Crusading journalist / egomaniacal hack Glenn Greenwald released Part Deux of his interview with noble whistleblower / foul traitor Edward Snowden yesterday:
Instead of engaging in the ritual Denunciation of the Firebaggers and Shaming of the Obots (which is so very last month), let’s focus instead on this one thing Snowden said:
Beyond that we’ve got PRISM, which is a demonstration of how the US government co-opts US corporate power to its own ends. Companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, they all get together with the NSA and provide the NSA direct access to the back-ends of all of the systems you use to communicate, to store data, to put things in the cloud, and even just to send birthday wishes and keep a record of your life. And they give NSA direct access that they don’t need to oversee so they can’t be held liable for it. I think that’s a dangerous capability for anybody to have but particularly in an organization that’s demonstrated time and time again that they’ll work to shield themselves from oversight.”
The companies in question have all denied providing the NSA “direct access” to their data, so either they are mistaken, lying or obfuscating or Snowden is. Whom do you believe and why?
Bonus points for anyone who can answer without accusing someone else of being an emoprog or torture apologist.
Redshirt
I think it’s semantics, and both sides are probably right. No, Google does not allow direct, unfettered access to their data by the NSA. But if the NSA asks, they get it.
Regardless, Google, Verizon, Amazon, etc, are storing everything about you that they can, for their own purposes.
Trollhattan
I don’t have any way to make an informed guess but I can use my magic guessing coin, which says “tails.”
This topic always nets TBogg five-hundred comments, so grab the reins and hold on.
Just Some Fuckhead
Instead of engaging in the ritual Denunciation of the Firebaggers and Shaming of the Obots (which is so very last
monthnight)FTFY
different-church-lady
Boy, that GG sure knows how to keep his powder dry — he’s now loading the used shells into the cannons.
Maybe next he can take that interview and do a autotune, and then a remix.
@Trollhattan:
I propose a new unit: 500 comments = 1 TBogg Unit
MattF
Well, I vote for “They’re all lying”, for some value of the variable ‘lying’.
Emma
I think that the government scoops the metadata without much hassle, but I think that the companies aren’t just handing over the keys to the kingdom and letting the NSA romp through their servers. I also think most of this stuff is never looked at. Why bother? Most of us lead life of utter mediocrity in the security sense.
Comrade Dread
It is difficult to assess without knowing exactly what Snowden had access to.
Snowden might have seen some files that implied that the government could do this and took from it the conclusion that the government was doing that.
Snowden might be interpreting the fact that these companies are storing this information and the government could easily access it with a national security letter or a FISA warrant and framing the context in such a way that it makes it seem like the government has spooks reading all your lolcats and pron.
Or the government really could have access to all this stuff, is actively monitoring it, and the companies are in CYA mode right now, trusting that none of this stuff is ever declassified or their stock prices are going to take a nose dive.
If only we had a separate, but co-equal branch of government to the Executive that could hold hearing and investigate this stuff. Some branch that we could elect people to act in our stead, let’s call them Representatives, who would be concerned about this enough to look into it for us. And if only we had some way of communicating with them, like a way to talk to them across the thousands of miles between our home and their Washington offices.
But such is the realm of science fiction.
KmCO
Yeah, good luck with that.
Trollhattan
@different-church-lady:
I like it. “Holy crap, this post on the difference between rap and hiphop netted one-and-a-half TBoggs!
P. Drano
I believe the corporations, without hesitation. They would surely not lie, as they have absolutely no history of it, and there’s nothing in it for them.
Corporations tend to be in the business of improving the common weal, spreading happiness, and so on. Naive people think it’s for the money. No. They make money, yes–sometimes lots of money, but they subsequently give most of it away to charity.
Origuy
All we’ve seen from Snowden is a Powerpoint presentation, as far as I know. Have we seen any technical specifications, like the format of the data or the transport mechanisms? How about the requirements documents, agreed to between the NSA and the various companies? For any large project, these should exist, along with test specifications, project plans, schedules of implementation, etc. Maybe these are some of the things that have been held back, but by now you would have to assume that the Chinese and Russians have them.
Edit: That is, if Snowden had them to begin with.
Gabe Nichols
I believe Snowden and the company spokespeople are both being honest, and I believe that Snowden is correct about the facts on the ground and the companies are honest but wrong.
More than 50,000 people work for Google and I can tell you for a fact that the number of sysadmins who would be required to give the NSA direct access to Google’s servers is 1. Make it 5 because you’ll need 4 people in legal who get the request, review the FISA court ruling, and include the piece about keeping it secret, then tell the sysadmin to set it up. I’m sure part of the request was a gag order explaining that this was a classified project and requiring them to keep it secret and that was done internally as well as externally. The C Suite doesn’t know more than 5% of what actually goes on at a big company like these
For the same reason when Clapper went to the house Intel committee and said that Snowden was lying and didn’t have the access he claims to have I believe he was being honest. I’m sure he went to an assistant and said “would he have had access” and the assistant looked up a policy document that said he wouldn’t. Policy documents and systems design are two entirely different things. Clapper was talking policy, Snowden is explaining about systems.
different-church-lady
@Comrade Dread:
Fixed, it’s fixed I tell you!
third of two
The answer probably lies somewhere in the murky application of the term “direct access.” Why use that specific verbiage; does the NSA/etc perhaps enjoy indirect access to the data under discussion?
Betty Cracker
@different-church-lady: Yeah, not much new there. I believe after being asked to define “direct access” following the last interview, Snowden or Greenwald (Snowald? Greenden?) or someone said more on that would be forthcoming. Which would be helpful.
NCSteve
I’m generally baffled by the whole PRISM thing. There seems to be a lot of weaseling and carefully ambiguous statements from both Greensnowd and the government that invite inferences and speculation without providing the information necessary to make those inferences and speculations valid.
But what I do know is this: I can just about guarantee you that everyone who chooses to to use one of those services (and most everyone uses one of them) clicked the “I Accept” button on a long-ass legal document detailing all the ways the company could use the data their quasi-voluntary use of the service generated to invade their privacy. I can also just about guarantee you that all but a handful of the people who are now concerned, very concerned, about their privacy being invaded by the evil corporate-government complex clicked those “I Accept” buttons without reading the documents first.
ChrisNYC
@third of two: Because that’s what’s in the powerpoint. “Direct access.”
different-church-lady
@Comrade Dread: I propose we create a fourth branch of government, so that everyone can claim it’s corrupt as well.
NickT
So far Snowden hasn’t actually come close to proving the major claim by which his whole case stands or falls – the claim of direct access. And yet, here he is repeating the same claim with nothing more in the way of proof. Given that no-one else with any credibility on these issues is supporting him in this claim – and that all of his alleged horde of secret data provides zero evidence for this claim, I decline to take him seriously.
So far Snowden has revealed the stunning truth that we have a security state and that we spy on other nations.
Well, there’s a shocker for you.
Comrade Mary
I have nothing to offer this thread but a soundtrack.
burnspbesq
@KmCO:
Is that from The Rite of Spring?
gorram
This is maybe slightly off-topic but why is this only being released now?
If we’re supposedly to take Snowden and Greenwald seriously why did they wait three and a half weeks from all of this starting off to get out their half of the story while everyone watched what happened to Snowden in Hong Kong, then Moscow, and now Venezuela?
That’s what this honestly looks like now: that Greenwald had a higher priority of covering Snowden specifically than of actually releasing this information.
different-church-lady
@ChrisNYC: Which is the lamest defense of the spin.
Snowald didn’t just tell us “direct access” — they both put their interpretation on what direct access meant. The when that didn’t bear out, GG tried to claim he was merely reporting on what the slide said.
Actual journalists do a bit more work than that.
different-church-lady
@burnspbesq: The Seinfeld Festivus episode, actually.
Biff Longbotham
“
of all of those big companies means lots of people in on this deal, if true. Seems like others in-the-know with a ticklish conscience should be mumbling affirmative mumblings about now. How come we haven’t heard from other Snowdonesque whistleblowers?
Mino
@burnspbesq: I see that my troll-fu was indeed weak yesterday. I didn’t look far enough into the past. Susan Weber Wright of the Paula Jones case and the Susan McDougal persecution is in charge of our Bill of Rights on the FISA court.
max
The companies in question have all denied providing the NSA “direct access” to their data, so either they are mistaken, lying or obfuscating or Snowden is. Whom do you believe and why?
I think Snowden is essentially is correct, because I think the NSA essentially has direct access via IP packet capture. (Then they have a different system for getting total access to the stored records of individuals, once they have chosen a target.) I think his phrasing was mistaken or unclear.
The corporate denials have to do with saying that the NSA doesn’t run or have administrative access to the systems (like Google or Facebook). Which is more or less true. They want to do that because they want everyone in the world to continue to use their products, even if (or especially if) using said products enables spying.
In practical terms, the NSA can get to all of it, and very likely do. (GCHQ in the UK, on the other hand, makes no bones about the fact that their taking it all – grabbing all data they can get regardless of whether corporations understand or know about that.) Too much traffic passes through the US for the NSA to *store* all of it, but they’re trying.
As for Mr. Snowden’s motivations:
He thought one thing back in the day, and then changed his mind.
max
[‘So there’s that.’]
burnspbesq
@NCSteve:
Reading it doesn’t lead to understanding. The lawyers who draft EULAs are the true Masters of Obfuscation. In any event, EULAs are the paradigm case of contracts of adhesion. They should be categorically unenforceable.
balconesfault
I suspect that these corporations are under legal obligation to deny that they are providing the info to the government.
burnspbesq
@Comrade Mary:
Can we offer you a towel to dry off? How about a pump for your basement?
Trollhattan
@burnspbesq:
Depends: are any French rioting?
El Tiburon
If Edward Snowden is knowingly lying – then he is destroying everything he is attempting to do thus far. And why lie? It seems his revelations thus far have set the planet on fire.
It just makes no sense that he would lie. Unless, he is mentally unstable and is unaware that he is lying. Of course it doesn’t mean he is lying or speculating wildly. But it just makes no sense.
Now, the companies named, do THEY have the motivation to lie? Or, as Clapper did, are they being too-cute-by-half and be technically correct while still doing as claimed?
Seems to me these companies have more of a motivation to lie or conceal or otherwise obfuscate.
But, as so many have mentioned ad nauseum, don’t we already know all of this anyway so what’s the big whoop, right?
Mino
And hoocoodanode that private enterprise, given all these wrenches, might turn their eyes from terrorism to commercial espionage. Not clear yet if it was upon instructions of the government or a little on the side. Seems to be concentrated on South American energy data. Wonder now why SA’s hair is on fire?
different-church-lady
@El Tiburon: Seriously?
NickT
@Comrade Mary:
I propose this as the official music for all future Snowwald discussions:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGFc3CfA5hM
NCSteve
@burnspbesq: Enforceability isn’t my point here. My point here is that those things are chocablock full of disclosures that add up to “we’re going to do whatever we want with your data, we don’t give two shits about your privacy except unless, in our sole discretion, its a PR problem for us and if you want to use our service, that’s the deal you take.
And most people aren’t concerned enough about their privacy to actually even attempt to see what all could happen to their data and yet now they’re shocked, shocked, to discover . . . whatever it is we’ve discovered.
Comrade Dread
Which is why I’m considering moving to Venezuela, long known for being a paragon of free speech and no government surveillance at all! he added.
@different-church-lady: That’s just crazy enough not to work. Let’s get on it!
Spaghetti Lee
@NCSteve:
Honestly, this sort of argument is what’s driven me over the edge since this story broke. I happen to think that ‘access to whatever personal information we can get our hands on’ is not a fair price for the ability to use the internet, and I also think ‘Well, you didn’t have to use Google, etc.” is, at least, an unreasonably high standard to set. Most people have to use online banking, online purchases, social networking and so forth these days for their job, let alone having any social life beyond that of a woods-dwelling hermit. This stuff is, for most people, an essential part of daily life-it’s not the same as, say, saying that someone who invested in an obviously shady get-rich-quick scheme or broke their leg while street racing sort of had it coming. People who don’t like this should be able to say so even if they’ve used the product-maybe especially so. People who actually use these websites and services getting discontent is the only thing that’s actually going to change them. And I don’t see what’s hypocritical about it. People have a right to want things to be different, and companies having access to our entire personal lives just for the privilege of us using them isn’t the only possible outcome.
I don’t know what it is about this topic in particular that seems to drain so many people of realistic perspective and human empathy, and make them so rabidly against the idea that things could or should be different. When, say, WalMart treats its workers like shit or Exxon causes an environmental disaster, people mostly don’t sit here and cluck their tongues and say what did you expect. So why do so many people automatically take the side of big technology companies?
White Trash Liberal
Greenwald was walking back the direct access claims to reflect that he was merely quoting the slides.
What Snowden has claimed has been vigorously denied, and the procedures clarified. The NSA is storing contents derived from FTP servers that these companies use to transfer data. The warrants appear to be excessively broad so that the US government can essentially suck up everything.
Foreign intelligence can be viewed with impunity. Domestic intelligence and data requires an additional warrant, which goes through FISA which has approved thousands.
Now, Snowden has made several claims that are frankly outside the bounds of truth. The claim that the NSA can practically read your thoughts as you type. That he had the power to tap any line. Whether he had some kind of potential super NSA hacking power and clearance has no bearing as to whether this power is or is not regulated.
In my opinion, Snowden is confusing the potential with the actual to the point where I think it is a deliberate conflation. And without a legitimate professional journalist to manage this story, we have Greenwald acting as an attorney flacking for his source.
In conclusion, the FISA procedures need transparency, oversight and increased scrutiny. PATRIOT needs to be repealed or at minimum revised to prevent the elasticity of data collection that is compromising civil liberties.
Further, legislation should be drafted to limit the duration that companies can hold “metdata” and regulate what can be revealed and shared privately and publicly.
Just like nuclear weaponry, cloning, and other breakthroughs, the innovation isn’t going away. But in the same manner that SCOTUS could keep genetic data from being patented, procedures can be implemented to rescue us from what is coming.
Snowden and Greenwalf, by doubling down on dubious claims only muddy the discussion we should be having. And creating discontent and apathy where there should be activism.
ChrisNYC
@El Tiburon: How do you know what he’s attempting to do? Not what he says he’s attempting to do. What he’s actually attempting to do.
RaflW
A good chunk of the answer is the Merkley-Wyden bill that Dick Durbin currently says is dead, but that needs a “freight train” of liberal (and selected privacy cons) rage behind it: to open up FISA court records.
It all comes back to that whole brave new world of double-secret court-made law that no one is supposed to know about, but the NYT disclosed.
When shit is that secret, of course Apple and the rest will just lie to your fucking faces about it. Duh.
El Tiburon
@Origuy:
So, Snowden would give crucial documents to the Russians and Chinese, but not to Greenwald, et al for publication?
Very David Gregoryesque…”aiding and abetting…” in tone, don’t you think?
El Tiburon
@different-church-lady:
Really? Can you not have one fucking serious debate without reducing it all to “Seriously?”
Can you tell me what part of my post you have a problem with? And do it like an adult. Please.
Just Some Fuckhead
@El Tiburon: Like an adult? Seriously?
GRANDPA john
@gorram: why? because it’s another headline hogging opportunity for GG
Mnemosyne
@El Tiburon:
I’m not sure if he’s knowingly lying or if he’s glossing over the fact that the government is only given that direct access after they present a valid warrant.
Since he’s also very, very upset that the US spies on other countries, I’m not sure he really understands that most people think there’s a difference between warrantless spying and spying with a warrant in hand. As far as he’s concerned, spying is spying is spying whether it’s done domestically or overseas, with a warrant or without a warrant.
Shorter me: Snowden doesn’t think the details are important, so he’s ignoring them.
Face
Since The Clap has already copped to fibbing to Congress (Congressional perjury, how the fuck is it prosecuted?), why should we believe anything else he or his cronies has said? As someone up above said, I’m guessing these companies are legally required to deny all accusations, regardless of their merit or accuracy.
Emma
@NickT: Second the motion!
Comrade Dread
@El Tiburon:
I think he thinks he is telling the truth. However, he may be applying his own interpretation and biases to the information he has, like we all do.
White Trash Liberal
@El Tiburon:
That is weapons grade DERP, bro
different-church-lady
@El Tiburon: I mean, an individual has no motivation to lie? But companies automatically do? Really?
El Tiburon
@ChrisNYC:
I have no idea what he is attempting to do. I never claimed I had that knowledge.
But he has implicitly stated what he is claiming to do: reveal the spying apparatus he finds so appalling. Whether or not that is his true claim, that is what he is claiming.
And going on that, then to assert a bunch of full-on lies would seem to destroy all of his credibility and everyone involved with him. So, it makes no sense.
Hey, if I banged Jessica Alba and Jessica Love Hewitt at the same time, why would I then lie and add in Angelina Jolie if that part were not true? It just makes no sense. Not saying it didn’t happen – just saying.
? Martin
Snowden is lying. He misunderstands what he stole.
There’s no technical way that the NSA can do what Snowden claims. Further, there’s no possible way they can do it with the budget that’s been cited in his documents for PRISM.
The ‘direct access’ is effectively a set of ‘escrow’ servers that the companies maintain. They are identical to the regular servers in terms of data structure and contain only data on users that have been subpoenaed. They get updated with new services as those services are rolled out. They get immediate updates when the users data changes. They are effectively ‘live direct access’ but only for the users that have been subpoenaed.
This solves one of the bigger problems for the social media firms, which is complying with the subpoenas, because they’ve effectively automated the compliance portion. It’s harder for them than for the phone companies because social media data isn’t standardized like phone records are, and social media data structure is constantly changing (consider the rate at which Facebook and Google roll out new features across all of their properties; consider the rate the phone company adds new features).
This is a technically feasible (and trivial) thing to do, and works within the budget quoted. It’s also something that the media companies would comply with because it benefits them. Keep in mind that Facebooks only business is user privacy. They walk a fine line (relatively poorly, IMO, but issues of implementation don’t matter here so much as attitudes toward policy and corporate mission.) Opening that door wide and facing a user backlash would destroy the company. Companies aren’t going to commit suicide over this. They’d fight the government when it works that strongly against the company, and I don’t see any evidence that they fought this.
From what we’ve been told by the companies, the majority of their subpoenas are from law enforcement, not national security. That’s another complication for them to want to solve because with data going in different directions and different capabilities on each end, this becomes a very expensive problem. Instead they can build this ‘escrow’ server, give each agency an account which allows them to access their data, and that’s that. What’s not to like all around?
Mnemosyne
@El Tiburon:
IIRC, both the Washington Post and Greenwald say that Snowden gave them more information than they published — for one thing, he gave them 40+ slides of a PowerPoint presentation but they only published 4 of them. If Snowden gave the Russians and Chinese the same information, then they have information that both the WaPo and the Guardian decided was too sensitive to be published.
ChrisNYC
@El Tiburon: I think the story, per Greenwald is that Snowden DID give him and the Guardian all the docs. They chose not to publish some of them. So there is something that Glenn Greenwald (reminder: infallible) believes should not be disclosed. What Snowden has or hasn’t shown the Russians or the Chinese or the “independent” reporters of the South China Morning Post is another story. But that’s Snowden’s business, clearly and we shouldn’t pry.
NickT
@El Tiburon:
The thing is that those companies live or die by how they handle data. I don’t believe that they would just give the government direct access to their servers without one hell of a fight in the courts. It’s completely against their interests to do so. Nor would the government want that fight. The dropbox solution would be the logical – and acceptable – outcome for both sides.
El Tiburon
@different-church-lady:
Is that what I said?
No.
I said IN THIS CASE, it makes no sense at all for Edward Snowden to lie. He has to know that eventually all of this will come out, right? It seems (at least from what I know) that he has enough of a case on what he does possess without just shooting bullshit off.
BUT, companies like Google, et al that RELY on the confidence and good will of the public writ large would have more of a motivation to lie to protect that confidence.
Do you really not at least accept this concept? Let me ask you: generally do you find corporations to be truthful and forthright especially when it comes to protecting their image and credibility?
ChrisNYC
@El Tiburon: Ahem
Like I said, he’s made statements about what he’s doing but I have no idea if those statements are true. None. Why do you place so much trust in his assertions?
NickT
@El Tiburon:
Given that Snowden pretty clearly did lie to a whole series of people along his merry way, I think you need just a smidgeon more evidence before declaring St Edward of Sheremetyevo a flawless truthteller.
Keith
I’m guessing that the companies are lying to avoid customer backlash and counting on lawsuit immunity as a trump card in the event it comes out.
Comrade Mary
@burnspbesq: All is fine here, thanks, but I’ll probably get rained on good when I go out to the dentist later today.
@NickT: Grieg, you magnificent bastard.
peach flavored shampoo
Pipe. Dream. Any president who both 86’d the PATRIOT and strongly enforced it’s no-longer-allowed-snooping would be DOA politically the first time terrorists struck. The howling about “we were blinded from spying on their planning and scheming!” would hit decibels that make airports jealous.
Politicians dont think long term….only until their next re-election. It’s not in their best interests to end the program. Only a 1-termer could get this done.
Carl Nyberg
Snowden says the companies give access.
The companies say they don’t.
This sounds to me like a plausible deniability situation. Officially, the NSA has limited access. Unofficially, the NSA knows where the key to unlock the warehouse is. The companies know the NSA knows the location and they could check how much the NSA is using the key to access the warehouse. But the companies have no intention of fighting the government on this point. So the companies pretend it isn’t happening.
Redshirt is right. This is quibbling over semantics.
And the tell is, the tech companies and telecoms won’t go into any detail.
NickT
@Comrade Mary:
At last, a woman who appreciates music and values me at my true worth!
Emma
@El Tiburon: He is an egotist. He expected to be hailed as a savior and hero. When there was pushback he started playing verbal games. And he seems to have been an indiscriminate thief — Der Spiegel flatly stated that some of the things they had obtained would put human beings at risk and wouldn’t publish them.
Having said that, and separating the issue from the messenger, there’s one opportunity here and that is to push for a lot more transparency from the FISA court and a lot better supervision from Congress. And that, boys and girls, ain’t gonna happen unless we move mountains.
(edit) and what Mnemosyne says below)
Mnemosyne
@Spaghetti Lee:
As I’ve said from the beginning, the only possible solution to what’s freaking people out is to restrict the information that public companies are allowed to collect. That’s what the law is in Europe — they restrict which information can be collected at all, while the US puts no restrictions on that but tries to restrict who is allowed to see/use the information collected.
The only way to prevent Google et al from sharing all of their information with the government is to stop them from collecting it in the first place.
NickT
@Carl Nyberg:
Snowden hasn’t gone into any detail either on the direct access claim.
Presumably that invalidates his assertions too, by your rules.
different-church-lady
@El Tiburon:
Why not? Evidence suggests he went in seeking what he “found.” Is a bad case of confirmation bias so hard to believe?
I’ll quote Oliver Wendell Holmes: “General propositions do not decide concrete cases.”
I do understand Betty posed the question within the framework of “belief.” I think you might have taken that a little too much to heart.
El Tiburon
@NickT:
Didn’t we just go through a big scandal a few years back with the telecom companies doing the same thing? And weren’t we all up in arms? And wasn’t it about to go to court before Congress and Obama passed legislation granting them immunity?
Is it really so unfathomable to imagine ANY corporation (maybe not CREDO I guess) working with the government in secret? Many of you sound shocked and incredulous to even imply such a thing.
Punchy
Is this the fat sister of Jennifer’s?
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@El Tiburon:
He doesn’t have to be lying to be wrong, simply under-informed or uninformed- half-assing it. His educational history, the way he took off to “free” Hong Kong, the way he applied for asylum without visiting embassies all say half-assed.
That said, $122K/year isn’t $200K/year. That was a fucking lie he didn’t have to tell, but he did.
joes527
@Carl Nyberg:
I’m not saying that anything that you said is wrong, but that “tell” could be just that they are prohibited by (secret?) laws from saying anything more. (even if that “anything” is: “we aren’t doin’ it, man!”)
Joe Buck
I agree with Redshirt: the companies are probably using legalism and semantics to dispute that the access they grant is “direct”, but for all practical purposes it is so close to direct that it doesn’t make a difference.
schrodinger's cat
I thinks Google needs to get started on a word salad to English translator. It will help with reading Brooks, Friedman, Greenwald and the like.
Comrade Jake
I just have more questions from this, honestly. It seems to me much boils down to whether or not an analyst needs a warrant to access such files, and if the companies are ever provided such a warrant in advance. And then, what does “direct” mean, precisely? Are things sandboxed or not?
But I suspect Greenwald will never ask Snowden these sorts of things.
White Trash Liberal
@El Tiburon:
But he has issued zero technical explanation behind his claims. Just some vague concepts and bits of jargon.
In my last job, I had access to the Marine Corps Total Force System (MCTFS). I had other accesses as well, which I could have used to reroute bank account information, steal identities, craft fraudulent payrolls, put people indebt, change addresses, etc.
I could explain the details on every level. I could also explain all the regulations and oversight in place to prevent and punish me should I have acted beyond my duties and abused my power.
Snowden is essentially stating that he personally had a blank check authority to engage in genius acts, but had provided nothing to create insight into how things actually work.
mk3872
It takes a very paranoid mind to believe a low-level server system administrator who worked in the HI office of the NSA for a few months and assume that he knows all of what he is talking about over each of those Internet companies and the entire U.S. gov’t.
NickT
@El Tiburon:
No, they aren’t the same cases. Google’s whole business model is built around handling data – which wasn’t the case for the telecoms.
Why do you keep giving Snowden the benefit of the doubt when he’s given you no evidence on his key claim and hasn’t produced anything else that we didn’t already know?
different-church-lady
@Comrade Jake:
Ah, then you’re doing it correctly.
Trollhattan
O/T Am now TOTALLY on board with fracking, now that noted expert Rich Lowrey has weighed in. Whew, do I feel better.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/352936/our-fracking-future-rich-lowry
BTW, did you know the nuclear industry continues “to thrive”? Me neither. It’s almost as though San Onofre and Fukushima were still chugging out megawatts by the bushel.
patroclus
That Edward Snowden guy sure is dreamy – he reminds me of George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, John Marshall, Paul Revere, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt all rolled into one. Why isn’t he on Mount Rushmore yet? Why no commemorative coins or stamps?
NickT
@Comrade Jake:
Part of the problem here is that Greenwald clearly doesn’t have enough technical knowledge to know what Snowden is talking about – which is why he’s blustering and bluffing and spinning his wheels on Twitter.
Redshirt
@Mnemosyne:
Agreed. That’s the only realistic avenue for action – pressuring companies to secure our data. The Government will always have the right to obtain data via subpoena. These corporations have no such right other than what we give them as consumers/customers.
For example, there could be a marketing advantage to this – how about a new search engine which is built on the implicit premise they will not collect your data? Would that be a threat to Google?
RaflW
@Biff Longbotham:
PBS’s Frontline — in 2007 for gosh sake — pretty firmly alleged that at least one agency had a data line running right out the back of one of the major telcos.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/homefront/view/
This pretty much sums this all up, again from six years ago:
Peter Swire, a law professor and former White House privacy adviser to President Clinton, tells FRONTLINE that since 9/11 the government has been moving away from the traditional legal standard of investigations based on individual suspicion to generalized suspicion. The new standard, Swire says, is: “Check everybody. Everybody is a suspect.”
Hardly anyone batted an eye then. I thought it was outrageous then and now. Anyone who bloviates on privacy but doesn’t contact their Rep and Senator (often!) on this is just that, bloviating. There are policy answers. Yelling 500 times here or at TBoggs place ain’t doin’ shit.
Mnemosyne
@Comrade Jake:
As far as I’ve been able to tell from the stories (including Greenwald’s), the government is able to access the information they want after presenting a valid warrant to the company. The original claim was that there was widespread warrantless information gathering going on, but even Greenwald has backed off from that claim.
That’s why the conversation has turned to getting better oversight of the FISA court and its warrant process — the original claims of warrantless surveillance have not panned out.
? Martin
I’ve commented before that much of what the government is doing is designed around reducing latency (the time between initiating something and completing it). If the data they want is at some company, and a national security issue comes up (say, two bombs go off in Boston), how long to get a warrant, get the court to approve it, deliver it to the company needed, have them assemble the data, deliver it, and then do the analysis. Best case, that’s weeks. That’s damaging. In the case of regular law enforcement, a program like PRISM is hugely beneficial. Some of those subpoenas are for missing persons. Knowing if their social media gets accessed tells you a lot about what’s going on, but you need to get access to it quickly. If the infrastructure is already built, and it’s just a matter of clearing the warrant with a judge, getting the user id in the system, and then logging in, you’ve improved the process for everyone.
As data goes digital and can be stored in such massive volumes (something not possible with analogue data) the previous physical barriers to data access vanish. Policies were never written because of the physical/economic cost to doing this stuff prevented it from happening. Well, those physical/economic barriers are falling fast. The only protection anyone has from any of this stuff is policy. Period. Facebook can release all of your data to whoever they want anytime they want and it will take seconds to do. The only barrier to this is policy.
So, some of the broad warrants have policy built into them:
1) The government can capture all of this metadata.
2) The government cannot look at what they’ve captured.
In order to look at the data they already have, they need a specific warrant. Do we trust them? Obviously some don’t. But we have no choice. And the reason we have no choice is because trusting policy is the only recourse left. Policy is the only protection we have in a digital world. Copyright holders have been learning this the hard way for 2 decades now as all physical copyright protection efforts have immediately failed. The only solutions have been policy ones.
Now, should there be more transparency here? Absolutely. But there’s a lot of misunderstanding about what’s happening here. There are constant calls for physical barriers to the data to be erected. That’s pointless. It feels good, but it’s counterproductive in the long run. What we need are policies and policy implementations that we can trust. That should be the call. The people most vocal about this are arguing for completely the wrong thing.
schrodinger's cat
@NickT: When has that stopped a Punditubbie from opining?
Mnemosyne
@Redshirt:
Just a slight correction — what I’m saying is that the companies should not be allowed to collect certain kinds of data at all. If they collect it, the government will be able to justify accessing it, so the private companies should be blocked from collecting it in the firrst place.
Jockey Full of Malbec
Just a practical point: Snowden worked at Booz Allen for only a few months.
This is technical work: It takes more than a few months to obtain the in-depth knowledge he claims to have.
Comrade Jake
@NickT: I don’t think you need any technical knowledge to ask when warrants are employed along the way. This seems like a very basic question that should have been asked long ago. Especially when you consider that one of the FISA warrants was amongst the leaked documents.
My guess here is that Snowden is mostly commenting on what the system is capable of. That is actually a very different statement from how the system is used in practice or as dictated by law.
NickT
@Redshirt:
No, because search providers generally make money from ads, not the search engine per se. Without the data they can makes available, those ads aren’t going to be half as effective and the revenue from them will dry up. Even if, say, DuckDuckGo succeeds in developing a search engine as good as Google’s, the question of how they stay afloat and make it big will still push them to accept advertising (as they do now to a limited degree), and that will probably mean they need your data sooner or later. Unless they manage to hook up to say a non-profit like the Mozilla Foundation (which actually got its financial boost back in the day by including a Google search box in their browser!).
matt
Snowden’s lying, with a built-in incompetence dodge based on his use of mushy terminology.
mclaren
Yes, Redshirt nailed it. Snowden says those companies provided the NSA with “direct access to the back ends of the devices” whereas google et al all claim the NSA has no “direct access to customer data.”
Snowden is talking about NSA devices without i.p. addresses that sit on the interface twixt the google servers and the fiberoptic switches, and do packet-sniffing. It’s notionally different from giving the NSA access to the googles’ et al’s servers, but from a practical standpoint, it amounts to the same thing.
Comrade Jake
@Mnemosyne: This is my understanding as well, which makes the release of this snippet of video somewhat reckless, no? What’s the impression it’s supposed to leave? Only that the government is free to do whatever it wants.
Soonergrunt
@different-church-lady: a drowning man will reach for anything.
NickT
@Comrade Jake:
But the key direct access claim made by Snowden and Greenwald doesn’t involve warrants at all. That’s where the problem with this whole story lies – because Greenwald doesn’t understand how utterly implausible that claim is. Why doesn’t he understand this? Because he doesn’t have the necessary technical knowledge. What Greenwald is doing is like trying to report on baseball without understanding what the strike zone is.
? Martin
@RaflW:
And that’s unnecessary now. 30 days of digital calling data for the entire US – every phonecall made in the country for a month would need about 1,000 square feet of data storage. It’d cost about $60M in hardware. It’s cheap. And the telcos could easily transfer the data in realtime over standard internet lines used by even medium sized data centers.
Mike in NC
This NSA stuff reminds me of that terrible movie that showed government satellites tracking Will Smith’s every footstep through the streets of Washington DC. Hyper-realistic!
Shakezula
Is none of the above a choice?
Bob In Portland
Years ago, before Jonah Goldberg, I discovered an interesting evolution in the definition of fascism in the American Heritage Dictionary.
From 1975: “A philosophy or system of government that advocates or exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with an ideology of belligerent nationalism.”
From 1993: “A system of government marked by a totalitarian dictator, socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition, and usually a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.”
The first definition seems extraordinarily like present-day America.
JCJ
@NCSteve:
I agree completely with your statement about the “I accept” button. Also, since I have not been asleep for the last few years, I have frequently laughed about how sad it would be to be the person listening to my wife and me chat when she is visiting her family in Thailand. All of these communications have been subject to the Patriot Act for years. Doesn’t mean I think that is good, I have sadly accepted the reality. My congresscritter is the shitstain who is “credited” with writing the Patriot Act, while one of my former senators is the only one who voted against it. As far as “domestic” communications I always imagined they would dream up an excuse about how since so many of our communications are international they had to check them all.
Tractarian
Simple.
Snowden is talking about the version of PRISM shown on his
stolenleaked PowerPoint slide.The companies are talking about the version of PRISM actually implemented.
So, Snowden isn’t really lying, I guess… more like Bush-level misleading….
Redshirt
@NickT: Oh, I agree. Just saying there is some potential for the market itself to regulate. Would you pay 10 bucks a month for private web traffic? Would you shop at an online store that promised not to collect your data? It’s a hook.
Unlikely though, for the reasons you mention. But possible. More possible than believing your data is ever safe from the Government, since they have the legal right to access it via court approval.
RaflW
@peach flavored shampoo:
Good lord. Presidents don’t repeal laws!
Legislating, how does it work?
Ms. D. Ranged in AZ
Speaking as an IT pro with over 15 years experience, a Masters in Criminal Justice and some experience as a forensics analyst…..here’s my 2 cents…..Let’s start with the technical definition of “direct access”. Originally “direct access” meant letting someone go to the physical location of a storage device and take data of their own choosing directly off that storage device. Back in the day, this meant that a person would do this by standing at the console that directly controls the storage device (e.g., hard drive, drums, etc). Of course that’s out of date because I can be in Podunk, Mississippi and connect to a storage device in BFE Africa and do the same thing. Physicality doesn’t necessarily matter any more.
The key here, IMHO, is the ability to take any data from a storage device. The keys to the kingdom, so to speak. Regardless of these new fangled interlocking toobs that allow such remote manipulation, there are still many many barriers in terms of logistically accessing the storage devices. Let’s use Google as our private company example.
They don’t have their servers all in one place. It has about 36 server farms worldwide. Every single one of those has multiple levels of security and probably a myriad of technologies (i.e., protocols, operating systems, security software, etc, etc) within a variety of local LANs. Data is not stored according to physical locations. There is no guarantee nor really any necessity for storing US data on servers in the US. They might have a preference for it, but that doesn’t mean that’s how it works. Furthermore, packets from a single email can and do travel different routes over the Internet (TCP/IP protocol breaks those messages down into packets that are given an unique identifier that allows them to be reassembled on the other end). That information can be tracked and intercepted easily enough. I’m not sure if they are recording for posterity the actual routes those packets take (any Networking experts out there know?). But that data would add yet another level of complexity.
Now take that complexity and multiply that times the number of Internet companies that the NSA would have to interact with because each company will have a different technology, set up, etc, etc. Navigating that is a nightmare for each company internally much less for an outsider, as savvy as the NSA might be. Most likely they have an entire department of attorneys and IT specialists who are specifically tasked with receiving and responding to governmental requests for information (which come from all over the world). So there is no easy “keys to the kingdom”–not in physical or virtual reality. This is a VERY good thing, actually because they can’t just let the NSA or anyone else just waltz in and take stuff.
Logistics aside it isn’t in these Internet companies business interests. Customers don’t want their data being used by unauthorized people. They know that and there can be real world consequences to violations of privacy. I know, personally, that if I feel a site is asking too much or I don’t like their privacy policy, I simply won’t use them. There are, usually, many other competitors to choose from. These companies want to be law abiding but they also want to keep their customers. The almighty dollar comes first. They’ve said as much and they’ve set up their policies and procedures in compliance with maintaining a balance between those goals.
So they aren’t letting the NSA come into the HQ or remotely connect and plumb their data. And they aren’t letting the NSA ask for everything–only what is legal which is a very specific set of data–metadata. The NSA has outright said that’s what they are given, note given, not taken, from Google, et. al. The companies back them up on this. An example of that info includes what phone or email accounts a person of interest has communicated with along with dates, times, the route the message took, the size of the message, names of attached files, etc. The NSA does not NEED a warrant to get that meta-data according to SCOTUS.
Originally known in telephone wiretapping parlance as a ‘pen register’, i.e., recording numbers called by a person of interest, was not considered by the Supreme Court to be a true “search” and did not require a warrant. This was decided back in 1979. Most rulings regarding meta-data flow from this decision, I think (not a lawyer and I don’t play one on the Intertoobs). Once the NSA has that data, they look for patterns. They are supposed to discard the data that doesn’t contain patterns (not sure if they are doing this and that is something we CAN and should do something about). But the subset of data that contains patterns is used to obtain an actual search warrant by real judges on real courts that any American can find via, ironically enough, a Google search.
The key to understanding this controversy is to understand what “direct access” really means in today’s technological world. See above. Is it possible to give someone direct access to a server remotely? Yes. Is it possible to give the NSA direct access to the Google et als server farms? Yes, but it would be illegal but more importantly it would be EXTREMELY implausible logistically–extremely inefficient for all parties involved.
And Snowden knows all this but he also knows that the general populace doesn’t. They might believe that Snowden can wiretap the President’s emails any time he wants but they also believe that a hacker can manipulate traffic signals and redirect fighter pilots remotely. We in the IT business are a scosche more cynical and can call bullpucky. Snowden is banking on the fact that the American public doesn’t really understand the term “direct access” and that it calls to mind all those crappy hacking movies. It helps drive his narrative. But it isn’t related to real IT. If I was a betting woman I’d say Snowden is full of shite.
FlipYrWhig
I think Snowden/Greenwald and Clapper/NSA/etc. are actually largely in agreement about what’s happening — they’re just emphasizing different things. S & G are emphasizing that there’s a huge infrastructure that does sweep up a lot of information and _could_ be used to target individuals other than dangerous terror suspects and such. A lot of what S says is essentially “If I turned the machine on you, I could find out everything about you, and I don’t want the government to have the ability to do that.” What Clapper/NSA are emphasizing is that there is a lot of data collection, but the next step, targeting, is always subject to oversight, which is why the government _wouldn’t_ go amok and target dissidents, gadflies, and random schmoes.
G & S want to say that this kind of surveillance is _potentially_ limitless and corruptible, and C & NSA want to say that as it exists now it is limited and above-board, and would never _become_ what the critics imagine.
Where a lot of people have gotten confused is that G & S have a tendency to blur two kind of statements: “This could be happening to anyone” and “This is happening to everyone.”
Which is why the grounds for consensus between the two sides lie in asking hard questions about oversight and regulation, particularly as regards the functions of the FISA Court. That’s the site where it all becomes legal, so it’d better be strict, not lax, and open (to the degree that it’s practicable; think FOIA), not shadowy.
Bri
This is good. Now John can post about it again in a few hours and we’ll have another flame war.
MattR
@NickT:
Do you really believe this? I see that court battle going as follows:
Companies – The government is asking for unprecedented and unwarranted access to our servers
Govt – National Security!!!!
Court – Give the gov’t what it wants. (EDIT: PS. And here is a gag order so none of you companies can reveal anything to the public)
NickT
@Redshirt:
Realistically, there is one thing that keeps your data (and you) safe from deliberate government or big corporation interference: the sheer volume of data out there. Unless you do something to make people notice you, it’s extremely unlikely that anyone will even realize you as an individual exist, much less care about it.
Frankensteinbeck
@El Tiburon:
For the same reason you bragged about doing it in the first place – the ego rush. People lie all the time for the ego rush, or wildly exaggerate already impressive claims. People with no financial benefit wildly misrepresent information to fit their paranoid fantasies all the time, and believe they’re telling the truth when they do it. He’s admitted he was looking for a reason to scream ‘Jackbooted thugs are coming for your informations!’ and he has plenty of reason to lie, fudge the truth, or be willfully wrong. His word by itself is as trustworthy as a chocolate hammer, and got a lot less trustworthy when he took large amounts of classified information first to China and then to Russia.
Morbo
@max: In fact, 2009Snowden thought 2013Snowden should be shot in the balls.
Comrade Jake
@FlipYrWhig: That seems like a pretty reasonable take to me.
NickT
@MattR:
I don’t believe it, because you are omitting the stage at which the corporations send out a cry of rage and distress by any means available online and through the media. That’s not a confrontation that the government would want, or, most likely, win.
Comrade Jake
@NickT: Of course. Having all of the data is actually not all that far from having none of it.
Nevertheless there is clear potential for abuse, and we should be concerned about that.
Forum Transmitted Disease
The only benefit that I’d like to give Snowden is a 9mm to the back of the head, but I would also have to say that if you don’t think the government and the three-letter agencies that run everything don’t have every single commodity communications system on the planet backdoored then you are woefully, and probably intentionally, naive.
Redshirt
@NickT: True, but a diminishing truth. With every passing year, tech gets more powerful, and thus search capabilities improve. Consider the following: It’s the year 1984, and there are video cameras on all the streets. To monitor you walking the street, some dude(s) would have to comb through tons of videos from separate cameras, spending no doubt hundreds and hundreds of hours, and possibly failing. Today? There’s software that can do it in seconds.
This is a trend that will only intensify.
Emma
@FlipYrWhig: Bingo! Yes. Exactly. Oversight. Transparency. Regulation.
MattR
@NickT: As I alluded to in my edit, the gov’t will get a gag order claiming that any revelation of the court case would damage national security (EDIT: Or it would be done through the FISC)
NickT
@Comrade Jake:
Sure – but what Greenwald and Snowden are doing is making it much harder to have that conversation. Right now this looks more like the middle stages of some unimaginative thriller than anything else.
Comrade Jake
By the way, one of you clowns recommended Maclean’s “Young Men and Fire”, which I am enjoying reading presently. This appears in it, and seems appropriate:
different-church-lady
@FlipYrWhig:
They don’t merely have the tendency — they do so deliberately.
Redshirt
Congrats, everyone! 115 comments in and this is a mostly reasonable discussion. I think we’ve proved/disproved someone’s experiment.
Close it up.
NickT
@MattR:
You seriously overestimate what the government can do in such cases and how quickly it could do it.
Comrade Jake
@NickT: I agree with you, but practically speaking, there is nothing stopping us from having the conversation here.
Well, except for Botsplainers and Firebaggers getting into a pissing match, that is.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Worth noting Ellsberg released an actual set of government documents with the Pentagon Papers. So were is the equivalent with Snowden?
Emma
@MattR: If I were to go to battle with the government over this, I would do it loudly, publicly, and in a regular court. A gag order would only generate stories, commentary, and rumors about the gag order, which would weaken the government position, not strengthen it.
NickT
@Comrade Jake:
Have some of the more boring regular trolls been dragged out and shot in the back of the head by the Tunch Death Squads? There’s a welcome lack of yapping from certain individuals.
Comrade Jake
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: IDK for sure but certainly the FISA Warrant seems to fit the bill.
Plus, ppt slides are the new paper.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Forum Transmitted Disease: ut I would also have to say that if you don’t think the government and the three-letter agencies that run everything don’t have every single commodity communications system on the planet backdoored then you are woefully, and probably intentionally, naive.
“Think” as in “I suspect” is much different from “I have irrefutable proof”, and that is what seems to be the problem with Snowden.
piratedan
@Emma: and we’re living in an imperfect world where the possibilities of how we can limit what is collected and who gets to collect it and the reasons for it are juxtaposed with the fact that we happen to have this current Congress, House and Senate combined. While I think that Wyden and Udall are on the right track, where are the votes to implement what they want in the Senate and how in the hell do you get it passed in the House.
Comrade Jake
@NickT: I’ve noticed that as well. Tunch is a heckofa kitteh.
? Martin
@mclaren:
No, they don’t quite claim that.
Read what I wrote regarding this ‘escrow’ data server for subpoenaed data. It is direct access to live data provided by the company, but only for subpoenaed users. It is not unfettered data access to all users.
Snowden/Greenwald read that portion of the slides and inferred they had access to everything. They don’t. But what they have is extremely valuable and beneficial. Not making use of it would be foolish – not just from the intel agencies, but law enforcement more broadly.
The companies are saying that there isn’t unrestricted access, which is true, but they aren’t claiming ‘no direct access’ for subpoenaed users. In fact, they have broadly indicated how many subpoenas. They are asking permission to break that data out more concretely.
And IP packet capture is hardly the same thing. For one, the volume of data is fucking massive. They’d have to filter it to a huge degree. Almost nobody has fixed IPs at the client end any more, so that doesn’t help. The security data to ID the user is almost exclusively in SSL, so IDing whose packet it is is exceedingly difficult. They can break that, but not in realtime as packets fly through, so it’s not helpful unless they can filter by IP (which they pretty much can’t do as they aren’t fixed in most cases).
What they can do is:
1) Capture specific kinds of packets, not knowing the origin, and process the data in the packet. So they could grab your public Facebook page and parse it. But they can do that just by running a search spider, so why bother?
2) Via subpoena or some other mechanism, get a fairly realtime correlation between IP and identity, and then sniff specific packets for that IP, seeing what services are in use, storing the unencrypted stuff, and then breaking the encrypted stuff. I’m almost certain they’re doing this, but they can’t do it in scale. The number of data packets sent daily is monumental. In the trillions. And because the internet is distributed, there’s no obvious place to tap in unless you’re targeting one of the endpoints of the packet (you could tap Facebook’s primary provider to get all of their stuff, but you’d need to do this for every provider out there – and that’s a huge undertaking.)
Even email’s shitty encryption is secure enough against this. The intel agencies would need to run one of the relays, decrypt the message, store it, and the re-encrypt it for the next relay. I won’t speculate on whether they’re doing this or not, just noting that sniffing packets won’t cut it here. It can’t really do very much unless you know exactly what IP to target. Internet taps are about where phone taps were in the 70s. That might change in the future, but it’s not technically possible to filter everything.
different-church-lady
@NickT:
Naw, Cole is probably just busy gardening.
Forum Transmitted Disease
@Spaghetti Lee: I disagree. None of us was forced to start using these things. Society did just fine without them before they came along. Just because something is easier does not mean that it is necessary.
You don’t have to use Google. Or Facebook. Or a cell phone. You may not be able to get clear of all the monitoring without incurring a degree of inconvenience that you’re not willing to live with, but you could sure as hell at least not give up the entire store voluntarily, as so many these days do.
PopeRatzo
Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook. These are companies that stay in business by commoditizing personal data. There’s a story from earlier today about Microsoft swapping out big chunks of Windows 8.1 code to give them better access to your searching and surfing habits.
Not one of those companies would hesitate to throw a baby off a bridge if it boosted their stock price, and they each have gigantic tax exposure for their massive profits. Tax exposure that seems, by the way, to have been eased quite a bit since the Patriot Act. Notice how quickly the story of Apple hiding profits in imaginary countries went away?
Each one of those companies knows that keeping the government happy will help their bottom line. In fact, if they weren’t giving the NSA access to our data, most of their big institutional shareholders would probably be pissed.
When the NSA spooks hit the front door, I guarantee they all hit their knees faster than a TV preacher caught with a male hooker.
Again, if Snowden is making all this shit up, why is the government after him for spilling secrets? It’s not like there’s a law against making stuff up or lying to journalists.
How many times do we have to catch the NSA and multinational corporations with their hands in the cookie jar before we stop giving them the benefit of the doubt? And why would anyone here be so committed to giving the government the benefit of the doubt? Maybe we could save time if we just made a list of the times government officials generally and intelligence contractors and NSA officials specifically actually told the whole truth about something. They seem to lie even when they don’t have to.
Snowden, I can’t say one way or the other. But I know the guys on the other side of this equation are a bunch of lying sociopaths, from the top of the org chart right on down.
Finally, ask yourself “who’s got more to gain by lying?” Once you wrap your head around that question, this whole picture starts to become clearer.
MattR
@Emma: But what if the gov’t is the one intiating the suit to demand this access from the companies? There might not need to be an actual gag order if this is done in the FISC, which is closed to the public and whose proceedings are classified. I also disagree with your assertions about the results of a gag order being disclosed. There is plenty of evidence of the gov’t using the state secrets privilege to shut down court cases and the public outrage ends up being shortlived and minimal so I don’t see why the discovery of a gag order would be much different.
@NickT: And I think you seriously understimate how subservient the courts are to claims of national security.
Emma
@piratedan: Yes. The primary problem we have is that the House of Representatives has stopped representing its aggregate constituency. They are going to do whatever they think is of political advantage whether it is supported by the country or not. It used to be like that on a few issues; now it is the order of the day.
Origuy
An early Guardian article claimed that Snowden smuggled out four laptops. A few days later, the LA Times claimed that he used a USB thumbdrive.
In either case, we may presume, and the NSA must presume, that the laptops or thumbdrive have been on a network controlled by the Chinese and probably the Russians. Whether Snowden intentionally gave them their contents or not, that information has been compromised.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Comrade Jake: Ah ok, then Snowden is incidental to the rest of it because that warrant is the real story here.
And having going threw similar stuff with court orders at places I work the company’s lawyers handle it. It’s hard to believe any of these companies did anything more or less than what the court orders demanded because they would just be opening themselves up to all kinds of legal trouble.
different-church-lady
@? Martin: But you keep forgetting to account for all the magical top secret technology the government has! They can do anything with it!
NickT
@MattR:
Which wasn’t my point. All it takes is one company screaming to the public about government spying on your personal data and there would be a shitstorm of epic proportions. I say again, you overestimate what the government can do in this area.
? Martin
@Forum Transmitted Disease:
Well, Congress required all internet routers to possess a back door that law enforcement could use to bypass encryption. So what you say is correct.
Problem is it’s not useful in the context we’re talking about here. There are millions of those routers. They can’t tap all of them. They could tap specific ones, though, but there’s physical limits on this problem. They need to filter at the tap, otherwise you need to double the size of the backbone just to transmit the data from the taps. Even the US govt can’t afford that. And that presents a new problem – how do you transmit the instructions to all of these taps on what to filter? This is an impossible problem to solve on the scale that people are thinking. You can only really do it in limited contexts.
NickT
@Origuy:
It’s the latest stealth technology – 4 laptops that compress into a thumb drive. And are also a floor wax and a dessert topping thanks to the wonders of nanotechnology, natch.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Comrade Jake: @Enhanced Voting Techniques:
Regardless of the medium, Ellsberg had a proven, qualifiable expertise on that included in his leak. That sort of expertise is sorely lacking in Snowden.
NickT
@different-church-lady:
Shhh. You’ll give away the Harry Potter Replicant program if you keep talking.
Older
https://startpage.com/@Redshirt: “a new search engine which is built on the implicit premise they will not collect your data” —
There is such a one:
https//startpage.com
Could be more than one, but I only know of the one.
El Tiburon
@White Trash Liberal:
Ok. Fair enough.
Betty Cracker posed the question: Who do we think is lying or not?
My point is I have a much greater distrust of corporations than One Dude out there.
Is Edward Snowden simply pulling this out of his a-hole? Of course it is possible. But is it not also possible that he is telling something of the truth and the corporations are the ones hiding something?
Which is more likely? Again, I tend to side with the individual.
NickT
@Older:
DuckDuckGo makes the same claim.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Mnemosyne: Along those lines, should employees at a bar be required to wear blinders so they cannot remember who came in there?
FlipYrWhig
@different-church-lady: I think if you’re confident that The Government Shitlist includes you, you don’t see much of a difference between “anyone” and “everyone.” If you can’t see how you’d ever end up on such a list, the whole thing sounds vaguely ominous but not likely to affect you directly one way or the other. And activist/rabblerousers — my brother fits the description, and has a lot of friends in those circles too — have seen their people get bullied and harassed plenty of times, so they’re just more on a hair trigger about anything in this vein. I’m a boring person with a boring life and I can’t imagine the government wasting its time trying to mess with me. So I respond to this whole story at a distance, while others feel it in their bones. (As to your main point, Greenwald is both on a hair trigger himself _and_ skilled at pulling other people’s triggers in his writing, IMHO.)
NickT
@El Tiburon:
This doesn’t have to be a question of lying by either side. It could easily be the case that neither Snowden nor Greenwald really understands what they have in their hands and are simply rushing to the worst-case scenario because that’s just how their minds work. I think you’d have to agree that they’ve both got a decent share of paranoid libertarian DNA based on their past histories.
kc
@Spaghetti Lee:
We’ll get pissed off about it as soon as a Republican gets in the White House.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@El Tiburon: I’m having trouble siding with someone who talks to the Chinese and he Russians, and thinks that going to Venezuela will be awesome.
MattR
@NickT: And I think you underestimate the fear of god that the gov’t can put in these companies to prevent them from speaking out. Do you think the gov’t would not retaliate hard against a company that spoke out like you suggest?
Emma
@MattR: OK. Point me to a case where that has happened and I’ll do the due diligence.
Also IIRC FISA is not that sort of court. The government cannot bring a case to it to scoop up everything, the law be damned”. FISA is specifically set up to review government data acess requests. Now, I think that it’s troubling that there is no vetting of that court’s decisions, no information provided to the public even with a safety zone of months/years. and a little too much broadening of government powers, and I would love the rules for all of those rewritten. And, considering the current Congress, an unicorn.
El Tiburon
@NickT:
Why are you giving a huge corporation the benefit of the doubt?
As I just explained, right now when there exists so many unknowns, I tend to side with the individual over a corporation. Whether it’s Exxon or Enron or Wells Fargo, experience seems to be that they will lie and obfuscate and continue to lie and obfuscate even after being caught and fined millions of dollars.
I still don’t understand why so many are flummoxed by this notion.
Also, it seems to be accepted that Snowden is a flake and a liar. I don’t know if I accept that position right now. I believe we are still at the he said/she said version of this drama.
NickT
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
To be fair, millions of our countrymen talk to imaginary gods and think that Oklahoma is a bastion of freedom.
kc
@Forum Transmitted Disease:
That’s fucked up. Though it could get you hired by Fox News.
NickT
@El Tiburon:
Because it’s in the interests of the big corporation for what they are saying to be the truth.
Surely you can read well enough to understand the point of what more informed people have been telling you on this subject? I don’t see you offering any coherent thoughts on this topic, unless you count generalized paranoia and a cult of the individual. Bush and Cheney are individuals too, my friend.
different-church-lady
@El Tiburon:
Phrased like that I never would have been sarcastic with you. Everyone’s mileage varies, right?
Once there’s a cease fire, people can even entertain the idea that he’s not lying, but merely mistaken.
The real distraction is that Snowden has become a Rorschach blot — everyone sees what they want to see in him. Playing the odds proves nothing, and doesn’t really add anything. Acting like we’re lawyers making closing arguments doesn’t accomplish anything.
? Martin
@PopeRatzo:
That’s not quite true. Yes, Google and Facebook. But not at all for Apple, and I’d argue not much for Microsoft.
Google and Facebook derive effectively 100% of their revenue and profits off of your data. Apple derives damn near $0. They make all of their money selling you physical things, and key to their success has been trust from consumers. They have a lot of financial incentives to never commoditize your data. In fact, few companies have as strong a disincentive to commoditize user data as Apple. Microsoft is in the middle, pulled in one direction toward Google by Bing and other services, and pulled in the opposite toward Apple by sales of Windows, Office, XBox and so on.
Google and Facebook (and Yahoo and pretty much any ‘free’ service) know they’re fucked if they step over the line, but their business model requires they put their toes as close to it as they dare. This is the price of ‘free’. Microsoft is the most challenged, but they seem to be headed more in Apple’s direction than away from it (Microsoft IE offers do not track features whereas Google’s Chrome is the only browser remaining that doesn’t. Apple’s Safari was the first to offer it. Browsers as reasonable proxies for user privacy attitudes.) Apple’s is the easiest. Just don’t go there. Ever. Not worth it in any possible way. Apple’s services aren’t free. They require a non-trivial up-front cost (computer, phone, tablet) and if you look at devices like AppleTV (the lowest cost of entry), Apple generally doesn’t put free services on it. They usually require a subscription because Apple is unwilling to comply with providing the data required to get on the free services.
FlipYrWhig
@El Tiburon: I don’t think anyone thinks he’s making it all up. I think the concern, or mine at least, is that he’s not being clear about the ways it has already been restrained by law, and IMHO by emphasizing what he thinks is technically possible he leaps over what has actually occurred. And he didn’t need to do that.
El Tiburon
@Frankensteinbeck:
First, you have no way of knowing that “he has plenty of reason to lie…”
You can’t know and you don’t know.
Back to my silly analogy: if I did in fact bang both Jessica Alba and JLH and bragged about it, the bragging is only so good if it is true and is believed. Why take a chance on adding Angelina Jolie and see it all fall apart? Then NO ONE would believe about Alba and JLH?
It makes no sense. Of course it’s possible, but it just doesn’t add up.
But why on this thread is the preponderance that Snowden is lying and not the corporations? Why the trust for these folks? I find it very curious.
MattR
@Emma: I am not sure if FISC would be an approparite venue although I would not be shocked to see the gov’t use the desire to capture this info about foreigners as a way to get access that they can eventually use against Americans. But even without FISC, the state secrets doctrine seems more than sufficient to prevent details of the case from coming out in public. At the very least, it can be used to obfuscate things enough that we end up having the same conversation we are having now – what exactly does “direct access” mean.
El Tiburon
@NickT:
Really? How so?
Seems to me it’s the incredulous media, pundits and commenters here that make it harder to have the conversation. Snowden AND Greenwald the conversation is even happening.
If not for the Greenwald articles on this, you all would be discussing Tunch or verbally assaulting Andrew Sullivan.
Forum Transmitted Disease
@MattR: Qwest.
May 2006: refused publicly to hand over all their records to the NSA
April 2007: CEO convicted of insider trading
April 2009: CEO reports to prison, six years for insider trading. The Supreme Court orders no bail allowed.
If that’s not an object lesson I don’t know what one is.
? Martin
@El Tiburon:
Because you’re unwilling to take the effort to analyze what everyone’s motives here might be. You’re just doing a kneejerk ‘corporations are bad’ thing here and refusing to recognize that in all manner of other contexts you trust corporations just fine.
Truth is everyone trusts corporations to some extent. Understanding when you do and when you don’t is illustrative. You’re unwilling to illustrate that, which makes you look either like a naive ideologue or a troll. And truth is everyone distrusts individuals to some extent and you’re being no more illustrative on that front either. My post at 161 gives part of my analysis on motivations in one particular, relevant context. You don’t have to agree with how/where I put my trust, but I at least am willing to acknowledge where that line is with me. You aren’t. And that’s why people don’t take you seriously.
NickT
@El Tiburon:
It isn’t.
You could satisfy your curiosity by allowing yourself the luxurious advantage of actually, you know, reading the thread, rather than getting all defensive about the thread you imagined to have taken place.
El Tiburon
@PopeRatzo:
Thank you, kind stranger.
Corner Stone
This is hilarious. Martin, is there nothing you can’t do?
John O
I believe Snowden, because he had far more to lose, and because I don’t trust authoritarian power structures, which all the named ones are at least in part as far as I can throw them.
To me Snowden’s actions have the whiff of, say, coming out of the closet 30 years ago. You knew it was going to cause pain for you, but you felt so strongly about it, for whatever reason, that you do it anyway.
Snowden had a good life, and he was well aware that he was going to ruin it. There is far less reason for him to lie.
Ms. D. Ranged in AZ
@? Martin:
Thanks, that’s an excellent network analysis regarding packets and how they might be using them. I’m of the opinion that they don’t track packets until they’ve narrowed it down to a particular target and that would be after the subpoena. Like you say, the scale is just too large.
Corner Stone
Anyone remember what happened to the former CEO of Qwest Communications?
NickT
@El Tiburon:
I’d say it’s the paranoid Snowwald deadenders who don’t want a conversation because that would involve facing the fact that Snowden and Greenwald don’t know what they are talking about. But hey, why don’t we have a few more expositions on the theme of Snowden the Apostle of Liberty to the Slavs and Greenwald the Grey fearlessly challenging cyber-Mordor? We don’t need facts for those, do we?
Trollhattan
@Ms. D. Ranged in AZ:
Very helpful [how DARE you!] post. Thanks!
? Martin
@El Tiburon:
We don’t if he lied intentionally, but he clearly doesn’t understand what he’s saying.
The very slide that is being used as proof of PRISM also says it costs $20M per year. How is a program on the scale that they’ve described able to be implemented for that price? It’s impossible. Snowden’s supporters keep waving away that contradiction because of confirmation bias – they want the description of the program to be true. But it’s equally possible that the situation is reversed – that the cost is accurate but their description of it is wrong. My description of the program perfectly fits what’s described on that slide – certainly better than Snowden/Greenwalds. Further it perfectly fits with what the companies themselves have stated, before they even stated it. Further yet, it perfectly fits with what the government has said. And yet further, it makes sense as something the companies would participate in, as not violating their businesses.
But one way or another, Snowden/Greenwald have yet to explain the contradiction in the materials they’ve provided with the story they’ve provided, even now a month after it’s come out.
NickT
@Corner Stone:
Well, you know that Aaron Hernandez got into trouble for refusing to share his data with the Feds, right? The murder story is just an elaborate bluff to keep the KRAFT program under wraps.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Corner Stone: Isn’t he dreamy? When he gave a play by play of the SEAL raid on the Osama Bin Laden complex, I knew we were in the presence of a remarkable individual.
It’s beyond me why they wouldn’t promote someone like this to front page. Instead, we get Soonergrunt who knows everything but can’t talk about it and so all we get is updates about the house he’s building.
FlipYrWhig
@John O: Well, you know, when paranoid wingnuts make accusations about the government’s jackbooted thugs coming to take their guns and Bibles, do you believe them because THEIR foes are “authoritarian power structures” like the military and law enforcement? How far does this rule actually go?
Emma
@MattR: No. Really not. The government cannot dictate to a court to fashion itself into a star chamber, even if it tries the case in the most sympathetic court possible. Partially because the court system is not built to work that way and because the moment the court does that its decision becomes public knowledge. A good legal reporter would smell a rat twenty miles away.
And as far as the possibility of a government using the data against its own citizens, that has always existed. Always. Doesn’t mean we don’t push back against it.
NickT
@FlipYrWhig:
? Martin
@Corner Stone:
I don’t know. Is there anything you can do?
Corner Stone
@Just Some Fuckhead: Actually I’ve been wondering why he hasn’t been appointed to some kind of Presidential Special Commission.
It seems he deeply understands so many varied topics, and is so sure of himself, that he could probably serve the nation at large much better than the unwashed here at BJ.
But, for however long it lasts, I for one welcome our Martin overlords.
Emma
@Forum Transmitted Disease: Well, it would have been a clearer one if Nacchio hadn’t dumped so much of Qwest stock right before it took a dive that he made over $50 million betting against his own company.
NickT
@? Martin:
I think you’ve hurt the poor little critter’s feelings with those facts of yours.
Corner Stone
@? Martin: I try to focus on just staying humble.
Just Some Fuckhead
@? Martin: Corner Stone has made some gorgeous pot holders with the the loom and the loops.
John O
Well, argument ad absurdum aside, yes, the “rule” has limits.
I’ve seen the interviews. I don’t get the sense of self-grandiosity from Snowden I do from Greenwald, who I’m a big fan of, for the record. He’s a bit of a zealot, but I’m one who thinks we need a few more 4th Amendment zealots stirring up the pot a bit.
It’s my favorite one. If only people were as invested in it as they were #2…
NickT
@Emma:
But… but.. the government forced him to do it!!! FEMA death camps!!! Death panels!!! Sharia law in Michigan!!!
Seriously, who needs Sarah Palin when paranoid kookery is so readily available?
daverave
@Ms. D. Ranged in AZ:
I, for one, appreciate the time spent crafting this reasonable and intelligent comment on this issue. Thanks!
Corner Stone
@NickT: Between you and Martin, I’m just thankful the BJ community has the direct access it needs to the pre-eminent authorities across so many diverse spectrums.
Spaghetti Lee
@Corner Stone:
Focus harder.
Frankensteinbeck
@El Tiburon:
I just explained it. I will try to explain it another way. Humans hardly ever do anything that has been precisely calculated to be in their best long term interests. It may not ‘make sense’ that you would lie in the example you give, but it is exactly the kind of senseless thing that people do all the time. Why? Like I said, for the ego rush.
I do not know WHICH reason to lie applies to Snowden, but your argument is that he has no believable reason to lie. My counterargument is that there are any number of reasons why he might lie. Some of them are even practical, like to cover his ass as he sells secrets to China and Russia. ‘Because it makes him feel like a hero’ or ‘because he wants to believe that the US is spying on everyone, went looking for proof, and jumped on the first thing that kinda sorta sounds like that’ are two reasons that would fit his behavior perfectly. They’re at least as believable as a corporation lying to cover its ass. Nothing that he’s done since paints the picture of a reliable informant, and the information he provided doesn’t say what he says it says.
Of course he’s being treated as an unreliable source.
Redshirt
@Corner Stone: And now we enter the “NO YOU ARE” phase of this tired debate.
It was productive for a while.
Betty Cracker
@Ms. D. Ranged in AZ: Allow me to add my kudos to the pile. Thanks!
Just Some Fuckhead
@Corner Stone: I know I probably don’t crow about it as much as I should but I am just about as knowledgeable and expert on teen porn and the mechanics of income redistribution as anyone you’re likely to find, pseudonymous or otherwise.
FlipYrWhig
@El Tiburon: You seem intent on this idea of “lying.” But lying isn’t the issue. The issue is how to reconcile all the information we have into something coherent. It seems to me that all the principals essentially agree that there is very large-scale data collection going on. Apart from the “direct access” side discussion, which seems to be a dispute over terminology, what happens after that is that Snowden and Greenwald want to say that all this large-scale data collection is itself an invasion of privacy already and, worse, could become virtually totalitarian if no one stops it. But the NSA, Obama, Clapper and the rest want to say that large-scale data collection only ever takes place under strict oversight and limits (e.g. “minimization”), so it isn’t even close to totalitarian and would never be. Neither side has to be “lying.” Those are both coherent arguments predicated on a common set of facts, arguments that may or may not be convincing depending on your own political views.
I mean, it’s true that with a GPS in your phone the police and sinister corporations _could_ track your every move and ambush you at the grocery store and spirit you off to Guantanamo. But that’s not the same thing as saying that they _are_ doing that, or that phones don’t now or shouldn’t ever have GPS in them. It’s just various ways to think about the implications of known facts.
Persia
@NickT: I’m not entirely sure Snowden knows what he’s talking about at this point.
At this point I’m just accepting that everyone’s lying, mistaken, or both, and I’ll probably never know what the actual truth of it is.
Corner Stone
@Redshirt: Oh no. Do you mean that because of my presence you can’t have the conversation you’ve been really eager to have?
I apologize, in full. I’ll retreat now into that sad lament, the bittersweet song of the discarded, one of the early James Bond themes.
encephalopath
I don’t think it’s backdoor access, but rather the other way around, like the AT&T Room 641A spying revealed by a contractor in 2006, the data is being rerouted before it gets to the company servers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
The corporate lawyerly claim they they aren’t giving the NSA a backdoor to their data is technically correct in this model. The technology companies don’t consider it to be “their” data until it gets to their servers. Since the NSA gets acess to the data before that the tech companies can claim that they aren’t giving the NSA anything.
NickT
@Redshirt:
CornerStone: the proud owner of the pointiest tinfoil dunce cap in all the big bad West.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Corner Stone: I thought we couldn’t have the discussion because Snowden made it seem icky. Et tu, Corner Stone?
Redshirt
@Corner Stone: There was a pretty reasonable discussion going on right here in this thread, for a while. I’m sure you’ve considered it duly.
Corner Stone
@Spaghetti Lee: It’s been my life’s work. Sadly, I sometimes fail.
But I know that if anyone can stay humble, it’s me!
Trollhattan
Two-fifths of the way to 1.0 TBogg unit. Moar postin’ and fightin’, please.
El Tiburon
@NickT:
“I find it very curious” to you is me getting defensive? Please.
So are you claiming that in the comments where one takes a stand on whether or not Snowden is the one lying or otherwise not being upfront is at worse 50-50 with those who claim it is the corporations?
Well, I do admit to not reading every single comment, but I would hazard a guess that it is at least 2-1 if not 3 or 4-1 with those laying blame on Snowden.
Soonergrunt
@Just Some Fuckhead: The house has been built for two months. Where the fuck have you been?
No, actually I don’t know everything. I’ve never claimed to, and if I come off that way, I’ll have to work on it. I do know a lot of people who tell me things when I ask. As far as classified information, well, I’ve seen some and even made some but I don’t discuss it because it’s you know, classified. Anyway, the VAST majority of the CI I’ve seen is probably stuff that if you saw it you’d be like “this is some of the most boring shit I’ve ever read.”
El Tiburon
@FlipYrWhig:
You seem intent on this idea of “lying.” But lying isn’t the issue. The issue is how to reconcile all the information we have into something coherent.
ruemara
@El Tiburon: You do understand that you’re admitting your views are prejudiced from the get go? How do you expect to get to the facts if you’re approaching things with a clearly staked out position?
accidentalfission
NSA told the truth when the said they had no “direct” access.
It went trough a third party IT company that I’m too tired to google up right now.
Eric Snowden? Good on ya mate. Daniel Ellsberg says so too.
Just Some Fuckhead
If we want to continue to have the conversation, I can make up a whole bunch of horseshit too.
El Tiburon
@FlipYrWhig:
Betty Cracker wrote this:
Now, I know in at least a few of my comments I said, “…lying or obfuscating…” So, my only intent is to address the question as posed by Ms. Cracker.
I agree I have used ‘lying’ as a shorthand for “mistaken, lying or obfuscating.”
But my point remains: I would think the leaker (Snowden, Manning, Ellsberg and so on) would have greater motivation to be as precise as possible. I also think (and know) that corporations are much more likely to LIE or OBFUSCATE since they have nor real culpability.
Spaghetti Lee
@Redshirt:
He realized it couldn’t be allowed to continue.
Bill Arnold
@? Martin:
Are you referring to the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act?
Having a hard time interpreting that wikipedia article. How do the backdoors work?
Just Some Fuckhead
Martin is a spy for the Chinese. Nothing else can explain his inside information. The only reason you people haven’t realized that is because you’ve been unwilling to explore Martin’s motivations.
Corner Stone
@Just Some Fuckhead: I think, and I’m willing to be corrected by others, that the conversation that people here enjoyed having was the one where several commenters here knew way more than the guy who did the actual work for 4+ years at the actual agency.
And so that conversation was eagerly framed in the way where of course the person who is acknowledged as causing serious, grave and irreparable damage to national security simply took random shit he *clearly* didn’t fully understand. But thankfully we have the benefit of direct access to people with a wonderful, rich and deep understanding that clearly refutes that other person’s.
So, really, when you think about it, the conversation we’ve all really wanted to have was in exactly how many ways the former NSA contractor really didn’t understand what he was doing then, and has since failed to understand what he’s talking about now.
That’s a conversation I think we can all get behind.
Corner Stone
@Spaghetti Lee: Why so angry?
Just Some Fuckhead
@Corner Stone: He’s pretty upset about what happened last night.
Rex Everything
The party who’s lying is likely to be the party with the deeper & more entrenched motivation for lying.
Bill Arnold
@Forum Transmitted Disease:
Little known fact; as a young company, QWest built the fiber optic intra-network at NSA headquarters.
Source – Bamford’s ”Body of Secrets”, p510. ”The cable contraact was offered to the small start-up fiber network company Qwest, said one person, ’because it was the only bidder that offered the agency its own fiber path that would not have to be shared with commercial users.”
(copied from an old comment post to highclearing.com.)
FlipYrWhig
@El Tiburon: As far as I can tell, and I’m no expert, the “direct access” dispute isn’t a case where either side is lying per se. Direct access looks to be under the terms of various court orders (one layer that involves authorization to compile and store metadata, one further layer that involves authorization to build a target list from analyzing that data). There isn’t indiscriminate direct access — but, Snowden and Greenwald want to say, there _could be_, and that’s how things are drifting. So the agencies do have direct access, but with some controls on it; the companies denied something more like indiscriminate direct access. Everyone could be right, and no one lying, just offering different interpretations of what the facts are and how dire their implications. But I don’t think anyone thinks Snowden and Greenwald were pulling a hoax, and that’s what “lying” connotes to me.
burnspbesq
@Corner Stone:
Nacchio?
Guilty of 19 counts of insider trading. Conviction upheld on appeal.
Surely you’re not going to trot out the old paranoid theory that his prosecution was in retaliation for Qwest not cooperating with the Bush administration’s illegal wiretapping.
Got even one scintilla of evidence to support that theory?
Didn’t think so.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Corner Stone:
Someone can work in an NFL locker room for as long (or longer) and not really know a damned thing about what’s in the playbook. We don’t know the specifics of Snowden’s role in the intelligence community. We don’t know if he understands the playbook, or beyond that, if he understands how the plays within are employed strategically.
different-church-lady
@NickT:
Well, thank god that’s over.
tybee
CALEA-II
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/06/the_problems_wi_3.html
Marc
@Corner Stone:
Bullshit. You know what story you want to believe, and you’re not willing to listen to anything that contradicts it. And you’ll mock, attack, or do whatever it takes to shout down anyone who tells you what you don’t want to hear.
burnspbesq
Hey Aunt Betty,
We were good for over 200 comments. Can we have our ice cream now?
different-church-lady
@FlipYrWhig:
But to be fair, Betty framed it that way to begin with.
Corner Stone
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again): Well, we do have some statements by officials to go on. No one is refuting he had access to very sensitive material. No one is refuting he had skills that made him valuable.
In fact, all we’ve seen from govt officials is an empowering of Snowden. They’ve repeatedly made the case that he was skilled, could possibly bypass safeguards and in a general sense had the run of the shop. They’ve also repeatedly told us he has caused grave and irreparable harm to our national security.
You’re making the alternative case that he was a proverbial janitor who snuck into the players dorms and stole a playbook?
I’d just like to make sure I understand your contention, thanks.
different-church-lady
@burnspbesq: Bah — you have to get to at least half a TBogg unit to get ice cream.
Corner Stone
@Marc: Shut up, shut up, shut up!!
Yes. I seem to be all powerful in this regard. I appreciate your clarity on this and will now retreat to my focus on humility.
Corner Stone
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again): Who do you go to when you want to know something? The mechanic, or the shop owner?
different-church-lady
Overall, I’d say that if one is interested in getting to the truth, the the question of who deserves the benefit of the doubt isn’t even germane to the examination.
I didn’t realize this when the thread kicked off, but Betty essentially requested that we all dump our feelings on the table and then construct some kind of intellectual defense of them. It’s not just a doomed exercise, it’s a pointless one.
Mnemosyne
@El Tiburon:
Because there are many technical experts saying that what Snowden is claiming happens isn’t actually possible.
So now it’s not “corporations vs. the little guy,” it’s “technical experts vs. people who don’t know much about technology.”
Add in the fact that Greenwald’s “technical expert,” Edward Snowden, has an agenda (to say the least), and you now have a credibility problem that Snowden is doing absolutely nothing to clear up.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Corner Stone: Based on his analogy, he’d go to the fans of the other football team who not only know less than the schmuck in the locker room but also have a stake in making sure he gets the wrong information.
Marc
@Corner Stone:
Nah. People are making a technical case about how things work. We all have our own biases. I’m a scientist, and this sort of thing happens all of the time – capable people describing things that they don’t directly do sometimes get key details wrong. And given the sheer reach of the NSA program. the odds are very good that any particular program (like PRISM) could easily fall into the “I heard about it, but didn’t directly work on it” category. That doesn’t make Snowden a liar – I doubt that. But it does mean that he could be using technical terms incorrectly, or confusing “things that could happen” with “things that are happening”.
I think that what’s going on is the last point. And the people who aren’t freaked out about this feel this way because the difference between the two is important, and we don’t have the evidence in hand that these powers are being abused.
NickT
@El Tiburon:
Wrong again. You should try reading threads before making grandiose assertions about them. But I guess that wouldn’t be as satisfying for your inner paranoid.
FlipYrWhig
@Marc:
Words like “capabilities” and “abilities” and “capacities” are crucial to the whole story. Lots of heavy hitters have lots of tools they _could_ use to fuck up your shit. That’s true. Kind of trivially true, in my view, at least if we’re pretending that laws and regulations don’t matter because the government can always break those when it sees fit. But once we get to that point, we have a whole hell of a lot of things we _could_ be worried about, and most of us don’t get preoccupied with those. The cops _could_ be on their way to my house right now to rough me up for no reason except to send a message about the extent and arbitrariness of their power. Could I stop it? Hardly. Am I actively worried about it? No. That doesn’t mean I think the cops never harass anyone, or that they don’t have a lot of power to expend on harassing anyone they choose. They do! But I don’t take a lot of time pondering how the very existence of cops and governments means that The Powerful can beat me and kill me and get away with it. Those of us who do often ponder that are either very important or very deluded.
NickT
@Corner Stone:
For the financials of the business….
For a tune-up…
You need to stop thinking in such simplistic terms. If you don’t ask the right question, the answer won’t do anything for you.
drkrick
@NickT: What Greenwald is doing is like trying to report on baseball without understanding what the strike zone is.What’s the problem? We let umpires work under the same conditions.
FlipYrWhig
@NickT: or, to go back to the football analogy, if your insider tells you that running backs fumble, he’s right, but that doesn’t mean that every running play is a fumble, or that fumbling is deliberate, or that running plays are bad calls because there’s altogether too much fumbling.
Corner Stone
@NickT: You know, I never thought of it that way. I guess if I wanted to know what actually happened at the NSA I would ask the guy who worked there for the last 4+ years.
Or I could ask you and Martin. Either way.
And if I wanted to know how to lie to Congress I would ask DNI Clapper. Man, this new perspective is very useful. Thanks!
Corner Stone
@FlipYrWhig: I’d like to say I find it hard to believe you bit on the ridiculous football analogy. I’d like to be able to say that…
DavidTC
When I heard the specific word parsing done by the various companies, I thought of one thing:
Providing ‘direct server access’ is too public. There are admin who can notice things.
But there is a rather easy way of giving them access to _all data_ without giving them ‘direct server access’.
I rather suspect the NSA is being _copied_ on all data, either in real time or via daily data dumps or just having access to the backups or whatever.
Giving them access to the backups, in fact, allows them to keep almost _no_ employees in the loop.
Basically, everything Snowden and the NSA slideshow said about the level of access could be true, and everything the companies said could be true. The NSA could have every single byte of information that Facebook has about you, as of a few hours ago, and yet have absolutely no access to the servers…in fact, such a setup would be generally less detected than giving them logins.
Thlayli
LGF got a two-TBogg-unit thread out of this subject:
here
Pat
Who needs President Middleman when you’ve got liberals focused on Greenwald’s and Snowden’s acts while ignoring the NSA’s, and the lies of James Clapper? These petty loyalists pose a serious threat to democratic progress. They will run off the kind of principled people the progressive movement needs to rid itself of liberal pretenders like Obama and Feinstein.
Betty Cracker
@different-church-lady: Conflicting claims are being made by Big Tech on one side and Snowald on the other, and the actual truth of the situation is really important, no? I don’t know who’s telling the truth, but many other folks here sure seem to think they do, so I was curious about how they rationalize their belief and what factors go into making that decision. Some cite “feelings,” others technical factors,etc. I think it’s interesting and illuminating, but YMMV, of course.
NickT
@Corner Stone:
Or you could continue being a lazy little troll with nothing substantial to say on any point of interest.
gene108
I don’t care.
This NSA shit ain’t gonna land me in jail anytime soon.
How many people has the Obama-Police-State locked up, because of NSA snooping?
So much of your info is just floating on the internet for any random lazy fucker getting boarded, with his laptop/iPad/smart phone on his lap, laying about on his sofa on a Saturday afternoon, with nothing better to do than random Google searches to see what info is linked to a FP’ers e-mail ID’s, for example.
The NSA is the least of our privacy concerns in the internet age.
Bigger fish to fry.
EDIT: I think people need to realize, there’s not much difference between posting something on the internet – with regards to privacy – as compared to standing on a street corner and shouting your opinions to passers by, except on the internet your crazy ass statements will stick around forever, for people to pick over and for you to not be able to deny having written/said.
Ms. D. Ranged in AZ
@Betty Cracker:
@daverave:
Thanks y’all.
AnonPhenom
I suppose you could still say that you haven’t given the local cops free reign to everything inside your home/business without lying even if you knew they had a checkpoint set up that x-rayed, metal detected and removed the shoes of everything that entered or exited said home/business. I mean, technically speaking, you wouldn’t be lying. Right?
Trollhattan
@Thlayli:
We’re just point-five losers [sniff].
Corner Stone
@NickT: Or I could follow your lead and try overly hard to post tediously quippy one-liners every second or third post in an attempt to curry favor with other commenters here.
As a friend, I’m cautioning you now against trying to usurp different church lady’s prime spot in this regard. She may decide to really out clever you in the battle of tedium you’ve engaged in.
My money’s on her.
NickT
@Corner Stone:
Poor Corny, you can’t help trolling, can you? We mock you and you have to respond. It’s just like shearing a piglet. Squeal away, little troll.
Corner Stone
@NickT: What? No cold meaty pie to be shoved down my throat?
***OUTRAGE***
Felonius Monk
Folks in Florida (we’re looking a you, Betty Cracker) have nothing to worry about from NSA because Gov. Scott signed into law a bill that essentially makes it illegal for anyone in the state of Florida to connect a computer or smartphone to the internet.
INTERNET ILLEGAL IN FLORIDA
Just what you’d expect when you turn the government over to morans.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Corner Stone: I was just pied by the miserable little SOB but he has his whole fucking posse mocking you.
Kathleen
@Origuy: Thank you! I have had the same questions from the beginning. Without baselined requirements documents, technical service descriptions, Service Level Agreements, etc., I don’t know how he would really understand how this system/process worked. Even if he had them, he worked in that position for such a short time I wonder if he really understood them. Regardless of how proficient he is with computers, new employees still face a steep learning curve in comprehending systems in the context of business being supported. With such a short time on the job, how did he know what to look for, where to look, etc. To me there is a huge gap in understanding the process used to obtain this reveleations.
Forum Transmitted Disease
@gene108: Agree with every word.
ffredpalakon
I’ll post something that I may or may not offer a clue – it’s definitely something I’ve never figured out, and which was given no explanation when it came up. The Bradley Manning case broke because he supposedly spoke to Adrian Lamo, who then contacted one of his friends, Chet Uber. Uber would make a big deal out of his role in the thing. He ran something called Project Vigilant, which supposedly gathered information on a volunteer basis from some of the top tech firms in the United States. Uber came across as a clown as people dismissed him – I do too.
This isn’t what’s puzzling – what’s puzzling is that Uber had top people involved in Project Vigilant. Alumni from the NSA, Homeland Security, NYSE. All of them admitted to being involved in what looked like a very half assed venture.
When this story broke I always thought – the top tech companies hand their data off to Project Vigilant, which then hands it off to the NSA, so tech companies cannot speak of directly giving data to the NSA. Uber is supposed to play the part of a ridiculous figurehead – he does nothing. The hand-off is all done and supervised by the others on the board, though it’s just a technicality. The whole question is how you define “directly”.
This post is very long, and only a part of it deals with Uber and this issue. In the original, it is footnoted with supporting documents.
The Invisible World: Bradley Manning, Adrian Lamo, Chet Uber, Timothy Douglas Webster
Seanly
Can I be a prog torturer instead? But not an emo apologist!
Dennis G.
It seems to me that he has it backwards. He said: “…US government co-opts US corporate power to its own ends”. That there is the problem. Let me fix it:
The most troubling aspect of the story to me is the complete capture of the US Government by corporations and their subcontractors. Of course this leads to civil liberty (and other) violations–that’s where the money is…
Emma
@Felonius Monk: I know! I’m in my office in front of my laptop and I’m breaking the law! WHHHHEEEEE!!!!!!!!
Betty Cracker
@gene108: That’s certainly an issue that is worthy of discussion. But if it’s true that the NSA can read our personal emails and text messages without a warrant, yeah, that’s a fucking problem.
Betty Cracker
@Dennis G.: Excellent point. And it’s not surprising that a Ron Paul supporter would get it bass-ackwards.
Mino
@Dennis G.:Exactamundo.
Richard M.
I think Snowden is somewhat inaccurate and the companies are, strictly speaking, accurate, but disingenuous. It is the NSA’s contractors that have direct access.
I don’t think scooping up the telephone metadata is that big a deal. When you have a suspect, it is/always has been incredibly easy to get their phone records, just not in a timely or readily usable way. Having the phone database pulled together, it helps solve those problems.
I have much more of a problem with the reports of the Government reading emails, IMs, texts and such.
El Tiburon
@FlipYrWhig:
Nice hard right into a red herring inside a straw man. I’ve never heard ‘hoax’ in this context. But I have heard LIE, AGENDA, and so on in reference to both Snowden and Greenwald. So a great many people in fact do think Greenwald/Snowden are full of shit.
El Tiburon
@Mnemosyne:
It may come to pass that Edward Snowden is the biggest fraud in our lifetimes and completely snookered Greenwald, et al. Fine.
Could also be these “tech experts” don’t have all of the facts and information necessary to determine what is really going on here.
I will admit my ignorance on a lot of the substance. Point of fact I don’t get in the weeds that much on this topic. (Like Climate change, I don’t get in those weeds, either.)
But up until something definitive comes down (and I don’t think we are anywhere near that yet) I am of the opinion that Snowdens leaks or whatever you want to call them have extreme importance. Otherwise why is he the most Wanted Man in the World? And as far as the latest allegations, I am (nor are you) in any position to judge them without merit.
So, back to the original point of all of this assfuckery: who am I more willing to believe? I still go with the little guy for now. Some tech nerd at Znet or whatever isn’t going to chang my opinion.
chopper
so he’s totes telling The Truth and isn’t lying about a thing cause he has no reason ever to lie about anything, or hell maybe he’s the biggest fraud in the universe.
no middle ground in your world?
Mnemosyne
@El Tiburon:
Or he’s a guy who’s exaggerating his own technical expertise — you know, the way he exaggerated his salary — and the information he gave Greenwald doesn’t actually support his claims. That’s the “mistaken” part of Betty’s “mistaken, lying, or obfuscating” construction.
Neither does Greenwald, who (as far as I know) has never claimed to be a technology expert. Now what?
Other than the fact that he gave details about our spying on China and Russia to the Chinese and the Russians? And that newspapers like Der Spiegel refused to publish additional information Snowden gave them because it included names of US operatives currently in the field? Gosh, I can’t imagine why the US government wouldn’t want him to do that. It must be the domestic spying allegations! It’s not like the US has spies currently in place overseas that they would want to protect or anything.
So even an expert’s opinion on what Snowden released isn’t going to change your mind. Gotcha.
different-church-lady
@drkrick: Simply oozing with win.
Just Some Fuckhead
Wonder what happened to Martin? Meh, he’s prolly playing scrabble with Marilyn Vos Savant and Neil deGrasse Tyson.
different-church-lady
@Corner Stone: It’s good to have fans.
different-church-lady
@ffredpalakon:
Jeez, there’s that name again.
NCSteve
More than halfway to one TBogg Unit of comments! Keep it up people! Even if we have to descend into the offtopic and creepily banal to do it!
different-church-lady
@NCSteve: Naw, this one’s not gonna make it.
The TBogg might be too large a unit. We might have to go with deciTBoggs (dTB’s).
ffredpalakon
@different-church-lady: He sure does get around.
Corner Stone
@different-church-lady: I have faith in you. No one can out-tedious your comments, and I don’t give a damn how hard NickT tries.
FlipYrWhig
@Betty Cracker: Corner Stone is going to hate this, but it depends on the meaning of “can.” If what we’ve learned from Snowden is at all remotely accurate, and I don’t have any interest in adjudicating that, then the NSA _can_ read those things… if they decide to ignore the law that says they can’t, or can but have to destroy them afterwards. Again, I think Snowden is hung up on the idea that the NSA has the technical capability of going rogue and eavesdropping on most anything it feels like. And I think that’s true. But there are also laws against it. And we don’t worry that other law enforcement agencies blatantly defy the law on a whim, i.e. because they can, unless we have reason to suspect that they have done so in particular cases. So that’s where we are. Snowden is pushing hard that there are things the NSA has the power to do. The NSA is pushing back that there are things they do not do (and they want to keep secret what they have the power to do). That’s why neither side is “lying.”
different-church-lady
@Corner Stone:
Don’t despair: as long as you keep your effort up one of these days I’ll be off my game and you’ll finally get to the winner’s circle.
Corner Stone
@Just Some Fuckhead: I think, based on previous comments, that he’s probably still slaving away at his 120 hour a week publicly funded job in a lab at a public university.
Although, he may be working on a secret way to clone himself so he can complete assigned tasks and also fire young assistants who just aren’t cutting it.
But you’re right. Someone with his elemental grasp of all things can probably complete his work, improve our understanding on varied concepts here at BJ AND defeat Stephen Hawking in some decathlon of the mental variety.
Kathleen
@Ms. D. Ranged in AZ: Your overview was very helpful. Thank you! You contributed light as opposed to heat.
Corner Stone
@different-church-lady: *blushes*
I appreciate that. It’s nice to know someone believes in my long term stretch goals.
But I’m still a little too humble to ever think I could really ever compete with you in the category of tedious comments.
That was nice of you though.
Corner Stone
@FlipYrWhig:
First, the NSA is not a law enforcement agency. And LEA’s have at least a modicum of public oversight, in most cases.
You feel ok with Chief Justice John Roberts 11 picks?
Corner Stone
It’s amusing that some are still trying to parse out direct access. The Great Semantic War ™ continues apace.
eemom
@Corner Stone:
OMFG. Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and the manger. You are hands down the most tediously predictable commenter in the history of this blog, with the possible exception of blieber, or whatever he’s calling himself now……and that one particular psychostalker troll who’s got it in for Zandar.
Have you no self-awareness, sir? Have you, at long last, no sense of self-awareness?
different-church-lady
@Corner Stone: You have spinach stuck to your front teeth.
Just Some Fuckhead
@eemom: C’mon, you are letting your emotions overtake your keen analytical mind. Corner Stone is easily one of the most entertaining commenters on this site.
danielx
Is this a serious question?
Seriously worn thread…but gosh, if I absolutely have to choose who’s lying – the US government and a number of large corporations – or some guy who supposedly saw something he perceived as wrong and did something about it, effectual or no – I think I’ll go with door number two. Snowden had to know that once he did this, life as he knew it was over, and that he would – will – pay a substantial price for his actions. I realize this is ancient history, but all the things that are being said about Edward Snowden – crazy, egotistical, traitor, naive, etc etc – were said also about Daniel Ellsberg in regard to his release of the Pentagon Papers. Which document demonstrated that, according to the Grey Lady…
And not just the Johnson administration, but the three preceding it, starting with Truman. And then there was the guy who followed, one Richard M. Nixon….
I get that Snowden’s actions have to do with ongoing intelligence operations, but the question over whether the government and corporations are lying to us on an ongoing basis is exactly the same. Whether Snowden’s revelations have to do with active operations or not is not germane to the issue. I want to be an informed citizen, and if what the government is doing involves looking down my shorts (an truly appalling sight) I want to know about it. If that ruffles the feathers of the great and wise, fuck ’em – they’re being paid to take the heat, among other things, and if they don’t think what they’re doing will stand the light of day then goddamnit maybe they oughtn’t being doing it. Moreover, I’ve heard “national security” invoked as a reason to cover up shitty dirty deeds and programs all too often, when the actual reason is that revealing of said deeds would be embarrassing to various government and corporate officials.
The distinction between government and corporations (particularly those involved with national security) is an artificial one, given 1) the revolving door between government and corporate positions for so many elected and unelected persons, and 2) the purchase – er, bribing – um, provision of campaign contributions to ever so many of our duly elected leaders by those very same corporations.
So to recap – I don’t have any particular reason to believe that Snowden is lying, whereas the government and any number of corporations have lied to me, repeatedly and to the point of ridicule, throughout my lifetime. *cough*James Clapper*cough*.
FlipYrWhig
@Corner Stone: no, which is why on every one of these fucking tediously repetitive threads I use my allotted time to push the idea that what should happen next is FISA Court reforms.
FlipYrWhig
@Corner Stone: BTW, who’s parsing now? Law enforcement agency, really, that phrase matters to you out of the whole damn paragraph? Christ.
Corner Stone
@FlipYrWhig: I don’t consider that a parse in any way. If National Security and Law Enforcement are the same entities then we have already gone way too far down a path.
I don’t consider your use of “LEA” to describe the NSA a mistaken parse here, I consider that to be willful on your part.
FlipYrWhig
@Corner Stone: I don’t think the meaning of direct access matters. I think what matters is that direct access happens under some kind of court order, not warrantless, which is what the original Greenwald story implied (before Snowden even went public as the source). Which is why the part that’s broken is the way that court issues its orders. Everything else is worries about slippery slopes to dystopia. We don’t have to go there yet. We can try to get traction so the slope ain’t so damn slippery. Like by changing FISA, or the Patriot Act, or formulating new laws about digital privacy, all of which I would welcome.
FlipYrWhig
@Corner Stone: Fine, you win, I don’t even give a shit, I don’t know the terminology. Take your point and move on to something else.
Corner Stone
@FlipYrWhig: Finally. I’ve been trying out a new marinade for my beef fajitas. A little soy sauce, some fish sauce, a few squeezes of honey and a few squirts of lime concentrate juice.
It’s really been working for me, I have to say.
FlipYrWhig
@Corner Stone: My point is that the government will always have the ability to fuck with you if it sees fit to fuck with you. Stopping them from fucking with you will always be a matter of laws and regulations. That’s all there is, that’s all there ever is. That’s why Snowden’s stuff about how the only limits to what the NSA can do are “procedural” is just being ominous for its own sake. The limits on tyranny and oppression are always “procedural.” If by saying “law enforcement” I made things cloudy, strike it. It has no bearing on the point I wanted to make.
FlipYrWhig
@Corner Stone: Fish sauce is the fermented stuff that smells like death, right?
I’m searing tuna later. Cuban style black beans as the bed.
eemom
@Just Some Fuckhead:
Ah, but tediously predictable and entertaining are not mutually exclusive.
/keen analytical mind
Yatsuno
THREE-FIFTHS OF THE WAY TO A TBOGG UNIT!!!
FlipYrWhig
@eemom: I think the entire run of Saturday Night Live proves that the line between tediously predictable and entertaining is often quite thin.
Just Some Fuckhead
@FlipYrWhig: You can’t say you don’t give a shit and then make a further point. It makes you look cheap.
Do the right thing and stay conceded.
FlipYrWhig
@Just Some Fuckhead: I didn’t give a shit about the particular “law enforcement” point. But, yeah, by adding something I blew the flounce. I can’t help it. I have a jones for explaining myself, regardless of whether anyone is paying attention.
Just Some Fuckhead
@FlipYrWhig: Sometimes I watch you work and think how awesome it would be if your efforts were spent in the service of morality but I know that’s not your schtick.
FlipYrWhig
@Just Some Fuckhead: I am a notorious hedonist. Immorality’s my bag, baby!
different-church-lady
@Yatsuno: Or 6 dTB.
NickT
@FlipYrWhig:
Sometimes immorality is the only form of morality available.
FlipYrWhig
@NickT: if it feels good, painstakingly justify it for hours, that’s my motto.
NickT
@FlipYrWhig:
Ah the Doctrine of the Hedonistic Margin. A fine creed, sir.
FlipYrWhig
@NickT: As an approach, it’s essentially Tantric.
NickT
@FlipYrWhig:
Some go Tantric, some throw Tantrums. I prefer your approach.
Keith G
@FlipYrWhig:
Conservatives (the true ones, not the neocons) say the same thing, and then they add….
“Which is why we need to keep the government small and starved of cash.”
LAC
@Emma: third it! Huzzah!
Corner Stone
@NickT: Wow. I applaud this display sir. It takes real balls to throw this compilation of largely unreadable one-liners right into the face of DCL.
I still don’t think your ability to curry favor is quite there yet. But I know you’ll keep working on it, responding time and time and time again with your patented style.
Bill Arnold
@gene108:
This is true now. On our current path, eventually all street corners, being public places, will be recorded and the recordings will last forever, and will include searchable derived metadata like names of people speaking, transcripts, movement and gesture descriptions, facial expression descriptions, hair styling and clothing choices along with machine-generated catty fashion comments, gaze direction, pupil dilation, etc. People will say that you have nothing to worry about if you have nothing to hide, that it is a public place, you can’t reasonably have expectations of privacy.
NickT
@Corner Stone:
I had no idea you found pies so sexually absorbing. Still, I dare say the sheep deserve a night off.
LAC
@eemom: don’t waste your time getting upset with corner stone. It is like being stuck in a straight to video version of “Rainman 2” with that one – endlessly repeating shit over and over and over. And Tom cruise nowhere to be found.
Gopher2b
@Redshirt:
Any prosecutor with a subpoena (in some instances a search warrant) could get “it.” This is such a non-story. Dude is a naive hack
fuckwit
I’m puzzled by this whole thing.
I am way more scared of unaccountable, privately-held by the 1% , provably evil corporations having all this data, than I am by the gummint having it.
The gummint is us, in a democracy, we are the gummint, so I don’t fear it (well, any more than I fear the rest of us, which is a lot, sometimes).
What I fear most is private corporations, and the elite who own them, particuarly because they have used that power and wealth to buy our government out from under us. And they have MORE data than what the NSA has.
Don’t believe me? Look at your TRW credit report sometime. The finance industry— remember them, they’re the 1%!– has way more personal information about you than the government has.
This, folks, is the story. You are being distracted by nonsense. I’m not freaked out by the NSA having sniffers on the networks of all these corporations. I’m more freaked out by the corporations having the data in the first place.
mclaren
@burnspbesq:
Exactly correct (amazingly, for once) — EULAS embody the very definition of “contract by adhesion.” And yet court after court has upheld ’em.
You appear not to have noticed this glaring chasm in the logic of your legal onslaught against those like myself who point out that using the AUMF and the NDAA to justify grossly unconstitutional atrocities like extraordinary rendition or murdering U.S. citizens without trying them in a court of law is an outrage and a depredation. Let’s try to think it through slowly and carefully, shall we, burnsie?
1) You assert that non-lawyers cannot declare unconstitutional grotesqueries like the AUMF and the NDAA by using unrelated Supreme Court decisions, of the kind I cite;
2) …And yet, courts have repeatedly upheld legal practices like the EULA contracts of adhesion which by their very definition grossly flout the law, as any student learns in the first year of law school…
3) Which leads us to the inevitable conclusion that courts decide constitutionality and legality not according to logic or precedent or the black-letter definition of case law, but according to whim and a brute-force lust to ram through their political agenda in the face of overwhelming legal and social and case-law opposition.
4) …So, therefore, we should stop trying to argue the merits of atrocities like the AUMF and the NDAA on the basis of legal logic, but on more fundamental grounds: they are destroying the basis of the rule of law which underpins civilization itself. The rest of the legal gobbledyook is disposable bullshit, as we clearly see since the courts themselves ignore it when it suits them.
All your finely honed legalistic sophistry in favor of the AUMF, burnsie, is as empty as air because the goddamn courts whose case law precedents you cite so worshipfully and the law schools whose exquisite logical casuisitry you fellate so assiduously throw out that logic and those precedents whenever it suits them.
Citizens v United is an outrage not beacuse of bad legal logic or disregard for precedents, but because that atrocity of a decision is rapidly turning America into a Hobbesian snakepit of savage oligarchy. The AUMF is grotesque and must be opposed with mass civil disobedience not because it crosses some exquisitely razor-sharp line of legal logic but because it slams a wrecking ball through the fundamental basis of Western civil society asserted since the Magna Carta. Obama should be impeached and Dubya and his torturer sidekick need to be dragged before The Hague in leg irons wearing orange jumpsuits not because I’m a purity troll but because these people are arrogating to themselves tyrannical powers not even William the Conquerer asserted to his barons. (William the first Conquerer asserted the right to torture or murder any of subjects at will without trial, but at least he admitted that when he did so, he owed his barons an explanation of why he’d done it. Obama and Dubuya don’t even allow that much!)
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Yatsuno:
I go to work thinking there’s no way this won’t hit 500…And come back to this.
TBogg wept…
different-church-lady
@Corner Stone: Since I now know it annoys you, in the future I shall reduce my one liners to one-worders.
mclaren
@NickT:
Ants pants, dark sparks. Yaks woks! Dogs bogs!
Ah, the sweet sound of gibberish in the morning…it’s how I know I’ve arrived at the graveyard of intelligent discourse, the commentariat of Balloon-Juice.
Corner Stone
@different-church-lady: Seriously?
mclaren
@LAC:
Yes, pointing out that the constitution of the united states prohibits some specific acts (like extrajudicial murder, or torture, or gross dragnet warrantless searches and seizures) is just “endlessly repeating shit over and over and over.”
Yes, indeedy, citing the basics facts is “like being stuck with Rain Man.”
This, ladies and gentlemen, is what you get when you try to show a world globe to a flat earther, or when you try to explain basic arithmetic to someone who belligerently and arrogantly asserts that 1 + 1 = 3.
Yup. Citing those annoying facts over and over again just gets so tiresome, doesn’t it? If only Corner Stone could change his tune! If only he could agree, just for once, that 1 + 1 = something other than 2, maybe he’d be less tiresome…less irritating…less like Rain Man.
If only Corner Stone could stop harping on that tired boring trival old Fourth Amendment just for once, why, then he’d at least be entertaining, wouldn’t he?
It’s so desperately wearisome in our wonderful post-reality Karl Rove “I’ve got the real math” Barack Obama “Hope and Change” world to just repeat those unutterably dull facts over and over again. And over. And over. And over. Ye gods! Someone change the record! Can’t 1 + 1 be equal to 5 just once? Just for the sake of variety? Can’t someone admit that in this marvelous po-mo world, the Obama administration’s Attorney General Eric Holder explored sublime new frontiers of postermodern Lacanian textual interpretation when he declared that “due process of law is firing a hellfire missile at an American citizen”?
It’s so so sooooooooo dull, 1 + 1 being 2 all the time. Let’s spice it up! Live a little, folks! Why not give good ole Barack license to commit extrajudicial murder every once in a while? It’ll make life exciting in this dreadfully boring America of 2013. Why not let Obama off the hook for standing by while his NSA goes berserk hoovering up trillions of yottabytes of every American citizens’ emails and bank records and phone calls and twitter tweets and forum posts and stores ’em in a colossal million-square-foot NSA data center in the middle of the Utah desert? Fourth amendment, schmourth amendment, it’s so boring reading those black-letter words in the constitution “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be abridged” in their plain-English meaning. Why not add a little zest to our lives? Why not break the tedium by redefining “right” to mean “potato soup” and “secure” to mean “electrophoresis”?
Why, then we’ve got a wonderfully interesting and novel interpretation of that tired wheezy old fourth amendment that no longer sounds like Rain Man! Now we’re cookin’! Now we’ve got entertainment enough to keep us all amused…at least, until the next president orders us all dragged out to a slit trench and knelt down and shot in the back of the head on the basis of “conspiracy to commit subversion” inferred from a phrase in one of the 50 trillion stored emails on servers in the Utah desert.
Christ on a minibike. This is what passes for “thinking” on the balloon-juice forum?
It’s like trying to argue with planaria.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@? Martin:
I do have to admit that cornerstone is an accomplished piece of shit, so there’s that.
Mnemosyne
@mclaren:
The funny part is that you posted this passionate, hundreds-of-words comment in defense of the only commenter so tedious that he is the sole occupant of my pie filter.
Yes, that’s right — Corner Stone is so much more repetitive than you that he’s in my pie filter and you’re not.
different-church-lady
@Corner Stone: Banana.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@Ms. D. Ranged in AZ:
That was well stated and informative, What are you doing here?!
mclaren
@Mnemosyne:
Once again, you impugn the “style” of Corner Stone’s posts without ever dealing with the substance of what he says. You attack him for being “tedious,” not for being wrong.
How Noam Chomsky is discussed — The more one dissents from political orthodoxies, the more the attacks focus on personality, style and character,” Glenn Greenwald, The Guardian, 23 March 2013.
NickT
@mclaren:
If you think Corny has substance your mental problems are clearly worse than anyone here ever imagined.
The Raven on the Hill
Links on the subject I like:
The EFF, Why Metadata Matters
Microsoft social network researcher Danah Boyd, where “nothing to hide” fails as logic
The EFF, Civil Liberties Groups to the FISA Court: Ungag Google and Microsoft
Generally, reading Snowden, I do not get the sense of a fool or incompetent. He seems to know what he is talking about and understand why it matters. There is not the wordy blither of a con man, or the evasiveness of a person hiding the limits of their knowledge. If he was politically naïve when he was first employed—well, how many of us were politically savvy when we were 20?
pattonbt
Heres what I believe (like it matters or has any resemblance to whatever the actual facts are)
1) Snowden is not “lying” but he is taking the most extreme example of potential abuse and leaving silent whether any such abuses have happened. So does the NSA have direct access to meta-data? Sure, I could easily buy that. But I dont believe that measn they exercise their sweep of it illegally (as the law currently stands). I believe Snowden also exaggerates how easily, quickly and procedurally could directly access “content” of phone calls and emails, etc. But Snowden went in looking for trouble so Im not surprised he found trouble that fit his bias.
2) The Corps are not “lying” but they are probably parsing their words carefully and pretty much the NSA could have direct access anytime it wants via a pliable FISC. The corps are not saints in this so those people concerned about their data privacy should be more scared by them than the Gov. Tell the corps to stop collecting that data. But I’m sure the NSA has an easy way, which would resemble “direct access”, to gather the data with the appropriate legal FISC warrant.
3) The Gov might well be lying their ass off.
Heres what I’d like to see from Snowden before I decide, the full set of actual documents that prove illegality, not potential for illegality. He says he has it all, then dump it please. Why be such a drama quenn about things? What he has released to date is inconclusive. Potentially troubling? Yes. Great potential for abuse? Yes. Actual examples of abuses shown? No.
Why is Snowden and / or Greenwald holding back? If they have the smoking gun, why wait? I make up power point presentations every day, they mean nothing. Where are the documents? Each day that passes and they do not release what they say are “bombshells” they lessen their case.
Oh well, back to lurking.
Blah
Just want to confirm pretty much all of what Martin has already said on this thread, FWIW I went all-but-dissertation for my PhD in Computer Science and I’ve typed almost the exact same sentences elsewhere. (Only when I did it I was called an authoritarian boot-licker, an imperialist, and asked if I had migrated from redstate.com.)
The slides say right there that the program referred to as “Prism” has a grand total budget of only $20 million to cover all the major public-facing commercial data centers in the US, and the protocols listed in the slides get pretty bandwidth-intensive.
Therefore we know that Snowden is not speaking the truth here. I won’t use the term ‘lying’ because I have no idea if he honestly believes his erroneous statements or if he’s deliberately being dishonest. There’s plenty of evidence for either conclusion and it’s pointless to speculate.
Keith G
@The Raven on the Hill:
@pattonbt:
Interesting and even informative. Moderate in nature and ringing true without need for cognitive contortion.
I understand why so many here push so hard to cement an understanding that all this is all okay. First, as a single point in time, right now what is happening can easily appear as non-malicious or no big deal. It’s when these events are looked at as a part of a chronic process, a flow of history, if you will, that one can find very worrisome patterns.
Second, being skeptical (or even critical) of the policy of this government means one is by definition being critical of the current executive leading this government. Many here have an very high level of emotional investment in the ideal of Barak Obama. I shudder to think of what it would take for many here to be able to say even a simple, “Gosh, he is not handling this very well.”
brantl
My question is where is Snowden’s proof? He keeps saying that he could listen to phone calls at will, there is no proof of that.
LAC
@mclaren: @mclaren: another one with diarrhea of the mouth and a crazy belief that their self righteous blather and crib notice writing of greenwald makes them a force to be reckoned with. What, missed your turn? Your repetitious paranoid twattery at week 5 of this saga is just as tired as weeks one and two. Nothing you and corner stone have contributed to this discussion, aside from perfecting the art of cutting and pasting wiki leaks talking points, has shed any new light on these “revelations”. Btw, you worried about a bullet to the back of your head by the gubbermint? Really? I am more worried about the waste of a bullet. I hate government waste.
DavidTC
The slides say right there that the program referred to as “Prism” has a grand total budget of only $20 million to cover all the major public-facing commercial data centers in the US, and the protocols listed in the slides get pretty bandwidth-intensive.
Therefore we know that Snowden is not speaking the truth here. I won’t use the term ‘lying’ because I have no idea if he honestly believes his erroneous statements or if he’s deliberately being dishonest. There’s plenty of evidence for either conclusion and it’s pointless to speculate.
It is this sort of thinking that baffles me.
Are you asserting that _Snowden_ made those slides? Because that’s the only way _he_ can be lying if the slides are factually wrong.
It is entirely possible the people _doing the presentation_ lied on those slides, but that wasn’t Snowden.
I don’t understand how people think Snowden could lying, and yet they’re somehow not claiming the slides are forgeries. It’s fairly clear that if Snowden is stating untrue things, he’s doing that because _he_ was lied to, that capabilities were exaggerated, either by the company he worked for or by the NSA.
Also, you’re wrong. 20 million dollars certainly isn’t enough to _wiretap_ all those data centers (Unless the NSA has some tech breakthroughs it’s not sharing…which is not impossible.), but it’s actually way more than enough to provide some sort of secure interface into systems they’ve been granted access too. Or to just have a real-time mirror of the servers that they can log into.
I mean, Facebook itself only spends a total of $50 million in data center costs, on 60,000 servers. By my estimation, that means each Facebook server costs about $833 a year. If you had a backup of Facebook’s data, and their code, how many servers would it take to put together a single-user instance of it? Three or four? (DB server, maybe another DB server, some sort of caching server, frontend…)
And that’s assuming that the NSA wants it to look like Facebook or Hotmail or whatever. It actually seems more likely the NSA would just want a mirror of the data and the ability to query it. (Which, yes, would include real-time notifications of chat and whatnot.)
If, when Facebook, or Hotmail, or whoever, grants you access, you can’t set up a system to figure out what anyone is doing on it, for less than a million dollars for each system, you have pretty shitty programmers. (And one thing the NSA does not have is shitty programmers.) In fact, doing it for more than a hundred thousand is pretty insane, but we can give the NSA the benefit of the doubt here and assume that program includes other things.
And remember…we’re just talking about computers _in_ the data centers…the NSA has a boatload of other computers, the ones in the data center are just the ones doing the collecting.
Sally
Why speculate when a lot has been documented on the topic. James Bamford has written at least two books and several articles. Search his name and you’ll find them. Then, there is the sworn testimony in the EFF cases which can be found on the EFF website. With all the information on the programs already out there, and Prism is only one of them, the only question is do we think that the NSA has stopped doing what they were already doing. That answer is pretty easy, only if they stopped to take advantage of better technology. Snowden probably isn’t lying. It’s far more likely that he just doesn’t have the whole picture.
boatboy_srq
@NCSteve: TRUE THAT.
This is the individual-privacy-v-Big-Gubmint-intrusion version of Xupiter.
What bugs me most about this is that Snowden figured all this out only now. C’mon, guy, this is what DHS and the Patriot Act were about. Regardless of whether there’s any meat to the story, the whole way it’s broken has the taint of TABMITWH all over it.
NSA eavesdropping is NOT OK. But great noodly FSM, people, it’s hardly “news”, and all the overreach from years of Shrubbery is a) clear forewarning and b) a fair sampling of what can be done even with conventional means (remember the Society of Friends groups that got spied on as potential terrorist cells? The anti-nuke groups who were investigated for presumed anti-government bias or danger to infrastructure? Yeah: that.). The only thing different between 2013 and 2002 is that the complexion of Washington has changed (literally and figuratively). The time to get upset about all this was when the process started. It’s a little late now to whine that intel is prying into the metadata of your business when that prying has been going on for a a decade: rather like “discovering” your water heater leaks only when you find you need scuba gear to get into the basement.
As to Snowden’s intentions, and understanding/awareness of what he stumbled onto, recall that this is a guy who fled to Hong Kong under the assumption that it’s a bastion of free speech. This is not something you do if you have any understanding whatsoever of global IPs as related to geography (meaning which IP ranges are used by which ISPs in which countries), which as an “infrastructure analyst” Snowden should have done. Anyone who’s suggesting Snowden has delivered at least some of his “proofs” that the NSA is watching everything everyone does on Teh Intertubz to China/Russia for some malicious/self-serving reason is conveniently ignoring the possibility that – if he did turn any of that material over to someone in either place – he did it just because he’s ignorant.
william casey wesley
Information is power, absolute information is absolute power. The NSA can acquire or manufacture damning evidence on anyone. They will not use this power against or for the vast majority of people who have no power or influence, they will use it to expand the power of the NSA among the nations leaders.
The enemies of whom ever stands in the way of the NSA’s power expansion will receive what ever damning information they need to win their fight whether the information is true or not, the friends of the NSA’s expanding power will find a wellspring of information both true and manufactured to use against their enemies.
Tthe best possible scenario for the NSA is a continued whittling away of the separation of powers until we are ruled by a tyrant who first and foremost owes their position to (and is therefor beholden to) the NSA.
Its only a bad situation for the vast majority of powerless people. Oh well, its hard to sympathize when so many Americans seem to be hell bent on discounting the need for their own rights and constitution, who bow and grovel before celebrity and wealth, aspiring toadies acting against the general interest in the hopes of being doled out personal rewards like a good pet, its disgusting.
Andrey
@DavidTC:
Uhhh. No. You’re not even close. They spent over $600 million in 2011. That number is much higher now.
Ms. D. Ranged in AZ
@Odie Hugh Manatee:
Slumming? (jk)