This week, the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald posted a classified court order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that ordered Verizon Business Network Services to produce the following “tangible things”:
All call detail records or “telephony metadata” created by Verizon for communications (i) between the United States and abroad; or (ii) wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls.
And this just in, apparently the Guardian has a 41-page Powerpoint training document containing the National Security Agency’s training document for PRISM, a data collecting system that accesses user information “directly from the servers” of Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google, Facebook, Paltalk (people still use this?), YouTube, Skype, AOL, and Apple.
Paging Michel Foucault, George Orwell, and Jasbir Puar , your table is ready.
Also on today on #TWiBRadio, we also talk about the consequences of overstepping as a reporter and I read some hilariously translated Google voicemail transcriptions.
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And this morning on #amTWiB, L.Joy, Imani, and the rest of the #TheMorningCrew started the movement to FREE DANE COOK! … sort of, making “annoying a police officer” a felony, and challenging gender stereotypes.
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Patricia Kayden
Repeal the Patriot Act then since that’s what makes all this surveillance possible.
beltane
All of us 5th column DFHs predicted this would happen when the Patriot Act was passed in such a hurry. In fact, wasn’t this the real motive of the Patriot Act in the first place?
Corner Stone
Excuse me, kind sir. Excuse me sir, but would you happen to have any opinion on these issues of privacy?
Kind regards.
FlipYrWhig
@Patricia Kayden: And repeal or make expire the AUMF, because that’s one of the bases for expansive executive power when it comes to investigating terrorism and suspected terrorism.
Violet
So is Tim F. going to show up with an action item post for us to call our Congressional representatives and request the Patriot Act be repealed?
Shalimar
Sure, spying on it’s citizens isn’t a good thing, but I’m happy the US is at least still the best in the world at something.
TooManyJens
@Violet: My idea, and I’m sort of serious about this, is that liberals with GOP senators and representatives should call them up, pretend to be Tea Partiers, and demand that they strip That One of his powers to spy on Real Americans.
I mean, shit, they don’t care what liberals have to say, so we might as well hit them where it hurts — the fear of a primary challenge.
Baud
@TooManyJens:
That’s not bad. I could see it working.
Villago Delenda Est
@Patricia Kayden:
I wonder if Huckleberry Closetcase (Wingtard, SC) ever even considered that as an option?
Violet
@TooManyJens: Ooh! I like it! I live in a red state with two wingnut Senators. I’m happy to do that. Although I know from past phone calls they just route you to a voicemail box that is full most of the time. Won’t stop me from trying.
Anyone want to come up with a strategy and talking points for this sort of thing?
gnomedad
Republican are shocked by Obama’s invasion of our privacy and will not rest until this power is in their hands again.
Villago Delenda Est
@gnomedad:
You left out the obligatory second shocked right after the first one, there.
currants
This is not really news? Last August this aired (NY Times Op-Doc), which … well.
What is there to do? This is not a hands-flung-in-air-I-give-up comment, it’s a real question. We use computers, cellphones. Switch to servers/companies that aren’t complicit? Credo is one for cell, but that means not having a cell out where I live. I used to live without one, and I suppose I could again.
Hal
Just think of the NSA agent who has to monitor Facebook. “Single, in a relationship, single, it’s complicated, engaged, single, it’s complicated…”
That and millions of game requests.
Omnes Omnibus
@Hal: I am sure there are coded messages in Farmville.
Chris
@Shalimar:
Amusing that the “something” is a government function.
Villago Delenda Est
@Omnes Omnibus:
There are all sorts of coded messages in World of Warcraft. Most of them have to do with buying mounts and pets from the Blizzard pet store.
currants
@currants: (It’s a video op-ed of William Binney, I think, who worked for NSA–a whistle-blower (aka mathemetician). Data collection, baby.
Patricia Kayden
@gnomedad: Have any Repubs expressed outrage about the NSA issue? I haven’t heard any outrage from them (as yet). But I suppose Rand Paul probably is against this (if he’s consistent).
Omnes Omnibus
@Villago Delenda Est:
I don’t know what that means.
Villago Delenda Est
@Chris:
You’ll note that this issue only rose to the level of a credible threat when competent Democrats replaced the bungling Rethugs.
Keith G
@Patricia Kayden:
Or a president could decide not to use these troublesome procedures. That is, if he felt they were troublesome. After all The Obama administration’s refusal to defend DOMA is a celebrated decision. It was bad law. Here is, for all intents and purposes, a bad process. Don’t do it Mr President. Just say “No”.
Engage the citizens now, Mr. President. Ask them, “Do you want a government that does these very serious things? Do you want this level of surveillance as a regular part of what your government does?”
beltane
@Shalimar: Meh, I bet the Chinese kick our butts at this sport as well.
gbear
@Hal: I was wondering why [redacted] kept showing up as one of the ‘likes’ for my Facebook posts.
Mike with a Mic
This is why IT security types have been banging on about using linux with proxy servers, sending files through TOR networks, using disposable burner phones and all of this for a good bit now.
And this didn’t even start under Bush, we’ve been doing all this since at least Clinton when mobiles and the internet really kicked off. And it’s not just the government that does this sort of crap, apple/facebook/google are violators of an insane level as well, though oddly microsoft is one of the “good guys” (such as they are) now.
The only hurdle has always been storing it and having the processing power to do something meaningful with it. But those hurdles have been obliterated.
[quote] Switch to servers/companies that aren’t complicit? [/quote]
There isn’t much you can do. The best start is to avoid google, apple, facebook as if they were cancer. But outside of that it’s easy to suck wireless signals out of the air and the internet only has a few main trunks that have been tapped for ages. Your best bet is hiding your tracks behind a proxy, using prepaid phones you paid for in cash, and moving to the “dark net” areas of usenet, newsgroups, IRC and other areas where the nastier types hide.
But this is too much effort for most people. People just need to accept when you get an iphone, on AT&T, put your gmail on it, use facebook on it, you pretty much gave up your entire life.
Villago Delenda Est
@Omnes Omnibus:
Ah, a mundane.
Blizzard is the company that published and runs World of Warcraft. The Blizzard pets store sells mounts and companion pets that join you in the online virtual world. They go for like $25 apiece, less during sales promotions. Not bad for a bunch of pixels, don’t you think?
Omnes Omnibus
@Villago Delenda Est: Now that you explained, I just don’t understand.
Villago Delenda Est
@Mike with a Mic:
To a group of heartless Ferengi who would sell their own mothers in a heartbeat for the right sum of latinum.
Corporate intrusions into your privacy are infinitely more likely to affect you in some negative way than the government, because the corporations aren’t looking for bad guys. They’re looking for marks.
Chris
@Villago Delenda Est:
LOLOL, yes indeed.
Villago Delenda Est
@Omnes Omnibus:
Just go to warcraft.com, sign up for a free account, download the software (will take a while), and play the game for 10 minutes. You were an FA officer…understanding will come!
Omnes Omnibus
@Villago Delenda Est: Nope. I have enough time wasting bad habits as it is.
magurakurin
setting aside all the issues of whether it’s legal or not, or whether the government should or shouldn’t be doing it, has anyone bothered to ask them if, you know, it actually works? Has anyone ever been arrested as a result of this surveillance? Has any bad actor been stopped as a result? Is this anything other than an enormous waste of time, money and resources?
Villago Delenda Est
@magurakurin:
Please. The “does it work?” approach is for DFHs. As long as Cheney gets a hardon from torture, it works.
mk3872
Now we all know why Glennwaldo wants protection for Manning, Assange and the AP … He was just protecting his own sources who gave him classified documents!
Keith G
@Villago Delenda Est:
And you are depending on a universal, correct, and unchanging view of what a “bad guy” is?
Was Aaron Swartz a bad guy? Richard Jewell? Wen Ho Lee?
gnomedad
@Patricia Kayden:
I confess my premise is speculative. It will be remarkable if they keep silent on this, because anything that happens on Obama’s watch is tyranny.
Mike with a Mic
@magurakurin:
The data can’t be analyzed in real time, that’s impossible. It’s there to look at after the fact. Their just sucking up everything possible in case they want to do something with it or might need it later.
Now, if they were to start running analytics on it they could map out networks, patterns, of all sorts of shit.
It’s pretty much a money sink to store shit for the sake of storing shit because you might be able to do something with it or want it later.
Mike with a Mic
@Keith G:
The unholy trio of google, apple, and facebook are actually vastly more nefarious than the NSA is in terms of data. What happend to Aaron was sad, but then again people who have breached apples corporate issues have been killed, others had their homes raided by off work cops in the US and their stuff taken at gun point back to apples corporate headquarters, and god help you if you fuck with google.
People have their hands up in the air because it’s the NSA doing it, but what they are doing isn’t that much different than what peoples favorite companies do to them constantly, and people pay for those products. All the NSA is doing is sucking up and storing the crap that corporations were already sucking up and storing. They’re tracking you through your iphone and monitoring it because apple and AT&T do that, they’re reading your gmail because google is doing it. The very nature of these technologies is what makes this all so easy.
Roy G.
Oh, but GG is teh purist devil here at BJ, so move along folks…
Jenny
I post my vacation videos on Youtube. The government collects them. How does that violate my privacy?
magurakurin
@Mike with a Mic:
so, as suspected, an enormous waste of time, money and resources. Par for the course, I suppose.
gussie
@Mike with a Mic: We pay for the NSA, too. And the NSA’s core purpose is to serve us, not sell stuff to us.
Cacti
Glenn will never forgive Obama for using the laws his boy Bush established years ago, and which were passed, renewed, and renewed again by huge bipartisan legislative majorities.
He and Mrs. Obama should sit down, shut up, and make some tea while he screams at them.
Mike with a Mic
@gussie:
You have to pay taxes, some goes to the NSA. You don’t have to have an iphone on AT&T’s 4g network, and you don’t have to use gmail. You chose to screw yourself and support those monsters completely on your own. It’s not exactly the same thing.
@magurakurin:
I’m sure something can be done with it at some point. You have to remember until recently storing this amount of data and the processing power to compress it was a pipe dream. Now it’s a bit of a joke to do that. And while the processing power to deal with this in real time still really isn’t around (yet), you sure as shit can datamine the fuck out of it and analyize it to hell and back. GPU computing is going to make things crazy soon.
So while now this is just “storing shit for the sake of storing, and archiving for the sake of archiving” (which anyone who’s been in the military will laugh and say shit never changes), who knows down the line!
Fred Fnord
@Mike with a Mic: Wow. Well. That’s the kind of stuff that belongs on InfoWars. I confess, I didn’t expect to see it here.
Most Apple-haters, and their counterparts on the pro-Apple anti-Google/Microsoft/whoever side, content themselves with accusations of corporate malfeasance, not felony kidnapping, murder 1, and other such things.
Mike with a Mic
@Fred Fnord:
The Foxconn workers in Taiwan who lost the iphone prototype were met with security and then “jumped” out of the window to their death. This has happened several times and it’s always the apple plant that it happens at.
Apple raiding people, here’s just one where they got the cops to do it, they are known for using off duty cops to do this as well on their spare time http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/26/the-iphone-leak-gets-ugly-police-raid-gizmodo-editors-house-confiscate-computers/
This is not conspiracy crap, it’s well documented and happens fairly often. I don’t like any of the big tech companies, but for this sort of shit apple is bar none the worst offender both in how bold they are and how often they pull this. Not to mention they are up to their elbows in conflict minerals that make conflict diamonds look rather clean and moral.
This is a point against corporate problems, apple just happens to make Koch Industries look like nice people.
guachi
@magurakurin:
To answer your questions: Yes, Yes, Yes, and No.
Dr. Omed
For your #NSA listening-in pleasure, tonight’s song is ELO’s Telephone Line: “I’d tell you everything If you’d pick up that telephone yeah yeah yeah” http://youtu.be/WdF8iqtrZr0
gussie
@Mike with a Mic: I couldn’t agree more. One reason the NSA is so much worse is because it’s not optional. Facebook, in fact, does not have any of my data, because I won’t let them–I avoid them completely. I don’t have that option with the NSA, which is solely funded by tax dollars.
Mike with a Mic
@gussie:
Yeah, but the NSA can’t vacume up you didn’t already give Facebook. That’s the rub in all of this. When I don’t want to be tracked I use a laptop with a custom linux load that doesn’t store data, I use proxies, send files through TOR networks, and talk to people in IRC and usenet. I know that’s private. I have no expectations that what I do with my iphone is remotely private, I assume it’s all public to everyone who wants it, because it is.
Wilson Heath
Are there only like 20 of us on Earth who get that the Patriot Act is still alive and well? I seriously don’t see how the NSA thing is a revelation. I had been under the impression that this has been SOP for over a decade. And many of us kind of suspected that the NSA already dabbled here and there before.
Liquid
I remember playing a certain spy-centric video game many years ago. There was an off-hand comment like “NSA doesn’t spy on it’s own people.” <– that game was ten years ago and I laughed really, really hard then.
That anyone could possibly be surprised by this bullshit now is even more funny!
? Martin
And this PRISM revelation is very suspicious to me. We have several prominent companies going out of their way, going on the record to say they’ve never heard of such a thing. That’s odd. That’s not a defensive statement, it’s not the usual platitudes of ‘we take everyones privacy seriously and are in full compliance with the law’. That’s actually a statement on offense because it gives them no deniability if it’s revealed that they did know about it. I’m more inclined at this stage to think that it’s a honey pot to catch the person leaking this information.
If you look at the bottom of this slide: http://www.theblaze.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/prism-slide-41.jpg
It says “Complete list of details on Prism web page go PRISMFAA. PRISMFAA is this page here: http://www.dot.gov/individuals/privacy/pia-prism:
I think someone is getting punked here. The phone records thing is clearly happening, but I don’t buy this.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@? Martin:
I think the same, this seems like it was designed to generate outrage. If this is all it takes to set off the crazies, I can’t wait for the leaked Access database that “proves” this.
? Martin
@Mike with a Mic:
Have been killed? Really? How many teenage deaths are on Facebook’s hands then? Twitter’s?
Elie
@Wilson Heath:
You are not alone.
I am also not convinced that some of it is — well — necessary. I can’t seem to get a complete discussion of how these data may be used for necessary vs un-necessary uses. I don’t think we can say that our country should not monitor anything about us but can we talk about the consequences both of surveillance restriction vs open, tacit state monitoring. Isn’t there some point in between where we can tolerate as a trade off for certain security? or not?
? Martin
Wait, bullshit meter is really going off the scale here. Look on this slide: http://www.theblaze.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/prism-slide-5.jpg
Program cost is $20 million? Seriously? They’re harvesting data from Apple’s data centers (which they spent $3B constructing), Google’s (WAY larger and more expensive), Facebooks (also larger), Microsofts, Yahoo’s and so on – and they’re doing it for $20M? You couldn’t pay the data bill just to access Apple for $20M, let alone the servers, power, and staffing.
Now, the FAA program I linked to above – that looks like a $20M program. Seriously, someone is getting played here. Either the WaPo or the guys that leaked it or someone. But this is bullshit.
Suffern ACE
@? Martin: Do you have a link to the slide that GG references in the story about how the purpose of the programs is to get around FISA?
If I read the fist slide correctly, this could be an integrated communication tool similar to the one that my company built for its smart phone users.
Mnemosyne
@? Martin:
That sounds strangely like the purchasing system we use at work, SAP. Of course, all of us who use it already know that it’s the source of all evil.
Suffern ACE
@Mnemosyne: I think you are right. This is about allowing vendors who use various applications to hold online meetings and whatnot to be captured and stored so that it is compliant.
Mnemosyne
@Suffern ACE:
Not just that — we gather a lot of very sensitive information from our vendors (like Social Security numbers and bank account numbers) to facilitate payment. We have to make a lot of statements about how we protect their privacy because they could be really screwed if someone managed to get into our database and get hold of that information.
? Martin
@Suffern ACE: Yeah, it presents it that they’re intercepting data that happens to pass through non-US routers. Now, we know that’s how they worked around FISA under the wiretapping era, but if anything that makes this even less believable.
We passed a law in 1994 requiring backdoors in all hardware routers so that government can decrypt and intercept communication on the fly. That’s hardly new. So if they’re intercepting communication outside of the US, they don’t need the help of the companies – just have the packet analyzer filter based on the trace endpoint and grab everything. They’d only need the companies to handle software based encryption, and it’s not even clear if any of the companies hold a key to decrypt that stuff or could provide it en masse.
Suffern ACE
@? Martin: As for the $20 million. You would think that since the NSA’s budget is dark, they would have some kind of standard about not putting the costs of things in TRAINING presentations for end users.
Also, too. Per the slide that GG read as being a FISA work around, you also wouldn’t put that in a training presentation either. As much as I think our NSA is nuts, they aren’t stupid.
Berial
Does it bother anyone else that all this shit coming down on the president that is getting everyone so upset and getting hyped up more and more; none of it seems to be illegal. Is it really a scandal or a ‘xx-gate’ if nothing illegal happened?
And what the hell are liberal minded people supposed to do if it turns out the President DID do something illegal? It’s a hell of a choice, to pick to support the criminal(admin) or the obviously insane(the loyal opposition) .
YellowJournalism
@Hal: That’s nothing next to the guy that’s been assigned to people’s phone photo stream. “Cat, cat, drunk friend with cat, naked self-portrait, naked self-portrait, close-up of junk, cat, cat, naked self-portrait with cat in the background…”
? Martin
@YellowJournalism:
FTFY
YellowJournalism
@? Martin: We forgot: “Unusually clear picture of mustard obviously taken by accident…”
Suffern ACE
I guess in the end, I’d rather be arguing about whether seizing Verizon phone records have fourth amendment protections and losing that argument than arguing that torture was illegal and losing that argument. And I believe that torture argument was lost for eight years. The NYT can disagree. Since we all have cell phones and e-mail accounts, I guess the collection of records affects us and we can get mad. But for 8 years we were losing an argument about government torture. The NYT couldn’t even be bothered to call it by its name during that period of time. But then their editorial board wasn’t likely to be tortured.
Sirkowski
The government is watching you a lot less than the advertisers.
Villago Delenda Est
@Keith G:
I guess I should have said “bad guys”. Corporations don’t care about that sort of thing, they are interested in EVERYONE as a potential consumer. They’re not looking for a few individuals who might be contemplating or actively planning mayhem…they’re looking for people to give them money for whatever it is they’re producing. Which is a lot more people, and in many ways a lot more invasive.
Matt McIrvin
My hope is that this is the beginning of people actually agreeing that this kind of thing is not OK. My fear is that it all ends up being about the horribleness of Obama and Democrats, and the moment a good Republican gets in it quietly goes back to being OK like it was before.
Bobby Thomson
@? Martin: FTW