decoration decoration
Stories

GROKLAW
When you want to know more...
decoration
For layout only
Home
Archives
Site Map
Search
About Groklaw
Awards
Legal Research
Timelines
ApplevSamsung
ApplevSamsung p.2
ArchiveExplorer
Autozone
Bilski
Cases
Cast: Lawyers
Comes v. MS
Contracts/Documents
Courts
DRM
Gordon v MS
GPL
Grokdoc
HTML How To
IPI v RH
IV v. Google
Legal Docs
Lodsys
MS Litigations
MSvB&N
News Picks
Novell v. MS
Novell-MS Deal
ODF/OOXML
OOXML Appeals
OraclevGoogle
Patents
ProjectMonterey
Psystar
Quote Database
Red Hat v SCO
Salus Book
SCEA v Hotz
SCO Appeals
SCO Bankruptcy
SCO Financials
SCO Overview
SCO v IBM
SCO v Novell
SCO:Soup2Nuts
SCOsource
Sean Daly
Software Patents
Switch to Linux
Transcripts
Unix Books

Gear

Groklaw Gear

Click here to send an email to the editor of this weblog.


You won't find me on Facebook


Donate

Donate Paypal


No Legal Advice

The information on Groklaw is not intended to constitute legal advice. While Mark is a lawyer and he has asked other lawyers and law students to contribute articles, all of these articles are offered to help educate, not to provide specific legal advice. They are not your lawyers.

Here's Groklaw's comments policy.


What's New

STORIES
No new stories

COMMENTS last 48 hrs
No new comments


Sponsors

Hosting:
hosted by ibiblio

On servers donated to ibiblio by AMD.

Webmaster
Expert says Kiwis under constant surveillance | 193 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Why Metadata Matters
Authored by: JamesK on Tuesday, June 11 2013 @ 10:51 AM EDT
Traffic analysis has long been a tool for intelligence gathering. During WW2,
when much was made about breaking Japanese and German codes, simply seeing where
the enemy's traffic was going and how much, could provide important clues, even
if the messages themselves could not be read.

Even without Prism, telecommunications companies have long performed traffic
analysis, not to spy on customers, but to determine network capacity
requirements.


---
The following program contains immature subject matter.
Viewer discretion is advised.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

How Big Is the NSA Police State, Really?
Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, June 11 2013 @ 03:33 PM EDT
The comment by Clemente that "all digital communications are — there's a
way to look at digital communications in the past" suggests the technology
is "save it to disk and analyze offline"...

When asked how much it would cost to do this level of traffic analysis for a
small ISP, I came up with a price for a sufficient deep-packet-inspection box
and associated infrastructure that cost almost as much as their existing routing
backplane.

Their response? "If this is imposed on us, we'll spool everything to disk,
which will cost a fraction of what you suggested. In addition, keeping a
circular buffer of everything will allow the police to get the data, not just
the metadata."

Fortunately the Canadian government hasn't required ISPs to pay to put in their
own snooping infrastructure, although they have proposed doing so.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Expert says Kiwis under constant surveillance
Authored by: soronlin on Tuesday, June 11 2013 @ 03:58 PM EDT
Expert says Kiwis under constant surveillance

The good professor holds that the Bluffdale Data Center was built to house the collected data and its capacity is around 5 exabytes (Wikipedia agrees, although we can't be sure what its purpose is.) Let's assume for a moment that every US citizen is targeted. There are 316 million US citizens. So the NSA expects to have to hold 16GB of data on each one. That's not much if it's video data of course, but one assumes the NSA can filter out streamed episodes of Friends. The NSA maintains that they only keep data on conversations with people outside the USA. If we assume 90% of US citizens never communicate outside the USA, that means the NSA expects to hold 158GB on everyone who does.

That seems to me too large for a reasonably filtered data-set, even if they were holding communication content as well as meta-data. It seems more likely that this is some other invasion of privacy, for example the combined recordings from every public CCTV camera.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Apple's new Mac Pro
Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, June 11 2013 @ 04:26 PM EDT
zdnet

Evolutionary, not revolutionary. Oh and
zdnet's pages load faster and are easier to read than Apple's

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

  • that link is 404'd - Authored by: nsomos on Tuesday, June 11 2013 @ 04:46 PM EDT
    • Sorry - Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, June 11 2013 @ 06:23 PM EDT
PJ's comment on Wyden cites contradiction in eavesdropping answer
Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, June 11 2013 @ 06:23 PM EDT
comment being:

[PJ: Given likely fears of what PRISM knows about them, they'll probably vote
for it to continue to the end of time, as Congress and Presidents did with J.
Edgar Hoover.]

Good one, I believe the same.
But how much time to come can one permit such a remark without being suspected
of being an enemy of that system and therefore being caught up in this
"fear system" oneself ?
What can one safely blog and what is "out of line" for the system?
How to stop the system running its participants / subjects ?

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

For PJ - Apple Boots Google for Microsoft in Siri - WSJ
Authored by: Tim on Tuesday, June 11 2013 @ 09:11 PM EDT
PJ, Please reconsider your comment attached to the News Pick: Apple Boots Google for Microsoft in Siri
At its developer conference Monday, Apple said Bing is displacing Google as the default source for searches spoken into the Siri voice assistant for iPhone and iPad. That means starting with the next version of the iOS software, released to consumers in the fall, people who ask Siri for Kim Kardashian’s birthday will get answers from Bing.
[PJ: And since asking Siri anything means your request is sent to Apple, does that mean you end up double surveilled, being in the control of both Apple *and* Microsoft?]
Until the announcement Siri has used Google's search engine. The Guardian's timeline for data collection by the NSA shows that Microsoft's was the first in November 2007; Google's started in January 2009; and Apple's did not start until October 2012. So the data from Siri may have been available through Google nearly 3 years before it was available from Apple: Guardian article.

As an aside, I note that many of the companies involved have stated that the government did not have access to their servers. If true, I would assume that they would have had access to all of the data coming in to the companies servers, and all of the data going out to their users through the network infrastructure - You don't need access to what is actually on the server - This technique was used to monitor electronic communications by Western Governments from at least the 1960s, before computing became ubiquitous: Link to Wikipedia - ECHELON

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Epoch Times
Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, June 11 2013 @ 11:08 PM EDT
The Guardian published a leaked FISC Section 215 court order well ahead of its declassification date of 2038.
The Verge   Is this another symptom of the Y2K38 problem?

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Groklaw © Copyright 2003-2013 Pamela Jones.
All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners.
Comments are owned by the individual posters.

PJ's articles are licensed under a Creative Commons License. ( Details )