Good Will Hunting's rant at the NSA

I've dug up a couple of references for Chinese hacking of delegates laptops and phones here (from 2008) and here (from 2012, with references to earlier visits and leaving compromisable items behind).

Well, yes. But also ridiculous to expect humans to act dispassionately, logically and reasonably rather than treating absolutely everything as some sort of adrenaline-fuelled game of one-upping brinksmanship.

Ironically, the government could deploy secure comms on an ordinary smartphone, but don’t, because they…

1) Define in as much detail as you can what “direct access” means.

More detail on how direct NSA’s accesses are is coming, but in general, the reality is this: if an NSA, FBI, CIA,…

corporate money traders :)

I’d imagine that NZ has some sort of secure inter-embassy communication system, but it’s cumbersome – the user has to go to a secure place in the embassy,…

I guess so. But really, when you're holding the cards, you're holding them. Eventually, they all get played. Most of the real sorting into who gets what happens at the deal, not during the playing. If you have a…

Nicky Hager, maybe? Oh wait, he doesn’t surveil, he just receives leaks, which is not the same thing.

So who on earth could be is spying on him......obviously not the British.... cos we're mates.

"But he was less worried about his host governments than others who might seek…

I helps if you know their negotiating postions as you go.

Not having anything to keep quiet is an ostensible reason to remove that money and power. And that's the least of the reasons not to have…

On that note, what if it happened, say, to the World Economic Forum or the Bilderburg Group? Unstoppable force meets immovable object?

Given NZ isn't in the G20, we wouldn't have been there. But I wonder how well GCSB defends our people against similar bugging when they visit UK, given their status as a branch office of Cheltenham/Langley. (Not to…

Blocked on copyright grounds. Curse you, erm...Someone!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjMCaw4qzjg

So that’s why copper is so expensive these days!

Here's a flashback to earlier surveillance system start ups...

Or you have in-house expertise who verify it all, and keep the details as secret as possible because they don't…

Mostly I use youtube as online radio to listen to music in the background. So, recently: Chopin, Rachmaninov, drum’n’bass, dubstep, old-school goa trance, sludge/stoner/doom, thrash. Also for watching the IoM TT races and some martial arts stuff. And cartoons with my daughter.

you the target…

Being indifferent, distracted (by I-don’t-know a rugby test), practising non-confrontational behaviour, embarrassment, fear of public speaking, possessing insufficient English, politely not wishing to disrupt anyone-else’s rugby watching, not having a formed…

What a poo party-pooper you turned out to be.

So then we still don't have any evidence that data mining has had any success in this…

One way to…

Bugger

Kyle wrote:
there should be laws against allowing him access to big data
Heh. I was just near the front of the curve realizing that if you have a time series of marriage records and a time series of electoral records,…

Unfortunately.

What generally happens in a pumping station (unless they've changed vastly in thirty years, which I doubt) is that there is a computerised controller box that runs the pumps at…

Must be the mathematical proofs Ben , I watched a few worm farm vids and got ads for cell phones and Mitre 10.

I noticed years ago how I was getting deals in the mail promoting dog food at Countdown and yes…

What have you been watching? My annoying YouTube crap is mostly travel insurance.…

True, but it’s interesting to note that even…

Well, 9 times out of 10 the targeted ads I get on youtube are for pop albums by acts like one direction or beyonce, hair conditioner, female skin cream, and creams…

I attended a talk last year by a NZ expert…

However, as is mentioned several times in the story, the only reason they were stopped in the first place was because…

The official, James R. Clapper Jr., a retired lieutenant general, said satellite imagery showing a heavy flow of traffic from Iraq into Syria, just before the American invasion in March, led him to believe that…

Do we know how they got their intel for it, though? It is an unfair thing I'm claiming, in one regard – they…

Well, to be fair, the sucesses get a lot less press than the failures. There’s been half a dozen separate stories in the UK press over the last year or so about the arrests, prosecution and sentencing of various small groups.…

The amount of money spent…

I've acknowledged and corrected the error. I do have some…

I did once get an enquiry to the effect of "My great grandmother and great grandfather seem to be listed as living in separate parts of town" and all I could do was agree that yes, they were.

So, if PRISM doesn't give the NSA unfettered access to all our online files, Gmail messages, Facebook posts, and tracking metadata, what does it do?

Basically, "PRISM is a kick-ass GUI [graphical user interface] that allows an analyst to look at, collate,…

Those snooping powers themselves, while controversial, have never been secret however. There is a gulf between them and the implications of the original reports concerning Prism, which strongly suggested the NSA could simply help itself to whatever it wanted, whenever it liked.…

That's a good way of putting it. Currently, on the success rate of apparently nothing whatsoever, I don't rate their chances of finding…

That's what those of us who do genealogy live for ;-)

Edward Snowden sounds like a thoughtful, patriotic young man, and I’m sure glad he blew the whistle on the NSA’s surveillance programs. But the more I learned about him this afternoon, the angrier I…

Again by analogy to the science I work in – it is when groups collaborate that progress is made. Research groups working in isolation rarely make breakthroughs. That…

Not doubting your experience.

Just saying that the datasets we access, genomic data, are very similar to the kind of large datsets of metadata that are being described. To give an idea of scale the bioinformatacists routinely describe genome datasets as the…

How's this instead?

Yeah, but it wish it was at all surprising from someone who went…

Who, me?

good to remember most of this stuff is about analysis and graft…

Mind you, I wouldn't know if there aren't thousands of people charged with reading the outputs of the various data trolling surveillance algorithms, and doing footwork to follow…

I read something about this recently, but unfortunately my retention of ideas is better than my ability to dig up a proper citation – maybe it was Gladwell's thing about thin-slicing. It was a story about some US army war games,…

Minority Report could be de-fictionalising sooner than we think.

Otoh, Glenn Greenwald is now blowing up on Twitter and saying:

Bart Gellman's claims about Snowden's interactions with me – when, how and why – are all…

I'm sure it will happen. 20 years ago I was one of the people designing resource allocation systems and getting laughed at. I make my comment entirely because I actually remember…

I ran out of time to work in a Huawei mention.

Which appears to say that he had authorised access to what he has leaked.

Booz Allen has acknowledged that Snowden was their guy, but says…

Agreed, but 20 years ago even that would have been a laughable suggestion.

I've worked with big datasets and modern biology is now a mixture of combining large datasets with in depth detailed knowledge to make progress. As important as the in depth understanding…

There weren't in the mid-90's on NT4 and Exchange.

Ah. I was just about to mention the LAPD project.

It was.

That's not really the same thing. It's just distributing coverage of resources, exactly like the cops already have to do. That is actually a somewhat appropriate job for a computer. To some extent, obviously there still needs…

Stupid technocrats. Next thing they'll be promising computers predicting crimes before they happen

The look on his face have been a thing to behold.

Correct. When I started running IT for a small government agency (which meant me and a tech), I had no security clearance and I raised the matter with…

It's possible that the bigger private data-houses are doing some of the feds' chewing for them. [[http://research.google.com/pubs/pub40571.html|This…

Anyway, if the purpose of an activity would be defeated by making it public, then there is a long standing principle of law enforcement that secrecy can be required. Such powers were traditionally strongest in matters of national security.

I have observed…

No doubt the NSA runs a tighter ship than most people, but it's impossible to do your job as a sysadmin without being entrusted with access to things you wouldn't otherwise have access to.

"Why didn't tech company leaders blow the whistle?"

https://mailman.stanford.edu/pipermail/liberationtech/2013-June/008815.html

Their intelligence gathering appears to…

The map suggests that intelligence is still being gathered with a degree of selection, but bear in mind that the Utah data centre is not finished yet. When it comes on line, in September of this year, it might be possible to fulfil the vision…

It looks remarkably like a Paranoia role badge.

Some former CIA officials said they were troubled by aspects of Snowden’s background, at least as he described it to The Post and the Guardian.

For instance, Snowden said he did not have a high…

Dude, he's a deep mole for the Illuminati.

http://www.statschat.org.nz/2013/06/09/what-the-nsa-cant-do-by-data-mining/

or "Hey, that Science thing seems promising"
#nolatin

Indeed. Yikes.

That is the only surprising thing about this entire affair. What were they thinking?

For my part, I remain convinced that the Verizon call data should be used as a viable data base for counter-terror investigations and that its misuse should be greeted with the hyperbole that currently adorns the present moment. On the other hand, the arguments…