My brother worked for years in the intelligence community. One of the common stereotypes within the IC regards the fact that Mormons are heavily overrepresented, for various reasons that involve foreign language skills from mission trips, a reputation for respecting authority, abstinence from drugs/alcohol, family connections, ease of gaining security clearances, etc. The stereotype in the IC regarding Mormons is they never "question." The dozens of friends I have that work in the IC say that the stereotype is accurate.
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The apparent incorruptibility of Mormons' moral righteousness make them ideal candidates for the nation's law enforcement and intelligence agencies.
Mormons are disproportionately represented in the CIA. A recruiter told the Salt Lake Tribune that returned Mormon missionaries are valued for their foreign language skills, abstinence from drugs and alcohol, and respect for authority "
I wonder if this has bearings on constructing the new data center in Utah?
I'll go ahead and contribute to this discussion, since, well, I'm a Mormon. I was a little bit shocked to see this be the top comment.
I served a mission in eastern Ukraine (Донецк, Харьков) from 2008-2010 and there learned to speak Russian fluently. Since returning home I've had probably a half dozen offers to work for the FBI or other government offices. Every now and then the highest level Russian classes at BYU will get an announcement from some government agency trying to recruit us, and a lot of them are rumored to actually be the CIA.
It's more than just the language fluency (not all return missionaries speak the same level of Russian,) it's also having lived in the culture and living very conservative lifestyles (no smoking/drinking, emphasis on families, etc.) and fierce loyalty. It's the overall perfect stereotype for what government agencies want.
Combine that with how cheap everything is ($80K/year is a pretty solid job here and $500K bought my parents a 3-story 3,000 square foot house). That's the reason Adobe, Microsoft, Novell, eBay, Overstock.com, Goldman Sachs etc. have all started to put up shop in Utah - it's ideal if you want people who are content to do a good job with their 8-5 and go home to their families.
The new data center in utah is probably a mixture of all of these things; everything is uber-cheap including workforce, so why not put a data center there? (Bluehost is here as well).
Why were you "shocked"? Was there anything at all I said that wasn't accurate? Mormons are absolutely, astoundingly overrepresented in the United States Federal Government Intelligence Community. This is a well-known and documented fact.
When I hear "shocked", it makes me think that you think my comment is prejudiced in some way, or is perhaps making a wrong judgement on motivations for locating a data center.
Anyone who thinks there wasn't a big "there's plenty of Mormons there to recruit for the job" factor in the decision is kidding themselves. Cheap land can be found in virtually every part of the country. There are tons of tech workers in Colorado, Arizona, Alabama (Huntsville), Texas (Austin/San Antonio metro area), etc. All of these places have super cheap land.
Conversely a certain subset of Mormons are going to be very vulnerable to a certain type of attack that the regular (incl. more liberal subsets of) population would not be vulnerable to.
A gay mormon (which is just as common as a gay catholic, or a gay atheist) will be likely to be in the closet. They would probably be ostracised by family and friends if they were outed, lots of people in the general community would not be ostracised. Mormons are more vulnerable to that form of attack and compromise.
Yup. I would be very wary of any article claiming that a religious group is preferred by a government because of their righteous lifestyle. It's just so many more opportunities for blackmail. You'd have to screen those candidates so carefully, and you couldn't even do the usual thing of asking their family, friends, neighbours etc, because these are precisely the people they are hiding their quirks from.
If you have a very open person that engaged on the occasional responsible drink, they are much more useful to spy agencies. How do you blackmail someone whose life is an open book? On the other hand, it could be relatively easy to blackmail a Mormon over some minor (from an outsiders perspective) infraction, particularly as the price for being excluded from the Mormon community is so high
You still need to understand the Mormon culture and church more so. I'm not sure what you mean by being excluded (Excommunicated, shunned, offended?) isn't absolute, in fact, no one really is excluded from the church as all are forever welcome (Some extreme edge cases aside) back. This is in an ideal situation and I know that in some locations that maybe a local leader or some local members because of lack of experience, their own mistakes or whatever don't truly welcome and help someone return. I'm also curious what are some of the minor infractions that were induce someone being excluded from the Mormon community..
Not all Mormons hide everything from their family, friends and leaders. We're encouraged to do the opposite, actually, in appropriateness and relativeness especially so when it's something quite bad which are the things someone would be blackmailed about. You wouldn't go blackmailing someone because he didn't read the Ensign every month which is something a Mormon probably wouldn't really bother telling anyone.
Also, someone who is a Mormon probably has fewer things to be blackmailed about—lewd pictures, drunken mistakes, egregious offenses to others and the law, hidden relationships (Sexual or otherwise), etc. are not things we seek out, instead, we actively avoid those things and not only actions but locations (Bars, night clubs, etc.) where more embarrassing/illegal things tend to happen. This is based on what I've seen and learnt throughout my life and I'm not pretending that these are any great or completely accurate comments, simply some postulations.
someone who is a Mormon probably has fewer things to be blackmailed about—lewd pictures, drunken mistakes, egregious offenses to others and the law, hidden relationships (Sexual or otherwise), etc. are not things we seek out
You're presuming that non-heterosexual mormons are able to just "turn that off" easily, without fail. There are numerous examples of either religious leaders or conservative political leaders engaging in same sex activity to imply that this is not possible.
You'd have to screen those candidates so carefully
I doubt that's even possible. How do you detect if a candidate is actually homosexual if they've been lying to themselves, their family and friends for decades? They're only homosexual activity might be the odd shame-filled masterbation session every few months, or the rare hook up. All it takes is one of those hook up people to blackmail the candidate.
Weellll, as long as it's only a thought-crime, you probably can't really blackmail the person. It's only when they act on things that they become vulnerable to negative social consequences, and hence blackmailing to avoid said consequences.
A skillful polygraph interrogator (erm... i mean operator) will know and make sure to dig into that. Morality related questions would play a big part in the process.
Of course! Not trying to say its all Mormons, I'm simply commenting on the various explanations for Mormons being heavily overrepresented in the IC, and linking it to the facility being built in Utah.
Where is there farm land which is anywhere near as expensive as building a warehouse or data center? And where there's low population density?
The cost of farm land seems to be around $9000/acre, and certainly under $20,000/acre. The major exceptions are places like Sonoma County, where vineyards are still profitable even though the land can go for $100,000/acre. But this is also a place where there's high population, so excluded from consideration.
A warehouse, for 30,000 sq. foot (about 0.7 acres) costs around $3 million, as does a 20,000 sq. foot office. (On average across the US.)
I wrote "The cost of farm land seems to be around $9000/acre, and certainly under $20,000/acre."
If you're talking about oil land, then that's not really farm land, is it? It's obvious that land with good mineral/oil rights can be worth a lot more.
In any case, oil doesn't seem like a good example. A derrick and pump don't need much in the way of land, and slant drilling means that any really expensive land can be avoided. I see prices in North Dakota of 'certainly under $20,000', even in that oil boom state:
"Linda Fisher, a Land Department leasing coordinator, said the three quarterly sales [in 2010] have fetched a record $269.2 million for about 135,000 acres, compared with about $103 million for 137,800 acres for all of 2009." (http://www.deseretnews.com/article/700059300/ND-oil-lease-au... ). That's an average of about $2,000/acre, though the boom has continued since then.
"At about the same time, records and interviews show, other companies were purchasing drilling rights to land on and near the reservation for $300 to $1,000 per acre plus royalties as high as 22.5 percent.... Two lawsuits allege that by buying Dakota-3, Williams effectively paid more than $10,000 per acre for those rights." (http://www.opb.org/news/article/land-grab-cheats-north-dakot...; )
I haven't found anything which says that $9,000/acre for oil land is "really a low figure these days." If anything, that seems to be only somewhat below the going rate.
On the other hand, it is high compared to non-irrigated farm land, which goes for no more than $3,000/acre for the most expensive county average in North Dakota. (The value in most counties is usually under $1,000/acre.)
So, where is this $20,000+/acre land you're talking about?
Oil land is farm land, what is under doesn't affect farming. I've seen 30k in western ND. Back, to the original point of the original poster, the land isn't dirt cheap.
I'm confused now, to the point where I don't understand why you are commenting.
The topic asked about "bearings on constructing the new data center in Utah".
This specific branch started with "Low population density is almost redundant with "Cheap land"'. You said 'Not is the case where resources are found under said land or the land is farm land.'
That's two different cases: 1) resources are found under said land, and 2) said land is farm land.
I pointed out that category #2, "farm land", is generally not expensive compared to the price of building a data center. There are places where farm land costs $100,000/acre, but those are also places with high population density. Hence, I am in complete agreement with the statement that "low population density is almost redundant with farm land that doesn't have resources under said land."
You continue to talk about land which is in both category #1 and category #2. But that is not what my comment is about, and I never meant to imply that.
However, when I research it, I find that oil lands are not enough to greatly affect land which is both farm land and oil land. (BTW, not all farm land is oil land, and not all oil land is farm land.) I therefore would like more than your un-attributed claim that there is cropland going for $30K/acre in ND. The only examples I can find are for places which also have buildings on the land, which are included in the price.
I think would be misleading to include a $80,000 home on 5 acres of land for a total price of $100,00 as meaning that the land itself is worth $20,000 per acre. That isn't the situation we're discussing, since few would spend $100,00 on 5 acres with a house, only to tear down the house to build a data center, if 5 acres of land are available nearby for only $20,000.
"North Dakota cropland values increased by about 42 percent during 2012, according to Andrew Swenson, North Dakota State University Extension Service farm management specialist. ... The drivers that have pushed land values have been well-documented. Grain prices from 2007 to the present have been much higher than any year prior to 2007. Also, yields generally have been strong. For example, the three highest wheat yields ever have occurred within the past four years. This combination has provided several years of strong profit for crop producers, which has fueled their financial ability and desire to buy land. ... A factor that has been just as important in driving land values has been low interest rates. Interest rates to finance land purchases are attractive, while returns and confidence on alternative investments have been weak."
You'll notice that oil is not mentioned in that list as a major factor affecting farm prices.
That document also links to a PDF showing "the average per-acre values of cropland in North Dakota from 2007 to 2013." The highest average prices are in the South Red River Valley at just under $4,200 per acre. In western ND the highest average prices are $1,500/acre.
These numbers are so far from $30K that your $30K number must be an unusual outlier. It's certainly not high enough to affect someone's decision to build a data center in western ND.
Please provide some evidence which confirms your understanding.
Yes, some oil land is farm land. Some oil wells are on urban land, including in a shopping mall in L.A. Some are on grazing land. Some are in desert. Some are on the tundra. Not much farming goes on at the edge of the Beaufort Sea.
Compared to the price of the data center, where the building alone costs $2 million to construct, $30K/acre is dirt cheap.
And I still don't believe you about the price of land. It must have been an extreme outlier, since I can't find any advertisements, any government reports, or anything else which agrees with you.
Utah overall population density is low but the Salt Lake metro is in geographically constrained valleys and fairly dense (maybe halfway between LA and Midwestern densities). The deserts and mountains are not useful for the NSA.
I live in SLC and have met quite a few people over the last few years who lost jobs in the financial sector, usually in the NYC area, and subsequently moved to Utah.
Besides, I presume the CIA factors that into their recruitment. Clearly, they don't need ineffectual communication with foreign assets so they would control agents who do just that. I imagine if Mormons are employed en masse, it would be for translations of already recorded data.
Not only does this seem like a gross generalization but it also isn't responding to anything the parent commenter said - where does it say that Mormons are also over-represented in the population of interrogators?
As others have pointed out, you made a quite a sweeping generalisation. What I will add is that what other general groups of people have more emphasis and training on teaching skills and not because it's directly applicable to their career? I'm a Mormon. We have manuals (Publicly available, for example, Preach My Gospel[1] and Teaching, No Greater Call[2]) that focus on asking good questions, empathy and rapport, lesson plans (Interrogation plans?), understanding those you teach, studying and using resources (Scriptures), how to tell if the students are learning, different teaching methods, listening skills, etc. From an early age we have opportunities to teach too and this continues on forever—much to the disdain of some members though haha.
On my mission I spoke with everyone from those in prisons to the general populace to someone running for president of the country. He did become the president too. I/we did quite well in conversing with the apparent equivalent of foreign informants in the context of this discussion.
Well then full-disclosure, I'm a Mormon, I served the usual 2-year mission speaking Spanish, and I used to work on said software :)
The church operates Missionary Training Centers with the main one in Provo, UT and other smaller centers distributed around the world. When somebody starts their mission they go there for a few weeks for a crash course in how to teach religious priniciples, the policies for missionaries, etc. A lot of missionaries are assigned to foreign countries or even language-specific assignments in the US. Those missionaries stay for 2-3 months to learn the language. It tries to be a fairly immersive program, taught by native speakers of the language and former missionaries, and has a fairly significant software component to it as well. I don't know specifics first-hand, but it was widely spoken about that groups in governments, etc... would visit to learn more about why the program was so effective in so little time. I don't think it's entirely the software, it's a pretty good program all-around - but it's certainly nothing to dismiss.
edit: The main website is http://www.mtc.byu.edu, but as language learning consulting is hardly their main goal, I doubt you'll find much more of an answer to your question there.
I'm glad someone posted this. My immediate thought after reading the breaking news about the massive phone surveillance was, "wait, did people not think this was happening?" I'm really not a conspiracy nut, but that Wired article and the NYTimes reporting made it pretty clear that the Gov't is pretty much collecting everything they can get their hands on.
Glad to finally see some outrage though.
Legitimate question: what's new about what is breaking in the news right now? Merely confirmation that the NSA is conducting indiscriminate phone-taps?
Journalist Glenn Greenwald obtained documents from a leak that confirm the NSA has secretly been requiring Verizon (and presumably the same for other networks) to provide the complete information (location, duration, id) of every single call, national or international, on an ongoing daily basis.
There is no discrimination - this is everybody, all the time.
That's kind of a big deal.
It's also pretty damn brave of whoever leaked the document.
Yes. Under Obama, the Justice Department has prosecuted more leakers of confidential information than prior administrations. However, the number is 6, so whether this is due to a difference in policy or random occurrences is not clear to me.
> whether this is due to a difference in policy or random occurrences is not clear to me
Also, 6 is a numerator. The denominator is unknown. Are there more leaks under the Obama administration, period? Are people more willing to leak? I don't feel like there's enough information available to make a judgement call.
The Obama administration has been much more forward and harsh against leaks that past administrations. At least, it appears that way to people looking in from the outside.
There is a very interesting book called The Puzzle Palace, about the early history of the NSA and its forerunners. The telegraph system had ATT cooperating with the government to let them have a copy of everything. This is before telephones. I always assumed this never stopped.
Project SHAMROCK. It ended in 1975 due to the scandals that came to light during Church committee hearings (and Watergate), hearings that resulted in things like FISA and the Congressional select committees on intelligence oversight.
I'm relying on my memory of the book from many years ago, and I don't have a copy any longer, but I think I recall that the telegraph eavesdropping began way before SHAMROCK, in the early days of the telegraph. In other words, as long as we have had electrical communications, our government has been listening in. Before that, of course, there was the post office....
This has been around for much longer than people realize. What does everyone think this is used for these days: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON All those intercept points didn't just go away.
Wasn't there a legal requirement that ISPs install some sort of box for law enforcement usage back in the early 2000s?
Also, I recall reading article from around the same time where a network operator noticed mysterious taps that appeared in his fiber rack over night. These were at a major peering point(lvl3 or att?). The taps went into the ceiling and over a wall. When he questioned their existence, he wasn't allowed to remove them or investigate further.
This has been going on ever since the internet and cell phones became popular. The difference now is that they are less secretive about it. See before, you had to have your ally(the UK, AUS, etc...) log communications for you and you'd log communications for them. Then there's no risk of federal or local laws getting in the way. It looks like just good old fashioned espionage. I guess after 9/11, the powers that be felt that wasn't good enough.
> what's new about what is breaking in the news right now?
That they no longer operate on a cloak-and-dagger basis, and that all three branches (judicial, executive, legislative) are demonstrating an unprecedented level of cooperation -- the "checks and balances" we so hold dear in democracy are now null and void.
Previously, plausible deniability and "neither confirm nor deny" public relations policies dominated the privacy debate arena, however now we can move forward beyond that and we can have a frank and honest discussion about it all.
The window of opportunity to debate these broad-sweeping and baseless violations of privacy is distinctly ajar, however it is closing quickly.
The various levels of government will soon rely quite heavily on this domestic surveillance network and implementing restrictions after the fact is almost always impossible.
2nd Amendment is probably the check and balance with the least potential efficacy these days -- pro-gun supporters who tout right to bear arms to protect against government tyranny are living a fantasy. Realistically there is 0 chance an armed citizenry rising against the establishment would pose any threat to them -- the cards (and methods of control) are stacked wildly in their favor.
Realistically there is 0 chance an armed citizenry rising against the establishment would pose any threat to them -- the cards (and methods of control) are stacked wildly in their favor.
I think that is true only if you make certain assumptions - assumptions which I consider unfounded.
For example, if an armed revolution broke out, are we assuming that no military units would defect and join the rebellion? If so, I'd consider that questionable.
Also, are we assuming that the rebels are armed only with pistols, shotguns and semiautomatic rifles? No way... first, factor in IEDs and homemade weapons, and then factor in the likely capture of at least some military grade weaponry, and/or ilicit supply of those weapons to the rebels.
Nukes aren't even part of this equation, so no point bringing that up at all.
The thing I'd worry most about in a rebellion scenario, is the air superiority of the standing military. But if we're talking guerrilla warfare... well, it's hard to bomb an enemy when you don't know where they are.
Finally, consider sheer numbers: I forget the numbers now from last time I looked this up, but the number of members of the standing US military is fairly small relative to the population of the US. And there are a LOT of guns out there. And as somebody (possibly Stalin) once said "quantity has a quality all it's own". Get enough Americans to participate, and you'd have a chance.
Anyway... not to suggest that it's a given, nor do I hope this scenario ever unfolds. Just food for thought.
It's useful when discussing this topic to break the word "spy" down into more discrete terms to understand exactly what we are discussing.
I found this article to be useful in differentiating the various terms:
On its face, the document suggests that the U.S. government regularly collects and stores all domestic telephone records. I use the caveat because there are several ways to interpret it, assuming it is real. (It looks real.)
A few definitions: to "collect" means to gather and store; to "analyze" means that a computer or human actually does something with the records; to "intercept" means that a computer or human actually listens to or records calls.
...
The NSA, under the FISA Amendments Act, is able to analyze metadata, like incoming and outgoing call records, so long as the Attorney General certifies that a particular set of information is useful for reasons of national security. Then, the NSA asks the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to order that a company comply. As that bill was being ironed out, this step was requested by private companies because they wanted protection from lawsuits in case innocents — or millions of innocents — found that the NSA had gathered their call information.
My own understanding is that the NSA routinely collects millions of domestic-to-domestic phone records. It does not do anything with them unless there is a need to search through them for lawful purposes. That is, an analyst at the NSA cannot legally simply perform random searches through the stored data. He or she needs to have a reason, usually some intelligence tip. That would allow him or her to segregate the part of the data that's necessary to analyze, and proceed from there.
In a way, it makes sense for the NSA to collect all telephone records because it can't know in advance what sections or slices it might need in the future. It does not follow that simply because the NSA collects data that it is legal for the NSA to use the data for foreign intelligence or counter-terrorism analysis.
This is written specifically about the telephone call metadata, but being able to differentiate exactly what is collected about Internet traffic would also aid this discussion. Unfortunately this would only be possible if the government was more transparent about what is being collected.
We know exactly what's being collected: all the Internet traffic they can get their hands on. They have installed beam splitters on Internet backbones at facilities around the country:
And are funneling all of the traffic to a datacenter in Utah with "yottabyte" scale capacity, with the goal of having enough capacity to archive the data for 100 years:
The NSA whistleblower who disclosed the project to the public was the person who wrote the backend of the system, which was originally designed for foreign data collection only. The NSA later repurposed the system for domestic data collection too. The goal, according to him, is to build models of every single person in the country, model the social graph, and be able to classify people as potential threats.
The goal, according to him, is to build models of every single person in the country, model the social graph, and be able to classify people as potential threats.
Another example of government waste and redundancy. We already have Facebook for this!
The mythos of Room 641A is troubling as it relies on the idea that spying at 10 or 20 such sites across a handful of providers actually sees enough internet traffic to build a useful picture of US internet activities.
AT&T is just one of ~15 Tier 1 providers, never mind large number of tier 2 providers that carry the majority of internet traffic. There would need to be 1-10 such rooms in every NFL city and metro area in the US to do that owing to peering (public & private) and regional traffic. IMO that's simply too big of a undertaking to happen in secrecy.
Far more likely that it happened to be a handy place to watch traffic from transpacific cables or non-US IP traffic from non-US Tier 1. Actually, going by 10-20 sites I'd put my money on spying on non-US Tier 1 provider traffic.
Your expert analysis flies directly in the face of the testimony of former NSA analyst turned whistleblower William Binney. Given he wrote the software that underlies Stellar Wind, I'm going to go with his assessment of the situation.
His claim is that Stellar Wind was originally designed specifically for foreign intelligence gathering, then repurposed by the NSA to do domestic spying. Domestic spying was his motivation for leaving the NSA and becoming a whistleblower in the first place.
Binney wrote worked on ThinThread which was a competitor to Trailblazer which is reportedly the software behind Stellar Wind. None of the public information that I've seen says he had any role in the deployment of Trailblazer.
The fact that a program has the capability to process certain information does not have any bering on whether or not the information is actually capable of being collected and delivered to the program.
I guess it depends on how broadly one defines "all the Internet traffic they can get their hands on". I'm saying they can't get their hands on that much, and what they can, based on the reported locations of other intercept rooms, could be legitimately foreign traffic at points where foreign providers peer.
So far as tapping any significant portion of US internet traffic goes, a large portion of the entities on this list: ftp://ftp.arin.net/info/asn.txt would have to be in on it.
I don't need to think anything about Binney's motives to reason about the possible scope of surveillance on IP traffic.
Based on what you'd have to do to capture foreign traffic as opposed to US traffic it makes sense that the Room 641A sites are intended to capture foreign traffic. All the public information supports this. There isn't any public disclosure of the type of infrastructure needed to comprehensively monitor US IP traffic.
If they are trying to capture foreign IP traffic there would need to be a intercept device where the foreign network interconnects with the US networks and where cables land. Large foreign providers tend to have 20 or fewer IP POPs in the US clustered in the same places. Look at networks maps from Tata, ReTN, NTT, etc. You will see many of the same locations. To tap them you'd put a intercept site in Seattle, Bay Area, Chicago, Miami, New York, and Virginia. Maybe Atlanta & Texas.
By the nature of the internet US traffic would get caught in that. E.g. ReTN had too much inbound traffic so they sold a college in Chicago some cheap outbound traffic. Now ReTN loses a router and their peering goes down so the bits to that college get hauled out to Europe and back. Bits just got captured. ThinThread (Binney's program) reportedly accounted for that and would mask US person PII pending a court order to decrypt it.
The fact that Trailblazer doesn't mask PII is a issue, but both programs would have captured US person PII, the difference is the addition of a bureaucratic hoop that the current and past administration would order jumped in a heartbeat. It isn't like ThinThread required a FISA Judge to walk over with a crypto token and descramble the data.
The nature of the problem means some US traffic will be caught but that does not make it a domestic spying program.
Unlike many other countries with a domestic internet surveillance regime (Syria, Egypt, Iran just to name a few) the US does not mandate that traffic pass through the national carrier or otherwise limit connections within its borders. Syria can drop in a few Blue Coat boxes and catch everything. In the US you'd need thousands, if not tens of thousands of intercept devices -- one or more for every edge in the graph of ASs (http://www.caida.org/research/topology/as_core_network/). It is not a insurmountable problem but it would take a act of Congress (likely challenged to the Supreme Court) and the cooperation of a lot of people to implement. It would not happen overnight or in secret.
Now, US providers are required to support CALEA but that is targeted at individual subscribers and most manufacturer implementations aren't suited to wholesale spying.
This isn't to say 641A sites couldn't work in hand with CALEA, just that it would be a bit more legit than "omg nsa taps all the wires". E.g. 641A could be watching traffic to/from a Jihadi site hosted in France without a court order under the Protect America Act of 2007. NSA notes someone from a US IP has been posting things that indicate radicalization. NSA passes it to FBI to check out. FBI gets a court order for a CALEA tap for the US IP. FBI sends order for tap to ISP.
No wholesale tapping of US traffic is necessary. Of course in this example watching anything to/from the US without a FISA order is likely not kosher prior to PAA hence the warrantless surveillance controversy.
When fearmongering over home-grown lone wolf terrorism get louder, that's when the real trouble starts (except they probably have all the info needed for that over the counter from TransUnion etc).
So I'm confused: are you accusing William Binney of lying, or do you just think he doesn't understand Stellar Wind as well as you do? To reiterate: William Binney's allegations are that the NSA had the opportunity to intercept (and I mean in the Webster's sense, not the USSID 18 sense) only foreign traffic by putting these taps specifically on fiber entering the country, but they elected to spy on domestic traffic anyway.
And what are your credentials, exactly? Did you work for the NSA? Is there some reason I should believe you over an NSA whistleblower? As far as I can tell you're just guessing, and your guesses disagree with someone with insider knowledge.
I'm doing neither. I'm saying that nothing Binney has said or that has been leaked thus far shows evidence of a program that is designed to comprehensively intercept internet traffic between US persons and that doing so covertly is technically and politically impossible because of the number of intercept points required, not because they lack the software (we know it exists via Binney), or have a place to store it (they do-in Utah).
Putting taps on undersea cables is risky. Cables are closely monitored and quite frequently are owned by multi-country consortiums so if you don't want a party to the consortium to find out you might not want to stick a tap in the landing station. Also, you might only care about public IP traffic and not want to see piles of corporate MPLS traffic.
I'm not saying that's what happened, just that there are valid reasons why tapping fiber coming into the country wouldn't be desirable.
It is entirely possible that you are claiming a "there exists" and I'm arguing against a "for every". I'm sure we both agree that there exists a NSA program that happens to intercept some US traffic. That's what Binney and others have claimed. I'm arguing that going beyond that isn't supported by the leaks OR the nature of the internet.
I run operations at small regional Tier 2 ISP/transport provider with 25 provider edges on that AS graph that I mentioned before. I've personally installed, repaired, or inspected all cable and gear that 12 of those links traverse end to end and there weren't any secret spy boxes. So, no, I'm not just guessing. I can guarantee that quite a few people aren't having their bits snarfed wholesale when they email (local ISP mail to school mail), post on locally hosted community forums, or reserve a book at their local library.
My network may be too small to matter, but any comprehensive intercept regime would require myself and every other Tier 2 (transit + unpaid peering) ISP to cooperate.
You'd think that, but you'd be wrong. Since Smith v. Maryland (1979) the standard has been that you don't have an expectation of privacy in the records of the calls you make (as opposed to the content of those calls), on the grounds that you necessarily share that information with the phone company. This is analogous to not having any expectation of privacy on the street, eg which friends you choose to visit or which places you go that could be observed by third parties, or the lack of privacy in who mail letters to, which information is shared with the post office.
Now in 2006 Congress decided that consumers should have such privacy after all, and amended the telecommunications act of 1934 to make it illegal for phone companies to sell or share subscribers' call data, but that law contains a broad exception for law enforcement and intelligence gathering activity.
Here's a good (non-jargon) summary of the arguments on both sides from late last year: http://www.courthousenews.com/2012/10/03/50935.htm From the legal standpoint, it's important to bear this context in mind, rather than assuming the current situation is the result of massive overreach by this administration, or the government since 9-11. The fact is that the NSA of today sits atop foundations dating from from the Cold War
By chance I picked up a 70s spy novel at a thrift store the other day, and it's all about Soviet sleeper agents hidden in the US and activated by coded messages in telephone calls - the heroes are in a race against time to pinpoint the origin of the calls and interrupt the planned sequence of events. I happened to notice the book because I remembered being scared of the movie trailer as a kid since it seemed to suggest that calling the wrong number could result in a violent death (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Qg0w8qbBQo). So in the book the author was clearly worried about the openness of US society providing America's enemies with the tools of its own destruction - not unlike today's anxieties over cyber-warfare - and there's an implicit argument that high speed communications infrastructure is too powerful a force multiplier not to be under government supervision. Agree or not, it presented a surprisingly prescient understanding of asymmetrical warfare, to the point of seeming like domestic propaganda.
I mention this not to justify current NRA data collection, but to offer some historical context for how the law came to be the way it is. Too often, privacy discussions on HN are pendant on mythical notions of privacy being considered sacred until very recently. Historically (and going back all the way to the country's founding) the scope of the 4th amendment has been a lot narrower than people imagine and courts have generally not given much weight to the idea of a right to privacy. The notion that the Constitution provides a right to privacy wasn't articulated by the Supreme Court until 1965, in Griswold v. Connecticut (a case about birth control that paved the way for Roe v. Wade). See http://faculty.ncwc.edu/mstevens/410/410lect16.htm for a good overview. Griswold is still considered bad law by a lot of legal scholars, who think that any right to privacy needs to be added to the Constitution by amendment rather than extrapolated by judicial imagination.
Since Smith v. Maryland (1979) the standard has been that you don't have an expectation of privacy in the records of the calls you make (as opposed to the content of those calls), on the grounds that you necessarily share that information with the phone company.
In the future, I hope that the legal interpretation of privacy is changed. Just because we entrust a company or individual detail of our lives does not mean we should give up all privacy interest in those details. I'd like to see a roughly similar right to privacy with regard to our transactions with commercial agents as with legal or medical agents (i.e. attorney-client privilege and doctor-patient confidentiality). In other words, employing an agent to act on our behalf should not automatically remove all privacy of that act.
The thing is, there are excellent reasons for the current interpretation based on precedent. Although I'm quite liberal, I partly agree with conservative legal scholars that the Warren court engaged in quite a bit of legal overreach during the 60s with cases like Griswold, interpreting the Constitution so broadly that legal argument ever since has involved too much rhetorical trickery and too little straightforward explanation of the Constitution. We spend too much time on increasingly strained arguments about what the language of the Constitution means, which would be better spent on building a public consensus to amend the Constitution using clear and unambiguous language, eg inserting an explicit constitutional right to individual privacy rather than 'discovering' one in the 'penumbras' (shadows) and 'emanations' of other constitutional protections like the due process clause of the 14th Amendment.
Of course the problem with rewriting the Constitution every time you have an idea for improving it is that after a while you end up with the sort of Constitution we have in California, which is less a collection of guiding principles than a heap of legislation on steroids: http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/const-toc.html
At bottom, what you have is a set of conflicting imperatives. It's perfectly reasonable to charge government with the job of protecting people from military attacks, and as we saw in 2001 the costs of failure to do so can be truly severe. The opportunity costs of investing the government with broad powers to prevent such attacks are much harder to quantify. I have to say that I think the 'war on drugs' has been legally and practically far more destructive of liberty than the Patriot act or the NSA (but please don't interpret this as an endorsement of the latter). I don't worry about top-down totalitarian government nearly as much as I do about the inexorable economics of privately run prisons and city and county pension gaps. People don't care as much about the liberty of crack- and meth-heads (since drug addicts stereotypically have little consideration for others), so we craft these overbroad laws intended to protect the legitimate interests of good people by scapegoating ne'er-do-wells.
is the 'reason' even verified? is that not just a pretty way of saying "they can't browse through the data, unless they have a reason - any reason will do - feel secure:) "
Does anyone know how they do this, technically, and to what extent? Does Google just feed them billions of emails, or what? Do they type my name into a form on Amazon.com to get SSH access my EC2 server? And how the hell do they see my finances? Do all of those terms of service agreements say, "By the way, we give your private information to the government without question" ???
At first I thought it didn't matter that they can see what I do, because if I store a movie of my underground lair with nukes and a few F-22s in Google Drive, they can't use the evidence against me in court unless they get a warrant. But let's be real: if you've got a movie of yourself shooting some guy in the face in Google Drive, they're going to find a way to get that warrant before you delete the movie. And they'll have a copy of it to show the judge. You don't even know they've seen your not-so-secret stuff. The fact that they do this in a clandestine manner effectively makes it unconstitutional since the warrant protection is easy for them to circumvent.
The CIA doesn't ask for judicial warrants, and doesn't have to. Extrajudicial murder is legal.
Al-Awlaki was murdered on suspicion that there was an imminent threat to US persons. No warrant obtained. Al-Awlaki's son was murdered, again without warrant, because of complicated reasons that boil down to his last name being Awlaki.
Any of those videos by themselves would be enough for you to be included on the kill list, and executed. No court would have to be involved. You could also be executed by mistake, like Awlaki's son, or many Yemeni children that were so. Or being kidnapped in Italy by CIA agents into a plane, and imprisoned without trial. Or you could be an Al-Jazeera journalist, being arrested by the Pakistani army, then imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay for six years without any crime charged against you, like Sami al-Hajj. It's all fair game.
Oh, don't forget that you could lose your job as a politician because you hired a prostitute, and the Mormon CIA doesn't like that. Definitely fair.
So it's like the KGB, but worse (the KGB didn't kill careers because you had sex). Living in a country from the former communist bloc, I can tell you what the endgame looks like. It looks like 60% of the population willingly collaborating with the security service and writing reports for them. If I were American, the first thing I'd do is convert to mormonism.
Facebook has internal teams and tools used to do searches on activity of users, when law enforcement requests come in FB looks at the request and makes a judgement on whether to comply with it. They supply information such as when and from what IP a user logged in, and can provide user content - however I do not know to what extent they provide it.
Nothing gets deleted from FB. So the data is there for a long time - further, FB is careful about where they build datacenters and hold the data so as to ensure that FB is the owner of the data, and not subject to some foreign government claiming that they own the data of their national users.
Google surely has the same team, tools and procedures.
What about Dropbox? and Box? How do these companies deal with this whole situation? FB has an entire .gov policy/interfacing office in DC - do these other companies as well?
> however I do not know to what extent they provide it.
Probably in the same form they do for law enforcement. A little booklet with every photo ever uploaded (deleted or otherwise), every message, location and IP address the user has ever used, every single click they have made in the interface. Seriously.
Here's an example booklet, complete with redactions.
The link gave me an error 400: bad request message. I changed the ending of the url from recommendation=false to recommendations=true, and it worked. Just in case anyone was attempting to see the proof.
It is interesting what the media and public choose to be concerned by. 15 years ago I would've guessed that this sort of wide-spread operation would never have been tolerated by either. Post 9/11, it was surely scandalous when ATT got caught providing taps, but honestly, it didn't seem that anyone cared that much. Not enough to put strong pressure on the government to, you know, stop. At this point, I'm convinced that almost nobody actually cares. (I'm talking about practical concern, not just a vague sense of "I don't approve".)
Interestingly, this has roughly coincided with the growth of cloud services. When using a cloud service, there is some level of conscious acceptance that someone else is processing your data and can see what you're doing, and you're more-or-less OK with it. I wouldn't have guessed that people would be so eager to use cloud services whole-sale.
I think that at this point, people tend to assume that anything that leaves their computer will/can be inspected, and for the large part they're OK with it.
I don't know what could possibly done. If the legislature or courts got involved and told the NSA to stop, they'd just say "Ok, sure" and then continue on in secret.
They could cut their funding and/or use the data center for parts. That data center alone costs billions to build, it makes me uneasy knowing my tax dollars goes to abuses of power like this.
There is a interesting talk on youtube [1] by William Binney (a former U.S. intelligence official turn whistle blower) [2], where he talks about the tech behind ThinThread [3]. He describes how ThinThread uses Latent semantic indexing [4] to pull together all this metadata into a type of fingerprint. There are various reports (see google) that Stellar Wind was based on a component of the ThinThread capability or that Stellar Wind was an off shoot of ThinThread.
Note that Binney resigned on October 31, 2001. While he may have been privy to planned initiatives, his knowledge is now 12 years old. We don't know what new tech has been developed since then.
What is truly a scary thought is if the vast, mindless mass of people easily swayed by consumerism, advertisement and buzz, talk about this for about two weeks and then forget the whole thing, screaming "We have NOTHING to hide!" as a logically flawed and incredibly poor excuse.
The entire premise that democracy would work is flawed. Take Turkey. A ravaged, torn, depressed state, brought back to life by a fucking dictator, Kemal Ataturk. And now? Riots and revolution are taking place on the streets of Istanbul.
I'm not saying dictatorship is the best idea, but a good, conservatively Green or Green Libertarian government is the only path to resolution. But since the United States mass public is uneducated and apathetic (unlike how it used to be 300 years ago, and also markedly unlike quite a few in Europe who actually give a fuck about their rights), don't expect it to happen any time soon.
And for those who think this is elitism:
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are,
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
- Tennyson
> What is truly a scary thought is if the vast, mindless mass of people...
This is why privacy advocates (and libertarians more generally), can't get more popular traction: the incredibly derisive and arrogant tone with which they address their fellow citizens, and their flippant, dismissive attitude towards democracy.
Why should I listen to the opinions of someone who calls my parents, most of my friends, my in-laws, my wife, etc, "mindless"? Just because they have different priorities and care about different issues, or (gasp!) have different ideas about the appropriate boundaries of police surveillance?
Why should I listen to the opinions of someone who calls my parents, most of my friends, my in-laws, my wife, etc, "mindless"? Just because they have different priorities and care about different issues, or (gasp!) have different ideas about the appropriate boundaries of police surveillance?
It is not that you are mindless, it is that we are too dumb to contain the sums of human knowledge within our head. Individually, we can be great at disciplines that we specialize in. But expecting us to decide competent government officials to represent us? That's impossible.
I think you're generalizing and/or hanging out in the wrong places. For instance, on Reddit's [libertarian sub-reddit][1] I've found "sheeple" comments get downvoted pretty quickly.
edit: I'd also add that I've never felt this elitism from libertarian figureheads either. I can clearly recall Milton Friedman saying that libertarianism should never be forced on people, and if it isn't taken up freely then it wasn't meant to be.
Just look at how much "oh my god I can't believe the public doesn't care about this" angst has bubbled up in the HN threads on the NSA's actions. Amusingly, you see the same sort of rejection of democratic consensus from some extremist feminists ("women can't be trusted to know what they want because they've been brainwashed by the patriarchy.")
Geeks internalize the network. It's like an extension of their mind and body. Intrude into their online activities and you might as well be touching them in their no-touchy zone.
You sound like a bleeding "blame the victim" sexual harassment apologist. All the other secretaries are okay with the bosses' constant groping, what's the big deal? Maybe they like being touched. You were asking for it by dressing that way (putting your data on the cloud) anyway.
Well, it's not their fucking decision whether the abused secretary should put up with the boss's wandering hands!
It's interesting that you mention groping. The tort of battery is evaluated according to an objective standard: would a reasonable person consider the contact offensive? It is defined by social norms: grabbing someone's ass is offensive, bumping into someone on a crowded subway is not.
So your point fails even within the four corners of your analogy. That secretary will have a pretty tough time arguing that her boss's handshake was sexual battery, even if she belongs to an obscure religion that considers hands to be sexual objects.
Mindless with respect to political issues, is quite appropriate, I think. When my mom or my dad or my grandma says, "I have nothing to hide" (and they do, whenever I call them about some privacy concern), my respect for them with regards to political issues, drastically drops. Perhaps "mindless" is harsh, but they certainly aren't being insightful or politically educated.
I'm not trying to launch ad hominem attacks on you or your relatives. I'm trying to get people to wake up.
My parents are extremely politically educated, as is my wife. My dad has traveled the world extensively (80+ different countries) and seen nearly every kind of government under the sun. He was very involved politically when Bangladesh was seeking its independence. My wife, for her part, lived in east Germany after high school and observed the political situation in a city where many people still remembered life under communist rule. Yet, none of them care about your pet issue.
Fact is not everyone sees life in terms of slippery slope fallacies. The status quo is really pretty good, and it's perfectly rational to think there are more pressing political concerns than the NSA knowing how often you call your mom. My dad has his pet issue (he's anti-war), and my wife has her's (she's an adherent feminist). People aren't mindless or irrational because they don't share your political beliefs or your priorities with respect to political issues.
Do you always consider people with differing opinions "mindless"?
Everyone has different levels of privacy needs. I imagine you are OK with people seeing your face, knowing your name, or generally overhearing your conversations on the street. This is simply a different level of openness than being OK with people knowing what websites you visit or hearing your telephone conversations remotely.
In the same way that I don't care if some random guy at a coffee shop sees me visiting HackerNews or watching cat videos, I don't really care if the government sees it either. How does that make me mindless?
Privacy advocates are not a subset of libertarians. Libertarians may be privacy advocates, but there are many privacy advocates that are not libertarians.
Privacy advocacy is popular among the upper classes, because they really don't want anyone from the lower classes sticking their noses into their business.
Libertarians are unpopular because some of their policies are deeply unpopular. For example, many libertarians oppose the Civil Rights Act of 1964 because they feel it violates their first amendment rights.
> Privacy advocacy is popular among the upper classes, because they really don't want anyone from the lower classes sticking their noses into their business.
That is, in my experience, my friends' only real problem with the TSA (other than the hassle). They hate people with GED's bossing them around.
I think it's also the stupidity. You know you're going through this ordeal that could be easily circumvented by even a moderately clever attacker. It just seems like such a waste.
>Privacy advocacy is popular among the upper classes, because they really don't want anyone from the lower classes sticking their noses into their business.
I hope that this is either patently untrue or you're just misled.
"I've got nothing to hide" isn't the only argument that is used to counter privacy advocates, and I agree that this argument is wrong to some extent.
A more valid argument might be that when I think of government agencies looking at data from Google I know I'm just a number, unless they want to investigate, in which case they may look at my personal info. But I have to guess the number of investigated people is pretty low and there must be valid reasons to start an investigation, just like they need a warrant to get inside a house. It would simply be impossible to investigate every one of us in detail.
You're more of an optimist about the state than I am because I think the only POSSIBLE resolution long term is the dissolution of all state power and moving towards enclaved/anarchistic models. Basically I'm talking about the Diamond Age in real life here. Hell, we already have prototype matter compilers. When an enclave all has 3d manufacturing and scanning down and starts to build their own civilization kits, of what use is the state to anyone aside from starting wars?
What is truly a scary thought is if the vast, mindless mass of people easily swayed by consumerism, advertisement and buzz, talk about this for about two weeks and then forget the whole thing, screaming "We have NOTHING to hide!" as a logically flawed and incredibly poor excuse.
It won't stay at the top of the news for even two weeks. Most people don't care because a) it doesn't actually affect their lives and b) they actually want government to monitor traffic patterns for potentially suspicious activity. As a society, some 25% of our labor force is engaged in some sort of security activity, not counting police and military. This is arguably a consequence of the fetishization of private property in the US compared to other countries: http://tuvalu.santafe.edu/~bowles/GarrisonAmerica2007.pdf
a good, conservatively Green or Green Libertarian government is the only path to resolution
Er...I think you're going to run into some consistency problems there.
United States mass public is uneducated and apathetic (unlike how it used to be 300 years ago
Highly questionable. Most people in 1713 were not educated at all and even if we look at the revolutionary period we should remember that wealthy landowners whose writings have come down to use were economically exceptional (eg John dickinson, the 'Penmnsylvanian farmer' who was chided by Alexander Hamilton for implicitly arguing for 'free as in beer - http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfi... and http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfi... ...please excuse my gross oversimplification, but it's a fact that many colonists saw revolution as a means to get out from under state and private debts owed in England).
Kemal. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n17/perry-anderson/kemalism. I feel that "dictator", while technically accurate, doesn't have quite the right connotation---his rule didn't have the same totalitarian nature that those of Stalin, Hitler, Hussein, Castro, the Kims, etc. do/did to varying extents. (Or maybe I'm being oversensitive to questions of connotation.)
Inevitably complete electronic surveillance of communications will be used for insider trading, implicating enemies/competitors in crimes, and suppression of journalists and politically unfavorable activists.
Giant corporations competing for market share need to consider the operational security implications of bribable government employees having access to their trade secrets and strategies.
The recent case of the NYC cop that was planning on kidnapping and eating women would be chilling enough, but becomes even more horrifying when you learn that he was using law enforcement databases to stalk potential victims.
No human or group of humans can be trusted with total information awareness.
Yeah, he deserves some big hypocrisy points on that.
But where are the Republicans on this issue? After what feels like about 300 years of them calling Obama a fascist who's trying to turn America into the USSR every day, what do we hear from them when soviet-type stuff actually happens on his watch? Nothing. They're too busy with Benghazi and other non-scandals.
Who do you think put the Patriot act into place to begin with? At the time the GOP not only held the White House, but both houses of Congress. Among the first things they did on obtaining legislative control in late 1994 was start work on rewriting immigration law - resulting legislation so draconian that experienced criminal lawyers are often floored by its provisions when they have occasion to study it.
For example, an alien with a criminal record who is unable to prove their right to be present in the US on the spot can be detained incommunicado for six months before being entitled to any kind of hearing. This is a step forward; until a few months ago, the government was able to detain said alien indefinitely: http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=9721558833419753...
Bear in mind that the President is sworn to uphold the laws as they are, even when he disagrees with them; his powers are far more circumscribed by Congress than most people appreciate, viz. Obama's oft-repeated desire to close Guantanamo, which has gone nowhere because Congress won't authorize funds for setting up detention facilities on the mainland. It's not so much the case that Obama wants to know who you were calling last Tuesday as that he's supposed to maximize the government's legislated powers to defend the US from attack. If he ordered the NSA to suspend this sort of intelligence-gathering and subsequently a terrorist attack took place that could supposedly have been prevented, he'd be impeached. The whole Benghazi thing is arguably an effort to build momentum for impeachment, IMHO - if the GOP gained supermajority control of the Senate the current House would draft articles of impeachment in a heartbeat.
Stuff like this does not surprise me. Well, actually it does. It makes me question my assumption that the U.S. government has been doing stuff like this all along. If this leak is legitimate, then one can reason that the NSA didn't just acquire all of this data by itself in the past, but that they asked permission for it in the present.
I've always wondered, as a Canadian whose communications are most assuredly intercepted by the US gov., why such spying is not considered an act of war?
If I go to the US and "physically" spy, I'll get prosecuted, won't I?
All international slights are weighed against the cost of losing the offending country as a trade partner. This is how most peace is maintained these days.
All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
"The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him." -- Nuremberg Principle IV
Those that perform traitorous deeds to prevent traitorous deeds are traitors to their nation and themselves. -- Me
The whole "pizza case" phenomenon is hilarious. ironic but hilarious.
I'm sure there are tons of ethical implications, and the NSA has its share of shady activities, but part of it seems to be akin to that final scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark when the government loses the powerful, dangerous artifact in some nameless Army warehouse filled with tons of beef jerky or whatever it was.
This is probably why US bandwidth hasn't increased in ten years. Telecoms didn't want it to, obviously, but more importantly, the US government didn't want it to either, because more bandwidth increases the amount of information they have to store to have a carbon copy of everything.
Individual connections haven't gotten a great deal faster, but more people have higher speed connections and they are using them more. Traffic has increased by some enormous factor in the last 10 years (picking conservatively from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_traffic easily gets a factor of 20 or 30).
True, but it was planned in the nineties to go up by much more than that, and it could have increased faster than storage technology increased in density.
I wonder if this means we'll see the rise of huge botnets and networks calling each other and using flagged words just to saturate the data the NSA is picking up.
I'm eerily reminded of Deus Ex and the Aquinas Router. The main difference is that it was located in Nevada, not Utah... And that the NSA probably does not have a human-level general artificial intelligence developet yet. Although one never knows.
The NSA's charter is to monitor foreign communications and intelligence, so yes, the whole point of what they're doing is because the internet exists outside of the US.
Yes, you know that the Internet that exists outside the US is connected to the US, right?
Which belies one of the most insidious parts of Stellar Wind... that the NSA could've just tapped the cables which link the US to other countries, but they chose to spy directly on US citizens as well.
Yeah, but they've got their claws in down here with their ping-pong ball monitoring centre in Waihopai. Echelon, we in whether we like it or not - New Zealand is the lapdog I'm part of. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON
This one actually has techie relevance, but I hear what you're saying. The political links and their duplicates and their duplicates are drowning out the technology posts, even on /classic.
Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/11-surprising-things-you-didn...
" The apparent incorruptibility of Mormons' moral righteousness make them ideal candidates for the nation's law enforcement and intelligence agencies.
Mormons are disproportionately represented in the CIA. A recruiter told the Salt Lake Tribune that returned Mormon missionaries are valued for their foreign language skills, abstinence from drugs and alcohol, and respect for authority "
I wonder if this has bearings on constructing the new data center in Utah?