re: NSA Dragnet Debacle: What It Means To IT
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The other shoe already dropped, but everyone seems to be politely ignoring it.
When Bush started all of this, a technician revealed that massive-bandwidth fiber trunks were being tapped into in special rooms at all the phone and internet providers.
Then last year, a Wired article quoted a systems-designer/whistleblower as saying that every phone call, email, ATM transaction, HTML request, electronic toll booth use, and library book loan that anyone in the country does is being tape recorded and stored in the new NSA data center in Utah at the rate of petabytes per day.
THIS is the data made available through PRISM, which is just a GUI into the massive database. I guess some of it is cached on disk.
That triggered a Senate investigation at which Clapper famously lied about it going on. For some reason, everyone insists on talking about mere telephone billing records--something their realtime data collection can't get.
It was also revealed then that there was a back door in every cell phone firmware allowing the NSA to turn on the GPS and microphone remotely.
I myself had a job interview with a friend of a friend contractor in an Arlington bar about a job tuning up the heuristics of the ontological model for the software that reads every single email anyone sends. I would have worked at UM, where the software was developed and where I did graduate work in knowledge representation and natural language understanding. I said "what about encryption", and he said they can brute-force anything, and if they can't, then they know it's important and they'll let the big machine crunch on it until they do.
I'm sure he wasn't supposed to tell me that, but he was drunk, bragging, and wanted to get in my pants. I didn't get the job because my DOJ security clearance had expired and the FBI was backlogged with clearance checks after 9/11. They needed someone NOW, with an active clearance.
I told the Washington Post, but they couldn't officially believe it unless I worked on the project or had documents.
We also now know details of the massively-parallel "big machine", also in Utah. I calculated that with 100 of the Nvidia CUDA arrays available now at Amazon, they could generate every 12-character password using every keyboard character in
20 minutes.
It also came out then that the NSA position is that they're not "intercepting" your phone calls until a human actually plays back the recordings.
Obama's statement "nobody's listening to your phone calls" was carefully worded. He would have preferred to say "nobody's recording your phone calls".
Y'all really need to WISE UP, and stop believing whatever the he11 you prefer to believe.
-faye kane GÖÇ girl brain
User Rank: Strategist
6/26/2013 | 5:10:04 AM
The other shoe already dropped, but everyone seems to be politely ignoring it.
When Bush started all of this, a technician revealed that massive-bandwidth fiber trunks were being tapped into in special rooms at all the phone and internet providers.
Then last year, a Wired article quoted a systems-designer/whistleblower as saying that every phone call, email, ATM transaction, HTML request, electronic toll booth use, and library book loan that anyone in the country does is being tape recorded and stored in the new NSA data center in Utah at the rate of petabytes per day.
THIS is the data made available through PRISM, which is just a GUI into the massive database. I guess some of it is cached on disk.
That triggered a Senate investigation at which Clapper famously lied about it going on. For some reason, everyone insists on talking about mere telephone billing records--something their realtime data collection can't get.
It was also revealed then that there was a back door in every cell phone firmware allowing the NSA to turn on the GPS and microphone remotely.
I myself had a job interview with a friend of a friend contractor in an Arlington bar about a job tuning up the heuristics of the ontological model for the software that reads every single email anyone sends. I would have worked at UM, where the software was developed and where I did graduate work in knowledge representation and natural language understanding. I said "what about encryption", and he said they can brute-force anything, and if they can't, then they know it's important and they'll let the big machine crunch on it until they do.
I'm sure he wasn't supposed to tell me that, but he was drunk, bragging, and wanted to get in my pants. I didn't get the job because my DOJ security clearance had expired and the FBI was backlogged with clearance checks after 9/11. They needed someone NOW, with an active clearance.
I told the Washington Post, but they couldn't officially believe it unless I worked on the project or had documents.
We also now know details of the massively-parallel "big machine", also in Utah. I calculated that with 100 of the Nvidia CUDA arrays available now at Amazon, they could generate every 12-character password using every keyboard character in
20 minutes.
It also came out then that the NSA position is that they're not "intercepting" your phone calls until a human actually plays back the recordings.
Obama's statement "nobody's listening to your phone calls" was carefully worded. He would have preferred to say "nobody's recording your phone calls".
Y'all really need to WISE UP, and stop believing whatever the he11 you prefer to believe.
-faye kane GÖÇ girl brain