skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Apparently, they do. FISA spying has been found unconstitutional since 2011, but they are keeping it a secret:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/06/government-says-secret...

This is happening in the "beacon of democracy" of the world.
As best as I can tell Greenwald was claiming that the NSA managed to backdoor most major Internet PIM service providers for the unbelievably low cost of $20 million.

You couldn't really do that for $20 million just on labor cost alone, so it was clear there was more to the story, it was just a question of what.

To be clear the story is important enough that I don't think it should be required to overstate or mislead either. Transparency of data collection and intelligence services is a conversation that America should at least have, whether it's backdoors or not.
The Government Is Not Us
You can disable/lower routing. There is also bandwidth limiting. I don't recommend disabling the routing entirely, however.
"The more affordable Gen III, available in three years, will have a less expensive battery, but at the cost of a shorter per-charge range."

[citation needed]
"small systems"; I get that it can be hell-like on very small systems but the Raspberry Pi works great.

There's a thread on zzz.i2p about it.
Interesting that Instagram is still (at least partially) on EC2 rather than in Facebook's datacenters.
NSA tech stack for Boundless Informant
It's not really a "novel interpretation" of direct access if all access to a company's servers have to go through the company. That's a subpoena-on-steroids and not much more, and this additional slide which the Guardian was so kind as to decide to provide to the masses doesn't really dispute that interpretation.
From Anatomy of the State - What the State Is Not

http://mises.org/easaran/chap3.asp
That this doublespeak surprises anyone shows the tragedy of the small size of Glenn Greenwald's readership. He has been writing on Obama's abuses and misdirection since Obama admin has been in power; and before that, he's written about Bush's (published three books about Bush, in fact)
Well that the flip side of "innocent until proven guilty" is that merely having an open case is not enough.
don't be so sure. The NSA is probably far, far ahead in mathematics.
> So the whistleblower law is just a "pretend-law"?

Not sure why you used the phrase 'pretend-law' in scare quotes, since the post you responded to said no such thing.

Either way, there isn't really such a thing as the whistleblower law (IANAL). Aside from the first amendment, the closest thing I could find was the Whistleblower Protection Act [1]. It's a young law by any standard (1989), so you'd be hard pressed to argue that we didn't have a functioning democracy in its absence.

Your central point is well received, but you rebutted a partial straw man.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whistleblower_Protection_Act
No. I'd vote Bradley Manning for president. This is just more reason.
The cost of VM RAM is bounded below by the cost of the physical RAM used to provide it, unless it's subsidized by costs elsewhere.
"Folks who buy $90,000 cars tend to replace them every few years, and the bid for a four-year-old Model S may prove disappointing if it's going to need an expensive new battery in a few more years."

Seems odd that there are three different models/pricing options in the model s but they only mention the $90k price (85 kWh)....smaller battery (65 kWh) = smaller cost, not sure why this is so difficult to understand.....the Nissan Leaf is a 24 kWh battery and it is under $30k now

Also the battery has an '8 years, unlimited miles' warranty, idk I could say a few years or I could say almost a decade.....poor framing of the basic facts

Despite Barron's scare tactics, there is new tech on the horizon for high energy density/low power density metal air batteries, but somehow that discussion got left out.
> the term "direct access", which we've seen is the antithesis of forthrightness.

This seems unfair. There was a specific accusation or suggestion of direct access, so it's not (or at least not necessarily) misdirection for Google and friends to specifically deny it. It certainly doesn't answer all questions about PRISM, but between the denial of direct access, and the denial of any Verizon-scale order which would amount to direct access in all but name, you get a pretty forthright statement limiting the possible extent of the NSA data-gathering.
No, if anything it supports the Google/FB interpretation.

From this slide it appears the distinction between the two types of data collection are between "indirect" on-the-wire intercepts and "direct" where the data's obtained from the company holding it. Given the context it could be referring to FISA obtained documents.
Check out http://www.layoutit.com&#x2F; or divshot.com
Stupid article. Within the first two paragraphs, they make a massive factual error, misstating the entry price of Tesla's car by $40,000. This error is repeated later in the article. Nowhere is it stated that the "Grand Canyon leap that Tesla must make", according to the article, of reducing the price, has already been made.

Don't count on mainstream US business magazines to be accurate about an electric car company.
> this is just an arms race

For encryption, that's not really true. If armor were like encryption then one inch of armor would be a billion times more resistant than half an inch.

The strength of encryption can be calculated to be on a cosmic scale infeasible to crack.
please support the project! More details about the robot can be found on TechCrunch: http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/06/the-rk-1-is-an-arduino-base...;

Or on RK-1's website: http://mymobilerobots.com/rk1
Remove the power to classify long term information from the executive branch and put it into the judicial. It is obvious that it is abusing it currently with classifying everything. If they have to compelling interest to classify something that can jump at least the standard for a warrant.
Better do that soon:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/06/new-york-annoy-poli...
Exactly the point I was thinking
On top of that, thanks to the citizens united ruling, there were a ton of 501(c)4 groups applying for status. It would make sense for the IRS to apply extra scrutiny to make sure that they groups weren't just fronts for corporations.

Further more, there were liberal groups caught up in the IRS's extra scrutiny as well.
How can we prove something guilty when we don't even know it exists?
'New York State Senate Wants To Make It A Felony To 'Annoy' A Police Officer' -- http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/06/new-york-annoy-poli...

Now it says there must be physical contact, but the cop would probably just bump into you to get the charge. Look at what happened to Adam Kokesh during the Philadelphia Smoke Down Prohibition event. They claimed Adam assaulted the officer when he clearly just bumped into him and was trying to gain his balance.

These people take serious things like assault and water the definitions down to suit their corrupt MO.

EDIT: Tangential, but Kokesh was just arrested again during Smoke Down Prohibition D.C.
This makes me wonder how we have the balls to go into other countries and yell about all their problems with surveillance & censorship when we do it more & arguably, better than all of them combined.
"The law enforcement and security officials, who were not authorized to speak publicly, said the agencies that normally conduct such investigations, including the FBI and Justice Department, were expecting a probe into the leaks to a British and an American newspaper."

So basically the fact the NSA leaker was going to be prosecuted was leaked, how can the the security officials who leaked this piece of information not see the irony ?
Makes the Huawei boycott feel a bit... special, too, don't you think?
Absolutely true in 1970, but probably much less true now (they probably ARE experts in traffic analysis, though, since ~no one but intel agencies cares about that yet). Academia and commerce tend to surpass the government in every OTHER area where they participate, it's just that no one cared pre-70s. I don't think they're using their huge budget efficiently, just like every other government/military program. The bulk of their budget and effort is going to collection, mainly satellites, physical installations, staffing for those, etc.

Judging by what I've seen of USG security, their COMSEC side (defense) is actually comparatively weaker than best practices in most of the high-end civilian world. Their only saving grace is a focus on physical separation and hardware implementations; otherwise they'd be totally pwned, and they seem to be moving "into the cloud" which will lose their their existing advantages.

And, if they had a magic way to factor or whatever, it would be so highly classified (like Enigma break in WW2)that they could never use it on anything which wasn't totally justifiable through other plausible means, and of such incredible value (like "killing OBL" or higher), that I can act as if they can't factor.
"The question for users is there not whether the can evade surveillance etc. or not but which government they prefer to directly monitor them"

Except that users can evade government surveillance. Encrypt your email. Use anonymous remailers. Send broadcast messages to Usenet. When you need to manage more than two people, there are things like attribute based encryption that allow you to create access policies that are enforced cryptographically. Etc., etc., etc.

The real issue is that people are far too apathetic to accept the momentary inconvenience imposed by such cryptosystems.
Show HN: Decentralized Operations - Hierarchical trust based darknet
So basically, trying to engage in a debate about such gives something (like the president suggests), that shouldn't have legs to stand on constitutional grounds, is just more fuel for the machine? Good to know.
Jumping on the darknet post train. I wrote this a number of years ago. Never really found a niche. It's a YC08 reject, though to be fair I was totally unprepared for the interview.
For those who desire karma from ideally-timed submissions, my recommendation for the next posting regarding the NSA is the Wikipedia link for NSA's "Clipper Chip".

After that we can post the link about IBM's DES where the NSA made one minor itty-bitty little tweak that made the cipher resistant against differential cryptanalysis (IIRC) years before other people know the technique even existed.

Suggestions for the link after that?
Greenwald replies to a Twitter user asking "when do we see the full redacted deck?"
"@markskogan @nycsouthpaw You won't - it contains very specific technical NSA means for collection - we'd probably be prosecuted if we did." - https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/343454484917280770

Everyone should be keeping their eye on @ggreenwald's twitter, reveals much about the debate and what's going on with him. He gives bits and pieces of background info..
The long-term success of Tesla seems to turn mostly on the improvement pace of batteries, so hanging up because of a debate on that subject seems a bit unfair.

A 10k-12k$ battery with current ranges would be a miracle.
One interesting thing about Euroscepsis is, to my unscientific observations, that it is pretty well represented in all layers of society. There's plenty anti-EU people of all levels of educations, family backgrounds and vocations. Their reasons wildly vary, though, and those might coincide more with particular groups.

This is not to say that all these people also vote for the populist anti-EU parties, which typically have a broader populist agenda (e.g. EU bad and muslims bad)

Nevertheless, this makes it obvious that there's also plenty of anti-EU folk on HN, simply because there's plenty Europeans here. Especially in a thread with the word 'Europe' in the title, I'm not surprised.
Ripple is a scam
More than just having bachelor's degree, Musk dropped out of a PhD program in Applied Physics and Materials Science at Stanford to start his first company.
Be careful with criticizing an obviously smart person like this based on a side comment you didn't had a chance to ask her to elaborate upon. I think with Python she meant things like Python not having real private variables or methods and not having real explicit interfaces, which I guess makes it pretty correct to say it doesn't have data abstraction.
Not getting a wage equal to your productivity at the margin may be considered exploitation in several schools of microeconomics. If an employee provides value X and receives wages X-10, the amount of exploitation is 10.

However, depending on who you talk to, workers are not 'exploited' in a loose sense because they can move to another organization that pays the prevailing wage. But the fact remains that the prevailing wage may be below the worker's contribution to organizational productivity at the margin. Thus, my econ professor still taught that exploitation, in a formal sense, occurs whenever wage(worker) < marginal_productivity(worker).
Social media forces companies to act more human
LOL! That document shows they use GWT to build their internal spook apps. (Disclosure: I work on GWT) I wonder if they review all patches that open source people make to the compiler :)
We knew PRISM existed though. It's even mentioned in job postings, and we already knew about FISA and Section 702 as well.

We just didn't know we cared.
I think it bears repeating again, as we see yet another major disclosure about NSA programs throughout the world: the NSA has been hacked by someone who is deliberately leaking these documents in some super-Risk game of international espionage. Given that Obama and the President of China are meeting this weekend, my money is on China being the ultimate culprit.
He wonders why this is covert when all smart terrorists know it already.

I'll play Devil's advocate and answer that. To the extent that the USA publicizes what it does, people in other countries around the world will get concerned and develop alternatives that are not subject to US jurisdiction. Alternatives developed for legitimate reasons by non-criminals then provide options for terrorists to use that are hard for US authorities to monitor.

Let me give a specific example. Around the world, terrorists are forced to use sites like Facebook to promote their views because that is where they will find the people that they want to convince. They take precautions, but they are still forced to use the tool, and it is still easy for them to slip up and get caught.

If, however, distrust of the USA had pushed the people that they want to convince to social networks based outside of the USA, then the exact same terrorists could use those networks in the exact same ways and it would be much harder for the US to capitalize on those inevitable small mistakes.
What really scares me about all this FISA and PRISM stuff is that they treat foreigners as essentially non-persons.

Something that struck me a while ago is that while most of the modern world talks about protecting "human rights", the ruling classes in the US always seem to talk about protecting things like "Constitutional rights" or "citizens' rights". I'm not sure what that says about their underlying attitude, but it can't be good.

The trouble is, a lot of places have at least tendencies in the same direction, it's just hard to see them if you're a native and get to go in the "EU citizen" queue at customs or whatever it might be, so you don't see how others visiting your country are treated even from the moment they arrive. And since typically those outsiders have no direct influence on policy in places they visit, there is no natural political incentive for each country's government to treat them as much more than a source of revenue for the tourism/education/commercial sector.

With the rise in modern times of ubiquitous international communications networks and relatively quick and easy physical travel between countries, unfortunately this seems to be a race to the bottom, with a lower bound determined only by the point at which people actually stop visiting/communicating with your country, which as a practical matter is going to be difficult for many people to do.
Jacob Appelbaum on Dystopian Securitization
I've seen mention of people adding a bare '#' hash to URLs to avoid duplicate link detection. No idea if that can be handled well in software.

pg could attempt to hash the head or meta tags from the remote url (though that would require making a request for every submission), and pay closer scrutiny to urls with common domains and paths. Just adding cruft to a url would seem to be something you'd be able to detect easily.

Of course I say this having no clue how difficult that would be to do in Arc. To say nothing of having to follow redirects, etc...
You've get some editing errors that make your comment hard to parse.
I think the point is that data abstraction in python is just a suggestion. If you follow convention, things can be abstracted to an extent. But there is nothing that enforces these abstractions on a user; you are not bound to operate only within a constrained context. Also, certain types of abstractions aren't possible in python because of the lack of interfaces.
Guide to using free software to take back some of your privacy today
Quite stringent and largely unenforced.
"hacked"? It could easily be someone(s) with legitimate access to these documents, couldn't it? International espionage in what way? The leaker(s) could have just sold this information to foreign governments, but they went to Greenwald, a civil liberties advocate and writer working for an American sub-outlet of a British news org.
The <title> appears to be double-encoded.
This seems to be already damaging US European relations in a way little has for a long time. Seems just the tip of the iceberg.
China Backs US Startup Coinbase And US Falls Behind In Virtual Currencies
What you don't know about the cloud could kill you
Seems like cheap high performance batteries will make or break Tesla. Musk is underwriting the resale value of the model S and planning a move towards the volume market. Both depend on a cheap battery.

I am certainly no expert on batteries, but I'd bet that Musk is correct. Now that we are seeing EVs selling 10k/year it makes sense that economies of scale would start reducing costs. Additionally the smartphone/tablet industries are also driving battery production.
About 75 groups were specifically targeted for having words like "Tea Party" or "Patriot" in their names, and none had their tax-exempt status revoked.
Facebook.com broken for IPv6 users
Ask HN:  Shouldn't 4 spaces be the standard instead of 2 in Coffeescript?
Wouldn't it make more sense to have 4 spaces as the standard since the most popular significant whitespace language, Python, uses 4 spaces? Four spaces just makes the code easier to read when whitespace matters. I know there are people that use 4 spaces in Coffeescript but most code I look over is 2 spaces. Just curious what everyone else thinks.
Government Says Secret Court Opinion on Law Underlying PRISM Must Stay Secret
I am in awe of your ability to stay informed on multiple fields - economics to compilers to lisp.
Alright, I'll grant that it may not be a hack. My point is the quality of the leaks and the timing is too good for it not to have some more serious motivation than what appeared to me to be another instance of the NSA 'Trailblazer/ThinThread', etc ongoing whistle-blowing.
Thank you. It is only on the second page in the article do they obliquely clarify where the $90,000 figure comes from. The article was filled with snark, such as "ELON MUSK IS NOT A GUY ...." after he hung up on them. Pretty sad.
What are those _G, unbound gensyms?
> So it's hard to really say one is any better than the other.

Smart people look at both and try and learn, rather than getting on a high horse about "better", when "better" is awfully difficult to define anyway.

> Berlusconi? Seriously? Twice?

Sadly, no: three times, the first being in 1994.
Also, is it such a crazy idea that Facebook, Google, etc. would get together and come up with their own talking points? That was my first reaction on seeing the similar statements -- that they're acting with a common purpose and agenda, but one that's their own, not the governments.
Checklist: All the reasons Yahoo is going to acquire Foursquare
What about the part where the NSA dropped the key size of DES from 128 to 54 so that it would not be resistant to brute force attacks.

I vote the next link should be the rumors of a backdoor in OpenBSD's IPSEC. http://bsd.slashdot.org/story/10/12/15/004235/fbi-alleged-to...
Dear Internet,

America has become a very strange place. At the same time our military was "bringing freedom to the Iraqi peoples", our legislature and executive conspired to remove or automate much judicial review of spying. In effect American citizens lost another type of liberty.

We seem to be better at protecting our access to riffles.
Most of the liberties created by America's founding fathers (women were not allowed to vote) were designed to thwart the power of a monarchy and the power of the Roman-Catholic church. Many of these founding fathers were members of a fraternity called the Free Masons and read authors like John Locke. My point is they were a fairly homogeneous group of Englishmen.

Since then America has expanded civil rights explicit in the Constitution to include people of all races and genders.
But the Industrial age has been a constant force of erosion of our liberties. Our elections are not publicly funded. This means there is a huge advantage to material wealth and the wealthy have steered Congress to benefit themselves.

The bright shinning star of hope for The Land of The Free is our government is not systemically corrupt, at least not in the traditional meaning of corrupt.

I think this is a good discussion by Prof Lessig, "Republic Lost":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxCo2bE9Gtk
They kind of have a solution for that http://threema.ch/validation
Batteries improve at about 8% per year. Otherwise cell phones would still be the size of bricks and very expensive, like they were in the 80s.

http://seriouslackofdirection.blogspot.com/2013/06/barrons-r...
It looks like they do as much spying on Germany as they do on China and US itself. Interesting. I wonder what Germans and the German MEP's will have to say about this in the EU Parliament.
The nice thing about donating to an org with a small budget (unlike, say, a presidential campaign or your alma mater) is that you feel your contribution makes a real difference to them.

For example, for a large-but-imaginable donation of ~$2500 you can fund their entire operation for an hour — and that's assuming 2000 business hours in a year (the cost per hour is a lot less if you amortize over evenings and weekends :)).
NSA Honeypot
Are you saying they should investigate Congress instead?

(I noticed that nobody has specified who the "they" is. In a democracy, maybe the "they" is supposed to be "us"?)
Show HN: library for parsing Twitter feed, generating variables, doing research
I've added binary variable support to twitter_to_csv (https://github.com/cantino/twitter_to_csv) and wanted to show you guys in case others will find it useful.

This library dumps tweets to CSV, rolls up retweets, does sentiment analysis, generates composite binary variables, and more. It is currently being used for ongoing epidemiological research at UCSF.
These aren't the PRISMs you're looking for
What's a good theory as to why these ones haven't taken off?

Bittorrent got there first.
On the 14th of September 2007, Denmark initiated our Anti-Terroism Surveillance act, wherein ALL phonecalls, texts & internet traffic is saved for at least 2 years.

Welcome to Denmark.
The process of classifying material is uncontroversial because in general parlance, we assume that material is specific intelligence of people, place, and times.

The extension of that definition to include classified courts with classified rulings used as the legal basis for programs like this... is not the generally accepted one.
I note also that there are many, many more stupid terrorists than smart terrorists. Likewise criminals.