NSA Broke Into Links Between Google, Yahoo Datacenters 394
barlevg writes "The Washington Post reports that, according to documents obtained from Edward Snowden, through their so-called 'MUSCULAR' initiative, the National Security Agency has exploited a weakness in the transfers between data centers, which Google and others pay a premium to send over secure fiber optic cables. The leaked documents include a post-it note as part of an internal NSA Powerpoint presentation showing a diagram of Google network traffic, an arrow pointing to the Google front-end server with text reading, 'SSL Added and Removed Here' with a smiley face. When shown the sketch by The Post and asked for comment, two engineers with close ties to Google responded with strings of profanity." The Washington Post report is also summarized at SlashBI. Also in can't-trust-the-government-not-to-spy news, an anonymous reader writes: "According to recent reports, the National Security Agency collects 'one-end foreign' Internet metadata as it passes through the United States. The notion is that purely domestic communications should receive greater protection, and that ordinary Americans won't send much personal information outside the country. A researcher at Stanford put this hypothesis to the test... and found that popular U.S. websites routinely pass browsing activity to international servers. Even the House of Representatives website was sending traffic to London. When the NSA vacuums up international Internet metadata, then, it's also snooping on domestic web browsing by millions of Americans."
sounds like a man in the middle (Score:5, Insightful)
... and I hope that "string of profanity" was directed at the NSA who put it there.
When will the sheep look up (Score:5, Insightful)
"secure fiber optic cables" (Score:5, Insightful)
Nothing is "secure" any more. "Secure" is now a one word oxymoron.
As long as you make the distinction between (Score:1, Insightful)
Americans and us dangerous foreigners, expect no sympathy. One does not have to believe in Karma to know that you deserve the domestic spying.
Re:I'm for this (Score:5, Insightful)
No one knows how many terrorist plots that have been adverted due to this. Just think back at the Boston marathon event. We should be grateful that we have not had more of them for the past decade. A lot of people forget this.
You forgot your <sarc> tags.
Re:As long as you make the distinction between (Score:5, Insightful)
Americans and us dangerous foreigners, expect no sympathy. One does not have to believe in Karma to know that you deserve the domestic spying.
By that same line of thinking, one could also say that you deserve to be spied upon and drone-striked, due to your blanket, wholly uninformed generalizations about Americans.
I wouldn't say that, because I'm not an egocentric dick... but someone could, and it would be just as invalid and moronic as your hypothesis.
Re:When will the sheep look up (Score:2, Insightful)
The public-at-large are vain, petty creatures; and just as your average slut with no self-respect treats any kind of attention as the good kind, so do the rest of the public as they post pictures of their cats and share descriptions of the minutiae of their bowel movements and that they went wild and had sugar in their coffee today.
You who are on Facebook and Google plus are part of the problem. Until you at least make an honest first-step to ween yourselves off the social networking and media dicks you suck, you have only yourselves to blame.
-- Ethanol-fueled
Re:When will the sheep look up (Score:5, Insightful)
All depending on which animated series you prefer.
Re:NSA denies everything (Score:5, Insightful)
So, they claim they don't break into servers. So what? That's entirely different than tapping the links between the servers. And you can bet he knows the difference.
Re:When will the sheep look up (Score:5, Insightful)
The public doesn't give a damn that the President and Cabinet have been ordering assassinations, torture, or invasion that leads to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. Why should they be concerned with a little spying? They are literally more concerned about the welfare of dogs (see Michael Vick), tiny fetuses, and boobies on TV.
Re:I'm for this (Score:5, Insightful)
Hello, NSA shill! Let's be honest here. That's quite right. Exactly: no one knows how many. You know something else? It doesn't even MATTER how many: the ends DO NOT justify the means!
This, what you're doing here? This is state-sponsored terrorism! This is completely off limits. You're way, way out of line. You need to look in the mirror and realise that Snowden has more integrity in his big toe than you have in your whole body. Stop making excuses. Shut these operations down. Publish details of any vulnerabilities you know about, including ones you've created or discovered. It's unethical not to: and it's quite frankly extremely damaging to national and international security not to. And we'll fix them, because we can't trust you to.
At this point I'm not worried about blithering crazy idiots waging "war" on us with half-assed bombs: I'm worried about our own governments waging "cyber-war" on us with billion-dollar budgets. It's obvious with a moment's thought which one the greater threat is, and I'm sorry, but it's not the frothy-mouthed jihadist who's actively sabotaging efforts to secure critical internet and other infrastructure. It's YOU.
People should not have to be afraid of their governments. But they do. We're not interested in your feeble justifications. Freedom IS worth human lives: it always has been. Operations like this make the sacrifices of those who gave their lives in years long past to ensure you have at least the promise of freedom utterly meaningless, and turn our own governments - quite literally - into our adversaries. You should be ashamed of yourselves. That has to stop. It has to stop now. And it has to stop no matter what the cost, no matter what the trade-off.
Given the hard choice between anybody having privacy and nobody having privacy, even if it means sitting down and redesigning baseline security protocols and the internet at large, I'd rather make the right choice than the easy choice. It's time to roll up our sleeves and start fixing this mess, and you're not invited to the party.
Re:NSA denies everything (Score:5, Insightful)
PARSE THE WORDING, DAMMIT.
Alexander did NOT say they didn't do it. He said "we are not authorized to go into a U.S. company’s servers and take data" (emphasis mine). That's a completely different statement.
To me, that looks to be specifically designed to avoid lying without answering the question - such as when Obama answered the question about bugging Merkel's phone with "we are not recording her conversations and will not in the future". Fortunately, in that case, the press noticed the subterfuge and followed up with a question he wouldn't respond to ("Did you, in the past, ...").
Re:what's taking so long (Score:5, Insightful)
Is there some reason the NSA is still around?
Yes. They have a file on everyone in Congress.
Not to mention that most of my fellow Americans are too poopy-pants afraid of teh terroristz to ever allow that to happen. If anybody in Congress tried to dismantle the NSA, you'd better believe that their next opponent would label them "soft on national security". That could be enough to swing many elections, thus you'll never see it done.
Re:When will the sheep look up (Score:5, Insightful)
You are under the amusing assumption that ballot boxes change anything. What we are dealing with are institutional government entities that exist apart from any apparatus to effectively monitor and contain them. THIS is the shadow government nobody pays any attention to, until it is too late. And those of us that have warned people for years, have been labeled "kooks" and "loons".
Oh, and this is just the surface they are allowing you to see. It is much much worse than you can possibly imagine.
Re:NSA denies everything (Score:5, Insightful)
Here are my questions: why do they always talk about "authorization" when making denials? And why don't reporters call them out on it? This story is a classic example:
That's great and all. But it's like a shoplifter saying, "sure I went into the store and looked around, but I wasn't authorized to take anything."
Re:I'm for this (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes exactly look back to the Boston bombing.
At the Boston bombing we had two countries telling us to watch the bomber that he was radical and potential terrorist, his youtube channel was full of sermons by Muslim extremist clerics.
And what happened... Big Brother did nothing.
Meanwhile the NSA agents are using their dragnet of all of the worlds communications to do what? Loveint, the NSA agents are using their wiretaps to spy on their loved ones, neighbors, crushes, and anyone they want.
So we are left with two options the Government let it happen or the are to incompatent/preoccupied getting their rocks off to be allowed near their own dragnet.
Re:NSA denies everything (Score:4, Insightful)
Have to love the weasel word games. When asked question 'x' they skillfully reply with an answer to question 'y' ... Alexander has deployed this trick everywhere I have seen him speak publically.
When asked about bulk collection of metadata rather than respond to the actual question he instead proclaims reports of bulk content collection of US citizens are wrong.
When asked about tapping communications links between datacenters he says we are not directly in their servers.
Note vast differences between the questions asked and answers given.
'One-end foreign' : This is the NSA's *charter*! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:NSA denies everything (Score:4, Insightful)
His statement is truthful. NSA did not go "into a server"; this story is about NSA obtaining data as it passed between servers.
Re:Terms of Service violation (Score:2, Insightful)
Honestly now, do you really think that the NSA is operating from IP addresses that can be tied to us government domain names?
Re:Why the secret data collection? (Score:5, Insightful)
"In fact, the FISC ruled a similar, smaller scale program involving cables on U.S. territory illegal in 2011."
Exactly. The defenders of this nonsense want that little bit to get skipped and forgotten.
There is no question this is illegal, they dont even have a tiny fig leaf of being able to argue they thought it might be legal. It's illegal, even the FISA "court" refused to agree to this.
So they just did it anyway. Sounds to me like despite all the noise about 'oversight' adult supervision is exactly what has been missing.
Re:I'm for this (Score:5, Insightful)
Terrorists?
Why would they try to stop terrorists? The sooner there is another successful attack the sooner their budget gets doubled.
Re:When will the sheep look up (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the public figures "if I'm not doing anything wrong, why should I care about spying".
Part of the problem is that they remain ignorant and/or unconcerned that recent history is filled with examples of surveillance on people who were "not doing anything wrong"...well, other than expressing opinions unpopular with those in power. (MLK being perhaps the most famous example.) Unless one thinks that pesky activists of whatever political stripe don't serve any useful purpose to society or even one's own personal interests, there is much more to be worried about than just whether or not they're spying on *you personally*. That aspect seems to get lost in this debate.
So instead of "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear"...it should be more like "if you have nothing to *say* and don't care about others who might have something to say, well, then you have nothing to fear...maybe."
Re:When will the sheep look up (Score:5, Insightful)
I think Snowden and the Grauniad are managing this very carefully and deliberately. Instead of dumping 100,000 powerpoint decks on an already jaded world, they're publishing a new menace every month. So instead of a transient explosion of anger (that the NSA is bracing for, and expecting they'll be able to manage), there is a seething resentment that's slowly building over time. First, people with cell phones got mad, and resentful. Then Merkel got mad, and got the EU all torqued. Today, people who use Google are getting mad. Next month, it'll probably be how they read every message and contact in iCloud, making all the Apple users mad. At this rate, everybody is going to take turns feeling violated a couple of times each over the next year or so.
With this schedule, the administration has to squirm and dodge and apologize every time the spotlight twitches. Even the left no longer trusts the words the President speaks these days, because he's so busy spitting out weasel words defending this out-of-control agency. My guess is there's still a really big expose yet to come that will reveal the NSA did something truly damaging to our democracy with this info, like they rigged a Federal election, or a Supreme Court assignment. And by then Congress will be facing an angry public demanding that they not only react, but over-react.
As a matter of fact, they're releasing this information so carefully orchestrated that I have to wonder who is guiding them. How would Snowden know exactly how to publish this data to maximum effect? He's a sysadmin, not a PR expert. This seems more like one of the successful KGB misinformation campaigns of the 1970s and 1980s.
Re:I'm for this (Score:5, Insightful)
No, all the terrorist plots that never were are thanks to my Anti-Terrorist Rock. It protects against terrorists within a 1,000 mile radius with a 90% accuracy rate. I got it when my Anti-Tiger rock so effectively protected me against tiger attacks (in New York). Sadly, I lost my Anti-Government-Overreach-Of-Power rock. I really could have used that one.
Report the NSA to the RIAA (Score:5, Insightful)
Technically the NSA has been downloading copyrighted material, and very likely has more than a few MP3s of popular songs filed away in their datacenters.
I suggest we lobby the RIAA to sue the NSA for $10,000,000,000,000,000 because that's what 50 or so songs are worth, so they say.
The only trouble with this strategy of course, is that I don't know who to root for. The enemy of my enemy is my friend? No, the enemy of my enemy is still my enemy dammit.
Re:I'm for this (Score:4, Insightful)
1 person per year has been caught. We also know that the analysts are nearly totally unsupervised. How many do you think were not caught? 100? 1000? It's certainly a lot more than have been caught.
Re:I'm for this (Score:5, Insightful)
However, it doesn't matter how I feel, it matters how the people feel, because this is a democracy.
But a democracy doesn't work when the government makes decisions in secrecy; that's the real problem.
Look it up, 90% is a low estimate (Score:3, Insightful)
How is the well known, and obvious fact that most of the media are Democrats [yahoo.com] a lie?
Look it up from any source you care. This fact is undeniable. My 90% is in fact a very conservative estimate because I like to give some slack, but poll after poll reports this result.
You can also verify this in the core story at hand - outage over the NSA. It is mentioned in the press but not very much. Or what about drone strikes, or the embassy killings, or any other story you can name⦠all of it gets short attention in the media, nothing like what you see with any Republican wrongdoing.
As the original poster said the two parties are currently very much the same. So the only thing that makes sense to do is to vote for the party the press actually reports wrongdoing on.
Re:When will the sheep look up (Score:5, Insightful)
This is because the US major news outlets are not covering the leaks much. Check out MSNBC, Fox News, CNN, or any major outlet...and nothing. The people only get outraged when their particular partisan talking head tells them to. I find the best coverage on the leaks is from the UK Guardian. Certainly not here in the US.
Re:sounds like a man in the middle (Score:5, Insightful)
NSA? They can do a lot more to hurt you, and you do not really have any recourse against them. Just talking to the 'wrong' person can get you on their expletive list and all of a sudden find yourself locked out of a lot of stuff.
Government is inefficient arg (Score:4, Insightful)
I often hear people say this on slashdot. Americans about American government, whenever somebody mentions "a plot". This can be one of those plots.
5 years ago, everybody would say it's impossible this conspiracy plot is happening because they're stupid morons who can't do sh.t, and I should go buy me self a tinfoil hat somewhere.
What we heard in the last 5 months invalidates opinions of 90 % of people visiting this site. They're obviously efficient and capable at having plots and god only knows (maybe Snowden too) what they did/are doing and will continue to do in the future, but anybody who can think without getting his emotions involved, will naturally assume that whatever they're doing - is not good.
Here's another conspiracy plot. Make Americans think they Government is not capable of doing anything so they (the Americans thinking like this) discredit and label everybody who figures out the truth.
If it's not on the TV/Newspapers it's not happening mentality will ruin you. They are and were just tools for the same Gov that is doing this to all of us to misinform you and control what you know and not know.
Thanks to the internet, blogs, mistake made by booze allen or whatever is the name of that company, we now getting more and more informed. While we getting more and more informed, we're also getting more and more disgusted which we weren't before... naturally. Since we didn't kknow any better, we just knew what they told us.
I know i know... it's a plot again, but i don't expect any better from your, or any other Gov anyway.
Re:I'm for this (Score:5, Insightful)
There are other, far greater dangers than a Boston, 9/11, or even "mushroom cloud". Namely, collapse of freedom in the US via decades-long slippery slope. Once the tools of a 1984-like tyranny are built, with nothing but "you are supposed to get a warrant" stopping G. Gordon Liddy types from spying on political opponents, it's all over.
It's the lack of real, detailed oversight, uncorruptible, reviewed logging of all queries, and so on, which we need, and which will bring an end to the need to "trust us".
Re:When will the sheep look up (Score:5, Insightful)
That's exactly what the journalists he gave it to know, or are supposed to know.
Your average FoxNNBC reporter won't, but Greenwald is smart as hell about politics (I've been reading his blog for years and it always felt like the good kind of homework) plus he's teamed up with Poitras, Scahill and others who fit the same mold, and now he just got a quarter billion dollars to work with. Oh, and the people he's been writing about recently held his fiance hostage.
Let's just put it this way - the Snowden briefings in October 2014, right before the mid-term elections, are going to make your ears bleed. If an NSA apparatchik is up for a primary election in the Spring, expect some juicy ones then, too.
Remember, the NSA has enough information to blackmail almost everybody in the Westernized world (and then some).
Re: Government vs. Corporations (Score:4, Insightful)
You lost me at
by law the NSA can't
Re:When will the sheep look up (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps more appropriate [xkcd.com].
People do care. That's why high up people in the government and NSA have been making public appearances to justify what they are doing. If no-one cared they wouldn't bother. The real problem is that everyone is largely powerless to do anything about it.
In a couple of years an election will come around, and whoever you vote for they will carry on spying on you.
Re:Government vs. Corporations (Score:5, Insightful)
Google is a less restrained than government. Google can limit your life a lot more than the NSA can.
I suppose, hypothetically, if Google execs really wanted to make me disappear, they have enough money to hire people to make it happen, but you have to be pretty far out there to think that Google founders have it in for you personally. If Google isn't making a profit from me, they could terminate all my accounts and sell all my data, but to do anything more would dig into their profits, so they won't.
On the other hand, The US Gov has put away several people I know for drugs, frequently after investigating them on totally bogus, unrelated charges. So I've seen people's data abused by the government for more than the targeted adds Google would have sent them. And this is not even mentioning all the time and money non-convict people I know have had to sink in defending themselves from damning scraps of data.
The NSA, by law, can't even enforce laws in the US
Yeah, they wouldn't enforce anything, they can just turn over their data to agencies that could enforce within the US borders. E.g.: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/08/05/the-nsa-is-giving-your-phone-records-to-the-dea-and-the-dea-is-covering-it-up/ [washingtonpost.com]
the NSA could only tap foreign data centers
1) I accidentally made the horribly unpatriotic blunder of meeting and making friends with some of the six and a half billion people who live outside the US. Some in a public high-school no less!
2) Unfortunately for the good patriots, who did a better job of shunning the dirty foreigners, the internet is pretty fuzzy on borders and as the summary points out, data is often sent to information centers outside the US even if it is just returned unaltered, back inside.
3) I have never paid attention to the geographic location of my web-surfing before and I suspect neither have you. Are we sure even Slashdot has all it's data centers in the US? Many of the liked articles aren't, so I'm sure they got some good meta data on the two of us accessing leaked documents published by foreign agencies.
Really, in the side of Government vs. Corporation, the only side that represents YOU is Government.
Depends what the conflict was. Normally, yes, in healthcare, employment rights, unconscionable EULAs, etc, these are situations where the government needs to kick corporate ass on my behalf. This situation on the other hand, the government is not protecting me from the corporations; the government is coming after me. Even if the corporations only want to protect me to ensure their profits, I don't care. Right now they are on my side.
Now, if Google was caught tapping the NSA to get my personal info, then I'd be pissed at Google, not the NSA.
Without government, Corporations would, literally, have you as slaves.
This is true, but from here on out, you really left the situation at hand to talk about political movements I'm not familiar enough with to comment on but I'm thinking 30% chance you are going to reply to my post with "Sarcasm, moron: learn to detect it!"