[subego]

Originally Posted by Brandon Downey

**** these guys.

https://plus.google.com/app/basic/st...hovmgul15qrg0k

[subego]

This is the slide which broke the coder's back:

[Shaddim]

We need to reevaluate the power of the Executive branch from the top>down, specifically executive orders. It's clear that it's been abused, and those abuses have become even more apparent and egregious lately, due to the incompetence and criminality of the current administration.

Slowly we've become a quasi-dictatorship, with more fascist elements and schemes seemingly being revealed almost every day, all in the name of our "safety". Those powers need to be curtailed right now, because it's apparent that it's become too much for any one person to wield.

[subego]

The 2008 restructuring of FISA is what let them do this.

[Shaddim]

Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, they essentially dropped the first bit, there.

[subego]

I am 100% sure they're targeting a non-US Google network.

Of course, that network just might have a copy of everything going on in the US constantly uploaded to it as part of Google needing nation independent redundancy.

AFAIK, upon this being released, Google started encrypting inside traffic.

[Snow-i]

You think those floating barges they're building have anything to do with hosting servers in international waters where they can avoid US legislation and NSLs but still enjoy protection from the US coast guard considering they are a US company?

[subego]

Until Google can field a carrier group, all that would do is let SpecOps take the gloves off.

[subego]

How much do you want to bet that smiley face really pissed Google off?

[Shaddim]

Salt in the wound? Oh yeah. That was an epic troll, if ever I saw one.

[Powerbook]

Before yottabytes of data from the deep web and elsewhere can begin piling up inside the servers of the NSA’s new center, they must be collected. To better accomplish that, the agency has undergone the largest building boom in its history, including installing secret electronic monitoring rooms in major US telecom facilities. Controlled by the NSA, these highly secured spaces are where the agency taps into the US communications networks, a practice that came to light during the Bush years but was never acknowledged by the agency. The broad outlines of the so-called warrantless-wiretapping program have long been exposed—how the NSA secretly and illegally bypassed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which was supposed to oversee and authorize highly targeted domestic eavesdropping; how the program allowed wholesale monitoring of millions of American phone calls and email. In the wake of the program’s exposure, Congress passed the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which largely made the practices legal. Telecoms that had agreed to participate in the illegal activity were granted immunity from prosecution and lawsuits. What wasn’t revealed until now, however, was the enormity of this ongoing domestic spying program.

For the first time, a former NSA official has gone on the record to describe the program, codenamed Stellar Wind, in detail. William Binney was a senior NSA crypto-mathematician largely responsible for automating the agency’s worldwide eavesdropping network. A tall man with strands of black hair across the front of his scalp and dark, determined eyes behind thick-rimmed glasses, the 68-year-old spent nearly four decades breaking codes and finding new ways to channel billions of private phone calls and email messages from around the world into the NSA’s bulging databases. As chief and one of the two cofounders of the agency’s Signals Intelligence Automation Research Center, Binney and his team designed much of the infrastructure that’s still likely used to intercept international and foreign communications.

He explains that the agency could have installed its tapping gear at the nation’s cable landing stations—the more than two dozen sites on the periphery of the US where fiber-optic cables come ashore. If it had taken that route, the NSA would have been able to limit its eavesdropping to just international communications, which at the time was all that was allowed under US law. Instead it chose to put the wiretapping rooms at key junction points throughout the country—large, windowless buildings known as switches—thus gaining access to not just international communications but also to most of the domestic traffic flowing through the US. The network of intercept stations goes far beyond the single room in an AT&T building in San Francisco exposed by a whistle-blower in 2006. “I think there’s 10 to 20 of them,” Binney says. “That’s not just San Francisco; they have them in the middle of the country and also on the East Coast.”

The eavesdropping on Americans doesn’t stop at the telecom switches. To capture satellite communications in and out of the US, the agency also monitors AT&T’s powerful earth stations, satellite receivers in locations that include Roaring Creek and Salt Creek. Tucked away on a back road in rural Catawissa, Pennsylvania, Roaring Creek’s three 105-foot dishes handle much of the country’s communications to and from Europe and the Middle East. And on an isolated stretch of land in remote Arbuckle, California, three similar dishes at the company’s Salt Creek station service the Pacific Rim and Asia.

Binney left the NSA in late 2001, shortly after the agency launched its warrantless-wiretapping program. “They violated the Constitution setting it up,” he says bluntly. “But they didn’t care. They were going to do it anyway, and they were going to crucify anyone who stood in the way. When they started violating the Constitution, I couldn’t stay.” Binney says Stellar Wind was far larger than has been publicly disclosed and included not just eavesdropping on domestic phone calls but the inspection of domestic email. At the outset the program recorded 320 million calls a day, he says, which represented about 73 to 80 percent of the total volume of the agency’s worldwide intercepts. The haul only grew from there. According to Binney—who has maintained close contact with agency employees until a few years ago—the taps in the secret rooms dotting the country are actually powered by highly sophisticated software programs that conduct “deep packet inspection,” examining Internet traffic as it passes through the 10-gigabit-per-second cables at the speed of light.

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The NSA Is Building the Country's Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say) | Threat Level | Wired.com

[mattyb]

What an excellent way of putting what I think a lot of people around the world think of the USofA :

Not in that flag-waving bullshit we've-got-our-big-trucks-and-bigger-tanks sort of way, but in the way that you can looked a good friend who has a lot of flaws, but every time you meet him, you think, "That guy still has some good ideas going on".

Bravo.

[subego]

That said, big tanks are awesome.

[reader50]

Agreed, so long as someone else fills the fuel tank. 500 gallon / 1900 L. (Abrams)