Washington Post Brushes a Few More Prism Crumbs Onto the Floor
June 30th, 2013Thank you, Master, thank you.
My now familiar and broken-record-response to this thing is to go back to Room 641A last decade if you want a real thrill.
They have beam splitters installed at the peering points. NSA is getting everything. The end.
The media’s repeated ramblings/mantras about the FISA court and protections for Americans are absurd.
For Prism to be a big deal, you’d have to have amnesia, or not understand the implications of those beam splitters. Querying structured data from the regime’s collaborators (Prism) is a tiny piece of what they’re doing.
Ok, so what are some other aspects of the wider surveillance story that I would like to know more about?
One of my long standing theories is that the NSA intercepts represent the front end of something like Synthetic Environments for Analysis and Simulation system. What are they doing with these simulations?
I would like to know more about MAIN CORE.
I’m pretty confident that realtime geolocation data from mobile phones/license plate readers/cameras/??? are being used as a sort of invisible tripwire. If people on the MAIN CORE list happen to stray too close to certain physical locations (critical infrastructure, corporate headquarters, government installations, etc.), that could trigger… shall we say, a variety of responses. This would be very, very trivial to implement.
Is there an automatic mechanism that adds individuals to MAIN CORE? Book purchases, Google searches, websites visited, movie or television watching habits, the number of firearms at a residence???
What is the nature of the quantum computing systems to which NSA has access? Are these one-trick-ponies, like the D-Wave system, or are they the real deal.
Anyway, back to our regularly scheduled programing…
Via: Washington Post:
These slides, annotated by The Post, represent a selection from the overall document, and certain portions are redacted.
I’m glad at least some of us can remember farther back than last weekend.
When some of my friends went ballistic this time around, I sent them a time ordered list of news stories from 2001 to this year. They had the authorization (whoo, we’re going to catch us some terrorists) idle speculation, and unfounded reassurances.
None of them even remembered the Room 641A news stories. I guess they didn’t care, because it was one datacenter in San Francisco. They didn’t quite get it when I told them that I had found rooms in just about every major datacenter I’d been in, where they had rooms they couldn’t talk about.
At one datacenter, they were temporarily hosting some Google servers. It was a few thousand square feet of their floor. The sales guy said “Oh, I really can’t tell you… but it’s Google.” In the same datacenter I asked about another room, and he got dead serious and said “I really can’t tell you.” We got the tour of the whole place. He named off customers and how much bandwidth and the number of racks they had. He showed us generator rooms, DC rooms, meet-me room. They even pointed out the underground fuel storage.
The only places I ever went where I didn’t find a room like that were branches off of major hubs. Why bother monitor those, when you can monitor them centrally a few blocks away. Sometimes it’s just a few floors away, through “conduits” drilled in the floor. They didn’t even need the fiber splicer if they could just turn on a monitor port for it. (Cisco talk for a copy of everything sent to everyone on the network goes down another wire to monitor)