i have not yet received any nsl todate,
i have not yet received any nsl todate, and certainly not since my last post that i have received any...
An error by the US Department of Justice's document-redaction staff has inadvertently let slip a secret that the DoJ has spent months battling in the courts to protect – albeit one that will come as a surprise to no one. The DoJ has long maintained that the practice of using National Security Letters (NSLs) to obtain …
Kind of funny watching the wind pick up on the government and the NSA's house of silent cards. Impressive they got this far with all the private contractors. Secrets are probably a lot easier to keep when you have the moral high road and the subordinates understand this. When you are hiding things just to be hiding things eventually it will fail. So much for Obama being the transparent President.
Adsf makes a very good point here.
Everyone wants to work for the good guys, you can even pretend you are the good guys and fool yourself.
With some of the stuff being hidden here, any actual real good guys will be hard pressed to feel good about what they are doing or have any real loyalty to the administration that is pushing them to ignore any moralities they may have personally.
unless it is a local area issue, but a girl i interrupted in a restaurant also cannot access google.
A guy walking out said, "i applaud google for holding out as long as they did. At&t, those bastards, they rushed to help do everything they could to help them"... Well, time will tell what is up...
You're talking about a civil servant. Prison, for those people, is forbidding access to the cappuccino machine for a day. The worse he'll get is a year's delay in the promotion schedule.
And yes, they have word search, but that's just like self-cleaning ovens - you still have to launch the procedure.
And that's hard to do if you've been banned from the cappuccino machine, man ;)
You are forgetting the need to vet all sotware and subject the developers to intrusive body searches. The whole process only takes twenty years (the contractors are paid by the hour and are in no hurry). And then some bureaucrat has to sign it off (and he's only interested in covering his backside, not in getting results, which means he won't). Explains why the FBI was till recently (still is?) on MSDOS
That is actually insufficient for properly redacting electronic documents. After you've applied the search and replace you also have to remove the data that shows you applied the search and replace. But you need to do so in a way that keeps track of the document and all of it's changes in a forensically acceptable manner in case the document(s) in question are required at court proceedings.
So if you can find a way to easily meet both requirements, you can make a fortune on government contracts.
These things were easier when all you needed was a box full of black markers and stacks of paper.
Re: Don't they have a word-search to redact documents? Really?
OK, this one is jokes-free/politically-neutral...
In the 90s, what I used to do was:
-- Edit the doc
-- Think about the mistakes ms made with doc revisions (recall the one about the doc having something to the effect of "[client] is such an idiot and a waste of our time and efforts converting them to [product name]..."
-- Copy the text to a notepad file, to hell with special formatting (mostly gimmicky anyway, and showy-offy)
-- Close the original .doc/.lwp/.wp file saving it for future edits
-- Close the word processing app
-- Reopen the app
-- Paste in the TEXT FILE's contents
-- Re-do all the textual formatting, making NO incriminating or politically embarrassing commentary updates and adding/causing NO FURTHER revisions.
-- Save that document as "SANITIZED Verson of DOC [document name]
But, with massive work flow, CRM, CMS, and similar programs, data can be far-flung, and content control might be dodgy or troublesome if online/offline backups are mid-stream. So, some sort of parallel, mini, pre-publishing platform might be needed so that publishers can be more confient that embarrassing or contract-killing revisions do not resurface. All this, of course, presumes there is no malicious or mean intent to expose the embarrassing stuff.
In the case of court docs, find-and-replace should have been sufficient, especially with and without wildcard searches on the term "Google". Simply searching on "G*g*l* should have sufficed, unless the document is compount, and edited in real-time by other contributors/editors and too many in-stream saves are actively uindermining document sanitizers. In that case, an on-screen warning to finalize all edits to enable security sanitization to take place should have led to locking the file and forcing all involved to walk to a secure room to team-read the publication-pending document.
Well, in theory...
... twas nice to have known you.
So who is going to replace the Americans, now that they're doomed to cease to exist? ... Presumably that is the inevitable result of this breach of their National Security... now that's compromised, they must surely all be about to vanish in a puff of smoke?
What's that you say? America won't cease to exist? Wall Street will continue exactly as it did before? The American people will still all be there tomorrow, doing what ever it is they do, wherever it is they do it?... No that can't be right their National Security was compromised, when some dumb fuck revealed the government had sent a letter to Google...
Isn't it about time Americans started taking those guns their constitution allows them to hold, and shooting the paranoid fuckwits who have usurped their country from them?
We will, just as soon as we determine exactly who needs to be shot. Right now we've got about 1/3 of the country who want to shoot the commies who've invaded. We've got another 1/3 who want to shoot the conservatives. And the last 1/3 wants to shoot the other two thirds. As soon as one group has attained a majority, the purge will begin.
But fair warning: you might not like the outcome when we finally do. In fact, I'm pretty sure you'll wish we'd never started.
It must pass a law saying that some things are to be kept secret...
...and then it must pass a law saying that people must not talk about the thing that is to be kept secret....
...and then it must pass a law saying that people must not talk about the fact that they have been told to keep something secret....
...............
This looks like a good job for life for the legal profession.
Interestingly, keeping very quiet about government secrets only made sense during a World War, when it was reasonable to suppose that the enemy was continually listening for every scrap of intelligence which could be gathered. And you really only needed to worry about operational military secrets in those circumstances.
I wonder what has changed in the last 70 years...?
'"I wonder what has changed in the last 70 years...?". Only the rest of the world.'
Which is the core of the problem. As long as the USA remains on a war or emergency footing, power stays with the federal government. As soon as the emergency ends, a lot of powers are supposed to devolve back to the individual states.
The USA Federal Govt has been flapping around ever since the end of WW2 trying to keep itself in a state of emergency so it can justify its 60-year long power grab. The flapping grows more desperate as it becomes less able to continue justifying the status quo.
It used to be said that only 3rd world dictatorships spent more on their military than on education. Perhaps it's still true and the USA just hasn't crashed yet.
You know how it goes. You've been redacting crap all day. You've one last doc to complete. It's over and you can head for a beer! You tell the system to shut down. That aggravating message from Word pops up and you answer honestly - forgetting that there was one last redaction you hadn't saved.