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domestic spying round-up
Aug. 10th, 2013 10:22 pman ars technica story talks about an NYT piece lurking behind their paywall, which apparently says
and the US government appears to be driving secure communications providers out of business in order to hassle mr. snowden. that human rights activists in authoritarian countries depend on these services is mere collateral damage; it's not like they matter to the US government. (sadly, that's nothing new...)
finally, in the "locking the door after the horse has bolted" department, the NSA to cut system administrators by 90 percent to limit data access. this one is strange to me for a couple of reasons, none of which have to do anything with privacy rights, but have rather a lot to do with tradecraft, which i'm also interested in.
1) ISTR the US government developed standards for secure operating systems, and among the features for certain kinds of secure ones was partitioning of access, such that /sys/admins couldn't actually do much damage. hell, VMS had that sort of scheme, and it's forty years old.
2) my understanding is that spy agencies try to avoid firing people, since disgruntled ex-employees can do plenty of damage. telling a broad class of people that they're gonna get fired soon for somebody else's misconduct (from the standpoint of the NSA) just seems like it's begging for trouble. not that i'd mind another huge leak, of course...
To conduct the surveillance, the NSA is temporarily copying and then sifting through the contents of what is apparently most e-mails and other text-based communications that cross the border. The senior intelligence official, who, like other former and current government officials, spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the topic, said the NSA makes a “clone of selected communication links” to gather the communications, but declined to specify details, like the volume of the data that passes through them.so much for "the NSA isn't reading our email"... the ultimate source for the story is this guardian article, which has the juicy (or sordid) details.
and the US government appears to be driving secure communications providers out of business in order to hassle mr. snowden. that human rights activists in authoritarian countries depend on these services is mere collateral damage; it's not like they matter to the US government. (sadly, that's nothing new...)
finally, in the "locking the door after the horse has bolted" department, the NSA to cut system administrators by 90 percent to limit data access. this one is strange to me for a couple of reasons, none of which have to do anything with privacy rights, but have rather a lot to do with tradecraft, which i'm also interested in.
1) ISTR the US government developed standards for secure operating systems, and among the features for certain kinds of secure ones was partitioning of access, such that /sys/admins couldn't actually do much damage. hell, VMS had that sort of scheme, and it's forty years old.
2) my understanding is that spy agencies try to avoid firing people, since disgruntled ex-employees can do plenty of damage. telling a broad class of people that they're gonna get fired soon for somebody else's misconduct (from the standpoint of the NSA) just seems like it's begging for trouble. not that i'd mind another huge leak, of course...