Verizon Customer?

[JudeBaldo]

The name of the startup that my buddy and I started last year (back when I hit you up when I was in San Fran for that conference) is Prizzm. We've since changed the name but that's an unfortunate coincidence.

Haha oh man. How's that going by the way? Your anecdote reminded me of this:

http://www.snopes.com/business/market/incubus.asp

[Fresno Bob]

I still blame Chenney....

[bryanbutler]

i told you the thread would turn this way ...

[johnnya24]

The Guardian are really drip feeding this out ... this is not really a surprise though. But I wonder how the Chinese will be feeling about this given the way the US have tried to take the moral high ground on their cyber activities ... especially since Obama is due to meet the Chinese President in 4 hours ... they should have put this story out earlier today, or yesterday

Obama orders US to draw up overseas target list for cyber-attacks

Full text of the Presidential Directive

Barack Obama has ordered his senior national security and intelligence officials to draw up a list of potential overseas targets for US cyber-attacks, a top secret presidential directive obtained by the Guardian reveals.

The 18-page Presidential Policy Directive 20, issued in October last year but never published, states that what it calls Offensive Cyber Effects Operations (OCEO) "can offer unique and unconventional capabilities to advance US national objectives around the world with little or no warning to the adversary or target and with potential effects ranging from subtle to severely damaging".

It says the government will "identify potential targets of national importance where OCEO can offer a favorable balance of effectiveness and risk as compared with other instruments of national power".

[johnnya24]

Waiting for the first person to identify the problem as being the people leaking this confidential material.

[Roto Rooter]

[heyelander]

David Simon's take on this...

http://davidsimon.com/we-are-shocked-shocked/

Yes, I can hear the panicked libertarians and liberals and Obama-haters wailing in rare unison: But what about all the innocent Americans caught up in this voracious, overreaching dragnet? To which the answer is obvious if you think about the scale of this: What dragnet?

Your son’s devotional calls to 1-800-BEATOFF? Your daughter’s call from the STD clinic? Your brother-in-law calling you from his office at Goldman with that whispered insider-tip on that biomed stock? Is that what you’re worried about?

Take a deep breath and think:

When the government grabs the raw data thousands of phone calls, they’re probably going to examine those calls. They’re going to look to establish a pattern of behavior to justify more investigation and ultimately, if they can, elevate their surveillance to actual monitoring of conversations. Sure, enough.

When the government grabs every single fucking telephone call made from the United States over a period of months and years, it is not a prelude to monitoring anything in particular. Why not? Because that is tens of billions of phone calls and for the love of god, how many agents do you think the FBI has? How many computer-runs do you think the NSA can do? When the government asks for something, it is notable to wonder what they are seeking and for what purpose. When they ask for everything, it is not for specific snooping or violations of civil rights, but rather a data base that is being maintained as an investigative tool.

[chancellor]

When the government grabs every single fucking telephone call made from the United States over a period of months and years, it is not a prelude to monitoring anything in particular. Why not? Because that is tens of billions of phone calls and for the love of god, how many agents do you think the FBI has? How many computer-runs do you think the NSA can do? When the government asks for something, it is notable to wonder what they are seeking and for what purpose. When they ask for everything, it is not for specific snooping or violations of civil rights, but rather a data base that is being maintained as an investigative tool.

It would probably stagger David Simon's little mind to know exactly what kind of computing power the NSA has at their beck and call. ECHELON could almost do what's being described here, and that was in 2001. Computing power has increased roughly by a factor of 256 (using Moore's Law) since then.

[amcg]

With both Microsoft and Google involved there's a huge potential impact here on corporate adoption of cloud computing.

Interestingly, both Google and Facebook came out this evening with remarkably...remarkably... similar statements denying all knowledge of Prism... https://docs.google.com/document/d/1...7cS-I-d6E/edit

[johnnya24]

David Simon's take on this...

http://davidsimon.com/we-are-shocked-shocked/

His website is down ... link not working (for me anyway).

It's not often you hear David Simon coming off with naive stuff. He clearly doesn't realize the extent of current computing power. Heck even the power of affordable commercial processing is staggering. The authorities may not have the man power to properly investigate even big cases ... but they sure as hell have the processing power.

I actually really disagree with the sentiments he's expressing in this statement (I can't read the whole article) ... and I do believe that David Simon is one of the best commentators and observers out there. A lot of public outrage is exactly what is needed here.

... and besides that. It's not just peoples reactions that matter. No-one is really that surprised that this stuff is going on ... although even I didn't imagine they were simply demanding all phone records and sitting with wide open pipes to all the main servers ... that's disgusting. Snooping the chatter is bad enough (but defensible to a degree), but this is unlawful, unconstitutional and in open contravention of every principle of Liberal Democracy. I think its also the fact that people feel betrayed and are being asked again to question their votes and the democratic process (which is ultimately a good thing, albeit futile) ... just like the Bush years. So much of the reaction to the Bush years are bracketed by the shame that we all participated in it in one way or another. It's happening again with Obama ... only this time people are being conned not cowed.

How much disillusionment and disappointment can people take?

[JudeBaldo]

His website is down ... link not working (for me anyway).

It's not often you hear David Simon coming off with naive stuff. He clearly doesn't realize the extent of current computing power. Heck even the power of affordable commercial processing is staggering. The authorities may not have the man power to properly investigate even big cases ... but they sure as hell have the processing power.

I actually really disagree with the sentiments he's expressing in this statement (I can't read the whole article) ... and I do believe that David Simon is one of the best commentators and observers out there. A lot of public outrage is exactly what is needed here.

... and besides that. It's not just peoples reactions that matter. No-one is really that surprised that this stuff is going on ... although even I didn't imagine they were simply demanding all phone records and sitting with wide open pipes to all the main servers ... that's disgusting. Snooping the chatter is bad enough (but defensible to a degree), but this is unlawful, unconstitutional and in open contravention of every principle of Liberal Democracy. I think its also the fact that people feel betrayed and are being asked again to question their votes and the democratic process (which is ultimately a good thing, albeit futile) ... just like the Bush years. So much of the reaction to the Bush years are bracketed by the shame that we all participated in it in one way or another. It's happening again with Obama ... only this time people are being conned not cowed.

How much disillusionment and disappointment can people take?

Oh God I hope he's okay.

I love David Simon's work but he's dead wrong here. You don't even really need manpower to parse through all of that data, you simply need algorithms. I've got two PhD buddies that started an augmented reality company to sell furniture that would blow peoples minds. And that's for couches. I imagine the NSA, probably has the largest collection of quants and com. sci. geeks in the world tethered to sick hardware.

Mr. NSA Guy if you're reading this, I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU. That Roto Rooter guy, he slept with your wife.

[chancellor]

mr. Nsa guy if you're reading this, i love you i love you i love you. That roto rooter guy, he slept with your wife.

lolol!

[johnnya24]

Oh God I hope he's okay.

I love David Simon's work but he's dead wrong here. You don't even really need manpower to parse through all of that data, you simply need algorithms. I've got two PhD buddies that started an augmented reality company to sell furniture that would blow peoples minds. And that's for couches. I imagine the NSA, probably has the largest collection of quants and com. sci. geeks in the world tethered to sick hardware.

Mr. NSA Guy if you're reading this, I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU. That Roto Rooter guy, he slept with your wife.

I finally got it to work ... I think he's off his meds or something ... it's a 4000 word rant ... and he's taking on all comers in the comments section.

He's totally wrong here ... and since he's not the kind of guy to admit he's wrong, it's quite an entertaining read

Edit: there is some interesting debate in there. I keep coming back to the huge difference between snooping chatter, and mass hovering of peoples random data. He doesn't seem to want to draw a difference. The difference is massive. At one point he even defended the secretive courts signing off on these data hovering orders as an upgrade as it was previous unregulated ... ignoring the fact that the exact same thing is now simply "regulated" and by extension justified by the lawmakers ... in other words breaching the constitution is now being regulated by justified at the highest levels. That is far worse than being unregulated in my mind. What's the point of regulation if it's simply a rubber stamp? If they're not going to regulate the mass random hovering of peoples data, what will they regulate?

Aside from the fact that the very existence of these activities (even the prior presumed or possible existence) makes it more likely that real criminals and real threats will simple encrypt all electronic data and communications (which they probably already do ... considering it's so easy to do and difficult to break) ... so in the long run, it's really only the average citizen who will suffer the infringement.

He seems to collapse the difference between law enforcement at the micro and macro levels. They are two different things, with two vastly different agendas. He's obsessed with man-hours, and analyzing the data ... programs can sift, filter and flag this data in no time. I think he still pictures hundreds of people manually sifting pages of data. He still views this from the end-user point of view (i.e. the police building a case against a citizen using this data). That is really not the point.

The authorities have no right to this data indiscriminately. In the pre-internet days they could theoretically have fixed surveillance equipment to every phone in the country, and then listen whenever they wanted. They could do this ... it would never have been allowed or accepted. Yet according to David Simon, we should just roll over and accept this when it comes to internet data, electronic and mobile based communications ... because he seems to believe that how it could be used against us is being overestimated.

I guess he's never experienced how easy it is to hack a "secure" internet connection. A friend of mine a few years back had the middle apartment of a 3 story building. He was paranoid about Internet snooping (rightly so as it seems) so refused to have a connection in his name. So he "borrowed" his neighbours connections ... all 4 of them. He swapped and changed. So easy to hack into. How soon before someone gets pulled over for a traffic offense, has their data checked, illegal activity found several years prior from a hacker (unprovable) ... and gets jailed for shit they knew nothing about.

[JudeBaldo]

lolol!

Oh hello Chance. Glad to have you back. Your mention of Moore's Law made me shed a tear. Those Intel guys are the stuff of Silicon Valley legend.

[JudeBaldo]

The Guardian are really drip feeding this out ... this is not really a surprise though. But I wonder how the Chinese will be feeling about this given the way the US have tried to take the moral high ground on their cyber activities ... especially since Obama is due to meet the Chinese President in 4 hours ... they should have put this story out earlier today, or yesterday

Obama orders US to draw up overseas target list for cyber-attacks

Full text of the Presidential Directive

Well it may actually end up being the Cold War, nuclear version of mutually assured destruction. That may result in somewhat chilling cyber-aggression. So in the grand scheme of things I'm less concerned about the moral high ground as it pertains to spying on citizens than I am with Unit 61398. Their theft of US IP and probes on US infrastructure has huge ramifications for America's well-being.