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  • Current Events & Politics Moderators: deficiT | tryptakid | Foreigner

NSA surveillance thread

Foreigner said:
There should be a full on revolt in the U.S. already. Are you guys pushovers or what? Your government is becoming tyrannical more and more every day. What does the last straw look like? Because in many places in the world, the NSA spy program would be it.
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Most of us are aware that mindless violence solves nothing.
 
Foreigner said:
Because in many places in the world, the NSA spy program would be it.
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Name one.

I think most people, from whatever country, understand that their government is capable and willing to use modern technology to its advantage. Just because America was the first to get caught with its hand in the cookie jar doesn't mean it's the only one.
 
:|
Mods: this may not be the right thread, move it if desired.

U.S. directs agents to cover up program used to investigate Americans
(Reuters) - A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans.

Although these cases rarely involve national security issues, documents reviewed by Reuters show that law enforcement agents have been directed to conceal how such investigations truly begin - not only from defense lawyers but also sometimes from prosecutors and judges.

The undated documents show that federal agents are trained to "recreate" the investigative trail to effectively cover up where the information originated, a practice that some experts say violates a defendant's Constitutional right to a fair trial. If defendants don't know how an investigation began, they cannot know to ask to review potential sources of exculpatory evidence - information that could reveal entrapment, mistakes or biased witnesses.
...
THE SPECIAL OPERATIONS DIVISION

The unit of the DEA that distributes the information is called the Special Operations Division, or SOD. Two dozen partner agencies comprise the unit, including the FBI, CIA, NSA, Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Homeland Security. It was created in 1994 to combat Latin American drug cartels and has grown from several dozen employees to several hundred.

Today, much of the SOD's work is classified, and officials asked that its precise location in Virginia not be revealed. The documents reviewed by Reuters are marked "Law Enforcement Sensitive," a government categorization that is meant to keep them confidential.
...
As a practical matter, law enforcement agents said they usually don't worry that SOD's involvement will be exposed in court. That's because most drug-trafficking defendants plead guilty before trial and therefore never request to see the evidence against them. If cases did go to trial, current and former agents said, charges were sometimes dropped to avoid the risk of exposing SOD involvement.
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This is disgusting.

Can anyone remember any kind of legislation in 1993/1994 that might be a pre-cursor to the Patriot Act? I would presume that the PA streamlined this agency after it was enacted under Bush.
 
^according to that article, narcotics police in the US are being urged to commit perjury. They should be prosecuted for that.
 
Corazon said:
find evidence with prism
reconstruct the 'evidence' after the fact (without mentioning original source)
fill in any important gap with informant who agrees to testify by the script.
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So this is the result of domestic spying. Where does the line get drawn? This is becoming horribly Orwellian at this point. That being said, I can't say I'm surprised. And I'm sure the exact same thing is going on all over the world.
 
Wyld 4 X said:
Can anyone remember any kind of legislation in 1993/1994 that might be a pre-cursor to the Patriot Act? I would presume that the PA streamlined this agency after it was enacted under Bush.
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The Patriot Act has been around since the 90's. It was passed in 2001. This whole thing was a long time in the making, they have been setting it up for the past 20 years very slowly and very quietly.

It was in 2005 or 06 that the nail was hammered in and all hardware manufacturers were required by law to start designing in back doors to all PC hardware. I remember seeing the law being discussed on Slashdot, and I even posted about it on here back then. I can't recall the actual name of the legislation and it's like a virtual black hole every time I look for it. It's like it's been deleted from the internet...
 
Joeof1 said:
I can't recall the actual name of the legislation and it's like a virtual black hole every time I look for it. It's like it's been deleted from the internet...
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Unpossible!!!! You've been re-programmed to forget where to look.

NSA broke privacy rules thousands of times per year, audit finds
The National Security Agency has broken privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times each year since Congress granted the agency broad new powers in 2008, according to an internal audit and other top-secret documents.

Most of the infractions involve unauthorized surveillance of Americans or foreign intelligence targets in the United States, both of which are restricted by statute and executive order. They range from significant violations of law to typographical errors that resulted in unintended interception of U.S. e-mails and telephone calls.
...
The Obama administration has provided almost no public information about the NSA’s compliance record. In June, after promising to explain the NSA’s record in “as transparent a way as we possibly can,” Deputy Attorney General James Cole described extensive safeguards and oversight that keep the agency in check. “Every now and then, there may be a mistake,” Cole said in congressional testimony.

The NSA audit obtained by The Post, dated May 2012, counted 2,776 incidents in the preceding 12 months of unauthorized collection, storage, access to or distribution of legally protected communications. Most were unintended. Many involved failures of due diligence or violations of standard operating procedure. The most serious incidents included a violation of a court order and unauthorized use of data about more than 3,000 Americans and green-card holders.

In a statement in response to questions for this article, the NSA said it attempts to identify problems “at the earliest possible moment, implement mitigation measures wherever possible, and drive the numbers down.” The government was made aware of The Post’s intention to publish the documents that accompany this article online.
...
The May 2012 audit, intended for the agency’s top leaders, counts only incidents at the NSA’s Fort Meade headquarters and other facilities in the Washington area. Three government officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified matters, said the number would be substantially higher if it included other NSA operating units and regional collection centers.

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who did not receive a copy of the 2012 audit until The Post asked her staff about it, said in a statement late Thursday that the committee “can and should do more to independently verify that NSA’s operations are appropriate, and its reports of compliance incidents are accurate.”
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No shit Senator, good job on doing your job of help protecting our privacy. You should be fired.

James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, has acknowledged that the court found the NSA in breach of the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures, but the Obama administration has fought a Freedom of Information lawsuit that seeks the opinion.
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Hmmm, interesting. This sounds nothing like the transparency he touted when he was being elected into office in 2008.

Members of Congress may read the unredacted documents, but only in a special secure room, and they are not allowed to take notes. Fewer than 10 percent of lawmakers employ a staff member who has the security clearance to read the reports and provide advice about their meaning and significance.

The limited portions of the reports that can be read by the public acknowledge “a small number of compliance incidents.”

Under NSA auditing guidelines, the incident count does not usually disclose the number of Americans affected.

“What you really want to know, I would think, is how many innocent U.S. person communications are, one, collected at all, and two, subject to scrutiny,” said Julian Sanchez, a research scholar and close student of the NSA at the Cato Institute.
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The government we deserve.
 
23536 said:
Did he name the tech companies?
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No names are mentioned.
The key component of the NSA's battle against encryption, its collaboration with technology companies, is detailed in the US intelligence community's top-secret 2013 budget request under the heading "Sigint [signals intelligence] enabling".

Funding for the program – $254.9m for this year – dwarfs that of the Prism program, which operates at a cost of $20m a year, according to previous NSA documents. Since 2011, the total spending on Sigint enabling has topped $800m. The program "actively engages US and foreign IT industries to covertly influence and/or overtly leverage their commercial products' designs", the document states. None of the companies involved in such partnerships are named; these details are guarded by still higher levels of classification.

Among other things, the program is designed to "insert vulnerabilities into commercial encryption systems". These would be known to the NSA, but to no one else, including ordinary customers, who are tellingly referred to in the document as "adversaries".

"These design changes make the systems in question exploitable through Sigint collection … with foreknowledge of the modification. To the consumer and other adversaries, however, the systems' security remains intact."
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Joeof1 said:
It's like it's been deleted from the internet...
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No, it hasn't I have read about this before on arstechnica. You should go roam around there in the enneseh articles and discussion, I've seen people talk about it and post links to a certain Schneier or something, a pro of cryptography going after the feds on his site since about 7 years...he's too high profile and his life is too dedicated to this shit 24/7 that I imagine that's why he's still alive. well, I'm glad my computer pieces are all made in taiwan or malaysia. What I am not glad is the need to pay for a remote server in a country where downloading ANYTHING (except snuff and whatever illegal sickfutery is out there) is legal (netherlands), Canada only has the mp3 trading being legal according to the supreme court in 2005. I do not own a cell phone since 2 years, don't give a shit, I love my desktop, but yeah, to feel safe even though I don't do anything remotely worth being scrutinized (HOLY SHIT, ANOTHER GUY WITH A SCIENCE DEGREE WHO'S OUT OF WORK....NO WAIT, HE GOT DISABLED AFTER BEING OUT OF WORK, HE MIGHT GET WEED AND HAVE DEXEDRINE FUELED SEX....wait I'm saying more than what any record out there must know. I'll do the FOIA thing, we got here too, even to see info on yourself, that should be funny.

Alright, now that I have settled down, here's what it's like for a canadian. Without going through my server(s) using openvpn or proxying, I hardly can tracert another geographically close canadian IP without it bouncing back to new york, well, about 33% of the tracerts...but that's just the tracerts, not whatever else it is that I do. But yeah, now not only I have to pay for this/those servers (depends on how much I torrent television shows (UP YOURS BIG 3 ISP's, you lost me when you put on ridiculous caps and like 300 dollar bills for taking 25gb more than I should have....on a 60mbps/10mbps connection (not regular), a trustful additional vpn service to cover the servers themselves and having now the need for 3 browsers to be used, including Tor yeah, whatever it is that I do that isn't linkable to me, I do through Tor which is over these 2 other bouncers etc. If whatever I say is true.

But it seems that for those who were born just the right time (people who are 30/early 30's) who got to enjoy the Internets through horrible dial up that made the non nerds cringe and viewed it as a waste of time, as I was learning and learning and learning more about the world and life more than in my stupid ass shit high school that was just there to waste my time with classes unrelated to what I liked blah blah I graduated very late but it's because I felt like this gift my generation was given, the internet, was a safe, government approved experiment in social anarchy, in electronic form. People say about how I talk and talk and talk or type type type here lol, but it's just that I did my best to keep my head up and not fall into the rot that is most of the people a little younger than me or even some same age as me's reality.

Hilarious, how I said more about me to random people and it "could", hi CSIS ! be more "problematic" in case they decide I don't enjoy American/Canadian Idol and I do not drool saliva of defeat, so I do not love big brother and am a threat, lolz.

But yeah, I know too much, they don't want us to know too many thing, that's dangerous. They fucking think they're God and blah blah blah, jews did wtc. J/k but have a look at this...this was under the radar, only happened the on the internet, but this guy Greenwald, he's releasing things at peculiar times...I wonder why he isn't just throwing all he knows at once to us, so people would stop speculate...but yeah....to me this is the final straw, as it should be for anybody liking life to some extent :
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...-data-on-signals-intelligence-data-to-israel/

There's actually another article too, gotta dig in, do you want to follow the rabbit ? Most people think they do, I did, it's ugly.

Over.

This might cure my "Internet Addiction Disorder" that is in the appendix of the DMS-V, LOL
 
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THE_REAL_OBLIVION said:
There's actually another article too, gotta dig in, do you want to follow the rabbit ? Most people think they do, I did, it's ugly.
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You're still at the beginning of the rabbit hole my friend. A good book is "House of Bush House of Saud" by Craig Unger. Good luck.
 
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