Who watches the Watchmen?

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Mongrel
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Who watches the Watchmen?

Postby Mongrel » Wed Feb 12, 2014 12:51 am

Tap your phone/computer surveillance etc. thread.

So, this may just be the first time I a) link to a Fox News story unironically and b) celebrate Maryland:

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/02 ... latestnews
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Cthulhu-chan
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Re: Who watches the Watchmen?

Postby Cthulhu-chan » Wed Feb 12, 2014 11:56 pm

Wow, on both points. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.
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sei
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Re: Who watches the Watchmen?

Postby sei » Thu Feb 13, 2014 11:55 pm

Relatedly: offnow.org is an organized effort towards that end.
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Re: Who watches the Watchmen?

Postby Mongrel » Mon Feb 24, 2014 10:21 pm

It is quickly growing apparent that the level and quality of NSA-and-similar-agency's penetration of the internet is at levels best described as "Utterly terrifying".

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014 ... ipulation/

I mean, the Chinese actually look like nose-picking rank amateurs compared to this shit.
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Re: Who watches the Watchmen?

Postby Mongrel » Fri Feb 28, 2014 11:05 am

More fun news from England, as snoops with way too much power do exactly what you'd think snoops with too much power would do.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/27/gchq-nsa-webcam-images-internet-yahoo
So, turns out a lot of people use webcams for sex and the dirty bastards at GCHQ have been monitoring these feeds one handed.
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Re: Who watches the Watchmen?

Postby Thad » Sun Mar 02, 2014 7:08 pm

Kind of. Except, per Stross, in stereotypically prudish British fashion, the people conducting the surveillance seem upset by all the nudity.

The deeply serious spooks tried to spare the sensibilities of their employees by employing automatic image porn filters. Unfortunately naive porn filters block images on the basis of how much of the picture consists of flesh tones. In the case of video conference calls, this turns out to be too much: they were getting lots of false positives (images classified as pornographic that were not in fact so), and as the whole point of the program was to trial face recognition software in order to detect Bad People Discussing Terrorism On The Internet, this was a bit of a problem.


Stross adds that it gets worse because the UK has strict anti-child porn laws that do not distinguish between intentional and accidental possession.

I am still trying to get my head around the implications that the British government's equivalent of the NSA probably holds the world's largest collection of pornographic videos, that the stash is probably contaminated with seriously illegal material, and their own personnel can in principle be charged and convicted of a strict liability offence if they try to do their job.

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sei
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Re: Who watches the Watchmen?

Postby sei » Mon Mar 10, 2014 6:53 pm

Some idiot congressman spoke out against Snowden speaking at SXSW.

Didn't affect anything. Probably trying to stir his base... in Kansas.

Anyway, synopsis + clips of Snowden's talk at SXSW can be found on Washington Post. (Warning: utter shit audio quality + Glenn Beckian background image.) Maybe we'll get a transcript at some point.
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Re: Who watches the Watchmen?

Postby Mongrel » Mon Mar 10, 2014 10:27 pm

I actually think Snowden was off-base for mentioning constitutionality. That just makes room for people to have semantic constitutional debates.

Not that it's an irrelevant point to make, but I'd be happier seeing people call out NSA-type surveillance as straight-up immoral police state bullshit, constitutional or not.
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Re: Who watches the Watchmen?

Postby Thad » Tue Mar 11, 2014 1:56 am

See which one gets you farther in a courtroom.

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Re: Who watches the Watchmen?

Postby Mongrel » Tue Mar 11, 2014 2:13 am

Depends on if it actually is constitutional or not.
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Re: Who watches the Watchmen?

Postby Mongrel » Tue Mar 11, 2014 3:19 pm

Feinstein accuses the CIA of intimidation, cover-ups

That's the same Diane Feinstein who's not exactly known for not exactly being anti-security-apparatus. The same Diane Feinstein who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Pheeewwww, even if this is just bullshit grandstanding and nothing goes to court (surprise, surprise), this is still a Big Deal.

I liked this comment:
The CIA pissing off Feinstein took a lot of work but if even some of the allegations are accurate this is the biggest affront to America the CIA has committed since... well probably 2005? 2006? Shit.
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Re: Who watches the Watchmen?

Postby Grath » Wed Mar 12, 2014 4:39 pm

Mongrel wrote:Feinstein accuses the CIA of intimidation, cover-ups

That's the same Diane Feinstein who's not exactly known for not exactly being anti-security-apparatus. The same Diane Feinstein who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Pheeewwww, even if this is just bullshit grandstanding and nothing goes to court (surprise, surprise), this is still a Big Deal.

I liked this comment:
The CIA pissing off Feinstein took a lot of work but if even some of the allegations are accurate this is the biggest affront to America the CIA has committed since... well probably 2005? 2006? Shit.


I'm in favor of pretty much anything that pisses Feinstein off and distracts her from meaningless bans on gun aesthetics.

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Mongrel
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Re: Who watches the Watchmen?

Postby Mongrel » Thu Mar 13, 2014 5:31 pm

And the quote of the day is:

It's unbelievable to me that America's intelligence community has grown so lawless that the CIA can outright admit to spying on the Senate committee charged with overseeing them and not even stop to think that there might be any implications to such an admission.


(No, it's not from anyone recognizable. I just think it's a good point)
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sei
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Re: Who watches the Watchmen?

Postby sei » Sat Apr 12, 2014 11:25 pm

Condoleezza Rice joining the Dropbox Board of Directors. wrote:[Condoleezza] Rice not only spoke in favor of the Bush administration's warrantless wiretap program and expansive domestic surveillance program, she authorized the warrantless wiretap of UN Security Council members.

Given everything we now know about the US's warrantless surveillance program, and Rice's role in it, why on earth would we want someone like her involved with Dropbox, an organization we are trusting with our most important business and personal data?
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IGNORE ME
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Re: Who watches the Watchmen?

Postby IGNORE ME » Sun Apr 13, 2014 3:56 pm

If it's a Board of Directors position there's probably not much they can do about that. She is a stakeholder.

To be honest, though, I know my company at least already gets super pissed already if you use Dropbox, Google Docs or any sort of butt-based service to host business data. I guess it makes sense if you don't consider yourself to be heavily invested in R&D, or don't have customers that may be competitors. Or just can't afford to do things semi-securely (between the NSA and Heartbleed, "internet security" has become sort of an oxymoron lately).

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Re: Who watches the Watchmen?

Postby Blossom » Sun Apr 13, 2014 5:23 pm

I believe Sharefile bills itself specifically as being Dropbox for enterprise. Business data, levels of security, etc. Costs, though.
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sei
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Re: Who watches the Watchmen?

Postby sei » Sun Apr 13, 2014 5:27 pm

Spideroak and tarsnap claim zero knowledge.

Owncloud would take shit out of any other party's hands regardless, so that would make a lot of sense for internal use at a company. Being FOSS, I'm assuming the UI and convenience factor are both total shit.
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Re: Who watches the Watchmen?

Postby Thad » Sun Apr 13, 2014 6:42 pm

I'm using it at home, and kinda, yeah.

Had a particularly fun one the other day where I updated my resume, shared the directory, and then after pressing OK, immediately realized that oh shit I really should have backed that up just in case it gets the damn fool idea of overwriting the newer local version with the older remote version.

And then guess what happened in the seconds I spent frantically trying to copy the file to another directory.

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sei
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Re: Who watches the Watchmen?

Postby sei » Sun Apr 13, 2014 7:31 pm

Sad to hear.

If OwnCloud is shitty and obnoxious, I have to wonder whether the effort wouldn't be better spent on puting together some kind of rsync + file-watching (inotify?) package.

How is torrentsync working out so far?
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TedBelmont
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Re: Who watches the Watchmen?

Postby TedBelmont » Thu Apr 17, 2014 8:41 am


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