Topic: PRISM - Who else is disgusted by this? - page 9. (Read 41124 times)

I have to say that a focus on the NSA's dirty tricks is really going to miss the boat.

• Recently we say Eric Holder grab massive data from Verizon.  He didn't use the NSA for that - he sent a court order to Verizon.
• The IRS is developing a comprehensive database on us, supposedly including all credit card and bank data.
• The forthcoming Obamacare database would hold intimate details on every American.
• Local police departments are close to being able to track most vehicles on the road by combining mosaic data from the uploaded records of their camera systems, both stationary and mobile.

The threats to liberties thus are occurring at multiple levels of government, and at each level in multiple places.

Evidence of the political use of the datasets exists.  Evidence exists that the major commercial companies involved in the NSA scandal will hand over data sets to anyone who has a buddy who is a judge.

In the last year, we've seen a number of news stories about "the Democrats data center" and "how the smart guys at Google helped Obama win".  But at that time we didn't know the "how".  

Now it is pretty obvious.

Here is a concrete example of why I think focusing on the NSA is a red herring.  Suppose you encrypt all your phone calls and data, increase your use of VPN and Tor, increase the use of cash and btc versus tracable credit card charges, encrypt computers and databases on the clouds, so forth and so on. 

Assume further that in that fight for privacy you fully utilize emerging tools that the market will provide which we haven't seen yet - and which will be very powerful and cheap.

Suppose the NSA notices this pattern and it's filters respond by "keeping the data forever". 

So WHAT? 

That does not have anything to do with whether the thugs under Eric Holder get or can use those datasets, or the IRS, or the Dept. of Agriculture, or the political operatives of the Democrats, or any other of the current or future corrupt operations that may come to be.

So I would argue that the figure is against the primary sources of the data aggregation which then benefits the various government agencies seeking to get it.  And this would mean, yes, against Google and Yahoo ... and you can go on down that list.  The fight is to prevent their aggregating data in a useful form, and your privacy interests are diametrically opposed to their commercial interests.

Seems like that's what it's come to.

maybe someone could build a lightweight emailer cloned and built rebuilt on qt from existing wallets   lilke multibit  or armory* with signatures that can be scanned and verified in qr code across a p2p the same way w bitcoin ( in the model of hascash).. maybe this is similar to Tor... im not versed in it.. lightweight easy to use on the fly over a sidechannel of btc... limted to 6 per hour(arbitrary ) if it would clog network until the network grows... w smv simp mail ver) verification pruning so no storage same as spv simp pay ver)...no storage except what is needed per client... I am sure this already implemented and I just don't know  what the name is... could call it bitmail-Qt or multimail... or whatever fits.. it would have built in user friendly gpg enc./dec capability for secure im or similar to secure tweets... we already have alt coins...why not alt-mailers... symmetric of course w future limited asymmetric public addresses...idk...just a thought.

I know what Carter said, and partially agree even with the most dark interpretation of his comments.  But at worst we continue to have elements of a functional democracy.  Even if it is known that one is going to lose a battle, it can still make sense to fight it if doing so can disadvantage one's adversaries future mobility.

On the other hand, it is more common to sacrifice one's self for naught and lose the ability be effective at a more opportune time.  Even more common is simplify things to the point of doing something stupid...or fantasizing about it.  Gun nuts are famous for this.  They tend to have no real clue about how hard it would be to shoot down a drone, for instance, but they talk about it incessantly.  As something of a 2nd amendment supporter it is awfully embarrassing.

Do realize that the surveillance framework is first and foremost about quashing mass movements borne of discontent.  It has not 'come on-line' in a real sense mostly because there is yet no need.  To a large degree the system works by simple intimidation (and to this end it is necessary at some point to uncover it's scale.)  At a later phase, if it comes to this, it would be used for active policing.  If Mubarak had the system he would probably still lead Egypt.  Why, exactly, the US cut him out is a bit of a mystery to me.  My sense is that things were happening to fast for the Obama admin with the 'Arab Spring' happenings around that time.  The window of time to get in there and give the brother an hand was measured in days, and I think they just blew it.

Most populous countries have as their biggest threat their own populations so it is fair to characterize the domestic population as 'the enemy.'  The most interesting part of this whole Snowden show is watching Brazil, India, and Germany.  Since they don't have satisfactory reach and/or technical abilities, they have been trading with the 'Five Eyes' and apparently have come to feel fairly dependent on the services rendered.  I shit you not but I actually anticipated this so I feel inclined to take a victory lap here.

But back to my point.  The surveillance framework is probably not really well suited to protecting itself in a functional democracy which, arguably, we still have here in the US.  I make no apologies for believing that the most logical and suitable avenue of approach to this battle is old-school-democracy style politics and plain-Jane marketing/propaganda.  This, in part, because 'our side' has the moral high ground.  The alternate seems to be to sit around fantasizing about some revolution or what-not.  It would be advisable to do some hard-nosed planning for such an eventuality, but not at the expense of neglecting more immediate efforts

It just doesn't seem in any way logical to assume that new laws would have the desired effect on someone or an entity who has already demonstrated no concern for your privacy, and other rights, and who is already openly breaking numerous laws and often in violation of sworn oaths. In Fact, I would consider this an excellent example of crazy.

I like the general way this conversation is developing, and would like to note that there are problems with thinking legislation will fix the problem.

Did the much heralded "Privacy Laws" help?

Did the federal "anti spam" help?  (You know...the "Can spam" law...)

Many other examples where the law that is advertised as a solution actually entrenches the problem.

I didn't mean to sound quite so legal about it, but in the US at this point making the demand(s) of this nature clear to one's political representatives is almost certainly the best course of action.  The issues can resonate with the population if the right cord is struck, and it is still the case that without popular support it takes a lot more special interest money to win elections.  Plus there are a certain number of independent and decent politicians who are personally troubled by the direction these things are going and they are not useless.

But on to the term 'lobby'...  A lot of us place critical importance on 'getting the money out of politics.'  It's actually not 'the money' which is so pernicious but what the money buys and how the sausage is made.  One silver lining of the whole surveillance state apparatus is that it has almost certainly captured a great deal of the inner workings of our developing fascist state.

I mess around with Bitcoin and do sex chat with my girlfriend from time to time.  I also have strongly held political views which I am not shy about presenting.  The political opinions and Bitcoin are legal absent a breakdown in ex-post-facto.  I've got rather large genitals which I am somewhat proud of so threatening the exposure of archived NSA data is not really as bad as it could be.  In short, I actually have little to hide and what I do (like my secret keys) are very well hidden. 

Probably I am typical for Joe Sixpack, but this absence of deep dark secrets is likely NOT the case for a fair fraction of our political leadership given their connections to their sponsors.  But that data is there so it is a prize well worth seeking out.  One of the huge problems with 'big data' is cleaning it up without leaving loose ends.  If we can somehow eventually 'open source' this data, that is on par with 'getting the money out of politics' in terms of the benefits it could bring.

Oh, yea, sure.  You mean like your existing right to query the records the FBI has on you?  For which you have to at your own expense go get your fingerprints taken and a certified copy sent to the District of Criminals?

For which the response takes six months?

 

Great points - all but the "lobbying".  There's no stopping them now. Even if we could successfully lobby to stop them - they would not stop. Pandora's box has been opened...

I get that... Why? It's because these ignorant fools who are the greatest threat to our freedom.

great. let'em spend years and waste thousands of man-hours cracking my truecrypt files. And when they finally do, I hope they get a nice kick out of all my worthless (to them) personal information. But who knows perhaps they will blackmail me when they see the videos of me and some ex's havin fun?

But as for the nobody's with nothing to hide because they are "non-political" - Someone needs to explain to them that they will have to stay non-political for the rest of their life - because if an issue ever does arise that does move their apathetic asses - well then...they're in trouble.  Plus they better be alright with watching their friends and family members (who might not be so apathetic) destroyed.

Love your guild idea...

A healthy majority of people are not equipped to comprehend what is (very likely) going on here, or recognize that it is nothing new and that all entities who wish to consolidate power throughout history have employed as much surveillance as the technology of the day allowed...and usually with tragic results for the populace.

Here's one way to deal with this 'fat middle':

Remind people of 'identity theft', 'wi-fi' theft, computer virus infections, etc, and how much of a hassle it is end up on a list like the 'no-fly' one since it is nearly impossible to get off of it.

Thanks to Snowden finally blowing the lid off things in a major way, it is no longer a secret that massive amounts of information are retained.  Thus, the argument for keeping 'terrorists' from changing their ways is mute.

Remind people that they paid for the collection of the data with their tax dollars and it is thus rightly 'their' data in more ways than one.

Lobby for a program which would allow people to query their own data for references to themselves so they can check up on things to make sure that there are no mistakes and that no bad data got in which could come back to haunt them later.

This is a pretty reasonable thing to ask for at this point.  The only real argument against it would be that it could take some resources away from the 'war on terror' (which most thinking people recognize as 99.9% bogus), but it is also the case that bad data could complicate efforts and harm innocent people.

edit: ad computer viruses as a way to be mis-tagged in the NSA's database.

Most "normal" middle class people just shrug their shoulders and probably think PRISM is necessary to catch enemies. One of my friends said on Facebook that Snowdon was a traitor and spy for the Chinese. I find it hard to still consider him my friend.

As I understand things, encrypted messages are retained indefinitely (by the NSA) while obviously non-valuable data is discraded after some years.  It probably is true that if you really have nothing to hide (meaning you are a non-political nobody who does nothing interesting) then you have nothing to fear...but if you are even reading this forum there is a strong likelihood that you are a potential threat.  I suspect that it will be possible to extract decryption info from most people as needed by one means or another unless they have genuinely forgotten or lost the key material.

If 'we' wish to solve the problem, here's how to do it:  Form a 'guild' of sorts where a lot of participants use their excess bandwidth to randomly exchange information which could be needed messages, but are 99.999% garbage.  This would provide plausible deniability in the cases where there is an actual need to communicate without big brother and the inner party analyzing everything we do.  To really give the NSA clusters something to do, embed these messages within media files.

Agreed! And to that end it is up to the software community to make trustworthy-open-source private and anonymous encryption solutions (aka software & services) -and they need to keep it up-to-date - for compatibility purposes AND to remove found bugs & security holes. {This must also be simple and convenient, otherwise, the ignorant masses won't use it.}

By the way, to those of you that think that this assault on our privacy isn't an issue - you are a damn fool if you think that it would never or could never be used against you (or against someone else that you may care about). Yep, those of you that so ignorantly proclaim "I have nothing to hide". Please tell every business (every store, doctor, hospital, or service provider- and your employer too..) THAT you don't need no stinkin' privacy policy...

Please also post your email password here so I can scour your email looking for things you've said (over the years) that I can put together and twist to make it look like you're involved in a crime. Please do this now because I want to prove to you how incredibly foolish and shallow minded you are. And hey, thanks in advance!

My point of view in this issue is that we should all start using encrypted measures in our communications, most importantly in our emails and such, users information will be the most valuable asset of the future.

But it's got a long history of only being updated once a year or so.

Have you noticed the truecrypt hasn't been updated in over 1 1/2 yrs? diskcryptor hasn't either.

+1 Great post.