Sounds like great news for Glenn Greenwald. Can we see the audit trail for Team Themis and understand more about how Palantir was contracted to be paid $3.6MM for malicious datamining to attack a US journalist?
And in two sentences after your excerpt, it says it's closely related to the push for popular sovereignty. This "higher ideal" that the American and French Revolutions prided themselves on is called the Citizen. Let's not forget we were serfs living before this in a time of oppressive monarchies and a very corrupt and powerful Catholic Church.
But a US citizen's rights are not derived from the Constitution. It's clearly hypocritical to say a German has no natural right to privacy. We could declare war on Germany, then we could morally justify violating their rights.
But we can't pretend they have no such rights. And I'd contend that this does violate the US organic law, although this is a minority opinion. It depends on how you define "all men" and rationalize the fact that every human right existed before any government ever did.
So from Wikipedia, Boundless Informant uses 504 separate DNR (electronic surveillance program records) and DNI (metadata) collection sources known as SIGADs. In a 30-day period, they collected 3 billion data elements from within the US from these SIGADS.
And the PRISM document says it is the "the number one source of raw intelligence used for NSA analytic reports". Doesn't that mean that PRISM is the majority source of those 3 billion data elements?
And why did Page, Zuckerberg and Apple say they never heard of PRISM? Perhaps I am wrong but it's somewhat confusing!
If 2.999 billion elements never make it into those analytic reports then it may very well be possible that of the remainder that manual systems like PRISM end up being the majority source. As you note, there are hundreds of SIGADs, of which PRISM is just one.
> And why did Page, Zuckerberg and Apple say they never heard of PRISM?
Because PRISM is the name for the NSA end of that service and associated data tools. The company end of that service would be whatever they called the system they use for FISA warrant/NSL compliance.
We should be doing this. The United States' organic law is based on natural rights. Defined as the innate right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Our rights do not come from the Bill of Rights. If the US repealed or diminished the Fourth Amendment then we'd have the Right of Revolution to alter or abolish said government based on the organic law. (Many people will disagree with this saying the US organic law has no constitutional force.)
Every human being has the natural right to privacy regardless if they are a US citizen. It's sad and ironic that the US Government claims that foreigners have no natural rights. There should be a global agreement where countries respect the innate rights of all human beings and if not, are punished.
This is the worst aspect of globalization -- the refutation of "sacred and undeniable" rights.
I never realized how powerful HBGary was. I knew they employed dirty tricks but I did not know they had so many unpublished 0-day exploits and sophisticated rootkits. I had this impression from the Colbert Report that they were inept government contractors who taunted Anonymous. Reading this article from Ars is rather terrifying-
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/02/black-ops-how-hbg...
For a social site, they are doing great but how could they possibly have any technology that the CIA would need?
And while I realize their personas are a joke, to me, they represent everything I dislike about music.
Also advocating amphetamine use (not much different than meth) and openly talking about delusional theories of having sex on them would somehow produce smarter kids is just insane. I know some of it's a joke but their narcissism seems authentic.
"And while I realize their personas are a joke, to me, they represent everything I dislike about music" and pop culture in general. The decline of authenticity is depressing.
The NSA is wholesale collecting data and later using a secret court to authorize them to query their own databases [1]. PRISM is not just an interface. It is officially known as SIGAD US-984XN which means it intercepts and collects electronic communications.
There is also a black box (electronic data recorder) on that Mercedes. If something manipulated the system, you'd assume the EDR would record it.
Not to mention it'd be a terrible place to try to kill someone, with cameras everywhere. And there's a ton of disinterested parties, from Mercedes, to the LAPD to voracious friends/fans to investigate the story.
Other commenter on the thread pointed to a paper demonstrating how pretty every car control function can be hacked and overriden. It can even be rigged to self-erase after crash. And I'm guessing, if you can do that, you can just rewrite the EDR on crash too with fake data and erase any trace of the hack.
The argument of "this would've been a bad place" is pretty much null, for two reasons. First, if you assume the car was hacked, there wasn't anything to film or observe for anybody in the vincinity other than a driver going fast and then crashing, doesn't get much more perfect than that. And secondly, there'd have been friends/fans/police to investigate no matter where the guy died. That place is as good as any.
