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

he gave up a $400k job and a stripper girlfriend just to protect our freedoms

― iatee, Wednesday, 12 June 2013

stripper girlfriend and snowden's income are more interesting news stories to a lot of people than anything with the word 'metadata'

― iatee, Wednesday, 12 June 2013

she was a stripper? poledancer isn't synonymous with stripper in 2013

I'm glad Tom Friedman knows how to keep us safe.

when he's sunk to cribbing from TV producers, tsk

Longtime NSA-observer James Bamford on building the national security state (Chicago Tribune)

In a much-cited story, the influential Republican statesman, Henry L. Stimson, was described as deeply offended by the very notion of snooping into people's private communications. As the new secretary of state in 1929, Stimson shut down the Black Chamber with the now immortal phrase, "Gentlemen do not read each other's mail."

But when President Franklin D. Roosevelt later appointed Stimson secretary of war during World War Two, Stimson changed his mind. He wanted to eavesdrop on every possible communication, especially on the Germans and Japanese.

Once the guns of World War Two began falling silent, however, the communications privacy laws again took effect. Thus, Brigadier General W. Preston Corderman, the chief of the Signals Intelligence Service - another pre-NSA iteration — faced the same dilemma Yardley confronted after World War One: a lack of access to the cables flowing into, out of and through the country.

So, once again, deals were made with the major telegraph companies - the Internet providers of the day - to grant the SIS (and later the NSA) secret access to their communications.

Codenamed "Operation Shamrock," agents would arrive at the back door at each telecom headquarters in New York around midnight; pick up all that days telegraph traffic, and bring it to an office masquerading as a television tape processing company. There they would use a machine to duplicate all the computer tapes containing the telegrams, and, hours later, return the original tapes to the company.

The secret agreement lasted for 30 years. It only ended in 1975, when the nation was shocked by a series of stunning intelligence revelations uncovered by a congressional investigation led by Senator Frank Church.

If the revelations are so stunning, how come I've never heard of Operation Shamrock Shake?????

Why did Michael Morell go, or why was he sent away?

New Yorker profile on Bamford

“The Shadow Factory,” Bamford’s rageful 2008 book about the N.S.A.’s current troubles, is probably the most relevant of Bamford’s books today. In it, he describes an agency that has become increasingly cavalier about what data it will collect, and from whom. As one official told Bamford, “It’s what the N.S.A.’s been doing since 9/11. They’re just sweeping the stuff up.” Hayden, by this time, has been made into “a three-star sycophant unwilling to protect the agency from the destructive forces of Cheney and David Addington,” Cheney’s chief of staff. Whereas “Body of Secrets” referenced Borges, “The Shadow Factory” alludes to Orwell.

Particularly irksome is the suspicion that, as far as spy agencies are concerned, the N.S.A. just isn’t very good: Bamford said it has “failed badly” in preventing attacks since the Cold War, missing everything from the first World Trade Center attack in 1993 to the recent Boston Marathon bombing. That’s partly because, as the agency has been inundated with so much data, it has perhaps lost the ability to evaluate information in a timely manner. You need people to point out patterns, to say what is relevant and what is not. Or, as Bamford puts it in “A Pretext for War,” the “N.S.A. needs human intelligence sources to help tell it where, and to whom, to listen.” In the past, a rivalry with the C.I.A.—which is largely responsible for human intelligence, in contrast to the N.S.A.’s general focus on data—had prevented that sort of symbiosis.

At the root of Bamford’s fixation on the N.S.A. is a fascination with Americans’ willingness to “buy the company line” of spymasters, who assure us that the letter of the law is being followed, that civil liberties are respected, even as evidence accumulates suggesting the opposite. It seems we want to believe that those charged with protecting us may occasionally break the law, but will only do it to keep us safe, the way the roguish patriot Carrie Mathison, played by Claire Danes, routinely does on the TV show “Homeland.”

All this has made Bamford increasingly outraged. Though he refused to gloat during our conversation, it was clear that he felt vindicated for all his years of dogged pursuit. And he is still angry, as angry as he was back in 1982, when few Americans had ever heard of Crypto City. Surprisingly apolitical, Bamford simply wants the spies to account for what they do before they do it: “You want to do this?” he says of the N.S.A.’s Prism program. “Put a bill through Congress. Have a public debate.”

Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), who questioned Alexander about the section, wanted specific figures about what attacks had been averted.

Not yet, responded Alexander. But he vowed to have them soon.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2013/06/12/live-updates-cybersecurity-hearing/?hpid=z1#liveblog-entry-46364

Soon

exaflop is a word that makes me laugh

but otherwise :/

Bamford's book 'The Puzzle Palace' is a great read, of course dated now but a good history of the NSA. I still need to read Shadow Factory.

Shadow Factory is outstanding. Definitely check it out.

I will!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/snowden-wants-people-of-hong-kong-to-decide-my-fate/2013/06/12/a69e94ee-d370-11e2-a73e-826d299ff459_story.html

He added, “I have had many opportunities to flee HK, but I would rather stay and fight the United States government in the courts, because I have faith in Hong Kong’s rule of law.”

suchhhh a paulite

for $200,000 he can eat a lot of dim sum

i don't think i can even bring myself to read that friedman piece. is it as bad as i expect?

aw hell be a man!

Don't read it. You can still be a man J.D. without reading Lil' Tommy Friedman. Go read something good. Something else. You should never read anything by Tommy F.

oh god he just quoted fuckin' david simon

Someone else is having a ball quoting Simon

ppl keep saying they want more 'nuanced' takes on this -- and i agree! -- but i'm afraid that what they mean is stuff like:

So I don’t believe that Edward Snowden, the leaker of all this secret material, is some heroic whistle-blower. No, I believe Snowden is someone who needed a whistle-blower.

The Three Stooges-- Sully, Friedman, and D. Simon

It sounds like his girlfriend Sally Stripper blew his whistle plenty, am I right, guys? ;)

do we know for sure that it was tears on her keyboard

A few weeks ago, at a Reuters summit on cybersecurity, Gen. Keith Alexander said, “The great irony is we’re the only ones not spying on the American people.”

guam is spying on us??

read that as: gwar is spying on us??

This is in the first row of results for GISing "gwar spying":

http://184.173.194.236/~worm64/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/gwar_santorum.jpg

I do not know why.

I'm getting to the point where I wish Orwell had never written '1984'. The Right referencing it whenever 'political correctness' was mentioned was bad enough, but now I can't read anything without it being invoked.

we should force everyone to call it 'nineteen eighty-four.'

the gwar on terrorism

the clapper in that link from above:

Clapper’s deceptions don’t stop there. Rambling on in his rationalization to Mitchell, he focused on Wyden’s use of the word “collect,” as in “Did the NSA collect any type of data ... on millions of Americans?” Clapper told Mitchell that he envisioned a vast library of books containing vast amounts of data on every American. “To me,” he said, “collection of U.S. persons’ data would mean taking the book off the shelf and opening it up and reading it.”

that is either insanely idiotic or a total lie

clappertrap

if you're going to obfuscate, fucking obfuscate

to repeat my favorite and most oft-used phrase: don't piss on me and tell me it's raining

"either"

this is any selfrespecting tabloid's headline tho

Clapper told Mitchell that he envisioned a vast library of books containing vast amounts of data on every American.

i meant pullquote

how borgesian!

iknorite can't get over vision of him wandering blissfully but officiously through the stacks

"collecting" a book here and there

where IS that copy of Fanny Hill, it's never on the shelves

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/5/50/Terrorist_300.jpg/200px-Terrorist_300.jpg

http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lmwrz0BwsT1qd9gmo.jpg

http://image.lyricspond.com/image/d/artist-david-byrne/album-look-into-the-eyeball/cd-cover.jpg

iatee is it tru u went down your local poledancing class & called them all strippers, later telling police, "it's ok i'm a liberal! hilary 2016!!!"?

its tru

remember romney said binders full of women and everyone acted like it was somehow funny or notable for some reason, idk it was so long ago they were strange times

Obama has metadata full of women

Clapper told Mitchell that he envisioned a vast library of books containing vast amounts of women.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/06/snowden-says-nsa-hacked-china/

“We hack network backbones – like huge internet routers, basically – that give us access to the communications of hundreds of thousands of computers without having to hack every single one,” he said.

Snowden said he wanted to expose the government’s hacking activity to show “the hypocrisy of the U.S. government when it claims that it does not target civilian infrastructure, unlike its adversaries….Not only does it do so, but it is so afraid of this being known that it is willing to use any means, such as diplomatic intimidation, to prevent this information from becoming public.”

pollin pollin pollin

http://www.gallup.com/poll/163043/americans-disapprove-government-surveillance-programs.aspx
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162-57588748/most-disapprove-of-govt-phone-snooping-of-ordinary-americans/

btw David O Russell has an Abscam (google it) movie coming out this fall, so the '70s are BACK BABY!

― ballin' from Maine to Mexico (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, 12 June 2013

abscam plays a big if backgrounded part in the popular motion picture Donnie Brasco

"Edward Snowden's online past revealed"

For all you potential whistleblowers here on ilx: this is what will happen if you come forward. I fear for Garu G the whistleblower tbh