There is no contradiction if you accept the suggestion from http://financialcryptography.com/mt/archives/001431.html that the NSA got access to this information by planting moles at target companies who then created back doors for the NSA to use.

This would be reasonably easy for the NSA to do, relatively hard for companies to catch, and perfectly explains all published facts.

How are NSLs addressed? I assume to the CEO, but what if one was sent to a departmental VP? Would that VP be permitted, by the NSL, to inform the CEO that the letter had been received?

For that matter, who is the CEO authorized to tell if the CEO got the letter. Obviously they have to be authorized to tell at least enough employees to actually implement the demand.

Google's statement was strong enough to rule out the possibility that either the CEO or chief legal counsel was aware of the existence of NSLs or warrants that are nearly as broad as what Verizon received. Therefore, while they can't say one way or the other whether they receive NSLs, it is a safe inference that Google has not received broad NSLs.

No it wasn't strong enough.

All the companies ruled out is direct access (and Microsoft said is if there's a voluntary program, they're not part of it; they didn't rule out an involuntary program of course).

They did not rule out even something so simple as an API, or another party doing the work for the NSA (which the NSA then taps into, ala the Palantir concept).

We may be thinking of different statements by Google. The one that I am thinking of is at https://plus.google.com/106189723444098348646/posts/A98pnaek.... Specifically this chunk of paragraph 3:

Press reports that suggest that Google is providing open-ended access to our users’ data are false, period. Until this week’s reports, we had never heard of the broad type of order that Verizon received—an order that appears to have required them to hand over millions of users’ call records. We were very surprised to learn that such broad orders exist. Any suggestion that Google is disclosing information about our users’ Internet activity on such a scale is completely false.

Yeah, I'm wondering if "someone down the chain in Gmail got NSL'd" is a possibility or not. I'm not familiar with Google's org chart nor do I know if NSLs are even flexible enough to accomplish such a thing.

If it is possible though, there could perhaps be an NSL that covers "just gmail" that is otherwise as broad as the Verizon one.

The notion that a CEO could be unaware of something like that happening is incredibly disturbing though. I hope that is not possible.

It's not uncommon for an NDA to name specific individuals in company A which could use proprietary information from company B to add features which would be useful to B into company A's product.

The covered persons in A would be just enough to appropriate the necessary budget and deliver the features.

When the VP of Engineering or CEO asked, 'why did we add this particular feature, what's the use case?' the answer was, "If it's business critical that you need to know, we would need to document that and see if you can be added to an NDA."

"An NDA with who?"

"I can't say."

NSLs take this to an entirely different level. Page and Zuck don't have a clue. As soon as the databases were large enough to be useful, the data was in the hands of the NSA. That much should be taken for granted. The more important question has always been "if and how can it be used against you?"

With Obama claiming it's legal and approved by 3 branches, and how widely outside the NSA the data will be shared, the reality of "show me the man, I'll show you the crime" has never been truer.

I assume they can but it would be a risky strategy. If google security found a breach where customer data was being leaked then they might disclose publicly before they can be informed that it is a national security issue.

I wonder if this could happen anyway in reverse.

I suppose though that whatever part of a NSL that authorizes the CEO to tell developers to make it would likely also authorize the CEO to tell the security guys not to sound alarms about it.. at least not without consulting senior management first.

If moles are involved, they might have simply leaked the private SSL keys. If used together with MITM this would be almost impossible to catch.

This. I imagine that an agency with the resources of the NSA could probably work out a couple of ways to obtain almost any private key they want.

Why do you need a mole? Just have someone dig up the street, and intercept the fiber optic cable.

I mean you still need to deal with private keys but the NSA might have the certificate authorities wrapped around their fingers.

If the NSA was MITMing SSL communications on a wide scale, presumably the companies would notice that the cert fingerprints were not what the companies expected.

I didn't say MITM. I said redirecting/copying traffic to spy on it.

That would mean they've broken TLS which, whatever powers the NSA supposedly has, seems unlikely.

I don't think they would be intercepting SSL traffic either, because Google has a hard enough time legitimately updating their certificates [1] that I imagine if the government were doing it on a wide scale people would definitely notice.

[1]: http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com.au/2013/05/changes-...

Without the key, they couldn't read it. Getting a CA on board doesn't give them that (that would only allow them to create an alternative key that software without pinning would accept), they would need to either be given the key by anyone that had it or factor it themselves.

The private key should not be that hard to obtain. Google has thousands of frontend servers, each one of them has to have the SSL private key (at least in memory). Probably at least a hundred people have access to these servers. It's enough to bribe just one of them.

But this would cost way more than the yearly costs of $20 million in the leaked documents.

FB is riddled with ex-government employees.

Exactly why is no company addressing the fact that the government already accepted the program's existence and the fact that they snoop emails/communications. How can the program exist and take data and these companies not giving the data at the same time? Other explanations include...

* Data is not, as everyone seems to keep saying, "direct access" and either first sent to NSA servers or a copy is sent periodically.

* Companies don't know and NSA is unlawfully getting data (unlikely).

* Companies are being forced to not talk about it and outright deny it.

* There is somehow a plausible deniability. The are not willingly giving up the data but they aren't stopping them from taking it either and just turning a blind eye to NSA's activities.

To quote myself in another message,

> I've never taken a single lesson in legal or PR and even I can see the big huge holes. They insist on direct access, they insist on servers rather than data and they insist on governments.

Anything else would be simply untrue. These companies obviously give limited data (not server access, not direct) to the government when required by subpoena and whatnot so they couldn't say "we give no access to any data" or anything like that.

The NSA have hooks in various data centers and internet backbones. They collect the intel indirectly giving the companies plausible deniability.

Yes, but how would they do this exactly? To collect anything valuable from Google they would need to MITM SSL on a large scale. And Chrome actually ships with a list of pinned certificates, including those for Google, making it difficult to MITM even for the government.

They wouldn’t do that, obviously, even if it was actually feasible. That kind of MITM would be easily detectable (though still effective, in short term)—we know when the Chinese do it.

However the private keys have to deployed, on scale. So if as someone here is suggesting the NSA has infiltrated those companies, they could have got those keys and just decrypt the stream.

I wouldn’t bet my money on that… but it’s more likely than breaking the encryption, and if they can get military secrets, I guess they could get the keys.

Also those companies could have just volunteered them—that’s where the emphasis on ‘direct’ access comes in.

My understanding is that MITM (but in a perfect way, using the leaked private key) is still required, if ephemeral Diffie-Hellman is involved. You can't just passively record the stream and decrypt it, since you don't know the exchanged DH secret.

The suggestion that the companies actually gave them the keys and this explains the "direct access" phrase makes a lot of sense!

Right. But if you look at the slide why would companies slowly get "added" rather than just implicitly be being spied upon?

I mean Apple only got added in 2011. If what you're saying is true then what does this date refer to?

> But if you look at the slide why would companies slowly get "added" rather than just implicitly be being spied upon?

Well, if they are intercepting data through backbones, and much of that data is encrypted, they need to defeat the encryption in a durable way to get a clear feed. While I don't suggest that this is what was going on, if it was, there would be know reason that each provider would necessarily be broken at the same time; there would likely both be prioritization of resources directed at each provider, differences in the security of each provider, and chance involved as to when each was broken.

> I mean Apple only got added in 2011. If what you're saying is true then what does this date refer to?

Growing popularity and usage of icloud and apple's own messaging system? iirc, before icloud, Apple didn't have that much user data.

iMessage debuted in 2011.

And Obama came out to defend the program without saying that the companies were not involved (he did not say they were involved either) His press conference: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=iS6MO...

Maybe the government conspiracy is a government conspiracy!

<sarcasm>That's the problem with you geeks: you need real evidence for everything. Can't you just have faith? Can't you learn to just believe?</sarcasm>

One thing that has bothered me is that neither the Guardian or the Washington Post (someone kindly post the link if I've missed it) has posted more than just a few slides of this 41-slide presentation. I understand the leaker may want as few of slides as possible shown due to the danger of them being watermarked, but the few slides posted so far alone seem to lack important context.

Secondly, in defense of the companies, at least Google and Facebook, they've put up real people (Zuckerberg and Page) behind these assertions. In the case of the leaker, we just know that he/she is a career intelligence official...which could mean many things.

No, I'm not saying that leakers should be distrusted until they identify themselves...I'm saying when the evidence that the leaker has given is heavily redacted, then it's hard to know what assertions the responding companies have to actually lie about.

In other words, it could be the case that we shouldn't believe anyone so far.

Implicit confirmation that the programs described in the press are real and as described goes all of the way to Obama himself. For example he responded to a reporter today by saying, "With respect to the Internet and emails, this does not apply to U.S. citizens and it does not apply to people living in the United States."

If the programs were not as described, Obama would have certainly said so. Instead he confirmed their existence without disagreeing with what was said in the Washington Post about it.

Given that, there is good reason to believe the substance of the leak, even though we don't know who leaked it or exactly what is in that presentation.

FWIW, here's the press conference referred to, and here's the question:

> Q Mr. President, could you please react to the reports of secret government surveillance of phones and Internet? And can you also assure Americans that the government -- your government doesn't have some massive secret database of all their personal online information and activities?

THE PRESIDENT: Yes. When I came into this office, I made two commitments that are more important than any commitment I made: Number one, to keep the American people safe; and number two, to uphold the Constitution. And that includes what I consider to be a constitutional right to privacy and an observance of civil liberties.

Now, the programs that have been discussed over the last couple days in the press are secret in the sense that they're classified. But they're not secret in the sense that when it comes to telephone calls, every member of Congress has been briefed on this program. With respect to all these programs, the relevant intelligence committees are fully briefed on these programs. These are programs that have been authorized by broad bipartisan majorities repeatedly since 2006.

I'm not arguing against you, I'm saying that his statement is vague, and that it could just be a broad assertion of the executive powers. It doesn't matter whether the program is called PRISM or SUPERPATRIOT or what (in the president's reasoning), such surveillance measures have been legally approved and are regulated, if the government chooses to undertake such measures in the name of security. This is not the same as acknowledging that PRISM exists (which would put Google/Facebook's claims to the test).

See http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2013/06/07/transcript-what-oba...; for the full answer to the question. Obama separately addresses the phone issue and the internet issue. In both cases he implicitly admits that what was said in the press about them is substantively true. In both cases he claims that Congress and the FISA court were kept appraised. In both cases he defends the programs with justifications that can be supported by what was said about them in the press. He makes it clear that they are separate programs.

The inevitable conclusion is that while he did not specifically confirm what was said in the press, he lent great credibility to the leaks being real documents describing real programs.