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

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

If the President can kill any citizen with a flying death robot without a trial and people are fine with that....

just wait til they find his reddit account

THERE IT IS -

http://ath-cdn.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/slideshows-wide/061313Cartoon1_3.jpg

Snowden's online past looks super fucking mild

Totally. Plus that cartoon has the worst drawn t-shirt I've ever seen - thought he was holding a billboard at first.

“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.

Relevant book on the early history of this type of wiretapping

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/c5/BMBcover.jpg

Sadly paw at my man totem is kinda lolzy

the hazing/vilifying of snowden by the media is kind of shocking to me. shocking and hateful. it's like a host of putatively reasonable just become schoolyard bullies at the first opportunity.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/13/us/nsa-chief-says-phone-record-logs-halted-terror-threats.html?hp&_r=1&

In a robust defense of the phone program, General Alexander said that it had been critical in helping to prevent “dozens of terrorist attacks” both in the United States and abroad and that the intelligence community was considering declassifying examples to better explain the program. He did not clarify whether the records used in such investigations would have been available through individual subpoenas without the database. He also later walked back the assertion slightly, saying the phone log database was used in conjunction with other programs.

Yeah, I think if I was in power, my next move would be to make a programme on TV taking a hypothetical risk and go through step by step to demonstrate how the information is used, leading to the neutralisation of the hypothetical risk. Maybe even have Obama present it, lead you through it. It would be fairly easy to present an innocuous and effective process (no matter what the realities), and most people, when faced with the abstraction of all this data, will probably not be all that alarmed by it. Obviously this would just be propaganda, but it's what I would do if I believed in such a structure. The downside would perhaps be the revelation of techniques that have previously been secret, but that might be something the State will have to accept.

At this point they are probably already working on a new similar and secret project. Spies will be spies.

He said the surveillance programs were critical to unraveling terrorist plots at home and abroad. In particular, he cited the cases of Najibullah Zazi

That's from today's Washington Post quoting the head of NSA yesterday. But days before this testimony various sites have asserted that these programs were NOT what was key in Zazi. Alas, the senators did not do follow-up questions and the Post reporter didn't even use google

http://www.emptywheel.net/2013/06/07/mike-rogers-as-confused-about-telecom-surveillance-as-he-is-about-drone-strikes/

more references to the debunking of n.s.a.'s Zazi story

http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2013/06/11/18902828-did-the-nsa-stop-najibullah-zazi

The Associated Press' Adam Goldman explained that the NSA program was very likely irrelevant -- British intelligence had already identified an al Qaeda email address, and shared that information with U.S. officials. Zazi did, in fact, send an urgent message to that address, which ultimately led to his arrest before he could successfully murder a lot of people.

So, what does this have to do with NSA surveillance, metadata, and PRISM? Given what we know, nothing.

But maybe, the argument goes, British intelligence learned of the al Qaeda email address in the first place thanks NSA programs. Right? No, as it turns out, the address was found on a laptop when a different terrorist was captured in 2009.

is Kathryn Bigelow at work on the NSA spin yet?

one time (and now again?) far-right blogger goes there:

http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/42124_Images-_Edward_Snowden_Modeling_Shoot_Found

Rick Perlstein suggests Greenwald made a mistake.

man i hate that fawkes mask but that photo is a sight

For all you potential whistleblowers here on ilx: this is what will happen if you come forward.

We are currently seeking a person of interest named Excelsior from the secret online collective known as 77 borad

https://sphotos-b.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash3/946661_496948723709933_306826955_n.jpg

Jack Shafer:

Secrets are sacrosanct in Washington until officials find political expediency in either declassifying them or leaking them selectively. It doesn’t really matter which modern presidential administration you decide to scrutinize for this behavior, as all of them are guilty. For instance, President George W. Bush’s administration declassified or leaked whole barrels of intelligence, raw and otherwise, to convince the public and Congress making war on Iraq was a good idea. Bush himself ordered the release of classified prewar intelligence about Iraq through Vice President Dick Cheney and Chief of Staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby to New York Times reporter Judith Miller in July 2003.

Sometimes the index finger of government has no idea of what the thumb is up to. In 2007, Vice President Cheney went directly to Bush with his complaint about what he considered to be a damaging national security leak in a column by the Washington Post’s David Ignatius. “Whoever is leaking information like this to the press is doing a real disservice, Mr. President,” Cheney said. Later, Bush’s national security adviser paid a visit to Cheney to explain that Bush, um, had authorized him to make the leak to Ignatius.

In 2010, NBC News reporter Michael Isikoff detailed similar secrecy machinations by the Obama administration, which leaked to Bob Woodward “a wealth of eye-popping details from a highly classified briefing” to President-elect Barack Obama two days after the November 2008 election. Among the disclosures to appear in Woodward’s book “Obama’s Wars” were, Isikoff wrote, “the code names of previously unknown NSA programs, the existence of a clandestine paramilitary army run by the CIA in Afghanistan, and details of a secret Chinese cyberpenetration of Obama and John McCain campaign computers.”

holy shit the nsa knows our phone numbers now?

yeah the white house leaking intel to political or policy advantage is as old as the hills, clinton managed to raise the game to an absurdly trivial level leaking things that would normally be rightly ignored - where they intended to take their summer vacation for example - and turning them into 'exclusives' (hilariously they would often poll this kind of data beforehand, in a weird way for the time it was a pretty sophisticated operation). occasionally there will be grumbling about investigating the leaks by the out of power party and occasionally the leak will be genuinely obv serious enough to provoke outrage and an actual investigation (hello again scooter libby) but by and large it's treated as another example of the kind of bullshit that works in politics. it's also obv an example of to what absurd degree overclassification has taken place, that the entire case for a war is made via leaks or that the existence of a massive program everybody (including the ppl it targeted) effectively knew existed can only be confirmed after many years via leak. and it's very effectiveness points to why the need for greater transparency, that it is such an effective tool w/ the press but that so much of what is classified can be de facto declassified and leaked to press not on the basis of national security but political expediency distorts and corrupts public debate. at the same time to not acknowledge that there is a gulf of differences between the white house leaking something and some independant contractor is to not get the difference between averill harriman and anna chennault.

http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/06/encrypted-e-mail-how-much-annoyance-will-you-tolerate-to-keep-the-nsa-away/