NSA PRISM snoop-gate: Won't someone think of the children, wails Apple Apple has joined Facebook and Microsoft in revealing it has received thousands of requests for sensitive user data from US investigators in less than a year. And like the two other giants, the fruity computer company is vague about the details. A statement from Cupertino marks another attempt to diffuse the ongoing row over …
AFAIK none of these corporations has said that they must lie about NSA backdoors by law and any queries should be referred to the US government. That would probably be the best way to show trustworthiness (if it could be shown), talking about Alzheimer sufferers and children or the privacy of iMessage, FaceTime, map searches, location details and Siri requests are just more lies amongst many.
what if they aren't black boxes? what if they are fairly innocent looking commercial, vendor branded routers, with "someone else" providing the internal electronics & software? Coming soon to a rack near you .... (ok, not soon, but a while ago, and a rack adjacent to you, unless your data centre manager is a complete moron, or in "someone's" pocket)
If the next ‘regime’ wants to classify something that I do as ‘terrorism’ then they are going to find a lot of people not voting for them in the next election, that’s if they manage to get a law passed classifying what I do as terrorism, we do not live in a dictatorship, hell, the US Gov can’t even get assault rifles outlawed when it wants to, and the British government are trying their best to make the Police and Military as useless and ineffectual as possible, you think they can just flick a switch and decide everyone wearing glasses is to be rounded up and shot a la Pol Pot?
There's an interesting bit of history from the 1930's in Germany you might want to study. 'We the people' have a history of voting in some stark raving lunatics. Every person who thinks as you do, just waiting for someone else to protest is part of the problem. In a representative democracy you can't wait to vote someone out, you have to take action before the next election: It is incredibly difficult to rollback power.
Yes, the Weimar Republic and its fall is indeed an interesting case, which is why I get irked when Godwin's Law is overused to squash out discussion concerning related topics. It is usually dismissed without taking into account that the worst evil perpetrated by the Nazis was possible because they actually made all those things legal, and even had the Reichstag passing the laws that let them do what they did. Hell, the Enabling Act even had a Patriot Act-ish name to it, the "Law to Remedy the Distress of People and Reich". And it was extended twice as well.
Being able to vote in/out your representatives is useless if they keep on voting for extensions to these things. And even if someone campaigns on a platform promising to take down these things, there's absolutely no guarantee they will follow through their promises.
And it was extended twice as well.
Nice one. A good reference when yet another sponsor representative politician is trying to pass a law with the use of either "emergency" or "temporary". It always means that there is something in that law which they fear you may object to if you were thinking rationally.
We have more than enough laws to deal with emergencies that do NOT harm the principle of due process, and I have yet to see temporary powers that are either extended indefinitely or turned into law proper on the next possible occasion. Does anyone actually know of an occasion where temporary power handed to the state was handed back? No? Thought so.
Civil War, suspension of habeus corpus. Or if you prefer the even larger issue at the heart of the whole damn thing: the abolition of slavery which was about to become law through the democratic process.
World War II, internment of Japanese Americans. Took a while, but reparations were even paid for that one.
You're spot on, their actions were legal, until Nuremberg; but even that only applied after the fighting was over and the winners could make new rules. If all the well examined strategic errors of the Third Reich hadn't been made would those things still be legal? Thankfully we will never know, but a lot of people died to prevent that from being the case.
One of the great things about the way the US was structured is that it is not only a nation of law, but of principals and ideals as well. Over time the principals and ideals have been discarded because they were inconvenient to the application of various laws and that is extraordinarily dangerous. Law, being a definable set of rules, is always subject to manipulation because it is quantifiable and intricately structured. Principals and ideals are ethereal and can hold in check the law simply because they cannot be subject to writ or bull; therefore they must be eliminated. Short sighted men who could not look past their own immediate rewards have caused this world many, many problems.
True, but if you studied that history a bit more you would know it took an extraordinary set or circumstance, and lack of governmental powers and influence from outside the parliament that lead Hitler being Chancellor, remember he only got 18% of the vote.
“In a representative democracy you can't wait to vote someone out, you have to take action before the next election”
Just like the Nazi’s did.
They won't pass a law. Maybe it'll be a secret Executive Order, but more likely a National Security finding. And that's assuming they want to keep it official. They can always just ignore the law like they did with the IRS scandal, or outright lie to Congress the way Holder did with the James Rosen warrant. (Or if he didn't lie to Congress, lie to a judge; but either way he lied to someone who requires truthful statements in order to properly perform their official function.)
Dear John,
Presumably you walk around with your tin foil hat on and a hoody obscuring your face. You probably have camera resistant number plates and move house every 6 months so that you don't show up on the electoral register. You may of even elected to have some form of surgery so that you can no longer be recognised?
Hmm, probably not. So what are you and all the other posters so afraid of? You have been monitored in some form since your birth. You have been registered on so many systems. Just what kind of activities are you getting up to that are making yourself and a majority of others so paranoid? Yeah I hear all the talk about erosion of privacy and all that. Maybe it's just that your life is more exciting than mine. Maybe you worry about the data that they hold. Me on the other hand am more worried that I'll forget to put the bins out tomorrow. And some how I feel that the "authorities" don't actually care about that soft of thing.
I thought PRISM was only used against us foreigners, and not good, law-abiding (or not) US citizens. Therefore, none of what is being discussed about robberies, local sheriffs finding local kids and whatever else does not fall into the reported remit of PRISM. Does that mean the remit is being over-reported, or perhaps the news from Apple, Microsoft et al isn't the full picture, but only shows attempts from them to just show it has nothing to do with them?
Have AT&T and Verizon said anything?
The authorities were obviously very concerned about that patient with Alzheimers, and that suicidal person to put in so many requests about them.
The amount of weasel wording around all this is intense, from all concerned. I expect soon, that some enterprising journalist will put together an index of all the conflicting statements. What we'll be left with will either be:
a) No surveillance was happening and this has all been a big misunderstanding
or
b) Everyone, including US citizens and residents have received the same treatment as foreigners and known terrorists.
The amount of bullshit overall is staggering.
I thought PRISM was only used against us foreigners, and not good, law-abiding (or not) US citizens.
Well, they have to be 51% sure that their target is foreign.
Therefore, none of what is being discussed about robberies, local sheriffs finding local kids and whatever else does not fall into the reported remit of PRISM.
Yes. Read the last paragraph in Microsoft's quote, buried at the end of the article. It explains that and why these reports being released include non-PRISM data.
Does that mean the remit is being over-reported, or perhaps the news from Apple, Microsoft et al isn't the full picture, but only shows attempts from them to just show it has nothing to do with them?
No, it means that Apple, Microsoft, et al. have released summary data about all government requests, including non-PRISM ones because they're not allowed to release even summary information about PRISM requests alone, and the news agencies, including El Reg, are (in some cases possibly un-) intentionally bigging up the scandal by being vague on that distinction (for example, by not making the distinction until the end of the article, and then only in a quote from Microsoft. Really? Who pays attention to Microsoft anymore?)
You have to parse these statements as carefully as a prosecutor who has Bill Clinton on the witness stand.
Trying to do that I these are the available facts:
*PRISM isn't the actual data collection, it's a tool used to analyze data in already collected data. The media seem to be including data collection in the term, although that's like a whole different program.
*From a US-centric perspective, it's legal for the NSA to collect data on any non-US citizen even if it is ungentlemanly.
*There is a lot of data about you that can be legally collected and included in such a database prior to The Patriot Act becoming law.
*The Patriot Act allows the NSA to examine that data to look for terrorists.
*There is a law (not sure which one, could be The Patriot Act but probably something prior to that) which prevents anyone who responds to a warrant issued by the FISMA courts from publicly discussing the warrant. This includes even how many warrants have been issued to it.
*It is legal for law enforcement, even absent The Patriot Act, to request user information if they have probable cause resulting from an ongoing investigation.
So applying that, I expect the companies issuing press releases are trying to walk a very fine line. I suspect they are releasing the total number of inquiries they receive. But they are only talking about the issues for the NON-FISMA requests because that's all they are allowed to talk about. I also expect the NSA has live taps to gather the information they are currently allowed by law to gather.
But part of the problem comes from one of those Personally Identifiable Information (PII) protection courses the government makes employees take every year: A first name of Julia is not PII. That Julia is an Eskimo is not PII. That Julia lives in Port Saint Lucy, Florida in not PII. That Julia is an accountant is not PII. But it is entirely possible that Julia is an Eskimo accountant who lives in Port Saint Lucy, Florida is PII. And the NSA has each of those non-PII pieces of information and the means to connect them. Of course, none of this is a problem if you trust the government. So do you trust the government?
the government wants the data on our customers and we definitely want to please the government, because it could - very quickly indeed - cut us off from the source of our profits (think: "legal enforcement").
At the same time, we definitely want to please ourselves, by keeping ALL the revenue from our customers, by not paying any taxes, which suddenly seems to displease the governments so much..
And, at the very same time, we want to please our customers, so that they think we "do no evil", i.e. we pay the taxes, and that we "do no evil" by keeping the data on the customers safe from the government, so that they keep trusting us and giving us more revenue, by spending on our products, and clicking on the ads and letting us gather information on them in peace, so this will, in turn, please us by continuing to provide profit.
So we've got those three bananas in the box, and we're going mental, issuing statements, denials, reassurances, inquiries and pleadings with the governments, so that we still please ourselves, the government, and the punter. But lose one....
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