FTFA: The three former NSA employees with declarations in EFF's brief are were William E. Binney, Thomas A. Drake, and J. Kirk Wiebe. All three were found dead yesterday due to natural causes.

FTFT

What is everyone emailing their friends about that they're so afraid of the NSA reading it? I sent an email recently about a douchebag former boss, I guess this is going on my "permanent record"? If they do read it, I hope they shut him down for tax evasion and breaking labor laws.

Oh, and...

Dick Gordon: National Security Agency.
Martin Bishop: Ah. You're the guys I hear breathing on the other end of my phone.
Dick Gordon: No, that's the FBI. We're not chartered for domestic surveillance.
Martin Bishop: Oh, I see. You just overthrow governments. Set up friendly dictators.
Dick Gordon: No, that's the CIA. We protect our government's communications, we try to break the other fella's codes. We're the good guys, Marty.
Martin Bishop: Gee, I can't tell you what a relief that is... Dick.


This is so cool...

It's the ability to look back that should scare the crap out of you. Everyone has something(s) in their past they would rather not become generally well known (and if you don't, you need to get out more). Let's say you dabble in something or other years ago, but after maturing a bit, you clean up, decide to fight the good fight and succeed in a run for elective office, or gain some other position of prominence. Don't think for a minute there's not then going to be a file on you filled with whatever could be gleaned from an exhaustive search of your archived data, your friends, associates, etc. You're not squeaky clean (and even if you are, people you care about are not), so there's some dirt there. When the day comes that you can be useful, you will be approached, just a little at first, some small matter, something that can be compromised away in the face of a disclosure threat. You'll acquiesce of course (these guys are pros), and now the ice is broken. It'll get easier and easier to compromise as you get older, more comfortable, more invested in the system. Besides, by then, you're in so deep, you've gotten to like the stench.

tuna762: I remember reading a book (dissecting the hack) where hackers use guild chat in wow to communicate. Is it possible to monitor that?

/facepalm

OF COURSE it's monitored. And recorded. And archived. Reporting other people for spam, racist remarks, real-life threats and in-game harassment wouldn't be very effective if Actiblizzard didn't have server logs of chat that they could go back and examine, now would it?

Under the hood, it's all IRC. About the 3rd most obvious communications protocol in the world, after flying a flag upside down and those fark-me eyes that subby's mom was giving me in the bar the other night.

Majick Thise: NewportBarGuy: and find out what boundaries NSA must follow.

If you think they have or ever will have any boundaries or regs that they actually obey/respect, you are naive. If any court rules against them there will be someone who takes the fall, and then they will go right back to doing whatever they damn well please.

All though I agree with NewportBarGuy, sadly, it is my understanding that the NSA was created to circumvent the restrictions placed on the CIA. Its' purpose is to evade or ignore restrictions, regulations, and boundaries.

There seems to be a lot of discussion on this thread regarding the lack of time on the part of agents to read or scan all the data that is captured. I'll concede that what I know about technology could fit in a thimble, but why would a person read that data? Why wouldn't they create an algorithm to sort down the data and determine what deserves a closer look?

The three former NSA employees with declarations in EFF's brief are William E. Binney, Thomas A. Drake, and J. Kirk Wiebe.

It's astonishing that Thomas Drake would be willing to stick his head in the lions mouth again. He has already been persecuted by both the Bush and Obama administrations.

The Obama Administration's aggressive war on whistleblowers suffered a humiliating setback on June 9 when former NSA official Thomas Drake accepted a misdemeanor plea agreement for exceeding his authorized use of a government computer.

The Department of Justice had been pursuing Drake for alleged violations of the Espionage Act that might have sent him to prison for up to 35 years. But the government withdrew the evidence supporting several of the central charges after a judge ruled Drake would not be able to defend himself unless the government revealed details about one of the National Security Agency's telecommunications collection programs.

On two other counts, documents the government had claimed were classified have either been shown to be labeled unclassified when Drake accessed them or have since been declassified. Faced with the prospect of trying to convict a man for leaking unclassified information, the government frantically crafted a plea deal in the last days before the case was due to go to trial.

Aside from the problems the government had with classified evidence, it faced a real challenge proving Drake believed the information would cause the US harm, as the Espionage Act requires.

He gathered several of the charged documents in support of an Inspector General complaint for which he argued the NSA spent $1 billion outsourcing a program it could have done better in-house for $3 million. Long before the case crumbled, the government tried to prevent Drake from explaining his Inspector General complaint to the jury, but the judge ruled against the government.

Yet he's still willing to step up yet again and expose the Government's illegal actions. Good man.

Lunaville: There seems to be a lot of discussion on this thread regarding the lack of time on the part of agents to read or scan all the data that is captured. I'll concede that what I know about technology could fit in a thimble, but why would a person read that data? Why wouldn't they create an algorithm to sort down the data and determine what deserves a closer look?

You are correct. This is indeed what happens.

There's nothing in this article that Gene Hackman didn't already tell us in 1998

/seriously underrated movie

Lunaville: All though I agree with NewportBarGuy, sadly, it is my understanding that the NSA was created to circumvent the restrictions placed on the CIA. Its' purpose is to evade or ignore restrictions, regulations, and boundaries.

The NSA was created out of Army Intelligence after WW2, in the same restructurings that created the Air Force. Its sole purpose until the fall of the Soviet Union was to monitor communist communications and protect classified communications, but when the Cold War ended it branched out... much like the rest of the military.

The only positive so far is that they're so deep in counter-terrorism that they couldn't give a shiat if you're having an affair with your secretary or hookups on craigslist, or swapping dirty pictures and buying scheduled meds from Canada, but someday Congress will come to them and say, we've created a new law that criminalizes extramarital sex and porn and we need to know who's violating it, or the DEA will demand the names of anyone who's ever bought anything from overseas. Having it all in one place is a godsend for agencies that would otherwise have to subpoena individual ISPs with varying retention policies. From that point it's only a matter of time until anyone who doesn't like you will have the ability to get a court order to embarrass and ostracize you later in life.

You only have to look at the self-aggrandizing AWs currently in Congress to realize how likely that is.

zaiustheape: who's taking votes on how long it takes all 3 of the whistle-blowers to have unfortunate accidents?

Back when they were still trying to work within the system, all three of the whistle blowers received visits from armed Federal agents designed to intimidate them.

In July 2007, armed FBI agents raided the homes of Roark, Binney, and Wiebe, the same people who had filed the complaint with the DoD Inspector General in 2002. Binney claims they pointed guns at his wife and himself. Wiebe said it reminded him of the Soviet Union. None of these people were charged with any crimes.

I really hope they enjoyed my conversation with my brother this morning, we had a heated argument about who's had the biggest shiat!

neomunk: Or, you know, simple bitwise XOR with a shared, data-sized, collection of random bits (or bits only known to the legitimate message participants)... Properly executed book based encryption, even stone age implementations, can't be beaten without the shared codebook. Period.

But it can be beaten with it; it's only as good as the people using it. (Which, in fairness, is true of any other encryption scheme as well.)

Wikipedia reading: The Venona project
"Somebody who was working for the manufacturers of Soviet secret-communication materials had reused pages of some of the one-time pads in other pads, which were then used for other secret messages. This defeated the purpose of the one-time pad, which provides perfect security when each page is used exactly once and then disposed of."

In other news, "Person of Interest" has been renewed.

You Idiots: GAT_00: NewportBarGuy: we are have a goddamn right to have this case heard and find out what boundaries NSA must follow.

Yeah, that's not going to happen. The NSA is going to read everything, and there's nothing we can do to stop it.

Enjoy your police state!

Enjoy your government health care, brought to you by the same police state.

Huh?

This is not a secret code phrase designed to activate all the sleeper agents who read Fark.

/Blessent mon cœur d'une langeur monotone

UNAUTHORIZED FINGER: "Gentlemen don't read each other's mail."

-Henry L. Stimson
U.S. Secretary of War

So I have been drinking. remember we are in a thread about what is certainly a search. Two big quotes from Timson are

_____ Gentlemen don't read each other's mail.
_____ The only deadly sin I know is cynicism.

The first statement should be true. There are the base elements among us. However, we should not be sucked down to their level. I shouldn't have to encrypt shiat because gentlemen don't read each other's mail.

The people most likely to embody and recognize such principals would be the Virginia gentleman farmers who founded our country. There, like a thumb in the eye of decorum and civilized behavior, sits the 4th amendment. The base elements will prevail. I was raised in a time and place where you could with a straight face say "crazy" talk like Stimson.

When the fark did we start running schools like business. Why can't we just teach people the classics; leave to employers to teach their peculiar principals; and trust that the truth will out.

sno man: So what you are saying is not unlike the internet, everything you type is there somewhere for ever. This is a lesson many people should learn.

People should take more care to secure their communications.

But that's no reason we shouldn't try to get the NSA to stop this crap.

Wood thay be abel to spel chek my messeges for me and fix dem?

this is funny...

sno man: anyone with any interest in getting a job, let alone career, ever... should be all over reining in what they share on the interwebs, period.

I'm pretty sure society will come to a new understanding of how privacy works and what is and is not acceptable in "public" places on the Interwebs. If it didn't there would be whole generations of unemployable people, which seems unlikely.

/ And then we'll probably back-step a bit once people realize that real-life is and always has been much more anonymous than life online, in spite of what old people have been saying about the Internet for decades.

I think the entire f**king world should be an open book. Let's put everything right out there and just get it over with, including thoughts.

Boris S. Wort: This is not a secret code phrase designed to activate all the sleeper agents who read Fark.

/Blessent mon cœur d'une langeur monotone

I don't know what you said but, I bet its funny.

zaiustheape: who's taking votes on how long it takes all 3 of the whistle-blowers to have unfortunate accidents?

They won't have unfortunate accidents. They will be struck with huge feelings of guilt that compel them to kill themselves by shooting themselves in the back of the head... with a shotgun...3 times.

You Idiots: Enjoy your government health care, brought to you by the same police state.

Health care and health care insurance are not even close to remotely similar to the same thing.

dittybopper: Somaticasual: badhatharry: foxyshadis: Subby might be the only person around who's never heard of this before.

RexTalionis: If you're concerned, then you should've been encrypting your emails.

The NSA probably has a huge database of cracked 1024-bit private keys, and larger ones that were subject to various flaws over the years, and I wouldn't be surprised if some of the major US SSL cert companies have been compelled to hand over their private keys. All they have to do is archive everything until they crack the cert, then they can go back and read everything.

Just write letters in code like prisoners.

Using grid ciphers and single replacement codes to hide from an agency whose purpose it is to crack codes 1000x more complex. Brilliant concept.

Use manually generated one time pads.

Completely and forever unbreakable, provided you follow the few simple rules of one time pad use. The NSA will never be able to break your message.

You have to manually generate the pads, btw, because otherwise you open up a possible avenue for attack: Either you have a cryptographically secure electronic RNG (either hardware or software), but the computer used to store and use the pads is potentially insecure, or you use some pseudorandom process to generate them, and the pads themselves are insecure.

Quickest way I've found is to roll a handful of 10-sided dice, and type the result using a manual typewriter (not an electric one!) and use a well-worn fabric ribbon. If you use blank 2 part carbonless forms, you get precisely two copies and you don't have to worry about burning the carbons. If you use a well-worn ribbon, it's unlikely that they can get any useful sequence out of it, as you'll have layers and layers of overstrikes, but you can always just burn the ribbon after you've generated a series of pads anyway.

I just speak ig-pay atin-lay. Good luck breaking THAT, NSA.

dittybopper: Decryption would be the opposite: You transcribe the electronic message onto paper, then manually decrypt, and similarly destroy the paper and the OTP page used to decrypt the message.


BESURETODRINKYO....