The Press Is Waking Up
Apparently Murdoch is really annoyed with the detention of David Miranda by the UK, as well as all of the spying on people, while he is losing big bucks over the spying that his newspapers have done.
The Wall Street Journal is reporting on the NSA story using their own sources, which corroborates many of the points in The Guardian‘s coverage. One of the things the WSJ is reporting really gets to me: NSA doesn’t know what Snowden took. Apparently they don’t have audit trails or logging that reflects what system administrators are doing. If they don’t have that rather basic level of management in place, they really can’t claim that the data they are hoovering up is secure, nor can they claim it isn’t being routinely abused. They just don’t know, and have no way of finding out in the system they created.
CBS reports NSA gathered thousands of Americans’ emails, FISA court records show, but the ‘records’ are really judgments by the court that NSA was acting in violation of the Fourth Amendment for at least three years, and misled the court as to exactly what it was doing. This gives me real confidence in the system of ‘checks and balances’. 😈
Kevin Gosztola adds a bit of background on the Toobin-Greenwald issue: Jeffrey Toobin Preaches on Sanctity of Government Secrets Despite Once Stealing Classified Documents. Well, Toobin did it for a good reason – to help sell the book he was writing, not some silly reason like exposing government misdeeds.
The actions taken by the UK government against The Guardian have helped to shift the focus away from personalities towards the real story – your government is using terrorism as an excuse to violate your civil rights and Constitutional protections.
5 comments
I just read this little article on a VPN blog (doing a little last minute research before I sign over to CyberGhost). 🙂
Digital Al-Qaida; What the FBI Calls Snowden Supporters; Talk of ‘Blinding’ Hackers
What that kind of attitude and big mouth’s, it’s no wonder there is no actual *Justice* available in the USA (or UK for that matter).
This was on the CyberGhost Blog: 🙂
The worth of your privacy
LOL I just got a bargain! 😀
I’ve noticed a trend with software lately, especially European and German in particular.
After installing some software, and you decide to uninstall it, it will usually pop up a web page with a really good special offer to keep the software. So, I thought I might see if the CyberGost VPN client does that. And it does! 😀
CG have a pretty good deal online anyway right now, 50% off for 12 Mth Premium account, which is 30 EUR (about AU$45 or US$40). If you install the client, set up a free account, then uninstall it, you will be offered a deal for $15 EUR for a 12 Mth Premium Acct (about AU$22). Not bad, and an absolute bargain for some privacy. 😉
The real issue here is that privacy is no longer a right guaranteed by the Constitution in the US, but a privilege that must be purchased. When the government makes you purchase your rights, they lose their legitimacy. We are going back to Geneva under Calvinism when curtains on windows were illegal.
It still boils down to utility – gathering all this data makes finding terrorists, real terrorists, harder, not easier. The bombing in Boston is the prime example – those guys left markers all over the Internet, made calls to an area were radical Islamists were known to be operating, and the system didn’t discover them. After the fact all of these things are known, but you could have found that out with a standard search warrant after the bombing. The system doesn’t work; it doesn’t provide protection.
We are going back to Geneva under Calvinism when curtains on windows were illegal.
ugh.
gathering all this data makes finding terrorists, real terrorists, harder, not easier.
i often wonder if they don’t really care about finding terrorists so much as what they really want is lots and lots of data on which to train their killer apps .
So far the only case that seems to be a verified ‘success’ for this entire system is a Somali refugee in San Diego who was picked up for sending around $9K to the al Shabab group. He might have been supporting them, or it may have been ransom for a relative. That’s it. All of the other cases the government has mentioned were actually after fact, and the evidence could have been obtained with a normal search warrant in a regular court.
There is definitely a negative ROI on this program.
It is possible that they are amassing the data to see if they can find a pattern that would have identified attacks that have taken place, but the hardcore professionals don’t use telecommunications for anything other than their press releases.
This mess is eating up resources that might actually be used to for the traditional investigations that still seem to produce results.