skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It sounds nice to put the victim's wishes first, until you realize that if the perpetrators aren't handled properly they might go on to victimize more people.

Thank you for bringing up something that needs to be considered, but situations like this are too complex for hard rules.
CALEA, Carnivore, and Countermeasures - by David Gessel (Seoul, Korea 2000)
This is an interesting read in light of PRISM.

a lecture given in Seoul, Korea in 2000 by superDave:
http://www2.dis.org/filez/#superdave

Realize how long this sort of stuff has been going on, everyone...

"In general, more is known about the state of government sponsored surveillance than corporate surveillance which, without regulatory oversight, is certainly far more extensive, though usually in the guise of “marketing research” or competitive analysis."

CALEA Carnivore Lecture

This Lecture, as presented at IS2K in Korea, is about CALEA, Carnivore and possible Countermeasures. It presents an overview of the state of surveillance in the world today, introduces some of the many threats to data (some overt, most covert) and highlights the value of security in a very insecure world.
The phrase "direct access" is absolutely weaselly language.

It leaves open the possibility that however "indirect access" is defined is how they get their info.
Meanwhile, http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathanhall/2013/06/07/washingt...; "Washington Post Updates, Hedges on Initial PRISM Report"
It depends on what you are used to. I started programming in the 1980s and the first editor I used was pretty much like EDLIN (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edlin)---think of an unholy cross between the Unix commands cat and vi (line based and modal).

And, except for code completion, there isn't anything an IDE can do that can't be done via the command line (just not as conveniently). Then again, I don't program in Java.
> that enslaved a race, legally, is conclusively worse than a society with harsh sentencing laws.

True that.

> tptacek's assertion that we should strive to be less ahistorical when assessing the current status quo.

We != people. We = Government, I believe. The Government should be less ahistorical in their workings and policy-making. Prevention of terror attacks, cold war logic is exactly the kind of argument that is outdated.

[Edits: Text]
I really like what you guys do. It is a great concept, and it sounds like a really fun domain to work in. I hope I didn't ruin the puzzle by blurting this out.
Just curious, has this whole issue led you to at least entertain the thought that CISPA might be worse than you previously thought? Or are your views on that unshaken?
Exactly. They may not know what you're hiding, but if they see small portions of your internet traffic are encrypted using a scheme very different from your regular traffic, flags are raised. Then it's simply a matter of sending an NSL to whoever they need to in order to get the content of the message.
Googled for you.

"I have a great idea. What do I need to do to get my invention on the market?" http://www.bpmlegal.com/pletter.html
Why aren't we already? It's new, unproven and most of us haven't even heard of it yet. A quick glance at the website suggests you have to install a native program, which, compared to a web app, adds friction, makes it harder to use and requires trusting the authors with full access to your computer. There isn't a mobile app. OS X support is "only lightly tested".

And, even if none of that were the case, the most important reason we aren't using it already is because the people we want to talk to aren't using it, either. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect
Video: Making Psychology Work for You in Video Games
off topic. I came across this post from you https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3170221

Would you still be interested in that service?

tom at blendah.com
What the ...?
My electrical engineering professors were constantly trying to ingrain in us the tendency to estimate the solutions to problems long before solving them. Why? because if you know the ball park solution you'll be able to catch gross errors before they happen. Thus you will be less likely to pull a Homer Simpson at the power plant or end up transmitting too much power from your antenna. I'm thankful to be in an industry where catastrophic failure does not have such harmful results.
Hi Matt - Thanks for answering. I genuinely appreciate your earnest communication. To answer your question, I sincerely believe Larry should do the right thing irregardless of the law, which means telling the American public the truth.

What Sergey (and Google) bravely did in China gave Google years of priceless respectability. This is one of those situations where civil disobedience is best. I realize you can't just "pull out of the United States", yet Google is looking like liars, and that just doesn't work.

For what it's worth, if Larry summoned the courage to speak his conscience completely, he will not go to jail. Far from it ... Google will be the true statesman, showing courage and leadership.

Indeed, I believe it may help Google the most, by catalyzing people's courage to do what's right. It's simply wrong to associate yourself with this.

It must come from Google first, Google is the strongest. Please consider the honor in doing this. Done genuinely, the public will rally behind Google, just like SOPA/PIPA. And don't forget, you have the world's largest bully pulpit.
They're commonly known as "closed cities". You can read up more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_city
I think this article shows exactly how two-faced the denials made by FB and Google really are. The NYT is talking about PRISM here, which is implemented via FISA.

While it's possible that NSA does not have "completely unfettered" access to all Google/Facebook/Microsoft databases, it's obvious that they have direct access to a system which provides real-time data. For example in the case of monitoring Skype conversations (voice, video, data), email, and web searches, of a previously identified target. Yes, they sign off at the start, and then they let the system RUN.

Of course data is sent "automatically" and "in bulk" but by themselves these words mean little to nothing. I think the question is do they even bother identifying foci for the search? For Verizon "meta-data" they didn't bother, they just suck it all up. Note well, that URLs are considered "meta-data", even though in most cases they fully describe the content. Note well, GPS location of your phone is "meta-data".

A true and honest debate about whether we want to live under this type of "total surveillance" would require a lot of education for the average American to understand what these systems are truly capable of. Senators Wyden and Udell have been whispering warnings for years, but even they are gagged by FISA. It's so insulting to hear Obama claim he welcomes debate on the subject, while he continues to obfuscate the true scope of the surveillance.

If the PRISM slides are accurate about the "2 degrees of separation" then even targeting an individual at the start is meaningless. 2 degrees of separation along what axis? You think it's just 2 degrees of "sent mail"? There are spooks who do nothing but think about this shit all day long... "Two degrees of separation" could mean the warrant automatically broadens itself up to 2 hops from the foci, based on any "contact" along:

- Outgoing / Incoming email

- Facebook, Skype, Google Groups, contact lists

- IRC channel members

- Common web searches

- Common URLs visited

- Common brick & mortor shops visited

You can taint a LOT of people with only 2 degrees of separation if you starting thinking along multiple dimensions of contact.

It's specifically this "social network" which the FBI is interested in. You need these "support systems" installed at Google/Facebook/Microsoft if you want to build the graph out efficiently. The document was leaked, the government acknowledged how vital and important they believe it is for them to have access to this data. I'm not sure what more do you need to see?

Frankly, the blog posts the way they are worded don't deny anything at all. If Google was willing and able, they could tell us unequivocally the process, format, and scope of the data they share with the NSA. A Google Analytics for "NSA Spook Activity, Quarterly". Then we can start to have the "public debate".
> But how would you determine on the internet that an account holder was a US person or not?

That's why they only have to check a box saying they a reasonably sure that there is at least a 51% chance.

Vague laws are invariably wildcards that can and will be abused.
"Law enforcement has more or less universally requested and more or less universally been granted
access to packet switched networks. But because of the difficulty of pulling useful data off any single
wire, law enforcement asked for access to the switch itself. New laws in the US and elsewhere require
equipment manufacturers to make a ground breaking change in the design of their equipment: not
only would law enforcement be granted access, but the equipment would be designed for that access."
I have seen a Palantir demonstration of a similar product at IF-SEC, 2011, New Delhi.
A Palantir employee had demoed the product and we all thought that this product will be very effective in the fight against terror.
What is actually scary is that the expansion was not as dramatic as we tend to think. Consider the following:

1. Nixon signed the Banking Secrecy Act requiring banks to report suspicious transactions to the Treasury Department to fight organized crime. This was held to be Constitutional in California Bankers Association vs. Shultz.

2. Carter signed FISA, in a bid to contain Nixon-era domestic wiretapping. Under Carter you also see the rise of FBI Swat teams and expansion from there to local police forces.

3. Reagan asks for and gets a drug exception to Posse Comitatus, allowing the military to be directly involved in enforcing domestic narcotics law. Reagan also expands on Carter's SWAT programs by forming the outright military arm of the FBI known as the Hostage Rescue Team (involved in both Waco and Ruby Ridge, working aside the military in both cases under the drug exception to Posse Comitatus).

4. Clinton asks for and gets the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which provides for most of what was in the USAPATRIOT Act. Clinton Asks for the rest and a bill written by Biden fails to pass. Clinton also asked for a terrorism exception to Posse Comitatus and this also failed to pass Congress.

5. Bush, in the wake of 9/11, signs the USAPATRIOT Act into law, and embarks on Nixonesque wiretapping of Americans. Seeks to hold Americans without trial.

6. Obama sucedes in getting the Bush-era wiretaps legalized, and argues that Americans suspected of being in terrorist organizations can be killed anywhere in the world without trial.

The point is that 9/11 was not a tipping point. It was not what destroyed this nation. This has been going on for a long time. It just started to be thrust into public discussion after 9/11.

I am both optimistic and pessimistic on this. On one hand, we are losing what we need in order to recover this country, as the economics and politics are deeply interconnected. On the other hand, at least we are having the discussion which we were not having to the same extent under Clinton or Reagan.
Isn't the standard denial required of NSLs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_security_letter)? Could it be possible that the NSA is using an FBI trick to remain legal and quiet?
Or, "if you stop watching Raiders of the Lost Ark halfway through, the Nazis win"
This article seems to misinterpret the (admittedly complicated) facts for the sake of the instant gratification of conclusion-jumping.

From the OP:

> The New York Times says you knowingly participated in the NSA’s PRISM data monitoring program. In some cases, you were asked to create ”a locked mailbox and give the government the key”, to allow it to peer into our private communications and web activity. Even if the exact words of your denials were accurate, they were false in spirit.

This is the article that the OP refers to:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/08/technology/tech-companies-...;

Do a Ctrl-F and see if "PRISM" shows up. It didn't for me (not even with case-sensitive option turned off).

OK, now read the passage in the NYT article about ”a locked mailbox and give the government the key”...and then read the paragraph immediately after it:

"The data shared in these ways, the people said, is shared after company lawyers have reviewed the FISA request according to company practice. It is not sent automatically or in bulk, and the government does not have full access to company servers. Instead, they said, it is a more secure and efficient way to hand over the data."

FISA != PRISM (or at least, as PRISM has been reported initially), not in acronyms or in spirit.
> Ephemeral Diffie-Hellman creates a new key per connection in a public-safe manner.

How does that make a difference when you have the Diffie-Hellman key? We are saying they have the Diffie-Hellman keys, not the signing keys, nor the block cipher key that is exchanged. They have the only key that matters.
I don’t think the CEO knows every technical detail of the IT infrastructure.

The CEO is the last person to know that.

Pay or blackmail people who work on the datacenters. (more plausible)
Can you back that up? In my experience, when I replay an H.264 screen capture, I can't tell the difference. I'd be happy to post PNG screenshots.

Keep in mind that H.264 does not have to be 4:2:0, it can easily be 4:4:4.
To add to your points on Iraq, I have always maintained we should never have gone. I opposed the war at its inception and hoped we could pull back before we became responsible for the wellbeing of the Iraqi people.

This being said one thing that really differentiated Iraq from Vietnam was that when backed into a corner, Bush had one of his few shining moments as President when he tied the troop surge to political reforms aimed at a more inclusive Iraqi government. One of the problems in Vietnam was that we were so used to propping up despots we were unwilling to confront Diem on issues of governance. At least Bush learned from that lesson albeit late and with his back to the wall (and I think further it is pretty damning that Bush's finest moment was one that merely managed to contain a mess he created).
I only bring it up because I've seen the unintended misery it can cause. People sometimes assume that these actions have only positive repercussions, and that just isn't so. This poor girl is plastered across the Internet unconscious, half naked, and abused. And her attackers got a year in juvie. Worth it? I'm not sure. You'd have to ask her.
Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. - George Orwell
Cellulite Treatments That Work
Thank you for bringing some sanity to the discussion. "our country has weathered worse" is true and an excellent way of putting all this shit in perspective.
How are they getting the DH keys without cooperation from at least one of the SSL endpoints involved? They're newly generated at every SSL handshake, you can't just get a mole to hand you the keys once and be done with it. If you had the certificate private key, you could do a MITM, but this requires a LOT more resources and would be much more easily detectable.
Why do I keep clicking on TechCrunch links when the content is all just clickbait?

Seriously, I think the person writing this article is actually literally retarded....
Take Alcohol to Drink on Your Flight
The rivalry between gcc and clang has been wonderful for everybody who use either of them.
Why using improvisation to teach business skills is no joke
Is it really possible to completely anonymize an online purchase? Like others have said, the sheer act of buying something online which must be shipped somewhere is going to leave some trace. Unless both money and phone are transferred via a special courier (preferably in one those suitcases that you handcuff to yourself), a dedicated surveillance effort would be able to discover the customer's identity eventually. I'm sure you guys are well-intentioned, but, honestly, if I was paranoid enough to need one of these, I sure as heck wouldn't be comfortable buying it online. I'd probably just buy a cheap pre-paid cellphone from a corner store using cash.
You've nailed it here, outstanding job.

Any chance of defining a custom selection key other than ctrl? On my Macbook air, holding the control key with my pinky or thumb while I type is really awkward. Shift would seem more natural, as the pinky finger is already used to using this as a modifier, no?
Well, as you quoted, the author explicitly says that "that inconvenience pales in importance to the actual liberty PRISM strips away from us." Not to mention that it is kind of tragic to lose the ability to use these awesome things that have been built because we can't trust them.
This is not as interesting a question as who is lying.
Mobile Website vs. Native Apps: Which One Should Your Company Use?
Palantir is much larger than just Prism, and its collection of "solutions" sound frighteningly suitable for surveillance operations. From their "what we do" statement [1]:

>We build software that allows organizations to make sense of massive amounts of disparate data. We solve the technical problems, so they can solve the human ones. Combating terrorism. Prosecuting crimes. Fighting fraud. Eliminating waste.

They evidently do enough business with the government to warrant an office in McLean, VA. Incidentally, McLean is also home to the CIA Headquarters and the office of the Director of National Intelligence [2].

Palantir's seed funding included $2mm from In-Q-Tel, the CIA's investment arm. [3]

The company was part of a consortium called "Team Themis" along with HBGary and Berico. The team was approached by a law firm hired by the US Chamber of Commerce and BoA to attack WikiLeaks and WikiLeaks supporters. [4]

In 2011, Palantir hired Michael Leiter, former Director of US National Counter-terrorism Center. Leitner served under both the Bush and Obama administrations. [5]

The company is known to work directly with GOOG on security-related data mining projects [6]:

>Google Ideas task force, teaming with Palantir Technologies and Salesforce.com (CRM) to build the first data-sharing platform to identify global patterns on how the human-trafficking trade operates and how to better protect the victims.

>The Google announcement [of this partnership] came on the same day the White House called for more data-sharing among federal agencies to help disrupt these criminal human-trafficking networks.

Make of all this what you will.

[1] - http://www.palantir.com/what-we-do&#x2F;
[2] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McLean,_Virginia
[3] - http://wiki.echelon2.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel
[4] - http://wiki.echelon2.org/wiki/Team_Themis
[5] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Leiter
[6] - http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-04-10/google-turns...
When the government asks them for access to data, they provide it ONLY THROUGH LEGAL MEANS ON A CASE BY CASE BASIS.

That's what they mean by not providing direct access.

The government can't just waltz into their front doors and just ask for the data of all the users. Nor does the government have straight access to the servers or databases.

Hope you understand now.
>In reality, I could write in my neighbor's dog on the ballot, to demonstrate I am a politically engaged individual who is likely to vote for a human candidate if the candidates change their tune. That is the superior answer to the mythical doctor visit, as well.

Does anything you say have anything have to do with addressing the point that making a choice somehow magically correlates to the ability to hold an opinion? Because politics or your dog doesn't really have anything to do with it.

>I would further argue that refusing to be involved may have resulted in cancer in both the left nut and right nut.

Well for anybody that insists on flogging the cancer/politics analogy then this would be impossible, assuming you are a member of the US electorate, as a viable candidate from either party would never pick a running mate from the other side of the aisle (right nut cancer would be mutually exclusive of left nut cancer).
Frankly, I would argue that the 2,400 lives lost at Pearl Harbor pale in comparison to the total number of casualties that occurred during the war in the Pacific.

Pearl Harbor was the first act of that war, not a cause of the war. Whereas Osama bin Laden didn't have much capacity to do anything beyond 9/11 style attacks, the Japanese were intending to take control of the entire pacific. There is a huge difference there.
Chinese supercomputer destroys speed record and will get much faster
But there were some very courageous people who did openly dissent. My mother's uncle (John Caughlan) was first kicked out of his law firm and shortly thereafter the ACLU for standing up and saying that the Communist Party USA had Constitutional rights too and they should be defended (and defend them he did for which he earned a year in prison but did not lose his license to practice law and continued the fight pretty much up until his death).

There is an interesting interview with him at http://depts.washington.edu/labhist/cpproject/caughlan_inter...

It is worth noting that our strong protections of open dissent were specifically created by the court in response to very dramatic overreaches by the government.
Made me think of an App I wrote a while ago with the opposite objective, never touch the keyboard to launch an app. (SapiensApp.com).
Thanks for this. "Dropbox coming soon" indeed.
Whose to say they would pursue those charges? Why do they have to even disclose why they nabbed them? Under the PATRIOT act they can make anyone disappear without justification. Obviously if they're committing treason they could figure out any number of ways to make it happen.
Wait...how is it "obvious" that "they have direct access to a system which provides real-time data"...? Isn't that direct access what Google and Facebook are said to have explicitly denied?

The NYT doesn't seem to be talking about PRISM here. It seems to be talking about FISA. From the WaPo and Guardian's reports, I thought that PRISM was concocted as a response to what the NSA saw as "shortcomings" in FISA?
I fooled around and fell in love
What debate is "surrounding rape" exactly? Are you referring to a debate as to whether rape is ethically permissible or not? If so, where do you hang out?
I not really an expert in this at all, but we were not discussing ciphers, but key exchange methods.

I open google.com in Chrome, click on lockpad icon, go to the second tab, and it says:
Key exchange method: ECDHE_ECDSA

Some googling turns up that:
"ECDHE-ECDSA provide perfect forward secrecy"
http://nmav.gnutls.org/2011/12/price-to-pay-for-perfect-forw...
Of course, there is no moral equivalence between US spies and Soviet spies, since there is no moral equivalence between subjugation to the totalitarian soviet state (which soviet spies were fighting for) and the liberal democratic capitalism of what remained of the West.

Violence is a nasty thing. But violence in service of slavery is a far nastier thing than violence in defense of human rights and freedoms.
Welcome to the PATRIOT act. There's a reason people are pissed about it.
They are not comparable to Osama bin Ladin. bin Ladin cannot do more than add a tiny increment to the risk that Americans go through every day in life. The government, however, by monopolizing violence, can then use that violence to take away anything that makes life good.

A government that has lost accountability is far more dangerous than a terrorist organization. If you don't believe that, ask those who fled the Soviet Union, or who lived through Saddam's regime in Iraq.
dude, If someone at that level gets jailed, it wouldn't be treason. It'd be insider trading, or perhaps something less palatable.
I couldn't get through the first paragraph without getting angry about the writing style. closebox