salary and having a cap of 155K (assuming you move into senior management (GS-15 step 10)) vs somewhere like Google where you start at ~100K and the limit for technical people seems like its the 400K+ range seems like a tough sell. Also maybe its just stereotypes, but it seems like antisocial behavior which seems somewhat prevalent in excellent technical types wouldn't really mesh with the command structure there.
The parent didn't mention the political right or the NRA. There are a massive number of gun rights supporters that do not fall into such convenient stereotypes.
Where does your 1/3 liberal come from? I cannot find that anywhere. You are corrected they were not targeted for AUDITS, but they were targeted.

It is not just the problem that they were targeted based on name (I actually think that's pretty reasonable) but the questions that were asked, the time it took to get approved (or denied) and the fact that IRS lied to congress about it.
ShowYou's New Channel platform
Why is the text so small?
ChatSecure for iOS does that, plus it's open source and free.
If you're going to build something like PRISM because the ends justify the means, is prison really going to be the only thing you threaten people with?
To me the presence or absence of court orders is absolutely a substantive distinction, as is the question of whether information is requested for only a limited subset of customers or for all (or a significant fraction of) customers.
From a logfile to a histogram with a few lines of R - Andy Davies
Herd effect. Happens every few months when enough of the stars align.
Almost makes you want to question the "liver cancer" story.
Do you have any data to back up your "0 chance" claim?

Presumably you are aware of the Iraq and Afghan insurgencies.
Good luck combining a strong government, with an accountable one. Political power tends to corrupt toward not wanting to be accountable.
As always TJ pulls off something brilliantly simple.
Ask HN: Was the Coinbase iPhone app removed from the App Store?
Was the Coinbase iPhone app removed from the App Store?

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/coinbase/id588530550?mt=8

The link (from their homepage) leads to the store and says "Item Not Available - The item you've requested is not currently available in the U.S. store."

When I try searching for in it comes up with no results.
300,000 NSL's? Is that really how many terrorist plots they've foiled or even suspected? Because I'm very skeptical about that.

The fact that the government can put a gag order 300,000 times on companies and people like this is insane. Forget about "future abuses". It has already happened and keeps happening. It's pretty clear the government is very loosely using these NSL's now. Where are the checks and balance?
New Zealand amateur astronomer captures amazing deep field image of Centaurus A
The Atlantic, who spams HN for hits, just happens to also have insight on what the NSA is up to? Yeah, right. There is nothing in this article.
No, they're not peeved at all. If he was, he'd be burning the IRS alive. They've spent all their effort so far on deflection, lying, covering-up, etc.
OpenStack at the National Security Agency
I'll get behind the toolchain (GCC, as, gdb, etc) as a game changer, but "everyhing"? Please...other than GNU rewrites of BSD 4.3 userland programs (not hard), most of the projects on gnu.org happened after Linux became ascendant if not dominant. And of the major pre-Linux projects, how many are still indispensable? How about the colossal waste of resources behind GNU Emacs? GNU could have recreated Genera, and done it better, and really changed the world for all that went into it and it did nothing more than create a fetish for a tiny and declining group of people. We don't even need to go to Hurd; it's punchline to a software project joke right there with Duke Nukem.
Sure, but let's say there was a very popular e-mail company where you paid for the service. They would be keeping your e-mail anyway. Do you really think it would make any difference for NSA/FBI? They'd still get them just as easily as from Google, Apple and others.
The trustworthiness of data is a function of its provenance, not its accompanying analysis or commentary.

Conversely, the trustworthiness of information (i.e. analysis and commentary) is a function of the degree of bias of the source and not the data that informs it.

If the raw data is universally accessible then there should be no shortage of trustworthy information sources for the third audience you mention. Unbiased sources are ideal but that’s too much to hope for, so the next best thing for that audience is to consult a multitude of sources that are known to be examining the same data.

Finally, I do not think Wikileaks is ideal (I prefer something more like what Nate Silver does). But I take it as axiomatic that a free press — even one with an editorial voice — is a Good Thing. A journalistic organization that also releases its sources is a Better Thing and hence must also be a Good Thing.
Bruce Schneier gives a more coherent overview on the current HN "surveillance state" theme.

tl;dr : massive surveillance is real, there is far more, blow the whistle if you can, take precautions
OT: There should be some rule about publishing articles without date on them.
Our government is putting its own self-interest ahead of the interests of the country. That needs to change.

This, this, a thousand times, this.
I certainly agree with what you said, by my comment was more of a meta post rather than regarding this particular topic. The same thing happened when Steve Jobs died.

At a glance, there seem to be 4 or 5 unique aspects to this story that appear on the front page, despite multiple sources parroting each other.
No surprise there - his record shows him to be an outstanding champion of civil rights, as long as you're not gay, foreign a member of the media, a Muslim, or a woman. (Sarcasm warning.)

http://votesmart.org/candidate/key-votes/27142/jim-sensenbre...
Protect your privacy