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

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/

otm

http://thedailybanter.com/2013/06/snowden-and-greenwald-beginning-to-self-destruct-the-nation-and-mother-jones-raise-questions/

that kinda smacks of counter-narrative work, right down to the headline, though the small Kevin Drum piece it links seems good and avoids the pitfalls of narrative-building/unbuidling

I also think more attention should be given to the misleading testimony of the head of the NSA and the Director of National Intelligence, and their histories

some of the counter-narrative stuff strikes as akin to "if the glove don't fit, you must acquit" -- meaning if snowden and greenwald's claims aren't completely accurate, there's no longer any show. which seems far from the case.

Should note that The Daily Banter, which I've never heard of, has been at this stuff all.week.

I haven't heard of it either; just stumbled across it.

false flag

false blog

I'm just glad Beetbort didn't live to see any of this.

I'm just glad Beetbort didn't live to see any of this.

White House press secretary Jay Carney told reporters this week that Obama “certainly believes that Director Clapper has been straight and direct in the answers that he’s given.”

maybe his heart and his best intentions tell him that's true, but the evidence, oh shit

straight and direct has nothing to do with the truth, of course

Prism will help maintain order and vanquish pesky anti-Waterworld activists

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/earth-insight/2013/jun/14/climate-change-energy-shocks-nsa-prism

"Climate Change Energy Shocks NSA Prism"

cool. gov't analysts and scenario planners foresee potential disaster. government's response is not to actually do anything to prevent disaster, but to let it roll on and control us instead. great.

reminds me of that gov't memo that said we could all adapt and live in underground caves in case of climate change.

Strangelove 2019

with shit like this I honestly wonder if we're nearing the end of the current order of things. wtf is going on.

in fairness, Spectrum, they know it's too late to prevent it.

xxpost giant bell jar or gtfo.

that whole article is so poorly argued

like the crux is linking this:

"Just last month, unilateral changes to US military laws formally granted the Pentagon extraordinary powers to intervene in a domestic "emergency" or "civil disturbance"

to random quotes from random reports

like its that dude's job to churn out blog posts about the environment so it's easy to see why he'd be tempted to try to link it to the subject du jour that is a nonsense article

but that*

but the pieces, they all fit. i hope the impression i'm getting from this is wrong.

some of us don't give a shit about brilliantly argued articles, this ain't moot court

yes, the pieces being quotes from a bunch of different studies done by places that do thousands of nonsense studies

xp

do you guys think obama subscribes to the DoD's "Quadrennial Defense Review"

I think he borrows Biden's copy

i'm on board with The World Is On Fire thesis, but iatee otm that the article is kinda hand-wavey

building a conspiracy on random quotes from the PR document the DoD releases seems like a bad plan

certainly the government is forecasting a variety of strategic scenarios for the future, climate-driven unrest among them, and the ongoing surveillance of/application of anti-terror laws & techniques against environmental activists is very real as well. the convergence of these two things does worry me quite a bit. reading that snippet of that forecast in that way, though, strikes me as a little Alex Jones-y.

yah

White House press secretary Jay Carney told reporters this week that Obama “certainly believes that Director Clapper has been straight and direct in the answers that he’s given.”

depends on what your definition of 'wittingly' is, man

http://i.ytimg.com/vi/fdChg4P1wWY/0.jpg

man why do still from 1999 look like 1980

Should note that The Daily Banter, which I've never heard of, has been at this stuff all.week.

Two writers from that site have a podcast "The Bubble Genius Bob & Chaz Show" that seems to be 100% devoted to attacking Greenwald and Sirota.

So we learn more about the confrontation in Ashcroft's hospital room in 2004.

Yep.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/us-surveillance-architecture-includes-collection-of-revealing-internet-phone-metadata/2013/06/15/e9bf004a-d511-11e2-b05f-3ea3f0e7bb5a_story.html?hpid=z1

Oops, same linked article. Nucleon!

When the NSA aims for foreign targets whose communications cross U.S. infrastructure, it expects to sweep in some American content “incidentally” or “inadvertently,” which are terms of art in regulations governing the NSA. Contact chaining, because it extends to the contacts of contacts of targets, inevitably collects even more American data.

Current NSA director Keith B. Alexander and Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. have resolutely refused to offer an estimate of the number of Americans whose calls or e-mails have thus made their way into content databases such as ­NUCLEON.

The Post has learned that similar orders have been renewed every three months for other large U.S. phone companies, including Bell South and AT&T, since May 24, 2006. On that day, the surveillance court made a fundamental shift in its approach to Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which permits the FBI to compel production of “business records” that are relevant to a particular terrorism investigation and to share those in some circumstances with the NSA. Henceforth, the court ruled, it would define the relevant business records as the entirety of a telephone company’s call database.

The Bush administration, by then, had been taking “bulk metadata” from the phone companies under voluntary agreements for more than four years. The volume of information overwhelmed the MAINWAY database, according to a classified report from the NSA inspector general in 2009. The agency spent $146 million in supplemental counterterrorism funds to buy new hardware and contract support — and to make unspecified payments to the phone companies for “collaborative partnerships.”

When the New York Times revealed the warrantless surveillance of voice calls, in December 2005, the telephone companies got nervous. One of them, unnamed in the report, approached the NSA with a request. Rather than volunteer the data, at a price, the “provider preferred to be compelled to do so by a court order,” the report said. Other companies followed suit. The surveillance court order that recast the meaning of business records “essentially gave NSA the same authority to collect bulk telephony metadata from business records that it had” under Bush’s asserted authority alone.

you know it's bad when cold-blooded corps would rather be forced to do the thing rather than being paid off to do the thing

otm

the name of the game is managing liability

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/jun/16/gchq-intercepted-communications-g20-summits

wow. am i just naive or is that a massive story?

seems like a big deal to me