
Secret to Prism program: Even bigger data seizure - brown9-2
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/secret-prism-success-even-bigger-data-seizure
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wyck
This is finally starting to make sense to the "media". A large part of the
story was the unfiltered taps, PRISM seems effective at pinpointing the
important bits in what used to be an overwhelming stream.

e.g. Get FISA request on someone, gather the data, tap into the big pipes to
see what else they are doing.

Does anyone remember this from 2005 ? They retrofitted a submarine (USS Jimmy
Carter) to the tune of 1 billion to cable tap under the ocean,
[http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/20/politics/20submarine.html](http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/20/politics/20submarine.html)
. If they are trying to do that thousands of feet under water ( 7 years ago)
imagine what they have on land now.

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eli
Are you sure the NSA indeed had unfiltered access to data? Several tech
companies very specifically and loudly refuted that claim and the Washington
Post backed away from some of the initial claims about the level of access and
complicity the NSA had.

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ryanmerket
It's well known that they do on the transport layer (Verizon, AT&T, etc). Not
so much on the application layer (Google, Facebook, AOL, etc).

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andrew93101
This is the best article I've read yet on the subject of what's actually going
on. The NSA slide deck was always inconsistent with most of the public
statements of industry execs, and this article reconciles them nicely.

The more I read on PRISM, it seems that PRISM itself is a minor revelation
(that being, PRISM just automates what used to be done manually).

Most of the outrage just flows naturally from the Protect America Act, which
was never a secret. The public is just now hearing about how the act is used
in practice.

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schme
What I'm really waiting for is that other countries start realizing what this
means to them. From what I've seen, most of European media has failed to point
out how big of a deal this is to everyone, not just Americans. Not just the
fact that a lot of European traffic comes and goes through the US, but in
smaller countries this kind of all observing surveillance might be easier to
set up (depending on geographical and some other factors of course).

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raldi
_> Like a triangular piece of glass, Prism takes large beams of data and helps
the government find discrete, manageable strands of information._

I don't think that's the basis of the name at all.

Much more likely, the rainbow part represents all the sources they pull data
from, each so different from the next, and the white part represents the
single unified feed it provides the NSA agent using it.

~~~
brown9-2
Agreed. Especially since Prism just sounds like integration/viewing software.

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scribu
Regarding the direct tapping into the fiber cables, does using SSL have any
effect on it?

(in case it's not obvious, I'm a cryptography n00b)

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c0ur7n3y
I wouldn't be surprised if the NSA has a "special" relationship with many
certificate authorities that allows it to man-in-the-middle SSL.

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EthanHeilman
Not just the NSA, many companies can buy CA privledges from a CA. For instance
trustwave used to sell this as a service so companies could watch their
employees.

[http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Security/Mozilla-Asked-to-Revoke-
Tr...](http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Security/Mozilla-Asked-to-Revoke-Trustwave-CA-
for-Allowing-SSL-Eavesdropping-545114/)

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zby
How about this: all web browsing history for everyone (that is not a paranoid
computer geek) all over the world - gathered through 'safe browsing' from
chrome, ie and also firefox (possible to disable in firefox:
[https://support.mozilla.org/pl/questions/922449](https://support.mozilla.org/pl/questions/922449)).
All 'just metadata'.

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thrownaway2424
Safe browsing works by download a bloom filter into your browser, checking
sites you visit against the bloom filter, and on a positive hit, making a call
to Google to get the full (not bloom) list of matching URLs.

Safe browsing does not transmit your browser history to anyone.

~~~
zby
Thanks for the info!

