The NSA watches you poop.

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Adebisi

Clump of Cells
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Does the NRA know what I'm doing riiiiight ...



NOW?

sniffing my vinegar ball stink
 
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What narrative is that? The one about how people shouldn't leap to crazy conclusions based on zero evidence? Look at me! LOL CONTROVERSY!
So the research papers and the collaborated word of the chief counterterrorism/cybersecurity advisor of4 presidentsmeans fucking nothing?

If it weren't being brought forth by him, I'd be willing to just write it off as a wank off story by fucking Prison Planet. But TYT seems it's pretty worthy of air time. Maybe Cenk Uygur is just a crazy conspiracy nut now, too.

To just write it off as insane fantasy, when someone like that comes forward and speaks up, is incredibly asinine. I'd ignore your dumb ass, if this forum would fucking let me.
 

fanaskin

Well known agitator
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What narrative is that? The one about how people shouldn't leap to crazy conclusions based on zero evidence? Look at me! LOL CONTROVERSY!
however apparent that is, even if it's like a 4% chance it's noteworthy enough to ponder outloud. as a comment of it's own merrit it's pure supposition.
 

fanaskin

Well known agitator
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If you ever spell this man's name like this again, I will find you, and I will murder you.
Fuck that Frenchman I know why we hated him too to the point where Roosevelt said he had all the qualities of a dictator.
 

Running Dog_sl

shitlord
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I like the last bit in this quote about respecting privacy:

"The Army admitted Thursday to not only restricting access to The Guardian news website at the Presidio of Monterey... but Armywide.
Presidio employees said the site had been blocked since The Guardian broke stories on data collection by the National Security Agency.

Gordon Van Vleet, an Arizona-based spokesman for the Army Network Enterprise Technology Command, or NETCOM, said in an email the Army is filtering "some access to press coverage and online content about the NSA leaks."

...He said it would not block "websites from the American public in general, and to do so would violate our highest-held principle of upholding and defending the Constitution and respecting civil liberties and privacy."

http://www.montereyherald.com/local/...wide-officials
 

chaos

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They are blocking it for the soldiers/personnel's own good. The information in those stories is still considered classified and technically, even if you have a clearance, you can get in trouble for reading them on government machines. That counts as a UDCI, unauthorized disclosure of classified information.
 

iannis

Musty Nester
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Correct me if I'm wrong, because I might be very very wrong --

I imagine that if a soldier did want to read that information all he has to do is go down to the starbucks, use their wifi, and do his search.

So it's sounds hinky as shit on the surface of it, but it's an army agency restricting secondary access on army systems to material already deemed by the army to be restricted. It's a lot less hinky if you put it that way, and my assumption isn't wrong.
 

chaos

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The real thing they are "concerned" about is having the information on government computers. I would hope they realize that in this day and age you can hardly avoid hearing about the details between news, internet, radio, etc. Shit, I listen to the Security Now podcast and they had like 40 straight minutes on the whole thing this week.

It's stupid, but this is the government we're talking about here.

Speaking of that podcast, one of the things they were talking about was apparently the DNI testified in front of Congress that the NSA is intercepting and storing ALL encrypted data that transverses the internet. That is pretty shocking if true, I didn't have time to verify it.
 

Loser Araysar

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headInSand_southPark.jpg
 

Torrid

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apparently the DNI testified in front of Congress that the NSA is intercepting and storing ALL encrypted data that transverses the internet.
Now I feel even better for encrypting all my p2p downloads. A mere $40/year for unlimited use VPN, payable via bitcoin so you give them no personal information. Connect to the Switzerland node because of their privacy laws. Performance is great. When I don't torrent over that, it's SSL/TLS encrypted newsgroups.

Hope you NSA fuckers like having 250+ gigs/month of my data rotting on your HDs. Your reward for cracking my data's encryption is science fiction television shows from the '90s and lots of Elle Alexandra porn. Oh, and GoT. Best show ever.

Need some fiber to the mother fucking home over here to really waste their resources. /rude
 

Torrid

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They have no way to know what kind of data it is when I tunnel it through a VPN.

I originally got the VPN to avoid those extortion civil suits, but now that is becoming the secondary benefit. If enough people encrypted all of their data, it would make many of the NSA's domestic spying programs impossible. I don't need comcast or the NSA recording every embarrassing medical query I submit to google either.
 

iannis

Musty Nester
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They have no way to know what kind of data it is when I tunnel it through a VPN.

I originally got the VPN to avoid those extortion civil suits, but now that is becoming the secondary benefit. If enough people encrypted all of their data, it would make many of the NSA's domestic spying programs impossible. I don't need comcast or the NSA recording every embarrassing medical query I submit to google either.
I've got a feeling that if enough people encrypted all of their data the NSA would just hire more cryptologists. I mean, ya know?

Decrypting your porn and meticuously catagorized funny cat pics folder would probably be a waste of time, sure... but I mean, ya know?
 

tad10

Elisha Dushku
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I've got a feeling that if enough people encrypted all of their data the NSA would just hire more cryptologists. I mean, ya know?

Decrypting your porn and meticuously catagorized funny cat pics folder would probably be a waste of time, sure... but I mean, ya know?
Why do you think the NSA has a hardon for Quantum Computers? QC are awesome for decryption.
 

Torrid

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I've got a feeling that if enough people encrypted all of their data the NSA would just hire more cryptologists.
That's just it, they can't decrypt it. At least not yet. That's why they are storing it all, so they can decrypt it later when (if) technology allows for it. The public adopting mass encryption would be like a DDoS against the NSA. At some point it becomes impractical to just build more datacenters, buy more computers, etc. They would have to be much more selective in which individuals they spied on, like they should be doing already.

And yes, they would need a technological breakthrough like Quantum Computers to even have a chance to break modern cyphers. Brute forcing a randomly generated key would take longer than the universe has existed. If encryption didn't work, online banking wouldn't be safe and bitcoin would be dead right now.

Take AES for example; AES is one of the most common cyphers, is used by the NSA itself, and modern CPUs even have specialized hardware decryption support for it. It's been around for 12+ years and is still the first choice for symmetric encryption. A 256 bit AES key has 1.1e77 possible combinations-- that is only a few orders of magnitude less than there are atoms in the observable universe. Even futuristic computers won't guarantee decryption because you start running into laws of physics.

The NSA hoards all this encrypted data in the hope that one day a weakness will be discovered in the cyphers that reduce the searchable keyspace down to realistic levels. (unlikely) Or in the case of symmetric encryption (i.e. disk encryption) that the user created a weak key. Or they hope to get the key via some other means, like a keylogger or a man-in-the-middle attack. At the very least encryption prevents casual snooping as it would require them to commit considerable resources to decrypt your data. No more 'lol check this phone call out dude!'

It's easy to encrypt your data nowadays btw. Truecrypt is free, polished, easy to use, fast, and effective. I encrypt my media drives, and the performance hit is entirely unnoticeable. My VPN provider created a pretty braindead easy client too. And enabling SSL for usenet is clicking a checkbox. It's not like I'm going out of my way to do this.