Privacy, Government, Surveillance, and You.

Greenwald is Snowden's source. Snowden contacted him and gave him the documents, and Greenwald has largely chosen what documents to release when he was at The Guardian paper.

Greenwald is American by birth, but lives in Brazil with his life partner/husband David Miranda, for a variety of reasons.

Sorry, very poor phrasing I should have said 'contact'. Greenwald is known as an advocate and journalist for a variety of things. Snowden contacting him to tell him he had documents on the NSA surveillance storiy and Greenwald jumped at it, for explanation.

My main problem is Greenwald has been the source of documents for a while, especially in the beginning. As he's an advocate first by his own admission, that raises...concerns about info we're getting.

edited 25th Mar '14 6:52:13 PM by Lightysnake

You mean Snowden is Greenwald's source, right?

Snowden gave the documents to Laura Poitras to, plus you're ignoring that the Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger has said that the Guardian have seen 58,000 documents, so the documents aren't being handled by any one or two people.

edited 25th Mar '14 7:08:02 PM by Silasw

He contacted Poitras in early 2013, but he contacted Greenwald first.

I had forgotten briefly, but Snowden provided documents to both Poitras and Greenwald, who are in close contact

Greenwald also couldn't be bothered encrypting emails and had to later be bought in by Poitras, which puts her as the first point of proper contact.

edited 25th Mar '14 7:34:11 PM by Silasw

I fail to see how the chip on one's shoulder about Greenwald's ego constitutes anything but a red herring, given the content of what was reported on.

That's just the thing. From all the documents, Greenwald's deceptive reporting on it ended up defining the story. I listed examples of this previously (namely his 'direct access story that Washington Post later walked back).

It's deceptive and it has no place in such major news stories like this. It's giving people, as demonstrated here, the false impression the NSA is hacking into phones and tracking them through their apps, or watching the videos they use on youtube. Greenwald's articles routinely left out important, mitigating factors like this

That appears to not only be something that happens, but has been corroborated by additional leaks. The SIM card vulnerability used is pretty well-known in the tech industry by now. It's obscure and requires some foreknowledge of the data structure you're injecting into, but not particularly difficult if you know a fair bit of Java. To my knowledge Sprint never bothered closing it or even encrypting their shit (which takes literally two lines).

If they strongarmed Google, they have this data. They've used it to discredit political opponents — none of the targets they used as examples (yes, I read the actual document) were involved in terror plots, and a vanishingly small minority (7 out of hundreds) were even associated with extremist groups, much less full-on terrorist groups.

edited 25th Mar '14 8:40:25 PM by Pykrete

here's the issue: there's a big difference between what they can do and what they are actually doing. If they're actually tracking citizens via phones, we haven't quite seen that.

As for the youtube thing, are we on the same page? I'm going by this one

The issue is, it was a pilot program demonstrated once, and scrolling down in the article...they used commercially available software for it and we're told: The presentation showed that analysts could determine which videos were popular among residents of specific cities, but did not provide information on individual social media users.

ohai (hyphen in long url etc)

edited 25th Mar '14 8:43:17 PM by Pykrete

Gonna need a tinyurl.

Link's not working there.

and let me rephrase: what they're doing to citizens. It's unlikely they're not using the tech in some way.

Nevermind. Basically, open the link above and join the letter "d" with "spee".

edited 25th Mar '14 8:47:19 PM by Quag15

Might want to try again.

Don't get pissy at us for your failings.

edited 25th Mar '14 9:11:28 PM by DeviantBraeburn

Here let me backspace two characters in that URL for you

Seriously, most of us know how the TVT parser works by now, but if you don't, broken URL's are almost always

• inserting hyphen+space in long things, or
• adding spaces after commas (LA Times)

edited 25th Mar '14 8:49:10 PM by Pykrete

Google, DuckDuckGo And The Regulation Of Privacy. I found these bits interesting:

edited 25th Mar '14 9:01:11 PM by Quag15

Much appreciated.

Have to head to bed soon, so I'll try to continue this after work tomorrow

Duck Duck Go is unfortunately a terrible search engine. Like, almost Cuil terrible.

But they do bang-tag support, like proxying and encrypting searches through other engines.

edited 25th Mar '14 9:58:20 PM by Pykrete

@Lightysnake: I was merely pointing out which allegations are true, rather than making a comment on whether the NSA's practices are desirable or not, which goes beyond the question of reliable journalism.

The real question is not whether they can do it, or even so much whether they have done it, but what criteria do they use to determine whether or not they should do it. It's pretty clear, from a variety of sources, not just Greenwald or even Snowden, that the criteria the US Intelligence Community want to use are not strict enough. That's the real policy issue, one that is being debated as we speak.

edited 26th Mar '14 9:45:18 AM by DeMarquis

That's an excellent point of debate, in fact. I think there are substantial questions, and a fair debate to be raised about the efficiency of the FISC. But at the same time, they're not rubber stamps. Being real, here, we should expect the NSA to overstep at times. The courts have shown that when they have tried, they were slapped back. Which is absolutely how the system is supposed to work. Individual law enforcement and the FBI have to deal with the same, and I see local law enforcement run roughshod over citizens' rights with way less care and oversight demonstrated by the NSA.

Nor is the rate of approval any straight evidence that the courts are too lenient. Given the amount of vetting info before it arrives at court, a high approval would be expected.

But when we see issues like "there are nearly 3000 abuses", without context, I get frustrated. Particularly given how many errors that evens out to per day, and the inclusion of computer errors and typographical errors.

Speaker John Boehner backs end to NSA metadata collection.

Well, FISC bases it's decisions on the law, and it's that law that's the problem. The phone metadata was based on section 215 of the Patriot Act, which specified that the government can mandate the turnover of "any tangible things" from any entity as long as the items are for an investigation to defend against international terrorism or spying. That's clearly way too broad, esp. in light of the fact that Obama's Commission on domestic surveillance couldn't find any evidence that it was helpful in stopping terrorist acts. It's esp. troubling because, until the commission findings, we couldnt know what the FISC legal reasoning actually was- it was classified. No one could know exactly what was legal and what wasnt, and hence the public had no way of holding the government accoutable for obeying the law- not only did we not know what the NSA was doing, we didnt know what the court's interpretation of the law was.

This is the commission report. Their recommendations regarding the surveillance of US citizens begins on page 17. On page 18 they have this to say:

"...We recommend important restrictions on the ability of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) to compel third parties (such as telephone service providers) to disclose private information to the government. We endorse similar restrictions on the issuance of National Security Letters (by which the Federal Bureau of Investigation now compels individuals and organizations to turn over certain otherwise private records), recommending prior judicial review except in emergencies, where time is of the essence...

"Legislation should be enacted requiring information about surveillance programs to be made available to the Congress and to the American people to the greatest extent possible (subject only to the need to protect classified information). We also recommend that legislation should be enacted authorizing telephone, Internet, and other providers to disclose publicly general information about orders they receive directing them to provide information to the government. Such information might disclose the number of orders that providers have received, the broad categories of information produced, and the number of users whose information has been produced. In the same vein, we recommend that the government should publicly disclose, on a regular basis, general data about the orders it has issued in programs whose existence is unclassified...

...We recommend that, in the absence of a specific and compelling showing, the US Government should follow the model of the Department of Homeland Security and apply the Privacy Act of 1974 in the same way to both US persons and non-US persons."

I recommend it, it's an interesting read.

edited 26th Mar '14 4:23:05 PM by DeMarquis

I dream of having the Patriot Act overturned and its provisions made unconstitutional by an amendment.

Keep dreaming, maybe it will happen...