August 21, 2013, 11:35 AM | #1 |
Staff
Join Date: September 27, 2008
Location: Foothills of the Appalachians
Posts: 13,059
|
Privacy and the NSA
The email service Lavabit recently shut down rather than release all their records to the NSA. Lavabit's mission was to provide private and secure encrypted email services. Following that, a similar service called Silent Circle closed their doors as well. A spokesperson for Silent Circle issued a statement that nothing was truly anonymous, and that if you want privacy, "you may wish to avoid email altogether."
As of today, Pamela Jones has shut down the Groklaw blog for the same reasons. The issue is twofold. The first problem is that the NSA can get a rubber stamp from a FISA court to collect metadata on electronic communications. You won't know if you're being monitored. The second problem is the blanket abuse of National Security Letters. Under Section 505 of the Patriot Act, the FBI can issue a letter to the administrator of a web service demanding any sort of information they want. The recipient can't discuss the contents or even the existence of the letter with anyone, nor do they have any legal right to refuse. They've gone after librarians and phone companies. They've gone after websites. You won't even know if something you read or wrote is under scrutiny. Needless to say, aliases don't do much to shield your identity. Be wary of what you post online. A simple crack about fertilizer and jackboots could get you in hot water. In case you're inclined to do jazz hands and scream "I never voted for that," you did. Here are the tallies for the House and Senate votes on the FISA expansion that allowed for this situation.
__________________
Sometimes it’s nice not to destroy the world for a change. --Randall Munroe |
August 22, 2013, 11:48 AM | #2 |
Senior Member
Join Date: December 15, 2011
Location: San Diego, CA
Posts: 317
|
One of you legal mavens is going to have to 'splain to me how these spying programs still exist, given the finding that they were unconstitutional 2 years ago.
|
August 22, 2013, 02:24 PM | #3 |
Senior Member
Join Date: December 5, 2010
Location: Miami, Florida
Posts: 6,429
|
This is just getting worse and worse...I use Google's mail service a lot. I think that's supposedly one of the most non-private email service one could have isn't it?
|
August 22, 2013, 03:16 PM | #4 |
Senior Member
Join Date: January 27, 2013
Posts: 988
|
Can you imagine how many people the NSA would have to have working for them in order to actually read/listen/see everything you do online? It isn't a possible task, and they don't care about your average Joe, or his guns. They don't have the time, man power, or resources to be able to care about stuff like that.
__________________
Semper Fi Marine, NRA member, SAF Defender's Club member, and constitutionally protected keeper and bearer of firearms |
August 22, 2013, 03:20 PM | #5 | ||
Senior Member
Join Date: December 15, 2011
Location: San Diego, CA
Posts: 317
|
Quote:
Quote:
The humans, theoretically, would then respond only to the flagged issues. |
||
August 22, 2013, 03:44 PM | #6 |
Senior Member
Join Date: May 3, 2009
Location: Central Texas
Posts: 3,930
|
I have always been one to assume there is no such thing as privacy on the net, or on a phone for that matter.
Heck if you use a cordless phone on a land line a person with a police scanner can listen to your conversations. I think it is possible with cell phones if one has the right equipment. When I was younger my step dad bought a police scanner. He would listen in to know what was going on. It would scan, and pick up our neighbors telephone conversations. They lived three quarters of a mile away. This was in the eary 1990's. I am sure there are better ones theese days.
__________________
No matter how many times you do it and nothing happens it only takes something going wrong one time to kill you. |
August 22, 2013, 03:54 PM | #7 |
Senior Member
Join Date: November 23, 2009
Posts: 3,963
|
They're not reading our emails, or listening to our phone calls, or looking at the faxes, text messages, none of it.
What they are doing is gathering a database of our communications, ready to investigate it when the 'need' arises. |
August 22, 2013, 04:46 PM | #8 |
Senior Member
Join Date: December 5, 2010
Location: Miami, Florida
Posts: 6,429
|
Privacy and the NSA
Sorry to badger you, may we get a link from a reputable source that says that?
|
August 22, 2013, 04:57 PM | #9 |
Senior Member
Join Date: November 15, 2007
Location: Outside KC, MO
Posts: 10,128
|
What difference does that ultimately make, kilimanjaro? If, at some future date, you were to become a suspect, the government could recreate your entire history.
So they may only look at metadata for now, but they are archiving the lot. |
August 22, 2013, 09:28 PM | #10 | |
Senior Member
Join Date: October 17, 2007
Location: Cowtown of course!
Posts: 1,747
|
Quote:
Funny, I thought that was illegal. But, I'm no lawyer and never played one anywhere.
__________________
NRA Chief Range Safety Officer, Home Firearms Safety, Pistol and Rifle Instructor “Today, we need a nation of Minutemen, citizens who are not only prepared to take arms, but citizens who regard the preservation of freedom as the basic purpose of their daily life......” President John F. Kennedy |
|
August 22, 2013, 09:36 PM | #11 |
Moderator Emeritus
Join Date: June 29, 2000
Location: Rupert, Idaho
Posts: 9,660
|
You want a link? How about the NSA itself?
http://nsa.gov1.info/data/collect-citizen-data.jpg - Scaled to 640x246 on the website And, of course, the accompanying story: Domestic Surveillance Data. The Main article is here: NSA Utah Data Center - Serving Our Nation's Intelligence Community Meta-data? Hardly. |
August 22, 2013, 09:50 PM | #12 | |
Staff
Join Date: September 27, 2008
Location: Foothills of the Appalachians
Posts: 13,059
|
Quote:
Back in the halcyon days of Usenet, folks used to love the anonymity they thought they had. Then folks showed up on alt.religion.scientology posting copyrighted materials from the organization. The Church of Scientology tried to sue, and in their deposition, they had lists of names of the posters. They'd gotten them from the IP addresses and service providers. Suddenly, the notion that anyone was truly anonymous became very suspect. That was twenty years ago. Technology has come a long way. My original point was, calling myself Kommando66 and maybe going through a proxy or two may not be enough to disguise my identity. It's a good thing not to post anything online we don't want to explain later.
__________________
Sometimes it’s nice not to destroy the world for a change. --Randall Munroe |
|
August 23, 2013, 12:23 AM | #13 |
Senior Member
Join Date: February 20, 2013
Posts: 194
|
I heard something on the radio about the FISC being upset with the NSA for deviating from their mission by not putting protocols in place to prevent un-needed data from getting dragged into the net. Supposedly this was from a report written by the director that oversees national security or something like that. Supposedly it has been on going for 3 years where the FISC tells them to stop and they keep doing it. I wish I could remember more details. I also found this tonight.
http://personalliberty.com/2013/08/2...as-nsa-moment/ Privacy is pretty much non existent right now. I'm sure everything from this forum gets added on a weekly basis. Let's hope the NRA doesn't cave to political pressure in the future. |
August 23, 2013, 06:38 PM | #14 |
Junior member
Join Date: July 29, 2013
Location: Gardnerville, NV
Posts: 569
|
Couldn't agree more, there is no anonymity or privacy online. No doubt we have all been flagged for posting on this forum.
Reminds me of an old Russian joke: a man reports his neighbor to the KGB for hiding undeclared diamonds in his woodshed, the secret police arrive while the neighbor is at work and tear the woodshed apart. When the neighbor gets home the man tells him what he reported. The mans neighbor thanks him for getting all of his wood split for him and agrees to call the KGB on him next week. Hell of a thing living in a police state. |
August 24, 2013, 12:10 PM | #15 | ||
Staff
Join Date: November 23, 2005
Location: California - San Francisco
Posts: 9,471
|
Quote:
__________________
"It is long been a principle of ours that one is no more armed because he has possession of a firearm than he is a musician because he owns a piano. There is no point in having a gun if you are not capable of using it skillfully." -- Jeff Cooper |
||
August 26, 2013, 10:13 PM | #16 |
Senior Member
Join Date: July 26, 2005
Location: The Bluegrass
Posts: 9,142
|
For anyone interested in trying to secure greater online privacy, look at this page from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) -- https://ssd.eff.org/tech. The Tor browser bundle mentioned on that page lets one surf anonymously, though some suspect a government might have been responsible for a recent attack on Tor and which apparently harvested some IP addresses. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/0...re-immediately.
I haven't used it because I assume everything online can be harvested by the government. |
August 27, 2013, 11:59 PM | #17 | ||
Senior Member
Join Date: July 20, 2005
Location: Indiana
Posts: 10,446
|
Quote:
Quote:
|
||
August 28, 2013, 10:10 AM | #18 |
Senior Member
Join Date: December 15, 2011
Location: San Diego, CA
Posts: 317
|
True, the link's domain is gov1.info, which is not the gubbermint
|
August 28, 2013, 05:30 PM | #19 |
Moderator Emeritus
Join Date: June 29, 2000
Location: Rupert, Idaho
Posts: 9,660
|
Groan!
No Webley, I didn't catch that. sigh....... |
August 28, 2013, 05:44 PM | #20 |
Senior Member
Join Date: February 14, 1999
Location: Pittsburg, CA, USA
Posts: 7,417
|
OK. It gets worse. First, No Such Agency ("We Peep While You Sleep!") is secretly passing data to the DEA to tell them which domestic drug dealers to target, and then telling the "drug cops" to develop their own separate intel/evidence chain so that they can claim the 4th Amendment wasn't stepped on...with all this hidden from defense attorneys by policy:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/0...nce-laundering http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/hol...8/26/id/522343 http://www.deathandtaxesmag.com/2045...in-drug-busts/ Naturally, this illegal-as-hell intel got shared with the IRS as well: http://dailycaller.com/2013/08/08/re...-deansa-intel/ Ready to puke yet? Hold on to your barf buckets, it gets worse. As part of the general collapse of the rule of law around here, private companies that are contracted to help the NSA do all this spookbuggery are in turn given the right to do black hat hacking for profit, as long as they don't help anybody hack US government systems. If you have $2.5mil to spend you can go see these guys and they'll let you hack 25 computers anywhere on the planet. No idea who their customers are but the biggest buyers of computer security services (which is what this insanity started out as) are typically banks. Here's what their offices look like, and what happened when I pointed cameras at it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vr5LIgZvx_8 It looks like somebody crossed the set of "Get Smart" with a small-scale clone of Google's offices, with an extra side-dish of creepy as heck. Here's the full report on what's going on, written by my fiancee and I: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B6Fh...gxdXEwMzg/edit So. It ain't just the NSA we have to worry about, it's various private companies who due to political connections don't have to worry about getting busted. There's no oversight on those maniacs at all.
__________________
Jim March |
August 28, 2013, 10:14 PM | #21 |
Senior Member
Join Date: December 5, 2010
Location: Miami, Florida
Posts: 6,429
|
Privacy and the NSA
Jim March. That's chilling. I find it funny how his "thank you" really meant "get out of here now". Nice work!!!! I'm about to hit the sack so I'll read your article tomorrow. I'm sure I'll enjoy it.
|
August 28, 2013, 10:54 PM | #22 | |
Senior Member
Join Date: December 15, 2011
Location: San Diego, CA
Posts: 317
|
Quote:
|
|
August 29, 2013, 08:13 AM | #23 |
Senior Member
Join Date: October 24, 2008
Location: Orange, TX
Posts: 3,078
|
Today it's narcotics, tomorrow it's thought crimes...
|
August 31, 2013, 08:00 AM | #24 | |
Senior Member
Join Date: January 25, 2013
Posts: 317
|
Quote:
50 years ago most people would be paranoid to think the government was listening in on them. It was not economically feasible to task a person to listen to or follow another person unless the survailed individual was a known threat. But today, data collection, storage and mining has reach such economies of scale that the cost is virtually nil to do all that to everyone and apply algorithms. There are policymakers who think citizen gun owners are dangerous. Why would not IP coming into firing line have some utility when algorithm/machine cross referenced to other data? I worked for a detective agency in college 30 years ago. They used to send interns down to the Suffolk country (Boston and environs) courthouse, say they were going to pay the parking tickets for a person being survialed/investigated and ask for all their parking tickets. The clerks gave up those ticket records 100% of the time with no ID. That often gave us lots of data on people's movements. Your wired and wireless IP trail (all metadata) is many orders of magnitude times more useful. The issue today is not just the massive economies of scale, it is the younger generations' facebook induced devaluing of their own privacy. So we have both the technology and a social attitude shift that co-amplify the problem. If the data is collected it WILL be mined. Years ago it was posited that major big box retailer were collecting transaction data not simply for marketing, but for the identification of less profitable "devil customers". hat was derided as paranoid. As the WSJ recently noted it turns to they have been doing exactly that, and selling and trading lists as well. You don't collect data and not use it in real time these days. |
|
August 31, 2013, 10:33 PM | #25 | |
Senior Member
Join Date: September 6, 2012
Location: Lakewood, CO
Posts: 1,057
|
Quote:
__________________
NRA Lifetime Member Since 1999 "I ask, sir, what is the militia? It is the whole people except for a few public officials." George Mason |
|
|
|