Or to put it another way, who the hell needs “direct access” or “back doors” when companies are building “secure portals” for them instead? We could quibble all day about whether these men lied (no), or simply misled (yes). But what I really want to know is this: What has these people, among the wealthiest on the planet, so scared that they find themselves engaging in these verbal gymnastics to avoid telling a simple truth? This section boils it down pretty well imo. What has them so scared? is a great questions. What do they have to gain by being so cooperative? I do suppose it is easy, from the sidelines, to suggest that one of them fall on their swords to elicit a public trial, bringing light to what is at stake. Still, I wish someone would. The public has to care about this because the politicians will not and clearly the companies won't either. This seems like the kind of thing that all of the protest factions could rally behind. Tea Partiers, OWS... you name it. This is some fertile common ground.n case you missed it, Miller spells it out for you: “While handing over data in response to a legitimate FISA request is a legal requirement, making it easier for the government to get the information is not.”
I got started on this this morning and then had like five different jobs erupt. Lemme start again: Every journalist who writes about wiretaps, espionage, the NSA, the NRO or the Internet should be required to read a little Bamford. The dude's been covering the NSA for 30 years. Fun facts in no particular order: - Google colocated a data center with the NSA in 2003 in Texas - Microsoft colocated a data center with the NSA in 2005 in Utah - The foreign complaints against the NSA are rarely related to human rights, and invariably related to industrial espionage - The NSA has been caught red-handed time and time again handing over trade secrets gleaned in pursuit of "terrorism" to American companies for economic advantage - Routing telecommunications traffic through the United States is now, has been and shall always be a convenient way to conduct wiretaps on foreign manufacturers without running afoul of the World Trade Organization (we've been very careful to protect the NSA in all trade agreements) - the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act has been used as justification for economic spying since 1977 - Woolsey is straight up about it why on earth would these "don't be evil" companies be in bed with the NSA? IT'S THE MONEY, STUPID. Everyone's all twitterpated over PRISM like they can't believe the NSA would do such a thing when for fuck's sake, people, the NSA has had all ( ALL ) voice and data traffic in the world running into its servers since 2003. That "warrantless wiretapping" everyone freaked out about in 2006? THEY NEVER STOPPED. Read this. The NSA has had software that allows them to mine voice traffic for context since 1989. They've had carte blanche to mine ALL OF IT ( ALL OF IT - ALL THE DATA - ALL THE VOICE - EV.RY.THING ) for a mutherfucking decade. And now people are all "holy shit they're still spying on us?" * * * That said: These people had every email the Tsarniev brothers ever sent. It did nothing. They had all the voice traffic and emails associated with Bengazi. It did nothing. They've had total, unrestricted access to anything they want and they still are ineffectual - UBL wasn't caught because someone hacked his gmail account, UBL was caught because someone read the HUMINT right. Look. The NSA doesn't want a sip, they want a firehose. They've been able to make that firehose wider and wider. It's never going to stop. However, their ability to actually drink from the firehose has gone down in the past 20 years because there's so much more water to drink. ...Which journalists would tell you if they read a little Bamford. I'm big on privacy. I think there ought to be an amendment guaranteeing it. It offends me to my core that the NSA could read this right now if they wanted. But I'm also aware that they're not, because that's not how they roll. Know who should be offended by PRISM? Alibaba and Baidu. And I'll bet they are.
I don't think much talk about it is surprise, just that PRISM being in the news provides a chance to talk about mass surveillance without looking like a raving paranoid. It'll die out in a few months and people will look at us like we're wearing tinfoil hats again, but maybe there will be more of us raving paranoids. Progress!
I admit I was surprised at the extent. I suspected, and call me naive, but I had thought it entirely probable that all my emails were at least behind a rubber stamping judge. I was actually told by someone that worked in an intelligence agency that they were careful not to catch US citizen communications without a warrant. I do think he believed it.
They're all publicly traded companies, and taking an ethical stance against the government would not please investors. I think this is one of the unfortunate side effects of the web becoming the only way most people use the Internet, and the popularity of cloud services. That forces us to centralize our software, and makes running anything widely-used require a lot of capital, making is easy to control us. The government has one entity to attack, and we're beholden to whoever can fund us.
Email is already distributed. You can run your own mail server. Usenet and the Freenet forum whose name I've forgotten have already done it, they just have few users. Bittorrent is pretty nice for distributing video. No streaming, but there are tradeoffs in everything. irc? To distribute files? Freenet is probably closest, torrents are probably a better choice. As a private backup? Disks are cheap, and colos aren't that expensive if you want remote backups. I don't know, those sounds like interesting problems.or of an email service
Reddit
or of YouTube
or Twitter
or Dropbox
of Google
or Skype
Bittorrent is pretty nice for distributing video. No streaming, but there are tradeoffs in everything.
utorrent actually has streaming functionality for torrents with video files. It doesn't always work the best, and of course you'll take a hit to your DL speed, but it's cool.
Back when anyone used the eDonkey network, {e,a}Mule had settings to prefer chunks from the start of files, so in principal you could stream video from them. In practice you never got download rates fast enough to do it, so it was mostly just useful for making sure the episode of Firefly you were getting wasn't actually mislabeled CP.
I bet it's doable, people broadcasting posts and shares, and feeds being built on everyone's individual server. I doubt I have the chops for it, but it's very interesting. forwardslash, do you have any thoughts?
Oh man, as you may or may not know I was a backer of Diaspora and I've posted a few thing on Hubski about Tent.io - in short, I think distributed, decentralized systems are the bee knees. Unfortunately I don't even really use the centralized social networks so I don't really have a need for a decentralized one and thus have preferred to spend my time working on things I do use, such as hubski. There are a few cool technologies to broadcast things including pubsubhubbub - which is an awesome name for a protocol - and there are a number of existing distributed networks we could hook into: aggregation via hubski, anyone? Unfortunately a lot of the implementations of these networks are bogged down in existing ideas of things, as such everyone (including me) just asks things like, "So it's just a distributed twitter?" because microblogging is an easy first thing to do. What if you hosted your own blog and had a hub running on the same server. As you posted new content on your blog you would send out pings to those subscribed to whatever you tagged it as, those subscribed to you, or those subscribed to your domain. People could subscribe via a centralized service such as hubski, or their own server, or even via any service which implemented the pubsubhubbub protocol. All in all I have very lofty ideas about what can be accomplished with this.
IMO the key to success here is any given user not having to know that they are not using a decentralized service.Unfortunately a lot of the implementations of these networks are bogged down in existing ideas of things, as such everyone (including me) just asks things like, "So it's just a distributed twitter?" because microblogging is an easy first thing to do.
What are ways we can ensure that Hubski doesn't fall prey to such things?
BLOB_CASTLE will be our pen pal while we are in prison.
SSL would be a start. As it is now, it's http, and wouldn't be hard to tap. I'm assuming Hubski is based off of servers leased/rented from someone or in a colo? Or are Hubski's servers somewhere on Mk's property? Either way, all the non-SSL traffic for Hubski is already flowing through a datacenter or major telecom at some point... Not that hard to monitor as it stands. Most of these datamining and collection projects just look for keywords. Like if you say some words that I'll refrain from saying, then that conversation gets saved and put infront of a rep to look into. So if a "black box" sees a certain string of keywords from in-flight data, it copys that and it gets flagged. Having SSL makes that a little more difficult for them to do that.