square wrote:

Baywolfe wrote:

So, good for them.  Turn you phone off when you go murder somebody if you don't want to be tracked.

Just to be clear: cops are misrepresenting what they're doing to the courts, and everyone within range of these devices is affected.  If you're happy with that, then good for you I guess?

Yes.

square wrote:

How does the NSA square its call for built-in access (don't call it a "back door," that sounds bad) to all encryption products with the fact that other governments will demand the keys also?  We can work through this.

Wow, even I wasn't expecting the irony train to arrive so soon.

In an interview with Reuters, Obama said he was concerned about Beijing's plans for a far-reaching counterterrorism law that would require technology firms to hand over encryption keys, the passcodes that help protect data, and install security "backdoors" in their systems to give Chinese authorities surveillance access. "This is something that I've raised directly with President Xi," Obama said. "We have made it very clear to them that this is something they are going to have to change if they are to do business with the United States."

choad wrote:

shrill and sanctimonious bombast

Didn't Ambrose Bierce define this as "calmly speaking the truth to those in power who do not wish to hear it"?

choad wrote:

Security and surveillance are an either/or equation, according to Bruce Schneier, a usually reliable EFF source of shrill and sanctimonious bombast.

Sadly, Schneier's right. As square's link above proves, world leaders are pursuing No-Win-War, where today's secret surveillance tools become tomorrow's global vulnerability.

I'm not sure what he's proposing as an answer to this particular technological dilemma. Is he saying that if we don't allow governments to hack us we'll all be secure in our data, just as if we hadn't started the Manhattan Project the Nazis couldn't have developed nuclear weapons? Or that government in its enlightened benignity should create an unhackable computer/internet system? Or is he saying that we should stop worrying and learn to love the NSA?

Well, he doesn't object to the NSA finding vulnerabilities - the problem is keeping them secret rather than getting them fixed.  Of course, a vulnerability is susceptible to attack by other nations or by criminals.

As an analogy, it's as though the NSA discovered a simple way to cause the typical nuclear power plant to melt down, but refused to inform operators of U.S. plants so they could fix the problem.  The NSA fears that others might learn about the fix and protect their own nuclear plants.  Instead, they keep this knowledge to themselves in the event they want to attack foreign plants, and just hope nobody else discovers it, leaving everyone vulnerable.

Last edited by square (2015-03-07 15:39:43)

Whistleblower Cloaking Device

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square wrote:

Now we have the world's smallest informant, at 11 inches tall.  Get those kids used to having their conversations captured and uploaded early!

"...We may make such Recordings available to the parent account holder and permit the parent account holder to share such Recordings with third parties."

By using Hello Barbie, parents agree to these terms. It's not clear how long the recordings stay on ToyTalk's systems.

Student Admissions flunky, 2030. "Says here you caught your daddy boning the babysitter and your mom entered Hello Barbie's testimony in the subsequent divorce proceeding, is that right?"

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Spot the idiots...us for letting it come to this.

One former Behavior Detection Officer manager, who asked not to be identified, said that SPOT indicators are used by law enforcement to justify pulling aside anyone officers find suspicious, rather than acting as an actual checklist for specific indicators. “The SPOT sheet was designed in such a way that virtually every passenger will exhibit multiple ‘behaviors’ that can be assigned a SPOT sheet value,” the former manager said.

The signs of deception and fear “are ridiculous,” the source continued. “These are just ‘catch all’ behaviors to justify BDO interaction with a passenger. A license to harass.”

square wrote:

Another TLA got there first, it seems.  File this one under the Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama White House.

For more than two decades [starting in 1992], the Justice Department and the Drug Enforcement Administration amassed logs of virtually all telephone calls from the USA to as many as 116 countries linked to drug trafficking, current and former officials involved with the operation said. The targeted countries changed over time but included Canada, Mexico and most of Central and South America. . . .

Instead of simply asking phone companies for records about calls made by people suspected of drug crimes, the Justice Department began ordering telephone companies to turn over lists of all phone calls from the USA to countries where the government determined drug traffickers operated, current and former officials said.

There are way, way too many tight-asses in the country who have nothing better to do than be concerned with who we fuck and how we get high.  Unfortunately, instead of laughing these people out of town, we've allowed their attitude to permeate the Fed, State and Local Governments.  Fuck the religious freedom bills, how about social freedom?

It's a fetish for secrets.  They want to know yours, and can't bear revealing theirs.  It's why they don't care whether surveillance even works.

The FBI and National Security Agency had long told Congress and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that the bulk collection of all domestic telephony metadata was "vital" to its counterterrorism efforts. But once Edward Snowden leaked the program to journalists, these claims crumbled under public scrutiny. The government now admits it didn't help interdict any terrorist attacks, a conclusion backed by a group of experts the President charged with reviewing it. Yet a bill that would not even have ended the program, but merely narrowed the government's use of the data, failed last year.

Likewise, the Government Accountability Office, or GAO, has since 2010 issued a series of reports that criticize a Transportation Security Agency behavioral detection program that purportedly trained its airport personnel to identify subtle behavioral cues that reveal a passenger's intent to harm an aircraft. Over four years the program sent more than 150,000 passengers to secondary screening, but didn't identify a single threat to aviation. Meanwhile, GAO found that 16 people who were later convicted of terrorism-related crimes traveled through eight airports deploying behavioral detection officers 23 times without being identified. Last year, a follow-up GAO report confirmed the program's continuing failure.

Baywolfe wrote:

square wrote:

It's a fetish for secrets.  They want to know yours, and can't bear revealing theirs.  It's why they don't care whether surveillance even works.

Once you create a government bureaucracy, no matter how well intentioned it is, it's damn near impossible to kill it.

The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.

choad wrote:

Emmeran wrote:

The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.

The kids of several of my oldest friends have gravitated south to DC's booming surveillance industry and enjoy gloating about the amenities; the manicured campus/office parks, weight and game rooms, five star meals, Segway shuttles, and who knows, probably rickshaws, swimmin' pools, movie stars... the Baghdad Green Zone rea$$embled on the Potomac.

They know all our secrets now, and think they're bullet proof.

It's the smart IT arena for the foreseeable future of the 21st century.  This is the arms race all over again and, oh my, didn't the money roll in during that heyday?

Just in case anyone hasn't yet seen the Edward Snowden interview about dick pics by John Oliver.

Good read: The Lie Behind The Lie Detector

DIA Polygraph Countermeasure Case Files Leaked

Note how long the US has flogged polygraph fraud.

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Frog National Assembly Surrenders to Broad
Surveillance with Little Judicial Oversight.

Though perfect transcription of natural conversation apparently remains the Intelligence Community's "holy grail," the Snowden documents describe extensive use of keyword searching as well as computer programs designed to analyze and "extract" the content of voice conversations, and even use sophisticated algorithms to flag conversations of interest.

The documents include vivid examples of the use of speech recognition in war zones like Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as in Latin America. But they leave unclear exactly how widely the spy agency uses this ability, particularly in programs that pick up considerable amounts of conversations that include people who live in or are citizens of the United States.

Overturning a 2013 ruling, the judges did not, however, halt the programme but urged Congress to take action.

Yeah, like that's ever going to happen.

https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-future/m … suspicions

Most interesting revelation in recent days, if you're following the Section 215 debate, is that Senator Burr exposed this program captures Internet metadata, not just phone metadata: https://www.emptywheel.net/2015/05/07/e … ate-floor/

Nothing surprising about that of course, except that it hasn't been part of the previous debate, and that the Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee slipped up to reveal it, instead of a whistleblower. And of course no major news media outlets understand the issue enough to provide coverage, and the Senator's office is trying to cover up the slip.

Last edited by lechero (2015-05-08 13:25:17)

In the immortal words of Steve Martin, "I forgot."

"This was not an untruth or a falsehood. This was just a mistake on his part," Robert Litt, the general counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said during a panel discussion hosted by the Advisory Committee on Transparency on Friday.

"We all make mistakes."

Litt on Friday said that Clapper merely did not have a chance to prepare an answer for Wyden and forgot about the phone records program when asked about it on the spot.

House passes reform lite, as the EFF withdraws its support for the bill.

To protect and serve the corporations.

"The Keystone pipeline, as part of the oil and natural gas industry, is vital to the security and economy of the United States." . . .

The FBI files appear to suggest the Houston branch of the investigation was opened in early 2013, several months after a high-level strategy meeting between the agency and TransCanada, the company building the pipeline.

For a period of time - possibly as long as eight months - agents acting beyond their authority were monitoring activists aligned with Tar Sands Blockade.

Orwell knew where the real trouble would start.


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square wrote:

The guy whose cronies used the New Jersey government to punish a local official for not campaigning for their boss sees no danger of abuse of government power: civil liberties are a "narrow agenda."

I really hope Christie keeps spouting off like this.  Jeb too.  I'm long gone from the Republican party, but these two scare the crap out of me.

Cue lots of crying, even though only a small corner of the spying apparatus is temporarily stopped.