Do any of the representatives passing these inflated budgets have any idea what their five billion dollars is buying? I have to imagine that all of our elected officials hear about our "cybertroops" supplying "cyber-fire support" enacting "cyber-kinetic attacks" and they might as well be hearing about stealth bombers without knowing what radar, explosions, or airplanes are.
Are there some kind of Congressional training sessions where basic information about computers is disseminated and explained, or is it all really just a bunch of hand-waving for all the individuals involved? I assume the latter, but I'd love to be pleasantly surprised.
From watching the C-SPAN video that was on the front page of HN, I take from it that different senators and congressman have different levels of understanding. Senator Mary Landrieu (D-Lousiana), for example, had pretty much no idea what was going on ".gov is a coke bottle" ".com is the room surrounding the coke bottle." (paraphrasing).
While Jeff Merkley (D-Oregon) had a better idea of what was going on "How did we get from the reasonable grounds, relevant authorized investigations, statement of facts, to all phone records, all locations, all the time." (@ time 1:22:05)
> Senator Mary Landrieu (D-Lousiana), for example, had pretty much no idea what was going on ".gov is a coke bottle" ".com is the room surrounding the coke bottle." (paraphrasing).
I saw that too. She was completely dumbfounded, and apparently just defaulted to the attitude, "well, I don't understand what the hell is going on, and I trust you guys are doing a good job, so... good job!"
It's terrifying. We need more computer-literate people in Congress, because the current crop are dinosaurs.
> We need more computer-literate people in Congress, because the current crop are dinosaurs.
In NL, one of the most important things Bits of Freedom (Dutch equiv of the EFF) does, is writing reports and summaries explaining just what all this computer stuff means, what the consequences are, that politicians can use and read to be informed. Afaik, they word them in a decidedly non-partisan manner, so they can be used by left and right, conservative and progressive all the same.
Now you might have seen the posts about surveillance in NL being at least as bad or worse, they're all true, but I've also seen politicians change their minds about things because of these reports. And not just the leftist or progressive ones, either.
At least no one was actively joking and boasting about their computer illiteracy the way so many do. ("I have to ask my kids for help to turn the thing on").
I just don't understand how the NSA can even have the technical capacity to store all of this data. If their total operating budget is a few billion dollars, that doesn't even really come close to buying enough disk to store what some claim they are storing (all network traffic, social data, images, emails, voice, etc).
Where are you getting that budget? Supposedly, the new Bluffdale facility alone will cost at least $2B. Do we have any way of knowing what their real budget is?
Haha, yeah I bet the kind of data they collect dedupes and compresses pretty well. They probably sometimes collect the same packet many times on its journey.
The best speculation I've seen on the matter is that the NSA's budget is between $12 and $15 billion, but that was several years ago, it might be much higher now with the emphasis being placed on all of these programs (with the NSA effectively being turned into a military asset).
We can extrapolate a floor on their budget by looking at the FBI and CIA, with it being publicly known that the NSA is far larger than both.
The FBI's 2014 budget request is for $8.4 billion, with 37,000 permanent employees. The NSA is thought to be at least two to three times larger than the FBI.
I had this strange thought occur half way through the article.
The US government is storing, analysing and recording all internal electronic transmissions so that US civilians can be protected from external aggressors. Doesn't that then provide a hypothetical aggressor a simplified target. If they can access these data hubs then havent they hit the motherload?
I wonder how secure the governments facilities are in retrospect.
Furthermore, doesn't this make the task of detecting or hunting non-state aggressors that much harder now that they know all electronic transmissions are recorded (and thus forcing them into an electronic darkness where they can't be spied upon).
I think PRISM and all these internal external spying facilities are inevitable but the ramifications of their public knowledge are going to be interesting.
Edit: Im also surprised by the complete lack of interest by the general US population. Maybe because HN readers are educated and technical they understand the implications but you would think there would be some kind of public uproar over this, especially considering the myths that Americans are brought up upon (freedom from tyranny etc.)
I wonder how secure the governments facilities are in retrospect.
We'll find out, I imagine, as soon as Anonymous gets their press briefing finalized.
But I wouldn't say there's a complete lack of interest. For most Americans,this is just another in a series of scandals that play out on television, abstracted from their real lives. And as someone pointed out to me recently, almost no one seems to care when facebook and gmail mine your data. If it weren't for social media, I don't think PRISM would have been as acceptable culturally.
Although I am a bit disturbed that the threat of affordable healthcare seems to have been far more revolting to people than this.
>Furthermore, doesn't this make the task of detecting or hunting non-state aggressors that much harder now that they know all electronic transmissions are recorded (and thus forcing them into an electronic darkness where they can't be spied upon).
>I think PRISM and all these internal external spying facilities are inevitable but the ramifications of their public knowledge are going to be interesting.
I think an adversary with any chance of succeeding already assumed this sort of program was in place. I don't think this revelation will force any adversaries into electronic darkness--I imagine any actual capable adversaries were already there. That's one of the most ridiculous parts of these programs to me.
>Im also surprised by the complete lack of interest by the general US population.
I think there will be some major objection and noise from Americans about this. I just don't think there's a full realization of what's going on yet. Many people are just a single debunking of "nothing to hide, nothing to worry about" away from being upset about this. And a lot of people are passionately doing just that.
There is a certain beauty to the PRISM idea though. You're right that a capable adversary will already have been avoiding U.S. nets for obvious reasons.
But if you're going to recruit new soldiers, bomb-makers, suicide bombers, etc., you eventually have to go to where the people themselves are. So someone in the terrorist group will have to dip their toes into those dangerous waters.
If a cell is smart that one person will be the only one who does so, but that is still one link into the overall terrorist network, if the NSA can find it, and that can help lead to IP tracking, which can lead to drone surveillance, which can lead to a boots-on-ground raid to grab the computer (and maybe even the recruiter), and go from there.
Obviously the hypothetical "capable adversary" can be resistant to a lot of tracking techniques, but that doesn't mean you give up. They may very well make a mistake eventually and then you've got them.
The NSA's precursor once even cracked part of a one-time pad because the Soviets reused individual pages from their one-time pad codebooks. Breaking the parts of the code they did took lots of time but by 1946 revealed the existence of Soviet spies in many high-level organizations, including the Manhattan Project, which was a pretty significant coup of its own for U.S. counter-intel.
And all that by pursuing an enemy using theoretically unbreakable crypto...
That's true--the Prism program really could have the positive effect of making recruiting harder. That's definitely the most sensible argument I've heard for it.
It's interesting that the program being useful in that way doesn't require the program to be secret...
Well, secrecy had its uses too. People might have assumed about Facebook and Google being susceptible to FISA warrants (not to mention PRISM), but I'd never even heard of PalTalk until this.
Either way though the cat is out of the bag so there can be no further national security interest from a lack of transparency around that program.
There are a lot of Americans concerned about this, in my opinion. However, most Americans go to work, get home from work, eat dinner, surf the web, watch tv, mow the lawn, pet their dog, play with their kids, and go to sleep like it's just another day, same as the prior and same as the next.
The NSA is currently doing very little to physically intrude on the lives of the typical American. Like most people, if a threat isn't in their face, they generally will not respond to it. So it doesn't seem real (making it very easy to cower in fear and avoid confrontation, with statements like: I have nothing to hide), and by the time it does, it'll be far too late to stop it.
I agree--most Americans have probably been going about their lives and not paying too much attention to this so far.
But I think this issue is going to be in news cycles for quite a while. The more news cycles, the more likely people will start to think about it, the more likely they will run into the friend who feels passionately about it, and the more likely they are to decide it doesn't belong in their America. (Or that if it does belong in their America, that it shouldn't be kept a secret.) It's important for those who feel strongly about this to speak up now.
I'm from former soviet country and even I personaly am a bit too young to have experienced full force of soviet surveilance - all this current NSA crap hits quite close to home.
And I do feel that i have more privacy. My governmet is rather to busy trying to shoot itself in the legs repeatedly to implement surveilance of any significant scale.
My online presence probably end's up in NSA hands though. Since it is rather insignificant (i don't use facebook or any other "social" crap) I don't think much of it. It DOES annoy me, don't get me wrong.
I'm from an Asian country, and I have always assumed I have privacy, but that's only because my government is too incompetent to set up any reliable surveillance system.
I think it's every bit as likely that the NSA will be responsible for instigating and elevating (arms race) the very cyber war they claim the private sector won't be able to defend itself against (eg Stuxnet, and I'd hate to know what they've been up to since). Self-fulfilling prophecy.
It really sounds a lot like the run-up to World War I. Kings and militaries running around gearing up and thumping their chests, polarizing their populations, with only the dimmest understanding of the utter hell which they were about to unleash upon themselves.
Thankfully, we people are awake now and can put a limit on the foolishness before it gets too late. But this is why a free and open internet is so important.
Are there some kind of Congressional training sessions where basic information about computers is disseminated and explained, or is it all really just a bunch of hand-waving for all the individuals involved? I assume the latter, but I'd love to be pleasantly surprised.