The Big Brother Thread

[davidbfpo]

An example of vulnerability and in Syria, so no surprises that many sources have disappeared into the regime's care:http://www.cjr.org/feature/the_spy_w...c.php?page=all

[Firn]

An interesting and quite sad link with lots of further leads and reads.

After reading quite a bit about the latest events and trying to piece most of it into a big picture I had to note once again the deep irony of the whole story. The sheer size of the dragnet, and its depth needed a greatly increased the number of people working on secret stuff. The fear to fail to connect the dots has seemingly increased the amount of sharing and more people know more about the national efforts. The gigantic scope and reach of certain programs, especially those involving your average citizien have increased the danger of employing people who might feel it morally justified to whistleblow.

If that happens the public echo might be big indeed and it can indeed seriously harm directly and indirectly the most important, the true key interests of a nation. At least some sources are saying that terrorist groups have changed their comm. patters and that certain methods will be much harder to pull off. While there are certainly political games involved there should be a certain amount of truth in those informations. So if the fight against terrorism has indeed been the main goal of those various efforts then the NSA&Co might have scored an own goal in that area as well.

[davidbfpo]

I know many Americans have a strange regard, if not dislike for their postal service and it's inefficiencies - so they may think this odd:

..the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program, in which Postal Service computers photograph the exterior of every piece of paper mail that is processed in the United States — about 160 billion pieces last year. It is not known how long the government saves the images.

Link:http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/us...pagewanted=all

That must be some computer database, even if only retaining the photos for thirty days.

[Firn]

I know many Americans have a strange regard, if not dislike for their postal service and it's inefficiencies - so they may think this odd:

Link:http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/us...pagewanted=all

That must be some computer database, even if only retaining the photos for thirty days.

So when the US spooks want 'everything' they really want every metadata at least from US citiziens. More, if possible from the rest of the world.

“In the past, mail covers were used when you had a reason to suspect someone of a crime,” said Mark D. Rasch, the former director of the Justice Department’s computer crime unit, who worked on several fraud cases using mail covers. “Now it seems to be ‘Let’s record everyone’s mail so in the future we might go back and see who you were communicating with.’ Essentially you’ve added mail covers on millions of Americans.”

Bruce Schneier, a computer security expert and an author, said whether it was a postal worker taking down information or a computer taking images, the program was still an invasion of privacy.

“Basically they are doing the same thing as the other programs, collecting the information on the outside of your mail, the metadata, if you will, of names, addresses, return addresses and postmark locations, which gives the government a pretty good map of your contacts, even if they aren’t reading the contents,” he said.

In this case it seems as if the methods of the digital age have been brought into the old analog world. Legally the path has been the reverse. Whatever floats the boats and is possible seems to get done with the legal bounderies getting streched and streched or even completely removed...

Law enforcement officials need warrants to open the mail, although President George W. Bush asserted in a signing statement in 2007 that the federal government had the authority to open mail without warrants in emergencies or foreign intelligence cases.

In such days it certainly feels like that the terrorists did indeed score some important victories against key and noble ideas of the Western World. And once again it seems that the scale of the tracking efforts opens the door for highly questionable abuses which pushes the whole thing into the spotlight and alerts also the valid targets. Imperial intelligence overstrech.

[jmm99]

Petabytes (Wiki)

1000 kB kilobyte
1000^2 MB megabyte
1000^3 GB gigabyte
1000^4 TB terabyte
1000^5 PB petabyte
1000^6 EB exabyte
1000^7 ZB zettabyte
1000^8 YB yottabyte

A billion 1MB scans = 1 petabyte; so, 160 billion scans per year at 1MB per scan = 160 petabytes. Hitachi was marketing 32 petabytes of rack storage in 2004 (BBC).

The Bluffdale UT database (easily expanded at ~$2billion per site) could take us into the zetta and yotta storage ranges (UK Guardian).

William Binney, a mathematician who worked at the NSA for almost 40 years and helped automate its worldwide eavesdropping, said Utah's computers could store data at the rate of 20 terabytes – the equivalent of the Library of Congress – per minute. "Technically it's not that complicated. You just need to work out an indexing scheme to order it."

The USPS scans (@1MB per scan; a pure WAG) works out to ~ 1/2 petabyte (500 terabytes) per day - or 25 minutes of Bluffdale's daily capacity - IF Binney is in the correct order of magnitude; and if my math done in head is correct.

I believe all of this is due to the political response to the perceived demand by the American public for absolute security. Others will easily migrate to varied conspiracy theories. I believe it depends on whom we elect; and on whom they appoint. Others will disagree.

One can spend an interesting hour plus, watching William Binney on Youtube, NSA whistleblower William Binney Keynote at HOPE Number Nine (2012). Note the picture of the British sheep about two minutes into the video.

Regards

Mike

[davidbfpo]

Actually the article's full title is 'NSA and GCHQ: the flawed psychology of government mass surveillance' and yes it is in The Guardian. The sub-title is probably more telling:

Research shows that indiscriminate monitoring fosters distrust, conformity and mediocrity

Link:http://www.theguardian.com/science/h...nce?CMP=twt_gu

I am uncertain about the science, but it certainly fits in here!

[davidbfpo]

The debate in the UK over privacy and security has restarted as the Conservative government proposes a new law on extending surveillance and adding safeguards.

Today I found a number of good commentaries; if you want the "spin" by some papers assisted by the intelligence agencies you will find them too about a week ago.

The Economist 'To MI5 with love':http://www.economist.com/news/britai...pies-mi5-love?

Jamie Bartlett concludes:

First, it’s not clear how long any measures will even work. Thanks in part to Snowden revelations, soon there will be a new generation of easy-to-use encryption services. The net will become more private and also more difficult to censor and monitor, and I think this might require a very real rethink in how we do intelligence.

And then there is a risk of serious long term damage to the economy, especially the digital economy, of monitoring too much, or forcing companies to install the equipment required to collect and store internet connection records. It’s not quite clear either how serious or damaging this might be, but I think it could be more than the government thinks. And as more of life goes online, we’ll need ever more powerful encryption, not less. This can save the police a fortune in reducing cybercrime, although will certainly make other types of policing more difficult.

Link: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technolog...ts-or-not.html

Heather Brooke's pice is sub-titled:

The new surveillance bill renders the citizen transparent to the state, putting every one of us under suspicion. It would serve a tyranny well.

Link:http://www.theguardian.com/commentis...george-orwell?

Janet Daley in The Daily Telegraph is rather trenchant, as the title suggests:

Britain trusts its spies too much – even when they’re threatening our freedom
It is deeply worrying that the government could soon have the legal right to snoop on the private activities of all law-abiding citizens

Link:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ukne...r-freedom.html

[davidbfpo]

In the UK licence plate readers (LPR in the USA) are known as Automatic Number Plate Readers (ANPR) and as the title implies we have a lot of them:

UK number plate monitoring one of the 'world's biggest surveillance systems'

Link:http://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/news/24371...llance-systems

Personally I am not shocked that the (publicly owned) system across the UK ANPR system currently has 8,300 ANPR cameras (mainly overt on main roads and motorways or inter-state) in use submitting 25-35 million ‘read’ records to the National ANPR Data Centre daily, but lacks any legal framework or governance.

What is odd is that a former senior UK CT police officer, now having oversight of surveillance cameras has spoken publicly asking why:https://www.gov.uk/government/speech...ing-university

He is also critical of:

In the UK our (police) database is touching 18m images made up of custody photos (The FBI has 51m). They include photos of people never charged, or others cleared of an offence.

ANPR was originally limited to the "Ring of Steel" around the City of London IRRC long ago when the IRA were bombing London. Their arrival on motorways was originally announced as a prelude to road charging, traffic control and more - not for policing. They have been added in most city centres and almost every port.

The publicly owned system can be supplemented by downloading imagery from the privately owned and to my knowledge not netwworked ANPR at petrol filling stations, let alone car parks or airports.