Stats for nerds
2recommend
5mentions
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2020–2021years
100% recommend
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- PRISM is targeted surveillance, not bulk - these are the FISA court orders.
Please read Bart Gellman's book, Dark Mirror, on the specifics of the Snowden documents.
Despite being targeted, it is warrantless and is the #1 used source by the IC.
- I very strongly recommend reading Dark Mirror by Bart Gellman.
https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781594206016
It's a look at the reporting of PRISM and other Snowden leaks by the guy who first broke the leaks. Pet jarring look at how the program can't to be, and how it evolved.
- Apparently the documents that he provided to the press had specific descriptions of names, cities, places, and events that had occurred that Gellman didn’t find specifically newsworthy but that the IC really, really wanted kept secret.
The view of people familiar with the matter is that anything placed into the unskilled hands of people like Greenwald or Gellman (although the latter did get professional assistance and take a lot of steps to protect it) got accessed/copied by any of a half-dozen other state-level intelligence services, so presumably the US IC was concerned about these particular not-published-in-the-media secrets being available to the public. (This is not to say they weren’t concerned about them being known to other intel agencies, just that based on the unprofessional hands in which it was placed, that ship had probably already sailed once it was given to those incompetent in safeguarding it.)
Personally, I wish the original unredacted PRISM deck had been published in full to the public. The state derives its authority from the consent of the governed; it is impossible to consent to something of which you are unaware and uninformed.
I heartily recommend reading Gellman’s book about Snowden, Dark Mirror. One of the things he mentioned that surprised me was that Snowden told him that they (the IC) would not hesitate to assassinate him (Gellman, a US citizen on US soil) instantly if they thought it would prevent the leak from going further.
- Snowden asserted clearly, on at least two different occasions, on the record, that the IC would not hesitate to assassinate Bart Gellman, a US journalist, if doing so would have prevented the publication or further distribution of the documents Snowden provided him.
Gellman writes about both of these occasions in his book Dark Mirror, which I recommend you read if you’re interested in becoming less naive about the American spy apparatus.
Additionally, the commander in chief of the entirety of the US military, including all of the IC (CIA et al), has plainly stated that Snowden should be executed. Note that Snowden has not at this time yet been put on trial, and the US constitution establishes the presumption of innocence, so such an event if it were to occur would be accurately described, legally, as an extrajudicial assassination of a US citizen.
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/39568370275766272...
- No, I'm saying that the notes are not encrypted from endpoint to endpoint. They are encrypted with TLS keys known to Apple in transit, and they are encrypted with storage keys known to Apple at rest in your iCloud account.
This means that Apple has the ability to decrypt them at all times without your knowledge or involvement, and can and does so via the PRISM program for US military intelligence to access the plaintext data, the same as they do for the CCP in iCloud users in China.
End to end encryption is not the same thing as transit encryption.
For the record: PRISM is not "sniffing" or any other type of bulk surveillance program that would be thwarted by TLS. It's an API/app-driven program, run by and within large tech companies, that permits the US military intelligence organizations to pull the decrypted contents of the account of anyone on the service, directly from the storage systems of those tech companies. The majority of the data that the IC processes is the result of PRISM. I encourage you to read Bart Gellman's book Dark Mirror for more information and specifics.
