What is most disturbing is that NSA & DEA seem to have such a Cozy relationship.
Given that one is a mostly domestic agency and the other is supposed to focus primarily on Foreign Intelligence, this incestual relationship sets up many troubling opportunities for abuse.
We know the DEA manufactures cases. Michele Leonhart is another Bush cancer Obama decided to keep around. She is off the reservation and needs to be thrown into jail. The PBS documentary also mentioned the FBI does it as well.
It's called an idiom, and when interpreted literally or historically they are offensive, like "busting our balls" for example, many many of them are offensive if you put on your HR hat. That said, they are commonly used and in that context are not offensive.
1. (literally) To leave a reservation to which one was restricted.
2. (US, politics) To break with one's party or group, usually temporarily.
3. (by extension) To engage in disruptive activity outside normal bounds.
Why would this term even be seen as negative in an HN context? It sounds like every startup founder/rebellious techy would want to "go off the reservation."
The article two levels above cites that very definition, then goes on to say it's offensive because: "Removing the physical aspect of leaving from the equation, we are left with the ideological aspect that infers, historically, that Native Americans have wanted to be placed on a reservation."
If we ignore the first literal definition, which obviously doesn't apply in this case, and focus on the second and third metaphorical definitions...they seem like admirable behaviors. The original poster's comment about Michele Leonhart, using the second two definitions leads me to believe that either (2) Michele Leonhart can temporarily go across the political aisle (from Republican to Democrat), which is admirable, or (3) Michele Leonhart is disruptive, which is just what we need in Washington. Neither (2) nor (3) is what the poster meant, and they definitely didn't mean (1) unless Michele Leonhart was an Indian who literally left her reservation!
So I'm quite confused by what the intended pejorative was supposed to be.
Describing someone as being "off the reservation" means they need to turn around and go back where they belongs a.s.a.p. The expression is pejorative because it rests on the idea is that Native Americans are actually okay when they're on reservations, and likewise, that they're out of place anywhere else. In reality, reservations are more like prison camps without walls into which these people been unceremoniously dumped.
If you want a brief, brutal look at what "the reservation" really means, see this short film from Aeon called "Honor the Treaties". You'll see exactly why the casual acceptance of reservations as places where anyone "truly" belongs is so problematic.
Getting back to the expression, it should be avoided for the same reason that you'd avoid analogies to slave plantations or concentration camps that imply these institutions were benign, defensible things. It's far better to use the phrase "way out of line", which conveys the same meaning, but without the unthinking disregard for genocide, theft of land, and institutionalized deceit that underpin most reservations. For the people who live on reservations, or are connected to those who do, the term is loaded with a lot of bitterness, futility, alienation, and despair. Not to put too fine a point on it, but suicide rates among young people who grow up on reservations are double what they are anywhere else in America.
As an aside, the Navajo reservation is an interesting exception to this rule in that it encompasses the territory on which the Navajo have lived for more than 10,000 years, and not some crappy godforsaken piece of land to which they were forcibly relocated. So there's a bit more pride in that case. But a history of dismissal and segregation means there's still an unbelievable amount of poverty. As time goes by they look more and more like wounds that never heal.
> Describing someone as being "off the reservation" means they need to turn around and go back where they belongs
I didn't get that intention from the definitions found on the interwebs. Slang dictionary [1]:
> used to slam people who are thinking differently than what their group considers acceptable.
I believe what you are saying is true, its not a phrase I would use but...why do all of these dictionaries get the phrase so wrong as to mean something positive?
One of America's greater shames is the "success" with which it's managed to erase the genocidal history of westward expansion from the collective memory. Spend some time with Indians and you'll get a very different picture of the post-Colubian era. For a brief primer on what was lost, see here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Columbian_era
You can also see why having circumstances reduced to a handful of godforsaken reservations was - and remains - a profound trauma. Indeed, the fact that most people have no idea why the terms causes pain is, itself, a source of ongoing pain since is so clearly signals how thoroughly Native suffering has been airbrushed from American history.
Considering that it also connotes that the person off the reservation is completely out of his depth and liable to get swindled extremely badly, I am more than happy to agree that the starry-eyed entrepreneurs are off the reservation.
We can agree that the VCs are the white traders, then, yes? Let's talk about equity.
Says who, you? Do you think phrases that are commonly used can't be offensive? What do idioms have to do with anything anyway?
You can pretend it's the PC police, or if you want to be the kind of person who isn't insensitive towards some subcultures you could try to avoid the phrase. There are plenty of alternatives.
As a firstborn American with a German family, I am not too bothered by "Nazi", "kraut" or other terms... It all depends on context, which is poorly conveyed over text
How exactly is "off the reservation" not offensive in the way that several commonly used idioms are now considered offensive, such as "that is retarded", "that is gay", "you Jewed the price down", "I got gypped"?
>are not offensive.
Right, literally nobody takes offense to "off the reservation" because you of course don't mean Native Americans. Are you seriously saying that slightly racist terms are only ever offensive in literal contexts?
Only one of those is universally considered offensive. One is a recently-manufactured "outrage" that only the terminally-gullible actually find offensive (i.e. folks best described by exactly that adjective). I've never heard of anyone actually taking racially-based offense to the fourth one there, outside of a dumb joke on a bad sitcom 15 years ago, and even then they were faking it.
> One is a recently-manufactured "outrage" that only the terminally-gullible actually find offensive (i.e. folks best described by exactly that adjective).
I can't even tell if you're referring to "retarded" or "gay" here.
I think "gay" is offensive only because it refers to a widely recognized social reality that is still being fought out, the reality that gay people are socially inferior, and that gay bashing is a social art for men.
Take away that reality and "that's gay" becomes an idiom lost in time.
Do you live in a place with a substantial Roma population? Because every Roma person I've met finds the fourth phrase racist. The rest are pretty universally known as offensive, and there's easy substitutes, so why use something that's going to cause offense when you can make the same exact same points 100 different ways?
I'm guessing the other unnamed country is Afghanistan. It's a major drug producer which would justify DEA's involvement but also has general terrorism/national security concerns for the NSA's own interest. The word length also is a good match for the blacked-out area.
The unknown country is blacked out in two locations. Carefully measuring the length of "Bahamas" vs. the redacted word, I found that the missing word is 1.28x longer than "Bahamas" in one case and 1.29x longer in the other. (Note that the correct way to do this is not to measure the black box, but to measure the gap and subtract off an estimate for leading and/or trailing whitespace.)
Then putting the list of 206 sovereign states from Wikipedia in Times Roman (which seems to match the font used), and finding countries that are 1.28 to 1.29 times longer than "Bahamas", I get the following list of countries:
Bangladesh
Cape Verde
Kazakhstan
Kyrgyzstan
Madagascar
Montenegro
San Marino
Somaliland
Afghanistan
El Salvador
Ivory Coast
Philippines
Saint Lucia
Switzerland
Transnistria
Looking over that list, I'd say that Afghanistan, El Salvador, and Ivory Coast, are likely candidates because of US geopolitical interest and likely cooperation of the country with the American DEA.
For example, although the US might be very interested in Bangladesh and Kazakhstan, I think it's unlikely that those countries would permit the DEA to tap their phone or cellular network even for drug interdiction.
We can also rule out the Philippines because it was already separately mentioned when talking about the redacted country: "targeted communications in the Caribbean, Mexico, Kenya, the Philippines, and the unnamed country."
You can strike all two-word countries from that list because the word was long enough to wrap and it had a good amount of space on the prior line. Switzerland would be another interesting one, given the amount of financial activity there but I'm not sure what business DEA would have to make it a priority.
The Bahamas and Switzerland both have a large number of off shore bank accounts. So there are more parrallels between them than between the Bahamas and Afgahnistan. It could also explain why the name is not being disclosed as the uproar in Switzerland would be huge.
But it would be kind of ironic to have bank secrecy, but then let the NSA listen in to your citizens phone conversations.
The communication protocols war raged in Europe from 1983 to 1992. Most governments opposed internet technology, backing instead nascent ISO networking standards. CERN’s decision to migrate to internet was heavily criticized by TCP/IP opponents.
In Geneva, the very first meeting of the Coordinating Committee for Intercontinental Research Network (CCIRN) was in May 1988. This committee was the first attempt to harmonize the inter-regional operation of the emerging world-wide research network.
The second meeting took place in October 1988 at a summer resort in Western Virginia, sad and grey this particular autumn. The Americans turned up in force. Bill Bostwick, from the Department of Energy was the Chairman, Barry Leiner from the Department of Defense and Vint Cerf were present. The European representatives were thin on the ground: a German and British representative plus Francois Flückiger.
In 1991, 80% of the internet capacity in Europe for international traffic was installed at CERN, in building 513.
From 1985 to 1988, as CERN's first official "TCP/IP Co-ordinator", Segal was responsible for coordinating the introduction of the Internet protocols within CERN.
This router was one of two installed at CERN in 1987; they are thought to have been the first Cisco routers in Switzerland and possibly the first in Europe.
Maybe, but Switzerland is a very small country and it's not even part of the EU, which makes it easier for the US gov't to do whatever they want in that country. So, while they would be outraged, they wouldn't be able to do anything about it.
Look at Austria which is very similar to Switzerland in many aspects: They already know that they're 100% under US surveillance and no changes are planned whatsoever (plus, they're even a EU member state).
In this case, I think it is the news agency that is doing the redacting, not the government. The article says, "one other country, which The Intercept is not naming in response to specific, credible concerns that doing so could lead to increased violence".
Well, it's still pretty effective when they black out 3/4 of a document, which we sometimes see. And even in this case, though we might know the country, we can't quote the source on it.
Translation:
As part of "Mystic" apparently the NSA monitored not only
all communications in Iraq, but also in Austria. The
basis for this was a secret treaty, by which the
government knew about it, writes an Austrian magazine.
[...]
I was thinking the same thing. Figure out the scalability issues, work on performance, and of course anti-detection. Then roll it out somewhere more sophisticated.
i will just say that if you're in the business of smuggling drugs and are dumb enough not to use secure communication channels, you deserve to be caught.
keeping that in mind, the only ones who end up in the dragnet are small-time stupid smugglers and your average innocent citizen. the value of the former at the expense of the latter is likely inconsequential.
Back in the day with the Nextel phones and service the two way walkie talkie bit use to be impossible to monitor. The FBI made them basically break the security on it. Then right inside their data center they had a rack of their equipment. For engineers there was no drama in listening in to any phone call (press a button basically). Now that all this has come out, I would not be the least bit surprised if the FBI just pressed that button without a warrant. They definitely didn't need physical access.
Interesting point that the NSA spends billions of dollars, if not trillions of dollars, along with some of the most sophisticated technology on the planet to catch b-level smugglers and criminals.
Quite often NSA spends billions because it already spends billions.
Contractors, infrastructure, PR, salaries, promotions, training. That has been put into place.
Well it was there to spy on the Soviets. Then it was kind of sitting there waiting for a problem. And the problem was found. Terrorism. Drugs. Could be something else tomorrow. As long as Joe Smith in SIGINT department 15 gets his salary paid, he doesn't care. As long as L3 or whoever gets to build another data center they don't care. They will all collectively find some reason to justify it, but underneath, quite often is just making more money keeping busy.
They made the mistake though (mistake from their point of view), that one of the characteristics they look for in people they hire is patriotism. That can very very dangerous if eventually those people are forced to do un-patriotic things (or things they can't brainwash them into thinking they are patriotic). You end up with Binney and Snowden then.
Usually not. They jump from gov to private and back.
This happens with other agencies as well. FDA is full of future and past heads from agro-businesses and pharma companies. FCC is full of people from cable and satellite companies and so on.
This is capitalism at work. Achieve success by whatever means possible. The easiest means is the get in the position to re-write rules and police yourself.
Some people conflate blind faith and patriotism. I am pretty sure that what they really wanted was the former.
All organisms want to survive (political, economic, etc). Now if the NSA could just deem cancer a threat to the national security of the country then they could put their super computer power to good use.
I'm interested in the technology they use for this -- record on-site, requiring someone in the country maintain a pretty decent hard disk farm, or send every call back to the US over expensive bandwidth?
For the Bahamas, you could clearly do either, but for the Philippines, sending back all content would be seriously difficult. Which is why it looks like they just do metadata from the bigger countries.
For the unnamed full-data country, I'd probably bet on the Caymans. Antigua or another small Caribbean nation would be a possibility.
I assume there is another entire program for actual jihadi communications (Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan, Yemen, etc.) under different cover and pretense; the other countries in MYSTIC appear to be DEA LI based.
The population of the Bahamas is only ~400k. Lets say everyone talked to each other for 2 hrs a day, 200K * 2hrs. And their conversations are recorded using Opus [0] @ 32 kbits / s (we don't want analysts ears getting tired from compression artifacts)
32kbits is 4KB/s ~ .24 MB/minute ... turns out to be on the order of 6TB a day on the high end.
This 9U server can hold all of the Bahamas voice traffic for 30 days.
45 drives * 6TB drives = 270TB of storage in one chassis (more than a month's worth of recordings). How much does it cost to get a whole rack colo'd in the Bahamas?
As you mentioned, if you have the horsepower, you can do speech to text right on the box. Plenty of space for ElasticSearch as well.
Using the USS Jimmy Carter, you'd have to believe there is a web of undersea cables they have laid to backhaul from where-ever they'd like.
To think that the NSA is wholly reliant on already laid carrier cable is naive.
It would be interesting to speculate on the method by which they lay their cables to protect them from detection.... meaning, do they now have means to bury the cables as opposed to surface-lay.
Is anyone else curious on what data setup the NSA is using? Do they have some crazy non relational ZFS setup that makes Hadoop seem like a kid's toy? Or is it just a bunch of off the shelf enterprise SQL servers duct taped together?
I think they are the cutting edge of this sort of thing. Think about military tech that we now use in everyday life, lots of innovations come from military applications. Think about memory foam and NASA.
Think about it they have more money to spend than anyone; corporation or government.
"The documents don’t spell out how the NSA has been able to tap the phone calls of an entire country. But one memo indicates that SOMALGET data is covertly acquired under the auspices of “lawful intercepts” made through Drug Enforcement Administration “accesses”– legal wiretaps of foreign phone networks that the DEA requests as part of international law enforcement cooperation."
"lawful intercepts." As opposed to what the NSA does with them later.
Hopefully the Bahamas won't indict anyone from the NSA, as we just did with China. /s
Today's revelation is that the NSA records and stores 100% of the phone calls made in the Bahamas.
The Post's revelation was that the NSA records and stores 100% of the phone calls made in an unnamed country.
These two countries are distinct. Read the actual article we're discussing.
I'll quote:
> In March, The Washington Post revealed that the NSA had developed the capability to record and store an entire nation’s phone traffic for 30 days.
(...)
> The Intercept has confirmed that as of 2013, the NSA was actively using MYSTIC to gather cell-phone metadata in five countries, and was intercepting voice data in two of them. Documents show that the NSA has been generating intelligence reports from MYSTIC surveillance in the Bahamas, Mexico, Kenya, the Philippines, and one other country, which The Intercept is not naming in response to specific, credible concerns that doing so could lead to increased violence.
However, it's being done from within the DEA - and actually erodes the DEA's long-term powers. Likely, governments will no longer allow DEA involvement if they know it now comes with the 'full-take' capabilities of the American NSA.
And so with the lawful directives of the FBI. And so with the CIA. Etc. etc.
Is it the NSA's job to record every single phone call made in every foreign country? Is that what you're saying? I can't call my mother without my conversation being stored?
It's all stored, but don't worry, they won't access it.
Unless either of you have had any contact with any non-U.S. citizen potentially under scrutiny, or had any contact with anyone who may have had any contact with a non-U.S. citizen under scrutiny.
This is the new law, the old law allowed three hops (so append "or had any contact with anyone who had any contact with anyone who had any contact with a non-U.S. citizen who may be under scrutiny")
edit: Unless your or your mother are non-U.S. citizens who may be under scrutiny yourselves, in which case they may have listened to you and your mother on the phone. But if you've got nothing to hide, what are you worried about?
In a recent interview with Democracy Now[1] Greenwald talked about the status of his relationship with the Guardian at the time he went to Hong Kong to meet Snowden, and it made me view his move to create The Intercept in a very different light. Here's a quote:
"I had only worked with them for eight months. My deal with The Guardian was I write whatever I want, and I post it directly to the Internet, and you don’t interfere in any way in what I’m writing. So I had barely worked with any Guardian editors at all, let alone on a story of this size."
Here's a quote from a recent interview he gave to the Guardian:
> The move [to create his own journalistic enterprise] was audacious and bold, but when I raise it with him he's in a surprisingly reflective mood. He's had some feelings, if not of regret, then perhaps of a little guilt at having left the Guardian at a time when the NSA disclosures were still blazing. "I don't want to say betrayal, that's too strong, but a lack of loyalty ..."
That's beside the point though. What matters are the disclosures. Not who makes them and not the newspaper where they appear. The disclosures are all that matter.
Not only that, The Intercept (or actually, First Look Media) has hoovered quite a lot of high-grade journalists.
I'm slightly miffed because they got Matt Taibbi to leave Rolling Stone.[1] And I'm still waiting for his first piece with FLM. Man must be wading neck-deep in documents and politics to keep him from writing.
Exactly, which is why someone should ask the question, "Why would that represent audio recording?" Is the NSA still fumbling with fishing the tape through the spindles to record all our phone calls?
They should have just depicted an analyst sitting there with headphones and a pencil (with manual sharpener on desk) writing furiously.
I guess the intended audience for this article is all 50y.o.+ and/or people who have worked in some recording facility's store room 10 years ago.
Given that one is a mostly domestic agency and the other is supposed to focus primarily on Foreign Intelligence, this incestual relationship sets up many troubling opportunities for abuse.
Absolutely needs to be stopped.