"PRISM Surveillance Makes Verizon Surveillance Look Like Kid's Stuff"
That's the headline on the Ryan Gallagher piece on Slate I saw just before I had to get pillow-bound. An excerpt:
It appears the National Security Agency's sweeping surveillance is not something only Verizon customers should be concerned about. The agency has also reportedly obtained access to the central servers of major U.S. Internet companies as part of a secret program that involves the monitoring of emails, file transfers, photos, videos, chats, and even live surveillance of search terms.The Washington Post disclosed Thursday that it had obtained classified PowerPoint slides detailing the program, codenamed PRISM, from a career intelligence officer who felt "horror" over its privacy-invading capabilities. "They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type," the source told the newspaper.
Participating in the PRISM program, according to a selection of the leaked slides, are Internet titans including Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, AOL, Skype, YouTube, and Apple. It was established in 2007 and is used by NSA analysts to spy on Internet communications as part of the agency's foreign intelligence-gathering work.
...The PRISM program is far more extensive and intrusive than the Verizon phone records grab because it reportedly includes communications content and seemingly unfettered access to the internal servers of the world's largest Internet companies.
Under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the NSA can obtain a secret court order to lawfully intercept communications from foreign targets, and in some cases the agency admits that it can sweep up Americans' communications incidentally. But spy agencies having direct access to the servers of companies like Microsoft and Google, which privacy advocates have previously warned about, raises major questions about the extent of companies' undisclosed complicity in government surveillance. In a recent transparency report, for instance, Microsoft claimed that it had received "no requests" requiring it to hand over communications content for Skype users--which is cast into serious doubt if it has allowed the NSA direct access to its servers to mine chats apparently at will.
Yoohoo...anybody out there worried about our civil liberties yet?
An important note I picked up from a technical site: The companies have stated that they do not provide access to their servers. This is a meaningless denial. PRISM apparently relies on a direct data tap (think of a prism splitting light into two beams), and the duplicated data is then processed on government servers.
a_random_guy at June 7, 2013 1:54 AM
I think it's time for all of us to add sigs to our emails that contain a bunch of trigger words to foul up their searches.
I mean, it's not like we can depend on our lawmakers or judges to protect our civil liberties.
Astra at June 7, 2013 4:38 AM
I think it's time for all of us to add sigs to our emails that contain a bunch of trigger words to foul up their searches.
The emacs editor has a command that invoked "spook mode", and would randomly pull words and phrases that were guessed to be triggers.
I R A Darth Aggie at June 7, 2013 6:29 AM
I've got to read up some more on this. Off the top of my head, I've got some questions about how this actually works and how plausible it is that nobody noticed it before. In order for this to work, at a minimum there would have to be some software inside the service providers' servers that provides the tap funciton, and someone would have to have written and maintained that software. And it's seldom the case that one piece of software operates in complete isolation from all of the other software that it shares the machine with. (In fact, trying to accomplish that very thing is a significant problem in computer science.) Additionally, it would have required some substantial comm capabilities. Unlikely that nobody would have noticed a fist-sized bundle of T3 lines going off to nowhere in particular.
To me, this suggests a different approach: It would be easier to keep hidden if the capability was something that rode on top of the service providers' internal networks and databases. Additionally, this way first-level filtering could be provided at the site, reducing the amount of longhaul comm that has to go back to Langley or wherever the government users' access point is. The government-controlled part of the system would have to be in the service providers' facilities, but that could be disguised as some co-located value-added service, or just another tenant in the building. I have no inside knowledge, but if I was going to try to implement a system like this, that's how I'd do it.
Cousin Dave at June 7, 2013 7:10 AM
I think I'm gonna become a luddite.
Sabrina at June 7, 2013 9:40 AM
I've been following this throughout the day as best I can while at work. I'm seeing it as potentially the biggest political story since Watergate.
Today, execs from Google, Microsoft, and several other companies are all denying that they've ever heard of PRISM or that they participated in any such program. They also deny that they've provided the government with any information without a warrant. So either the material that the WaPo received is an elaborate hoax, or a bunch of bigwig corporate execs are lying through their teeth. Interestingly, I just saw a report that said that Apple refused to participate until some time after Steve Jobs died.
Congress is getting nervous that they are also being spied on, and that the other two branches are ganging up on them. A Congressional committee asked Eric Holder whether he could assure them that they had not obtained phone records of members of Congress in the Verizon records case, and he could not or would not give them that assurance.
Cousin Dave at June 7, 2013 9:46 AM
Does anyone still seriously believe, the the FBI stumbled onto the emails between David Petraeus, and Paula Broadwell "accidentally"?
Isab at June 7, 2013 12:27 PM
Obama's plan to destroy privacy around the world.
And the Brit who rips him a new one:
http://www.politico.com/story/2013/06/glenn-greenwald-us-privacy-92400.html?ml=po_r
Gog_Magog_Carpet_Reclaimers at June 7, 2013 4:52 PM
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