NSA taps in to systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and others, secret files reveal

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-nsa-data

Just in case the Verizon thing wasn't bad enough for you. Some of the slides inline at link.

Thank God for Glenn Greenwald and his sources.

15 years of NSA Spying

Who's betting that they won't get the same treatment Bradley Manning is?

Odd thing is nobody seems to care that communications in all forms are regularly documented by our government.

Speak for yourself.

Preaching to the choir bub.

My first reaction: FUCK OFF.
My second reaction: Just why can't I bring myself to act surprised.

It's pretty much unthinkable that various... organizations... wouldn't use the plethora of personal information on the 'net. Doesn't mean I agree with it, not in the slightest.

Agreed. Most folks realized years ago that the government was keeping tabs on us in one form or another, and that advances in technology have made that task incredibly easy.

When I was in the military they showed up movies "Hi, I'm Troy McClure..."
about the gub'mint monitoring our phone lines and show them only listening for specific security concerns. The movie showed them having no interest in personal, harmless conversations, and stopping the monitors unless they suspect something is amiss. So it must be Kosher, nothing to worry about kids! It's in a gub'mint movie, and they wouldn't/couldn't lie.

Oh thank goodness, for a moment I was worried the gub'mint might not respect our privacy.

Aw, I thought everybody knew what's in RickDeckard's head:

Propaganda, and bubble wrap that's already been popped.

While I certainly will not defend Obama here (he could have stopped this at any time). But IMHO these breaches of trust are clearly remains of the PATRIOT act. That shit is probably even legal.

It's Bush's fault! AND it's Obama's fault! AND it's the fault of every meely-mouthed, scumbag, cocksucking, uncle fucking politician who supports this fucking shit!

If this doesn't have people rioting in the streets and calling for these politicians heads on pike's, then our society is truly doomed!

The bank bailouts should have had riots, but most people were too stupid to understand it, and too docile from cellphone addiction to care anyway.

Wonder if that's why DHS has been hoarding ammo and buying war toys -- maybe somebody figured out that this particular corruption-blister would eventually burst, dousing them all in rancid pus and putrefied tissue. They need all those war toys just in case we do cause any "domestic disturbances" in opposition to this shit.

Bump to force the index to update.

I forget which one it was, but years ago I read a line in a Tom Clancy book that made me raise an eyebrow. It basically said that the NSA had a backdoor into every piece of security software on the planet. Why? Where did you get the best security people to program the software? Retired or ex-NSA...

Um, not sure why this is such a big deal.

Pretty much every industrialized nation has had some sort of foreign signal monitoring program in place since the days the telegraph and radio were invented. In the 21st century, that includes electronic communications.

Now, monitiring domestic signals (like the Verizon situation) without a warrant is entirely another affair, and is definitely a big deal and newsworthy.

And don't you Europeans get all snooty about this. If you don't think MI6, DGSE, BVT, etc. aren't up to the same thing re: foreign signals monitoring, then give your head a shake.

We don't. Data retention is the law here. It does exactly the same as the Verizon thing, but everybody knows about it. Yet no amount of protests could stop it. Shameful.

Give me the usernames and passwords to your email accounts.

Now you know why this is such a big deal.

Now that this thread is nicely cleaned up...

Apple, Facebook, Google all offer up nearly identical denials:

Notice anything in common? How about "direct access"? It's entirely possible for them to not be lying in these statements under the following conditions:

0. They've got National Security Letters and are under penalty of jail not allowed to disclose the existence of the program.
1. They never knew it was called PRISM.
2. They provide their SSL certificate and private key, along with a (literally) mirrored copy of their inbound fiber-optic light traffic, like the Great Firewall of China.
OR
2. As the NYT alleges, the companies build encrypted mailboxes outside of their data centers and not on their servers where they "don't know" who's getting the data. But the NSA might have the key. Maybe.

Could be either #2 or both, possibly varying by company.

I don't find a one of the denials even remotely convincing.

As I pointed out on Facebook regarding the opposing claims issue:

WaPo, The Guardian and whoever blew the whistle on this component of the domestic spying have nothing to gain from speaking up about this, and in some cases quite a lot to lose. IOW, if claims of the complicity of these companies are true, the people making those claims have gained nothing.

On the other hand, if these claims are true, and if these companies admitted their complicity, they stand a good chance of losing massive amounts of revenue. They're the ones who have the stronger motive to lie.

Speaking of Europe.

More at the link.

I was going through one of my email accounts, deleting old emails whne I found this one from democrats.com from December of last year.

Me neither, but seeing as they are fairly emphatic, do people have grounds to sue them over this, I wonder?

On what grounds?

First you have to prove the government has your specific data and you're not going to get that evidence.

Second you have to prove that them complying with the law violates their agreement with you.

No... it's not going to work.

The only way things will change will be changing the laws and that's not going to happen because I can tell you right now most of America isn't even paying attention to this story.

They only way they might is if you put it on Facebook and add "Send this to 10 of ur closest friends and u'll have good luck FUREVARRRRR!!!!"

Again, it's possible that every word of the denial is true, but on technicalities:

You're right to be outraged.

We have however set up a tap that mirrors all traffic to Facebook to NSA servers, and we've given them the certificate to decrypt that traffic.

Instead, we were requested to provide our SSL certificate and to install some hardware in our data center. We never handed over any data ourselves.

Too much work to provide all that data. Best to just give them a mirrored PHY stream.

We didn't know what the program was called; they never told us, specifically for plausible deniability reasons.

Technically, they didn't ask for user data, they asked for a hardware interconnect and a private key.

But it's not a promise or specific claim, so our lawyers said we can say this.

Good God, what have we done?! We're under an NSL, can't you tell that, people?!

Now this is just embarrassing.

More at the first link.

FTFY