BIG STORY from WaPo: Government secretly mining data from Internet corps. UPDATE: Companies deny.

[BlueCheese]

... including Facebook, Yahoo, Google, etc.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/us-intelligence-mining-data-from-nine-us-internet-companies-in-broad-secret-program/2013/06/06/3a0c0da8-cebf-11e2-8845-d970ccb04497_story.html

The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person’s movements and contacts over time.

The highly classified program, code-named PRISM, has not been disclosed publicly before. Its establishment in 2007 and six years of exponential growth took place beneath the surface of a roiling debate over the boundaries of surveillance and privacy. Even late last year, when critics of the foreign intelligence statute argued for changes, the only members of Congress who know about PRISM were bound by oaths of office to hold their tongues.

...

The technology companies, which participate knowingly in PRISM operations, include most of the dominant global players of Silicon Valley. They are listed on a roster that bears their logos in order of entry into the program: “Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple.” PalTalk, although much smaller, has hosted significant traffic during the Arab Spring and in the ongoing Syrian civil war.

Update

According to the Guardian, which also had the initial story, five of the companies deny the story, with several saying they have never heard of PRISM.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/07/prism-tech-giants-shock-nsa-data-mining

Weird. Who's right and who's wrong?

[brentspeak]

1. The phone data-mining was just the tip of the iceberg n/t

[BlueCheese]

5. Beginning to look that way.

[Hissyspit]

19. LBN Thread:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/1014502286

[Dawson Leery]

2. OnStar has a passive listening feature.

Which has much to do with why I do not buy GM cars.

[Ednahilda]

28. I've heard that it can be disconnected.

Not just turned off, but disabled. Since I'm not a car geek, I don't know how it's done, but if I ever bought a car with any such feature, I'd take it to my trusty mechanic to have it removed.

I have also heard that as long as a cell phone is turned on, its speakers can pick up and transmit ambient conversations. Anyone know about that? When we're in the car, I've started to stick my husband's cell phone (turned off) in the glove box just in case.

[Lenomsky]

36. LOL really?

GM cars fitted with listening devices and Cell phones being hacked as passive listening devices.

Is this for real or 'troofer' territory!?

As for cell phones buy a RFID/Faraday Cage for it.
You can buy on E-Bay just a little metal infused plastic holder.
I do wonder if a simple ESD bag as used in electronics would be sufficient.
Useful if you travel a lot and often forget to disable data roaming as it blocks all data.

Edit: typo

[Ednahilda]

37. I think I heard about disconnecting OnStar

on "Car Talk", which is pretty much my only source of car information.

As for the cell phone as a passive listening device, I read that on some electronic-geeky website last year or so. I don't have a cell phone and I would never be mistaken for an electronic geek - I can barely use the television remote correctly - but another article I was reading had a link to it and the title was intriguing. I imagine a little searching around might find the information again.

O.K. Here you go, from an ABC news story of several years ago:

Cell phone users, beware. The FBI can listen to everything you say, even when the cell phone is turned off. A recent court ruling in a case against the Genovese crime family revealed that the FBI has the ability from a remote location to activate a cell phone and turn its microphone into a listening device that transmits to an FBI listening post, a method known as a "roving bug." Experts say the only way to defeat it is to remove the cell phone battery.

Here's the link (as long as I've done this right): http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2006/12/can_you_hear_me/


About 25 years ago, long before any of us had heard of cell phones, a high school friend of my husband told us that the technology existed to use a land-line phone, even one that was hung up and not in use, as a passive listening device to pick up conversations that occurred in the room with the phone. He worked for a company that was somehow involved in developing the technology and was absolutely not a woo-woo kind of person. Unfortunately, it didn't occur to us to ask a lot of questions at the time. I have heard the same from at least one other source, so I'm assuming there must be something to it. I'm going to guess that tapping into cell phones is a lot more desirable now than messing with land lines, since only we dinosaurs seem to have them any more.

[Prism]

3. And my cover is blown.

Screw you, Washington Post!

[Downwinder]

4. Sounds like NSA snooping has replaced polls.

[marions ghost]

6. Look out for your cloud storage....

"Dropbox , the cloud storage and synchronization service, is described as “coming soon.”

(from the Wapo article)

[BlueCheese]

7. Twitter is "conspicuously absent"

Good for them.

[marions ghost]

9. Well, isn't Twitter highly transparent anyway?

I don't have a feel for how many restricted Twitter accounts there are. maybe somebody knows.

----Twitter Content

San Antonio-based market-research firm Pear Analytics analyzed 2,000 tweets (originating from the US and in English) over a two-week period in August 2009 from 11:00 am to 5:00 pm (CST) and separated them into six categories:[77]

Pointless babble – 40%
Conversational – 38%
Pass-along value – 9%
Self-promotion – 6%
Spam – 4%
News – 4%

Social networking researcher Danah Boyd responded to the Pear Analytics survey by arguing that what the Pear researchers labelled "pointless babble" is better characterized as "social grooming" and/or "peripheral awareness" (which she explains as persons "want[ing] to know what the people around them are thinking and doing and feeling, even when co-presence isn’t viable&quot . (Wiki)

[BlueCheese]

10. Probably...

On the other hand, they probably have useful IP data that tells where a user is located...

[marions ghost]

14. Good point

I'd be surprised if they are bot-free tho. Tweet if you hear more.

[nadinbrzezinski]

13. Goodie, we fall in that 4% as in news

traffic (yes serious) and life tweeting of actual news worthy events!!!!

Oy

[ProSense]

8. Interesting:

Last edited Thu Jun 6, 2013, 07:41 PM - Edit history (1)

The highly classified program, code-named PRISM, has not been disclosed publicly before. Its establishment in 2007 and six years of exponential growth took place beneath the surface of a roiling debate over the boundaries of surveillance and privacy. Even late last year, when critics of the foreign intelligence statute argued for changes, the only members of Congress who knew about PRISM were bound by oaths of office to hold their tongues.

An internal presentation on the Silicon Valley operation, intended for senior analysts in the NSA’s Signals Intelligence Directorate, described the new tool as the most prolific contributor to the President’s Daily Brief, which cited PRISM data in 1,477 articles last year. According to the briefing slides, obtained by The Washington Post, “NSA reporting increasingly relies on PRISM” as its leading source of raw material, accounting for nearly 1 in 7 intelligence reports.

<...>

Formally, in exchange for immunity from lawsuits, companies like Yahoo and AOL are obliged to accept a “directive” from the attorney general and the director of national intelligence to open their servers to the FBI’s Data Intercept Technology Unit, which handles liaison to U.S. companies from the NSA. In 2008, Congress gave the Justice Department authority to for a secret order from the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Court to compel a reluctant company “to comply.”

Apple demonstrated that resistance is possible, for reasons unknown, when it held out for more than five years after Microsoft became PRISM’s first corporate partner in May 2007. Twitter, which has cultivated a reputation for aggressive defense of its users’ privacy, is still conspicuous by its absence from the list of “private sector partners.”

[nadinbrzezinski]

11. I wish I could even feign surprise any longer

FUCK HOOVER!!!!

[kentuck]

12. Is the other story just a diversion??

This seems to be much more serious?

[markiv]

15. Facebook is lifelong privicide

even after you quit using it, you've given out enough info to analyse what makes you tick, and they will sell it for the rest of your life

[marions ghost]

17. "Privicide"

that is what's being done all right.

[DirkGently]

16. Microsoft was the first "partner." And now they want to put a Kinect

camera, always on, with infrared capabilities, under every TV in America.

Hmmm.

[abelenkpe]

29. There are already cameras

in your TV, phone, computer, laptop. Especially Samsung.

Not saying it's OK but nothing about this story is new news. Or even shocking. During the Bush administration it Rumsfeld was helping the pentagon put together a similar data mining operation.

Still sucks of course. Still wrong. But I'm always surprised that people don't already know and/or suspect this has been going on since 911 under the excuse of our global war on terrorism.

And it isn't just our government collecting and mining this data. Every corporation with access to the internet knows everything you do. They target you with ads. They know what you buy, where you shop, what shows you prefer, etc etc etc

[DirkGently]

33. No. Private companies are not reading our e-mail & logging our phone calls.

That is private information that only a set of recent, highly controversial legal interpretations and new law have enabled.

And no, we do not all have always-on, internet connected, infrared cameras with microphones facing us in our living rooms already.

[RILib]

38. masking tape

I have one laptop with a web cam. I taped over it as soon as I got it home. I say it's 90% probable they can somehow see through masking tape

This will probably get me thrown out of DU: I read the news about the feds snooping and promptly changed my voter registration to unaffiliated. The hot place will freeze over before I vote for anyone who supports this.

[Berlum]

18. 2007 - that makes this Chickenhawk Chimpy's Republican tar baby

But Bush is AWOL again in the matter of responsibility. As usual. A compleat Republican.

[frylock]

20. that's ONE year under bush..

Obama has been in office a little over FOUR years now. Obama now owns this baby, baby.

[BlueCheese]

21. I almost don't care which president is most responsible for this.

It's obvious by now that Obama believes in the national security state every bit as much as Bush did.

I'm curious now who among our leaders has the courage to push back. So far we've heard the right things from Sanders, Feingold, and Gore. (I may be missing some.) Feinstein and Reid have spoken for the wrong side. Who will take a stand on this?

[RILib]

26. Wyden

has pushed back. And if you look at his statements for years, it's apparent he was trying to let the cat out of the bag that this was happening without the result being that he was charged with treason.

[BlueCheese]

27. Of course. He's first on the list. And Udall of Colorado, as well.

[Iliyah]

22. WOW, this information has been

out and open for awhile now, geeeeeeeeezzzzzzzzz.

Force Congress to repeal the Patriot Act and install the Shield Law, for crying out loud.

[G_j]

23. +1000

[abelenkpe]

31. exactly. nt

[Honeycombe8]

24. Well, duh. MS, Yahoo, Google, FB, etc., are all mining your personal data...

I'm not surprised that the govt is taking a look-see, as well.

I'm more concerned about Google, frankly. Google is getting so widespread and fishing and mining so much information that it's all but impossible to stop it. I can't watch a youtube video without fear of Google sending that fact to my gmail contacts. Even though I have never connected those two accounts...youtube and gmail.

[Luminous Animal]

25. Greenwald at the Guardian also broke this story today. Both the Guardian & Washingtong Post received

this top secret document.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-nsa-data

When the NSA reviews a communication it believes merits further investigation, it issues what it calls a "report". According to the NSA, "over 2,000 PRISM-based reports" are now issued every month. There were 24,005 in 2012, a 27% increase on the previous year.

In total, more than 77,000 intelligence reports have cited the PRISM program.

Jameel Jaffer, director of the ACLU's Center for Democracy, that it was astonishing the NSA would even ask technology companies to grant direct access to user data.

"It's shocking enough just that the NSA is asking companies to do this," he said. "The NSA is part of the military. The military has been granted unprecedented access to civilian communications.

"This is unprecedented militarisation of domestic communications infrastructure. That's profoundly troubling to anyone who is concerned about that separation."

[justiceischeap]

30. The first time any of us signed onto the internet we lost our privacy. nt

[BlueCheese]

32. Update: Companies flatly deny being involved.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/07/prism-tech-giants-shock-nsa-data-mining

Very curious. Now I don't know what to believe.

[kentuck]

34. Plausible denialbility?

From the Nixon years?

[octoberlib]

35. Here's the statement the Director of National Intelligence released

In a separate statement, Clapper defended a separate U.S. government effort to collect private communication from major techonolgy companies under a still-classified program known as Prism, as reported by the Washington Post Thursday.

“Information collected under this program is among the most important and valuable foreign intelligence information we collect, and is used to protect our nation from a wide variety of threats,” he said. “The unauthorized disclosure of information about this important and entirely legal program is reprehensible and risks important protections for the security of Americans.”



Read more: http://swampland.time.com/2013/06/06/obama-administration-declassifies-phone-records-seizures-condemns-leaks/#ixzz2VUv572a0

[RILib]

39. they're lying

Last edited Sat Jun 8, 2013, 03:44 PM - Edit history (1)

Article in the nytimes this morning about almost all the big companies being involved.

Edited to add: I no longer believe anything the government says.