Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Sheb]

They were not, the warrantless wiretap thing was unlawful. But yeah, they followed orders and without thinking about legality, so any future president who want to use them directly against the people will have no trouble. Just seems like one more chink in their "We're self-regulating, don't worry" justification.

As for the NSA guys and Snowden, yeah of course I meant example.

[palsch]

Big document declassification dump by the NSA.

The one that's being picked up on is the court order blocking communications due to ineffective minimisation procedures. Or, more simply, they were gathering thousands of internal US emails they weren't meant to.

I've hardly had time to open the documents, let alone read them, but the significant part seems to page 14 onwards of the October 2011 letter in that link dump.

This is the FISA court acting in a review role of how well the NSA is abiding by it's minimisation procedures and finding them wanting.

[misko27]

Bradley Manning has come out as transgendered, and wishes to be refereed to as Chelsea.

Someone tell me they punked the NY times. Also on CBS. And CNN. And Washington post.

You heard it here first folks.

[Eagleon]

Big document declassification dump by the NSA.

The one that's being picked up on is the court order blocking communications due to ineffective minimisation procedures. Or, more simply, they were gathering thousands of internal US emails they weren't meant to.

I've hardly had time to open the documents, let alone read them, but the significant part seems to page 14 onwards of the October 2011 letter in that link dump.

This is the FISA court acting in a review role of how well the NSA is abiding by it's minimisation procedures and finding them wanting.

Spoiler: This about sums it up. (click to show/hide)

I've never understood how 'declassified' can mean 'half of it is blacked out but here ya go!' Yes, I understand that there are other classified documents it can refer to, but if you have to go so far as to literally black out an entire half-page paragraph how can you be sure they're not just redacting everything that incriminates them more? What's the point?

[GlyphGryph]

What's funny is that the page shown above is actually LESS redacted than most of the pages I attempted to view so far.

[Zangi]

You mean 95% redaction and not half right?

[palsch]

Spoiler: This about sums it up. (click to show/hide)

I've never understood how 'declassified' can mean 'half of it is blacked out but here ya go!' Yes, I understand that there are other classified documents it can refer to, but if you have to go so far as to literally black out an entire half-page paragraph how can you be sure they're not just redacting everything that incriminates them more? What's the point?

Like I said, I didn't spend long with it, but it seemed to me that the core of the document (eg, what wasn't redacted) was the incriminating part. Likely active procedures that were found to be legal probably should stay secret. Procedures were the NSA was found to be in breach of the law are discussed in the plain text.

A conservative view of the releases here. Carrie was the one who thought Obama's reforms were unneeded and too much, so take her article with that in mind (although if you read it to the end you won't be left with any doubts about her view of things...). Her take on the reason and likely results of the releases;

don’t like it one bit. I can imagine at least two possible reasons for the release: either the government knows that more leaks are coming and is trying to get ahead of the newspapers, or, it felt compelled to push back against the story line that the FISA Court is just a shadow of a real court. But I hope it is clear that the critics of surveillance activities only see transparency as the first step in a longer fight. The strategy is a one-two punch. The first punch is transparency. The second is to scale back or eliminate our national security surveillance capabilities altogether. Don’t take my word for it, an activist from the Electronic Frontier Foundation said as much in a discussion I took part in on KCRW’s show “To the Point” yesterday.

I don't think this is entirely inaccurate, although I do disagree with the idea that these releases are a bad idea. I think this strengthens the case for further restrictions on the NSA's actions - including in my mind - but at the same time it does show that the FISC is at least a viable model for such restrictions and isn't the toothless rubber stamp it's been accused of being. Given the first is pretty universally assumed right now (at least among those paying attention) achieving the latter even in a limited form is a worthwhile goal for the government.
Lawfare also have a more detailed series on the documents from Witts. 1, 2, 3, 4. Part 2 addresses the October ruling, which is the big issue here. If you want to see how incriminating the documents are, read that part. Part 3 is about the government's response to that ruling in the following months.

Bradley Manning has come out as transgendered, and wishes to be refereed to as Chelsea.

Someone tell me they punked the NY times. Also on CBS. And CNN. And Washington post.

You heard it here first folks.

For the record, this was semi-public knowledge for a while. There was a concious decision made not to make it an issue on the part of a lot of people who knew. One I agreed with and went along with.

Back in June of 2010 Wired released chat logs between Manning and Adrian Lamo. These were heavily redacted. A lot of people complained about that, believing it was protecting Lamo. So a year later they released the whole things. They had been protecting Lamo, but also had removed multiple references to Manning's desire to transition. Honestly, it's those logs that have given me the most sympathy for Manning and always said she should have only received time served as a sentence. And that make me hope she can get a commutation from Obama once his appeals are exhausted. They are fucking heartbreaking.

EDIT: Pronouns. How do they work.

[GlyphGryph]

Yeah, Lawfare was one of my first stops after hearing from the release. Definitely an... opinion, there, hah. Like usual, I respect their opinion, but I don't often agree with them. I especially liked the bit where there was an accusation that those opposed to the program were going to seek more transparency and then use that to push to reduce the scope of the program, as if it was some insidious and terrible plan, and the evidence is that... they admit that is in fact what they are trying to do. It worries me that "If people know what's going on public opinion might turn against it and it may stop" is seen as a valid reason to keep something secret in a democracy. But eh.

It's still worth reading - even if you disagree with the conclusions, they have been touching on a lot of the bits that are actually important.

[lue]

I have to admit, it made me feel a bit better that the FISC isn't the yes-man it so obviously could be, at least once.

Big document declassification dump by the NSA.

The one that's being picked up on is the court order blocking communications due to ineffective minimisation procedures. Or, more simply, they were gathering thousands of internal US emails they weren't meant to.

I've hardly had time to open the documents, let alone read them, but the significant part seems to page 14 onwards of the October 2011 letter in that link dump.

This is the FISA court acting in a review role of how well the NSA is abiding by it's minimisation procedures and finding them wanting.

Spoiler: This about sums it up. (click to show/hide)

I've never understood how 'declassified' can mean 'half of it is blacked out but here ya go!' Yes, I understand that there are other classified documents it can refer to, but if you have to go so far as to literally black out an entire half-page paragraph how can you be sure they're not just redacting everything that incriminates them more? What's the point?

Agreed. (Might as well be called... "demiclassified") At some point it looks to be less about revealing information and more about showing there is a page that says stuff. Why not do something like print some white text over the blacked-out portions summarizing what they blacked-out in a safe way, or maybe just black out the important nouns and verbs?

[palsch]

I'm betting it has to do with the declassification procedure which seems to involve the physical redaction of hard copy documents. As for giving reasons, that could be problematic in itself. Oh, and would likely mean admitting the existence of documents they really don't want hit by FOIA requests. Not to mention that such reasons would be impossible to verify so would be nearly useless as far as transparency goes. You would have no more way of knowing if an official reason was accurate than a guess from context was right.

[Eagleon]

Like I said, I didn't spend long with it, but it seemed to me that the core of the document (eg, what wasn't redacted) was the incriminating part. Likely active procedures that were found to be legal probably should stay secret. Procedures were the NSA was found to be in breach of the law are discussed in the plain text.

Lue's statement is more what I was getting at - declassifying a document that says what's already been said. They've already been caught with their hand in the cookie jar, so what I fear is that there is much more to what's been done (or what's in the works) than they've already been accused of, and cutting off a bit of the project is being seen as the way to save the rest. Snowden was a very small part of a very expensive investment, so thinking that he was briefed on the scope of the entire project is rather strange.

What I'm honestly afraid of is that they've taken the smart route and developed this into a tool of information manipulation. It would not make sense to develop an information network like they have and ignore the potential of using it to analyze what key components of the graph are responsible for communications between (as a relatively safe example) terrorist cells. More, it wouldn't even be difficult or expensive - they're probably already automatically saving highly connected pieces of information for further examination. Going further, the prospect of being able to introduce the right information to exactly the right audience would be a fantastically smart way to mitigate the impact of these leaks.

If you don't believe this is possible, then you don't believe in marketing - any advertisement firm worth their salt would squeal in delight for hours at the prospect of open access to communication analysis on this level. Watson is an example of how powerful machine learning in this area is becoming. The timing is right - there's big money, and lots of education going into developing this for more benign purposes.

All speculation, but if I were at the NSA, this is what I'd personally be pushing for if it wasn't already being developed into a program.

[SalmonGod]

Understanding memetics is really the key to influence in the modern world.  If you know how to make an idea spread, while preventing the spread of opposing ideas... you win.  Of course, that's always been the case... but in a global society of instant communication, understanding how information travels is far more powerful than any amount of brute force.

[Scoops Novel]

I was wondering, has there been much attention paid in the media or otherwise to how other countries are imagined to manage their own surveillance schemes, or how they work with PRISM? Bearing in mind how much of the internet lie's in the US, and presumably the difficulty other government's would face with cutting the US out of the loop, I've heard very little about the international interests in PRISM's operation. Also, i agree with Eagleon's point on information manipulation, and i wonder how access to their own data and others varies across countries.

[alway]

Like I said, I didn't spend long with it, but it seemed to me that the core of the document (eg, what wasn't redacted) was the incriminating part. Likely active procedures that were found to be legal probably should stay secret. Procedures were the NSA was found to be in breach of the law are discussed in the plain text.

Lue's statement is more what I was getting at - declassifying a document that says what's already been said. They've already been caught with their hand in the cookie jar, so what I fear is that there is much more to what's been done (or what's in the works) than they've already been accused of, and cutting off a bit of the project is being seen as the way to save the rest. Snowden was a very small part of a very expensive investment, so thinking that he was briefed on the scope of the entire project is rather strange.

What I'm honestly afraid of is that they've taken the smart route and developed this into a tool of information manipulation. It would not make sense to develop an information network like they have and ignore the potential of using it to analyze what key components of the graph are responsible for communications between (as a relatively safe example) terrorist cells. More, it wouldn't even be difficult or expensive - they're probably already automatically saving highly connected pieces of information for further examination. Going further, the prospect of being able to introduce the right information to exactly the right audience would be a fantastically smart way to mitigate the impact of these leaks.

If you don't believe this is possible, then you don't believe in marketing - any advertisement firm worth their salt would squeal in delight for hours at the prospect of open access to communication analysis on this level. Watson is an example of how powerful machine learning in this area is becoming. The timing is right - there's big money, and lots of education going into developing this for more benign purposes.

All speculation, but if I were at the NSA, this is what I'd personally be pushing for if it wasn't already being developed into a program.

These already exist to some extent. Brought up in the progressive thread a year or so ago was something akin to this, albeit a manned approach. It is also known that there are several software packages available to effectively forge an identity, allowing a single 'handler' person easily manage multiple personas for just such purposes. Beyond that, I haven't heard of any fully-automated agenda-pushing software, but I would be more surprised if they don't exist.

Because, as you mentioned, Watson.

Agenda-pushing bots are simple; much more simple than Watson, and much more simple than a more general chat problem. All you need them to do is:
A. repeat slightly rewritten or similar material occasionally
B. derail conversations involving opposing viewpoints
And with part A, you could even grab it from a sufficiently large dictionary of propaganda/arguments mixed with a thesaurus. It's a case of quantity over quality; and so you don't need them to be particularly deep, you just need a lot of them [which with full automation is a piece of cake]. Send in 5 contrarion-bots, and suddenly you're able to derail a previously unfriendly forum. Send in 50, and you've basically made that place into a communication-free zone, in which any inhabitants either agree with your point of view or are overwhelmed by responding to idiotic bot posts to the point where they leave of their own volition.

[Mrhappyface]

Understanding memetics is really the key to influence in the modern world.  If you know how to make an idea spread, while preventing the spread of opposing ideas... you win.  Of course, that's always been the case... but in a global society of instant communication, understanding how information travels is far more powerful than any amount of brute force.

To a lesser degree, I thought this was quite interesting.  Watching a phenomenon become started, hijacked, and then ridden into the ground within the course of two months was quite a sight. Seeing how even Pepsi Co tried to get a slice of the pie means that they take this viral video stuff incredibly seriously. But the most ominous thing was that this didn't even go through 4chan or Something Awful.
http://qz.com/67991/you-didnt-make-the-harlem-shake-go-viral-corporations-did/