
Snowden releases information about Australian Intelligence gathering programs - SomeoneWeird
http://www.theage.com.au/world/snowden-reveals-australias-links-to-us-spy-web-20130708-2plyg.html
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irollboozers
This is now getting so entirely overwhelming. It's like you're on the beach
getting repeatedly smashed by waves that get bigger and bigger. There's
nothing you can do to fight it, stop it, or move, and it just keeps coming. I
feel so helpless with every new leak.

~~~
ChrisAntaki
We can stop it, and redirect it.

Once the people start creating new laws, and getting them passed, we'll win.
Currently, politicians hand us laws that are drafted by corporations &
lobbyists, then we simply react.

It's all about us being more assertive.

~~~
jaekwon
We will win.

We already have the bill of rights. Creating new laws won't help us. It's too
late for that. Maybe repealing some laws and executive orders might help...
but what we're seeing is the symptom of something bigger than governments.

We need to see the cage and step out of it. Educating ourselves and honing our
common sense will help us. Becoming self sufficient will help us.

~~~
ChrisAntaki
There's still plenty of time to pass laws. Why would there be a time limit?

~~~
ChrisAntaki
@jaekwon

You sound frustrated, as a lot of people are these days. Is it helping to be
reactive to all of the things you mentioned? What if you instead were
proactive, and defined a new law & helped promote it?

For instance, you mentioned illegal wars. What if we created a new law, that
required a popular vote, yearly, to continue any war? That would be awesome,
right? :)

Let's write some good laws, and get them passed.

~~~
jaekwon
>> You sound frustrated, as a lot of people are these days

You're still in the denial stage. I've been there. You've got a long ways to
go. Keep reading about recent history. Next you'll get depressed...

I'm actually quite happy nowadays. Every day is a day full of purpose. I'm not
reactive, I'm proactive. I see the patterns and I know what's coming. I know
what needs to be done.

I agree with Lessig on one point and one point alone. Code is law.

Not saying we shouldn't try the traditional approach, though. Here's some good
news:

\-
[http://www.reddit.com/r/restorethefourth/comments/1htaqf/the...](http://www.reddit.com/r/restorethefourth/comments/1htaqf/there_is_an_important_senate_election_going_on/)

~~~
ChrisAntaki
>> You're still in the denial stage. I've been there. You've got a long ways
to go. Keep reading about recent history. Next you'll get depressed...

I'm sorry to hear you are dealing with depression.

>> I'm actually quite happy nowadays. Every day is a day full of purpose. I'm
not reactive, I'm proactive.

Oh, well that's good.

------
jboy
To me, much more concerning is Snowden's revelation that the British
intelligence program 'Tempora' "saves everything":

"Tempora is the first 'I save everything' approach ('full take') in the
intelligence world. It sucks in all data, no matter what it is, and which
rights are violated by it. ... Right now, the system is capable of saving
three days' worth of traffic [...]. 'Full take' means that the system saves
everything. If you send a data packet and if makes its way through the UK, we
will get it."

~~~
DanBC
To me there's something of the "if a tree falls in a forest" koan here.

"If an agency caches the data but doesn't grep the data for anything related
to me has my privacy been violated?"

I would be a lot more worried if it was a US and not a UK agency.

I would also be a lot more worried if it wasn't GCHQ, but was a police force.

There are other databases in the UK that are a lot more concerning to me. All
the stuff that supermarkets collect on people with loyalty cards[1], all the
medical databases, the misuse of criminal records bureau checking. (These last
two have real world examples of real world harm being done to individuals. But
perhaps GCHQ's doesn't because it's secret and the information is shared with
weird routes.)

[1] Many years ago some friends and I had a loyalty card for "Ivor Trots". He
only ever bought loo roll.

~~~
grey-area
_If an agency caches the data but doesn 't grep the data for anything related
to me has my privacy been violated?_

If it's stored indefinitely (as they have the ambition to do, and will soon
have the ability), it doesn't matter if it is not used today, or in the past.
What if at some point in your life you run for parliament, or your business
strikes a prominent deal with a foreign power? At that point your records can
be taken out and scrutinised by whoever has access to this data _at that point
in time_ , and you won't even know, because it's secret. Information has a
habit of spreading beyond the intended boundaries, and if it is collected in
secret, we have no way of controlling that spread or controlling its use.

 _I would be a lot more worried if it was a US and not a UK agency._

You should be worried then, because this data is routinely shared with the
NSA, seems to be collected under the remit of a joint program, and is probably
stored indefinitely by several GCHQ partners where someone is judged to be of
interest or enemy of the state/agency, the definition of which will of course
vary with the agency.

 _I would also be a lot more worried if it wasn 't GCHQ, but was a police
force._

I'd be surprised if access is not given the police on some level, given their
participation in counter-terrorism activities, and there's nothing to stop a
secret policy change giving more access, you wouldn't even know about it. So
you should be worried.

 _There are other databases in the UK that are a lot more concerning to me._

Given that those databases exist online, and are probably transmitted
regularly as backups etc as well as accessed via the internet, you can assume
that all that data is also accessible by GCHQ partners and clients. The
important difference though is that, as you point out, these databases are
public, acknowledged to exist, and controlled by our existing law. If you want
to you can challenge the use or collection of the data in a court, sometimes
you can stop using these services, or ask to see all information collected on
you, but no such options are available for information gathered and shared in
the name of security.

What I find troubling here is that the only limit on the indefinite storage of
all this material by GCHQ is technical, not legal or moral, and that limit
will soon be overcome.

~~~
jboy
> _You should be worried then, because this data is routinely shared with the
> NSA, seems to be collected under the remit of a joint program_

Exactly. Snowden says "If you send a data packet and if [sic] makes its way
through the UK, _we_ will get it."

Given that Snowden is an NSA whisteblower, who's talking here about the "Five
Eyes" intelligence alliance (U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia and New Zealand),
this suggests pretty strongly that the "we" is the NSA.

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talon88
I find the drip-feed of information a really interesting choice, though I'm
curious of its efficacy versus the wikileaks style dump.

It keeps the news alive for a longer period of time, sure, but it also means
fewer eyes are looking over it and connecting the dots between various
different pieces of the revealed information.

Wouldn't it be better if everything was revealed at once, and the various
investigative reporters out there all got to go through it independently and
write up a cohesive summation of the results, instead of this two-three page
exposé per day?

~~~
ChrisAntaki
Would Breaking Bad be as good if every episode were released at once?

~~~
nikcub
this isn't for the same reason, its because they learned from wikileaks that
the publics ability to absorb information is limited. a lot of important
issues were burried in the wikileaks' releases.

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speeder
The same O Globo article reported a list of priority targets of the NSA and
they are basically the BRIC ( interestingly the population here did not gave a
shit about knowing US spies on them) also Iran andsome other powerful
countries. North Korea,.Cuba, Venezuela or Afghanistan are not on the priority
list, making clear that the "terrorism" is just a misdirection, and that PRISM
true purpose still is.intelligence for potential.enemies.in a.conventional
war.

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lightyoruichi
This is funny, if you actually google the keyword X-Keyscore, you'll find job
opportunities that matches the criteria of intelligence gathering. And if you
look closely, you'll find out it's a company called Raytheon that's awarded
the contract to execute these works. And they have main offices in these
crucial locations, eg; Fort Meade, Australia etc. And that they do all these
kind of intelligence works.

And ironically, Raytheon's scientist was the dude who invented microwave.

Edit: Found this post from Feb 27th. About X-Keyscore,
[http://www.nowtheendbegins.com/blog/?tag=xkeyscore](http://www.nowtheendbegins.com/blog/?tag=xkeyscore)
and the interesting snippet.

What happens next looks like a 21st-century data assembly line. At the NSA’s
headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, a program called Xkeyscore processes all
intercepted electronic signals before sending them to different “production
lines” that deal with specific issues. Here, we find another array of code
names.

Pinwale is the main NSA database for recorded signals intercepts, the authors
report. Within it, there are various keyword compartments, which the NSA calls
“selectors.” Metadata (things like the “To” and “From” field on an e-mail) is
stored in a database called Marina. It generally stays there for five years.
In a database called Maui there is “finished reporting,” the transcripts and
analysis of calls. (Metadata never goes here, the authors found.)

As all this is happening, there are dozens of other NSA signals activity
lines, called SIGADS, processing data. There’s Anchory, an all-source database
for communications intelligence; Homebase, which lets NSA analysts coordinate
their searches based on priorities set by the Director of National
Intelligence; Airgap, which deals with missions that are a priority for the
Department of Defense; Wrangler, an electronic intelligence line; Tinman,
which handles air warning and surveillance; and more.

Lest you get confused by this swirl of code names and acronyms, keep this
image in mind of the NSA as a data-analysis factory. Based on my own
reporting, the agency is collecting so much information every day that without
a regimented, factory-like system, analysts would never have the chance to
look at it all. Indeed, they don’t analyze much of it. Computers handle a
chunk, but a lot of information remains stored for future analysis.

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a2d9s22
I struggle to believe that GCHQ has the ability to store 3 or even 30 days
worth of internet traffic flowing through the UK borders and also make
reasonable sense of it all. It's such a mind boggling amount of data. I looked
at some bandwidth graphs from places like LINX, which is just one of
presumably many, and they are moving around a terrabyte a second - how can you
possibly store, let alone sift through that kind of volume? 30 days at a
terrabyte a second is nearly 3,000 petabytes of data. And that's just in one
exchange. Is this kind of thing feasible? Facebook allegedly deals with 200PB
of photo data - 3000PB is a lot more than that.

~~~
femto
Three seconds of data at 1TB/s, will fit on the largest consumer hard drive
(3TB). There are 3 x 86400 seconds in a day = 259200 seconds. Therefore three
days' data requires 86400 drives. Cost of said drives is about $100 each,
meaning the cost of disks to store 3 days of data is $8.64 million, which is
negligible to the government. Even with multiple links at 1TB/s the problem is
tractable.

~~~
malandrew
Storing it really is the trivial and cheap part. There are other really hard
problems to solve:

(1) Where do you place collection points so you get a full take of not only
international traffic (moving across your borders) and domestic traffic (all
traffic within your borders but that doesn't leave your borders) (2) Since the
number of collection points is limited, that means there is a lot of data that
has to be recorded at select points. How do you record that data to disk in
real time? (3) How do you avoid the duplication of packets that travel through
multiple collection points. (4) Lastly, the most difficult problem is figuring
out how to query all that data and not end up with a haystack. When you have
millions and millions of pieces of communication from people with no
involvement in the criminal activity, then all that communication becomes
noise.

~~~
femto
1) If it's your own country's traffic, at the choke point in the network,
which you (ie. govt) have full control over, since they are domestic.

2) Since you already have 100,000 disks, run 5000 of them in parallel. Each
disk interface does 200MB/s, for an aggregate of 1TB/s. If necessary, use
fibre to transport data from the collection point to the storage point.

3) Don't. Record the lot.

4) Spend a billion on a super computer?

I think it comes down to the bandwidth of computers now vastly exceeding the
bandwidth of human thought. It is now possible to record an person's entire
life, with plenty of headroom to spare, to account for any attempt to
overwhelm the recording system.

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digitalengineer
I thought Snowden had already released everything and it was up to the media
to decide what will be released when?

~~~
nodata
Isn't that nitpicking? Snowden released some information through the Guardian.

~~~
ramblerman
Russia said it would grant him immunity under the condition there were no more
leaks. So who is responsible for this leak is certainly relevant.

That said I could imagine this is enough for Russia to make their case either
way.

~~~
toyg
I'm pretty sure Snowden has already refused asylum from Russia, he wouldn't be
stuck in an airport otherwise.

------
ForFreedom
This is... WOW..

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nwh
I thought we were clear of this shit.

~~~
ramblerman
I wonder what would cause you to say something so stupid.

When you say "this shit" do you mean the negative image the USA is gaining
from this? Why on earth would you prefer to remain in ignorant bliss about
these happenings?

~~~
bigiain
I read that not as "stupid", but (perhaps incorrectly) as a fellow Australian
finally admitting to themselves that we're fooling ourselves if we think we
can point an laugh at USA's treatment of their citizens while hiding behind
some expectation that our local government is treating us with any more
respect.

The sad thing is, our government is no better, out intelligence service is
just as amoral and unaccountable, and our civil liberty movement is
ineffectual to the point of being invisible. Perhaps "ignorant bliss" was
preferable…

~~~
robryan
Actually it is likely worse than the US, the US government spying would
generally stay US government only. Whereas ours in Australia is likely
accessible by US agencies.

~~~
bigiain
Indeed, and given the NSA's unique interpretations of some fairly commonly
understood english words (like for example "collect" and "no"), I have no
doubt that they're capable of creative legal interpretations where they can
look their elected representatives and (in theory) overseers in the eye and
say "we're not spying on US citizens" \- claiming later if caught that it's
"the least untruthful answer" \- when what they really meant was "we asked the
Australians to spy on US citizens for us, and hand over everything they found.
_We_ didn't engage in any spying."

On the plus side, while I have niggling doubts about whether GPG and
encfs/OpenSSL/AES are really secure against the NSA - I'm reasonably sure that
even if they've got practical attacks against them, they aren't likely to be
sharing even the existence of them with ASIO. I'm as close to 100% certain as
makes no difference that GPG/encfs are secure against even the most powerful
Australian government agencies (which is to say, only as secure as anything
that'd break easily with rubber hose cryptography…).

