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Author Topic: they know what you are doing  (Read 273724 times)

Offline ArMaP

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Re: they know what you are doing
« Reply #60 on: June 10, 2013, 12:31:24 pm »
I told them to shut it off and the CS said NO, I can't and will not.
What's a "CS"? ???

Offline zorgon

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Re: they know what you are doing
« Reply #61 on: June 10, 2013, 12:31:55 pm »
Assange on PRISM: US justice system in ‘calamitous’ collapse
Published time: June 08, 2013 10:25



ikiLeaks founder Julian Assange (AFP Photo / Geoff Caddick)

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WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has slammed a recently exposed NSA mass-surveillance scheme as a "calamitous collapse in the rule of law." Google, Facebook and other tech giants apparently involved have denied giving the NSA access to their servers.

Assange accused the US government of trying to "launder" its activities concerning the large-scale spying program PRISM. The system was made public after a leaked classified National Security Agency (NSA) document was revealed earlier this week.

"The US administration has the phone records of everyone in the United States and is receiving them daily from carriers to the National Security Agency under secret agreements. That's what's come out," he said.

President Barack Obama earlier defended PRISM, saying it was a key part of the country’s counterterrorism efforts and that privacy was a necessary sacrifice for the sake of security. He also lashed out at the media, and those who leaked information on the massive spying program.


U.S. President Barack Obama (AFP Photo / Stephen Lam)

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“If every step that we are taking to try to prevent a terrorist act is on the front page of the newspapers or any television, then presumably the people that are trying to do us harm are going to be able to get around our preventative measures,” Obama said.

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Critics of the Obama Administration have accused it of an unprecedented crackdown on whistleblowers – more government officials are being prosecuted for leaks under Obama than all previous administrations combined. News of PRISM comes just after reports that the Justice Department secretly obtained two months of AP reporters' telephone records and tapped Fox News reporter James Rosen’s private email.

"Over the last 10 years, the US justice system has suffered from a collapse, a calamitous collapse, in the rule of law,” Assange said.

The US tech giants apparently involved in PRISM have rushed to deny they participated in the program; their logos were visible on each the 41 PowerPoint slides of the leaked NSA document.



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“Indeed, the US government does not have direct access or a 'back door' to the information stored in our data centers. We had not heard of a program called PRISM until yesterday,” Google CEO Larry Page and Chief Legal Officer David Drummond said in a statement.

Google's remarks mirrored those by Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo. All have claimed they have no knowledge of whether the NSA had direct access to their servers, and that only upon legal orders do they provide the government with data on specific persons.

While activists debate the legality and ethics of online espionage and high-tech firms try to distance themselves from the revelations, a former NSA official believes PRISM is largely ineffective, as the amount of data it collects cannot be effectively digested by a surveillance system.

“In fact it adds more of a problem because what that means, quite simply, is that if you go into a larger database, you get more data back no matter what the query is. It’s like making a query with Google. If you go in with a Google query you can get tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands or even a million returns. Well, there’s no way you can go through that, all of that, to see what you’re really interested in. So what that does is make them less proficient at doing their jobs,” former NSA analyst William Binney told RT.

Courtesy of the Russian Times

Offline rdunk

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Re: they know what you are doing
« Reply #62 on: June 10, 2013, 12:36:43 pm »
I guess it depends on the definition of "unreasonable", so they just changed what was considered unreasonable.

I don't think this will have any real effect. :(

YES IT DOES HAVE A REAL AND LASTING EFFECT!

This crap represents direct violations of what is in our Constitution and in our Bill of Rights. These are foundational documents for this country, and they do not change every time someone has a different idea about how they think it should be. All elected officials are in office to "uphold the Constitution", and that doesn't allow government to take actions that violate it and impinge upon the rights of we the people.

For any requirement that needs direct attention, that attention must be executed in such a way as to not conflict with Constitutional law, irregardless of difficulty for accomplishing it right, and regardless of how easy it might be to do it while violating Constitutional law. DUMB IS AS DUMB DOES - if the law is violated, then such action should be swiftly and severely dealt with, at the highest levels.

If we the people accept any responsible actions less than that, then we can kiss this country bye bye. Obama is the POTUS, and he should be held responsible for all infractions of the Constitution by his governing. With all that has occurred during his presidency, and all that is continuing to be brought into the "daylight", there should be more than reasonable grounds for impeachment. At the same time, grounds should be established for the declaration of Joe Biden as being "unfit to serve as President", as it is so obvious that he is unfit.

We need to get people out of governing that are not voted in by the people. Everyone in governing positions should answer directly to the people!  Lower level hired workers are ok. But, only the governing (voted in) positions would/should be held directly responsible for all actions.

There also should be a law established that in essence says, "Security Classification of Any Type of Data, Project. Process, and et al, Has No Foundation If Any Such is Deemed To Be In Violation of The Constitution and/Or Existing Laws". In short, let's make it a Federal offense to even classify (make "secret) and thing, just because it violates/might violate existing law!!!

uuhmmmm - my opinion of course!  :o

Offline zorgon

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Re: they know what you are doing
« Reply #63 on: June 10, 2013, 12:37:48 pm »
NSA whistleblower: ‘Mass surveillance makes intelligence community less efficient’
Published time: June 08, 2013 01:46


 
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While the intelligence community has succeeded in duping the US administration into allowing mass surveillance, it did not help improve national security at all, former NSA analyst William Binney told RT.

William Binney, who worked for the NSA for over 30 years as a cryptanalyst-mathematician but resigned in 2001 as a whistleblower, explained why the notion that mass surveillance is necessary in order to combat terrorism is false.

RT: You have first hand knowledge on how the NSA works, is this just the tip of the iceberg?

William Binney: Well, in terms of the number of companies in the amount of data, yes that’s pretty much the case. It’s a direct violation of the constitution, that’s why I left the NSA in 2001. They started to do this, and that’s why I left. I could not stay there and be a party to the violation of my constitution, plus it was in violation of any number of laws at the time.

RT: President Obama has said that the invasion of privacy is done in the name of security, is he right about that? Does mass surveillance help security?

WB: No, it doesn’t. In fact it adds more of a problem because what that means, quite simply, is that if you go into a larger database, you get more data back no matter what the query is. It’s like making a query with Google. If you go in with a Google query you can get tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands or even a million returns. Well, there’s no way you can go through that, all of that, to see what you’re really interested in. So what that does is make them less proficient at doing their jobs.

RT: And what about the cost of this to the taxpayer?

WB: Well all of that is being borne by the taxpayer. We had proposed to them a number of years ago, about 2004, that we design a system and build it for them for about $250 thousand, where it would select only the relevant data that they wanted to look at, out of the entire worldwide system. And we did it based on a simple two-degree principle - that is, if you had a terrorist calling somebody in the United States that was one degree, and that person in the US calling others in the US was the second degree. So, in other words what you would’ve been looking at was being able to find the cells inside the country, as well as being able to monitor terrorists worldwide. You would get it all, the rest of it was just extra information.

RT:  Do you think that the impact of 9-11 and the war on terror is so great that Americans are content to allow security to trample over anything else, even personal privacy?

WB: I think, initially, it began that way. People were trusting their government, I think that’s basically the case. Congress and the administration at the time was being bamboozled by the intelligence community, saying that you have to collect all this data to find the bad guys, and if we don’t do that you won’t be able to achieve that, which is absolutely false.

RT: Now there have been ongoing controversies surrounding the US spying on its citizens, is anything likely to make the government rein in its security services now?

WB: It’s going to be very difficult, because they have so much invested in doing what they’re doing. It costs a lot of money to do this, and their budgets have been almost tripled, I think, since 9-11, so that kind of spending is hard to waste. So what they’re really doing is saying we have to use what we have, which is the problem with power -- when you give power to an organization or to people they tend to use it. And assembling this kind of information about all the citizens in the United States, or anybody else for that matter, gives you power against them, you have leverage, and you can use that power against them. Or you can use other agencies of the US like the IRS to investigate people, and use your knowledge about people in the country to use the IRS to target them. For example, if they wanted to know who was in the Tea Party, they already have that from the telephone and email networks. The communities built from that data will tell them who’s participating in the Tea Party, the central figures, and who are not central to the Tea Party, and then from that if they are asking for tax exempt status, you can send the IRS after them to harass them. That’s what's possible, that’s what this power of knowledge does, it gives them that power to do that.

RT: In your experience with the NSA, is there a culture of surveillance which is prevailing there?

WB: No, I’m pretty sure there are a lot of people who are upset, at least from the ones who are retired. I’m getting feedback from them that they’re really upset at what NSA has been doing. And, of course, just the disclosure of the FISA warrants and this PRISM program says there are others who are working in government and in NSA who are upset by what they’re doing, otherwise they wouldn’t have been leaked.

RT: If this was practice, in both George W Bush’s administration and now apparently president Obama's, it suggests both seem to agree on this surveillance of its citizens, what does this mean for the future, where is this all going?

WB: Well, what that simply means is that we have to start electing people who are smart enough to realize when they’re being bamboozled by the intelligence community or anybody else, we can’t just take people and elect them who accept what they’re being told by departments of government. You have to have people who do real oversight, from not only the courts -- because after all, the courts, the judge that signed the orders for Verizon, he didn’t know any more than the government told him. So, he was totally dependent on what the government was telling him to justify their warrant, or their order. And that’s not acceptable.

Courtesy of the Russian Times

Offline zorgon

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Re: they know what you are doing
« Reply #64 on: June 10, 2013, 12:43:49 pm »
Obama on NSA surveillance: Can't have 100% security and 100% privacy
Published time: June 07, 2013 16:30



US President Barack Obama makes a statement to reporters on the Affordable Care Act at Fairmont Hotel in San Jose, California, on June 7, 2013 (AFP Photo / Jewel Samad)

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The NSA’s extensive spying program is justified as it allows agents to identify “leads with respect to folks who might engage in terrorism,” claimed US President Barack Obama, adding that no one promised Americans both total security and total privacy.

Obama weighed in Friday morning on an evolving series of scandals surrounding an apparent National Security Agency program designed to allow real-time online surveillance of US citizens.

Obama was concluding remarks about his Affordable Health Care Act during an address in Northern California Friday morning when he fielded a single question about the NSA and the recently disclosed domestic spying programs.

“I think it’s important to recognize that you can’t have 100 per cent security and also then have 100 per cent privacy and zero inconvenience,” the president told the crowd while delivering several minutes of unscripted remarks about the NSA.

Earlier this week, civil liberties-focused lawyer-turned-journalist Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian published a document disclosing that the NSA orders the phone records of millions of American subscribers on a regular basis, and that American telecom firms have been compelled to provide the US government with numbers dialed, duration of call and other metadata.

One day later, The Guardian and the Washington Post nearly simultaneously disclosed a program named PRISM. According to Greenwald, PRISM allows the NSA to connect directly to data servers controlled by the biggest names on the Web, essentially providing Uncle Sam with backdoor access to the bulk of the country’s communications.

“The National Security Agency has obtained direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other US internet giants, according to a top secret document obtained by the Guardian,” Greenwald wrote late Thursday.


US President Barack Obama makes a statement to reporters on the Affordable Care Act at Fairmont Hotel in San Jose, California, on June 7, 2013 (AFP Photo / Jewel Samad)

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Obama dismissed allegations that both NSA programs have been spying on Americans, instead calling them critical aspects of the country’s continuously expanding counterterrorism efforts. He also rejected the notion that the programs are as vast in scope as has been reported, at the same time shifting blame away from his administration and towards the lawmakers he said have been privy to both operations every step of the way.

“The programs,” said Obama, “are secret in the sense that they are classified, but they are not secret in the sense that when it comes to telephone calls, every member of Congress has been briefed on this program.”

“With respect to all of these programs, the relevant intelligence committees are fully briefed on these programs. These are programs that have been authorized by broad bipartisan majorities repeatedly since 2006. And so I think at the onset it is important to understand that your duly elected representatives have been consistently informed on exactly what we’re doing,” insisted Obama.

“When it comes to telephone calls, nobody is listening to your telephone calls. That’s not what this program was about. As indicated, what the intelligence community is doing is looking at phone numbers and durations of calls. They are not looking at people’s names and they are not looking at content. But, by sifting through this so-called metadata, they may identify potential leads with respect to folks who might engage in terrorism,” he said.

In regards to PRISM, Obama also downplayed reports of a widespread domestic surveillance operation.

“With respect to the Internet and emails, this does not apply to US citizens and it does not apply to people living in the United States,” he said. “And again in this instance, not only is Congress fully appraised of it, but what is also true is that the FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] court has to authorize it.”


Congress reauthorized FISA last year, giving federal investigators another five-year window to wiretap the communications of Americans citizens if one of the parties involved is thought to be outside of the US. Google began publishing statistics about FISA's court-penned requests for user data in recent months, but the actual scope of the government’s spying prowess has gone unreported. Last year, two members of Congress even wrote the NSA for a rough estimate of how many Americans were having their communications intercepted — a request which was refuted.


US President Barack Obama makes a statement to reporters on the Affordable Care Act at Fairmont Hotel in San Jose, California, on June 7, 2013 (AFP Photo / Jewel Samad)

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“What you've got is two programs that were originally authorized by Congress, had been repeatedly authorized by Congress; bipartisan majorities have approved of them – Congress is continually briefed on how they are conducted. There is a whole range of safeguards involved, and federal judges are overseeing the entire program throughout,” Obama said.

Obama also suggested that under former president George W. Bush, discussions of the programs might never have surfaced. “Five years ago, six years ago, we might not have been having this debate,” he said, calling the discourse an example of “maturity.”

That didn’t keep Obama from condoning the leaked reports, though, and he made sure to speak in that connection as well.

“I don’t welcome leaks, because there are a reason these programs are classified,” Obama said. “I think that there is a suggestion that somehow any classified program is a quote-unquote ‘secret program,’ which means it is somehow suspicious. But the fact of the matter is in our modern history, there are a whole range of programs that have been classified, because when it comes to, for example, fighting terrorism, our goal is to stop folks from doing us harm. And if every step that we are taking to try to prevent a terrorist act is on the front page of the newspapers or any television, then presumably the people that are tying to do us harm are going to be able to get around our preventative measures. That’s why these things are classified. But that’s also why we set up congressional oversight. These are the folks that you all vote for as your representatives in Congress, and they are being fully briefed on these programs.”

“In the abstract you can complain about Big Brother and how this is a potential program run amok, but when you actually look at the details then I think we’ve struck the right balance,” he said.

The White House had failed to respond directly to The Guardian and Washington Post articles before the comments in California. He is currently traveling in the state and plans to meet with the president of China there this weekend.

Obama said he would continue to take questions through the week.

Courtesy of the Russian Times

Offline zorgon

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Re: they know what you are doing
« Reply #65 on: June 10, 2013, 12:47:47 pm »
'Everyone in US under virtual surveillance' - NSA whistleblower
Published time: December 04, 2012 14:01


 
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The FBI records the emails of nearly all US citizens, including members of congress, according to NSA whistleblower William Binney. In an interview with RT, he warned that the government can use this information against anyone.

Binney, one of the best mathematicians and code breakers in the history of the National Security Agency, resigned in 2001. He claimed he no longer wanted to be associated with alleged violations of the Constitution, such as how the FBI engages in widespread and pervasive surveillance through powerful devices called 'Naris.'

This year, Binney received the Callaway award, an annual prize that recognizes those who champion constitutional rights and American values at great risk to their personal or professional lives.

RT: In light of the Petraeus/Allen scandal while the public is so focused on the details of their family drama, one may argue that the real scandal in this whole story is the power, the reach of the surveillance state. I mean if we take General Allen – thousands of his personal e-mails have been sifted through private correspondence. It’s not like any of those men was planning an attack on America. Does the scandal prove the notion that there is no such thing as privacy in a surveillance state?

William Binney: Yes, that’s what I’ve been basically saying for quite some time, is that the FBI has access to the data collected, which is basically the emails of virtually everybody in the country. And the FBI has access to it. All the congressional members are on the surveillance too, no one is excluded. They are all included. So, yes, this can happen to anyone. If they become a target for whatever reason – they are targeted by the government, the government can go in, or the FBI, or other agencies of the government, they can go into their database, pull all that data collected on them over the years, and we analyze it all. So, we have to actively analyze everything they’ve done for the last 10 years at least.

RT: And it’s not just about those, who could be planning, who could be a threat to national security, but also those, who could be just…

WB: It’s everybody. The Naris device, if it takes in the entire line, so it takes in all the data. In fact they advertised they can process the lines at session rates, which means 10-gigabit lines. I forgot the name of the device (it’s not the Naris) – the other one does it at 10 gigabits. That’s why they're building Bluffdale [database facility], because they have to have more storage, because they can’t figure out what’s important, so they are just storing everything there. So, emails are going to be stored there in the future, but right now stored in different places around the country. But it is being collected – and the FBI has access to it.

RT: You mean it’s being collected in bulk without even requesting providers?

WB: Yes.

RT: Then what about Google, you know, releasing this biannual transparency report and saying that the government’s demands for personal data is at an all-time high and for all of those requesting the US, Google says they complied with the government’s demands 90 percent of the time. But they are still saying that they are making the request, it’s not like it’s all being funneled into that storage. What do you say to that?

WB: I would assume that it’s just simply another source for the same data they are already collecting. My line is in declarations in a court about the 18-T facility in San Francisco, that documented the NSA room inside that AST&T facility, where they had Naris devices to collect data off the fiber optic lines inside the United States. So, that’s kind of a powerful device, that would collect everything it was being sent. It could collect on the order over of 100 billion 1,000-character emails a day. One device.

RT: You say they sift through billions of e-mails. I wonder how do they prioritize? How do they filter it?

WB: I don’t think they are filtering it. They are just storing it. I think it’s just a matter of selecting when they want it. So, if they want to target you, they would take your attributes, go into that database and pull out all your data.

RT: Were you on the target list?

WB: Oh, sure! I believe I’ve been on it for quite a few years. So I keep telling them everything I think of them in my email. So that when they want to read it they’ll understand what I think of them.

RT: Do you think we all should leave messages for the NSA mail box?

WB: Sure!

RT: You blew the whistle on the agency when George W. Bush was the president. With President Obama in office, in your opinion, has anything changed at the agency, in the surveillance program? In what direction is this administration moving?

WB: The change is it’s getting worse. They are doing more. He is supporting the building of the Bluffdale facility, which is over two billion dollars they are spending on storage room for data. That means that they are collecting a lot more now and need more storage for it. That facility by my calculations that I submitted to the court for the Electronic Frontiers Foundation against NSA would hold on the order of 5 zettabytes of data. Just that current storage capacity is being advertised on the web that you can buy. And that’s not talking about what they have in the near future.

RT: What are they going to do with all of that? Ok, they are storing something. Why should anybody be concerned?

WB: If you ever get on the enemies list, like Petraeus did or… for whatever reason, than you can be drained into that surveillance.

RT: Do you think they would… General Petraeus, who was idolized by the same administration? Or General Allen?

WB: There are certainly some questions, that have to be asked, like why would they target it to begin with? What law were they breaking?

RT: In case of General Petraeus one would argue that there could have been security breaches. Something like that. But with General Allen  – I don’t quite understand, because when they were looking into his private emails to this woman.

WB: That’s the whole point. I am not sure what the internal politics is… That’s part of the program. This government doesn’t want things in the public. It’s not a transparent government. Whatever the reason or the motivation was, I don’t really know, but I certainly think that there was something going on in the background that made them target those fellows. Otherwise why would they be doing it? There is no crime there.

RT: It seems that the public is divided between those, who think that the government surveillance program violates their civil liberties, and those who say, 'I’ve nothing to hide. So, why should I care?' What do you say to those who think that it shouldnt concern them.

WB: The problem is if they think they are not doing anything that’s wrong, they don’t get to define that. The central government does, the central government defines what is right and wrong and whether or not they target you. So, it’s not up to the individuals. Even if they think they aren't doing something wrong, if their position on something is against what the administration has, then they could easily become a target.

RT: Tell me about the most outrageous thing that you came across during your work at the NSA.

WB: The violations of the constitution and any number of laws that existed at the time. That was the part that I could not be associated with. That’s why I left. They were building social networks on who is communicating and with whom inside this country. So that the entire social network of everybody, of every US citizen was being compiled overtime. So, they are taking from one company alone roughly 320 million records a day. That’s probably accumulated probably close to 20 trillion over the years.

The original program that we put together to handle this to be able to identify terrorists anywhere in the world and alert anyone that they were in jeopardy. We would have been able to do that by encrypting everybody’s communications except those who were targets. So, in essence you would protect their identities and the information about them until you could develop probable cause, and once you showed your probable cause, then you could do a decrypt and target them. And we could do that and isolate those people all alone. It wasn’t a problem at all. There was no difficulty in that.

RT: It sounds very difficult and very complicated. Easier to take everything in and…

WB: No. It’s easier to use the graphing techniques, if you will, for the relationships for the world to filter out data, so that you don’t have to handle all that data. And it doesn’t burden you with a lot more information to look at, than you really need to solve the problem.

RT: Do you think that the agency doesn’t have the filters now?

WB: No.

RT: You have received the Callaway award for civic courage. Congratulations! On the website and in the press release it says: “It is awarded to those, who stand out for constitutional rights and American values at great risk to their personal or professional lives.” Under the code of spy ethics – I don’t know if there is such a thing – your former colleagues, they probably look upon you as a traitor. How do you look back at them?

WB: That’s pretty easy. They are violating the foundation of this entire country. Why this entire government was formed? It’s founded with the Constitution and the rights were given to the people in the country under that Constitution. They are in violation of that. And under executive order 13526, section 1.7 – you can not classify information to just cover up a crime, which this is, and that was signed by President Obama. Also President Bush signed it earlier as an executive order, a very similar one. If any of this comes into Supreme Court and they rule it unconstitutional, then the entire house of cards of the government falls.

RT: What are the chances of that? What are the odds?

WB: The government is doing the best they can to try to keep it out of court. And, of course, we are trying to do the best we can to get into court. So, we decided it deserves a ruling from the Supreme Court. Ultimately the court is supposed to protect the Constitution. All these people in the government take an oath to defend the Constitution. And they are not living up to the oath of office.         

Courtesy of the Russian Times

Offline petrus4

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Re: they know what you are doing
« Reply #66 on: June 10, 2013, 12:50:33 pm »


His face is changing.  That is what immediately jumped out at me, from the two photos in this post.  He's a lot more pale than usual, he's becoming more lined, and his hair has receded more than most images of him that I've seen.  The Presidency is apparently aging him rapidly.
"Sacred cows make the tastiest hamburgers."
        — Abbie Hoffman

Offline zorgon

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Re: they know what you are doing
« Reply #67 on: June 10, 2013, 12:51:35 pm »
So you've never played Angry Birds?

Angry Birds is a brainwashing control tool :P as is Gangdam Style :D

Offline zorgon

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Re: they know what you are doing
« Reply #68 on: June 10, 2013, 12:56:52 pm »
This is the one that got me... the LOGOS.

We all knew here that Facebook was associated with the spooks from DAY ONE.. but now it is explained why google and Youtube are pushing so hard to get you to change your account to your real name.
AOL on that list no surprize...

Skype... I remember well the fiasco we had through them. Erased that crap long ago

Odd though I do not see ATS logo on there :P Wazzupwitdat?

But here is one thing to consider... now we all get to say...

WE TOLD YOU SO!!

Conspiracy nuts 10  Skeptics: 0

Also there is a clearance on there I am not familiar with  TS SI and NOFORN I kow  but what is ORCON



« Last Edit: June 10, 2013, 12:58:31 pm by zorgon »

Offline zorgon

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Re: they know what you are doing
« Reply #69 on: June 10, 2013, 01:00:34 pm »
ORCON

ORCON or Orcon may refer to:

    Orcon Internet Limited, a New Zealand internet service provider
    ORCON, a U.S. intelligence code word used to mark information as "originator controlled"
    Operational Research CONsultancy (ORCON), a UK government initiative to improve ambulance response times
    Project Pigeon, later Project Orcon, a World War II project to use pigeons to control guided missiles

"pigeons to control guided missiles"  REALLY? WOW



Offline ArMaP

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Re: they know what you are doing
« Reply #70 on: June 10, 2013, 01:04:09 pm »

Offline ArMaP

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Re: they know what you are doing
« Reply #71 on: June 10, 2013, 01:10:32 pm »
YES IT DOES HAVE A REAL AND LASTING EFFECT!
My comment was a response to Sky Otter's post:"if this happening has the result of cancelling the patriot act..or limiting it's scope it will be a very good thing letting folks know what their apathy has led to is not doom and gloom"

Sorry for not being clear. :)

Quote
These are foundational documents for this country, and they do not change every time someone has a different idea about how they think it should be.
The problem with the US constitution is that it lets many things open to interpretation, like the "unreasonable". One person's definition of "unreasonable" may not be the same as other person's definition, that's why, many times, things like that end up being decided by the supreme court or, in specific cases, by a court judging a case related to the interpretation.

But this is my opinion, I am not a lawyer and I am not familiar with the US judicial system. :)

Offline rdunk

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Re: they know what you are doing
« Reply #72 on: June 10, 2013, 01:11:01 pm »
“In fact it adds more of a problem because what that means, quite simply, is that if you go into a larger database, you get more data back no matter what the query is. It’s like making a query with Google. If you go in with a Google query you can get tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands or even a million returns. Well, there’s no way you can go through that, all of that, to see what you’re really interested in. So what that does is make them less proficient at doing their jobs,” former NSA analyst William Binney told RT".

It is easy to think that, but in the world of today, the super computers (Crays & etc) can do in seconds - 1000 trillion+ transactions per second -  what man could never do no matter the number of people,  and what could take years for standard computers to do. Nope, large volume searches are just simple child's play for the computers that our government uses on a daily basis.

Super computers are now measured in "peteflops" - 1 petaflop = 1000 trillion calculations per second.

So, just because there is much data associated with this subject, that would not equate to an enormous amount of people needed for the results.

JUst FYI: an over two year old news item on super computer stuff.

http://www.csmonitor.com/Innovation/Latest-News-Wires/2010/1028/Chinese-Supercomputer-How-fast-is-a-petaflop
« Last Edit: June 10, 2013, 03:14:04 pm by rdunk »

Offline rdunk

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Re: they know what you are doing
« Reply #73 on: June 10, 2013, 01:18:02 pm »
ORCON

ORCON or Orcon may refer to:

    Orcon Internet Limited, a New Zealand internet service provider
    ORCON, a U.S. intelligence code word used to mark information as "originator controlled"
    Operational Research CONsultancy (ORCON), a UK government initiative to improve ambulance response times
    Project Pigeon, later Project Orcon, a World War II project to use pigeons to control guided missiles

"pigeons to control guided missiles"  REALLY? WOW

ORCON is just another classification caveat, like NORFORN.

ORCON: Originator controls dissemination and/or release of the document.

Offline thorfourwinds

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Re: they know what you are doing
« Reply #74 on: June 10, 2013, 01:21:29 pm »



Think your Skype messages get end-to-end encryption? Think again : Federal Jack



(ARS TECHNICA)   If you think the private messages you send over Skype are protected by end-to-end encryption, think again. The Microsoft-owned service regularly scans message contents for signs of fraud, and company managers may log the results indefinitely, Ars has confirmed.

And this can only happen if Microsoft can convert the messages into human-readable form at will. With the help of independent privacy and security researcher Ashkan Soltani, Ars used Skype to send four Web links that were created solely for purposes of this article.

Two of them were never clicked on, but the other two—one beginning in HTTP link and the other HTTPS—were accessed by a machine at 65.52.100.214, an IP address belonging to Microsoft.

For those interested in the technical details, the log line looked like this:

'65.52.100.214 - - [16/May/2013 11:30:10] "HEAD /index.html?test_never_clicked HTTP/1.1" 200 -'


The results—which were similar but not identical to those reported last week by The H Security—prove conclusively that Microsoft not only has ability to peer at the plaintext sent from one Skype user to another, but that the company regularly flexes that monitoring muscle.


Quote
Anyone who uses Skype has consented to the company reading everything they write. The H's associates in Germany at heise Security have now discovered that the Microsoft subsidiary does in fact make use of this privilege in practice. Shortly after sending HTTPS URLs over the instant messaging service, those URLs receive an unannounced visit from Microsoft HQ in Redmond...

Back in January, civil rights groups sent an open letter to Microsoft questioning the security of Skype communication since the takeover. The groups behind the letter, which included the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Reporters without Borders expressed concern that the restructuring resulting from the takeover meant that Skype would have to comply with US laws on eavesdropping and would therefore have to permit government agencies and secret services to access Skype communications.


In one sense, this shouldn't come as news. Skype's privacy policy clearly states that it may (emphasis added) use automated scanning within Instant Messages and SMS to identify spam and links to sites engaged in phishing and other forms of fraud.

And as Ars reported last year, since Skype was acquired by Microsoft, the network running the service has been drastically overhauled from its design of the preceding decade.




Gone are the peer-to-peer "supernodes" made up of users with sufficient amounts of bandwidth and processing power; in their place are some 10,000 Linux machines hosted by Microsoft. In short, the decentralization that had been one of Skype's hallmarks was replaced with a much more centralized network. It stands to reason that messages traveling over centralized networks may be easier to monitor.


Perception, meet reality
Still, there's a widely held belief—even among security professionals, journalists, and human rights activists—that Skype somehow offers end-to-end encryption, meaning communications are encrypted by one user, transmitted over the wire, and then decrypted only when they reach the other party and are fully under that party's control. This is clearly not the case if Microsoft has the ability to read URLs transmitted back and forth.

"The problem right now is that there's a mismatch between the privacy people expect and what Microsoft is actually delivering," Matt Green, a professor specializing in encryption at Johns Hopkins University, told Ars.

"Even if Microsoft is only scanning links for 'good' purposes, say detecting malicious URLs, this indicates that they can intercept some of your text messages. And that means they could potentially intercept a lot more of them."


Specifics of the Microsoft scanning remain unclear; one possibility is that the scanning and spam-checking happen on Microsoft servers as communications pass through supernodes. Another possibility is that the Skype client on each end-user machine uses "regular expression" programming techniques built into the software and sends only the links to Microsoft servers.

"Either way, the finding does confirm that somewhere along the stream, Microsoft/Skype has the ability to intercept/extract content from your communications though we can't conclusively say where," Soltani wrote in an e-mail to Ars. "For example, even if the scanning was happening client side, it's plausible that MS could be compelled to push a ruleset to the Skype client that just logs/transmits all our activity (similar to what CarrierIQ was doing on the HTC phones)."

Helping to feed this confusion about exactly what measures are taken to protect Skype messages is Microsoft's management, which remains vague about the precise type of encryption its service uses. Asked for comment on this story, a spokeswoman offered a statement that was identical to a single sentence in the privacy policy.

The statement didn't address my other question that's equally important: does Microsoft record the links and other content sent over Skype? Eventually I found the answer, and unfortunately it gives Microsoft all the wiggle room it needs. It states: "Skype will retain your information for as long as is necessary to: (1) fulfill any of the Purposes (as defined in article 2 of this Privacy Policy) or (2) comply with applicable legislation, regulatory requests and relevant orders from competent courts."




To be fair, Microsoft's scanning of Skype messages isn't too different from techniques Facebook reportedly employs, and what any number of other online services do, too. As Green notes, these companies have a duty to make sure their services aren't abused to circulate malware.

What's different in the case of Skype is the misunderstanding among many users that links and other content sent over the service are private. This misunderstanding is all the more unfortunate given the possibility that this information plucked out of private messages could be logged and retained for as long as some nameless, faceless Microsoft manager deems appropriate.

Add to that the fact that a server bearing a Microsoft IP address very well may click on any link you send over Skype and it may not be such a good option for dissidents trying to lay low.
So the next time you use Skype, enjoy the clarity of the voice communications, its generally slick user interface, and its many other benefits.

Just don't think the service can't peer into your messages and store indefinitely what Microsoft managers want. It can, and until officials specifically disclose their practices, users should assume it does.
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