skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> dozens of terrorist acts

Which ones were real or could have actually pulled anything off? The underwear bomber? The guy that locked his keys in the car? Or the ones the FBI convinces others to attempt? The NSA has been doing this for a long time and have missed things like the Boston bombing while there was plenty of evidence that required further observance. Just looking at some of his public photos, it was apparent to me that he probably should be observed. Those didn't even require these new legal means.

Don't you think if they did successfully stop a really major terrorist attack either Bush or Obama would have ran with it in the open? If it happened in 2008, Obama probably wouldn't have been elected because people would have loved to see these new [horrible] laws stop 9/11 part 2. Bush would have said something like "We told you we needed this and we were right. Without these laws we wouldn't have been able to catch them. These laws saved thousands of lives today and will continue to do so in the future."

However, here we are and nothing major has been found. Now they have the potential for political blackmail that can stop all sorts of challenges to the establishment. One thing many people agree is that Congress sucks and both parties are out of touch with us. They will use these legal means in order to hold onto their power. I do not trust them in the least.

Also, if they can do this, why can't we attach live camera and microphones to all of them? Why can't we make all of their emails public? They want this access to us, why can't we have it for them?
See my update: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5886826
You may not be interested in a semantic argument, but it's a semantic point you're arguing. The title of the article in question[1] is:

"NSA Prism program taps in to user data of Apple, Google and others
• Top-secret Prism program claims direct access to servers of firms including Google, Apple and Facebook
• Companies deny any knowledge of program in operation since 2007"

The first sentence states:

"The National Security Agency has obtained direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other US internet giants, according to a top secret document obtained by the Guardian."

Emphasis on according to a top secret document obtained by the Guardian. If you read on, the content of the article supports this title and summary. It doesn't matter what Emily Bazelon has said, it don't matter what others have said, and it certainly doesn't matter what the mainstream criticism is when determining whether or not the statements in the article are accurate. The slides say the NSA can "collect data directly from the servers" of these companies. Guardian states the the slides state that the NSA can collect data directly from the servers of these companies.

That is a demonstrable fact. In fact, I just demonstrated it.

Now, I'm in the camp of people who think that whoever wrote the slides just didn't know what they were talking about. Neverthess, I'm also in the camp of people who think that the Guardian was accurate in their reporting--because the reporting is right there to be read.

We could, of course, argue over the congruace between the phrases "direct access" and "collect data directly from the servers," but you said you weren't interested in semantics.

[1]: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-n...
So far fact is that the NSA denied listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants.

Now we know that the Obama administration and NSA intentionally lied and mislead the public. I am certain that with a little bit of luck we will find out how NSA email hacking works in practice. So far the smoke seems long from settling.

Based on how the Obama administration and NSA is handling this issue I see very little reason to expect anything else than the maximum level of intrusiveness possible.
TIME Collection: Secret Wiretaps
The Sinocism China Newsletter 06.15.13
It's almost like there are different people with different opinions.
Let's say we all listened to your constant posting, and put down the pitchforks.

Now what?

What would you have us do differently? Should we be quiet? Is there some other avenue of outrage you'd rather we follow? What?
Snowden's job is done. They will leave him alone as the US leaves alone dissidents once they have briefed the CIA and various other organizations and given testimony on how they have a secret, secret plan on the basis of which the US can start a war with the country.
many of them were "subversive", but very few were violently so.
> This is a case of the government executing the will of the people at the time.

How do you know that it was the will of the people of the time to persecute communists? There was no referendum.

In any case there are important protections in the US system to prevent 'mob rule' and the persecution of people for ideological purposes. These override "the will of the people at the time".

Also - "I thought i was doing the right thing" should (and generally does) not get you off the hook for any crime.
Am I missing something? The telcos control many of the internet backbones, and Email isn't encrypted. If the telcos give you unrestricted access, it seems trivial to harvest the contents of email.

FWIR, Google enforcing HTTPS connections to gmail is pretty recent as well: since firesheep, so that's another vector for someone who can read data from the wires.
Where by illicit I mean "is occurring without the knowledge of Google's CEO or General Counsel, despite their publicly voiced opposition to any such program."
How much would it cost to keep the whole place under UAV surveillance for the winter?
If I'm on helm of NSA, I would recruit spys on important positions so that the agency can have access to any data on minutes notice. Of course, in accordance to the law. And I believe it is legal for NSA to recruit somebody in a company to spy / give NSA access to the data.

My point is that it is irrelevant whether it is true or not that NSA has capability to access to all our emails. The key is whether our legal framework allows that or not. My understanding is that NSA can collect all the data it needs (emails, phone calls, etc.) and they will not break the law - even without FISA court order. So maybe the law needs to be changed...
I am confused by this particular piece of disclosure.

Who is disclosing it? CNET or Rep. Darrel?

If Rep. Darrel said it....y do they need comment? If he isn't disclosing it, how did CNET come by this statement?

This is quite confusing.
There doesn't appear to be anything happening on the live stream.
"He's spreading gross misinformation and propaganda that's damaging to the US government and major US based technology companies."

It is not propaganda if it is true, like the members of congress have admitted.

American companies and country own the world, they have power to abuse and they do. Is that hard to understand?

Like any other Empire, they fall down over its own weight.
Is it possible that through some elaborate conspiracy with specific unidentified Google employees unknown to Larry Page or Google's General Counsel that NSA has obtained access to the servers that operate Google Mail? Yes.

Is it plausible that having gained that access, their use of it is so routine that it has an official name ("PRISM") and a logo and appears in slide decks targeted at NSA analysts and is used a program whose existence is known outside NSA (there are DOD manuals that refer to the same PRISM program)? No. That is not plausible.
Well this is awfully suspicious

$ dig @8.8.8.8 petitions.whitehouse.gov

; <<>> DiG 9.6-ESV-R4-P3 <<>> @8.8.8.8 petitions.whitehouse.gov
; (1 server found)
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: SERVFAIL, id: 39404
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;petitions.whitehouse.gov.	IN	A

;; Query time: 500 msec
;; SERVER: 8.8.8.8#53(8.8.8.8)
;; WHEN: Sat Jun 15 18:05:23 2013
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 42
They can get all unencrypted SMTP messages which means they can get all messages between gmail and outside mail servers. They would only be missing internal gmail to gmail messages.
Since the modus operandi seems to be for the NSA to suck up everything it can and decide later it seems (wild speculation follows) that the NSA might be sitting on audio recrodings of all your phone calls for the past several years.

Can you imagine the number of divorce cases that would impact? Civil lawsuits? Proof of innocence or guilt in a crime?

Hell, get a decade or two of this and historians alone would have a field day with such material.

Oh, and by the way, it's completely fucked.

Back in the day, the FBI recorded folks that they suspected were subversives and it caused a huge stink. People were rightly outraged. It was considered a blemish on the FBI. Now we do the same thing -- only with everybody. And still 45% or so of the population hasn't figured out what the problem is. Amazing.
"The shift is occurring so quickly, and the potential costs are so high, that some fear rural China is once again the site of radical social engineering."

Yesterday Detroit announced it would be defaulting on billions of debt - just the latest chapter of what is happening in that city, in that state, in the entire old Steel Belt. In the 1960s, Detriot was the center of US innovation and the economic engine of the country - we all know what it is nowadays.

Why is this not "radical social engineering?" The US unemployment rate is currently at a level that has not been seen since five months in 1992, and before that not since 1984. Why is that not radical social engineering? The amount of hypocrisy and double standards in the US media is mindblowing...
Email is encrypted, far more often than you think it is. If you send email to someone else at Google Mail via Google Mail, your message is never on the Internet except in a retail-level TLS connection to Google Mail. If you send email via Google Mail to someone at some other email provider and that provider does SMTP+TLS, it's also never on the Internet in plaintext.
HN SOS: help Life on Bitcoin project
TLS client authentication allows the server to detect when an active MITM attempts to get into the connection[1]. This means that if you hold the theory that the NSA is acting as a MITM with Google's private keys, you also have to assume that they know they'll be detected the second anyone tries to use a client certificate to connect.

[1] http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/26142/do-client-...
Awesome concept. I wish he'd gotten someone to give him a decent microphone, or just used something like a Zoom H1.
Morally, perhaps we should wait to see whether the programs are ruled illegal before deciding to ask for a pardon.

Surveiling people without suspicion seems an obvious human rights violation - I have a hard time imagining how a court could legitimately rule that something like this is legal.
Ooh, that's an interesting one. Thanks! I've used a system before (no idea what it's called) that gives each voter a number of points (say 10) that they can distribute among the candidates. They can give all 10 points to one person, or spread them out. Of course, your average voter would find this way too confusing.

From the Wikipedia article:
> FairVote [argues Approval Voting] can result in the defeat of a candidate who would win an absolute majority in a plurality system, can allow a candidate to win who might not win any support in a plurality elections

This sounds like a good thing. You end up with an elected official that satisfies most of the population.

51% of voters think Alice would be the best person to lead, they'd be OK with Bob but think Carol and Dan are morons. 49% think Carol would be the best person to lead, they'd be OK with Bob but think both Alice and Dan are morons.

So now if we use normal majority voting, Alice wins and 49% of voters have an elected official they think is a moron.

With Approval Voting, Bob will win. Sure, he might have been everyone's second choice, but he's EVERYONE's second choice. So now we're all reasonably happy.
> 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 not at all saying that. I'm saying that most HN folks do not share your definition of what "direct access" means. I specifically said that it seems like most people are quite aware of the ambiguity of the meaning of "direct access" in a couple slides and that we can only guess at what it precisely means.

Your comment clearly indicates otherwise:

Either way: the original notion that NSA had direct access to the servers that
actually operate Google Mail has been found to be unsupported by the evidence
published thus far.

I call this out continuously and obnoxiously on HN because it is very much not
the mainstream view on HN

Which seems like you're implying that most here believe literally in some direct tap on a provider's servers. But that isn't my experience.
JUST SHUT THE FUCK UP WITH THIS TYPE OF "HUMOR".
Good article, but incomplete without a cost comparison. What's the overall cost/revenue difference b/t the fragile plan/s (which cost little but failed and made no revenue) and robust plan which succeeded but required 50+ freelancers.
>"That law says surveillance may be authorized by the attorney general and director of national intelligence without prior approval by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, as long as minimization requirements and general procedures blessed by the court are followed. "

So the numbers we recently got from Facebook and Microsoft don't mean anything.
The idea of the 85% rule is more a rule of thumb than some kind of rigid metric--I mean, I'm not sure how you would even quantify that.

But I would argue that "as long as business features are being implemented regularly" is too vague to be useful. You could be regularly implementing business features and still have half of development time building some framework that is unnecessary.
Police disperse protesters in park
Can you please explain what is suspicious for a n00b like me?
Hmm, it's back now.
The DNS entry for petitions.whitehouse.gov disappeared for a bit.
Yes, that is exactly what I think most people on HN that comment on this issue believe.
> To have the email of arbitrary Americans without a warrant, the NSA would need direct access to the servers that run Google Mail.

Or Google could provide the NSA a copy of the data.
"Nobody is listening to your phone calls." Oh, I presume that Obama was just addressing every American whose phone calls had not been listened to. This is outrageous, baffling. Somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but Obama did just outright lie about it, right?
How about this one ... keyword: "in the United States" which I guess means that it's either a lie, or they capture data outside the United States.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYNXVgYhPOc&feature=youtu.be
Nothing in the piece argues that one shouldn't try new technology. Under this 85%-rule-of-thumb, we went with Amazon Web Services for 100% of our infrastructure in 2008. It was clearly the right choice, and worth learning. My point was more that developers have a gravitational pull toward new and interesting that needs to be tempered by a focus on what's best for the business--and too often, it is not.
Plaintext mail is only encrypted in transit when both endpoints are using encryption. Google cannot transmit secure messages to an insecure endpoint because the endpoint wouldn't know what to do with them. I think nobody knows what percentage of Gmail gets sent to foreign servers without encryption, similarly for received messages, but I am surprised by the claim that most SMTP is unencrypted.
No they can't. Google's MX's do TLS too.
No, I don't think it means that. As I understand it ('declan could correct me), a court order isn't required to issue a collection directive under FISA, but one is required to enforce such an order.
This cleared it up for me: http://www.c-spanvideo.org/clip/4456141 *

* - Originally posted by marshray. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5886860
Its not, see my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5886826
It was just a SERVFAIL, not an empty response. It's not that uncommon.
We've† already verified this downthread; I'm wrong about Yahoo (they do TLS for their retail SMTP servers but not for MX's), but Google does indeed do TLS on their servers.

† Where by "we" I mean "the guy who isn't me that found the app that gives you the SSL connection details for arbitrary SMTP addresses"
ALTER is in itself an odd command, useful only in development, never in production, and bringin with it deep architectural implications and an endless list of problems in basically all SQL systems today.

In SQLite, an embedded database, it is certainly out of place. Drop, rebuild, and move on with life.
When I get bored/nostalgic I will search gmane for one of the prolific mailing list subscribers like Eugen Leitl or that Vladis dude from VT. I found liberationtech via Eugene.
It's possible, I suppose, that most HN people think that Google has, somehow, given the NSA a way to access their Bigtable database directly and query it--thereby entrusting the information on the structure of their database, and subsequently their billions of dollars, to NSA analysts making a few tens of thousands of dollars a year--ignoring entirely the ridiculous notion that such access is even physically possible or enabled.

That doesn't change the fact that they're wrong.

Google couldn't possibly give the NSA "direct access" in the way you're defining it without creating a subsystem to service it--like, say, a secure staging server that requires being populated by processes which run and pull the data from disparate parts of their system, whose access would most easily be accesses via FTP. Anyone technologically literate who considers what "direct access" could mean deeper than a surface level should arrive at the obvious conclusion that "direct access" does not mean the Google equivalent of a MySQL console.
Yep, and now all the major media & blow-hards have to back pedal on their smear campaigns, as little by little everything he claimed turns out to be true:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57589495-38/nsa-admits-lis...
The Worst Startup Idea
We agree that there is no magic that makes TLS work for SMTP servers that don't support TLS.
Part of the book 1984 was the complacence of the lower class. I am not targeting any class here but pointing out that a culture of complacency by division was a large warning in that book that is often overlooked.
Note that I am not taking sides in this argument in this particular reply, but the PRISM referred to in the leaked manuals appears to be an entirely separate program, for managing responses to emergency events.
Great point. I don't have the answer, but here's something to consider:

That brilliant journalist I hired, the person who was ready to take on the responsibility of writing 16 books in a year, needed $90k salary.

Finding people to answer some specific questions about their existing field of expertise has cost very very little. 48 researchers cost less than $60k.
Real communism was pretty close to being illegal as it explicitly calls for revolution, in contrast with social democracy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_Act_trials_of_communist_p...

The "witch-hunt" term needs to go away. The government was lousy with communists and soviet agents. McCarthy was ultimately not very helpful, as the media has found it very easy to use him to make the anti-communists look like the real villains.
Wow....thanks for this.

That is just.....why was this not picked up from before?
If Xinhua is taking a stand, it means the Chinese government decided they quite like the situation as it is. Looks like Snowden's bet paid off: he'll likely not face extradition from Hong Kong after all, and SEALs teams will be kept at bay.

The boy is hella smart.
Ask HN: GIMP or Photoshop For Android Design?
Should I use Photoshop or GIMP for my android app design?
A very brief history of US government Internet surveillance programs
I think of myself as fairly plugged in to the startup scene. One data point that Mattermark is indeed doing what it claims—"to uncover the most promising private companies in the world"—is the fact that I haven't heard of most of these companies. I'm looking forward to future issues.
Very well then. Practically speaking I'm much more concerned with spear-phishing on Google services than what we're discussing, but I'm glad you took the time to make your points. I won't hold my breath for them to introduce more flexible plans any time soon though... (As a sidebar, MS Office365 looks to be about the same thing, but not much different than Google on price/plans.)
Thank you for acknowledging that it is fathomable that NSA has Google Mail's keymatter, and that if they do, it would be one of the most closely guarded secrets in the agency, something they would burn other programs, and make other cover stories, to obscure.

The term "direct access" may have been fuzzy speak, and indicative of an "impedance mismatch" between what different concentric layers of the NSA knows. The author of the PRISM deck understood it to be "direct access" based on what he'd been told, and the low-lag operation he'd seen. But perhaps that was still be FISA-order based, just really fast: an analyst flags a name at their terminal. The name is forwarded the Google and the FISA court. Google does its "review" but knows a request of exactly this specific form always wins -- they don't get to challenge the reasons for the request, which they don't even see. Now it's 'reviewed', the SFTP dumps begin... but they aren't one-time, but perhaps daily... or even hourly or faster... to keep up with the target's ongoing mail activity. (They didn't go through the trouble of using one of their thousands of requests just to get old activity, did they?) To the PRISM deck authors, that still feels like "direct access" – and colloquially, it is.

But given compartmentalization within the NSA, what if some of the data is arriving via another, deeper capability? The PRISM deck author, the average analyst may just think it's from the other process. It's not their business to know more; the rows/records appear in their tool, and they get on with their work, happy for the bounty of info from other 'acquisition' programs which sometimes (often!) work in mysterious ways.
It wasn't illegal, but it was revealed many years later that pretty much every single Communist-leaning organization in the US had been receiving funds from Moscow. This doesn't justify what "Tail Gunner Joe" McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover did in persecuting suspected sympathizers (and anyone else they didn't like), of course.

Paranoia is "the unreasoning fear that others are out to get you". Only in this case, there was an element of truth to this. In the mid 50's Nikita Khrushchev spoke at the United Nations, banging his show upon the desk as he said "We will bury you!" The threat from the USSR was real.
A great book about this is “The Culting of Brands” - by Douglas Atkin.

http://sivers.org/book/CultingOfBrands
Still arguing with the NSA over their own capabilities?

I'm actually curious how you rationalize this worldview given the bizarre news over the last few days that the Fed is insisting on burying NSA FISA requests among requests from every other law enforcement agency when reporting statistics?

Leaving aside the point that aggregated and anonymized information seems to pose absolutely zero security risk and should not be classified in the first place, there seems a fairly obvious reason for the move that contradicts at least one if not more of your assumptions above.
Exactly what I was thinking. Not sure.
Why I Don’t Bother Getting my Inbox to Zero, and Why I’d Lose Out if I Did