PRISM

Khannie

Gavin wrote: »

Let's face it, doesn't matter if your email is hosted on Gmail, or Yahoo, or on your own private box. If the email travels over the internet to get to it's destination, GCHQ/NSA will grab it. If you want to keep the email contents confidential, you have to use encryption.

That's true, however the vast majority of a company's email will be internal. If that's hosted on a compromised server (i.e. anything from a US based company), well it has to be considered compromised. If you're a news agency for example, well that's a big problem.

silentrust

Khannie wrote: »

That's true, however the vast majority of a company's email will be internal. If that's hosted on a compromised server (i.e. anything from a US based company), well it has to be considered compromised. If you're a news agency for example, well that's a big problem.

Perhaps we should do a beginner's guide to GPG! :-)

900913

Just trying to think of what other stuff Snowdon has over them.

I doubt very much that he's an idiot. He'll have a get outta jail free card and a deadmans switch on something worse being released.

silentrust

900913 wrote: »

Just trying to think of what other stuff Snowdon has over them.

I doubt very much that he's an idiot. He'll have a get outta jail free card and a deadmans switch on something worse being released.

He's going to have to keep a lid on it for the time being if Russia grants his asylum request, until he can get safely to Latin America. European countries are toadying up to the US by trying to deny him safe passage through their airspace, bunch of spineless sicophants that they are...!

900913

silentrust wrote: »

He's going to have to keep a lid on it for the time being if Russia grants his asylum request, until he can get safely to Latin America. European countries are toadying up to the US by trying to deny him safe passage through their airspace, bunch of spineless sicophants that they are...!

Russia are probably thinking there ****ed too if the **** gets released..

silentrust

900913 wrote: »

Russia are probably thinking there ****ed too if the **** gets released..

Still, I think the US can afford to be pragmatic about him, the damage is pretty much done, and he'll most probably have to live the rest of his life outside the US, I hope he keeps on campaigning for digital rights though, he'd make a good poster boy for the EFF or similar.

900913

silentrust wrote: »

Still, I think the US can afford to be pragmatic about him, the damage is pretty much done, and he'll most probably have to live the rest of his life outside the US, I hope he keeps on campaigning for digital rights though, he'd make a good poster boy for the EFF or similar.

I think he would be dead by now or in a hole somewhere without something else held over the us.

silentrust

900913 wrote: »

I think he would be dead by now or in a hole somewhere without something else held over the us.

By the time they realised what he'd done he was out of their grasp, if he was blackmailing them I doubt they'd be indulging in the kind of bellicose rhetoric they have done about him needing to be returned immediately to the US - Russia has no extradition treaty currently with them so it's unlikely that'll happen - still if he does have more documents it'll be interesting to see what he comes up with, time will tell I suppose.

wolf99

I feel sorry for Snowden - He's done a good thing, but it seems more and more like the NSA has become very like the FBI of Hoover's paranoia, or the agency in the Bourne movies - i.e. it doesn't matter a whit about the result or where Snowden ends up, he's on a list somewhere now and will forever be considered "an enemy of the US and it's interests" he'll have no life wherever he ends up.

On the original matter of PRISM etc, while I of course have nothing to hide, I have taken the opportunity to look over all my public data etc updating Facebook privacy settings, taking down my personal website(it didnt do much - just had my CV). A few other sites I didnt know had public profiles of me popped up in a Google search and those got cleaned out too. Moreover I reduced links from one profile to others (e.g. removed twitter link from Fb profile)

While privacy settings dont do a whit for PRISM, hopefully the combined effect means the "web of connected" data about me out there is a bit more constricted. Combine this with the fact that I'm pretty careful about what I put on my profiles and Im not too unhappy about what they access to.

Obviously I'd be much happier if they weren't at it, but at the end of the day I can be my own gatekeeper. As I, and I assume a lot of others here, are not citizens of, or living in, the USA aside from the data I allow the access to, they'd have to mount a pretty black-ops spec maneuver to put problems/pressure on me that would bother me.

900913

By the time they realised what he'd done he was out of their grasp,

Yeah right, NSA employee books a flight outta usa.... And they didnt know......

WTF. Its nuts, maybe Snodon was a decoy o fu.ck up a real whistle blowler...

900913

OmG NSA agent Snowden Turns NSA agent.

WTF...

AnCatDubh

900913 wrote: »

Just trying to think of what other stuff Snowdon has over them.

I doubt very much that he's an idiot. He'll have a get outta jail free card and a deadmans switch on something worse being released.

On the public face of it Putin's precondition for consideration of Mr. Snowden for asylum is that he doesn't continue to publish details on the United States, so i'd be guessing that there is more out there. Snowden himself did say what was coming was an unstopable force (paraphrased) though that was before Putin had his speak.

900913

Amercia: My whistle is dampened :-(

900913

Imagine being a whistle blower still stuck in the states.. **** yould be tracked down within mins...

900913

erm.. the whole world is looking for snowdon...
my god i thought the usa would maybe have thought of this type of thing, silly them..

lets go on the snowdon thing..........................

900913

hey uk we dont trust americia, is are data safe?

................hey how de **** do we know,,, just trust us. we love your euros.............................

900913

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bradley_Manning_US_Army.jpg

US Army intelligence analyst released the largest set of classified documents ever, mostly published by WikiLeaks and their media partners. The material included videos of the July 12, 2007 Baghdad airstrike and the 2009 Granai airstrike in Afghanistan; 250,000 United States diplomatic cables; and 500,000 army reports that came to be known as the Iraq War logs and Afghan War logs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradley_Manning

Capt'n Midnight

900913 wrote: »

I think he would be dead by now or in a hole somewhere without something else held over the us.

Why ?

Spies get sent home or to jail. Even the Rosenbergs might have just got a prison sentence had they confessed like the others did.

It's a given that the spooks spy on people, that's their job. Look at any spy move made ever. This is only news because it confirms what everyone knew was going on.

Given the provisions of the Patriot Act have any US laws even been broken if they get a Judge to retrospectively rubber stamp the activities ?

900913

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

Why ?

maybe the usa would of stopped him before he had a chance to even think of attempting this...

Now if somebody trys to release NSA crap they will be laughed at.

900913

Im not that smart, but I think that the USA would still be hunting down the whistle blower locally, **** could you imagine the **** if a real blower got out...

Drop a few secrets that everyone already suspects,

WRECK TANGLE

900913 wrote: »

Yeah right, NSA employee books a flight outta usa.... And they didnt know......

WTF. Its nuts, maybe Snodon was a decoy o fu.ck up a real whistle blowler...

I've been thinking same for the last few days. All deliberate, I'm to lazy to come up with a why at the minute....though it has shown that Americans couldn't care less about the spying...and the NSA have been trying to get unhindered access to the financial world, which they don't have at the min...eh I'm to lazy.

900913 wrote: »

I think he would be dead by now or in a hole somewhere without something else held over the us.

He has stuff, about how exactly the NSA does what it does and how to avoid it but he doesn't want that released, he has measures in place if he is "disappeared" for it to be released. Dead Man Pact. More here.


Pic of asylum application released.




Flight plan options to Latin America.

WRECK TANGLE

I wonder what sort of thre...I mean negotiations go on for foreign owners of Internet Hubs to give access to US to plug in whenever they want with a half hours notice?

Walker34

eeh....open yer hubs, or we will Nuke you.?????:cool:

The real bombshell will be when he reveals that all previous presidents have been tea-boys for the real decision makers.....the Star Chamber.

Ed Snowden might go through Shannon on route to Cuba.

silentrust

900913 wrote: »

maybe the usa would of stopped him before he had a chance to even think of attempting this...

Now if somebody trys to release NSA crap they will be laughed at.

It seems he hadn't been employed by the NSA for several months before he left the US, as memory serves wasn't he working for a defence contractor?

blatantrereg

Microsoft say they do not allow direct access to user content or encryption keys, and only share data when required to by a specific valid demand.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_on_the_issues/archive/2013/07/16/responding-to-government-legal-demands-for-customer-data.aspx

Capt'n Midnight

WRECK TANGLE wrote: »

I wonder what sort of thre...I mean negotiations go on for foreign owners of Internet Hubs to give access to US to plug in whenever they want with a half hours notice?

LOL

I'll post this link about listening stations and undersea cable links http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON most intercontinental internet traffic terminates in those countries. The thinfoil hat brigade would point out convenient incidents where cables have been cut by ships anchors etc. but when you read the original news reports you'll see that some countries are very heavily dependent on just one or two cables.

Here most of our ISP's / telco's are UK owned. Even internal traffic here is regularly routed via the UK nevermind peering. And anyone who thinks the UK won't hand over third party stuff to the US is dreaming. And yes the UK were caught intercepting microwave telephone links.

Between the dept of defence, TSA, NSA, CIA, FBI and all the others the US is spending a trillion dollars a year on "security" and they employ lots of smart people.

Capt'n Midnight

http://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/view/33116/postprism-us-senators-introduce-bill-to-limit-patriot-act/

n the wake of the Operation PRISM revelations, a group of senators lead by Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) have introduced new legislation to bolster transparency and privacy when it comes to government surveillance.

Leahy, along with senators Mark Udall (D-Colo.), Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Mike Lee (R-Utah), Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and John Tester (D-Mt.), introduced the FISA Accountability and Privacy Protection Act of 2013, which would limit the scope of Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act.

PRISM is just a reflection (diffraction/distraction) of the important stuff.

It's not that Snowden has said X is happening, it's that newer laws in the US allow X to happen all the time with little or no accountability. These aren't isolated incidents , it's systematic.

During the Apartheid era in South Africa one of the senior ministers/police chiefs allegedly said that he swap all of their policing laws for a few of the provisions of the Special Powers Act then in force in Northern Ireland.

Once upon a time here a section was added to a local authority bill or some such to allow for special overriding of planning or zoning in rare circumstances. This became a brown envelope magnet as half of all council business in some places was about getting Section 4 planning permission.

The devil is in the detail and Sections 214 - 216 of the Patriot Act allow plenty of scope if you stretch definitions and suspicions. The US willingness to go after foreign nationals who may have broken US laws from abroad, but may not have broken any local laws can be scary, especially when you consider that US citizens have more rights in the US than foreign nationals.

silentrust

blatantrereg wrote: »

Microsoft say they do not allow direct access to user content or encryption keys, and only share data when required to by a specific valid demand.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_on_the_issues/archive/2013/07/16/responding-to-government-legal-demands-for-customer-data.aspx

They seem to have back pedalled a bit over Skype... :-)

[-0-]

900913 wrote: »

erm.. the whole world is looking for snowdon...
my god i thought the usa would maybe have thought of this type of thing, silly them..

lets go on the snowdon thing..........................

Can you at least spell his name right? You managed to do it once.

The drunken ramblings are a bit much.

WRECK TANGLE

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

LOL

I'll post this link about listening stations and undersea cable links http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON most intercontinental internet traffic terminates in those countries.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/07/deals-with-foreign-cable-owners-secret-court-rulings-broaden-nsa-spying-potential/

Brazilian newspaper O Globo and UK paper The Guardian published articles on Saturday alleging that the NSA was collecting and storing the e-mail and telephone records of millions of Brazilians through a program called FAIRVIEW. According to The Guardian, that program allows the US to partner with “a large US telecommunications company, the identity of which is currently unknown, and that US company then partners with telecoms in the foreign countries. Those partnerships allow the US company access to those countries' telecommunications systems, and that access is then exploited to direct traffic to the NSA's repositories.”

While the details that the Post reported did not pertain to the FAIRVIEW program, they showed that the US has put pressure on foreign buyers of undersea fiber optic cable systems to allow the US to maintain access to the communications that pass through the cables.
Specifically, the Post used fiber optic network provider Global Crossing as an example. The paper reports that a decade ago, the originally American firm prepared to be sold to an Asian firm, but the US worried about losing the potential to tap into the network when necessary. This concern stalled the sale of the company for months while a team of lawyers from the FBI and the Departments of Defense, Justice, and Homeland Security negotiated a deal with the new owners.


These lawyers drew up an agreement in September 2003 called the “Network Security Agreement.” This publicly available document “became a model for other deals over the past decade, as foreign investors increasingly acquired pieces of the world’s telecommunications infrastructure,” writes The Post. Today, the FCC is the enforcer of these security requirements during a network sale, using its own mob of lawyers, dubbed “Team Telecom,” to draw up lengthy agreements that allow the US to retain access to the information that flows over the cables.

This^ explains how it goes on a bit better.

I'm gonna call you the cap'in wiki from now on?