After Snowden, the NSA Faces Recruitment Challenge

Re:After Snowden, the NSA Faces Recruitment Challenge by nostrademons on Tuesday March 31, 2015 @04:05PM (#9299488)

So, when the news about Prism [1] broke, people inside Google were really, really baffled, because nobody had ever heard of it. We eventually came to the conclusion that Prism must be the NSA code word for FISA court orders [2], which is a lawfully mandated procedure where a court requires that an Internet company turn over records of a specific user under court order. From the outside, it's a big story; from the inside, it's one of those boring legal restrictions that we need policies in place to deal with.

Then the news about MUSCULAR [3] broke, and people were very, very pissed [4]. I saw the internal reports where people put together what must have happened; I'm not sure what sort of details I'm allowed to say, but it basically amounted to the U.S. (well, technically the UK, acting on behalf of the NSA) conducting military operations against the property of its own citizens. Google ended up encrypting all inter-datacenter traffic soon after. [5]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Intelligence_Surveillan...

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUSCULAR_%28surveillance_progra...

[4] https://plus.google.com/108799184931623330498/posts/SfYy8xbD...

[5] http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/google-enc...

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Re:After Snowden, the NSA Faces Recruitment Challenge by EdSharkey on Tuesday March 31, 2015 @04:38PM (#9299716)

Thank you for the classy response. Every time I think about this surveillance state situation we find ourselves in, I have trouble staying civil.

This news item you reminded me of - "Google ended up encrypting all inter-datacenter traffic soon after" - makes sense as a response that the government can't argue with (yet).

Looking over the MUSCULAR wikipedia article, I wonder if the NSA could still capture the user's and enterprise's unencrypted data at the Google Front End Servers like they had been before the inter-datacenter traffic was encrypted?

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Re:After Snowden, the NSA Faces Recruitment Challenge by jacquesm on Tuesday March 31, 2015 @04:39PM (#9299724)

It would be a fairly safe assumption that anything that hits the United States at a minimum has traffic analysis done on it. Most google services now use HTTPS at the front end.

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