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Originally posted by mikegrouchy
It's like that "on star" system in some cars.
If the government had forced it on us as surveillance,
we would have hated it.
But if we can have the same technology, except it works _for_ us
then we love it.
Oh... wait....
Mike
Originally posted by occrest
Originally posted by mikegrouchy
It's like that "on star" system in some cars.
If the government had forced it on us as surveillance,
we would have hated it.
But if we can have the same technology, except it works _for_ us
then we love it.
Oh... wait....
Mike
I thought i was alone in seeing through the 'on star' scheme of replacing good, reliable, non-computerized, standard parts cars with remote controlled, specialized parts cars that start falling apart after 15,000 miles. ("Failed" Cash for Clunkers)
All my friends and family still think i'm crazy.
reply to post by mikegrouchy
But all these data collection systems, they are only for our owners aren't they.
Originally posted by gotya
reply to post by supremecommander
Do ewe pay taxes?
Do you? (remember they are watching.)
Originally posted by OpViper7
reply to post by supremecommander
You always need permission. You never know, "You see something, Say something." Boy, this website is full of information, Yes I said "information". Time to play trace the I.P. Weeeee.....
Originally posted by occrest
reply to post by mikegrouchy
But all these data collection systems, they are only for our owners aren't they.
The trick is---figuring out how to use what we have to our advantage.
Originally posted by gotya
Originally posted by ShadowLink
reply to post by gotya
So you're aware of it, hear about it everywhere and you're "Ok" with it or just sick of hearing about it?
Don't you think it's ridiculous?
Don't you think it's illegal?
Don't you think it goes against everyones rights? Including Non-americans.
Don't you think something should be done about it?
Don't you think someone should be held responsible for the complete violation of practically everyone?
I'm guessing people like you are why these things continue, and right out in the open in our faces no less.
I'm not okay with it but stating the obvious doesn't solve a problem.
Example... there is a leaky pipe. Fine we can all see the pipe is leaking. If we all say the pipe is leaking it won't fix the leak.
If there is a leaky pipe you call a plumber. If the government is spying you........
(I fixed the pipe.)
In addition to the IRS, the Special Operations Division cooperates with a number of government agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency. The way the intelligence-gathering system worked is as follows: The Special Operations Division of the DEA channels secret data from overseas NSA intercepts, domestic wiretaps, informants and a large DEA database of telephone records to authorities nationwide to assist them with criminal investigations of US citizens, according to the Reuters report. The DEA telephone database is different from the NSA database that was revealed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who is now living in Russia under asylum. The DEA, which works behind the scenes to investigate drug dealers, money launderers and other criminals, argues that the practice does not violate the law and has been in “near-daily use since the 1990s.” The agency said the reason it directs federal agents to recreate the investigation trail is to “protect sources and methods, not to withhold evidence.” Judicial hurdles ahead Legal experts, however, say that concealing potential evidence from defendants violates the US Constitution. According to documents and interviews obtained by Reuters, federal agents use a procedure called "parallel construction" to conceal the tracks of the investigative trail. For example, agents could say that an investigation was launched due to a traffic violation as opposed to an SOD tip.
Originally posted by gotya
reply to post by supremecommander
Paranoid?
I'm not a government spook. (boo.)
I'm just not cattle.
Originally posted by OpViper7
reply to post by supremecommander
Hey, even some per say NSA, CIA, CSS, NRO and other employees don't all agree with what is going on in the U.S.A., were not here to patrol Americas gateways or internet services. It was never meant to turn into this. See if an employee quits because he doesn't like what he or she says. They will be out of a job and homeless and how will they take care of themselves then. It's a double edged sword, but this websites is full of knowledge and im sure fantastic people of the like minds.
Its funny to think and say that this time in are era, is only a moment of what acrews in our entire universe were not in this alone, it goes much beyond that.
Under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.” It is, in some measure, the realization of the “total information awareness” program created during the first term of the Bush administration—an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy. But “this is more than just a data center,” says one senior intelligence official who until recently was involved with the program. The mammoth Bluffdale center will have another important and far more secret role that until now has gone unrevealed. It is also critical, he says, for breaking codes. And code-breaking is crucial, because much of the data that the center will handle—financial information, stock transactions, business deals, foreign military and diplomatic secrets, legal documents, confidential personal communications—will be heavily encrypted. According to another top official also involved with the program, the NSA made an enormous breakthrough several years ago in its ability to cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption systems employed by not only governments around the world but also many average computer users in the US. The upshot, according to this official: “Everybody’s a target; everybody with communication is a target.”
The National Security Agency's (NSA) apparatus for spying on what passes over the Internet, phone lines, and airways has long been the stuff of legend, with the public catching only brief glimpses into its Leviathan nature. Thanks to the documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, we now have a much bigger picture. When that picture is combined with federal contract data and other pieces of the public record—as well as information from other whistleblowers and investigators—it's possible to deduce a great deal about what the NSA has built and what it can do. We've already looked at the NSA's basic capabilities of collecting, managing, and processing "big data." But the recently released XKeyscore documents provide a much more complete picture of how the NSA feeds its big data monsters and how it gets "situational awareness" of what's happening on the Internet. What follows is an analysis of how XKeyscore works and how the NSA's network surveillance capabilities have evolved over the past decade. Boot camp After the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the subsequent passage of the USA PATRIOT Act, the NSA and other organizations within the federal intelligence, defense, and law enforcement communities rushed to up their game in Internet surveillance. The NSA had already developed a "signals intelligence" operation that spanned the globe. But it had not had a mandate for sweeping surveillance operations—let alone permission for it—since the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) was passed in 1978. (Imagine what Richard Nixon could have done with Facebook monitoring.) The Global War On Terror, or GWOT as it was known around DC's beltway, opened up the purse strings for everything on the intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) shopping list. The NSA's budget is hidden within the larger National Intelligence Program (NIP) budget. But some estimates suggest that the NSA's piece of that pie is between 17 and 20 percent—putting its cumulative budget from fiscal year 2006 through 2012, conservatively, at about $58 billion. Early on, the NSA needed a quick fix. It got that by buying largely off-the-shelf systems for network monitoring, as evidenced by the installation of hardware from Boeing subsidiary Narus at network tap sites such as AT&T's Folsom Street facility in San Francisco. In 2003, the NSA worked with AT&T to install a collection of networking and computing gear—including Narus' Semantic Traffic Analyzer (STA) 6400—to monitor the peering links for AT&T's WorldNet Internet service. Narus' STA software, which evolved into the Intelligent Traffic Analyzer line, was also used by the FBI as a replacement for its Carnivore system during that time frame.
Analysis -- NSA leaker Edward Snowden’s revelations have forced President Barack Obama’s hand, leading the president to announce new reforms of the government’s classified surveillance programs. After his administration issued repeated defenses of a National Security Agency monitoring program that collects Americans’ phone and Internet data, Obama announced during a press conference Friday afternoon that reforms to the system will make the collection activities more transparent and "give the American people additional confidence that there are additional safeguards against abuse." Obama said the changes will include changes to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court system -- which currently greenlights requests for data gathering -- as well as the creation of both an internal NSA position devoted to privacy and an external working group to evaluate transparency in the program. Officials will also launch a new website next week that will serve as “a hub for further transparency” for interested members of the public.
What is particularly creepy about the Lavabit self-shutdown is that the company is gagged by law even from discussing the legal challenges it has mounted and the court proceeding it has engaged. In other words, the American owner of the company believes his Constitutional rights and those of his customers are being violated by the US Government, but he is not allowed to talk about it. Just as is true for people who receive National Security Letters under the Patriot Act, Lavabit has been told that they would face serious criminal sanctions if they publicly discuss what is being done to their company. Thus we get hostage-message-sounding missives like this: I wish that I could legally share with you the events that led to my decision. I cannot. I feel you deserve to know what's going on - the first amendment is supposed to guarantee me the freedom to speak out in situations like this. Unfortunately, Congress has passed laws that say otherwise. As things currently stand, I cannot share my experiences over the last six weeks, even though I have twice made the appropriate requests." Does that sound like a message coming from a citizen of a healthy and free country? Secret courts issuing secret rulings invariably in favor of the US government that those most affected are barred by law from discussing? Is there anyone incapable at this point of seeing what the United States has become? Here's the very sound advice issued by Lavabit's founder: This experience has taught me one very important lesson: without congressional action or a strong judicial precedent, I would _strongly_ recommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States." As security expert Bruce Schneier wrote in a great Bloomberg column last week, this is one of the key aspects of the NSA disclosures: the vast public-private surveillance partnership. That's what makes Lavabit's stance so heroic: as our reporting has demonstrated, most US-based tech and telecom companies (though not all) meekly submit to the US government's dictates and cooperate extensively and enthusiastically with the NSA to ensure access to your communications.
In light of the General Petraeus scandal, and the ease with which the feds can access your email and drafts stored in the cloud, then you may be looking for "keep it simple, stupid" solutions specifically to encrypt Gmail. Here are several Firefox add-ons and Chrome extensions that are free, yet so easy to use that even your technically-challenged friends or family could use them.
Breaking into those complex mathematical shells like the AES is one of the key reasons for the construction going on in Bluffdale. That kind of cryptanalysis requires two major ingredients: super-fast computers to conduct brute-force attacks on encrypted messages and a massive number of those messages for the computers to analyze. The more messages from a given target, the more likely it is for the computers to detect telltale patterns, and Bluffdale will be able to hold a great many messages. “We questioned it one time,” says another source, a senior intelligence manager who was also involved with the planning. “Why were we building this NSA facility? And, boy, they rolled out all the old guys—the crypto guys.” According to the official, these experts told then-director of national intelligence Dennis Blair, “You’ve got to build this thing because we just don’t have the capability of doing the code-breaking.” It was a candid admission. In the long war between the code breakers and the code makers—the tens of thousands of cryptographers in the worldwide computer security industry—the code breakers were admitting defeat.
Complaint: We had have serviced with Colo4 LLC for over 4 years. Our server was purposely hosting private email and for some of development thus bandwidth usage is in minimal usage. Started from August 2012, Colo4 LLC started to raise the monthly bandwidth overage to over 1900+ GB without knowing the caused and continue to charge bandwidth overage to over $500 per month in usage and bandwidth overage and continue to charging us even though all the service within server had been shutdown.We had have requested for an investigate into the bandwidth usage but then had been ignored by Colo4 LLC. Instead, they are trying to convince us that their service have changed and force us to sign their yearly contracts. Product_Or_Service: Collocate Server Hosting Order_Number: XXXX-XXXXX Account_Number: ****** ****** Business Response Contact Name and Title: ************, VP Admin Contact Phone: XXXXXXXXXX Contact Email: *****@colo4.com Mr. ****** was responsible for monitoring his bandwidth usage and maintaining awareness of the applicable charges. The excess usage (overage) billed to Mr. ****** was confirmed; the applicable charges are valid. While Mr. ****** did not ask Colo4 to investigate the cause of the overage (only claiming that they were fraudulent), it was likely caused from being hacked and/or infected by a computer virus. Either of these could dramatically increase the data transmitted to/from (i.e.; usage on) a server. Colo4 was not responsible for protecting Mr. ******'s server from hackers and viruses. It is not known if Mr. ****** had installed and maintained any security software on his server.