Yves here. Even though the NSA is now attempting to say that Google and Yahoo were told to comply with the latest data-hoovering exercise exposed by Edward Snowden, Google angrily claims otherwise. Here’s the tit for tat per CNN, starting with the “nothing new here” claim from NSA director Keith Alexander:
“The servers and everything we do with those, those companies work with us. They are compelled to work with us. This isn’t something the court just said, ‘Would you please work with them and throw data over it.’ This is compelled. And this is specific requirements that come from a court order,” Alexander said at a cybersecurity conference in Washington.
“This is not NSA breaking into any databases. It would be illegal for us to do that. So, I don’t know what the report is. But I can tell you factually we do not have access to Google servers, Yahoo servers. We go through a court order.”
Notice the emphasis on servers and database? That’s almost certainly not where the NSA got the data for this particular program, so the Alexander remarks are yet more NSA misdirection. This is the “one chart says it all” from the Washington Post, which broke the story:
This section presents more details about the architecture of Google’s international data centers, including this section on where the intercepts might have occurred. Notice that it’s not on the servers (as the story also makes clear), but on the data pipes:
And here’s the Google reaction:
Google has “long been concerned about the possibility of this kind of snooping, which is why we have continued to extend encryption across more and more Google services and links,” said David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer.
“We do not provide any government, including the U.S. government, with access to our systems. We are outraged at the lengths to which the government seems to have gone to intercept data from our private fiber networks, and it underscores the need for urgent reform.”
Now if Google has “long been concerned” but apparently was not able to circumvent it, what does this say about Google’s vaunted technological superiority? The Internet giant has made a name for itself for (among other things) the lengths to which it goes in recruiting to find “talent”. You can find hundreds of articles along the lines of this 2012 Forbes account:
In the hot war for talent being fought in Silicon Valley, no company has an arsenal quite like Google’s. Named Fortune’s Best Company to Work For in 2012, the search giant made a record 8,067 hires last year — boosting total headcount by a third. The thirteen-year-old firm’s recruiting has an almost mythical quality about it, particularly for the two million candidates applying to work there each year. In terms of elite American institutions, getting a job at Google ranks with being admitted to Stanford Graduate School of Business or becoming a Navy Seal. Behind the glitz there are a few Googley basics at work: data, money (lots of it), sophisticated programming, and an army of young, eager recruiters.
Having said that, the NSA breaking-and-entry operation may have resulted from Google being unable to secure lines leased from foreign telcos that were willing or compelled to assist the NSA, or from turncoats in Google (a well-placed double agent might have identified the security vulnerabilities).
Despite the wounded noises from the technology giant, this all looks like optics for the rubes. It’s hard to take protests from Silicon Valley seriously until we see some of the Internet oligarchs put their money and their names on the line. We don’t yet have tech billionaires playing the role of Mikhail Khodorkovsky: publicly advocating what by commonsense and world standards were pretty modest reforms, but nevertheless were a direct challenge to Putin. As a result, Khodorkovsky now languishes in a dank Moscow prison, a fate that even an obstreperous Internet magnate would be almost certain to escape.
No, the real barrier is that the initial NSA slides released by Edward Snowden calling top technology firms like Google and Yahoo “partners” were spot on. They are “partners” in the Ambrose Bierce usage: “When two parties have their hands so deeply plunged into each other’s pockets that they cannot separately plunder a third party.” As much as their involvement in the surveillance state might dent the telecom and Internet players’ reputations and international profits, it’s highly unlikely that they will find it in their business interest to tear up their deal with the devil.
By Wolf Richter, a San Francisco based executive, entrepreneur, start up specialist, and author, with extensive international work experience. Cross posted from Testosterone Pit.
Edward Snowden’s revelations have added a new dimension, deeper and more disturbing still, to the perfect, seamless, borderless surveillance society: under a program with the evocative moniker, MUSCULAR, the NSA and its British counterpart, the GCHQ, have secretly targeted American companies, managed to get around their security measures, broken into their “clouds,” and syphoned out user data on a large scale.
That would be illegal in the US.
But the cloud is a worldwide phenomenon. It’s a beacon of growth for American tech companies. Facebook, Amazon (its AWS hosts a number of big cloud-based websites, such as Netflix), Microsoft, IBM, Google, Yahoo… just about all tech companies, online retailers, social media companies, financial firms, app makers, every company with online products, they’re all making money in the cloud. Even Obamacare is in the cloud. You log into a website to access software and your own data – that’s the cloud. In terms of hardware, it’s data centers and fiber-optic links. Thousands of them. Everywhere.
The cloud is where the NSA goes to pick through everyone’s data. Under the PRISM program, revealed by Snowden some time ago, the NSA has enjoyed easy access to user accounts and their data. Companies cooperate. It’s permitted under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and overseen by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. We just didn’t know about it.
MUSCULAR is darker. It secretly targets American companies. Google and Yahoo have been named in top-secret documents that Snowden had pilfered and that landed at the Washington Post. To get around legality issues in the US, the NSA broke into Google’s and Yahoo’s overseas data centers. If you have anything in the cloud – and you do, whether you want to or not – it’s stored in numerous locations, including overseas.
In March last year, when David Petraeus was still CIA Director, before emails, ironically, about an extramarital affair unraveled his career, he spoke at the In-Q-Tel CEO Summit. He was accompanied by NSA specialists. He raved about how startups that had been funded by In-Q-Tel – the CIA’s venture capital branch – were “providing enormous support to us as we execute various critical intelligence missions.” He talked about “innovative technologies developed by the firms represented in this room.”
It was just a speech, and no one really paid attention. But he was disclosing the true nature of our perfect surveillance society, on the eve of the Snowden revelations.
“We have to rethink our notions of identity and secrecy. In the digital world, data is everywhere,” he said. “Data is created constantly, often unknowingly and without permission” – emphasis mine. “Every byte left behind reveals information about location, habits, and, by extrapolation, intent, and probable behavior.” The data “that can be collected is virtually limitless,” he said, which presented “enormous intelligence opportunities.” And in closing he thanked the executives and tech gurus for “helping to keep America’s Intelligence Community at the forefront of global innovation.”
So far, the Snowden revelations have shown exactly that: an intense, hand-in-glove cooperation between the Intelligence Community and American tech companies, from scrappy startups to corporate mastodons, at every level, whether adding backdoors to Windows operating systems or compromising the keys to encryption.
But the revelations about the MUSCULAR program show that, in parallel, the NSA also worked against these tech companies – Google and Yahoo so far, but more documents are likely to trickle out, as they have done in the past, like Chinese water torture, to reveal that other American companies got hit as well.
“According to a top secret accounting dated Jan. 9, 2013,” the NSA had in the preceding 30 days syphoned off from undisclosed interception points at Google’s and Yahoo’s clouds “181,280,466 new records” – metadata, text, audio, video, anything, from Americans and foreigners alike – and sent them back to its own data center at its Fort Meade headquarters.
The NSA and GCHQ aren’t even targeting anyone. They’re just grabbing massive data streams between data centers. A worldwide dragnet.
Google already warned in early September that it was furiously trying to encrypt the stream of data between its data centers to keep the NSA and other intelligence agencies out of them. “It’s an arms race,” explained Google VP for security engineering, Eric Grosse at the time. “We see these government agencies as among the most skilled players in this game.”
Even encryption won’t protect the data against the NSA’s all-out efforts to defeat encryption. But it will make it more difficult. As Christopher Soghoian, a computer security expert at the ACLU, put it: “If the NSA wants to get into your system, they are going to get in.” The only hope was the encryption would make, as he said, “dragnet surveillance impossible.”
The MUSCULAR revelations were met with total stonewalling from the government. A spokeswoman at Yahoo said: “We have strict controls in place to protect the security of our data centers, and we have not given access to our data centers to the NSA or to any other government agency.” Google was “troubled by allegations of the government intercepting traffic between our data centers, and we are not aware of this activity.” The company has “long been concerned about the possibility of this kind of snooping.”
How was the NSA able to exploit cracks in the networks? The Washington Post has some titillating tidbits:
For the MUSCULAR project, the GCHQ directs all intake into a ‘buffer’ that can hold three to five days of traffic before recycling storage space. From the buffer, custom-built NSA tools unpack and decode the special data formats that the two companies use inside their clouds. Then the data are sent through a series of filters to ‘select’ information the NSA wants and ‘defeat’ what it does not.
We don’t know yet how many more companies were hit, or how many more of these programs are out there. We do know, however, given the revelations of the past six months, that just when we thought it couldn’t worse, it gets much worse.
Corporate America has hugely benefited from the cooperation with the NSA, whose relentlessly growing budget makes it the perfect customer. And they have benefitted from their cooperation with other intelligence and law enforcement agencies. But these revelations have thrown dark shadows on the entire cloud and have made foreign companies and governments leery of buying Big Data software, services, or hardware from American companies. And MUSCULAR, too, will worm its way perniciously into revenues and profits of our already revenue-challenged tech heroes.
Evidence is already piling up. Teradata, which sells analytics tools for Big Data, warned that revenues plunged 21% in Asia. Then IBM confessed: hardware sales in China had collapsed. Every word was colored by Snowden’s revelations about the NSA’s ties to American tech companies. Read…. NSA Revelations Kill IBM Hardware Sales in China
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So, it looks like Edward Snowden’s revelations will create some casualties, after all. Corporate persons. Pass the popcorn.
The chart “forgets” that Google et. al. are compelled by the Patriot Act to provide NSA with direct access to the servers and not tell anyone about it! The court & its orders are secret too!!
If NSA is “in the pibes” also, it is probably just to verify that they really get Everything.
The courts limit the data that can be collected and require minimization of data collected on US persons. They also provide (albeit minimal) oversight on the overall scope of the surveillance. Do they have FISA approval for this collection, and has it been reported to the Congressional Intelligence committees? One can only hope not. Wyden/Udall will probably provide more information on that front.
Congress should reintroduce the legislation to rein in the NSA. It’s been a long time since Congress has done their jobs*. Perhaps it will even improve their popularity with the public a bit.
*From Wikipedia, a summary, not meant to be complete. Note that only Congress has the authority to spend, collect, and borrow money, thus is threatening itself when shuts down government and refuses to raise debt ceiling, the irony of which never fails to amaze me. How many years since a budget has been passed? By August the House had already abandoned the budget they passed just a few months earlier, in order to seek replacing sequestration with cuts to entitlements.**
Wikipedia Entry: Powers of Congress
**Statement by Rep. Rogers, Chairman Appropriations Committee
From above, note that the Executive power has been granted no powers over the purse (other than his right of veto). Obama may want to cut entitlements but the House (normally) introduces the legislation and then it must pass the Senate. Unlike the President who has nothing to lose, may even see entitlement reform as another legacy ‘success’, Congressional members are seeking re-election, the ultimate leverage that voters have. The “party of old white men” may issue hard-line talk about entitlement reform but should think long and hard before voting for cuts to one of the only constituencies they haven’t yet alienated. They would make better targets than Obama in the anti-entitlement cut effort, along with Democrat ‘deficit converts’ in Congress, for acting contrary to their stated pro-social welfare policies.
Alas though, as the vote on gun registration demonstrated, it seems that public will has become irrelevant…… We need to replace them all in 2014. Only then perhaps will Congress figure out for whom it is they serve, and maybe even the media get the message that it’s not manufactured issues such as Benghazi or IRS accusations that the public cares about.
Yes, I absolutely believe that the NSA is a wholly beneficit and loving organization that completely obeys all rules and laws maintaining the absolute privacy of all american persons.
/sarc
It is also illegal to lie to congress, correct?
The rule of law does not apply in this case. The courts and laws you quoted are for public show only.
US leadership keeps hanging themselves everytime one of these revelations comes out. They rush to deny, deny, deny, only to have next weeks news release prove that they spewed lies.
NSA and other .gov will spend the next week denying it.
then, the next revelation in this particular case will be proof that not only did they break in the “GFE”, but they did it with Google executive’s knowledge and compulsory consent, and that it’s actually a hardware based hack. The kicker will be that the hack also works on all intra-US traffic too.
NSA and .gov will deny that they ever did this to US “consumers” (the word “citizen” is being replaced).
The week after that we’ll get evidence that they did.
“The kicker will be that the hack also works on all intra-US traffic too.”
They don’t need to. Big companies like Google and Yahoo surely store backup copies of data overseas.
But we already know that the NSA was copying traffic off TransPacific cables into AT&T’s San Francisco switching station in the early 2000’s. There’s no reason to think this has ended. Information on US citizens is minimized unless information about illegal activities is found. In that case, the data is retained and/or shared with the appropriate agencies. Who needs a Fourth Amendment anyways?
One limit in the “FISA Amendments Act of 2008” is the word “intentionally”. From a legal perspective then the NSA can collect everything “un-intentionally” by deploying a “buggy” filter. The law does not say what must happen with the “un-intentionally” collected data. Second limit is that the collectiom must be ” … consistent with the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution”.
Presumably, the *purpose* of the FISA-court is to remove this last barrier too, which the court can always do with impunity, since the proceedings are secret (and flat-out lying to congress, when found out, is OK too).
Personally, I do sincerely hope the NSA/STASI- complex will use their powers to screw over American citizens as long and as hard as their equivalents did in the USSR. Americans need, I.M.O., a new perspective on life and I think that eating the “dog-food” that they think is good for “the world” will be good for them too. Besides, it keeps the three-letter agencies gainfully employed and out of “our” affairs while they are busy with internal dissidents – of which there will be an infinite supply, thanks to bureaucratic growth requirements.
As the DDR/USSR-regimes discovered, the supply of threats to National Security will always exceed the capabilities of the security services. When the DDR finally ran out of ressources and collapsed, STASI had 1/3 of the population ratting on their neighbours, friends and family. Instead of food- stamps Obama or his replacement, could well introduce rat-for-food- stamps to save some money ;-)
Data haven in Sulatante of Kinakuta anyone?
Wolf has some rather questionable points of view.
He starts out telling us that the NSA picks through everyone’s data on the cloud and then goes on to say (emphasis mine),
“MUSCULAR is darker. It secretly targets American companies.”
Ok…, so spying on American companies is darker than spying on American citizens, eh? Is that the way Wolf sees it (kind of like Angela Merkel who yawns when it’s her people getting spied on, but demands and explanation when she is the target) or is it simply a way of adding a little rhetorical drama.?
Another possible assumption comes in the next sentence when states, “Google and Yahoo have been named in top-secret documents that Snowden had pilfered and that landed at the Washington Post.”
I love the way everyone who is hugely benefiting from Snowden’s revelations (journalists, heads-of-state) takes full advantage of his bravery and manage at the same time to utterly dump on him. The term pilfer implies gaining benefit from something not yours and while Wolf is clearly benefiting, Snowden’s benefit is not so obvious; he is permanently barred from his home and all that is familiar and is being treated as a criminal.
Oh yea, and I love the way, “[documents] landed at the Washington Post”. Poor Washington Post, I hope no one got hurt when those documents fell from thin air and landed on them.
It always hurt a lot more when the system you carefully supported, nurtured and perfected, believing it was serving your interests, suddenly turns free-lance and bites you on the ass ;-p.
Merkel grew up with STASI and inner-party power structures in the DDR so it must be especially offensive to her – either being inner-party and treated as a commoner or the spying itself, we don’t know which.
Interesting news… Imagine the Federal Government using the NSA information to track and tax all transactions. A small 1-2% transaction tax would balance the cofers and rapidly pay down the Federal Debt.
Ahh the stuff of dreams. Only a specific type of spying is tolerable.
And in tonight’s “Guess Who’s Looking Stupid Now — UK Government Special Edition” the above revelations make a bit of a mockery over recent concerns about Chinese hacking from captive semi-state enterprises (Huawei)
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/jun/06/chinese-equipment-uk-phone-networks-huawei?guni=Article:in%20body%20link
Frankly, I’d rather mistrust the Chinese than the NSA. At least I know the Chinese might well be up to no good; the NSA have home field “advantage”.
Well this caught my eye. “He (Petraeus) was accompanied by NSA specialists. He raved about how startups that had been funded by In-Q-Tel – the CIA’s venture capital branch –” Say what? The CIA is using US Taxpayer’s money like private venture capital? Or are they dipping into their drug-running slush fund?
Something about “In the ‘Arms’ of The ‘Angel’…”
It’s well known that In-Q Tell provided VC for Google.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel
Google Earth was/is the CIA’s satellite mapping software. Google is EVIL
Yes, exactly. Google went from Do No Evil to See No Evil in 5 months time.
And this:
“Every byte left behind reveals information about location, habits, and, by extrapolation, intent, and probable behavior.”
Psychological profiling, thought profiling, behavorial profiling and then: though and behavorial control, the easy way if you can by psychological manipulation, but even if it has to be done the hard way (cracking the heads of a few protestors whose location, intent, strategic important, and networks you know).
Btw has California ever not been all about the military money at the end of the day? It used to be about defense spending proper, long ago, now it’s about the security state funding tech startups. No wonder we deserve aholes like having that witch Diane FieNSAstein to represent us. Sick of Karma in Kalifornia.
Angela Merkel never had a problem with US spying. She presides over a US occupation regime that’s been in place since 1945.
Google falls over itself to provide whatever the NSA asks for. If they stopped, then you’d start hearing revaluations about how Google is a haven for child porn or something similarly horrifying. Facts be damned.
This is a big out of control bazillion kilogram gorilla jacked up on the meth of unlimited funding and a totalitarian
The Germans put a halt to Google’s street view project in their country, part of Google maps. Only some major cities had their streets photographed before the complaints started from citizens and companies regarding the intrusion, and Google stopped. So,not 100% compliant.
All this will, hopefully, begin to help reasonably intelligent people to connect a few dots. No, connecting dots is not heresy even though, in the mainstream, it is. The national security state is the “deep state” and it has the ultimate power. As Mao said “political power comes out of the barrel of a gun” and or, better, that power comes from the application of force. You can’t dream that fact away–those people who ultimately hold the guns, the security services, have power over all branches of government and all parts of society. Fortunately for us, this “state” is not unified but rather decentralized and factional–basically it has a structure similar to organized crime because, surprise, it is literally organized crime–their main source of income is the protection racket, i.e., give us money or we can’t protect you from hooligans throwing a rock through your window etc.
Whatever Google or anyone else says, they are at this time infiltrated by agents of the national security state and have given NSA the encryption information just as Snowden stole data from NSA. If push came to shove, they would just threaten to kill the head of Google until they gave them the info. We need to understand that the national security state may have grown up with the idea of protecting the U.S. as a whole–even the arch-villain Allen Dulles, I’m sure, was a patriot and believed what he was doing was good for the country. I suggest that today, the culture of intel is much more cynical and much more varied and their connection to the corporate sector and organized crime (which is booming in the world) is very close.
a secret to who?
Breeding Consciousness
The empire is a given, gravity with momentum, thousands of years in the making. You cannot change it in the short term, but you can adjust it. It’s a process, not an outcome, so you can make large outcome changes in one dimension, change its dress, in fairly short order, by altering a few values, and/or you can make many adjustments in many dimensions over time to make structural changes, producing a quantum outcome, unseen until completion by those not participating, or participating unwittingly, in the value changes. The empire is a shared consciousness, a distribution moving in time perception.
Each social event horizon has assumed perception values baked into its DNA, which why most individual autonomous systems seek a like herd, resulting in a shared observers prism subject to diminishing scale returns. Their intellect is subject to determinant physical response to expected stimulus, which is re-enforced during a childhood immersed in the expected stimulus. The denial, anger, etc curve is part of the tuner.
Spiritual work is required to jump into another event horizon successfully, which creates a fuzzy logic that others may follow with somewhat less energy. Just because the herd assumes a solar system constant based upon university herd interpretation of observations made in a telescope, invented by somebody else, a long time ago, doesn’t mean that you must follow. When you hit the wall of recognition and engage the clutch, you may want to have another instrument in your bag. Don’t wait until you need the next gear to build it.
The battery problem the herd is having so much trouble with is the assumption of dc. The universe doesn’t work that way. Only gravity, the dumbest part of the universe works that way. You brain has two sides. Women are bred to favor one side as the net inductor, and men the other. The outside world is the expected resistor bank that tunes in an expected reality for most, and an unexpected reality for some. The potential difference creates a market exchange, of ideas.
So, back to that bumble bee question. Your human autonomous system is built upon a lot of other autonomous systems, which is why you can share reality, which is limited by the I/O feedback. Every software project begins by shrinking the box with deterministic false assumptions. You don’t get out of the box by mapping the inside of the box. How do you see beyond your physical limitations? What is language?
The assumption that you can rent a house out to pay the mortgage and pocket all the empire profit on resale results in what you see. Freddie and Fannie are massive RE subsidies, leveraged by derivatives, back into themselves, that have consumed the market, except the submarket swap being run by the same embezzlers, with a Nobel prize for the feedback. The Fritz healthcare scam is a similar algorithm. You don’t build a home the way you build a house, unless you want to live in a Disneyland economy, until it explodes.
Moderation: peace under pressure.
If you are receiving a low signal to noise ratio, what do you suppose that means? Which came first, the dust bowl or war? Ask Syria; an empire cannot reboot itself. You are the kernel, as much as you may want to avoid the responsibility.
An empire fears judgment, and so judges obsessively, only to act compulsively, with preemption, confirming itself. Its only possible outcome, without your interrupt, is tyranny. If you don’t like what you see don’t look in the mirror, is not a solution, as history attests, repeatedly. You didn’t create gravity, and nether did anyone else on this planet. It just is, for those who choose to dwell on it.
Fear is its own worst enemy. Just get out of its way, and do something, anything, that serves a purpose, and the rest will take care of itself. The empire isn’t going anywhere without good seed and good soil to plant it in, the destruction of which is the default option.
The Siemens circuit breaker blows up when it sees something it doesn’t expect. Until their position blows up, the cattle never see it coming. The real question is what happens before and after, on either side of the fulcrum, over time perception. How is that energy control system working out for you?
“use is flat or declining among teens,” keep-up-with-the-Jones, loss-leaders with no profit. What’s new?
delay, delay, delay
Breeding Consciousness
The empire is a given, gravity with momentum, thousands of years in the making. You cannot change it in the short term, but you can adjust it. It’s a process, not an outcome, so you can make large outcome changes in one dimension, change its dress, in fairly short order, by altering a few values, and/or you can make many adjustments in many dimensions over time to make structural changes, producing a quantum outcome, unseen until completion by those not participating, or participating unwittingly, in the value changes. The empire is a shared consciousness, a distribution moving in time perception.
Each social event horizon has assumed perception values baked into its DNA, which why most individual autonomous systems seek a like herd, resulting in a shared observers prism subject to diminishing scale returns. Their intellect is subject to determinant physical response to expected stimulus, which is re-enforced during a childhood immersed in the expected stimulus. The denial, anger, etc curve is part of the tuner.
Spiritual work is required to jump into another event horizon successfully, which creates a fuzzy logic that others may follow with somewhat less energy. Just because the herd assumes a solar system constant based upon university herd interpretation of observations made in a telescope, invented by somebody else, a long time ago, doesn’t mean that you must follow. When you hit the wall of recognition and engage the clutch, you may want to have another instrument in your bag. Don’t wait until you need the next gear to build it.
The battery problem the herd is having so much trouble with is the assumption of dc. The universe doesn’t work that way. Only gravity, the dumbest part of the universe works that way. You brain has two sides. Women are bred to favor one side as the net inductor, and men the other. The outside world is the expected resistor bank that tunes in an expected reality for most, and an unexpected reality for some. The potential difference creates a market exchange, of ideas.
So, back to that bumble bee question. Your human autonomous system is built upon a lot of other autonomous systems, which is why you can share reality, which is limited by the I/O feedback. Every software project begins by shrinking the box with deterministic false assumptions. You don’t get out of the box by mapping the inside of the box. How do you see beyond your physical limitations? What is language?
The assumption that you can rent a house out to pay the mortgage and pocket all the empire profit on resale results in what you see. Freddie and Fannie are massive RE subsidies, leveraged by derivatives, back into themselves, that have consumed the market, except the submarket swap being run by the same embezzlers, with a Nobel prize for the feedback. The Fritz healthcare scam is a similar algorithm. You don’t build a home the way you build a house, unless you want to live in a Disneyland economy, until it explodes.
Moderation: peace under pressure.
If you are receiving a low signal to noise ratio, what do you suppose that means? Which came first, the dust bowl or war? Ask Syria; an empire cannot reboot itself. You are the kernel, as much as you may want to avoid the responsibility.
An empire fears judgment, and so judges obsessively, only to act compulsively, with preemption, confirming itself. Its only possible outcome, without your interrupt, is tyranny. If you don’t like what you see don’t look in the mirror, is not a solution, as history attests, repeatedly. You didn’t create gravity, and nether did anyone else on this planet. It just is, for those who choose to dwell on it.
Fear is its own worst enemy. Just get out of its way, and do something, anything, that serves a purpose, and the rest will take care of itself. The empire isn’t going anywhere without good seed and good soil to plant it in, the destruction of which is the default option.
The Siemens circuit breaker blows up when it sees something it doesn’t expect. Until their position blows up, the cattle never see it coming. The real question is what happens before and after, on either side of the fulcrum, over time perception. How is that energy control system working out for you?
“use is flat or declining among teens,” keep-up-with-the-Jones, loss-leaders with no profit, selling soap. What’s new?
firefox automatically sends some data to Mozilla so that we can improve tour experience…crack me up.
I use the two-step verification available on Google’s Gmail, tho’ now I’m not sure why I bother. My calls always show the automated verification coming from the Washington D.C. area, which I thought odd for awhile until the Snowden revelations came to light.
To back up my suspicions, there was a time I had my phone in hand, expecting the verification call. Watching the screen, there was a momentary flash on the caller i.d. screen that showed “Palo Alto,” quickly followed by “Call Forwarded” and finally the usual phone number from the D.C. area. Hhhmmm.
Why use Google at all? You’re getting pwned
I wrote this to my Congressmen yesterday. Feel free to copy what you’d like. Or shout and call me an idiot.
I read in the Rockford Register Star this morning that Congress is discussing the NSA and spying. As a U.S. citizen I have concerns about this. Not about the NSA spying on foreign governments. I could care less about what foreign leaders the NSA wiretaps. That is their mission. That is their job.
I am concerned about domestic surveillance programs. And the ways they infringe upon constitutional and inherent human rights. It has been reported in both print and electronic news sources that the NSA routinely and indiscriminately collects telephone records, e-mail, voice communications, and text messages. This is apparently being done with little more than a morning memo as permission.
I am concerned by actions of the agencies involved. And the possible use of executive branch power for coercion. When James Clapper lies to Senator Wyden about domestic spying. And, claims innocence because his answer was the “least untruthful”. Or, when Eric Holder refuses to answer Senator Kirk about the possibility of wiretaps at The Capitol, and, the possibility of Executive Branch monitoring of the communications of Congressmen and Congresswomen. I begin to doubt their integrity and suitability to lead. If they feel secure lying to, and trying to evade answering, the people we elect to direct them. Then the system has been corrupted and they need to go. Mr Clapper should be jailed and Mr Holder should be fired.
I do support targeted investigation of specific individuals involved in criminal acts. But nonspecific and indiscriminate monitoring of US Citizens is objectional and criminal.
I therefore write to encourage you to investigate these abuses by our national intelligence agencies. To hold those responsible accountable. To repeal the Patriot Act. And end the secrecy of the FISA courts.
The tech giants (and their many, many smaller offspring and fry) have been in bed with the National Security State from day one, not just in bed with the NSA but with all of it; they helped build it, they operate it, their constant surveillance of their customers and everyone else in the whole wide world is a big part of the data held by government and private interests on all of us.
The court orders serve to protect and defend the companies from consumer and citizen wrath at what is and has been going on just as constitutional and legal provisions protect the government.
The companies have been routinely lying to customers and citizen in matters their of surveillance state cooperative endeavors, and anything they say about the privacy and security should always be taken with a huge barrel of salt. They are not going to tell the [whole] truth voluntarily, any more than the government will.
They will lie, they will misdirect, and they will dissemble.
Take what is published with a huge grain of salt. Part of what is going on is being revealed, yes, and outrage over it is perfectly natural — and expected, counted on, by the revealers (which include the Agencies involved). The purpose of it, however, remains obscured, behind many veils of propaganda and illusion.
Just ask who is really being protected — from whom — and you’ll have the obvious answer, but there’s no doubt something deeper as well. Who is really in charge? Of what?
Keep track of the high-level politics here.
To Google, NSA is the enemy, because NSA is bad for business. To NSA, Google needs to be coopted.
This is power politics of the sort which would have been understood in the late 19th century. Google is a power of nearly equal size to the NSA, but not quite. Google is not yet ready to make its move to kill the NSA… but make no mistake, Google does not like like the NSA at all.
I am not in any way saying that Google is the friend of the common person. I am saying that Google is a competing powerbase. Remember, corporations are nearly as powerful as countries these days. I am also saying that Google is a powerbase on a rising political trajectory, while the NSA is a powerbase on a decaying political trajectory.
This is 19th century style political analysis, it seems easy to me.