> For those keeping score, not only does Amazon own the The Washington Post and oversees the CIA’s Commercial Cloud Enterprise, it now has on its powerful board of directors the most visible figure from the NSA who illegally spied on Americans for the better part of a decade.
This sounds tinfoil hat crazy, but here we are. Not so crazy now.
Man in a position to have reams of compromising intel on the current president hired by a man in an ongoing battle with the president.
I have no evidence other than the sheer obviousness of it, but the ties still continue to this day. I have no doubt it is kept hidden from most employees due to the general political leanings of most Valley engineers. For instance, my work does a ton of work for the DoE and you hear them mentioned all the time. The DoD is also a customer and you never hear their name.
Google bought Keyhole (now Google Maps) from In-Q-Tel, the CIA's VC firm [1] -- this was when Eric Schmidt was CEO.
Maps was caught wardriving [2] with Google Streetview, linking Wifi access point names to physical locations early on. After getting caught, they settled for $13 Million last year.
Now Google Maps and even location services on all Android devices uses wifi scanning and bluetooth scanning as part of location triangulation. This is a constantly updating map of every SSID in existance, including unique radio devices in a given location.
Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, now heads up the DoD's advisory board on new technology [3]
Allegedly, Schmidt also games politics, albeit unsuccessfully, he spent millions on The Groundwork trying to prop up Hillary's 2016 campaign only charging them ~$700k (at one point they had 70 SWE/SRE on staff with most focusing on her campaign's needs for an entire year, they were only a couple blocks away in NYC from Hillary HQ). The company he invested in, Timshel, folded the same year as Hillary lost the election. I'd bet anyone money he wrote off his illegal in-kind contributions as 1099 losses. Check out his emails with Robby Mook.
More history about Google's mapping products is available in Bill Kilday's book "Never Lost Again: The Google Mapping Revolution That Sparked New Industries and Augmented Our Reality". Kilday was a founder at Keyhole, the startup acquired by Google to become Google Earth.
Remember the Google I/O when the presentation included a mom waiting in a queue inside a park ride and maps calculated that it's enough time to have another ride and then go somewhere else?
This was the moment I got afraid of every single Android device that's already on the market, sniffing around for everything they can find.
If private people do this, they get jailed. If google does it, nobody gives a damn about it.
There is no privacy, as everybody around you is compromising it without themselves knowing.
> Maps was caught wardriving [2] with Google Streetview, linking Wifi access point names to physical locations early on. After getting caught, they settled for $13 Million last year.
The issue was that they captured data from open APs, and that collection of data was deemed illegal wiretapping.
The mapping of WiFi networks to physical locations was not.
Regarding [2], the sensationalized, alarmist way the media reported this was not remotely accurate, nor would the conspiracy theory angle on this story make any practical sense.
Google’s official statement admitted to collecting payload data from unsecured WiFi networks but said it was a mistake from including a library with extraneous code. [1]
The statement also linked to a third-party analysis of the relevant code which concluded: [2]
“Gslite is an executable program that captures, parses, and writes to disk 802.11 wireless frame data. In particular, it parses all frame header data and associates it with its GPS coordinates for easy storage and use in mapping network locations. The program does not analyze or parse the body of Data frames, which contain user content. The data in the Data frame body passes through memory and is written to disk in unparsed format if the frame is sent over an unencrypted wireless network, and is discarded if the frame is sent over an encrypted network.”
JEDI has been headline news on CNBC for the last year. DARPA has numerous highly public initiatives and partnerships with SV darlings. Working with the DoD is almost never a secret, it just isn't sexy.
The government didn't create Silicon Valley, Robert Noyce and the rest of the Traitorous 8 did. They did however bankroll semiconductor fabs here and in Texas for a few years but the world is better for it.
I have evidence: I used to date a couple of CEO secretaries, and they always told me when the spooks came to town. Often. And a lot of companies where you think to yourself "gee, that's pretty weird, why would they be interested there."
well why wouldn't they? Every government would love to have silicon valley. The question is why the rest of the world blindly trusts the narrative about data security
All these 3-letter acronyms exists to further American interests - for a long time that was primarily the military/industrial complex followed by oil/gas. We're now just seeing the focus switch to supporting big tech as a priority.
It's still distressing to see those intelligence agencies further entrench themselves into fields perfectly suited for a surveillance state. Their reputation makes trusting that they won't abuse it difficult.
It may suit national interest, but it bodes poorly for the public interest.
They help the companies, who help the Government in return. And the whole conspiracy is carried on via the revolving doors of influence and networks of who knows who.
Where the public suffers is that it's their tax money that funds this rather than going towards education, health, essential services, better wages, social and economic mobility - the list goes on.
>They help the companies, who help the Government in return. And the whole conspiracy is carried on via the revolving doors of influence and networks of who knows who.
Except now one of the ways the companies can help the government is with readymade worldwide surveillance. That is much scarier than anything Dole could offer.
>All these 3-letter acronyms exists to further American interests
That's a strangely Aristotelian view of organizations. It is as if you are suggesting that the 3-letter agencies have a fundamental essence outside of the intentions of the people who work there.
I think their point was that these organizations are supposed to be filled with public servants, civil servants, and military/former military whose aims are the furthering of American interests. That's why they were started, and for at least some period of time (not necessarily through recent history, but maybe?) that's what they were. Honestly that's part of the argument for public servants making less money than their private sector counter-parts, that a big part of their "compensation" is being part of these huge organizations "saving America" or whatever patriotic spin you want to put on it.
Compartmentalization allows for that. You operate with orders to accomplish X, and it is more than possible to hide why you are accomplishing X.
Typically it goes like this: lobbyist meets with policy maker, policy maker decides objectives for [a-z]{3}, [a-z]{3} undertakes missions in support of lobbyist's objectives.
Tech is in bed with the government everywhere on the planet, and has been for a long time. The question has never been about fairness, it is: who has your interests in mind?
Who would you rather have logs of all your Internet activity: your own government, or another government thousands of miles away that is increasingly at odds with country's?
I could argue that I'm much more worried about the set of events my own government can set in action against me if they so choose.
The other government has less power over me because they are thousands of miles away and don't control the institutions that I need to function as a citizen.
That being said, the foreign government might be less afraid of using my information against me, since they would be less afraid of blowback.
It is increasingly "both, and do nothing about it" or "both, and be vocally opposed to it, and potentially cause issues for yourself x years from now."
Over ehre in Small Belgium it doesn't feel like it.
In bed with big internationals for other reasons some of which local like de beers sure tho but that just smells more of corruption than anything protectionist or intelligence based
Because EU countries don't have mammoth sized, trillion dollar SW companies with a global monopoly.
If your country's software industry is comprised mostly of 10-200 person web shops and consultancies there's no real gain for the Goverment agencies to be in bed with them.
If you follow that thought through to other industries, what do you think Denmark learns of US military movement and equipment from the armies biggest heavy lifter, Danish Maersk shipping? It can't be much since outside the software world companies don't sift through every single piece of "cargo" and goes to show why you shouldn't trust foreign software companies at all, allies or not.
Billion, trillion, shmillion, lose some, win some, it's all virtual. Not backed by anything real. I mean, you can see the house of cards falling down because of a sneeze right now :-)
Weird Ron Paul fiat currently pseudo-rant notwithstanding, SAP is a good example but an outlier. Pick a random multinational [b|tr]illion-dollar software company and it's going to be American most of the time, and from San Francisco most of the time that it's American.
The government has used Big Tech forever. Oracle, Microsoft, Apple products have been used by NSA+CIA for about as long as those companies have had products. Yes, those companies sell to the government. They want to make money and the government has money.
There is a difference between selling your product to government and working with government.
I am pretty sure USA government buy's plenty of stuff from Chinese companies like everbody else does. Doesn't mean Chinese companies are working with it.
Even if they weren't explicit partners it seems highly likely that intelligence agencies would get covert access to the resources of the main web companies - they are just too tempting a target not to.
Except that The Washington Post operates independently, and has strong editorial standards, something that a lot of "news" sites on the Internet today don't even pretend to have. The Post continues to publish articles about surveillance, as well as articles critical of Amazon.
For example, here's reporting on an interview with Martin Baron, the paper’s executive editor:
Mr. Bezos holds conference calls with The Post’s leadership every other week to discuss the paper’s business strategy but has no involvement in its news coverage, Mr. Baron said. During his occasional appearances at The Post’s building, Mr. Bezos sometimes stops by a news meeting “just to thank everybody,” Mr. Baron said.
“I can’t say more emphatically he’s never suggested a story to anybody here, he’s never critiqued a story, he’s never suppressed a story,” the editor said.
“Frankly, in a newsroom of 800 journalists, if that had occurred, I guarantee you, you would have heard about it,” he added. “Newsrooms tend not to like those kinds of interventions, particularly a newsroom that’s as proud as The Washington Post.
“If he had been involved in our news coverage, you can be sure that you would have heard about it by now,” Mr. Baron added. “It hasn’t happened. Period.”
That's not how editorial pressure works. Chomsky detailed it quite well, but in a few words:
The advertisers react to "wrong" coverage by withdrawing support, the chief editor is very attuned so he assigns the right people to the right jobs before trouble starts, and the journalists so assigned naturally work quite sincerely. No actual orders to publish or withdraw articles need to happen.
There's got to be a natural law that, for any given situation, one can compose a scheme whereby no proof of anything would actually exist, but evil would still be done.
I invite you to consider Hannah Arendt's words on institutional pressures driving unethical patterns of behavior. These she referred to as "the rule of Nobody" and also "the banality of evil".
In this frame, "business decisions / climate" are exactly the driving forces which perpetuate such structures and outcomes.
Business decisions and climate are also the driving forces behind literally everything a company does.
The banality of evil doesn't forgive laziness in the construction of hypotheses, unless you're Fox News.
To spell it out, what leak / disclosure would constitute proof of GP's belief? A memo from the WaPo editorial staff which says "Pursuant to Mr. Bezo's comments on X, please assign Y to story Z, so that reporting will be more favorable"?
And barring a plausible method of provability / falsifiability, we're in "just asking the question" rumor territory with regards to the original assertions of malice. Which, personally, seems below the level of discourse I expect from HN.
>Business decisions and climate are also the driving forces behind literally everything a company does.
This is the extent of the "conspiracy" in Chomsky's opinion. When things like the Amazon firing of a union organizer happen, the reporter set to cover it is going to have more connections to the corporate side and a be accustomed to writing stories that will please corporate sponsors.
If a reporter is overly critical, the story will likely get a less favorable placement and that reporter won't get similar assignments in the future. There is no overt conspiracy, but there is editorial pressure.
They eliminated their Ombudsman position in 2013. Not to pick on them, as most publications, NYT included have as well. I'll read occasionally, but definitely don't trust any of these any more without checking sources.
Just being the owner taints their coverage even with no direct influence (again, we can't just pick on Wapo here either). "So Joe, want to spend our time on researching this piece critical of Amazon or one the other hundred stories?"
> Except that The Washington Post operates independently, and has strong editorial standards, something that a lot of "news" sites on the Internet today don't even pretend to have.
Right, your news company is the only one that doesn't smell. Maybe you should adopt the motto "fair and balanced" to reflect how editorially independent and objective you are.
> Martin Baron, the paper’s executive editor:
The newspaper's editor says that he is objective? Zuckerburg also says facebook is all about user privacy. So it must be true.
C'mon man. I have firsthand knowledge of an editor asking a contributor to remove mentioning Amazon in a story because it cast the company in a negative light.
If a random guy online uses an account created a couple of days ago to say he has knowledge of something without providing any proof or substance then everyone should just blindly trust him and take his word for it.
Well... You may have firsthand knowledge or claim to have firsthand knowledge, but the rest of us don't.
When you saw that happening, did you just let it slide? Where did it happen? Was the story originally about Amazon or was it just an off-topic side remark that didn't really fit in?
Not everyone is willing to martyr themselves for a cause. Just because no such information has leaked yet does not mean it has not happened or that there will not be such leaks in the future.
Why should I stop sawing this branch I am sitting on, I havent fallen yet ?
> Why should I stop sawing this branch I am sitting on, I havent fallen yet ?
Your argument is that we can't prove the absence of a conspiracy.
Hence, a better analogy would be
"why should i stop sawing this branch? just because gravity has never left me suspended in thin air doesn't mean it can't or won't happen in the future"
Hey, want to hear something else a little tinfoil hat crazy and also 100% true?
- Checking out on Amazon was always encrypted.
- Browsing on Amazon was not encrypted until quite recently. Add To Cart wasn't encrypted.
- High end network equipment includes support for monitoring your browsing on the guest wifi to send URLs from you browsing Amazon to price-compare or buy. See, for instance, Cisco Analytics for Retail.
I think this varied by country. I was working on some HTTPS advocacy targeted at web sites before it was so ubiquitous, and I remember Amazon in the U.S. not allowing you to browse items with HTTPS probably sometime around 2010 (I think they would send a redirect back to the HTTP site).
>figure from the NSA who illegally spied on Americans
I like the way you included just 'Americans', may be because it's just the domestic spying which is against U.S. law, may be because you thought 'spied on Americans' hits harder for an American reader than just 'spied on everyone'.
But, for someone outside USA or China; there's absolutely no difference between U.S. tech or Chinese Tech w.r.t Privacy, what U.S. does privately, China does openly and that's not limited to just spying.
America won't arrest you on your vacation here just because you criticized the country on social media. I'd take American hegemony over Chinese hegemony any day of the week.
This bullshit game of "which is worse" between the US and China, with both countries constantly moving the goalposts, is just tiring. Yes, China is currently worse. But with children locked up in cages and a massive prison-slavery industry, not to mention crazy NSA spying and so on, you're kidding yourself if you say the US is that far behind.
You can say, as a US citizen, that all this stuff doesn't affect you much. But I can tell you, from considerable first hand experience, that the average Chinese citizen says the same about China.
The difference is that here we have the freedom to criticize and organize against it. One of the presidential candidates wants to tear down all the stuff you pointed out.
I can say that the surveillance doesn't affect me because it's almost unheard of for Americans to get arrested with evidence that the NSA collected. The NSA is not a law enforcement agency. In China arresting people based on data from surveillance is the norm.
> The difference is that here we have the freedom to criticize and organize against it.
Edit: I am mostly addressing the organize against it part. USA has far better free speech protections than China
Do you ? As an outsider it doesn't really look that way.
After watching events and protest around BLM, suddenly all those rights have gotchas in them.
Watching USA protesters and Honkong protesters, and goverment respones to them, there were far more similarities than differences. (Well china was still worse, but not by as much as most USA people seem to think).
The biggest difference in USA and china at the moments is that in USA some Politicians still listen to people (if only mostly out of self interest)
If we were like China, Joe Biden would be in jail. It's a different level entirely. Also please use some judgment when seeing America through the lens of our news media. They have every incentive to exaggerate stories so they can get more clicks and sell more ads. The police brutality at the protests is bad, but it's in a different ballpark than the Hong Kong protests. Here protesters don't have a reasonable fear of getting sent to mainland China to be imprisoned for decades, gang raped by cops in jail, and murdered while cops fake your suicide.
Regarding the reality distortion fields of Phox Noise and friends, what makes you think the news you get from the HK protesters are any different? Furthermore, please explain why the cameras were off when Jeffrey Epstein died? And the autopsy has been... err 'inconclusive'?
I think you could take the FBI's very different approach towards Ghislaine Maxwell as evidence that while the Epstein result was... questionable, there is some amount of vested interest in not just disappearing the related actors. Occam's razor, etc.
I see hundreds if not thousands people protesting and those of them who do not engage in acts of violence and property destruction have no problems. In fact, a lot of those who do engage in acts of violence and property destruction have no problems either - even if those are arrested, which happens very rarely, they are frequently released on the spot, and the charges are dropped. Only a handful of hardcore repeated offenders are even detained and charged. And with conviction and prosecution it remains to be seen if it ever happens even for most prominent and well-documented cases.
But the FBI has been trained to hide the source of information, probably because it is illegal in many cases (maybe comes from NSA)... they call it parallel construction but it probably should be called something much worst.
Under Biden's vice presidency, the NSA's collection of Americans' data reduced. Email metadata collection stopped in 2010 before the Snowden leaks, and phone metadata collection reduced after.
He seems consistent on this issue. Prior to his stint as VP, he complained about metadata collection by the GWB administration. https://youtu.be/h2qgU8kJt-0
Of course he complained about data collection by the administration his political enemies are running. The question is what happened when he was running it. So far you said "reduced" - reduced how? PRISM still exists, doesn't it? And there are many more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_government_mass_survei...
So the question is not whether Joe Biden ever grandstanded on the topic - I'm sure he did, as every politician would. The question is what he had done about it when he was Senator and VP - specific actions attributable to him? Because if he has been consistent to paying lip service to the issue while not doing anything in practice - it is prudent to expect the same consistency to extend into the future.
Which email metadata program specifically, how you know Biden personally had anything to do with shutting it down and how do you know there's no other programs such as Room 641A, MUSCULAR, etc. that can do the same? Same for phone metadata - what Biden had to do with it and how do we know it actually was reduced and not just changed codename?
You haven't told me anything in fact except that some things supposedly happened while Biden was a VP.
> you're kidding yourself if you say the US is that far behind.
Living in Europe I have the pleasure of hearing these kinds of naive comparisons on a regular basis. Somehow it's always "the US is basically China and/or Saudi Arabia".
It's exhausting having to explain to people who are seemingly only capable of operating with a binary black and white worldview that there is a massive difference between certain shades of grey.
>America won't arrest you on your vacation here just because you criticized the country on social media
Can you say for sure, that the phone will not be seized, imaged and/or bugged at the airport/border?
Anyways you are talking about differences in what they do with the data or the person to whom that data belongs and not contending the fact that tech companies from both the countries spy internationally.
In America you can buy privacy if you really want it. Buy a laptop here, install linux on it, and use a VPN. The NSA can't stop you if you really want privacy. This is illegal in China, where every VPN must be state sponsored and monitored.
See, that's what I'm trying to tell, What about 'Not in America'?
Before I proceed further, I want to categorically state that I don't intend to come off as supporting privacy violations by one country vs another; My argument over this entire thread has been that it sucks for someone not in any of these countries as they all spy on us and it's taken for granted in this kind of discussions.
That said,
>use a VPN. The NSA can't stop you if you really want privacy.
Because they have 'No logs' policy? Come on, don't be naive. Even the trillion dollar fruit company has been part of the program according to documents which hasn't been disputed.
>This is illegal in China, where every VPN must be state sponsored and monitored.
So you do agree that the Amercian VPN companies or any American company have double standards when it comes to China? Btw, almost every outsider in China installs a VPN to access content outside Great Firewall once they arrive, several U.S. services work without a VPN e.g. iMessage, Skype etc. I have heard of targeted deportation/arrests at airport, but never heard of random phone seizures at Airports.
Same advice, buy a VPN if you want the services that it provides.
>Because they have 'No logs' policy? Come on, don't be naive.
Contract with a VPN that is audited and resides in a legally favorable country. I hesitate to endorse any particular company, but they're out there. Maybe privacy just isn't convenient enough for you.
>So you do agree that the Amercian VPN companies or any American company have double standards when it comes to China?
What are you talking about?
>very outsider in China installs a VPN to access content outside Great Firewall once they arrive
You are allowed to do this at their law enforcement's mercy.
> several U.S. services work without a VPN
Surveillance wouldn't work very well if it made people quit using the services and network.
> I have heard of targeted deportation/arrests at airport, but never heard of random phone seizures at Airports.
I wonder why they don't feel the need to seize phones at airports. As an aside, I recall reading that the PRC forces Uighurs to install spying apps directly to their phones. That is, all the Uighurs who aren't in "Vocational Educational Camps" and have yet to flee to America, where the supposedly oppressive American surveillance state is a breath of fresh air.
Oh, I see. Yes. In America you are free to use whatever VPN you pay for, regardless of what country it's hosted in. The NSA won't prohibit it and cannot break it if it's using the right algorithms. If they wanted to intentionally examine your network traffic, that would require a court order. If they wanted to get past your VPN encryption, that would require targeted hacking of a US citizen, which is typically handled by regular law enforcement. The NSA doesn't primarily concern itself with US citizens because investigating them is, in short, a huge pain in the ass. If you have any evidence to the contrary I'd gladly read it.
No court order was necessary because AT&T consented to the NSA presence. Just like how your employer can hand over your corporate laptop to the police without needing a warrant. If you don't like it, consider dealing with another business and encrypting your traffic with a full tunnel VPN.
Yes. Secret courts are reasonable due process. Do you have an alternative method that wouldn't release damaging information?
Are you interested in talking about surveillance specifically or every talking point of the usual anti-American tirades?
> Do you have an alternative method that wouldn't release damaging information?
Yes, independent review by a board or committee separate from the defense intelligence complex who will help determine if the information is actually damaging or if it's just some bullshit a midlevel staffer at the Pentagon determined is 'damaging.'
As an American, I am deeply disturbed by the complete absence of transparency of these programs to Congress and the American people. And honestly I'm not convinced that the people running these programs have any ability to see the forest for the trees, or if they're not just some D.C. automaton skilled enough at groupthink and not asking questions to get the tippity-top security clearance.
Is it a drooling idiot running the program? Dunno. Classified.
Their spying on Americans is reviewed by judges and courts. They get warrants for every american they spy on.
The senate intelligence committee may (behind closed doors and under the oath of secrecy) inquire about just about anything the intelligence community does.
The president may at his or her sole discretion declassify any information.
Haven't you heard, the first rule of conflict is "all warfare is deception"? Try running a state with zero secrets and see how far you get.
Unfortunately, they only get warrants when civilians are looking over their shoulder. Snowden cleared that one up.
Those judges, and the members of the senate intelligence committee are most definitely not an independent committee. That's like calling the police commission an independent committee. Even if they were, how would we even know if they're not just rubberstamping stuff?
Congress is in the dark. Remember Niger?
"We don't know exactly where we're at in the world, militarily, and what we're doing. So John McCain is going to try to create a new system to make sure that we can answer the question (about) why we were there," he said. "We'll know how many soldiers are there, and if somebody gets killed there, that we won't find out about it in the paper."
When Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer was asked later on "Meet the Press" about knowing whether there were troops in Niger, he responded, "No, I did not."
If they don't even know where we have troops doing mildly classified stuff, how much do you think they know about black programs that are totally off the books?
The president has thus far decided things like, 'huh, the Coronavirus is a lot worse than everyone thinks...in February...better not tell anyone about it and we should do absolutely nothing to prepare' classified. Great guy to have in charge of that.
Think about the people we're actually fighting wars against? Do you think elaborate deception has made a sliver of difference in any conflict fought by the United States in the past 60 years?
We need transparency and civilian oversight. I'm not afraid of an Afghan Taliban fighter knowing our super secret plan to spy on the planet. I am afraid of a defense intelligence complex that has shown zero hesitancy in the past to spy on Americans and is increasingly operating in the shadows with little oversight outside of the White House.
This whole system is not engineered for the benefit of the American people. It's a juggernaut of bureaucracy and secrecy that serves a defense and intelligence community that is pursuing god knows what.
>Unfortunately, they only get warrants when civilians are looking over their shoulder.
Source on this?
>Those judges, and the members of the senate intelligence committee are most definitely not an independent committee.
What does independent committee mean to you? They are from entirely different branches of government. That's as independent as it gets.
The post you linked is from the Senate Armed Services committee which is not the legislative oversight for the NSA. Different people, different processes. Geriatric senators probably forgot we had troops in Nigeria because America has troops in untold dozens of countries. No one remembers the whole list.
If you think the Taliban is our biggest threat you should leave national security to the people who do it for a living.
This is the problem. I can't prove based on an objective source I can drop a link to, because it's all classified. That's literally the crux of the problem. When someone says 'trust us, we have all this evidence, but we can't let you see any of it because it's a secret,' does your skepticism not trigger in the least bit?
I can say that there are only 11 judges listed as being on the FISA court, and I don't believe that 11 people can personally oversee every instance of the NSA conducting surveillance on all potential Americans of interest around the planet. Maybe they can. Who knows, it's classified.
Congress is a different branch than the presidency, doesn't mean Mitch McConnell is an independent check-and-balance on the authority of the president.
It's literally their job to be aware of that. They have a staff whose entire job it is to keep them aware of that. If they can't keep track, what's the difference between them and the congressional committee that's supposed to be keeping tabs on the NSA?
The people who do national security for a living are in a bubble that facilitates the construction of boogeymen. And if they can't give me any credible evidence as to the existence of said boogeymen without saying 'sorry, that's all classified,' then why should I believe otherwise?
Right now I'm supposed to be scared of China, but I personally see no evidence that I should be more worried about them than my own president who covered-up the threat from Coronavirus in February, and then tried to blame it all on the Chinese as a diversion. Looks to me like the Chinese were actually trying to warn us in February, while the President was trying to cover it up:
If the Taliban aren't a threat to U.S. national security, then why was the longest war in American history fought on Afghan soil? Isn't that where all those 9/11 hijackers were from, and the country that bankrolled them? If they weren't from Afghanistan why didn't we sanction or invade the country they were actually from, and that gladly bankrolled the operation? Is that classified too?
They don't need a court order to sniff packets and do bulk collection. All that data goes into huge data centers. If they want to query that collected data for an American's information, they get a warrant. No human looks at an American's data before getting a warrant. You'd do well to familiarize yourself with their process, which is highly publicized.
There are other 3 letter agencies and 3rd country jails for that and That and this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposition_Matrix
I would not be hard to convince me that NSA inputs can place a person on these.
"Order" not sure, "recommendations" very conceivable. Anyway the issue is not NSA issue is the freedoms and protections offered by the country. If NSA doesnt but CIA does, its not any better.
You started with the claim that unlike China an US citizen is unlikely to get his/her privacy encroached on quoting all sorts of processes. I just gave examples where these processes didnt do much in preventing breaches of such encroachments. Add to that what we know is just a clouded view into the tip of the iceberg because of provisions of secrecy. If the clouded tip of the iceberg looks the way it does, it is not hard for someone not so deluded, or not so deprived of a full deck, to fill in what the rest of the iceberg could look like.
The examples you included do not show that Americans have their rights deprived without legal oversight. The exception is drone striking Americans who are overseas plotting imminent terrorist attacks.
That's an arbitrary opinion that you are holding on to. Being a target of warrantless search is not a sign of the land of the free.
If you disagree show me the proof of
> Americans who are overseas plotting imminent terrorist attacks
Show me the oversight over Anwar Awlaki's assasination that went ahead despite the fact that he had never been charged with (let alone convicted of) any crime. Proof of oversight, if you please over the killing of his 16 year old son.
I can play the same game that you have been playing in asking nothing less than irrefutable proof that will stand in a public court. Hope you believe in upholding the same standards over yourself that seek in others.
If you cannot, then how is it different from other places where such proofs are not forthcoming after killings or incarcerations ?
So you just have the word of one activist? Sorry, that's not enough evidence for me to believe it. If the NSA wanted to unlock a random journalist's phone, they would be able to hack it.
It also links to another similar account a few days before that. And why would Egyptian activists make that up?
Plus, even if the NSA isn't regularly doing the kidnapping, torture, and killing themselves, they certainly help our other organizations do these things. Things like the disposition matrix, black sites, and locally with parallel construction all rely on their surveillance.
How did she know he worked for NSA? Did she have any way to verify he was an American or worked for the NSA? Do you think the NSA hires people who specialize in HUMINT? Why would he tell her he works for the NSA?
Too many unanswered questions. It's more likely she made it up because it gets people angry and that's what activists need to do.
If you have problems with other parts of our government, by all means criticize them and be an activist. Speak your mind and vote. Making up stuff about the NSA is intellectually lazy.
> America won't arrest you on your vacation here just because you criticized the country on social media.
America won't even let you enter the country if you, or somebody on your feeds, criticized it on social media [0]
People who are too vocal in their opposition to the US government, or just been in the wrong places at the wrong times, have been plenty known to be abducted into torture black sites [1], if not straight up killed by a drone strike because literal SKYNET [2] interpreted their meta-data [3] as that of a terrorist.
And none of that is even accounting for the reality that the US has the highest incarceration rate on the planet, so if there's a place you will most likely be arrested during your vacation, then that's gonna be the US.
But I guess it's easy to forget about these parts of US hegemony while pointing at China over "social credit scores" putting people on no-fly lists.
The difference between 'recruiter' and a guy who sent some emails to some people is unfortunately a distinction that is up to some dweeb with more top-secret security clearances than medals on a North Korean general.
I assume it's the same thing in China, they just have more dweebs that can disappear people.
>"According to U.S. government officials, as well as being a senior recruiter and motivator, he was centrally involved in planning terrorist operations for the Islamist militant group al-Qaeda"
We are better off with him dead. He was American, but his allegiance was to al Qaeda and he was planning to murder civilians.
...based on classified information that we are not allowed to see, and may or may not exist.
You and I have no evidence that he was anything other than a loudmouth who bagged on the U.S. on the web and responded to emails from anyone who sent them.
Remember when Saddam had those tractor-trailer biological weapons factories driving around Iraq ready to release clouds of Anthrax on American civilians? That was also based on classified information from a US government official.
No, they just deny entry, or (try to) clone your data, insist on passwords/unlock of all sorts of devices, and so on. And email addresses/social media accounts, other online presences.
>But, for someone outside USA or China; there's absolutely no difference between U.S. tech or Chinese Tech w.r.t Privacy, what U.S. does privately, China does openly and that's not limited to just spying.
Maybe for someone outside the US and China who doesn't travel and never intends on traveling. On the flip side if you ever plan on visiting either country there is a pacific-ocean sized gap in what you'll face visiting the two countries. I can't recall the last time someone was "disappeared" for criticizing Trump on twitter. The same can't be said for those who criticize Xi on Weibo.
I think he got hired because AWS likes government and military contracts, and he has personal phone numbers of people who make that sort of decisions. And he doesn't have them through NSA data gathering, but because he can call these people and ask if they'd like to have a steak dinner and talk about why they should choose AWS...
Maybe. And even if he doesn't have the dirt on various people with power, including a bit lower down the food-chain. The idea that he might gives him an edge in those steak dinners.
It stinks no matter how you look at it. Actual criminal getting rich post crimes while Snowden who let us all know what a crook he is, is stuck in exile.
The rule of law and equality before it needs to be established.
"Bezos Taps Criminal To Strengthen Bid For Government Work"
Is about the kindest possible spin you can put on a headline for this story, right?
While I agree in principle, it hasn't really worked out well for IronNet. Maybe they stabilized now, but all those relationships didn't really produce the amount of business they thought they would.
Without addressing the specifics of IronNet, the fact that one entity adopting this strategy experienced sub par results is pretty meaningless - mostly since hiring former senior military and government figures is basically standard practice in any organization that handles (or aspires to handle) federal or military contracts. Swap out 'federal or military' for basically any other organization or entity and the practice still holds true.
> Amazon's chief executive officer (CEO) and founder, Jeff Bezos, is the company's biggest shareholder, with 55.5 million shares representing 11.1% of outstanding shares.
Maybe they were talking about options? You don't get voting rights by having options, you need to execute the options in order to get shares (and voting rights, in Amazons case).
Which would make him the majority shareholder. By a margin of 5% - almost double the next largest shareholder and more than the next dozen shareholders combined.
In other words: he has unilateral control of the company. Welcome to publicly traded companies. You don't need 51% to control the company.
He's a de facto controlling shareholder due to how comfortably secure his plurality is, absolutely. And he's got a significant amount of de jure control by being Amazon's President, CEO, and Chairman of its Board of Directors. It's under his control in many real senses.
But he's not a majority shareholder, since his percentage of ownership does not exceed 50%.
Bu that reasoning, if 1000 people each own 0.1% of a company, and one buys another out, then the person with 0.2% has "unilateral control of the company", implying that the other 99.8% could not stop the desires or action of the 0.2%.
This is nonsense. Any 3 of the 999 could stop the 1.
Your second link doesn't work. The first link shows some answers from Keith Alexander, but none of them were lies. It seems the author of the first article thought that PRISM is something different from what it was revealed to be.
In an exchange from March 2012, Johnson had an opportunity to question NSA Director Keith Alexander about precisely the kind of concerns that the exposé of PRISM confirms — that the signals intel agency can spy on content coming through American Internet servers.
I think it's pretty accurate description of what PRISM and other NSA programs allow NSA to do. Also:
Alexander categorically denied more than once in this clip that NSA even had the capability to conduct surveillance in the manner Wired reported
We now know not only they have the capability, they are actively using it. If claiming such capability does not exist is not a lie, then what it is?
> I think it's pretty accurate description of what PRISM and other NSA programs allow NSA to do — that the signals intel agency can spy on content coming through American Internet servers.
The part you quoted is correct, but he didn't claim otherwise. He said that they could not get Americans' data in that manner, which is true. Reread his exchange with Johnson in the article. ("Does the NSA intercept Americans’ cell phone conversations?") In other words, he did not lie.
The implication here requires a few things to be true.
1. The CIA illegally collected intelligence on Donald Trump prior to his election to the Presidency
2. This intelligence was specifically of a compromising nature to President Trump
3. This intelligence was retained and can be retrieved at a moments notice
4. The retired DCI, who is no longer a government employee, somehow retains his read ins, Need to Know or accesses or...
5. Has personnel working within the IC who do have access to this information that would give it to him.
6. That the DCI has provided the existence of this information to Jeff Bezos
7. Bezos then provides a PUBLIC position for this person on the Amazon board as a way to pay for access to this information that Jeff will then ostensibly have as a "secret weapon" to blackmail a sitting President
This type of conjecture is on par with other conspiracy theories which are so far from realistic that they defy logic to believe. I'd love to see the combined probability estimate for something like this.
Others have said it better - Hayden knows the DoD and IC process for IT basically better than anyone, and can help Amazon win more business.
Plus we've already had an impeachment trial. If there were damning, conclusive evidence that the CIA possessed on Trump, that would have been the time to present it.
While either is possible, your response reminds me of Russell's teapot because it's just as possible that Bezos eats dirt.
Without being able to falsify the claim, and by deferring to a claim that isn't the simplest possible explanation (he's got nothing), it makes me wonder whether other HN commentators will come to defend my "Bezos is a dirtmonger" conspiracy theory as well.
Oh god silly semantic games? really? Of course Bezos eats dirt because it's reasonable to assume without evidence to the contrary that Bezos eats food. It's reasonable to assume without evidence to the contrary that Bezos' food is no cleaner than yours and will contain some dirt.
Do we feel better about that now?
It's not reasonable to assume anything about the Intel Bezos has without evidence. Could be none. Could have hard evidence of crimes of the president and many senior politicians and public servants. Could be something in between those two. All are possible and there is no reason to discount any of it in the absence of evidence.
Good on you sticking up for the world's richest man who just hired a criminal though. It's important to maintian principle regardless of the optics.
Evidence is plain as a day to see: no "reams" of any kind have surfaced in 4+ years in spite of the entirety of the deep state working overtime to unearth them. While absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, the latest switch from mere misinterpretations and quoting out of context to brazen whole cloth made up hit jobs that dozens of people deny _on the record_ suggests that the DNC is out of ammo.
The USA badly, badly needs a way to get better candidates for both parties. Is there anyone who thinks this is the best the Republicans have to do the job for the american people? Is ther anyone who thinks this is the best the Democrats have to do the job for the american people?
It’s getting to the point where most people’s mental health would probably benefit from ignoring all this. It’s all very bad and will probably push you into coming up with crazy conspiracy theories.
> This sounds tinfoil hat crazy, but here we are. Not so crazy now.
Nothing about Amazon hiring a former NSA director to its board is "tinfoil hat crazy". It's in fact perfectly rational, since Amazon is literally in the business of selling services to the federal government.
> Man in a position to have reams of compromising intel on the current president hired by a man in an ongoing battle with the president.
I want the NSA to know everything a US President does while in office. I want the NSA to know everything a candidate for US President does while they are running for office.
The President of the US is not a regular citizen. The cost of being handed almost unlimited power is that you forfeit the assumption that you will use that power always and only to the benefit of the country.
If Alexander has compromising intel on the current president there is only one man to blame for that - the man who put himself in compromising situations.
> I want the NSA to know everything a US President does while in office. I want the NSA to know everything a candidate for US President does while they are running for office.
Neglecting the fact that, according to Snowden, they already have that power, are you aware what power this gives the intelligence community and, by implication, the sitting president over elections and up-and-coming presidential candidates? Yes, Donald Trump is dangerous. But this doesn't mean we should employ even more dangerous tactics to control him.
This sounds tinfoil hat crazy, but here we are. Not so crazy now.
Man in a position to have reams of compromising intel on the current president hired by a man in an ongoing battle with the president.