Boing Boing » nsa

Utah wants to tax power consumed by the NSA's massive, illegal data-processing facility

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 21 May 2013 18:37:44 +0000

Remember the gigantic data-center that the NSA is building in Utah in order to (illegally) process the electronic communications of the whole world? Turns out that the state of Utah plans on taxing the titanic amounts of electricity it will consume at 6%. The NSA is pissed.

"We are quite concerned [about] this," Harvey Davis, NSA director of installations and logistics, wrote in the April 26 email, obtained through a Utah open records law request.
In a follow-up email Davis sent 31 minutes later, he explained: "The long and short of it is: Long-term stability in the utility rates was a major factor in Utah being selected as our site for our $1.5 billion construction at Camp Williams. HB325 runs counter to what we expected."
HB325, which Herbert signed into law April 1, benefits the Utah Military Installation Development Authority (MIDA). It allows the entity, which was set up to put select military properties on the public tax rolls, to collect a tax of up to 6 percent on Rocky Mountain Power electricity used by the Utah Data Center.

In surprise to NSA, Utah Data Center may pay tax on electricity [Nate Carlisle/The Salt Lake Tribune]

(via /.)

HOWTO search the Web like the NSA

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 09 May 2013 21:49:48 +0000

Wired's Kim Zetter rounds up some of the highlights from Untangling the Web: A Guide to Internet Research [PDF], an NSA guide to finding unintentionally published confidential material on the Web produced by the NSA and released in response to a Muckrock Freedom of Information Act request. As Zetter notes, the tactics discussed as described as legal, but are the kind of thing that weev is doing 3.5 years in a Federal pen for:

Want to find spreadsheets full of passwords in Russia? Type “filetype:xls site:ru login.” Even on websites written in non-English languages the terms “login,” “userid,” and “password” are generally written in English, the authors helpfully point out.
Misconfigured web servers “that list the contents of directories not intended to be on the web often offer a rich load of information to Google hackers,” the authors write, then offer a command to exploit these vulnerabilities — intitle: “index of” site:kr password.
“Nothing I am going to describe to you is illegal, nor does it in any way involve accessing unauthorized data,” the authors assert in their book. Instead it “involves using publicly available search engines to access publicly available information that almost certainly was not intended for public distribution.” You know, sort of like the “hacking” for which Andrew “weev” Aurenheimer was recently sentenced to 3.5 years in prison for obtaining publicly accessible information from AT&T’s website.

Use These Secret NSA Google Search Tips to Become Your Own Spy Agency

NSA’s secret domestic spying program, code named "Ragtime," uncloaked in new book

Xeni Jardin — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 20:19:17 +0000

According to Marc Ambinder and D.B. Grady's new book Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry, the secretive National Security Agency spying programs have become institutionalized, and have grown, since 9/11.

Shane Harris at the Washingtonian read through the book's account of these sweeping and controversial surveillance programs, conducted under the code name "Ragtime":

Ragtime, which appears in official reports by the abbreviation RT, consists of four parts.
Ragtime-A involves US-based interception of all foreign-to-foreign counterterrorism-related data; Ragtime-B deals with data from foreign governments that transits through the US; Ragtime-C deals with counterproliferation actvities; and then there's Ragtime-P, which will probably be of greatest interest to those who continue to demand more information from the NSA about what it does in the United States.
P stands for Patriot Act. Ragtime-P is the remnant of the original President’s Surveillance Program, the name given to so-called "warrantless wiretapping" activities after 9/11, in which one end of a phone call or an e-mail terminated inside the United States. That collection has since been brought under law, but civil liberties groups, journalists, and legal scholars continue to seek more information about what it entailed, who was targeted, and what authorities exist today for domestic intelligence-gathering.

Harris, who is an experienced national security reporter, analyzes some of those findings in his Washingtonian item. You can buy a copy of the book here (released Feb. 14, 2013).

(HT: Laura Poitras/Freedom of the Press Foundation)

Jacob Appelbaum's 29C3 keynote on the out-of-control surveillance state

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 21:13:50 +0000

Jacob Appelbaum's keynote from 29C3 -- last December's Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg -- is a riveting hour on surveillance, freedom, and the wild, criminal lawlessness of the NSA and other spy agencies. Jacob's factual, methodical laying out of the growth of American surveillance is brilliant, terrifying and enraging, and it left me wanting to rush to a barricade. Jacob's insights into how we are coping with the surveillance state and why that needs to change are terrific. Someone make a transcript of this, please.

Jacob Appelbaum 29C3 Keynote: Not My Department (via Schneier)

Free at last (to talk in a very limited and constrained way about NSA crimes)

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 05:15:00 +0000

Hey, hooray, senators are finally legally allowed to mention the fact that the NSA has been breaking the law and spying on Americans! Freedom!

NSA whistleblower to keynote HOPE hacker conference in NYC

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 13 Jun 2012 21:54:06 +0000

2600 Magazine's Emmanuel Goldstein writes, "Our second keynote speaker at this year's HOPE conference is someone who has been deep inside the National Security Agency. Former analyst William Binney became aware of an increased tendency at the massive center of surveillance to focus their attention on American citizens, something the NSA was never supposed to do. Binney did the right thing - he quit and told the world what he had learned. Such integrity is something we see often in the hacker world, usually kids standing up to authority and telling the world of their wrongdoings. This time, the stage is much bigger."

DOJ asks Court to keep secret any partnership between Google and NSA, not that one exists, definitely not

Xeni Jardin — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 16:29:12 +0000

Mike Scarcella in The Legal Times writes about The Justice Department defending the government's refusal to discuss, or acknowledge the existence of, "any cooperative research and development agreement between Google and the National Security Agency."

The Washington based advocacy group Electronic Privacy Information Center sued in federal district court here to obtain documents about any such agreement between the Internet search giant and the security agency.
The NSA responded to the suit with a so-called “Glomar” response in which the agency said it could neither confirm nor deny whether any responsive records exist. U.S. District Judge Richard Leon in Washington sided with the government last July.

(via Oxblood Ruffin)

History of NSA computers, 1964

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 18 May 2010 07:46:47 +0000

Here is Samuel S Snyder's 1964 "History of NSA General-Purpose Electronic Digital Computers" in all its declassified glory. It's 106 pages and I've only skimmed it, but it looks like awesome vintage computer porn. Love the qualifiers "digital" and "electronic."

History of NSA General-Purpose Electronic Digital Computers (PDF) (via Schneier)

EFF won't give up the fight over NSA warrantless wiretapping

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 16:30:40 +0000

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's had a setback in its fight to get to the bottom of the NSA's wholesale, illegal warrantless wiretapping program: "A federal judge has dismissed Jewel v. NSA, a case from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) on behalf of AT&T customers challenging the National Security Agency's mass surveillance of millions of ordinary Americans' phone calls and emails."

But they're not giving up:

"The alarming upshot of the court's decision is that so long as the government spies on all Americans, the courts have no power to review or halt such mass surveillance even when it is flatly illegal and unconstitutional," said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston. "With new revelations of illegal spying being reported practically every other week -- just this week, we learned that the FBI has been unlawfully obtaining Americans' phone records using Post-It notes rather than proper legal process -- the need for judicial oversight when it comes to government surveillance has never been clearer."
Jewel v. NSA is aimed at ending the NSA's dragnet surveillance of millions of ordinary Americans and holding accountable the government officials who illegally authorized it. Evidence in the case includes undisputed documents provided by former AT&T telecommunications technician Mark Klein showing AT&T has routed copies of Internet traffic to a secret room in San Francisco controlled by the NSA. That same evidence is central to Hepting v. AT&T, a class-action lawsuit that's currently under appeal in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit.

EFF Plans Appeal of Jewel v. NSA Warrantless Wiretapping Case (Thanks, Hugh!)