
Stellar Wind (code name) - bascule
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_Wind_(code_name)
======
JPKab
My brother worked for years in the intelligence community. One of the common
stereotypes within the IC regards the fact that Mormons are heavily
overrepresented, for various reasons that involve foreign language skills from
mission trips, a reputation for respecting authority, abstinence from
drugs/alcohol, family connections, ease of gaining security clearances, etc.
The stereotype in the IC regarding Mormons is they never "question." The
dozens of friends I have that work in the IC say that the stereotype is
accurate.

Source: [http://www.businessinsider.com/11-surprising-things-you-
didn...](http://www.businessinsider.com/11-surprising-things-you-didnt-know-
about-mormons-2011-6?op=1)

" The apparent incorruptibility of Mormons' moral righteousness make them
ideal candidates for the nation's law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

Mormons are disproportionately represented in the CIA. A recruiter told the
Salt Lake Tribune that returned Mormon missionaries are valued for their
foreign language skills, abstinence from drugs and alcohol, and respect for
authority "

I wonder if this has bearings on constructing the new data center in Utah?

~~~
rollo_tommasi
It also has a bearing on the sorry state of U.S. human intelligence, since
Mormons make terrible interlocutors with foreign informants.

~~~
TallGuyShort
Their language training software for missionaries is the envy of many a
diplomatic agency, let me tell you.

~~~
kriro
Any further information on this? That's an interesting comment and I'm curious
now. Maybe I'll talk to them next time they knock on my door :)

~~~
TallGuyShort
Well then full-disclosure, I'm a Mormon, I served the usual 2-year mission
speaking Spanish, and I used to work on said software :)

The church operates Missionary Training Centers with the main one in Provo, UT
and other smaller centers distributed around the world. When somebody starts
their mission they go there for a few weeks for a crash course in how to teach
religious priniciples, the policies for missionaries, etc. A lot of
missionaries are assigned to foreign countries or even language-specific
assignments in the US. Those missionaries stay for 2-3 months to learn the
language. It tries to be a fairly immersive program, taught by native speakers
of the language and former missionaries, and has a fairly significant software
component to it as well. I don't know specifics first-hand, but it was widely
spoken about that groups in governments, etc... would visit to learn more
about why the program was so effective in so little time. I don't think it's
entirely the software, it's a pretty good program all-around - but it's
certainly nothing to dismiss.

edit: The main website is <http://www.mtc.byu.edu>, but as language learning
consulting is hardly their main goal, I doubt you'll find much more of an
answer to your question there.

------
voxmatt
I'm glad someone posted this. My immediate thought after reading the breaking
news about the massive phone surveillance was, "wait, did people not think
this was happening?" I'm really not a conspiracy nut, but that Wired article
and the NYTimes reporting made it pretty clear that the Gov't is pretty much
collecting everything they can get their hands on.

Glad to finally see some outrage though.

Legitimate question: what's new about what is breaking in the news right now?
Merely confirmation that the NSA is conducting indiscriminate phone-taps?

~~~
addflip
Legitimate question: what's new about what is breaking in the news right now?

Exactly! I was wondering the same thing.

~~~
knowtheory
The Guardian posted the FISA court order up on DocumentCloud. Check it out:
[http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2013/jun/06/veri...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2013/jun/06/verizon-
telephone-data-court-order)

------
TallGuyShort
>> "According to Mueller, approximately 99 percent of the cases led nowhere,
but "it's that other 1% that we've got to be concerned about""

No, it's the 99% of cases that were completely unwarranted in the first place
that we've _actually_ got to be concerned about.

------
brown9-2
It's useful when discussing this topic to break the word "spy" down into more
discrete terms to understand exactly what we are discussing.

I found this article to be useful in differentiating the various terms:

 _On its face, the document suggests that the U.S. government regularly
collects and stores all domestic telephone records. I use the caveat because
there are several ways to interpret it, assuming it is real. (It looks real.)

A few definitions: to "collect" means to gather and store; to "analyze" means
that a computer or human actually does something with the records; to
"intercept" means that a computer or human actually listens to or records
calls.

... The NSA, under the FISA Amendments Act, is able to analyze metadata, like
incoming and outgoing call records, so long as the Attorney General certifies
that a particular set of information is useful for reasons of national
security. Then, the NSA asks the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to
order that a company comply. As that bill was being ironed out, this step was
requested by private companies because they wanted protection from lawsuits in
case innocents — or millions of innocents — found that the NSA had gathered
their call information.

My own understanding is that the NSA routinely collects millions of domestic-
to-domestic phone records. It does not do anything with them unless there is a
need to search through them for lawful purposes. That is, an analyst at the
NSA cannot legally simply perform random searches through the stored data. He
or she needs to have a reason, usually some intelligence tip. That would allow
him or her to segregate the part of the data that's necessary to analyze, and
proceed from there.

In a way, it makes sense for the NSA to collect all telephone records because
it can't know in advance what sections or slices it might need in the future.
It does not follow that simply because the NSA collects data that it is legal
for the NSA to use the data for foreign intelligence or counter-terrorism
analysis._

[http://theweek.com/article/index/245228/the-fbi-collects-
all...](http://theweek.com/article/index/245228/the-fbi-collects-all-
telephone-records)

This is written specifically about the telephone call metadata, but being able
to differentiate exactly what is collected about Internet traffic would also
aid this discussion. Unfortunately this would only be possible if the
government was more transparent about what is being collected.

~~~
bascule
We know exactly what's being collected: all the Internet traffic they can get
their hands on. They have installed beam splitters on Internet backbones at
facilities around the country:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A>

And are funneling all of the traffic to a datacenter in Utah with "yottabyte"
scale capacity, with the goal of having enough capacity to archive the data
for 100 years:

[http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/al...](http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/1)

The NSA whistleblower who disclosed the project to the public was the person
who wrote the backend of the system, which was originally designed for foreign
data collection only. The NSA later repurposed the system for domestic data
collection too. The goal, according to him, is to build models of every single
person in the country, model the social graph, and be able to classify people
as potential threats.

~~~
jauer
The mythos of Room 641A is troubling as it relies on the idea that spying at
10 or 20 such sites across a handful of providers actually sees enough
internet traffic to build a useful picture of US internet activities.

AT&T is just one of ~15 Tier 1 providers, never mind large number of tier 2
providers that carry the majority of internet traffic. There would need to be
1-10 such rooms in every NFL city and metro area in the US to do that owing to
peering (public & private) and regional traffic. IMO that's simply too big of
a undertaking to happen in secrecy.

Far more likely that it happened to be a handy place to watch traffic from
transpacific cables or non-US IP traffic from non-US Tier 1. Actually, going
by 10-20 sites I'd put my money on spying on non-US Tier 1 provider traffic.

~~~
bascule
Your expert analysis flies directly in the face of the testimony of former NSA
analyst turned whistleblower William Binney. Given he wrote the software that
underlies Stellar Wind, I'm going to go with his assessment of the situation.

His claim is that Stellar Wind was originally designed specifically for
foreign intelligence gathering, then repurposed by the NSA to do domestic
spying. Domestic spying was his motivation for leaving the NSA and becoming a
whistleblower in the first place.

~~~
jauer
Binney wrote worked on ThinThread which was a competitor to Trailblazer which
is reportedly the software behind Stellar Wind. None of the public information
that I've seen says he had any role in the deployment of Trailblazer.

The fact that a program has the capability to process certain information does
not have any bering on whether or not the information is actually capable of
being collected and delivered to the program.

I guess it depends on how broadly one defines "all the Internet traffic they
can get their hands on". I'm saying they can't get their hands on that much,
and what they can, based on the reported locations of other intercept rooms,
could be legitimately foreign traffic at points where foreign providers peer.

So far as tapping any significant portion of US internet traffic goes, a large
portion of the entities on this list: ftp://ftp.arin.net/info/asn.txt would
have to be in on it.

~~~
bascule
You claimed:

    
    
      Actually, going by 10-20 sites I'd put my money on spying
      on non-US Tier 1 provider traffic.
    

If you really believe that, why do you think Binney risked his entire
livelihood to reveal what he believed to be a domestic spying program?

~~~
jauer
I don't need to think anything about Binney's motives to reason about the
possible scope of surveillance on IP traffic.

Based on what you'd have to do to capture foreign traffic as opposed to US
traffic it makes sense that the Room 641A sites are intended to capture
foreign traffic. All the public information supports this. There isn't any
public disclosure of the type of infrastructure needed to comprehensively
monitor US IP traffic.

If they are trying to capture foreign IP traffic there would need to be a
intercept device where the foreign network interconnects with the US networks
and where cables land. Large foreign providers tend to have 20 or fewer IP
POPs in the US clustered in the same places. Look at networks maps from Tata,
ReTN, NTT, etc. You will see many of the same locations. To tap them you'd put
a intercept site in Seattle, Bay Area, Chicago, Miami, New York, and Virginia.
Maybe Atlanta & Texas.

By the nature of the internet US traffic would get caught in that. E.g. ReTN
had too much inbound traffic so they sold a college in Chicago some cheap
outbound traffic. Now ReTN loses a router and their peering goes down so the
bits to that college get hauled out to Europe and back. Bits just got
captured. ThinThread (Binney's program) reportedly accounted for that and
would mask US person PII pending a court order to decrypt it.

The fact that Trailblazer doesn't mask PII is a issue, but both programs would
have captured US person PII, the difference is the addition of a bureaucratic
hoop that the current and past administration would order jumped in a
heartbeat. It isn't like ThinThread required a FISA Judge to walk over with a
crypto token and descramble the data.

The nature of the problem means some US traffic will be caught but that does
not make it a domestic spying program.

Unlike many other countries with a domestic internet surveillance regime
(Syria, Egypt, Iran just to name a few) the US does not mandate that traffic
pass through the national carrier or otherwise limit connections within its
borders. Syria can drop in a few Blue Coat boxes and catch everything. In the
US you'd need thousands, if not tens of thousands of intercept devices -- one
or more for every edge in the graph of ASs
([http://www.caida.org/research/topology/as_core_network/](http://www.caida.org/research/topology/as_core_network/)).
It is not a insurmountable problem but it would take a act of Congress (likely
challenged to the Supreme Court) and the cooperation of a lot of people to
implement. It would not happen overnight or in secret.

Now, US providers are required to support CALEA but that is targeted at
individual subscribers and most manufacturer implementations aren't suited to
wholesale spying.

This isn't to say 641A sites couldn't work in hand with CALEA, just that it
would be a bit more legit than "omg nsa taps all the wires". E.g. 641A could
be watching traffic to/from a Jihadi site hosted in France without a court
order under the Protect America Act of 2007. NSA notes someone from a US IP
has been posting things that indicate radicalization. NSA passes it to FBI to
check out. FBI gets a court order for a CALEA tap for the US IP. FBI sends
order for tap to ISP. No wholesale tapping of US traffic is necessary. Of
course in this example watching anything to/from the US without a FISA order
is likely not kosher prior to PAA hence the warrantless surveillance
controversy.

When fearmongering over home-grown lone wolf terrorism get louder, that's when
the real trouble starts (except they probably have all the info needed for
that over the counter from TransUnion etc).

~~~
bascule
So I'm confused: are you accusing William Binney of lying, or do you just
think he doesn't understand Stellar Wind as well as you do? To reiterate:
William Binney's allegations are that the NSA had the opportunity to intercept
(and I mean in the Webster's sense, not the USSID 18 sense) only foreign
traffic by putting these taps specifically on fiber entering the country, but
they elected to spy on domestic traffic anyway.

And what are your credentials, exactly? Did you work for the NSA? Is there
some reason I should believe you over an NSA whistleblower? As far as I can
tell you're just guessing, and your guesses disagree with someone with insider
knowledge.

~~~
jauer
I'm doing neither. I'm saying that nothing Binney has said or that has been
leaked thus far shows evidence of a program that is designed to
comprehensively intercept internet traffic between US persons and that doing
so covertly is technically and politically impossible because of the number of
intercept points required, not because they lack the software (we know it
exists via Binney), or have a place to store it (they do-in Utah).

Putting taps on undersea cables is risky. Cables are closely monitored and
quite frequently are owned by multi-country consortiums so if you don't want a
party to the consortium to find out you might not want to stick a tap in the
landing station. Also, you might only care about public IP traffic and not
want to see piles of corporate MPLS traffic. I'm not saying that's what
happened, just that there are valid reasons why tapping fiber coming into the
country wouldn't be desirable.

It is entirely possible that you are claiming a "there exists" and I'm arguing
against a "for every". I'm sure we both agree that there exists a NSA program
that happens to intercept some US traffic. That's what Binney and others have
claimed. I'm arguing that going beyond that isn't supported by the leaks OR
the nature of the internet.

I run operations at small regional Tier 2 ISP/transport provider with 25
provider edges on that AS graph that I mentioned before. I've personally
installed, repaired, or inspected all cable and gear that 12 of those links
traverse end to end and there weren't any secret spy boxes. So, no, I'm not
just guessing. I can guarantee that quite a few people aren't having their
bits snarfed wholesale when they email (local ISP mail to school mail), post
on locally hosted community forums, or reserve a book at their local library.

My network may be too small to matter, but any comprehensive intercept regime
would require myself and every other Tier 2 (transit + unpaid peering) ISP to
cooperate.

------
alexvr
Does anyone know how they do this, technically, and to what extent? Does
Google just feed them billions of emails, or what? Do they type my name into a
form on Amazon.com to get SSH access my EC2 server? And how the hell do they
see my finances? Do all of those terms of service agreements say, "By the way,
we give your private information to the government without question" ???

At first I thought it didn't matter that they can see what I do, because if I
store a movie of my underground lair with nukes and a few F-22s in Google
Drive, they can't use the evidence against me in court unless they get a
warrant. But let's be real: if you've got a movie of yourself shooting some
guy in the face in Google Drive, they're going to find a way to get that
warrant before you delete the movie. And they'll have a copy of it to show the
judge. You don't even know they've seen your not-so-secret stuff. The fact
that they do this in a clandestine manner effectively makes it
unconstitutional since the warrant protection is easy for them to circumvent.

~~~
lolcraft
The CIA doesn't ask for judicial warrants, and doesn't have to. Extrajudicial
murder is legal.

Al-Awlaki was murdered on _suspicion_ that there was an imminent threat to US
persons. No warrant obtained. Al-Awlaki's son was murdered, again without
warrant, because of complicated reasons that boil down to his last name being
Awlaki.

Any of those videos by themselves would be enough for you to be included on
the kill list, and executed. No court would have to be involved. You could
also be executed by mistake, like Awlaki's son, or many Yemeni children that
were so. Or being kidnapped in Italy by CIA agents into a plane, and
imprisoned without trial. Or you could be an Al-Jazeera journalist, being
arrested by the Pakistani army, then imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay for six
years without any crime charged against you, like Sami al-Hajj. It's all fair
game.

Oh, don't forget that you could lose your job as a politician because you
hired a prostitute, and the Mormon CIA doesn't like that. Definitely fair.

~~~
anonymous
So it's like the KGB, but worse (the KGB didn't kill careers because you had
sex). Living in a country from the former communist bloc, I can tell you what
the endgame looks like. It looks like 60% of the population willingly
collaborating with the security service and writing reports for them. If I
were American, the first thing I'd do is convert to mormonism.

------
B-Con
It is interesting what the media and public choose to be concerned by. 15
years ago I would've guessed that this sort of wide-spread operation would
never have been tolerated by either. Post 9/11, it was surely scandalous when
ATT got caught providing taps, but honestly, it didn't seem that anyone cared
_that_ much. Not enough to put strong pressure on the government to, you know,
stop. At this point, I'm convinced that almost nobody actually cares. (I'm
talking about practical concern, not just a vague sense of "I don't approve".)

Interestingly, this has roughly coincided with the growth of cloud services.
When using a cloud service, there is some level of conscious acceptance that
someone else is processing your data and can see what you're doing, and you're
more-or-less OK with it. I wouldn't have guessed that people would be so eager
to use cloud services whole-sale.

I think that at this point, people tend to assume that anything that leaves
their computer will/can be inspected, and for the large part they're OK with
it.

~~~
nsxwolf
I don't know what could possibly done. If the legislature or courts got
involved and told the NSA to stop, they'd just say "Ok, sure" and then
continue on in secret.

~~~
sfx
They could cut their funding and/or use the data center for parts. That data
center alone costs billions to build, it makes me uneasy knowing my tax
dollars goes to abuses of power like this.

------
WestCoastJustin
There is a interesting talk on youtube [1] by William Binney (a former U.S.
intelligence official turn whistle blower) [2], where he talks about the tech
behind ThinThread [3]. He describes how ThinThread uses Latent semantic
indexing [4] to pull together all this metadata into a type of fingerprint.
There are various reports (see google) that Stellar Wind was based on a
component of the ThinThread capability or that Stellar Wind was an off shoot
of ThinThread.

[1] <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxnp2Sz59p8>

[2]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Binney_%28U.S._intellig...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Binney_%28U.S._intelligence_official%29)

[3] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThinThread>

[4] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_semantic_indexing>

~~~
epoxyhockey
Note that Binney resigned on October 31, 2001. While he may have been privy to
planned initiatives, his knowledge is now 12 years old. We don't know what new
tech has been developed since then.

------
kunai
What is _truly_ a scary thought is if the vast, mindless mass of people easily
swayed by consumerism, advertisement and buzz, talk about this for about two
weeks and then forget the whole thing, screaming "We have NOTHING to hide!" as
a logically flawed and incredibly poor excuse.

The entire premise that democracy would work is flawed. Take Turkey. A
ravaged, torn, depressed state, brought back to life by a fucking _dictator_ ,
Kemal Ataturk. And now? Riots and revolution are taking place on the streets
of Istanbul.

I'm not saying dictatorship is the best idea, but a good, conservatively Green
or Green Libertarian government is the only path to resolution. But since the
United States mass public is uneducated and apathetic (unlike how it used to
be 300 years ago, and also markedly unlike quite a few in Europe who _actually
give a fuck_ about their rights), don't expect it to happen any time soon.

And for those who think this is elitism:

    
    
      We are not now that strength which in old days
      Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are,
      One equal temper of heroic hearts,
      Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
      To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. 
    
      - Tennyson

~~~
rayiner
> What is truly a scary thought is if the vast, mindless mass of people...

This is why privacy advocates (and libertarians more generally), can't get
more popular traction: the incredibly derisive and arrogant tone with which
they address their fellow citizens, and their flippant, dismissive attitude
towards democracy.

Why should I listen to the opinions of someone who calls my parents, most of
my friends, my in-laws, my wife, etc, "mindless"? Just because they have
different priorities and care about different issues, or (gasp!) have
different ideas about the appropriate boundaries of police surveillance?

~~~
kunai
Mindless with respect to political issues, is quite appropriate, I think. When
my mom or my dad or my grandma says, "I have nothing to hide" (and they do,
whenever I call them about some privacy concern), my respect for them with
regards to political issues, drastically drops. Perhaps "mindless" is harsh,
but they certainly aren't being insightful or politically educated.

I'm not trying to launch ad hominem attacks on you or your relatives. I'm
trying to get people to wake up.

~~~
rayiner
My parents are extremely politically educated, as is my wife. My dad has
traveled the world extensively (80+ different countries) and seen nearly every
kind of government under the sun. He was very involved politically when
Bangladesh was seeking its independence. My wife, for her part, lived in east
Germany after high school and observed the political situation in a city where
many people still remembered life under communist rule. Yet, none of them care
about your pet issue.

Fact is not everyone sees life in terms of slippery slope fallacies. The
status quo is really pretty good, and it's perfectly rational to think there
are more pressing political concerns than the NSA knowing how often you call
your mom. My dad has his pet issue (he's anti-war), and my wife has her's
(she's an adherent feminist). People aren't mindless or irrational because
they don't share your political beliefs or your priorities with respect to
political issues.

~~~
brymaster
> Yet, none of them care about your pet issue.

Actual former East Germans still remember the Stasi and Germany itself has
fought for privacy (see Germany v. Facebook).

------
willholloway
Inevitably complete electronic surveillance of communications will be used for
insider trading, implicating enemies/competitors in crimes, and suppression of
journalists and politically unfavorable activists.

Giant corporations competing for market share need to consider the operational
security implications of bribable government employees having access to their
trade secrets and strategies.

The recent case of the NYC cop that was planning on kidnapping and eating
women would be chilling enough, but becomes even more horrifying when you
learn that he was using law enforcement databases to stalk potential victims.

No human or group of humans can be trusted with total information awareness.

~~~
finnh
Exactly. Just look at the Spitzer thing - outed for political reasons based on
data collected "because of the terrorists".

And do those who say "if you've got nothing to hide, it's not a problem," I
ask the classic question: "so, why do you own curtains?"

------
hanifvirani
The worst thing is that people will talk about all this for a few days and
then go back to living their lives. I hope I am wrong though.

------
ck2
On December 15th 2005, Barack Obama viciously denounced this and the Patriot
Act.

Which he now supports in the fullest.

~~~
jbooth
Yeah, he deserves some big hypocrisy points on that.

But where are the Republicans on this issue? After what feels like about 300
years of them calling Obama a fascist who's trying to turn America into the
USSR every day, what do we hear from them when soviet-type stuff actually
happens on his watch? Nothing. They're too busy with Benghazi and other non-
scandals.

~~~
anigbrowl
Who do you think put the Patriot act into place to begin with? At the time the
GOP not only held the White House, but both houses of Congress. Among the
first things they did on obtaining legislative control in late 1994 was start
work on rewriting immigration law - resulting legislation so draconian that
experienced criminal lawyers are often floored by its provisions when they
have occasion to study it.

For example, an alien with a criminal record who is unable to prove their
right to be present in the US on the spot can be detained incommunicado for
_six months_ before being entitled to any kind of hearing. This is a step
forward; until a few months ago, the government was able to detain said alien
_indefinitely_ :
[http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=9721558833419753...](http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=972155883341975337&hl=en&as_sdt=2&as_vis=1&oi=scholarr)

Bear in mind that the President is sworn to uphold the laws as they are, even
when he disagrees with them; his powers are far more circumscribed by Congress
than most people appreciate, viz. Obama's oft-repeated desire to close
Guantanamo, which has gone nowhere because Congress won't authorize funds for
setting up detention facilities on the mainland. It's not so much the case
that Obama wants to know who you were calling last Tuesday as that he's
supposed to maximize the government's _legislated_ powers to defend the US
from attack. If he ordered the NSA to suspend this sort of intelligence-
gathering and subsequently a terrorist attack took place that could supposedly
have been prevented, he'd be impeached. The whole Benghazi thing is arguably
an effort to build momentum for impeachment, IMHO - if the GOP gained
supermajority control of the Senate the current House would draft articles of
impeachment in a heartbeat.

------
Swizec
Sometimes I wonder what I'd have to write online to get a knock on the door.

Then I remember I still want to visit the US some time. It pretty much kills
all the best ideas.

~~~
roc
Last we had a news story, the bar was as low as:

"Free this week, for quick gossip/prep before I go and destroy America?"

------
Casseres
Stuff like this does not surprise me. Well, actually it does. It makes me
question my assumption that the U.S. government has been doing stuff like this
all along. If this leak is legitimate, then one can reason that the NSA didn't
just acquire all of this data by itself in the past, but that they asked
permission for it in the present.

------
js2
M-x spook

[http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Mai...](http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Mail-
Amusements.html)

------
chm
I've always wondered, as a Canadian whose communications are most assuredly
intercepted by the US gov., why such spying is not considered an act of war?

If I go to the US and "physically" spy, I'll get prosecuted, won't I?

 _To be clear: I don't want to go to war._

~~~
bgilroy26
You're right, with one big caveat.

All international slights are weighed against the cost of losing the offending
country as a trade partner. This is how most peace is maintained these days.

~~~
Pxtl
I assume this is how China can functionally be running an active and violent
war of hacking with no repercussions.

~~~
X-Istence
As if the US doesn't do the same thing ...

------
jackcviers3
All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. --
Edmund Burke

"The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a
superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law,
provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him." -- Nuremberg Principle
IV

Those that perform traitorous deeds to prevent traitorous deeds are traitors
to their nation and themselves. -- Me

------
caycep
The whole "pizza case" phenomenon is hilarious. ironic but hilarious.

I'm sure there are tons of ethical implications, and the NSA has its share of
shady activities, but part of it seems to be akin to that final scene in
Raiders of the Lost Ark when the government loses the powerful, dangerous
artifact in some nameless Army warehouse filled with tons of beef jerky or
whatever it was.

~~~
sharkweek
the pizza case thing reminds me of the scene in Arrested Development "Nope...
you're looking at balls"

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsgOzLdWdgU>

------
RoboTeddy
Also see this NY Times documentary short, "The Program":

[http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/opinion/the-national-
secur...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/opinion/the-national-security-
agencys-domestic-spying-program.html)

It features William Binney, who apparently is one of the better mathematical
minds the NSA has ever had. He quit over the NSA's actions in 2001.

------
daniel-cussen
This is probably why US bandwidth hasn't increased in ten years. Telecoms
didn't want it to, obviously, but more importantly, the US government didn't
want it to either, because more bandwidth increases the amount of information
they have to store to have a carbon copy of everything.

~~~
maxerickson
Individual connections haven't gotten a great deal faster, but more people
have higher speed connections and they are using them more. Traffic has
increased by some enormous factor in the last 10 years (picking conservatively
from <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_traffic> easily gets a factor of
20 or 30).

~~~
daniel-cussen
True, but it was planned in the nineties to go up by much more than that, and
it could have increased faster than storage technology increased in density.

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darxius
I wonder if this means we'll see the rise of huge botnets and networks calling
each other and using flagged words just to saturate the data the NSA is
picking up.

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micah94
Thanks for the reminder. I almost forgot.

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Sharlin
I'm eerily reminded of Deus Ex and the Aquinas Router. The main difference is
that it was located in Nevada, not Utah... And that the NSA probably does not
have a human-level general artificial intelligence developet yet. Although one
never knows.

------
samstave
Reddit's /r/conspiracy hasa pretty good post on the matter as well:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/1fs228/this_is_n...](http://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/1fs228/this_is_now_confirmed_fact_the_nsa_is_tracking/)

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tjoff
You do know that the internet exists outside of the US, right?

~~~
chaz
The NSA's charter is to monitor foreign communications and intelligence, so
yes, the whole point of what they're doing is because the internet exists
outside of the US.

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grandalf
I'd like to know what kinds of criminals this stuff is really being used to
catch, since it's clearly not being used to fight terrorism.

~~~
stray
Dissidents.

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Keyframe
I'd really like to know more about this from tech and logistics aspect of it!
Imagine the challenges!

------
clarkston
Introducing the World's First Private Cloud Appliance.
<http://www.starkitsystems.com/>

~~~
brightghost
...isn't this at least the world's third or fourth private cloud appliance?

------
coherentpony
Can we _please_ stop with the politics/outrage posts? If I wanted to see
articles recycled from /r/politics, I would read reddit.

~~~
Tangaroa
This one actually has techie relevance, but I hear what you're saying. The
political links and their duplicates and their duplicates are drowning out the
technology posts, even on /classic.

