omnibus PRISM/NSA/free Edward Snowden/encryption tutorial thread

$150K, sure; lol @ $250K tho

Snowman's salary somewhere in the middle though!

the lowball on his salary (from "booze allen") is $122k; highball (from him i guess?) is $200k; i don't think he was a "senior analyst"

sorry, "operator"

(i think we got "disconnected")

if he left a $200k job for this, he is a true american hero but if he only left a $122k job, he is scum

and he didn't spend a dime on eyeglass frames

lol at sullivan praising obama for, among other things, 'no more completely unchecked executive power.'

Lol at Sullivan forever

this will probably seem paranoid to some but i think it hits the nail on the head.

http://truth-out.org/buzzflash/commentary/item/18018-when-the-surveillance-state-is-used-to-investigate-and-prosecute-whistleblowers-the-occupy-movement-and-environmental-activists

Normally annoying inside the beltway centrist Washington Post columnist Dana Millbank suddenly decided to spell out the efforts some folks had gone to trying to get some information in the recent past and the roadblocks they ran into:

lawmakers quashed efforts to allow even modest public disclosure of the broad contours of the program. Steven Aftergood, who runs the Federation of American Scientists’ Project on Government Secrecy, lists the various ways in which the administration, Congress and the courts denied the public any right to know:

The Justice Department and the DNI promised a new effort to declassify opinions issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court; Justice official Lisa Monaco, now Obama’s counterterrorism director, said all significant FISA rulings would be reviewed for declassification. But no new opinions were declassified under the initiative.

The House last year turned back attempts to require public reports on the general outlines of the government’s surveillance programs. The various disclosure proposals, offered by Democratic Reps. Bobby Scott (Va.), Jerrold Nadler (N.Y.) and Sheila Jackson Lee (Tex.), were defeated by the Judiciary Committee.

In the Senate, amendments to provide modest disclosures and declassifications, offered by Wyden and fellow Democratic Sens. Jeff Merkley (Ore.) and Mark Udall (Colo.) during the FISA renewal in December, were all defeated.

The FISA court itself colluded in the secrecy. After senators asked the court to provide declassified summaries of its decisions, the chief FISA judge, Reggie B. Walton, responded with a letter on March 27 citing “serious obstacles” to the request.

“It was a shoddy performance all around,” Aftergood said Monday. “The pervasive secrecy on this topic created an information vacuum. If congressional oversight was not going to fill it in, it turned out leaks would. That’s not the optimal solution.”

Not optimal, but probably inevitable. Officials who denied the public a responsible debate on surveillance will now have a debate on Snowden’s terms — and there’s no use in bellyaching about it.

Has this been discussed? http://www.vanityfair.com/online/eichenwald/2013/06/obama-verizon-cell-phone

Re Eichenwald's piece, defenders of the program always say that such data has been useful (but then they say that national security prevents them from telling one how). There was also a New Rebublic article saying that NSA andothers are so bogged down in huge data scooping that they are missing out on following up on real, hard data.

I heard constitutional law scholar Floyd Abrams on a radio show saying that the NSA's legal authority to look at written phone data (but requiring a warrant to listen to a call) without a warrant comes from a 5 to 3 Supreme Court decision that he disagrees with.

that article amateurist posted is mostly OTM. in a way it's kind of sad that so many progressives (me included) seem to expect more from obama just because he was once a 'constitutional lawyer.' i held out hope for the guy as long as i could but even when i read 'the audacity of hope' back in 2007 it was sadly obvious that obama was way more enthusiastic about some mostly imaginary ideal of truman-era 'centrism,' an era when all the politicians were mostly sensible guys who played poker and cut deals, than he ever was about restoring civil liberties or reversing the bad trends of the bush era. i can't say i ever expected him to become basically the worst civil liberties president of the modern era but i'm sure he's justified it all to himself. when he writes his memoirs he'll probably come up with some eloquent gloss on why he let it all happen and everyone will be praising his wise moderation or whatever.

and he didn't spend a dime on eyeglass frames

Or a decent haircut!

josh marshall has been particularly boneheaded on all of this.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2013/06/like_the_oj_simpson_trial.php?ref=fpblg

you know something is awry when your rambling defense starts out with OJ and includes about 10-15 strawmen arguments.

But it’s more than that. Snowden is doing more than triggering a debate. I think it’s clear he’s trying to upend, damage - choose your verb - the US intelligence apparatus and policieis he opposes. The fact that what he’s doing is against the law speaks for itself. I don’t think anyone doubts that narrow point. But he’s not just opening the thing up for debate. He’s taking it upon himself to make certain things no longer possible, or much harder to do. To me that’s a betrayal.

and he didn't spend a dime on eyeglass frames

Or a decent haircut!

well he only made 122k, barely enough to live on after taxes and ron paul donations

In what way are these things no longer possible or harder to do? I mean, the NSA is still doing this, right?

http://www.salon.com/2013/06/11/david_brooks_the_last_stalinist/

Re Eichenwald's piece, defenders of the program always say that such data has been useful (but then they say that national security prevents them from telling one how).

Directly from Eichenwald's article:

What was the purpose of bringing in so much information? As a moment’s thought would make clear, this wasn’t about inspecting random people’s individual activities. Instead, the National Security Agency puts the information through a larger process known as “knowledge discovery in database”—or K.D.D.—which cleans, selects, integrates, and analyzes the data. It is also run against a large set of what are known as “dirty numbers”—telephones linked to terrorists either through American signals intelligence or information provided by foreign services. Even the Libyans under Qaddafi turned over huge stacks of dirty numbers to us.

So, on its simplest level, the program—part of a broader enterprise codenamed Stellar Wind, which includes the now infamous warrantless-wiretapping initiative—allows the government to detect when someone in the United States calls a dirty number. (For those who love irony, one of the first phones found to have placed a call to a dirty number was located in the West Wing of the Bush White House; investigators determined it was a fluke, although it did raise questions about the integrity of such inquiries.)

In addition, as part of K.D.D., an algorithm was applied to the broader data set in efforts to detect patterns of behavior fitting models that had been previously established as being indicative of the activities of a terrorist cell. In regards to protecting individual privacy, the standards are strict. As I described it in the book:

The NSA would have no authority to pull up, say, some American’s email account out of curiosity. Anyone violating this ban could potentially be committing a crime, just as an unauthorized IRS employee sneaking a peek at an individual tax return could be cited for wrongdoing. But the stricture was largely theoretical; sifting through the metadata to isolate an (arbitrary) individual’s records would be an almost impossible—and pointless—undertaking.

Obviously the merits of this approach are debatable but it's kind of silly to respond to an article that provides a concrete example of how the data is being used with "but of course no one will tell us how the data is being used"

held out hope for the guy as long as i could but even when i read 'the audacity of hope' back in 2007 it was sadly obvious that obama was way more enthusiastic about some mostly imaginary ideal of truman-era 'centrism,' an era when all the politicians were mostly sensible guys who played poker and cut deals

He's also enamored of elites. So is most of Washington but Obama more so cuz he's one too.

Coming from this perspective, it’s hard to see any justification for what Manning did, which is basically downloading everything he could find and giving it to a foreign national (Assange) with the expectation that he’d just dump it into the public.

my god Marshall's being dense! This is not what Manning did!

x-post to DJP-
I was referring to specific comments by Diane Feinstein and a Republican senator. They both played games when it came to success specifics, and I read a Digby blogpost noting that Feinstein had referred to things that actually were not successful. The "Stellar Wind" program I think was largely kept secret and has been criticized for all the data it has gathered. As for its alleged success in Libya, hopefully someone will make that more public. The New Republic had this re the lack of success with enormous data collection:

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/113416/nsa-spying-scandal-data-mining-isnt-good-keeping-us-safe

x-post
David Brooks and Jeffrey Toobin are also arguing that Snowden has made it harder for others to open things up; when the facts have made clear that Obama and the NSA and Congress and the majority on the courts,etc. are all perfectly fine with how things are, and they think this way works. That's why they wanted and still want it all to be secret.

Another take on "Stellar Wind"

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/03/17/1075217/-Wired-s-Mind-Blowing-Scoop-On-Stellar-Wind-And-The-Enormity-of-U-S-Domestic-Spying

Binney left the NSA in late 2001, shortly after the agency launched its warrantless-wiretapping program. “They violated the Constitution setting it up,” he says bluntly. “But they didn’t care. They were going to do it anyway, and they were going to crucify anyone who stood in the way. When they started violating the Constitution, I couldn’t stay.” Binney says Stellar Wind was far larger than has been publicly disclosed and included not just eavesdropping on domestic phone calls but the inspection of domestic email.

all the pro-snowden takes that include something like 'unlike that reckless traitor manning, who just dumped everything he found and endangered american lives, etc etc' are pretty maddening.

There are also anti-Snowden people saying that Snowden was nearly as reckless as Manning because Snowden wanted to post even more NSA powerpoint slides than the Guardian decided to post. Plus Snowden went to the Washington Post first, and they would not agree to post everything the way he wanted.

the big problem with that eichenwald article is exactly what the "truth out" article i linked above confronts directly. you shouldn't worry b/c they're only looking for metadata patterns that point to terrorist activity... but what if "terrorist activity" were expanded to nearly any form of dissent.... i mean, this is hardly a fantasy as we know that some occupy and other activists have been tracked by police depts and the FBI. in fact rather than a fantasy it seems an inevitability.

why is this so hard for people pundits to understand????

I agree that is a serious problem/concern.

ya i wouldn't wanna be Z S or a hoos rn

well, i would but yanno

coursera helpfully reminds me today that the crypto class i signed up for starts in a few days

I agree that is a serious problem/concern.

― they are either militarists (ugh) or kangaroos (?) (DJP), Tuesday, June 11, 2013 4:32 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i'd say it's the central concern, at least for american citizens.

for foreigners it's being hit by a drone strike

http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/

"Top Secret America" is a project nearly two years in the making that describes the huge national security buildup in the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

When it comes to national security, all too often no expense is spared and few questions are asked - with the result an enterprise so massive that nobody in government has a full understanding of it. It is, as Dana Priest and William M. Arkin have found, ubiquitous, often inefficient and mostly invisible to the people it is meant to protect and who fund it.

The articles in this series and an online database at topsecretamerica.com depict the scope and complexity of the government's national security program through interactive maps and other graphics. Every data point on the Web site is substantiated by at least two public records.

xp: The flipside is that the resources necessary to hunt down every protester in the United States makes doing so an untenable project unless you have a large target like the original scale of the Occupy movements, which to my understanding were monitored and dicked around by municipal governments but not by state/federal? (This is a very limited understanding; I freely admit that I am giving impressions and not facts here.) I don't think you can reasonably participate in civil disobedience and not expect some form of institutional attention; the real issue is if this institutional attention manifests itself as punitive retribution for assembling to criticize the government. I know people have been arrested and hurt; I think anyone participating in a protest is aware that could be a possibility. My question is more along the lines of, "Are the people participating in these protests suddenly finding that they can't get work anywhere or that police/government agents are confronting them in contexts unrelated to their actual protests?" That is the type of action this type of analysis would pop up (actually IIRC there are people who have found themselves running into issues flying places, contradicting my first statement here? I could also see this info being used to corral and deport people who are not in the country legally).

I don't really know where I stand on this issue; there is a certain level where I feel like I've already been under this scrutiny my entire life due to being a minority in America, so from a personal standpoint (and particularly coming from a professional background that works on applications designed to manipulate large amounts of data using similar algorithms for a completely different context) I don't feel like my privacy is any more compromised than it has been. There are no concrete facts to back up that personal impression, however, and I also don't believe it is in the federal government's interest or intent to use this information to confront 99.9999999% of the population living here right now. There's no guarantee that won't change in the future, possibly even in my lifetime, but it seems much more likely to me that the country's attitude towards guns are going to have more of a direct impact on the average American's life, particularly when you look at all of the information reported into government agencies jut by virtue of paying taxes, responding to the census, voting and traveling into/out of the country.

Does anyone know if credit card information is also being pulled into this net? Because that means the government basically knows whenever you rent a car or check into a hotel.

would imagine that the credit card companies don't take much persuading

The flipside is that the resources necessary to hunt down every protester in the United States makes doing so an untenable project unless you have a large target like the original scale of the Occupy movements, which to my understanding were monitored and dicked around by municipal governments but not by state/federal?

this wasn't even a large target really

Sure, but a concentrated number of people protesting in a public/semi-public space is more of a target than two people bitching about banks in an AOL chat.

DJP it's well known that police dept's in numerous cities w/ occupy movements were helped/coordinated by dep't of homeland security--both in terms of military-style tactics+equipment but also "profiling" of dissenters, etc. there were a bunch of articles about this in mainstream newspapers that i'm too lazy to look for right now.

just to posit a recent example of the federal security apparatus being used to help local govt's keep tabs on/detain/etc. protestors as opposed to "terrorists"

"The 41 percent of Americans who disapprove of secret NSA phone-record collection included 34 percent of Democrats -- about half the proportion who disapproved of surveillance tactics in the Bush Administration."

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/06/the-obama-surveillance-revelations-are-pushing-liberals-over-the-edge/276755/

it's not that they were principled then but are hypocrites now. they were partisans then and remain so. maybe some of the democrats who disapproved then but approve now are finally following the mandate of their heart which thirsts for authoritarian repression but they disliked bush too much to express it earlier.

eh that's all true but that pew poll is all like "court orders" "everyone's gonna die waddaya think" & then is reported like everyone's fine with what's been going on

court orders for "millions of americans" still doesn't mean "me"

they asked two different questions. the 2006 question says "without court approval." i thought it was very bad then, and think it is bad now, but the fact that there was no fisa authorization under bush was significant then, and is significant now.

it's not that they were principled then but are hypocrites now. they were partisans then and remain so. maybe some of the democrats who disapproved then but approve now are finally following the mandate of their heart which thirsts for authoritarian repression but they disliked bush too much to express it earlier.

― Mordy , Tuesday, June 11, 2013 5:44 PM (56 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yes, this is why i posted it.

right the survey questions still assume a "trade off" b/t civil liberties and safety, replicating obama's own discourse

but i've yet to see any real evidence that this sort of wholesale disregard for constitutionally-protected liberties is actually preventing terrorism

ACLU sues

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/06/aclu-sues-four-top-obama-administration-officials-over-verizon-metadata-sharing/

glad I still write checks to them

my membership lapsed a while back - i should get back on that

yeah big up aclu

https://www.aclu.org/secure/setup-monthly-pledge?s_src=UNV130001C00&ms=web_menu_monthly