Bitcoin Forum

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)

So much irony here posting this on the internet for others to see. I am disgusted. This year is 2013, next year will be 1984.

I tried to search more on this and my browser crashed. Im scared.

I'd hoped never to see it confirmed, but it's a US problem only I hope:

I guess supposedly it will be used to examine the communication between US citizens and anyone from outside the country. Example: this thread.

We are really facing a snowballing issue here in the United states. Blatant disregard for the rights of Americans and their privacy.

Uh-Oh, better clear your browser cache, delete search history, etc.  :P

Nevermind it's too late, you've been caught in the prism.

Documents leaked by NSA contractor Edward Snowden[6] in June 2013 describe the PRISM program as enabling in-depth surveillance on live communications and stored information. It provides for the targeting of any customers of participating corporations who live outside the United States, or American citizens whose communications include web content of people outside the United States. Data which the NSA is able to obtain under PRISM allegedly includes email, video and voice chat, videos, photos, voice over IP conversations, file transfers, login notifications and social networking details.[7]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)

I would say it is more targeted at non-US citizens.

So what? Are foreigners not people who deserve privacy?

I'm not saying it is right.  I'm just noting that it is ostensibly directed at non-US citizens and communications with them.

Have you all seen the Edward Snowden video?  Scary.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/09/edward-snowden-nsa-whistleblower-surveillance

It's violating everyone's rights. They can see anything they want. There's not much we can do to protect ourselves right now. If you push enough of their buttons you'll inevitably get an unwanted knock at your door

everyone is disgusted by this, its no longer to stop terrorism, its to spy on americans who are tired of the totalitarian leadership of the US. The founding fathers of our country are rolling in their graves.

He doesn't want to be considered a hero, but he really is.

Give it a week, the major news outlets will report that he was actually addicted to heroine, was suspected of rape 5 years, and had ties to some violent militia group. They will do everything they can to bury this and ruin his credibility.

I don't disagree.  I am sickened by this.  Consider that simply posting on this site makes me a candidate for surveillance by Prism.  I would happily discuss my preparations for dealing with an iron-booted government but they are listening.  Let us just say the 2nd Amendment exists for a reason.

"Turn-key tyranny."

But you could really see the fear in his eyes.  This man is a real American, if I could put it that way; an actual hero.  He knew what could've happened to him if he let those secrets go and yet let his morals get the better of him.  A real human being.

But this just keeps making that line between the American people and the American government so much thicker and obvious.  They're not us, and they're not with us, is the theme that keeps cropping up.

Benjamin Franklin - "Those who surrender freedom for security will not have, nor do they deserve, either one."

They have unlimited power. Already we've so many constitutional violations, they keep pushing the limits "in the best interest of the American people."

Everytime I see more news about intrusive policies that invade the privacy of citizens, the British Government in the film "V for Vendetta" comes to mind.

I'll tell you one solution, stop using services provided by american companies. Fuck amrica Fuck Obama


www.boycottamerica.org FTW.

American government is going crazy, they think they can do anything, they want to abuse their powers.
They want to make other countries as their slaves, If they didn't stopped their bullshit, World war will happen some day.

Oh say does that star spangled
banner yet waaaive?
For the land of the unfree...
and the home of the slaves.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/08/what_about_a_us_tech_boycott/

"You're not to be so blind with patriotism that you can't face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who says it." - Malcolm X

Fuck american govt

America is a great country. The problem is that a majority of the population has degenerated in to a half retarded mass of reality show addicted mcdonalds employees.

The pupeteers at the top pull the strings any way they want.

What is really troubling is that Edward Snowden, in the best interests of human rights and mankind, exposed this information, and the US government will consider him a traitor and completely ruin his life. There is no escape for him now.

Collecting close to 100% of internet traffic, recording and archiving it, violating the privacy of every human they possibly can, to prevent a terrorist attack?

The terrorists have won. They gave the government the green card to manipulate American citizens any way they want. All under the guise of "protection."

Sorry for the rant, I'm just upset over all of this. Ignorance truly is bliss isn't it?

American govt is the biggest legal terrorist organisation.

How can all of these government employees sleep at night knowing that they're helping to devolve humanity by supporting this program?

Philip Zimbardo kindly explains

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment

For encrypted voice/video/chat, use Jitsi or RetroShare on your computer.  Pidgin has a plugin that can do encrypted chat, but no voice.  I like Jitsi.  I can just chat with people over googletalk and it's really easy for my friends to install and configure.

For Android there is Gibberbot

For Iphone there is ChatSecure.

For web browser there is crypto.cat

You don't need to pay $20/month for SilentCircle.  This is plenty of open source software.  Use it.

lol... good one ;D

While normally surveillance programs and stuff are pretty bad, this is the most hilarious one I've ever seen, no seriously, I'm really tempted to fuck with them, it's like a school teacher going on a power trip, there are just so many flaws with a system like this.

I already am. I use TrackMeNot, which sends around 10 search queries a hour and clicks on random links.

:D

I'm not digusted, was suspecting all this and much more ..  just surprised it went public..
IMO, much worst happen, we just dont have proof / know for sure

Not only disguted by what the us govt. is doing. Just to let you know. I am from hong kong, we got a bit of liberety here. And that guy who leak that thing is in hong kong and waiting for icelands' approval. Bad new that our hong kong govt have signed a treaty with america that if what he did is also violating hong kongs law. He could be orced to be brought back to america. Revealing national security sensitive data is not one but those computer havking is one of those.

For what i am more disgusted with. Is what China is doing. You see the walls they built (not the great wall but the great cencorship wall) and how they peek on QQs and im. Filter ou shit like the 4/6 tiananmen incident and those. Amd see how they treat the one who is leading and striving for a more liberative China. 
Reviewing what president Xi of china had said. We both (us and china) are dreaming the same dream. But for all of us on ghe world got liberty. Like you americans and we hing kong people. This dream is the beginning of the nightmare. All we hope is that prosm isnt the overture. But the finale of this

Sorry for typo. On my iCrap 4. Srsly i predict Apple rolls out ahit tonight

Indeed, the world seems a dark place lately. I just hope he doesn't end up in the same place as Bradley Manning.

The NSA can see everything we do online. Everything we did online.

That's kind of frightening  :-X

so how would they deal with 6 billion dissenters anyway? we're the one who feed them.

i am disgusted
the oligarchs control the world by controlling governments and corporations
we are debt slaves to a small group who rule with hidden tyranny

bread and circuses , look it up

Glad to hear you share my sentiment on the issue. The internet should be a bastion of freedom for all mankind. It's turning in to a death trap. I understand a large majority of internet traffic routes through the US, but it doesn't give our government literal ownership.

It feels good to know that blind patriotism doesn't exist here, and even though people like you are halfway across the world from myself, we have a common goal and are united in the interest of preserving freedom and the basic rights of humanity. The sad thing is, I think these policies will get much worse before the tide turns for the better.

Can't say I'm an Apple fan  ;) , but then again I'm not much of a Google or Microsoft fan anymore either since they gladly hand themselves over to the PRISM project.....

I doubt they could, but it is going to take a lot more poking and prodding of the people before the general populace stands up against this crap. Many people are just too dumb to realize, or too apathetic to care. As Edward Snowden said, they are content living mundane lives and not giving  one single shit about the fact that they are under complete surveillance and lack any sort of privacy whatsoever.

I am reminded here of a number of things.  Like picking out a place to sit down in the grass and avoiding one where there are a couple ants.  Because there are never "a couple ants."   There's a huge swarm of them of which I saw a couple.

It's the little bit pregnant type of a problem.

Inside the US, the uproar is about monitoring of US citizens.  Simply put, it is expected that NSA and like organizations will monitor non-US citizens.  As a US citizen, I am pissed that my activities are stored on an NSA computer.  As a non-US citizen, I would be pushing my government very hard to shut down the ability of the US to monitor the rest of the world's internet.

Longer term, this is just plain ugly.  The innocence of the internet is gone.  We had whispers before but this exposes the entire darkness of internet enabled surveillance.

2005 says hello.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/21/politics/21nsa.html

Seriously, what do people think the NSA does?  What did Snowden think when he took the job?

What's really frustrating, more than anything I've read about this, is the fact that the majority of Americans are OK with it. I wish I could find the article I read this morning, but it stated that 60% of Americans have no problem with what the NSA is doing because they feel safer knowing they're using it to stop terrorism.

do not trust statistics you didn't forge yourself  :)

The US should be cut off from the European internet.

Let them have their own internet protected by the Great Firewall of America, similar to what the Chinese do with their Great Firewall of China.

"The Golden Shield Project (Chinese: 金盾工程; pinyin: jīndùn gōngchéng), colloquially referred to as the Great Firewall of China[1] (防火长城) is a censorship and surveillance project operated by the Ministry of Public Security (MPS) division of the government of the People's Republic of China. The project was initiated in 1998 and began operations in November 2003." ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Firewall_of_China )

ding ding!  The poll question was probably something like "When it comes to known baby-killing terrorists, should the government track their phone and internet activity?"

American satirist Andy Borowitz has tackled the topic: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/borowitzreport/2013/06/useful-phrases-for-the-surveillance-state.html

same hapend to me

Connection between PRISM revelations and bitcoin:

http://www.coindesk.com/prisms-effect-on-bitcoin-prices/

Not possible, untill american govt wants that and i don't think they will ever do that.
they want to monitor whole world.

You also have to take into account when these morons use percentages is what the percentage is out of, I'm shit at percentages and this is the most classic trick they use, they'll usually take a poll of about 1000 people or something and then claim it's 'everybody' or in this case 'A percentage of all Americans' chances are most people are as outraged as you and the media is just trying to smooth it over.

VPN, Bitcoin, Tor, PGP. 

This is the world we live in and those are the tools you have to fight back.

Don't forget Ghostery http://www.ghostery.com/download (http://www.ghostery.com/download) to stop cookies from tracking.

Maybe we should have a separate thread with all the ways to protect oneself and how they work.

If you live in a city or apartment building, change your wireless network name to NSA.gov

https://www.eff.org/nsa-spying/timeline (https://www.eff.org/nsa-spying/timeline)
1791-2013
they did skip the Alien and Sedition Acts and  Andrew Jackson's tyranny

if you think G Bush or B Obama started this garbage, read up on it man

We must assume that governments everywhere are spying on us as much as they can afford. The only real solution is awareness of the spying and encryption to protect the communication. The easiest solution is communicating offline as much as possible, or using PGP and bitmessage online.

There are two NSA monitoring programs reported on.  One collects metadata on phone calls in the US, and the other one, called PRISM, gives access to email and other data at companies like Google.  Initially this sounds bad, but these programs appear to be legal.  The phone-monitoring program cannot listen in on your call without a warrant, but they can see who you called and when.  This program has been reported on for a long time, and collecting this metadata has been legal since 1979.  The other program, PRISM, does not target US citizens, who are protected by the constitution from unreasonable searches.  PRISM collects data of "non-US persons", particularly those in Iran and Pakistan.  These programs have congressional and judicial oversight.  

The uproar seems to be about the possibility that this monitoring program could be turned on US citizens, whether the NSA should be able to collect metadata, and whether the agency is filtering out US data appropriately since Snowden's leak shows that about 3% of the data collected is from the US.  Leaking secret documents about perfectly legal government programs overseen by elected congressmen makes Edward Snowden a traitor, unless we find his claim that the NSA is lying is correct.  There will certainly be an inquiry to find out the truth.

I think the whole argument is stupid.  Everyone knows that information you put online is not private.  Making sure the NSA can't legally access it doesn't fix anything.  There are still any number of corporations, foreign governments, and individual attackers with access who don't care about your privacy.  People who are actually concerned about their privacy encrypt their data.  Which is no one.  Privacy is over because no one cares.

I wrote a blog post about it.  Let me know what you think!
http://sethotterstad.quora.com/Edward-Snowden-is-a-Traitor-but-a-marginal-one

According to John Oliver on the Daily Show the system that assesses the target's level of "foreignness" is accurate up to 51%.  Thats a 49% margin of error.  A flip of the coin.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PCEnkynRuI

“There is a massive apparatus within the United States government that with complete secrecy has been building this enormous structure that has only one goal, and that is to destroy privacy and anonymity, not just in the United States but around the world,” said Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian reporter speaking on CNN. “That is not hyperbole. That is their objective.”

Absolutely terrifying.  I know this does not solely stem from the Obama Administration, but it is disheartening to see Obama defends PRISM when the overlying slogan of his campaign was governmental transparency....

It seems I'm one of the few that realizes PRISM, in all its shapes and forms, is nothing new..and as a result, I'm not shocked by it in the least.

"Modern" spying..whether on domestic or foreign persons..has been around for a number of decades (perhaps much longer), though obviously not on this scale. As technology got more advanced, it became easier and easier for "acronym agencies" to collect and analyze data. It was only a matter of time before something of this magnitude was uncovered.

I'm glad the first stages are underway but there is 100's of times this information about to come out.  Wait until people find out things like they were given cancer because it was profitable!

I think most people probably suspected something along these lines.  Still its not everyday something this large is leaked.

I agree, the size of this project is on a never before seen level. You have literally close to 0% privacy doing anything digitally unless you are really taking measures to avoid being watched. I don't believe I am doing anything wrong, so I don't try to hide anything. That's beside the point though. Just because you aren't doing anything wrong to tickle the government's balls and catch their attention, doesn't make this widespread of a privacy violation right.

And of course, I understand the amount of data they are collecting could be in the exabyte range which is ridiculously vast. You could argue "even if they can see all that you do, what are the chances they will find your stuff". Well, you don't build something that large without an excellent process to index and categorize the information you are collecting in a thousand different ways/views.

More than 99% of internet users are noobs or people like you saying "I got nothing to hide so I dont care".
The result: the 1% (probably more like 0.01%) that are very careful with their privacy and encryption is a so small population that they easier can be monitored manually.
Even if they are careful most of times its enough to make mistake a few times and you get identified.
Maybe I sound too paranoid, but you got to think just like your opponent to win the game of privacy.

SO...they know exactly what you bought with Bitcoins last week...

No, wait...they don't....

As for that "excellent process to index and categorize"?

You are kidding, right? 

For three years the IRS persecuted me with threat letters saying that I had two kids, not three, and so I was not allowed the third deduction for a dependent.  No number of letters to them made any difference, the threats kept coming.  "Notices of intent to seize", etc.

Man, they sure had some excellent processes to index and categorize, didn't they?

Every bureaucratic system regresses to the mean of simple, plain stupidity.

It blows my mind people are seriously ignorant enough to not give a shit.

"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin

Even if you are "innocent" , innocent is defined by the very people who have granted themselves this power.  They can move that line wherever they want as there is zero oversight.  Like Snowden says, they've recorded everything about your life, anytime they want they can go back and use the simplest of things against you and no one is there to stop them.  Bitcoin for example......  

Also, the Director of National Intelligence LIED under oath to CONGRESS.  Don't people normally go to jail for that?

It seems the general debate about prism is already being pushed under the rug.  Its difficult already to find the story on major news networks.  If anyone still cares sign some petitions!

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/pardon-edward-snowden/Dp03vGYD

Define "essential".

I think B. Franklin meant that liberty is needed no matter the situation.

+1

In this context the right to privacy.  I think the Patriot Act in general affected our Fourth Amendment rights.

That's a good idea.  Do it!

The people that helped found this country were not stupid they knew exactly what would happen

“I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. . . . corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.”
—U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, Nov. 21, 1864
(letter to Col. William F. Elkins)

This may need its own topic


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nvXn2w_FvY

Did it.

They are completely separate and bloated pieces of the government who probably don't interact much with each other. I highly doubt the IRS has any kind of access to PRISM information

When you sit atop the steaming pile of shit that is the government, the rules don't apply to you. If you want to be strict about breaking laws, there are quite a few current administration members that should be rotting in jail right now

Where were all you chuckleheads over a decade ago when people were screaming about this? Probably busy marginalizing those people as "conspiracy theorists", because after all the patriot act is only for brown people right?

I was in 6th grade at the time, I think :P

In Iraq fixing IED hunting robots.

I was too young to understand? When you don't know, you just don't know.

Same here, too young to know what the hell was going on  :P

Yes, everyone should boycott american IT companies such as Facebook, Google, Apple, DropBox, Skype, Microsoft, Dell, HP..
The only thing preventing the majority of people to not boycott them are ignorance and laziness to learn other products or operating systems (linux)

I think everyone in their right mind is disgusted by this. 

Speaking of which...I'd love to start browsing pretty exclusively with Tor just for more privacy, but Google searches don't work in Tor for me.  Does anyone know how to fix this, or alternatively, a different search engine that doesn't have this problem?

Good luck finding an ISP or telco operating in the US that won't give up your data when asked. Using linux won't stop that. :D

In our apartment complex, there has been a series of car radio thefts, resulting in smashed windows and damaged cars. Should we install security cameras (but losing tenant privacy?), or not? I think losing some privacy for the greater good, is required.

So instead of electronic Surveillance, the NSA should hire about 100k more employee, to physically watch every single potential terrorist?

This is a terrible analogy in this context.  On a scale of a country/world, that statement loses precision.  First off, the security cameras would be in plain view of the tenants, and would most likely be in agreement between tenants and managers/owners.  There would at least there would be some kind of notice, then you could voice discontent to the owners.  This is not the case when it comes to PRISM.  I understand the possibility of it doing good, but there is no reason a program of that magnitude should be ENTIRELY hidden from the public or its powers derived entirely from the people who created it, without any accountability or oversight.

Try duckduckgo.

Would you guys say that, since the advent of the internet, it has become easier or harder for a totalitarian government to stay in power? Are there examples of states that have become MORE totalitarian in the last 10-15 years or so in a state with decent internet penetration? I want to study the effect of the internet on the coercive state, but I'm having trouble finding articles or studies on it, although I think they probably exist. If anyone can link some, that would be awesome. Here is my initial take on it:

I agree with the sentiment of a lot of people that the end of privacy being caused by computers is terrifying. Governments can spy on populations much better than totalitarian regimes of the past. However, totalitarianism appears to be in MASSIVE DECLINE. Dictators have had a really bad decade, are getting taken out all over the place, and having revolutions despite the use of massive surveillance to support the regimes. Why do you think the opposite correlation would be true? You have to consider the positives of computers and the internet too:

Instant spread of information on government wrongdoing
Easier to organize protests
Stronger free speech protection
Easy access to information promotes more logical populations/representatives who will be less likely to believe, for example, that certain ethnic minorities deserve fewer rights

I'm sure there are a whole bunch I'm missing, but it appears that they outweigh the negative of an easier surveillance state, which I argue will be impossible to stop anyway since no one cares about encrypting their data unless their life depends on it. We have repeatedly seen that you only need something like 10% of a population out protesting in order to have a revolution. Some Eastern European countries saw protest rates of almost 50% during the fall of the soviet union, but such a high level is not necessary, particularly if they are armed with rifles.

PRISM is the ultimate Big Brother around...and when that Utah Yottabyte (YB) Data Base is ready, things are gonna be really bad...  :-X

Dark times are comming... :-[

But what bothers me the most is that Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook etc. don't stand a second against the GOV force.

BTW, I'll post here as well what I've suggested somewhere else:

OPs and MODs:

I'd like to suggest a fixed topic about PRISM surveillance and inside that topic some info like that available at http://prism-break.org/

And freedom for all!

Ooh, a search engine that doesn't track you.  Thanks for the heads up, I'll give them a shot.

I've seen some people reporting that ixquick is better than duckduckgo.  I've tried duckduckgo before and thought the results were so extraordinarily bad that I couldn't use it.

I thought that too; I guess all that data collection served a purpose :P  At least, started out with good intentions.

Yeah, I just tried it for the first time and it is significantly slower than Google.  I don't think data collection has anything to do with how good the results are, that's more an indication of how good the algorithms and the crawlers are.  You can have great algorithms / crawlers without collecting data about people using your search engine.  Going to give it a try for a while, no guarantees that I'll stick with it, but I like the no tracking thing.

A fixed topic about PRISM should be in place but i would say it wont help much.
In Europe the try to make it mandatory to have every new car registered from October 2015 be fitted with the "112-eCall-System"
it means that your car is tracked 24/7 How much information is collected and sent is anyone's goes. will it come with an always on in-build microphone and internal, external cameras?
Welcome to the future

void itIsWhatItIs() {
    std::string Corporations[] = { "banks", "military", "agencies", "hospitals", "transportation", "etc" };
    std::string Proletariat[] = { "good", "honest", "strong" };
}

int main() {
    auto Country = "America";
    itIsWhatItIs();
    Proletariat += { "American" };
    if (Proletariat[0] != "good") {
        std::cout << "Error! Database error. Userland compromised. Recommend beginning escape sequence." << std::endl;
        return 1;
    }
    else {
        std::cout << "Everything is good... oh wait, that sounds too good to be tru-

SEGMENTATION FAULT. FATAL ERROR!!!

lol, I'm bored. Prism honestly sounds god-awful.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/03/20/174827589/yes-your-new-car-has-a-black-box-wheres-the-off-switch

The US car market already has an "EDR" in the vast majority of new cars. 

The problem is who owns the data in it.

Personally, I believe that as the owner of the car, I should own the data in the EDR and access to it should require a warrant.  Sadly, it seems that is not how it is being treated today.

I don't know why this would come as a surprise to anyone with even the most basic understanding of governments. There's really nothing to be surprised about. Analogous operations have been ongoing for many decades among almost every developed "democracy" and not-so-democracy under the sun. This is the state. This is what it does.

There's also Startpage.com (also provided by Ixquick) where they claim to provide "complete privacy" as mentioned in their words as follows:

"Startpage offers you Web search results from Google in complete privacy!"

"When you search with Startpage, we remove all identifying information from your query and submit it anonymously to Google ourselves. We get the results and return them to you in total privacy."

"Your IP address is never recorded, your visit is not logged, and no tracking cookies are placed on your browser. When it comes to protecting your privacy, Startpage runs the tightest ship on the Internet. Our outstanding privacy policy and thoughtful engineering give you great search results in total anonymity."

Good luck trying...

"Wake to see - your true emancipation is a fantasy.
Policies have risen up and overcome the brave." -- Muse

OH???  Okay, try this.

Peer to peer Google request anonimizer.

Each request is sent to a random peer, then bounced back to sender.

At first I was thinking FF plugin, but just to spite the bastards, let's make it a Chrome extension.

Next problem?

I can't dare to use chrome/chromium anymore after Google sold his soul to NSA.  :-\

I'm back to my old and beloved Firefox wife.

I should have never betrayed her...LOL

Google ....  a total slut.

I uninstalled all Google SpyWare after this issue.

Honestly the biggest chock should not be that Keith Alexander (NSA) is a horny bastard for private data, or whores like Zuckerberg (FB) and Larry Page (GOOG) bending over for NSA.

The issue is how foolishly we internet users share so much private data without considering the risk of the data getting in to the wrong hands.
What facebook really is about for NSA, what they care about:
-WHO: getting info about each individuals social network, they know exactly who you know.
-WHERE: knowing where you are every day (every time you login to FB the GPS/IP data is logged). Some idiots even report themselves with "Check In".
-WHAT: searching for keywords used in your status updates, or private messages.
-BONUS: getting info about people that are smart enough to not be members of FB. But info about them might end up at FB when they are in pictures that you upload.

I never left firefox, chrome is crap.

I was damn naive at that time.

I was blind and could not see the true power of the open source community.

Governments will never completly shut up that community. No matter what.

Google, Apple, MS, FB etc, never trust that commercial closed source stuff...

That's the lesson!

link?

funny, but sad  :(

"Report themselves", lol that's great. I really do find it stupid that people feel the need to publish every detail of their lives and what they are doing as each and every day goes on. The total depth of this crap is show in exhibit A below:

"John Doe is at the car wash"

"Michelle Q. - I'm @ McDonald's yaaay :)"

"Mike M. - Taking a huge shit right now at my house!!!"

Pointless, unintelligible garbage.

It's a handy, dandy, CB radio!

But that has nothing to do with whether the government should collect and store all the chatter for your lifetime.

Seecrypt (https://www.seecrypt.com/) might be useful in all this, and much better priced than SilentCircle.

They also now have a partnership with an encrypted email service called Poosty (http://www.poosty.com/), which is based in Sweden...

Hopefully, they'll accept Bitcoins some day.  ???

Yes!  People are just pretending to care about what the NSA is doing, while their actions say they don't give a crap about what happens to their private data.

Logical error of the style 'false generalization', broad brushing a subject.

Emailing, skyping, and searching isn't indicative of a lack of giving a crap. 

Unfortunately it's difficult to be functional on the internet and avoid all of the large companies that are partnered with the US government on PRISM.

I know there isn't a whole lot I can do myself to make a change. My primary focus is trying to educate others the best I can on how this affects their lives as well.

Email is unfortunately the most unsecure form of communication which most noobs are unaware of.
When a few people use PGP encryption that makes them a minority that easily can be monitored, on other areas where they cannot hide.
So while the noobs dont care or dont know about encryption they also unknowingly sabotage for the few that care.

No, this is a presumption and it is not necessarily true.

And think of what communication could be hidden in spam.

At least we've found some use for SPAM:

It complicates the NSA data filtering work because SPAM volume is greater than 90% of the world's sent messages nowadays.  :P

It truly is disgusting.. The internet is the last free place in the world. We bitcoiners intend to keep it as such.

It is clear that PRISM was aimed at people who communicate with outside of US. Intelligence is a dirty business, all methods are game. Blackmail and corruption are flagship practices. Privacy of communications is small fish in this game.

What is disgusting is that program apparently lacked safeguards against abuse. What is more warring is that people did not care to include them in the design. Apparent is total lack of accountability, probably because system was classified. Lapse is really significant, because a foreign mole inside PRISM would could actually spy on Americans and do serious damage.

I would be if this was anything new.

Communications in the USSA have been monitored since the invention of the telegraph.

I like Snowden going to Ecuador as opposed to a major historical, if not current, enemy such as China or Russia.

Lot of people screamed and showed a lot of anger at little things Bush did, most of them are strikingly silent today.  Well, Snowden, like him or not, wasn't silent.

This is true but it's being taken to a new level now.

Yay a country that cares  :)

Or at least appears to.

Nobody saw the irony of Ecuador offering development aid to the USA? ;)

China, the enemy that finances the US govt and it's war machine. 

Nothing BUT complex and nuanced on both sides of that equation.  But we could all agree that the trend over say the last 50 years looks pretty darn good.

What did you think?
That US gov was spying noone?

"We now live in a nation where doctors destroy health, lawyers
destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, governments destroy
freedom, the press destroys information, religions destroy morals and
our banks destroy the economy"

- Chris Hedges

Disgusted yes, is anyone actually surprised?

Clearly they've always been shady. This is just taking it to an entirely new level.

Sounds about right to me.

Information is power. People censoring themselfes because of the risk of being spied on is power. The power elite has never been this powerful and Im afriad the point of no return is passed. We are so dependent on technology nowdays that technology is used to enslave the mind of humanity rather than liberating us. We are in this digital mind prison for many years to come. Maybe "singularity" will liberate us, or maybe it will enslave our minds even further.

We might even be presented with an option by the future power elite: Join the Matrix where you can be as free as you want to be, you can do whatever you want without any rules or any punishment, but there is a price: your physical body and your physical awareness will be kept hostage for your entire life. You can escape the real world and let us rule the physical world while you are asleep dreaming in the Matrix world for ever and ever.

Addendum: We may already be living in a simulated matrix world, but this world is a nightmare instead of a cute dream. Adding another matrix world in this world creates something like the dream-in-dream-in-dream... concept of the movie Inception. We may escape reality deeper and deeper without ever really feeling satisfied...

I'm surprised there aren't more US citizens on the streets. Even to someone who condones surveillance, the fact that the US government is hunting and criminalizing Snowden shows clearly where it stands.

Really, I thought Americans were civilized. This is not a behavior I would expect from them.

The correct response of the US population would be to march on their government and get out a formal apology to both Americans and unnecessarily targeted people abroad. Snowden should be officially honored for speaking the truth, in the peoples' interest, against massive coercion attempts.

After all the things in history government has done, i am not in any way surprised by this. The only thing that's keeping our heads over the water is the fact that the government can't keep up with technology innovation.

Dont be naive, the USA has bombed, sabotaged and overthrown countless countries back to the stone age in the last 70 years with an overwhelming approval of their population. They surly dont mind a little harmless spying for their nations benefit.

The Egyptians know how to get this shit done, everyone in our countries is too passive about this sort of thing, if people in my country took to the streets demanding the politicians resign I'd be right there with them, it's a shame people in Egypt care more than we do.

I am just surprised how easy it is for them to get away with this.  Half the public even defends the NSA.... because of course, the smartest, largest terror operations use a facebook/skype/gmail/mainstream solution, gotta update your status before blowing up a building.....

Its really sad to see about 90 percent of the population truly do not give a shit. 

True.  Look what they are trying to do with snowden as well. 

Yeah, true story. I mean this is the greatest spy attac in history but it seems that nobody gives a shit about it! I mean how can you just ignore something?

A large part of the answer has to do with how the media has presented or ignored it.

Yeah, also i find the amount of "good news" about other liberal topics astonishing.

The U.S. national media (TV networks, NYTimes, etc.) have pretty much focused on the plight of Snowden and ignored their duty to follow up on Snowden's allegations.  They report what Snowden has said, but have done little investigative journalism of their own to invalidate, confirm, or expand on Snowden's words.  The few stories that have come out since (google, facebook, etc. helping NSA) were dumped in their laps.  I think they would liked to have buried the whole affair but couldn't because it was getting so much attention from non-U.S. media.  They are so used to "reporting" to sway public perception and opinion against this type of thing.  Now they have a situation where public opinion is already firmly outraged about it, but they don't want to fan the flames because it looks really bad for Obama and they have so much invested in him.

2/3 of Americans think Snowden should be prosecuted.

Sometimes I wonder how much of this sort of developing process is the result of the following type of emerging reality:

A)  NSA/CIA Guy:  "I want to have a cool nice job in an air conditioned building staring at a computer screen.  My gosh - WAY BELOW ME to be out on the streets in a hostile country, in a disguise, handing money over for dirty work, late at night."

B)  REPORTER:  "I want to scrape stories from the Internet, from Twitter and stuff like that.  The AP and Reuters and head office sends most of the stuff to me anyway.  It's an easy, fun life.  What?  Me go out and dig stories up?  Talk to people?  Research?  Hey, no way...that's like hard, man."


C)  ....

You get the idea.  I don't have to continue with University Prof, Average Consumer, etc.

NSA Recruiters vs students  (Audio Only)


Students 1  /  NSA 0

https://soundcloud.com/madiha-1/students-question-the-nsa-at

Many people are upset, but the question right now is what would it take for change? I think most people aren't ready to risk their normal lives and march against the government. Who knows what negative punishment could come from something like that.

I believe it will take a certain breaking point for that to happen, and as bad as everything is now, that still might be far away.

If they can't keep up, they will just take what they need from the true innovators.

The US government has a deathgrip on all the major news networks, It's difficult to get good information out to the uninformed masses via press.

Good reporting by the Guardian in the UK. I applaud them for not giving one shit about the US governments desires.

Where does that poll data come from? Now THAT is sad

Im astonished its that low, afterall he betrayed his country and is working with communists and aliens.

"Because frankly, if people are making judgments just based on these slides that have been leaked, they’re not getting the complete story.”
-Barack Obama on PRISM

You really cleared that up for us Mr. President.  Thanks.

I agree he shouldnt have started sharing secrets to China etc.  That was idiotic, and prosecutable.  

But then again, the US should not be prosecuting him because he sacrificed the rest of his ENTIRE life, so you and the rest of the American people could see an injustice.

This is awesome and hilarious.  Wow what horseshit.  I can't believe the people working for the NSA dilute themselves enough to believe what theyre saying...... yikes.

You must assume that your ISP is spying on you so you should encrypt communication that needs secrecy. Windows and OSX has backdoors for NSA as you know so using linux will give you some more security.

Yeah i found it pretty awesome myself!!! :)

I'm glad this thread has gotten a good bit of attention here  :)

Awesome!  I was pretty much at the point of believing that my fellow Americans are to fucking stupid to deserve anything but a totalitarian police state, and a fair number of them would probably feel most comfortable in that setting anyway.  These students give me some hope.

Like I've said before (and before Snowden) the only silver lining on this amazing surveillance framework is that it will be sweeping up evidence of people who actually HAVE things worth hiding, and a lot of them are currently in the seats of power.  So this trove of data is the best hope to see them swinging from meat-hooks (figuratively) at some point in the future.  But only if we can get people like these students in the drivers seat.  And I expect that THAT is exactly why it is so important to Obama, Cheney, etc, that the police state framework they are building works effectively.

---

Here's a prediction.  I predict that 'because Snowden spilled the beans', 'terrorists have changed their ways' and it is necessary to eliminate from the network crypto which is not back-door'd for the safety of Americans.  (If/when this happens it will change aspects of how/if Bitcoin operates significantly BTW.)  My extra level of paranoia and reason to be extra careful about accepting as fact certain things around the Snowden affair probably stems from a several years old story involving security contractors and Greenwald by name.  e.g.:

  http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110209/22340513034/leaked-hbgary-documents-show-plan-to-spread-wikileaks-propaganda-bofa-attack-glenn-greenwald.shtml

It is interesting to note that where initially a majority supported Snowden's whistle-blowing, that has shifted after the mainstream media has had a chance to chew on the general public a bit.  The fat middle is now accepting that the surveillance is necessary to fight terrorism and Snowden should not have given away 'our' secrets.  So they will also probably accept that steps to keep terrorists from making and end-run around the system are also necessary.  Only about 5% of people are aware of what cryptography actually is anyway, and only about 15% even have the native intellect to do so if they tried.  My estimates.

My opinion:
The fear of T is most probably only a false fear to maximize control over the society through surveillance.

But even If the threat of T is real, the threatened state must solve the cause of T instead of fighting it. The only solution to conflicts are understanding and patience, not fear and war. But peace is less profitable than war and fear, so the latter solution wins.

I think that the biggest problem our leadership (in the US) has with terrorism is that there is not enough for them to achieve their goals.  They practically have to strap dummy vests on borderline retard kids themselves in order to catch any 'terrorists' and get a good scare going among the plebs in these lean times.

A vastly bigger threat of harm to me is corruption and mis-management of my tax dollars, and that is where surveillance is of genuine value.  Here's the policy I would put in place if I had my way:

 - Anyone who wishes to work in the government at a management or higher level submits to surveillance.  Those who don't wish to submit are free to resign.  They will receive full pensions as promised...unless 'austerity' intervenes...

 - The records accumulated since the spying went into place are preened of all but government official's data and one degree of linkage.

 - The entire ball of wax is open-sourced for analysis by interested taxpayers.

I would also not only fully pardon Manning and Snowden and the rest of the whistleblowers but ask them to become high ranking officials in an honest and honorable government.

Can judicial decisions be made in secret, and be Constitutional?

I think not, since the implication is "What we are doing is Constitutional....trust us on that...."

Behavior that was not Constitutional could occur in such "secret judiciary" by several means:

1.  Error.
2.  Good intent, bad or ridiculous interpretation.
3.  Corruption.
4.  Willful and/or intentional Constitutional disregard to achieve political, military or business objectives.

A second issue is the Constitutionality of the handling of datasets which exist as the result of the secret judicial decisions.  These, after being created by way of any of the means above cited, could be used in non Constitutional means by at least the four methods above mentioned.



http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/07/us/in-secret-court-vastly-broadens-powers-of-nsa.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&pagewanted=all&_r=1&

 Unlike the Supreme Court, the FISA court hears from only one side in the case — the government — and its findings are almost never made public. A Court of Review is empaneled to hear appeals, but that is known to have happened only a handful of times in the court’s history, and no case has ever been taken to the Supreme Court. In fact, it is not clear in all circumstances whether Internet and phone companies that are turning over the reams of data even have the right to appear before the FISA court.

Created by Congress in 1978 as a check against wiretapping abuses by the government, the court meets in a secure, nondescript room in the federal courthouse in Washington. All of the current 11 judges, who serve seven-year terms, were appointed to the special court by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., and 10 of them were nominated to the bench by Republican presidents. Most hail from districts outside the capital and come in rotating shifts to hear surveillance applications; a single judge signs most surveillance orders, which totaled nearly 1,800 last year. None of the requests from the intelligence agencies was denied, according to the court.

Beyond broader legal rulings, the judges have had to resolve questions about newer types of technology, like video conferencing, and how and when the government can get access to them, the officials said.

The judges have also had to intervene repeatedly when private Internet and phone companies, which provide much of the data to the N.S.A., have raised concerns that the government is overreaching in its demands for records or when the government itself reports that it has inadvertently collected more data than was authorized, the officials said. In such cases, the court has repeatedly ordered the N.S.A. to destroy the Internet or phone data that was improperly collected, the officials said.

The officials said one central concept connects a number of the court’s opinions. The judges have concluded that the mere collection of enormous volumes of “metadata” — facts like the time of phone calls and the numbers dialed, but not the content of conversations — does not violate the Fourth Amendment, as long as the government establishes a valid reason under national security regulations before taking the next step of actually examining the contents of an American’s communications.

This concept is rooted partly in the “special needs” provision the court has embraced. “The basic idea is that it’s O.K. to create this huge pond of data,” a third official said, “but you have to establish a reason to stick your pole in the water and start fishing.”

Under the new procedures passed by Congress in 2008 in the FISA Amendments Act, even the collection of metadata must be considered “relevant” to a terrorism investigation or other intelligence activities.

The court has indicated that while individual pieces of data may not appear “relevant” to a terrorism investigation, the total picture that the bits of data create may in fact be relevant, according to the officials with knowledge of the decisions.

As a long-time heavy user of Skype, Facebook & many of Googles products I find PRISM absolutely outrageous. To think that the US Government has had unlimited and un-scrutinized access to most of my personal data is terrifying. I don't have anything to hide, though that is not the point. This is pure, unadulterated abuse of power.

Whichever political party leads the United States now essentially has the power to read their opponents emails, listen to their phone calls and intercept sexy pictures from their wives. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that this is very wrong and potentially could have huge implications.

Not sure if this has been posted here, but this is a good summary of what PRISM is and and how it works. What is PRISM? (http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1fx8zs/what_is_prism/)

Just a note - is this exactly right?

If we are looking at the breakdown of the rule of law, who has access is anyone with pull who conspires to get access.  That may not be the "party in power", right?  Yes they might see this as useful in an election or for coercion or threats.

But in such circumstances, numerous others might have access - simply stated, access would be for sale.  It might even be more accurate to say that it was simply for sale....to the party in power.

I believe that the 'two party' idea is largely a myth at this point.  There are ideological differences, but they tend to be along a different divide.  In fact, the concept of developing a totalitarian-capable surveillance system is an excellent example of this.  Most democrats and republicans embrace the concept fully.  There are, however, outsiders on both the right and the left who are not on-board.  Wyden, Paul, and I handful of right-wingers who's names I cannot recall are balking.  Certainly there are elected representatives who are to stupid or uninformed to grasp what's going on, but most of them have to be entirely aware of what they are constructing.

I was certain that Obama was going to win a second term less than a year into his first.  He is everything his fascist masters could have wanted and has great power over the party-line dems even now...which is kind of hard for me to say as a lot of them are my dear friends.  Obama won the second term with exceptional ease by employing the same kind of analysis that on-line advertising companies use.  This requires a lot of PII (Personally Identifiable Information) so his lust for such data could be explained on that basis alone though at this point I believe his motives are probably even more sinister and he is fully aware of what he is doing to our country.  He is either very weak or genuinely evil and neither is especially promising for us citizens.

One really does need to ask oneself why our government is building this thing.  Clearly the 'fight against terror' is a joke and most of the architects must know it.  The strongest explanation I can see is that it will be needed in the aftermath of an economic meltdown and the likely world war which tends to follow these things.

Some of you may recall the PNAC.  I happen to believe that these guys (Cheney, Rumsfeld, et-al) were exactly on target in a lot of their analysis.  Specifically that there is one last shot at any nation arranging a hegemony in a multi-polar world, and what follows is most likely to be a one-world government of some sort.  I don't rule out Orwell's predictions for a small number of super-states, but even he left open the possibility they were a fiction invented to manage the proles.  One way or another, a high level of surveillance is a key tool in any number of potential dystopian settings.

The good news is that none of this may fully congeal within my lifetime, but I am pretty confident that we have taken several big steps into the swamp as I write this and that we are farther into it than most people realize.

But what if it wasn't the intentional construction of a totalitarian All Seeing All Watching state, but something that technology handed them before they even came up with the idea of building it?  Technology has handed similar benefit to you and I, many we could not have predicted they would exist a few years prior to their emerging.

From this point of view, the latent or suppressed or active control freak section of the personality of these politicians is considerably enhanced by the tools they have suddenly found themselves holding.  Are they going to give them up willingly?  Nope!  Do they even understand what they have?  In most cases, likely not.  (say the average member of the House or Senate).

And let me toss uncertainty into the array of possible outcomes as well.  We don't know what the outcomes may be.  They may be dystopia, or they may be the opposite. 

When a state SAYS it must "fight against T", that is synonymous with saying it must fight against the power of the individual, as the increased power of the individual today is at the root of tactics of T.  But this duality between state and individual is not new.  Obviously we're doing slightly better than a few centuries ago when every man was conscripted into the King's army as a foot soldier and sentenced to a short and brutal life.

A state that views its own citizens as a threat do not represent the people anymore but is more like an occupying force that needs to oppress people in order to keep the power.
Such power structure is not sustainable historically.

Unless it can successfully work the duality eg "fear me but trust me and love me and stay quite and submissive or else", but that is still pretty much a totalitarian state by definition.  And what is sustainable in the future may be different than in the past.  In the past, a totalitarian state needed massive numbers of informers to maintain cohesiveness.

Now, with technology, it would seem it does not need those informers.  They are the robots.  This would seem at first glance to imply higher efficiency for large statist structures but working against that is:

A)  the more rapid growth of technology in the hands of the individual
B)  the inability of the state to adapt to extremely rapid rates of change

I think we are in uncharted territory here but that with wise governance the outcomes could be extremely good.  Of course we have the opposite of that by all appearances...

http://news.slashdot.org/story/13/07/08/1516231/mit-project-reveals-what-prism-knows-about-you


Links:
https://immersion.media.mit.edu/
http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/comment/nsa-prism-surveillance-mit-immersion-121202

http://wikileaks.org/Statement-by-Edward-Snowden-to.html

Ya, I am totally disgusted by the NSA surveillance program. The scary thing is that the United States NSA PRIZM spying program goes way further than American soil.  By spying on Yahoo mail, Hotmail and Google searches and Dropbox they are essentially spying on the world, you know how many people from other countries use these online services.

Here is a WIRED magazine article that will scare anyone who reads it.

http://www.moneyaccumulator.com/1151/the-nsa-is-building-the-country%E2%80%99s-biggest-spy-center-spying-on-the-world/

I have already taken many steps detailed in this other article, I have changed from Dropbox  to Mega.co.nz.
I don't use Google search anymore... I use Startpage.com, it's google without the spying.  I use Torbrowser for all my surfing, now the only thing I have to do is get off damn YAHOO mail...I am looking for alternative right now.

Other article: http://www.moneyaccumulator.com/1062/avoid-u-s-gov-snooping-nsa-prizm-move-away-from-cloud-services-that-allow-nsa-backdoor/

Have a read.

CryptoCoinMKT

snowden is quite articulate, I hope and expect we hear more from him.

You can do a lot of other stuff that makes your life a little easier but also protects you.  For example, you can keep using dropbox, but just use Boxcryptor Classic or a TrueCrypt container for the bulk of your files.  Then music and other stuff that you don't care if it gets leaks, you can still have that in the clear, so all your apps can still take advantage of dropbox's interconnectedness to everything.  You can use a non-logging VPN instead of Tor-- yeah you have to trust the VPN, but at least you prevent ISP spying and you get speeds much better than Tor allows for.  And you can sign up for a Tormail or Lavabit e-mail, which again-- you have to trust them, but it's probably easier than only communicating with friends who use PGP.

Remember, security and convenience are always a trade-off, so my personal advice is to only protect yourself against egregious violations and let them have the small stuff.  It's just too much of a pain to not have Google on your phone or to only use encrypted communication or to constantly change services or use fake info all the time.  I mean, if you want to, more power to you, but understand the trade-off.  I like the little conveniences that are afforded by sacrificing some privacy, but I understand what I'm giving up.  I expect all my communications to be monitored, and I am able to protect myself if I want, but most of the time it's not worth the hassle.

But I guess, if you want to fight the good fight more than I do, that's perfectly fine and I bid you godspeed.

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA512

Just FYI people, there are ways we can protect ourselves...

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+1 Great post.

Have you noticed the truecrypt hasn't been updated in over 1 1/2 yrs? diskcryptor hasn't either.

But it's got a long history of only being updated once a year or so.

My point of view in this issue is that we should all start using encrypted measures in our communications, most importantly in our emails and such, users information will be the most valuable asset of the future.

Agreed! And to that end it is up to the software community to make trustworthy-open-source private and anonymous encryption solutions (aka software & services) -and they need to keep it up-to-date - for compatibility purposes AND to remove found bugs & security holes. {This must also be simple and convenient, otherwise, the ignorant masses won't use it.}

By the way, to those of you that think that this assault on our privacy isn't an issue - you are a damn fool if you think that it would never or could never be used against you (or against someone else that you may care about). Yep, those of you that so ignorantly proclaim "I have nothing to hide". Please tell every business (every store, doctor, hospital, or service provider- and your employer too..) THAT you don't need no stinkin' privacy policy...

Please also post your email password here so I can scour your email looking for things you've said (over the years) that I can put together and twist to make it look like you're involved in a crime. Please do this now because I want to prove to you how incredibly foolish and shallow minded you are. And hey, thanks in advance!

As I understand things, encrypted messages are retained indefinitely (by the NSA) while obviously non-valuable data is discraded after some years.  It probably is true that if you really have nothing to hide (meaning you are a non-political nobody who does nothing interesting) then you have nothing to fear...but if you are even reading this forum there is a strong likelihood that you are a potential threat.  I suspect that it will be possible to extract decryption info from most people as needed by one means or another unless they have genuinely forgotten or lost the key material.

If 'we' wish to solve the problem, here's how to do it:  Form a 'guild' of sorts where a lot of participants use their excess bandwidth to randomly exchange information which could be needed messages, but are 99.999% garbage.  This would provide plausible deniability in the cases where there is an actual need to communicate without big brother and the inner party analyzing everything we do.  To really give the NSA clusters something to do, embed these messages within media files.

Most "normal" middle class people just shrug their shoulders and probably think PRISM is necessary to catch enemies. One of my friends said on Facebook that Snowdon was a traitor and spy for the Chinese. I find it hard to still consider him my friend. ::)

A healthy majority of people are not equipped to comprehend what is (very likely) going on here, or recognize that it is nothing new and that all entities who wish to consolidate power throughout history have employed as much surveillance as the technology of the day allowed...and usually with tragic results for the populace.

Here's one way to deal with this 'fat middle':

Remind people of 'identity theft', 'wi-fi' theft, computer virus infections, etc, and how much of a hassle it is end up on a list like the 'no-fly' one since it is nearly impossible to get off of it.

Thanks to Snowden finally blowing the lid off things in a major way, it is no longer a secret that massive amounts of information are retained.  Thus, the argument for keeping 'terrorists' from changing their ways is mute.

Remind people that they paid for the collection of the data with their tax dollars and it is thus rightly 'their' data in more ways than one.

Lobby for a program which would allow people to query their own data for references to themselves so they can check up on things to make sure that there are no mistakes and that no bad data got in which could come back to haunt them later.

This is a pretty reasonable thing to ask for at this point.  The only real argument against it would be that it could take some resources away from the 'war on terror' (which most thinking people recognize as 99.9% bogus), but it is also the case that bad data could complicate efforts and harm innocent people.

edit: ad computer viruses as a way to be mis-tagged in the NSA's database.

great. let'em spend years and waste thousands of man-hours cracking my truecrypt files. And when they finally do, I hope they get a nice kick out of all my worthless (to them) personal information. But who knows perhaps they will blackmail me when they see the videos of me and some ex's havin fun?

But as for the nobody's with nothing to hide because they are "non-political" - Someone needs to explain to them that they will have to stay non-political for the rest of their life - because if an issue ever does arise that does move their apathetic asses - well then...they're in trouble.  Plus they better be alright with watching their friends and family members (who might not be so apathetic) destroyed.

Love your guild idea...

I get that... Why? It's because these ignorant fools who are the greatest threat to our freedom.

Great points - all but the "lobbying".  There's no stopping them now. Even if we could successfully lobby to stop them - they would not stop. Pandora's box has been opened...

Oh, yea, sure.  You mean like your existing right to query the records the FBI has on you?  For which you have to at your own expense go get your fingerprints taken and a certified copy sent to the District of Criminals?

For which the response takes six months?

 ::)

I didn't mean to sound quite so legal about it, but in the US at this point making the demand(s) of this nature clear to one's political representatives is almost certainly the best course of action.  The issues can resonate with the population if the right cord is struck, and it is still the case that without popular support it takes a lot more special interest money to win elections.  Plus there are a certain number of independent and decent politicians who are personally troubled by the direction these things are going and they are not useless.

But on to the term 'lobby'...  A lot of us place critical importance on 'getting the money out of politics.'  It's actually not 'the money' which is so pernicious but what the money buys and how the sausage is made.  One silver lining of the whole surveillance state apparatus is that it has almost certainly captured a great deal of the inner workings of our developing fascist state.

I mess around with Bitcoin and do sex chat with my girlfriend from time to time.  I also have strongly held political views which I am not shy about presenting.  The political opinions and Bitcoin are legal absent a breakdown in ex-post-facto.  I've got rather large genitals which I am somewhat proud of so threatening the exposure of archived NSA data is not really as bad as it could be.  In short, I actually have little to hide and what I do (like my secret keys) are very well hidden. 

Probably I am typical for Joe Sixpack, but this absence of deep dark secrets is likely NOT the case for a fair fraction of our political leadership given their connections to their sponsors.  But that data is there so it is a prize well worth seeking out.  One of the huge problems with 'big data' is cleaning it up without leaving loose ends.  If we can somehow eventually 'open source' this data, that is on par with 'getting the money out of politics' in terms of the benefits it could bring.

I like the general way this conversation is developing, and would like to note that there are problems with thinking legislation will fix the problem.

Did the much heralded "Privacy Laws" help?

Did the federal "anti spam" help?  (You know...the "Can spam" law...)

Many other examples where the law that is advertised as a solution actually entrenches the problem.

It just doesn't seem in any way logical to assume that new laws would have the desired effect on someone or an entity who has already demonstrated no concern for your privacy, and other rights, and who is already openly breaking numerous laws and often in violation of sworn oaths. In Fact, I would consider this an excellent example of crazy.

Do realize that the surveillance framework is first and foremost about quashing mass movements borne of discontent.  It has not 'come on-line' in a real sense mostly because there is yet no need.  To a large degree the system works by simple intimidation (and to this end it is necessary at some point to uncover it's scale.)  At a later phase, if it comes to this, it would be used for active policing.  If Mubarak had the system he would probably still lead Egypt.  Why, exactly, the US cut him out is a bit of a mystery to me.  My sense is that things were happening to fast for the Obama admin with the 'Arab Spring' happenings around that time.  The window of time to get in there and give the brother an hand was measured in days, and I think they just blew it.

Most populous countries have as their biggest threat their own populations so it is fair to characterize the domestic population as 'the enemy.'  The most interesting part of this whole Snowden show is watching Brazil, India, and Germany.  Since they don't have satisfactory reach and/or technical abilities, they have been trading with the 'Five Eyes' and apparently have come to feel fairly dependent on the services rendered.  I shit you not but I actually anticipated this so I feel inclined to take a victory lap here.

But back to my point.  The surveillance framework is probably not really well suited to protecting itself in a functional democracy which, arguably, we still have here in the US.  I make no apologies for believing that the most logical and suitable avenue of approach to this battle is old-school-democracy style politics and plain-Jane marketing/propaganda.  This, in part, because 'our side' has the moral high ground.  The alternate seems to be to sit around fantasizing about some revolution or what-not.  It would be advisable to do some hard-nosed planning for such an eventuality, but not at the expense of neglecting more immediate efforts

You do realize that President Carter just said that we are no longer a functioning democracy? Ah, anyhow. I'm just fussin'. I hate that we turned out to be a country that's all talk and bluster. You know... all the blowhards that swore they'd never let this happen here. Anyhow I hope that the present admin succeeds in their plans (whatever they are) because I think that the population gets (and has) the gov that they deserve. I only hope that I'm still around to watch and laugh as they get it. And I hereby volunteer to be a guard at a fema center.

I know what Carter said, and partially agree even with the most dark interpretation of his comments.  But at worst we continue to have elements of a functional democracy.  Even if it is known that one is going to lose a battle, it can still make sense to fight it if doing so can disadvantage one's adversaries future mobility.

On the other hand, it is more common to sacrifice one's self for naught and lose the ability be effective at a more opportune time.  Even more common is simplify things to the point of doing something stupid...or fantasizing about it.  Gun nuts are famous for this.  They tend to have no real clue about how hard it would be to shoot down a drone, for instance, but they talk about it incessantly.  As something of a 2nd amendment supporter it is awfully embarrassing.

maybe someone could build a lightweight emailer cloned and built rebuilt on qt from existing wallets   lilke multibit  or armory* with signatures that can be scanned and verified in qr code across a p2p the same way w bitcoin ( in the model of hascash).. maybe this is similar to Tor... im not versed in it.. lightweight easy to use on the fly over a sidechannel of btc... limted to 6 per hour(arbitrary ) if it would clog network until the network grows... w smv simp mail ver) verification pruning so no storage same as spv simp pay ver)...no storage except what is needed per client... I am sure this already implemented and I just don't know  what the name is... could call it bitmail-Qt or multimail... or whatever fits.. it would have built in user friendly gpg enc./dec capability for secure im or similar to secure tweets... we already have alt coins...why not alt-mailers... symmetric of course w future limited asymmetric public addresses...idk...just a thought.

I have to say that a focus on the NSA's dirty tricks is really going to miss the boat.

• Recently we say Eric Holder grab massive data from Verizon.  He didn't use the NSA for that - he sent a court order to Verizon.
• The IRS is developing a comprehensive database on us, supposedly including all credit card and bank data.
• The forthcoming Obamacare database would hold intimate details on every American.
• Local police departments are close to being able to track most vehicles on the road by combining mosaic data from the uploaded records of their camera systems, both stationary and mobile.

The threats to liberties thus are occurring at multiple levels of government, and at each level in multiple places.

Evidence of the political use of the datasets exists.  Evidence exists that the major commercial companies involved in the NSA scandal will hand over data sets to anyone who has a buddy who is a judge.

In the last year, we've seen a number of news stories about "the Democrats data center" and "how the smart guys at Google helped Obama win".  But at that time we didn't know the "how".  

Now it is pretty obvious.

Here is a concrete example of why I think focusing on the NSA is a red herring.  Suppose you encrypt all your phone calls and data, increase your use of VPN and Tor, increase the use of cash and btc versus tracable credit card charges, encrypt computers and databases on the clouds, so forth and so on. 

Assume further that in that fight for privacy you fully utilize emerging tools that the market will provide which we haven't seen yet - and which will be very powerful and cheap.

Suppose the NSA notices this pattern and it's filters respond by "keeping the data forever". 

So WHAT? 

That does not have anything to do with whether the thugs under Eric Holder get or can use those datasets, or the IRS, or the Dept. of Agriculture, or the political operatives of the Democrats, or any other of the current or future corrupt operations that may come to be.

So I would argue that the figure is against the primary sources of the data aggregation which then benefits the various government agencies seeking to get it.  And this would mean, yes, against Google and Yahoo ... and you can go on down that list.  The fight is to prevent their aggregating data in a useful form, and your privacy interests are diametrically opposed to their commercial interests.

Seems like that's what it's come to.

While I disagree with some details/finer points - everyone in here (so far) has proven themselves to be quite intelligent and I want to mention that I am very thankful for that.

@melon, I like your idea!

@spendulus, yes we are being assaulted on virtually all fronts.

The saddest thing about the leak of PRISM is that the media have turned it around and so now all they talk about is what is the airport hotel like that Edward Snowden is hiding out in and which anti american countries are going to offer him asylum. 

Have we lost our minds?  What happened to the shocking truth that was revealed, PRISM was designed to silently ass rape us...

Disgusting.  DOnt lose site of the real issue here...

In real combat, you cannot block attack completely. Linux can be secure if you do from zero. You may use given as people treat the being seriously.

Using combat analogy, another defensive technique is to "fake". IOW, also have a trail of garbage information. If we all did this they couldn't handle it.

On a side note, one good thing that came out of this nightmare is that for many people the mass-media has been stripped naked. IOW, many people knew that some pundits in the mass-media lied but they thought that overall the mm was truthful but now they know that they ALL lie. And they do this to keep their jobs and for whatever other sick & self serving interests they might have. Not to forget blackmail. Which PRISM really is. It is a massive Blackmail info gathering system.

In other words, many are now wide-awake for their "prism" raping.

A great many of these sorts of systems of top down control crumble when a country's economic self corrects after periods of severe overspending, such as the US is in right now.

In the meantime it would likely be reasonable to expect the bureaucracies and those profiting from this to try to support them to the last moment possible.  And I personally think that Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and the others named in cooperating with the NSA will be found to be the recipient of vast amounts of money not just for their cooperation, but to insure their willing and eager participation.  (And their support of the preferred political candidate).

This is the very Mafia concept of a "made man".

Translated:  These large companies are evil.  Take your business elsewhere.

Au contraire!  Corporations and our government here in the US are increasingly mutually supporting and merged via lobbying, revolving door structures, etc, so in many respects they can be considered as one entity.

Critically, a lot of power structures fail to retain control absent the sort of police state apparatus necessary for totalitarian population management.  I believe that people's pensions and other 'entitlements'* are already gone and have been for some time.  The only real shoe to drop is letting the population know (as they just did in Detroit) and the news is almost certain to be met with dis-satisfaction on the part of the losers.  Real wealth is generally zero-sum and it did not disappear.  It was transferred so a logical reconciliation which would resonate with the losers would be to transfer it back.  This is unacceptable to our political leadership who generally are composed of or installed by the winners, and hence the need for a 'turn-key' solution to keep the plebs in their place when the time comes.  That is THE primary rational for the most capable surveillance system the world has yet known.  Of course this is my personal hypothesis.

(*) 'Entitlements' are thus named because, for instance, I paid a lot into Social Security and am as such 'entitled' to get it back when I need it for retirement or whatever.  Of course I never counted on it and thus my toe dipped into Bitcoin, PM's, etc, and actively avoided such obvious scams as 401K (or 404K as I think it will come to be known.)

"404K", I got a chuckle out of that  ;D

This thread has gotten so deep, there's almost too much to respond to. One of my largest concerns for the US is the blatant manipulation of the media. TV truly is serving only one purpose in this county and that is to make people content being sheep. People will always use the "it's only entertainment" excuse but come on, "Jershey Shore", "Honey Boo Boo", "Real Housewives of New Jersey" just to name a few... disgusting. I feel dumber just trying to think of these titles. You know there are actually thousands of devout fans that would put off interaction with other people or even call off of work to watch this garbage.

Past the point of appeasing idiots with horrendous TV programming - there comes the redirection of attention from important news. One clear case that has happened in the past two weeks was information about the Bradley Manning trial. Didn't hear much about that from the so called "leaders in news" in America. No, people were a million times more concerned with the Trayvon Martin case....

I just, I can't, can't even brain right now.

That's quite interesting isn't it?

It could be something different, something radically different than that which you express.  Suppose that we are just coming out of a filthy stinking swamp and for the first time breathe fresh air.  Never know what you missed before, did you?

We now view - at least a fair percentage of people - view the TV mess from afar and see it quite clearly.

Even a great many of the people you criticize - the kids that watch reality TV - see the TV mess of news programming for exactly what it is - and see it from afar.

Those are sea changes at work, they are huge.

The fundamental dynamics of an enemy from afar, seeking totalitarian control over you and I, and the heroic seeking of independence, freedom and liberty are unchanged as struggles and perspectives of the individual.

But now that struggle is against branches of an over reaching US government, instead of coming from Eurasia.  As a distant enemy is Russia or China any "farther away" than Washington DC or the NSA?

Well all I can say is that many people have said that the would rather die fighting for freedom then to lose it; and that if they take away our freedoms, then the "terrists" have won. Hmmn? Hey! waitaminute! Somethin's not right here! Where'd all the freedom lovers go?

As for the mass-media, yes-sireee-bob, a large percentage of our population is now on to them (realizing that it's pretty much ALL controlled propaganda) and that's what worries me most now - because we very well may be approaching a critical mass: the dirty rats know this too. So what's in store for us next? What happens when you corner a scared and ruthless rat?

IF you have not seen it you'd not believe it.

A scared and cornered rat will attack a Doberman.  He'll straight on attack, with a jump sink his teeth right into the Doberman's nose, and have that dog crying like a baby.  He'll hang on and on and on, and the dog will try to shake him off, but that creates even greater pain.

DON'T get into the situation where there is a cornered rat and you have to deal with it, whether it is a actual Norway rat as I described above or the political more or less human style of rat.

That's why I'm just watching the show and other a smart-aleck comment here and there (which I cannot resist}, I will have nothing to do with it. I think that the people have (now) what they deserve and they will get lots more of it - more than they could ever imagine. Bully for them; I like to see people get what they deserve.

According to Google translate, Der Spiegel is reporting that the long-suspected NSA backdoor has been found in the Windows implementation of SSL.

http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web/windows-hintertuer-gefaehrdet-ssl-verschluesselung-a-913825.html

And what happens, exactly, when you are caught in the figurative crossfire between those folks "getting what they deserve" and the fellows dishing out the "just deserts"?

If our press/mm is covering this, I'd like to know where.

This is 3 days old: http://www.heise.de/ct/artikel/Microsofts-Hintertuer-1921730.html
Actually it is even older since it was in the print editition of the 29.07.2013
Just some old news dug up there :D

All I can tell you is that I more than paid my dues and I have no desire, intent, or interest in becoming a matyr for pos that don't deserve their freedom. Call it schadenfreude or whatever. If I am so blessed, then I am going to be around long enough to enjoy watching the rats do what they will to them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIiUqfxFttM

I won't be singing that song unless I get to see those that deserve it to get caught in the crossfire first. In which case, I hope that they also get to see me dance a nice jig before I meet my end. Ah but anyway...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-diB65scQU

X-KEYSCORE anyone?

This country is a god damn travesty.

Fuck everything about this.

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/audio/video/2013/7/31/1375269316245/KS4-001.jpg

NSA

Internet Explorer

 ::)

Skype backdoor confirmation...

 http://lists.randombit.net/pipermail/cryptography/2013-May/004224.html

It was in the news today that the NSA can read almost every data that is on the internet.

yeah, when i turned on fox news i couldnt belive it
but hey, i have nothing to hide

Me neither, but I like not being watched so I am going to intstall some vpn software.
I'm not so stupid like most people to ignore this scandal.

Saying "I have nothing to hide" is about the dumbest and most dangerous thing anyone could say about this: obviously you don't realize that it doesn't matter whether you have anything to hide or not because anything you say can and will be used (and twisted, and manipulated) against you. Words, and sentences, and situations can be easily selected, twisted, paired and/or taken our of context. Think of every word that you have used in the last 5-10 (or more) years or so.....etc. Even mis-dialed phone calls to someone could be used against you. I could go on and on... It really doesn't take much thought to see and to understand how incredibly and astronomically naive your position is. However, for whatever reason... you just don't get it.

So anyhow, bully for you, for you have just accepted and resigned yourself (and the rest of America/the former land of the brave and the free) to a position where you dare not express any discontent. Ever.

Let's also hope that everyone else that you might care about doesn't have anything to hide either. Let's also hope that all the politicians (that represent you and the rest of us over many serious & important matters) don't have anything to hide either.

Anyhow, you - you're in great shape, great and wonderfully submissive boot-licking shape! And it's good that you're okay with it. Stay submissive and subservient AND as long as you never grow a dissenting opinion and you never express any real concern then you'll be fine! Good man! Good man!

That's exactly what I'm always telling the people!

That's right, you're not stupid. And I mean that with all sincerity. You are acting with wisdom.

Some other options are to:
1: install tor
2. use tails on a USB
3. i2p
4. freenet

Also... included in tails are some other privacy programs for irc, pidgin, yahoo messenger, private email/pgp, etc.

Everyone if you are an American who appreciates and values their former freedom - then it is your duty to take these precautions and to spread the word and to help others with this.

That being said, I am here to help anyone with the use of these programs.

Available here: www.torproject.org

skype too! JC their like effin cockroaches! Where's the damn "raid" when you need it?

The NSA is the greatest parasite since the beginning of life on earth...

Skype was insecure!?!  That is a bit of a yawn to us 'conspiracy theorists.'

I'm predicting that there are extensive programs involving subversion of popular software (especially operating systems but also popular add-ons from vendors such as Adobe and Oracle) and device firmware which are providing surveillance data to the NSA and similar organizations.  Sometimes through the vendor and sometimes not.  It will be watching with interest to see if such programs follow up the latest 'xkeyscore' disclosure.

Thankfully Bitcoin is immune from subversion from such programs because the lead developers of the solution do not believe in 'conspiricy theories'.

The mission of agencies like the NSA is to fulfill the expectations of conspiracy theorists.

What we are talking about here is a confirmed and indisputed conspiracy - not a theory.

And if OB isn't impeached and all of his henchmen run out of the gov then this will make a mockery of everyone who claims (or claimed) that this could never happen in our country and that they would never allow it. If this is allowed to stand then it's really over.

From an NSA instruction manual:
"Point barrel downward toward foot and depress trigger."

As of today I do not use the Internet, I am going to go 100% TOR. I would also like to see a list of backdoored software. I will certainly not be buying any such products in the future.


Here are some resources:  https://prism-break.org/

And not understanding irony when its so obvious in light of the context is...ah well i leave the name calling to you.

Thanks for this website! It is really useful!

Nope, it absolutely isn't obvious in context when you consider that I have heard too many people say pretty much exactly what you did. First, they say it's wrong and then they say that it's no big deal because they have nothing to hide. And these idiots mean it. So how am I supposed to know that you aren't just another idiot?

Do you, or would you, live in a glass house?

Speaking of people who think they have nothing to hide...

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/01/government-tracking-google-searches

ffs, yes!
wanna see my dick now?

extremely dumb people that dont understand irony
here is a little recap:
it has been talked about the government spying on us here even before prism and all that shit for ages and then this:
https://i.imgur.com/V7OqDcd.png

You need something to indicate satire as it's difficult to detect through text.

But, yes it's true, this kind of spying has been around as long as the internet. If you believed in this before it was in the news, you were looked at as a crazy conspiracy theorist.

Certainly, but here 99% of the members are tinfoilhat wearers. :D
Fully equipped with VPNs, TOR, PGP etc. long before it broke the news.

Actually being secretive is probably the most sure-fire way to call attention to oneself, and once under the microscope one will need a truly extraordinary amount of technical ability to operate privately.  Unless you are a geek among geeks you probably don't have much of a chance if you are a person of significant interest.

I've long felt that the (supposed) massive data collection actually works well for anyone who has something to hide...and is smart enough to be an actual 'threat' if that is their disposition.  By being completely normal at all times and very carefully using secure methods to carry out important business it is more than likely that the 'evildoer' will evade any analysis whatsoever.  But again, this surveillance has probably close to zero to do with catching 'evildoers' as the the term is defined for public consumption and a great deal to do with political intimidation and what-not.

BTW, I am somewhat shocked at how 'mainstream' so many of the people in Bitcoin-land actually are, and also somewhat disappointed.  At this point I think it unlikely that the solution will develop the hardening it will need to succeed if/when the reason for the development of surveillance state emerges.

I'd disagree completely.   Here is why.  We routinely use SSL, is that "secretive"?  Nope, because it is common.  Many, many people use VPNs, if someone adopts such use is that "secretive"?  Nope.  Carry this forward with various other techniques and you see the flaw in the logic.  I recently quit using google's services entirely.  Does that mean I "called attention to myself?"

"Once under the microscope"???

REALLY?  Whose microscope exactly?

The NSA?  The IRS?  Eric Holder's crime gang?  Any of 50 commercial companies who want your data?

In my opinion, government and private company snooping falls into the malware/virus/worm category of nuisances.  And people have found anti virus programs to be very popular.  Similar for many other things that protect the little guy against "people who would steal their data".  So our protecting against outsiders is not new at all.

Chaos Computer Club [29c3] - Not my department - a talk by Jacob Appelbaum - Lead Tor developer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mnuofn_DXw

This keynote presentation is one of the most important talks of our time and a must watch for everyone.

Yes 'the entire history of you' of everyone in fact, kept for at least 100 years! Who is going to watch the watchers?

Aside from the privacy implications and breach of all our human rights, perhaps Jaron Lanier has a very valid point that governments and big internet companies etc. should really be paying us to use our data. Its our data after all. Instead they steal our data and aim to punish those who report on or make others aware of such injustices.  

Jaron Lanier on the future of the web - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjveRsCxypU

We headed for a THX1138 dystopia ? - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THX1138

Google and the World Brain - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vxIveocxjM

For H.G. Wells the 'World Brain' had to contain "All that was learnt and known, and that was being learnt and known" :o

Everyone want to get a google glass now ? - https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_glass

Ronald J Deibert at TEDxToronto - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAJ6BtZDhUk

Are we all to be guilty of 'thought crime' http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought_crime and the injustices of invalid, incorrect, misconstrued, misinterpreted or perhaps manipulated data ?

PRISM is really just the tip of the iceberg: https://wikipedia.org/wiki/FinFisher

I doubt that anything like PRISM can make for a better, safer or fairer world. Disgusting seems to be an understatement.


I'll recommend Charlie Brooker's - Black Mirror - TV series: https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Mirror_(TV_series) "...about the way we live now – and the way we might be living in 10 minutes' time if we're clumsy."

Well, they were being asked questions.
Nothing else happened.

Yeah, just from SEARCHING ON GOOGLE. Everyone who says that "nothing to hide" thing is more than just stupid.

I'd rather use DuckDuckGo, it's the best existing search engine in my oppinion.
Here is why: https://duckduckgo.com/about (https://duckduckgo.com/about)

If you are just pilfering copyrighted material you probably don't have much to worry about.  Unless you come under a situation where someone wants to throw the book at you for some other reason.

Those who have either political or financial operations going on may wish to become familiar with packet analysis and the framework of backbone network taps exposed (most recently) by Snowden.  Or solicit the advice of someone who does understand these things.  Probably also someone who can build a full OS from source code.

It may also be worthwhile to consider how to achieve necessary network communications using systems which can operate in 'batch mode' rather than in real-time.  High and random latencies probably have the potential to be very difficult to analyze.  Indeed, the small packet size and 10 minute block frequency are one of the things that gave me a lot of hope for Bitcoin in the early days.  It already has several features needed for security in this regard.

Again, run-of-the-mill privacy buffs probably don't have much to fear.  This because they don't have much to hide and because failure is an option.

I vehemently disagree with that position. A position that would have almost every founder and every soldier who fought and died for freedom spinning in their graves - no to forget how disgusted it would and should make any living relatives who lost loved ones in freedoms name.

And Yes, We ALL have much too fear from this: however, with that being said, at this exact point in time - if you are not doing anything illegal AND you have not expressed any discontent then you're probably okay. But it's all being held and so you better not ever grow a dissenting opinion or a conscience or principles - or to otherwise accidentally or inadvertently get on their radar. And I don't know about you but giving that much power to them AND also giving up my right to dissent, well that is about as UnAmerican as you can get and it disgusts me to the core (as it should every thinking and aware human being).

There we go:
America-freedom-wars and unamerican :D
/Getting popcorn

Just because those words have been played so loosely with and tossed around so much that doesn't mean that they aren't still super important. Now this is some incredibly big shit going on here. Makes me wonder....Why don't you care?

That's what I'm questioning all the time.. Why don't people care?

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/31/nsa-top-secret-program-online-data
unbelievable what is already happening >:(

I think you did not grasp what I was saying (but in response, you've made some very interesting points about latency I'll look into).

The right question is not the extent to which one has done wrong and must act to cover it up or hide it.  That's the actual reverse of the right question.

Assume that political coupled with commercial forces will act to protect their entrenched interests, using the data.  Assume this is a general current and future trend, and that it does not pertain to any particular party or leader.  Assume that it is a problem world wide, over, let us say, the next three decades.

The right question is the nature of the future of freedom.

This can double as a response to ~spendus also.

I said 'fear' rather than 'reject' or 'fight'.  These surveillance programs are extremely dangerous.  Snowden put it best when he said 'turn-key system for tyranny.'  If the system is not dismantled or successfully attacked it is just a matter of time before the key is turned.

One of the points I was getting at in the trimmed text was that the system is not going to be effective and in fact will probably be counterproductive for catching 'bad guys' who are smart enough to be an actual 'threat.'  The XKeyscore docs said as much...they capture almost everything the normal user does online.  This system targets 'normal' users and that point is very important.  (BTW, I'll bet that 'normal' includes using VPNs and DuckDuckGo, and again, that doing so simply produces an extra flag tagging the user for more exhaustive analysis.)  The most productive battles at this phase are going to be geared towards shaping public perception and pointing out the disturbing nature of these systems will help.

You can use privacy tools on an individual level, but they will only really be effective if a large number of people are using them (and, of course, that they are not themselves mis-designed for mitigating the actual threats or worse still, honeypots.)  If only a small fraction of people are using such tools it would take only a false flag event to produce justification for shutting them down since few people will understand anything but the mainstream media line that they are 'tools for terrorists' and even fewer will actually be personally effected.

https://inputs.io/illusion/project

Sweet!  A solution of this general nature will kill several birds with one stone.

And I thought the true solution was to implement a search engine utilizing the namecoin design with a different protocol hehe nice idea TF

Its your responsibility to not give out informations you dont want to

I like it.  In fact since I've stopped using the Chrome spybrowser, I can start using it again just as a identity-spam machine.  Give someone a list of a million sets of personal data and he can generate a million identity-spam copies of Chrome.

Think of the possibilities:  Your spam against their evil.

Take that Google.

**********************

More general statement of the user's problem.

Request:  app on phone link to/read contacts private data?
Request:  facebook, app read contacts and private data?
Request:  Computer app, read and link to Facebook?
Request:  Linkedin, read contacts?
Request:  Google+, link to .....

And you have really no way to know what any of these services is actually doing, do you?

Generally speaking, it should not be terribly difficult to overload or confuse many of the survailence systems when the details of how the function are leaked or inferred.  Similarly, sprinkling a little extra 'doubt' into things makes the systems vastly less usable.  At least unless things get so bad that there is summary punishment on suspicion.  We see this (summary execution based on suspicion) in the 'signature strike' drone activity, but so far only on foreign soil.  If/when widespread use of the general technique moves domestic in a big way there will be a significant social backlash since white people will have friends and relatives who are impacted.

Along these lines, I by happenstance receive a spam mail every few minutes because I've owned my domain for decades.  I also invent a new e-mail address for each different use.  It was not my initial plan to thwart analysis, but it's probably causing a lot of grief for the poor schmuck who pulls me up on his XKeyscore terminal.

Most of the posters to this thread I have learned something I did not think of previously.

Rather unusual...

This cannot be realistically done by most people in today's modern society. The internet has become a necessary part of life for most of us.

BTW, it seems that tor is having some sort of "outage" and may be under attack because a great many sites are down. Some onion posters are claiming that tor sites are "updating" but that's crazy - how could some 80% of the sites that I normally visit all be updating at the same time? Plus very few sites work when random surfing.

http://www.interpol.int/News-and-media/News-media-releases/2013/PR091

How convienient for the scare mongers...

What's your opinion of tor vs vpn?  And of vpn with the terminal node in the US, for a US user, versus choosing one overseas?

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=267624.0

The greatest security (along with the greatest performance cost) comes from using both.

Sign up for a VPN that uses a standard OpenVPN client (like AirVPN), and configure your OpenVPN software to connect via Tor. That way the VPN provider can't know where you're accessing from, and you can access web sites that block known Tor exit nodes.

Done.

But are you asserting that under the VPN/Tor Evil Twins, the question of locus outside or inside the US does not exist?

And also, I think my prior question remains as valid, for those modes of use that can't allow the sllllooooooowwwww down that seems to plague Tor.

It depends on what you're trying to access and your threat model.

A VPN alone will protect you from ISP-level surveillance, but the VPN provider can compromise your privacy. That might be an acceptable risk if the provider is located in a different country.

Tor is potentially more secure if used correctly, but many web sites block Tor exit nodes.

I'd like to see some VPN providers allow access to their system via I2P, as that network is better optimized for hidden services so should get better performance than a Tor connection.

Woowoo bogeyman alert, time to justify the NSA and GCHQ spying activities...

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/04/nsa-us-embassy-closures-terrorist-threat

Wouldnt surprise me at all if they cease all operations and activities or even sponsor some radicals until the public cries for their help and thus all their secret programs. Would be just the logical consequence to justify their crimes from an institution point of view.

I'll go for that.

Stop Obama supporting Al Queda, sending them weapons under the table.

"  Al Queda " is just a puppet.

No, it would be nice if it was that simple.  But Muslims will not tell you that. 

Al Queda's leader was OBL, disciple of Sayyed Qutbe.  He was head of the Muslim Brotherhood under Nassir and was executed for treason.  Qutbe wrote a series of pamplets or "books", essentially extensions to the Koran.  Believers in that crap are the radical Muslims who started attacking the west, and it continues today.

 

Tails first, Tor standalone second (using linux os and one other security recommendation which I will only give via pm), vpn second choice (because here you're trusting your privacy to third party that could be arm-twisted.). Overseas is prob. better. TorrentFreak has a great list of the best choices with detailed explanations. Tails over vpn is prob. very good. Then the best-bet overall is a new laptop purchased while in disguise, paid with cash, then walking blocks away to a fast-food restaurant bathroom to get out of disguise...then back to your car and home....and thereafter accessing only "other" open wifi networks. Of course, I don't go to that extreme measure - because I need convenient everyday access at home. Then again I suppose I could use a neighbors network but I wouldn't do that without permission ...because that just wouldn't be right.

BTW, I'm really enjoying the high-level of convo here! The one obvious jack-booted boot-licking paid shill disinfo agent notwithstanding... ;)

I wouldn't put it past them, since they've already openly crossed numerous boundaries that not all that long ago would have led to a civil war. Woah Man people were crazy back then, weren't they?!! - Thank God that we live in these times when people handle things by talking them out!

OBL mostly bought his way in as best I can tell, and probably using some of my tax dollars as he was a CIA asset back in those days...and I personally suspect that he still is.  You are probably thinking the medical doctor Iman Al-Zawari (sp?) who was the leader of the more extreme group that OBL became associated with, and who was strongly influenced by his Egyptian countryman Qutbe (sp?)

As I understand things Al Queda translates to 'the base', and it was a database of individuals who our intelligence services knew about and could call on for various operations, though that does not necessarily mean that they are employees or anything such as that.  OBL didn't start using the moniker 'Al Queda' for 'his' organization until our court system used the word in association with legal action against some incidence of terrorism.  The first WTC attack or a boat attack IIRC.

I strongly suggest the documentary http://archive.org/details/ThePowerOfNightmares-Episode1BabyItsColdOutside (http://archive.org/details/ThePowerOfNightmares-Episode1BabyItsColdOutside) for anyone interested in this stuff.  It's fascinating (to me.)

And yes, I think it is pretty clear that the US government has supplied 'Al Queda' with weapons periodically since the Soviets were in Afghanistan.  Happened in the Balkans struggles under Clinton (I believe) and it is almost certainly happening now big time in Syria under Obama.

Pretty much just like I said.

Qutb has no exact English spelling by the way, and when I posted the diatribe on the radical religious underpinnings, that does not mean there are no political currents.  No, I wasn't referring to the doc, although he essentially does have the same roots.

The disciples of Qutb are our enemies, no if ands buts.  That means Al Queda, the Muslim Brotherhood.

So yeah, Obama and cronies is with our enemies.

In saying this I realize that no doubt in some complex regional conflict some local Al Queda or M. Brotherhood group might find themselves on our side temporarily under shifting conditions, that is largely irrelevant except to third rate policy hacks.

I am no expert on Middle East, but I do know the antics of amateurs and that's what I'm seeing in our flailing actions for the last several years.

The 'disciples of Qutb' are not my enemies.  I don't care for them much, but they are no different to me than people who bomb abortion clinics.  A vast majority of Muslims and Christians are just normal people and probably have a higher then average amount of morality and care for their fellow humans.  Many are also not terribly bright else they would have found more credible answers to life's mysteries.

The simple fact of the matter is that I am about as likely to be hit by lightning than injured by some Islamic terrorist, and the chances are only that high because the US does everything possible to provoke terrorism.  If someone was doing 'signature strikes' and 'double-taps' with drones over my neighborhood from some command center half way around the world you can bet that the citizens of the country who was doing this would not be safe around me.

On the other hand, corrupt politicians who allow corporations to price gouge and bankers to leverage our economy into a perilous state are a direct and immediate threat to me and my way of life.  Sounds like you have drunk the kool-aid and directed your fear and anger in exactly the direction you are supposed to as a 'good American'.  You are not alone.  The 'terrorist' are nothing but tools that our leadership uses to achieve certain goals and ultimately induce American citizens to support projects which benefit their sponsors.

It is no surprise to me that populations rally behind groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, and Hezbollah.  Considering the alternatives offered, these groups are clearly more concerned about the well-being of the average citizen and their respective countries.  The leaderships propped up by the West tend to be corrupt scum who sell-out their own countrymen.  I remember when they called me up to fight for some king in Kuwait and said that once the king is re-installed America will work toward democracy in these Arab kingdoms.  It's been several decades and the only action I've seen is sending the monarchies more weapons to oppress their populations so forgive me if I find all of the BS about 'democracy' to be a completely hollow sham.

You are not seeing the work of 'armatures' though it useful to our leaders for you to think that.  What you are seeing is a well engineered scheme to re-direct your attention.  And it's working.

I see your points but do not believe they are inconsistent or contradict what I noted.   There has of course never been any organized group dedicated to meeting out death to providers of abortion clinics.  A comparison cannot be made between isolated cases of abortion clinic bombings, and radical Muslim bombings.

First, the current American propaganda is quite diffuse and confused.  It does not and has never indicated the Qutb spinoffs as problematic as I have done.   Even strict Wahhibi Muslims will agree with what I have said, because the Qutb teaches violence and death to Westerners.  They are your enemies by their own proclamation, whatever your opinion may be.

If some sect believes not in Islam but in Islam plus a group of 30 extensions which preach killing, this should be acknowledged for what it is.  

Clearly this is not the same subject as rationale private or public for Iraq 1/Iraq 2 etc.

My comments were and are directed more at the issue of "why did Muslim bombings/hijacking/killing of Westerners begin 30-40 years ago and why has it continued to the present day virtually unchanged."  At the same time, the risk of you or I being the victim of such terrorism is ridiculously small.

The purpose of terrorist actions is not to target you or I, but to target the world wide media system for maximum exposure by way of random brutality.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/05/us-dea-sod-idUSBRE97409R20130805

I don't even know what to say anymore.

That's how the USA is...

I say 'duh', but then I'm a 'conspiracy theorist.'   This is a natural evolution of mass covert surveillance and it is inconceivable that the system will not continue to degrade and be subverted even as it continues to expand.

Every Joe Sixpack that signs up for a cell phone is worth on average something like $3000 in revenue to corporate service providers.  Every Joe Sixpack who is thrown in prison is worth probably hundreds of thousands to corporate service providers.  Of course we see the development of a corp/gov feeder system to tap and expand this revenue stream.

http://i209.photobucket.com/albums/bb157/Metalfan_nl/tattoo/sod_jorgen.jpg

There really is no organized network of terrorism with religious group at the apex for the simple reason that 'terrorism' in the form of civilian murder is not very appealing to Muslims, Christians, or any other group of normal people.  There may be some lone wolf types and small splinter groups, but they are very rare.  This is most unfortunate for the leadership of the United States who are well served by 'terror' within our own civilian populations, and I believe that this is the basis for trying to cultivate more of them through fairly gratuitous assaults against Muslim populations world-wide.

There are plenty of 'Islamist', but they are strongly focused on their own domestic struggles and could not give two shits about the West.  I can understand this.  I pity any populations which comes under control of religious fundamentalism, and I would certainly hate to see Jerry Falwell issuing fatwas in my neighborhood, but it's simply not worth very much to me personally to fight against Sharia law in the Swat valley in Pakistan.  That is for the Pakistani people to deal with.  It is double-plus-not-worth-it to me to shred the constitution and have my country committing blatant war crimes for this goal or to control the energy transport routes are any other such project.

PRISM is funded through debt and inflation. This is why bitcoin is so important. The world needs bitcoin yesterday!!!

Read exactly what I said again and do not rephrase it, mis frame or mis interpret it.

Terrorism in the form of civilian murder is quite popular with the people of whom I addressed such attributes to.  There's no reason to shrug this off, and no reason EITHER to ignore it or exaggerate it.

The bolded part above is an obvious rephrasing and misrepresentation of the issues I stated.  They might have some general relevance, but not in this context.  Similarly, whether "terror" serves the interests of US government agencies is not relevant.

I believe this is reason #1 as to why a nation which doesn't produce any money whatsoever should not be eating itself alive into any more debt.  However, I also think it's much too late to ever come out of this trap, and Bitcoin won't save us in the short term; once the camel's back finally breaks, there will be hell.  So I suppose the reasoning is, knowing they'll never pull out, they may as well spend all the cash they possibly can before the jig is up.

I believe you are dead-on: eventually...and it could be soon or it could be a decade from now, but the shit will hit the fan - for as the saying goes - "the writing is on the wall".

As for all this "T" nonsense. The only T that we get "here" is the T that is allowed or encouraged to happen. And then it is blown completely out of proportion (and that's not done by accident) Speaking of "accidents"...far more people die from accidents - so the T really should be a non-local-issue: especially as compared to the many other bizarre and scary things going on (locally) that we know about.

That's a good point, and to be perfectly honest, I'm a lot more afraid of being hit by a stupid driver (not even a drunken one, just a really bad one) than I am of the likelihood of being held a gunpoint, not by the "T", but by one of my fellow citizens trying to jack my car.

this sounds like black magic to me ^^

Anyone following the Lavabit shutdown story? The site owner gives the impression (but does not say directly) that it is related to PRISM or something analogous - "I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit."

Detailed statement at the site: http://lavabit.com/

Normally I would Google "lavabit" to see what the fuss is about, but this time I chickened out (and I'm not even American). It's working!

Oh, wow. that's nuts! Shutting down and the man cannot tell us why. Whew. I can't even think about this any more. It's gone off the rails/it's too much. Well... "they' will get no grief from me. I'm beaten down and All I want is to find an isolated cave or lonely island and to spend my last years on this planet in peace. Anyone know of a place? PM me. LOL!

it cannot be!!!! i had several accounts there!!! oh my fucking jesus holy fucked motherfuckkers!!!!

I've been following it and am not at all surprised.  It's what I've been harping on for some time...if the US doesn't like something on the Internet, the pressure which can be brought to bare against it is greater than most people imagine.  Especially young  males.  It is why I feel that Bitcoin should be actively forming a hardened shell.  The strategy of getting the the US government to 'like' Bitcoin as a means of protection is probably a losing strategy in the end.

Bitcoin cannot be killed, but it can be forced into a role where it is used only by highly technical individuals...and very brave ones at that.

i already made a thread about lavabit because i'm a victim  :-[

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=270258.0

I'm sorry to hear that.

You might write the website owner and ask him if you can get a dump of your files.

No harm in asking.  It was your stuff.

I guess.

Sorry to hear you were affected directly.

I just looked at your thread and posted a link there that says Silent Circle is reportedly down now also.

Dark times for humanity.

https://lavabit.com/contact.html‎ -- 404 not found...not sure how we can contact them... anyone here knows how to get it touch with them?  There's a AMA request on Reddit for Ladar Levison am  looking forward to that...

Yeah, try the domain record.  Unless it's cloaked there should be a contact listed.  Actually and rather curiously, I suspect you have a legal cause of action against them for this behavior of theirs and the harm it caused you.  That their actions in resisting the jack booted storm troopers of the Evil Empire are understandable does not change this.

Also, note that the past records of the website, which would include contact info, are available on the 'wayback machine' through archive.org.

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.lavabit.com

Looking at this, i find "lavabit llc" is the company, so they would have a record in the state of origin.  Looking at the terms of use, here is some wording:

Lavabit does not actively monitor, censor or restrict its users. Lavabit does not claim any responsibility for the actions of its users. However, if presented with evidence that a particular user has violated this Abuse Policy, we will take appropriate action, including but not limited to:

    Locking the user’s account.
    Referring the submitter of the evidence to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center.
    Surrendering any applicable records to authorities if presented with a properly formed court order.


Therefore I would assume that whatever the authorities wanted from Lavabit did not involve a "Properly formed court order", in the opinion of the site owner.

Also interesting, Lavabit said they had 350,000 users.  All vanished just like that?  All their records and emails?  That's a house to house search of a pretty fair sized city.  Why is it I don't expect any mention of this in the mainstream media?

Okay, so here is one more factoid.  Here is the "Lavabit defense fund page."

And you know what?  I'd like to contribute.  With bitcoins.  Not with Paypal.  Because I know THEY are watching....

More revelations from No Secrecy Allowed

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/09/nsa-loophole-warrantless-searches-email-calls (http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/09/nsa-loophole-warrantless-searches-email-calls)

Silent Circle is also closing its mail service, time to start encrypting everything.

Tor and TorMail infiltrated too:
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/08/freedom-hosting/
Until now they made changes slowly so people dont notice, but now it seems they have thrown all caution overboard.

There are plenty other classified programs within the NSA that'll make you lose your lunch, this is small potatoes.

what about encrypting a SMS?
edit:
oops  ;)
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.thoughtcrime.securesms&hl=en

Well, i happen to like small potatoes.  Like the ones served as an appetizer in New Orleanz.  Small red potatoes.  Now those NSA potateoes, they have a rather bitter taste.

I don't know what ass end of what animal they came from.  May a variant of the giant Tasmanian rat which has been known to thrive in the District of Criminals?

The detention of David Miranda by the Brits is an interesting observation.  They held him right up to the 9 hour limit and made chit-chat to kill time.  One can only guess that they were still working on the encryption that he was using and didn't get it in the 9 hours they had.  One suspects that a significant percentage of the processing power of probably all of the 'five-eyes' was likely working on the problem.  Or at least the US and UK since it seems possible to me that AU, CA, and NZ defer putting much money into such systems and outsource to the US and UK when there is a pressing need for code cracking.  In fact, it could be the case by this time that the UK themselves simply serves as a US tool for specialized task and also lack the big guns (in a compute resource sense.)

Anyway, if my conjecture is accurate, I would say it's a safe bet that the Greenwald side has some competent technical talent at their disposal by now.

It may be that the detention of Miranda is going to become a significant milestone in the concerns about  mission creep occurring around the UK terrorism laws if the reaction is anything to go by.   I see that Glenn Greenwald is taking it personally too, damn right.  I hope he has something that can really embarrass the Establishment among the items passed by Snowden.  Let's spare a thought for Poitras too, who has to put up with this sort of thing relentlessly on the USA side.

I put up with over 4 years of this kind of shit at huge personal cost and huge cost to the British tax payer before a certain QC called out the UK authorities on it and it ended.  I still won't get into the USA, but that's on the same level as choosing to visit Mordor as far as I'm concerned.

I could say a great deal more about what fundamentally amoral, hypocritical, dishonest, duplicitous, manipulative, vindictive little shits the authorities and individuals involved showed themselves to be and I thoroughly documented it in its entirety for the protection of myself and those closest to me.   I'm thrilled that they've now gone and done it in a rather conspicuous way.

Go Glenn ;D

I'm hoping Greenwald/Snowdon release more information on GCHQ, they seem to have been let off lightly compared to all the NSA revelations. 

I'm hoping that Greenwald stays careful and deliberate.  Being emotional or in a hurry tends to lead to mistakes, and any mis-step in the game they are playing could be fatal.  Literally.

Snowden seems to me to have a mission to inform his fellow citizens about how their governments are operating and the steps he has taken are directed at doing so most efficiently.  Greenwald/Poitras also seems to have shown a lot of restraint in the timings and choices of what is released.  Every time the government and media shills take some bogus defense or produce some talking point, info is released which shoots it down.  And the frequency of the releases seems to be keeping people interested but not overloading them so they have time to think about the issues.  If these guys jump the gun or act out of anger or spite I would expect that their performance will suffer.

Agreed.  A steady drip of leaks, pardon the expression. It's being kept in the public eye at just about the right level, although the UK police seem to have a perfectly timed own goal on this occasion.

Call from Riseup:

It is a mistake to frame the recent US and European massive surveillance revelations in terms of the privacy of individuals. What is at stake is not privacy at all, but the power of the state over its citizenry.

What surveillance really is, at its root, is a highly effective form of social control. The knowledge of always being watched changes our behavior and stifles dissent. The inability to associate secretly means there is no longer any possibility for free association. The inability to whisper means there is no longer any speech that is truly free of coercion, real or implied. Most profoundly, pervasive surveillance threatens to eliminate the most vital element of both democracy and social movements: the mental space for people to form dissenting and unpopular views.

Many commentators, and Edward Snowden himself, have noted that these surveillance programs represent an existential threat to democracy. This understates the problem. The universal surveillance programs in place now are not simply a potential threat, they are certain to destroy democracy if left unchecked. Democracy, even the shadow of democracy we currently practice, rests on the bedrock foundation of free association, free speech, and dissent. The consequence of the coercive power of surveillance is to subvert this foundation and undermine everything democracy rests on.

Within social movements, there is a temptation to say that nothing is really different. After all, governments have always targeted activist groups with surveillance and disruption, especially the successful ones.

But this new surveillance is different. What the US government and European allies have built is an infrastructure for perfect social control. By automating the process of surveillance, they have created the ability to effortlessly peer into the lives of everyone, all the time, and thus create a system with unprecedented potential for controlling how we behave and think.

True, this infrastructure is not currently used in this way, but it is a technical tool-kit that can easily be used for totalitarian ends.

Those who imagine a government can be trusted to police itself when given the ominous power of precise insight into the inner workings of everyday life are betting the future on the ability of a secretive government to show proper self-restraint in the use of their ever-expanding power. If history has shown us anything, it is that the powerful will always use their full power unless they are forced to stop.

So, how exactly are we planning on stopping them? We support people working through the legal system or applying political pressure, but we feel our best hope of stopping the technology of surveillance is the technology of encryption. Why? Because the forces that have created this brave new world are unlikely to be uprooted before it is too late to halt the advance of surveillance.

Unfortunately, most existing encryption technology is counterproductive. Many people are pushing technology that is proprietary, relies on a central authority, or is hopelessly difficult for the common user. The only technology that has a chance to resist the rise of surveillance will be open source, federated, and incredibly easy to use. In the long run, decentralized peer-to-peer tools might meet this criteria, but for the foreseeable future these tools will not have the features or usability that people have grown accustomed to.

In the coming months, the Riseup birds plan to begin rolling out a series of radically new services, starting with encrypted internet, encrypted email, and encrypted chat. These services will be based on 100% open source and open protocols, will be easy to use, and will protect your data from everyone, even Riseup. This is a massive undertaking, made in concert over the last year with several other organizations, and will only work with your support. We need programmers, particularly those experienced in Python, C, Ruby, and Android development, and sysadmins interested in starting their own secure service providers.

We also need money. Donations from our amazing Riseup users keep us running on our current infrastructure. But in order to be able to graduate to a new generation of truly secure and easy to use communication technology, we are going to need a lot more money than our users are able to donate. If you have deep pockets and an interest in building this new generation of communication, then we need to hear from you. If you have friends or family who care about the future of democracy and who have deep pockets, we need to hear from them, too.

At Riseup, we have felt for the last few years that the window of opportunity to counter the rise of universal surveillance is slowly shrinking. Now is our chance to establish a new reality where mass numbers of people are using encryption on a daily basis.

If you have the skills or the money, now is the time to step up and help make this reality come true. Please contact waxwing@riseup.net

Bitcoins accepted: https://help.riseup.net/en/donate

Bernard,

Of course I share your concerns about the potential for tyranny made possible by the surveillance system.  I do not think that mass use of cryptography is even a partial answer though.  Among the reasons, it could relatively easily and relatively effectively be banned.  Another is that it is completely true that most people, and particularly most people who are not power-players really do have nothing to hide.  So any inconvenience at all is a usually a show-stopper.

'We' supposedly said no to 'carnivour' back in the early 2000's.  The powers that be said 'ah, OK', and turned around and did exactly what they planned on doing vis-a-vis 'total information awareness.'  So, legislation banning surveillance of innocent people is a proven loser.  Counterproductive, in fact, as it cause the 'good guys' to take their eyes off the ball.

To me the answer lies in a high level of transparancy.  We may (or may not) be able to make true transparency fly.  And an extra level of transparency as it relates to our corp/gov minders might even be possible.  The reason for this is that almost anyone with a warm breath is aware of the problems associated with influence peddling in our government.

It is completely legitimate and logical that individuals should be able to query themselves.  The various types of data and identity theft make it quite easy to me mis-tagged, and the ramification of ending up on the wrong list are genuinely scary.  For these reason it may be possible to induce greater transparency into the data base that has already been collected.

The argument that the 'terrorist' will know our surveillance methods was always bunk, but is not completely off the table thanks in large part to Snowden.  There is really no compelling argument to keep secret data on innocent people so it may be possible to change that.  Changing it by throwing away the dossiers is probably not the way to go since it is unlikely that they will be discarded, and entirely unlikely that deletion could be verified.  Changing it by making the secret dossiers non-secret has a chance of working.

The end result of my idea of providing a much higher level of transparency, and particularly when it comes to people who earn a livelihood off the backs of the taxpayers, is that either less information is hoovered up or the genuine miscreants who abuse our society are discovered.  I'll take either one.

I couldn't agree more. The end result is that it stifles debate, criticism and dissent and undermines any hope of democracy and social justice.  History shows that governments cannot be trusted and all it takes is the next McCarthy to justify spying on the (insert your fear here) in our midst for things to go horribly wrong.

I'd argue that several approaches are required. 

1) Encryption of personal data,
2) Far greater transparency and accountability
3) The dismantling of the overreaching and intrusive systems now in use.
4) Governments committed to the protection of personal privacy and  freedom and the economic well-being of all peoples rather than a select few regardless of culture/religion/genes/race/sex/colour/location. 

If that were true, and I am not largely in agreement with you, then Snowden is the cause of such social control, not the agencies which worked in secret, as he evoked the knowledge of always being watched which changed our behavior and stifled our descent....

Ya know what's kind of interesting?  Nary a peep about Booz, Allen, Hamilton for a while now.  A few weeks ago there were some 'official leaks' saying 'Oh, Snowden got info when he worked at Dell' and very little about BAH for a while now.  Early on it was reported that he took a job there specifically because it offered the possibility to get his hands on material.  I think that came right from the horse's mouth.  So BAH should be a major part of this story yet and there should be some interest in knowing why they had what they had and how they let it get away.  It's very interesting to me that there does not seem to be.  Hmmm.

Tor is still safe. Tormail was run by feds, so it doesn't matter.

Tor is 'run by the feds' to the extent that they provide the operating expenses.  I seem to be the only one who finds the 'we run it to help Iranian dissidents' line a little hard to swallow.  It also is not necessarily completely effective against correlation attacks by an adversary who has an array of network taps (such as 'the feds' as, thanks to Snowden, a lot more people are now aware.)

I'd say that Tor is the cat's pajamas for protection against entities who don't have a in with the 'five eyes' folks.  Even here I would not be not at all surprised if the NSA did a bit of horse-trading of intel data with 'our enemies' (Russia, China) in something akin to a prisoner exchange program.  Both sides would gain much more then they would lose in such an arrangement.

Did you even read the article???
FYI the headline is:

You couldn't make this shit up  ::)

Advocate of Government Surveillance Promoted to Review NSA Oversight

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvsNJK_Ez-c (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvsNJK_Ez-c)

Look...be reasonable...

You're a fox.

Won't you do a great job of guarding the henhouse?

Now what could go wrong with that?

I hope nobody is surprised.

What I'd like to know is whether companies that played ball with NSA or the 'powers that be' were secretly passed information that gained them serious competitive advantages or whether collusion between NSA-friendly companies and the NSA resulted in purpose destruction of competitors by government forces.

In other words, is/was the NSA interfering with the economy?

You know they were/are.

Remember the Boeing/Airbus scandal?
And that was Echelon only, i dont even want to think what they are doing nowadays.

I guess the NSA will just have to go to some really secure method for making their bribes and payoffs.

Like using bitcoin.

I don't think it Bitcoin a very useful vehicle unless the recipient has the same sorts of speculative hopes that some of us (like yours truly) hold.

The persistent and public ledger makes Bitcoin transactions highly prone to analysis by anyone with technical skill are resource, and it's a bloody nightmare to covertly cash out into fiat which 99.9% of the potential recipients would wish to do if the solution is used to pay off independent conspirators.  Currently the market cap is to small for anything meaningful anyway.

Indeed, one of the biggest arguments in my mind for Bitcoin being a wholly private development effort is that it suck so badly for typical covert work.

I was musing about LOVEINT and such things today while working and my mind wandered back to an earlier time when I (in theory) served our country in the armed forces.

We had an officer who, IIRC, served in S2 (battalion intel.)  We'll call him Lt. Man.  He apparently had a neighbor who was female and he had a habit of sneaking over to her window and spying on her.  He was caught.  Friends in S1 (battalion admin) pulled his records and the victims testimony.  When she caught him he said "I'm looking for my cat.  Have you seen it?  Meow, Meow."  We were rolling on the floor laughing at the thought.  He was found guilty of 'conduct unbecoming and officer' and demoted to buck private.  Dunno what other punishment he may have received.  We didn't see him around after that which is unfortunate because we would have had great fun making cat noises when we saw him.

Anyway, someone amusingly asserted 'It's not like some creepy stalker would be interested in working as an NSA analyst or anything.'  Hit the nail on the head.  Had Lt. Pvt. Man been a little more careful/lucky there is every possibility that he would be a higher-up in NSA right now, particularly if was able to supply his superiors with the kind of glossies that got them off.  One senses that Porter Goss might have had a weakness for such things.

I've 'quasi-known' that the story-line about B. Assad using his chemical weapons at all is a bunch of BS in the same way I 'quasi-knew' that S. Hussein had a WMD store that in any way threatened us (though it took me by surprise that he was able to destroy everything he had which I didn't think possible even if he tried.)

For one thing, Assad (both father and son) are/were highly inteligent and practical.  B. Assad would not shoot himself in the foot like this, and especially since there is no need since he is already winning the war against Western funded mercenaries anyway.

For two, it would be trivial and obvious for the chems to be be false flag operations.  The US has few qualms about seeing gas attacks against geo-political enemy personnel as our support for Iraq in the Iran/Iraq war demonstrated.  We tend to use proxies for such things and the likes of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, etc are in abundance for such operations.

Unsurprisingly (to me) evidence is mounting that false-flag operations to gas civilians were planned and executed.  The e-mail hack of the British-linked defence contractor (http://stormcloudsgathering.com/leaked-documents-us-framed-syria-in-chemical-weapons-attack (http://stormcloudsgathering.com/leaked-documents-us-framed-syria-in-chemical-weapons-attack)) strike me as credible although I have not studied them in detail yet.  Then there is the material that Syria claims to have found in tunnels they overran with precursor chemicals.  And assorted observations like the unlikely fusing material found on the rockets and such.

Bringing this back to 'PRISM'...  I've long felt that Google is one of the most powerful voices in the media because I and I am sure a lot of others click the update button on google/news like a monkey with an electrode in it's brain when interesting things are happening.

This morning I notice twice that stories disappeared immediately.  One was of a Syrian ambassador imploring the UN to take on the question of _who_ used chems.  That was Reuters.  The page was extremely hard to load, and it hung for a particularly long time trying to load an asset from "Media Innovations Group, LLC".  Another was also related to the suggestion that the rebels used chems.

I believe that there pretty likely another PRISM-like program which forces Google to keep their news search 'clean' during times when propaganda is of particular importance to the West.  Another possibility is that Google themselves take such action autonomously, but my experience is that this is not as likely as being forced on them.  Another would be, I suppose, that such alternate views are attacked at the network level and Google's algorithms respond by removing them.  I don't know the news search algorithms they use of course.

You may have a point there and here's why.

I just googled...

"Media Innovations Group, LLC" syrian ambassador chemical weapons

All that came up was this thread on bitcointalk.

Then I went to Duckduckgo and used the same search prhase and got...

hundreds.....

Well, the 'asset' that was causing troubles was likely just some pixel from a piss-ant marketing firm.  The domain was actually "mookie1.com" and it is very possible that their servers were just overloaded from the traffic or something silly like that.  I would not expect a search of "Media Innovation Group, LLC" (which I looked up through whois) to yield much of anything.

OTOH, it is poor design to have a page fail to load due to a timing-out asset.  I wish now that I had spent some time analyzing the page assets, but at that moment I was more interested in understanding the latest goings-on on since my country was an the war-path and about to cause the deaths of god knows how many more souls by stretching out the Syria conflict by another year or two.

One way or another, a story from Reuters about the Syrian ambassador imploring the UN to research who actually fired the various chemical weapons salvos (there have been many) appearing on Google then disappearing a minute later is suspicious indeed.  Something caused it to disappear.  What, exactly, is kind of an important question.  Or is to me. 

If Duckduckgo is producing more trustworthy and less censored and manipulated data than Google, hopefully market forces will bring people to them.

Not that i support Google in any way, but you have to give tham that their algorythm is just miles ahead.
I sometimes wonder if Duckduckgo has any at all, it seems they just give me pages containing the words i enter.

watch google get the software contract and then they will have data on everyone and create an amazing os to drive more money back into us economy case closed.

It's telling that they name the biggest of these illegal surveillance programs after US Civil War battles - Bullrun, Manassas - because it's really an agency of the US Department of War fighting a cyberwar against the US citizens who pay taxes in order for the NSA to exist!
1984 is finally here!
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/us/nsa-foils-much-internet-encryption.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0&hp (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/us/nsa-foils-much-internet-encryption.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0&hp)

A conversation needs to begin to switch ourselves from using corporations that are in bed with the NSA (Facebook, Google, Skype, Microsoft) and replace as many of their services as possible (e-mail, social outlets, video/photo/sound sharing sites, financial sites, authentication) as possible.

All the developments in P2P, routing and cryptography must be utilized.

We also need alternative networks, whether that is long range radios, information transmitting lasers or trained pigeons with encrypted flash drives.

Let's make our communications (or part of them) not easy to be spied upon on any scale.

Bitcoin is just the tip of the iceberg....

Also speak against the NSA's plans and their ideology. If you get enough people on our side, those clowns will be shown as what they really are...

This is an awesome video (recent) of one of my favorite people on YouTube about the NSA:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BU9WmcAa5So

+1 It will be a difficult battle, because the majority really don't care that they are paying taxes to be under blanket surveillance by the military in this 1984 dragnet, and even consider it beneficial overall.

So, we will continue to be considered by most people we know to be paranoid extremists, who have something illegal to hide... We'll just do our usual best, with the hope that we can some day become the majority.

Yes, the emerging narrative appears to be far bigger than PRISM alone ("Funding for the program – $254.9m for this year – dwarfs that of the Prism program, which operates at a cost of $20m a year, according to previous NSA documents." from link below).

Here's the companion piece to your NYT link, from the Guardian:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/05/nsa-gchq-encryption-codes-security

"This story has been reported in partnership between the New York Times, the Guardian and ProPublica based on documents obtained by the Guardian."

One chilling item among many: "Intelligence officials asked the Guardian, New York Times and ProPublica not to publish this article, saying that it might prompt foreign targets to switch to new forms of encryption or communications that would be harder to collect or read."

Another: "Among other things, the program is designed to "insert vulnerabilities into commercial encryption systems". These would be known to the NSA, but to no one else, including ordinary customers, who are tellingly referred to in the document as "adversaries"."

Might I suggest the establishment of a simple to read....

"Rating System"

...that provides info to consumers on key parameters of privacy?

I just noticed another interesting and relevant story vanish from Google's new page in the few minutes it took to read it.  This by representative Grayson noting that the intel about Assad ordering CW strikes was weak and questionable:

  http://obrag.org/?p=76716

It was the top story (in a date sort) and then it just vanished.

I suspect that the communication intercepts which supposedly demonstrate Assad's culpability in the CW attacks are very sensitive subject matter for a couple of reasons and worthy of high priority 'media information management.'

Veering off-topic a bit more:  It makes no sense to claim that the methods will be compromised by a full transcript release given that the government has already made it known that they (or someone) can do the intercepts.  Likely the big problem here is that it is not going to go over well if it is know that edited (if not invented) material, probably from Mossad, is being stove-piped directly to the executive branch.  Again.

This is Saddam's WoMD happening all over again.
When will people finally wake up and realize that those in power will stop at absolutely nothing to achieve their or their masters goals?

And whats up with all the pacifist discussion that America doesnt need another war?
Its about time for another 9/11.

a hint...

pipelines...

"The NSA Isn’t Evil, It’s Trying To Protect Us, Says PayPal’s Max Levchin", article from TechCrunch: http://techcrunch.com/2013/09/10/nsa-evil/

From the article's author, Josh Constine (bolding mine):

"He has a point. What the NSA is doing may be evil, but the organization as a whole isn’t, necessarily. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t question why this snooping is necessary, and it doesn’t mean we should protest and demand change, but we shouldn’t blindly hate the NSA."

Freudian slip or just a typo? No way to know.

More from PayPal's Levchin:

"Levchin went on to try to explain that the government spy agency is made up of hard-working people trying to help their country. He explains from his own experience,

    “These people are making $40,000 a year. Not because it’s a path to wealth, it’s not a way to get recognized.

    In college I applied to the NSA...."

I imagine there will be a lot of "it's not so baaaad" damage-control rhetoric coming our way.

Frankly, I don't care about the debate over whether an organization "is evil" or whether the people in it "are evil". I just want them to stop doing evil things, especially any organizations that do evil things "in my name" or "on my behalf". I'm not American, but my country (all countries) seem to have such organizations. The NSA just happens to be in the spotlight recently.

Jesus, what a pathetic wannabe.  I expect that almost none of these guys know who their 'customers' are and from what I've seen are actively discouraged from even speculating about it.  They are the proverbial cog in the wheel.

It does seem that once these guys have reached a certain level they are not discouraged from making a dime off the info.  The 'right' way is as Hayden did.  That is, by use of the revolving door, and Hayden is taking his pay-out in the private sector.  No matter what, it is unacceptable to embarrass the higher-ups like Buzzy Krongard did in shorting American Airlines on 9/10.  He was punished insofar as he didn't get to keep the weenie (or his job) but he never got in any trouble beyond that as best I can tell.

  http://www.emptywheel.net/2013/10/14/remarkably-timed-spamouflage/

Hehe.

As I've proposed already, this general technique of garbage overload could be leveraged and ratcheted up as needed to to a crimp in the NSA's pipeline and balloon their storage tanks.  Most of us use a tiny fraction of our bandwidth allotment so there is a giant capacity to utterly swamp the totalitarian surveillance state.

Actually, a spam-house could potentially make some bucks and do something decent for humanity at the same time by selling a service which would inject real messages into their stream of garbage.  For a fee.

That says it all really.  If you are surprised by this, then you just haven't been paying attention.

There is a certain amount of new stuff in Snowden's material.  More than that, however, a lot of the previously leaked/proposed material had to be taken with a certain degree of skepticism since it was mixed in with other material which was/is likely pure tinfoil-hat.  What Snowden's releases did was provide high quality verifiable information and a lot of it.  Orders of magnitude beyond what any other whistle-blower has done probably in the history of the US.  It was a singularly important event, and even more so due to the engineering of the material's release which has been very professional and highly effective.

Lots of people (like myself) who were fairly confident that certain of the surveillance operations were in place due to repeated strengthening of certain hypotheses are still somewhat awestruck to see things laid out as they have been.  I would take a victory lap except that I long ago stopped giving much of a shit about what my more proper straight-laced compadres (like Gavin) think.

The point is, it's irrelevant.  When you look at all the crimes that people in the government commit, all the killing and deliberate destruction in other countries, all the counterfeiting at the Fed, bailouts for bankers.  All these things that if you or I did it we would be sitting in a jail cell, then something like this comes along and it's no surprise to me.  Just more crimes to add on the top of all the existing ones. 

It's actually quite amazing to me that people have kicked up such a fuss about it, considering what's gone on before.  But I put that down to the bad economy.  If things were going great, most people wouldn't have cared much about this and the news cycle would have just moved on without much fanfare.

Facts are that the majority of people desperately want to believe that the govt are there to help.  Like I said, the economy is all most people care about.  If it isn't going well, they will use any excuse to complain to their masters because they don't understand how economics works and so can't grasp the true situation.

Well, no.  Because if we take your reductionist philosophy of "irrelevancy" anything can be justified anytime, anyplace.

That's no different that the whiny libertarians who voted for "hope and change" now saying that "both parties are just as bad".  That's being not a fool once, but twice.  

And here is how the political benefits result from using different attitudes at different times:

hope and change - D +1 R -1
both parties are just as bad - D 0 R 0

The net benefit and the net change in power is D. 

But then, libertarians have always been played for the fool.

I have nothing to hide, but I have a much to protect.

Change is always the result of a radical minority.

There is no reason or need to wish such to be a majority.

NSA gathering 5 billion mobile phone records a day (http://www.smh.com.au/world/nsa-gathering-5-billion-mobile-phone-records-a-day-20131205-hv4fv.html)

As if phone tapping wasn't intrusive enough, they are tracking the location over 100,000,000 mobile phones every day by recording which cell towers you connect to. This has got to stop.

Here is a good explination of how you're getting tracked right now. (http://apps.washingtonpost.com/g/page/national/how-the-nsa-is-tracking-people-right-now/634/)

10th Amendment center comes to the rescue of the 4th Amendment.
http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/constitution/item/16656-tenth-amendment-center-drafts-model-legislation-to-nullify-the-nsa

PRISM +1

If you criminal scum and anarchist tards didnt have shit to hide you would not be so butt hurt. Learn to live within the law of the land and prosper by it.

Everyone is disgusted but what are we gonna do about it?

Hey shit-for-brains, if the spy agencies followed the law of the land, they would be allowed to have a global surveillance state.

Spy agencies in covert push to infiltrate virtual world of online gaming

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/09/nsa-spies-online-games-world-warcraft-second-life (http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/09/nsa-spies-online-games-world-warcraft-second-life)

"The spy agencies have built mass-collection capabilities against the Xbox Live console network, which has more than 48 million players. Real-life agents have been deployed into virtual realms, from those Orc hordes in World of Warcraft to the human avatars of Second Life. There were attempts, too, to recruit potential informants from the games' tech-friendly users".

"Given that gaming consoles often include voice headsets, video cameras, and other identifiers, the potential for joining together biometric information with activities was also an exciting one.

You should kill yourself.

I'm beyond disgusted with this spy nonsense.  It shouldn't even be up for discussion and anyone who thinks it is acceptable should be spied on and targeted for investigation.

I would like to see all data which is collected made public after a time period.  Say 1 quarter.  Exceptions could be granted by a body made up of elected representatives.

This would:

 1) Go a huge distance toward discouraging collection of spurious data.

 2) Allow the small number of collections which are actually used for 'fighting terrorism' or whatever to proceed.

I also believe that it is perfectly reasonable for law abiding citizens to obtain ALL the data contained in their dossier on request.  There are relatively few secrets left about the nature and extent of the surveillance methods used so that argument for keeping secret dossiers on lawful citizens is out the window.

This might have some impact on the capabilities and potentials which our internal intelligence services desire, but in my opinion it is a very reasonable trade-off.  The potential for abuse in a surveillance state is enormous.  It's really not a question about whether this abuse will happen or not...the only question is when.  We in the U.S. are already to far down the road.  I don't think it is an overstatement to say that the life of the nation in it's current form is at significant question unless we go father than simply halting the trend but also back up significantly.