NSA Email Surveillance Pervasive and Ongoing 243
dkleinsc writes "The NY Times has a piece about work being done by Congressman Rush Holt (D-NJ) and others to curb NSA efforts to read email and Internet traffic. Here's an excerpt: 'Since April, when it was disclosed that the intercepts of some private communications of Americans went beyond legal limits in late 2008 and early 2009, several Congressional committees have been investigating. Those inquiries have led to concerns in Congress about the agency's ability to collect and read domestic e-mail messages of Americans on a widespread basis, officials said. Supporting that conclusion is the account of a former NSA analyst who, in a series of interviews, described being trained in 2005 for a program in which the agency routinely examined large volumes of Americans' e-mail messages without court warrants. Two intelligence officials confirmed that the program was still in operation.'"
More From The Atlantic (Score:4, Informative)
Here [theatlantic.com].
Four NSA domestic surveillance programs.
Re:Oh, quit whining (Score:3, Informative)
This situation isn't anything new. The US government has had a program like this since the mid 90's and if you remember right, they abandoned their own software for doing so in favor of commercial software (produced by the hack club cult of the dead cow I think). It was project magic lantern or echelon or something of the sorts.
I'm not sure if this "recent" awareness of the program brings about anything new or any new applications but I believe that it was already settled in the courts where a judge said that because a computer and not a human was monitoring, it wasn't in conflict with the constitution.
Anyways, the people won't fire the people in congress. There are two reasons, one is in how the dems successfully played the role of the helpless idiots who didn't have enough power to do anything even though they had larger majorities then the republicans did in the last 8 years. The second is that they blamed everything on the republicans because they had a majority (even though they didn't in both houses buy one year of bush's term). So in short, you have the people who are basically too ignorant, lazy, or somehow otherwise preoccupied and couldn't check something as simple as the strength of either party in either house so they just believed what was said and voted for them anyways.
You also have the problem of not having anyone better to replace them with. A non of the above vote still allows them to be elected, if not just for the candidate and their family voting for them.
Re:Oh, quit whining (Score:5, Informative)
The ability of a common person to influence governmental matters is, as it always has been, very limited.
This is a false statement that people who aren't actually interested in doing the work required to make changes in the organization of their Republic.
American history is full of examples of real changes made by determined groups.
Temperance. (Americans still have a bunch of crazy laws thanks to these folks.)
Suffrage. (A constitutional amendment too! )
Civil rights.
Abortion rights (This battle is still on. The ones that fought for them, and the ones dedicated to taking them away)
So, get off your ass and get to work. Oh wait, I forget where I'm posting this.
Re:SMIME (Score:3, Informative)
in my case all my friends have gmail accounts. It's not easily accessible to the government (assuming google's internal traffic is not tapped)
God, please don't tell me you're that naive. "It's not easily accessible to the government"?? It's one simple subpoena away, ffs! Assuming, of course, they don't just "convince" Google to give them real-time access to Google's systems.
Seriously, Google is one massive SPOF. That's the *last* thing you want if your goal is to circumvent government surveillance.
Re:Oh, quit whining (Score:3, Informative)
Bills originate in the House of Represenatives which doesn't involve an electoral college. The US President cannot do a whole lot in actually drafting laws, more so the power of veto is part of the checks and balances in that interplay.
Since the seats in the House are by district there is substantially more control over who is elected due to the local level. Money can't hide the fact your an asshole in politics at that ground level where as in the senate you can pretty much BS your way into office with enough money.
Email was never secure to begin with... (Score:4, Informative)
Remember, email is sent in cleartext, unless it's encrypted, which most of us don't actually do.
Re:Oh, quit whining (Score:3, Informative)
And yet we're still left with only the choice of "the elephants' asshole" or "the asses' asshole". It's assholes for everyone, assholes all around. The very nature of the patronage-based parties ensures that non-assholes are filtered out early in the process.
And never mind the power of gerrymandering, which not only ensures that the party in power stays in power, but also ensures that third parties have little to no chance -- and even if they do get a candidate elected, the damage will be confined to a single district.
And as for your contention that you can't hide your asshole-itude in the House... Senators average roughly 3,000,000 persons per seat. House members "only" average just under 700,000 persons per seat. Are you seriously suggesting that a ratio of 1:700,000 is sufficient to overcome all the ways that mass media can be used to completely snow the public?
Image is everything, and it's easily manipulable when less than 0.001% of the voters in a district have ever met the candidates for more than a handshake, let alone personally know them well enough to make educated judgments of character.
Re:Oh, quit whining (Score:1, Informative)
Canada has a proportional system. We've got one right-wing party, one big left-wing party, plenty of party-based partisanship, _and_ pervasive and growing seperatist movements in both Alberta and Quebec. The "smaller parties" only gain traction by being more radical, which serves to further polarize the mainstream parties.
Re:SMIME (Score:3, Informative)
Not to mess up a good rant, but you do understand that when you hand off a key to a certificate authority for signing, you only give them the public portion of the key? The same portion everyone who communicates would need in order to encrypt anything?
The CA signs your public key. It's basically a third party that confirms to Alice that Bob uses a particular public key. And if you know the public key is correct, only the owner of the private portion of the key can use it for encryption.
The kind of attack that would be required, if the CIA actually had control of the CAs, would be to present a phony public key for Bob, signed by the CA. And that only works if they can control the dissemination of the certificate itself. Control of the CA doesn't allow them to snoop on all conversations with the keys presented to them.
This is not to say that PGP is a bad idea, just that certs do not work like you suggest they do.
Re:SMIME (Score:3, Informative)
No, you have been misinformed. I can see how a couple sentences in that explanation could be misleading, but certifying that you possess the private key associated with your public key does not require the certificate authority to have your private key, and the phrase "...private key, which is also provided to the user" should not be construed to mean the certificate authority is creating your private key for you.
You and only you possess your private keys. Nobody else, not the certificate authority or anyone else, needs to have your private key for PKI to work. And they don't.