skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
someone who ... endangered national security

I haven't seen anybody make this claim and provide any reasoning or evidence to back it up.

On the contrary, if you were planning terrorist activities, you'd probably assume that the US government already had access to any of these services and instead use secure, encrypted alternatives. There's probably nothing about your behaviors that would change as a result of the existence of this program being revealed.
I'm also quite curious about this. The article doesn't even seem to acknowledge the fact that Nadler disclosed supposedly classified information. The only thing I can surmise is that a "classified briefing" may contain unclassified information:

Rep. Nadler's disclosure that NSA analysts can listen to calls without
court orders came during a House Judiciary hearing on Thursday that included
FBI director Robert Mueller as a witness.

Mueller initially sought to downplay concerns about NSA surveillance by
claiming that, to listen to a phone call, the government would need to seek "a
special, a particularized order from the FISA court directed at that particular
phone of that particular individual."

Is information about that procedure "classified in any way?" Nadler asked.

"I don't think so," Mueller replied.

"Then I can say the following," Nadler said. "We heard precisely the
opposite at the briefing the other day. We heard precisely that you could get
the specific information from that telephone simply based on an analyst
deciding that...In other words, what you just said is incorrect. So there's a
conflict."
Training a graduate software engineer
Aaaaand BINGO!

http://www.itwire.com/it-policy-news/govenrment-tech-policy/...
No, that isn't the logical conclusion at all.

The logical conclusion is that we need to cut the military in half expenditure wise (saving $340+ billion per year instantly, and cutting our budget deficit in half instantly, while still leaving a massive budget for the military). We need to close 9 out of 10 military bases around the world, perhaps more. End Homeland Security and the TSA. Strictly enforce privacy laws, including the 4th amendment, such that anybody in the government that violates them does hard prison time. Cut the espionage budget ($80+ billion) substantially, including all of the budget allocated to illegal domestic spying. Pass new restrictions on the ability of the executive branch to wage undeclared war (ie without congressional approval), both in the style of what we're doing now in Syria and the more traditional war in Iraq. We should also simplify the tax code, simultaneously wiping out a lot of tax fraud by ending 99% of all loopholes and deductions, and slashing the IRS in half, saving tens of billions per year in tax compliance costs.

We should also, obviously, end the failed war on drugs, and end the mass prison system. The policy of holding in prison millions of political prisoners should be immediately stopped, bringing the extremely violent 'war on drugs' assault on liberty by the government from 1980 until now, to an end. This war of power and greed, costs hundreds of billions of dollars per year in government expenditures, lost lives, lost productivity, prison costs, and the destroyed futures of those held captive as political prisoners (many to be enslaved for labor in corporate prisoners). Not to mention the tens of thousands of lives it ends around the world every year. We currently spend over $100 billion just to keep 2.2 million people in prison.

Your conclusion at the end presents a false choice. Simple black and white example: if you don't like violent gestapo politics, you might as well give up on all organized society (you can actually insert any government action, which proves your position to be filled with holes). The parent never said "no cent should be spent on something I don't like."
I hate this line of thinking. Nobody is watching you. Nobody is monitoring you. Even with PRISM, it's a massive amount of data, and unless you are on some watch list, nobody gives two shits about you specifically.
Keep in mind that US elections are generally between 2 candidates acceptable to the existing power structure, with a sideshow of more novel/progressive/interesting candidates who can't win because it's set up to be almost structurally impossible for them to.
You keep confidently asserting that, but many of the exact same compartmentalization and security procedures which protect the private keymatter also make a secret private key disclosure easier to keep hidden.

How would we know otherwise?

As you note, that "would be a more outrageous and damning discovery" - so there's more incentive to keep it closely held. It would help the NSA do what it feels it must, simply by using its other network taps. And, it would help minimize the risk of discovery without involving extra employees and ongoing connections, all while retaining the ability for Page/Drummond/etc to deny involvement.

Those add up to making a key compromise more attractive for NSA and Google than the alternatives.
If it's true, 'not good' is a very understated way of putting it. On the other hand, if there's anything this whole clusterfuck has reiterated is that it's best to be wary of uncorroborated, single-source statements. So far, the only source for this appears to be Congressman Jerrold Nadler.
Nadler is a U.S. Congressman, Snowden is an IT grunt?
I don't have to build a straw man. I'd just say people should read your comment, work out its narrative in their heads, and ask which is more likely: that PRISM is an elaborate scheme by which NSA gained illicit access to Google's servers, or that it is what other reporters have now reported that it is: a unified collection system for documents manually provided by Internet companies in response to FISA directives.

People that think the "manual" part in that last sentence doesn't matter should read the court order in the Yahoo case the NYT reported, where Yahoo went several rounds with NSA and the FISC to try to fight a specific FISA directive.

Note that Google, Facebook, and Yahoo have all taken pains to point out that they've pushed back on FISA directives. Which is something you can't do if the system isn't manual.
One thing I always wanted to do, is mine all the data I could, and produce a corruption index for each politician, it would kind of be a Facebook for bills, Bills would be friends with lobbyists through politicians, and you could try and rank each bill by who bought it.
For reasons which should be glaringly obvious, you're not going to convince anyone on HN that a view is the right one simply because drama-hungry mass media has decided it is.
Because he's a lawyer cross-examining a witness.

Video: http://www.c-spanvideo.org/clip/4456141

From TFA:
Mueller initially sought to downplay concerns about NSA surveillance by claiming that, to listen to a phone call, the government would need to seek "a special, a particularized order from the FISA court directed at that particular phone of that particular individual."
Is information about that procedure "classified in any way?" Nadler asked.
"I don't think so," Mueller replied.
"Then I can say the following," Nadler said. "We heard precisely the opposite at the briefing the other day. We heard precisely that you could get the specific information from that telephone simply based on an analyst deciding that...In other words, what you just said is incorrect. So there's a conflict."
“The National Security Agency does not listen to Americans’ phone calls and it is not reading Americans’ emails. None of these programs allow that,” -Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., chair of the House Intelligence Committee.

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2013/06/intelligence-co...
First, most SMTP travels without encryption.

Second, it's unfathomable to me to imagine the NSA isn't doing their damnedest to obtain all private keys. I have no idea how many they do have, but it seems foolish to assume they don't have a specific private key.

Why do you think the NSA would regard private keys as some kind of sacred ground? For example, they could go after it the same way the Chinese do - phishing attacks against employees. They most certainly use those techniques outside the US, how can you be sure they don't within the US?

I could never pretend to be sure they -are- doing it, but it seems a lot more difficult to be sure they -are not-.
I think you may be forgetting that it's not all-or-nothing. Not everyone uses Chrome.

I can't speak to a slide deck; We've only seen some slides for one program (PRISM). I am quite sure that NSA has several different programs variously encompassing collection and decryption. Hopefully in the next few days or weeks we'll see details about more of them.

I don't think it's beyond the realm of possibility for a nation-state adversary with a ca. $10bn annual budget (that happens to be the same country where Google lives) to get a copy of Google's key, no.
> the US government has a demonstrable history of engaging in illegal and unethical behavior.

To be fair, all governments engage in illegal and unethical behavior.

As a fellow old person and a history buff, I'm glad you're posting this info.
I wonder if Google are working with the Serval guys in Australia on this. They are turning Android devices into wireless meshes and have been sending up balloons with device + high gain aerials for quite a while... With the same project motives in mind: disaster recovery (with ground and pole based setup, including voice calls and txt messages with higher QoS over the network), and extending coverage to less populated parts of the world. Australia is a huge place. Wireless is the only sane option for large large parts of the country, and towers, with power - you have to get it there somehow , are expensive. Yes solar is often an option (though it makes the base station in the middle of nowhere a very attractive target for thieves) and I'll be very interested to see how Google will solve that one (assume balloons will be semi covered in panels plus quite large batteries, and possibly small amounts of wind generation?).
This really is becoming like 1984. First we had a president arguing about the meaning of "is". Next we get the the DIA lying to Congress say "No" when the truth was "Yes" and then when caught explaining he answered in the "least untruthful manner".

Now when our president says [1]:

"nobody is listening to your telephone calls"

"if the intelligence community then actually wants to listen to a phone call, they’ve got to go back to a federal judge"

"nobody’s listening to the content of people’s phone calls"

"do not involve listening to people’s phone calls, do not involve reading the emails of U.S. citizens or U.S. residents, absent further action by a federal court"

It actually means this [2]:

"If the NSA wants 'to listen to the phone,' an analyst's decision is sufficient, without any other legal authorization required"

[1] http://stream.wsj.com/story/latest-headlines/SS-2-63399/SS-2...

[2] http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57589495-38/nsa-admits-lis...
Your overly hateful and antagonizing message is not necessary. Please take another look at the posting guidelines: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
How was national security endangered? And I'm curious which of the two parties you think the "partisan" downvoters represent?
It is possible for that to be true, too: that to the best of anyone's knowledge, even though NSA retains the capability to listen to arbitrary calls, it has used that capability only in instances where they are reasonably certain that the calls weren't from Americans.

(Although half the site seems to think I'm an NSA supporter, here I'll again make it clear that the telco access NSA seems to have is an extremely bad thing.)
Yes, gcc -O2 on Opteron I believe (it was a while ago).
Lie, admission, lie, admission, don't you get it yet?
Is the relay of mail between, say, Yahoo and Gmail using strong crypto? (I'm curious; I thought not but I haven't been keeping up on bulk email interchange practices.)
Obama issues whistleblower directive to security agencies [2012]
It's actually easier, unless you're trying to do a clean install.

For some weird reason Apple made it utterly difficult to be able to make a clean install.
"My sole motive is to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them"

Must read for anyone interested in understanding the principle behind Snowden's acts. As requested in the article I also joined https://optin.stopwatching.us/ campaign.
Doh. Reading the FAQ. Many q's answered.
Most SMTP does, but does most SMTP that originates or terminates at Google Mail? I don't think so.

(Here it's worth noting that mail between Google Mail users doesn't ever hit the public Internet in plaintext SMTP).

I do not think it's unfathomable that NSA has Google Mail's public key. I do think it's unfathomable that, having illicitly obtained that key, their possession of it wouldn't be one of the most closely guarded secrets in the agency.
Shia LaBeouf claims to have listened to a phone call he'd made years prior, replayed to him by an FBI agent: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ux1hpLvqMw

Former FBI Agent Denies He Gave Shia LaBeouf a Recording of an Old Phone Call:
http://www.breitbart.com/InstaBlog/2013/06/12/Former-FBI-Age...

If you're going to make up a story - why would you come up with the whole 'two years ago' twist? It's a details that makes no sense to fabricate unless it actually happened.
Re Gambit: Learned this on an episode of Jeopardy screened in Australia this week. Never knew that it originated in Chess.
Rep. Nadler and FBI Director Mueller's 2-min video (c-span)
For not being interested in "the semantic argument", you have previously shown lots of confidence in the Governments secret semantic interpretation.

No evidence has been published, and who is talking about Google Mail anyway?
I never claimed it was illicit. I just said it was secret, and that disclosure of such secrets carries an incredibly harsh penalty. You're doing the strawman thing again, despite claiming otherwise. :/

Just because they've pushed back doesn't mean the system isn't automated. It could have been a matter of "implement the automated system now, per the FISA order, and then we can have a go-round in front of the FISA court with your objections after".
I strongly disagree with it, but it's been stated a few times that it's ok to use downvote if you disagree (1). This is certainly not a new thing around here...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171
To be fair, some of the groups that COINTELPRO targeted were subversive. For example, the weather underground:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_Underground#Major_activ...

Ctrl+F "Bomb" ^^
I'd say that her books The End of America and
Give Me Liberty give her more than adequate standing - certainly more than most posters on this board - to comment on the current question ... far more deserving than a dismissive 'pop feminist' handwave.
How can you rule out:

1. Google is lying.
2. Prism (or the backend thereof) is genuinely unknown to most Google employees. Those few employees who do know of it are lying. The others (i.e. legal) are ignorant because they have no need to know, and because it provides plausible deniability.
3. There exist NSA agents capable of passing a Google interview and installing backdoors, perhaps with the collusion of other agents.

Companies the size of Google are, in software terms, Borg cubes of interacting systems. No one comprehends the whole thing, and some degree of secrecy between services is normal. Who would notice if, say, Gmail traffic was being replicated onto NSA-controlled hardware? A small part of a small part of the Gmail team. No one else would likely notice even if it was done in an obvious way.
Semantics - the study of meaning. So you're saying you're only interested in a meaningless argument?
dude, an ubuntu point upgrade hosed wifi on a coworker's thinkpad within the last 6 months or so. These are not invalid concerns even for software developers.

Honestly, a better way to describe freedom zero is perhaps maslow's hierarchy of needs for computing.

works / performs required task is the bottom of the pyramid. So-called freedom zero is much higher.
> most of the people commenting on the NSA story on HN say things that make it clear that they believe NSA continues to have the direct access to Google's systems

You're mincing words. Your comments clearly indicate that you think "direct access" unambiguously means "access to servers that run GMail that the NSA can snoop on any time they like." But from what I've seen, most comments on HN adopt and acknowledge a more ambiguous definition.

The one you propose is the extreme. But other definitions include an interface for the NSA to request data and have it deposited in some "drop box" that can then be accessed by the NSA (all without a warrant). It's reasonable to call this "direct access", particularly if the audience is not tech savvy. (Which is something we don't know.)

Moreover, most folks here seem painfully aware that "direct access" really hasn't been qualified. It seems reasonable your definition isn't really true, but that doesn't mean the Guardian's reporting is incorrect. (The Guardian never put forward a precise definition---either because they didn't have one or were unwilling to release it.)

Personally, I think you are attributing way too much certainty to the HN crowd.
So what? The NSA is harvesting data on an unprecedented scale. It might be legal but it is definitly unethical.

Whether the initial reports were 100% accurate or not is irrelevant. What does matter is that this now out in the open and hopefully something changes.
I'm not interested in the semantic argument about whether publishing a story that contradicts a previous story without issuing a correction on that previous story counts or does not count as a "walk back", that term having no specific technical meaning the argument can rely on.

I'm not averse to all semantic arguments.
The lack of proper “alter table” support in SQLite
Inappropriate places to wear Google Glass
> That a user is expected to know what restricted drivers are--that the user is expected to know what drivers are--is the core of the problem.

That wasn't true at all the last time I did an Ubuntu installation. The process went to great pains to give plain-language explanations of any choices required by the user.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/GraphicalInstall

Not shown in those images, but it even managed to get proprietary video drivers happening without ever mentioning the phrase "restricted driver".
I suppose you are more charitable than I am.
I can't find a reference and until recently would have assumed it was unencrypted SMTP like the olden days.

What gives you that belief, and if it's TLS-secured, would you assume it has the same forward-security as (eg) Chrome-to-Gmail? Or might it be something else, because it happens out of sight, that is a little behind-the-times?
This is China's attempt to end the artificial labor shortage problems they've been having in urban areas. It'll be trivial for China to increase the productivity of their farming massively, given how intentionally backwards it currently is.
I'm not a Hacker News regular (so hope I'm doing it right), but I've had some interesting discussion about my post on Twitter this morning (see https://twitter.com/lightningdb/status/346036003540189184) plus some high level discussions with faculty staff this year about this topic. I'm keen to hear some more thoughts on this topic -- how do we satisfy industry without destroying the university experience?
Show HN: Catincan, Crowdfunding for Open Source Software
The fastest way is to use leverage.

Leverage technology to sell digital copies of something you only have to make once (which you seem to have already been doing and look to be doing more of.)

Leverage time by hiring other people.

Leverage money, which allows you to scale the other inputs more quickly than you would by bootstrapping. Preferably you would be able to use other people's money.

In another comment, you mentioned that you aren't living in a developed country. It's difficult for anyone to get investment money and it may be more difficult where you live. On the other hand, you have access to relatively cheap labor. If you are able find decently skilled developers in your area, then perhaps you could apply what you are making on your WP product which is selling well and hire a couple of developers.

You could also try setting those developers on jobs from Elance and Odesk. Maybe start out with a niche and build a brand for that niche. For example, build a WP team and focus on WP jobs. Too many developers on these platforms are too general. If your add-on is well known then that would give you a leg up on the competition. Actually, every add-on you create would add to your brand.

Another crucial point is to find someone who can sell! Too many job proposals on Odesk and Elance are the types which start out as Dear sir, broken English and no demonstrable understanding of the item they are writing the proposal on. Get this right and you could crush it. Maybe even get someone from the U.S. to work on commission and pair that person up with your best developer (or yourself) to work on each proposal. Essentially the salesperson would dress up the proposal from the tech guy and add some spice.

I'm currently living in the Philippines. I have been pondering going this route myself.
The process as I understand it:

* NSA (or some other USG agency) issues a directive to the provider under authorization from FISA. No court order is required for NSA to issue directives under FISA.

* If the provider is Google, Yahoo, or Facebook†, that directive is reviewed manually by the provider.

* In at least the case of Yahoo, where this step is supported by court documents, but probably all the other cases too based on provider public statements, the provider has the option of refusing to comply with the directive, at which point they send lawyers to FISC.

* For all intents and purposes USG never loses at FISC.

* Some process happens at the provider in which data pertaining to the directive is collected, marshalled into some kind of bundle, and placed on a secure drop box server ("similar to an FTP server"); it is NSA's access to these servers that "PRISM" refers to.

If you're telling me that this is the understanding most HN people have about what "direct access" means, I'd direct your attention to this very thread to rebut that argument. I'm accused upthread of "mincing words" but would respond by arguing that any attempt to characterize the process in this post as "direct access" is a much finer mince; a brunoise of words, if you will.

† Because those providers have publicly stated that.
What percentage of email stays within gmail?

Main point - I'd be willing to bet that the NSA collects as many private keys as it can. Can't prove it, don't need to. I'll conduct myself as if they have all the private keys. That's a loss of freedom, and that's not what the authors of the fourth amendment intended.
AppCampus Windows Phone app - Apply now to get up to €70K
Kettle, I mean American, meet pot, I mean Chinese.