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That is certainly the problem with blind partisanship, on both sides. PRISM was started under Bush, and greatly expanded under Obama. It was a knee-jerk reaction to September 11, and should have been fought by everyone. Alas, as you say, most just toed the party line.

And the FISA courts started in 1978. Which administration was... ?

Bueller?

Out of roughly 34,000 requests submitted to FISA, all of 11 were OK'd. Sort makes you feel all warm inside, huh?
 
@Rigby

I don't trust any of them. A few questions:

Did Apple only hand over user data when a court order targeting a specific user was served?

Have the NSA or other agency ever been granted access to any Apple system or did Apple just retrieve and hand over specific data?

Why was Apple the last of the big tech companies to work with Prism? Why are Apple on that slide if they were just handing over specific data after seeing a court order?

Has Apple ever assisted in decrypting any communications to help out the NSA?

There are more but these are the important ones for me.
 
Both the government and corporations are in the business of collecting "big data" on every person on the planet. The corporate overlords would probably greatly prefer that the government "privatize" the process so that the task of "keeping America safe" could become yet another profit-making corporate venture.

It has been privatized already after a fashion, since many of the NSA's staff are already contractors. Nonetheless, the question remains unanswered. Do the corporations get what they have requested? I have no doubt they will.
 
Your so naive, what makes you think you will ever find out whats going on?

Huh?

If I don't find out, I won't spend any more money with Apple, that was my point. Broadly speaking, I know what's been going on. I want to hear the specifics of Apple's involvement.
 
I do wonder how much Apple and the other tech/phone companies are paid for the information they provide to the government.

Another good question. There's an article out there detailing how much the carriers charge. Did Apple demand payment?
 
That's a good start, but I think we need a major overhaul of the Patriotic Act and the FISA court. I'm glad the American public is starting to understand what us Libertarians have been screaming about for years..

And any moment now, the American public will realize that Obama is a Kenyan-born Muslim. The Libertarians saw it coming.
 
And next week, Apple will request that the CIA be more transparent and identify the names of all agents operating at over seas postings...

When your job is to be a spy agency, transparency doesn't work. Once you tell everyone what you are doing, the adversary changes their behavior, and you no longer are getting good intelligence.
 
Having an iPhone app with full access to PRISM would be a great seller. No, this is not sarcasm.

Something should tell you, thats not going to happen. :D

And next week, Apple will request that the CIA be more transparent and identify the names of all agents operating at over seas postings....When your job is to be a spy agency, transparency doesn't work. Once you tell everyone what you are doing, the adversary changes their behavior, and you no longer are getting good intelligence.

There has to be a way to strike some kind of balance between the Fed having the tools to protect us, and the rights of ordinary citizens to a modicum of privacy. I'm a big believer in accountability, and maybe what it'll take is much tighter congressional oversight of agencies like the NSA, the CIA, and the FBI, while still allowing them to do their job, to prevent any and all abuses of their powers.
 
Property rights and privacy aren't respected by the federal government.

Apple, MSFT, and everyone else are completely powerless to stop the feds from demanding information. There are plenty of scumbag federal judges that will simply sign some BS warrant or issue a court order, forcing Apple to turn over information.

Lord knows what behind the scenes pressure is being applied. Or even worse, what bribery and perks...
 
Property rights and privacy aren't respected by the federal government.

Apple, MSFT, and everyone else are completely powerless to stop the feds from demanding information.
Yes. Joseph Nacchio said no and they put him in prison. He also said they approached him in EARLY 2001 and a direct tap into Qwest fiber optic lines.

And of course, you can't talk about it because they can gag you. I don't how that can be squared with the first amendment to the constitution. Being prohibited from talking about something is certainly an assault on free speech.

The whole set up stinks. If you can prevent people from talking about it, then you can keep the public from finding out, which means it's not possible to bring pressure on congress to stop it. Officials can go in front of congress and lie their asses off and if Ron Wyden says too much about what he knows they will put him in prison. How f'd up is that?

the solution is impeachment and removal from office, but this congress doesn't have the guts of the congress that took on Tricky Dick.
 
bullseye...

That's all nice and well, but Google (and a few other companies) have published so-called "transparency reports" for a long time ... and then we learned from the Snowden leaks that they were missing all of the "national security"-related requests and were thus not transparent at all. How can they expect people to trust in whatever new numbers they cook up?

Bingo!
 
Here is the problem:

We know we can send encrypted email and be pretty sure the NSA will not be able to read the content of the message.

If I send you a coded message by US Postal mail, even if the post office opens the letter they can't read it, it is strongly encrypted. But they can read the the address on the outside of the envelope. So they will keep a record of WHO you are are writing to and who sends to letterer. You can't encrypt the address or the post office can't deliver your mail. The content is easy to hide.

Same with emails, texts and phone calls. You can't encrypt the routing information or the message will not get through. So the NSA is able to keep a huge database of who talks to who and when.

HOWEVER, there are ways to to design an electronic message passing system that allows encrypted addresses. The NSA woud be unable to spy on such a system.

How to make this happen? ASK for it. Let developers know there is a market for it, offer to help an Open Source project create such a system. By all economic theories if there is a demand there WILL be a product.

So ASK for a Secure and ANONYMOUS message system. If enough people ask it will happen

How could it work?

Imagine a real physical post office where all the address on the envelopes are encrypted, no one one Earth except the intended recipient can read the address. Even holding the letter you can't know who it is to. So if the NSA gets their hands on it you don't care. But the mail man has a BIG problem he can't know which house to leave it at. So he thinks of a few solutions...

1) he xeroxes the letter and gives everyone on Earth a copy. All but one person see this as "junk" and trash it. This works but there is a LONG line at the
xerox machine.

2) he passes his mailbag around and tells each person, look inside and see if one of these letters is for you. If so copy it keep the copy and leave your letter in the bag. Give the bag to the next person. This works but you have to wait in a LONG line to look in the bag

3) a more complex solution involving thousands of bags that change hands and each letter is marked with a read-by date and is burned if found in the bag past that date. Now there are tolerably long lines at thousands of copy machines and reasonable long lines to look in the bags. What this does is make "almost everyone" a mailman.

We need a computerized version of solution #3. NSA would know if you were part of the mailbag exchange program but if EVERYONE was a member you would not stand out.
 
ZOMG! A strongly-worded letter?

Big Brother must be shaking in his boots!

Ehh, while it is just a letter, it's a good start.

The government might not take us ordinary citizens seriously when we say we are outraged over this invasion of privacy, but you better believe they'll start listening if companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft start putting the pressure on them. These are some of the biggest companies in this country and can have a direct effect on the country's economy.
 
I'm not so worried about the NSA as CSIS listening to me on the bus(which they do here in Canada). Not that I do anything criminal its just creepy.
 
That's all nice and well, but Google (and a few other companies) have published so-called "transparency reports" for a long time ... and then we learned from the Snowden leaks that they were missing all of the "national security"-related requests and were thus not transparent at all. How can they expect people to trust in whatever new numbers they cook up?

The only way this could work is if Apple, Google and all were able to hire some third party to collect and publish the data and route every request through that third party. And offer big rewards to whistle blowers
 
Whatever the reason I for one am glad there is some fight for privacy. It might be different if those watching us, allowed us to monitor their own personal private correspondence, But that is not likely to ever happen.

I liken it to credit bureaus and their infamously poor record keeping. Just because they can monitor every single thing we do and say, does not mean that it's right.

The so called Freedom that so many are militantly patriotic about, is being stripped away with every letter stored and cataloged in these so called minor invasions of privacy.

I don't have a problem necessarily with the people that started these invasions and continue them in the current offices. I do have a problem with the potential for all of this data to be horribly misused and abused by future office holders, or those with the skills to access it remotely.

Hitler did not build the framework for his empire, it was pieced together long before he ever came to power. In much the same way that Bush, and Now Obama seem to be doing setting the stage for their successors, that have the potential for huge gross abuse.
 
The Patriot Act was a green light for "police state" policies to move from control freak/paranoid wet dream to implementation. Hence, since 2002 the NSA has quietly been forcing fibre optic "splitter" HW into the major telecomm hubs to siphon off all the data (phone, email, internet searches, uploads/downloads, tweets, posts, etc.). All in the name of "national security". And now that their "vacuum cleaner analysis center" in Utah is ready, privacy is dead. They will know EVERYTHING about you.:eek:

No Gulag here folks...move along.
 
Liberals WERE screaming about it for years, and rightly so. They screamed about it right up until January 19th, 2009. Most don't care about the PATRIOT Act or the FISA courts now that a Dem is POTUS. You still have a number of more introspective progressives at EFF and the ACLU who realize that kind of power shouldn't be at the disposal of ANYONE in the government, regardless of party. Many rank-and-file liberals just don't care now that its Obama who wields the stick.

No we just stopped fighting it since, with Facebook and twitter nothing is private anymore anyway. On the other hand the date you mention is the date when conservatives cared all of a sudden. Google knows far more about you than the government so do the hackers if you have an android phone. There is no good that can come from the access freely given to corporations to better serve ads to you, how about acknowledging that we are stakeholders in a huge company called the USA, but they actually are charged with at least trying to keep us safe, if that is even possible.
 
The government gets away with a lot. Extortion, murder, illegal surveillance, etc. It's all okay if the government's doing it, but if I were to, I'd be locked up. We have a long way to go for the government to be operating "above board".

Id rather see Apple tell the federal government to ******* off and challenge them in court.

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No we just stopped fighting it since, with Facebook and twitter nothing is private anymore anyway. On the other hand the date you mention is the date when conservatives cared all of a sudden. Google knows far more about you than the government so do the hackers if you have an android phone. There is no good that can come from the access freely given to corporations to better serve ads to you, how about acknowledging that we are stakeholders in a huge company called the USA, but they actually are charged with at least trying to keep us safe, if that is even possible.
Just because people post something on Twitter or fb doesnt mean we posted it there for the feds to go snooping about all our internet activity. They dont need peoples private information to keep us safe. It just leads to the federal government chasing red herrings while boston bombs go off.

You see what they did to the guy in Germany? There is such a thing as too much information. Its just more stuff for the feds to go through. The US needs to stop acting like a communist government. Im annoyed with Obama over this.
 
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Property rights and privacy aren't respected by the federal government.

Apple, MSFT, and everyone else are completely powerless to stop the feds from demanding information. There are plenty of scumbag federal judges that will simply sign some BS warrant or issue a court order, forcing Apple to turn over information.

Lord knows what behind the scenes pressure is being applied. Or even worse, what bribery and perks...

Rubberstamp FISA court 99%.
 
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