skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have no issue with information being accessible under the right legal framework. Court orders, warrants, sure, go nuts. But the whole idea behind that framework is "you have to actually have a valid reason for getting this data", as opposed to "you can look at whatever you want and make up your mind about why you want it after the fact".

I think where this is sticking for me is the whole "consent" issue. I have a very difficult time believing that all the accused companies have voluntarily consented - without coercion - to NSA taps. If that's the case, then welp, all bets are off. I don't think that's the case, though - if it has happened, it is almost certainly under some sort of coercion, at which point it's very difficult to argue that this data is being given with free consent, and we're back to it effectively being seized via "consent" given under duress (which any court would strike down as not being consent at all!)

Regarding the language itself, the 4th says you have the right to be secure in your papers (personal data!) and effects (personal property) against search and seizure, not just the sanctity of your home and person. I would like to know how that is reconciled with modern legal interpretations - that seems like a big gaping hole to be filled.

Maybe I'm just naive and want to believe that things are better than they are. Maybe Google et al have just rolled over and happily handed over data. I really have a hard time believing that's the case. In either case, though, we have allegations of our government conducting wide-scale spying on its own citizens, by means of the seizure of those citizens' supposedly-private communications. Given a country that is supposed to uphold the values of liberty and individual freedom, that is extraordinarily distressing.
Bitcoin isn't anonymous, and if the NSA has infiltrated the various Bitcoin whitewashers (er, "exchanges") it also has your incoming transaction history, to boot.
Keep on thinking that as we slide towards civil war, our side is not igorning the truth as acknowledged by various heads of the IRS and Obama; if they say something wrong was done, perhaps there was?

To put this in perspective, here are two other 501(c)(4) "social welfare" organizations: the NRA's lobbying arm, the Institute for Legislative Action, founded in the late '70s, and Organizing for Action, what Obama's campaign Organizing for America became. And ironically the latter's first effort was post-Newtown gun control.

Besides ignoring all the other abuses, not all from the IRS, it sounds like you're confounding tax exempt with non-profit. E.g. donors to the political efforts of 501(c)(4) do not get to donate tax free. The organizations are allowed to be non-profits, they aren't established to make a monetary profit.

Well, they were, this abuse hasn't stopped, you know, despite all the apologies from the IRS for "poor customer service".
Here's a summary:

A girl in a high school football-obsessed small town went to a party and was assaulted by football players who later bragged about it on Twitter.

A blogger saw the posts (later deleted) and took screenshots. She tried to get justice for the victim by re-posting these on her blog. For this she was hounded relentlessly in the town and a defamation suit was brought against her.

The players bragged that the coach knew about the accusations and would make them go away.

Two of the football players were later given 1 and 2 year sentences in juvenile detention, largely due to the efforts by people who got involved in bringing this case to a wider audience.

As for the hacker...

I've read the linked article, another article, the accused's webpage, and an article by the blogger who stood up for the rape victim, and I still can't figure out exactly what role, if any, this guy had in this mess.
Obligatory XKCD: http://xkcd.com/538&#x2F;
Reads every much like google's statement. Heh, you'd think they had agreed it before hand.
Does anyone care, outside of tech circles? Most people don't seem to care, even though they understand what's happening
Except they weren't originally developed to be used by literal eyes of evil. They were the skype of the time, pretty much.
Connect from the parking lot.
Felt the same way reading it.
Computer-based face recognition

...has never been shown to work on the scale needed to secure access to commercial air travel.
I believe 0x80 is 0b1000000
Maybe make it walkie-talkie style, like those old Nextel phones?
Tradingview Bitcoin charts
If I were covering this story my first move would be to figure out who wrote the boilerplate version of the press release being used by all these tech companies.
I had to chuckle at Mr Page using the "royal we":

"As Google’s CEO and Chief Legal Officer, we wanted you to have the facts."
The the largest selection of startup jobs in Europe
The digitizers in the current iPad models are not high-resolution enough to permit anything more than rudimentary drawings or large scribbles of text. Do not expect Tablet PC/OneNote-like performance at all.

That said, I like the Bamboo Stylus and that one seemed to be the best-regarded when I purchased it.
While that certainly means such stories aren't as serious as they sound, it's still indicative of a pretty messed up sentencing system. Thank you for the link.
It's so creepy how Zuckerberg and Page, as well as every other CEO's responses are worded exactly the same. The same goes for Apple too. It's entirely not believable that everyone's answers would sound so similar.
I apologize for bothering you with this but I was nerding out on DNS recently and I have learned just enough to get very confused. It seems that you (the royal you) are benefiting from glueless out of bailiwick entries?

Should I not have such a strict belief that thou shall not have glueless out of bailiwick entries?

I appreciate you indulging my curiosity/confusion.
The example was using C, not Go.
> Page is clearly and unambiguously denying that Google supplies any information to the government on a millions-of-users scale.

Kind of like Mariano Rajoy insisted that Spain didn't need a bailout?
> Well, I won't read that version, I'll only read the "real" one.

You won't know which is which unless you already know enough to not need to look it up in a general reference such as Wikipedia. That's the point.
I just don't get it. Hacker news, just days ago had a posting: "Police admit they're 'stumped' by mystery car thefts", and the collective response was something along the lines of "silly police don't know how to use google."

And now, the "hackers" are in disbelief that the US government is actually reading their emails and listening to their phone calls. NSS!

We got what we wanted here, folks. Information is free - free to be created, free to be read, and free to be copied, stored, decrypted and analyzed by anyone with the means and drive to do so.

I don't know who said it, but "Don't put anything online you wouldn't want to appear above the fold of the Wall Stree Journal."
I am sure that it's just a consequence of lawyers using their distinct brand of wording that leads to every single one of these denials from various CEO's and PR teams looking almost verbatim, but I do have to admit, the similarity in wording is disconcerting.
The NSA have hooks in various data centers and internet backbones. They collect the intel indirectly giving the companies plausible deniability.
Maybe the government conspiracy is a government conspiracy!
It will be extremely interesting to see the government's reaction to all this top secret information being leaked. I'm sure orders are being yelled into telephones right about now.
Seems to be a strange thing though in our justice system- that seemingly more minor crimes have greater maximum sentences (and sometimes mandatory minimums) than more violent/harmful crimes.

I know it isn't just something we can 'fix' easily, but it does seem to be a bug in the system essentially.
Every single official corporate response in this story so far was formulated using the exact same terms, and did not constitute an actual, categorical denial of the claims. We have not giving "direct access". We are providing the government with our data through "legal channels".
The point is, they don't need to provide anything direct... the problem is the gov monitors the pipes and sees all, period. The problem is at the telcos, fundamentally. Even then it's not the telco's fault since they were forced and given immunity. The problem is our elected government, plain and simple. We've known about this since 2007. Happy to see it finally discussed in the mainstream.
Open source project sounds more likely, though you did say "startup". Startups don't seem to be rushing to build network infrastructure (apart from their own).

Still , I struggle to imagine how such a network might work. Things like Kademlia seem inefficient and inflexible for general use.

My ISP has the technology and infrastructure in place to make sure that when I connect to 184.172.10.74 it actually goes to the correct place. They seem ideally suited for this because they have the physical wires.

How could I be sure I was talking to the right endpoint on an overlay network? PKI?

Do I have to choose an overlay provider to route my packets around?
These comments read just like the ones on the Larry Page thread!

It's almost like someone is telling HN readers what to say...
The original Mother Jones story is here:
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/06/kyanonymous-fbi-...

At first, he thought the FBI agent at the door was with FedEx. "As I open the door to greet the driver, approximately 12 FBI SWAT team agents jumped out of the truck, screaming for me to 'Get the fuck down!' with M-16 assault rifles and full riot gear, armed, safety off, pointed directly at my head," Lostutter wrote today on his blog. "I was handcuffed and detained outside while they cleared my house.
It's definitely an interesting exercise to find out, to the best of our knowledge, how we will have evolved, appearance-wise. However, predicting anything that far out is rather moot. For all we know, humans may give up being constrained in a biological body, and move to a different form of reality. Or there may be an unexpected mass extinction event. Or our perception of what is beautiful may change drastically. Google glass and miniature cochlear implants will still be used 20,000 years in the future? Come on. This is like neanderthals saying the modern humans will have super big and long spears. I'm pretty sure by then, if we still have a brain in any form recognizable to us today, it'd probably have that capability built-in (assuming whatever value a google glass and cochlear implant provide would still be valued by people/society (if any) in the future...I said if any because the organization of humanity may change drastically in that time frame. No more nation-states, no more individuals, individual consciousness fluidly join and detach from others, big organizations form and crumble in nanoseconds for a fleeting purpose, who knows. Would there still be individuals even?)

Anyhow, I digressed. Still fun to speculate, I say.
Society is never powerless to outlaw something, even if they can't enforce it. It's not a right if it's illegal even if said law is unenforceable.
> Why is our first reaction to hamstring our intelligence agencies and deny them information other entities doubtless already have?

Because history, that's why. FISA -- in its original form, not the "War on Terror"-era "FISA Amendments Act" -- was a limitation on government surveillance power which criminalized all sorts of surveillance except in very narrow circumstances, that was adopted not because of theoretical concerns but because of widespread, notorious, abuse of the national security intelligence-gathering capabilities of the US government for political purposes by the executive branch of the United States government, particularly during the Nixon Administration.

These limitations were weakened through the FISA Amendments Act on the excuse that the limitations were "hamstringing" our intelligence agencies and jeopardizing our national security (after it became publicly clear that, in fact, the limitations were being widely ignored, and the current administration wanted legal cover for actions that it was already undertaking despite the law), and, hey, look what we see -- massive, unfocussed, broad-spectrum surveillance of exactly the type we were assured wouldn't happen if we loosened the reins a bit so that the executive branch had the tools it supposedly needed to focus on direct threats from terrorists without overly burdensome constraints.
Twitter may or may not be involved in this program or similar, but so far the documents released don't mention them. I wouldn't expect any sort of statement from them.
"Direct access 2 r servers: nope #prism #nsa"
Don't forget Tent (https://tent.io) which wasn't mentioned in the statement.
My thoughts exactly. And not just the content, but the vocabulary and the whole way the language is structured.
I suspect this is extremely hard to do well on Android because you need to know a lot about the physical size and shape of the device. However if they limited it to say the 100 most popular devices it sould reasonable.
We'll never truly know if instagram could've stuck around had it not been acquired.

Twitter is an indispensable communications medium that has more than 1 use case (read news, talk to friends, overthrow a government, etc). Thus ads makes sense (and I would even pay a low, yearly fee to keep it around).

Snapchat is interesting, but $100 million interesting?
This holds true when you are building a product where you'll potentially need money to scale but you know that though you are growing rapidly, your current infrastructure be enough for a while. There, you can raise money against the future.

But this is snapchat. Don't expect them to become another Facebook, don't expect them to become another twitter. Because they've already defined their use case, which is simple and straight forward so why $100m?
Spain builds submarine 70 tons too heavy by putting a decimal in the wrong place
It is eerie how similarly worded Zuckerberg and Page's denials are.
>Look outside your bubble; there are a lot of people that heartily approve of Guantanamo and would like to go farther down that route

There are a lot of people who think that ocean levels aren't rising or who deny evolution. Are we supposed to let the lie win just because a nontrivial number of people have been misled?

And the people in Congress know perfectly well what they're doing. It's not a coincidence that the set of Congressmen who most ardently refuse to close Guantanamo are the same Congressmen who take significant campaign contributions from defense contractors.
> But, why is the conversation technically yours?

Because the metadata is information that the phone company has to know in order to provide you the service and to bill you for it, and therefore cannot be information in which the parties to the conversation have an expectation of privacy.

The content of the conversation, OTOH, is not information that the company needs to have to provide and bill for the service, and therefore can still be information in which the participants have a legal expectation of privacy.
Twitter seems unlikely because most of the data produced by twitter is public anyways. Only private communication is DM.
And Obama came out to defend the program without saying that the companies were not involved (he did not say they were involved either) His press conference: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=iS6MO...
> So, you'd feel more comfortable if the company threw in some rhetoric about morals and freedom that are, as assertions, impossible to verify, but would make people feel more warm and fuzzy?

But when their impossible-to-verify assertion is that they've done nothing wrong, you'll accept that just fine?
<quote>Obama: number one, to keep the American people safe; and number two, to uphold the Constitution.</quote>

isn't that wrong order or priorities exactly what the constitution should protect us from?
Larry Page links to a Google "transparency report" in his blog post which gives a rough figure:

http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/userdatarequests/US
It's the Lisp Problem: If you call your new language by the same name as an existing one, even if you add qualifiers (such as Common Lisp or similar), people will think it's exactly the same and that no progress has been made.

OTOH, if you make a minor change, but give the result a whole new name (Java vs C++, C# vs Java), people will think the result is meaningfully different and take it as a sign of major progress.
Look at the two writeups (Zuckerberg's and Page's) side by side. Each has 4 paragraphs. Each of the pairs of paragraphs addresses the same thing.

1st paragraph: we wanted to respond to these claims. 2nd paragraph: never heard of PRISM, don't give direct access. 3rd paragraph: each request goes through legal channels. 4th paragraph: encourage governments to be more transparent.

Terrifying.

EDIT: It gets worse. Here's Apple: "We have never heard of PRISM. We do not provide any government agency with direct access to our servers, and any government agency requesting customer data must get a court order."

Here's Paltalk: "We have not heard of PRISM. Paltalk exercises extreme care to protect and secure users’ data, only responding to court orders as required to by law. Paltalk does not provide any government agency with direct access to its servers.”

Here's AOL: "We do not have any knowledge of the PRISM program. We do not disclose user information to government agencies without a court order, subpoena or formal legal process, nor do we provide any government agency with access to our servers."

And here's Yahoo: "We do not provide the government with direct access to our servers, systems, or network."

Microsoft refused to issue a direct denial of involvement in PRISM.
Isn't all Twitter data public? They don't need to deny anything
"Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard. Just ask. I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS." Asked how, he responds: "People just submitted it. I don't know why. They 'trust me.' Dumb fucks."

http://www.newser.com/story/88716/zuckerberg-once-mocked-dum...
Maybe they all share the same lawyer /s
I can understand this approach to a drug baron or armed fugitive, but to a hacker? Really 'merica? Way to go killing that fly with a sledge hammer!
OK, this sounds pedantic, but "Convicted for Longer"* is not accurate...you're not convicted for a period of time, you're convicted and then sentenced to a period of jail time, or probation.

And of course, as we all know from the Aaron Swartz coverage, "could serve for as long as..." is different than "actually serve a sentence of [xy] ears".

But the most relevant quibble is this: a father who beats these rapists with his fists would also face a longer sentence than these accused rapists (who, according to the OP, faced 1-2 years)...because these convicted offenders were juveniles.

And as much as we want to celebrate extra-judicial vengenance upon convicts, juvenile or not, I think we should be aware that there may be unpleasant consequences when our justice/political system looks the other way upon unlawful actions in which "the ends justified the means".

...because, I mean, isn't that at the core of the NSA controversy that is currently raging in the the other 20 HN threads?

* edit: the original title for this submission was "Hacker...Could Be Convicted for Longer..."
> to give the US or any other government direct access to our servers

"to give the US, or any other government, or any third party intermediary, direct or indirect access to our servers or our users' data"

I mean come on, I've never taken a single lesson in legal or PR and even I can see the big huge holes. They insist on direct access, they insist on servers rather than data and they insist on governments.

And that's not even taking into account the fact that most of those sentences are the same copy pasted text that we saw in Larry Page's message. If you want to make it sound like a personal message from the founder, maybe don't speak like a drone ...
indirect marketing. press coverage. easier to recruit people based on equity compensation (liquid market for shares). 'legitimacy' in the eyes of some potential customers. connected into investment banking world for future transactions (debt issue, equity issue, M&A, etc).
Freemium Distaste
1. It would be nice if these statements defined "direct access to our servers". It's safe to guess that they are using the narrowest definition possible, meaning that a NSA employee can walk into the building that Facebook's servers are hosted in and log in to any server and run arbitrary commands. This is likely not what a layman's use of "direct access" would mean. The issue is whether or not the government can access whatever user data they wish provided the correct clearance or assertions.

2. "We hadn't even heard of PRISM before yesterday."

Somehow I doubt that the National Security Agency is in the habit of telling companies that they work with the names they use for projects internally.

3. "we review each request carefully to make sure they always follow the correct processes and all applicable laws, and then only provide the information if is required by law. We will continue fighting aggressively to keep your information safe and secure."

This doesn't preclude the idea that the government accesses more Facebook user data than the general public might realize under current law. Facebook can provide large volumes of info as the PRISM slides suggest if it is indeed lawful, and this statement would not be a lie. It hinges on what exactly is "required by law", or more precisely, what is allowed under the current interpretation of the law.
I agree, the funny thing is Obama already admitted the programs existence (WSJ article).
I agree, the wording "direct access" is indeed very suspicious, and I tend to believe Arrington might be into something: http://uncrunched.com/2013/06/06/triangulating-on-truth-the-...;

I re-read the Larry's response carefully, and he did NOT refute the claim, that they are giving data to some 3rd party (who then forwards it to the government). He just says that government do not have direct access to it. But the issue that someone else can have the access is avoided, and it is exactly the same as the Zuck's response.
> I think where this is sticking for me is the whole "consent" issue. I have a very difficult time believing that all the accused companies have voluntarily consented - without coercion - to NSA taps.

Duress is not coextensive with coercion. Consent can be valid even if it involves leverage (e.g. no government contracts for you unless you consent).

> Regarding the language itself, the 4th says you have the right to be secure in your papers (personal data!) and effects (personal property) against search and seizure, not just the sanctity of your home and person.

4th amendment interpretation does make the logical analog between "papers" and "files" or "data." But information that you've given over to others (e.g. files stored in your Drop Box) or information that was not even generated by you (e.g. server logs, call data records) is not your "personal data" whether it's ink on papyrus or bits.

What's tripping you up is the illusion of "network transparency." You might think of your gdrive as the same as your hard drive, but of course it's not. The difference between the two is nothing less than keeping information about your finances in your desk (where the 4th amendment protects it), and keeping that information in your accountant's office (where the 4th amendment does not protect it).
Here is the HN discussion about the BBC link

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4150495