Is the NSA really as bad as many of the people here characterize it to be...

It *is* outlawed. It's forbidden right there in the fourth amendment of the US constitution. Unfortunately the US government is run by a bunch of criminals who give no fucks about such things.

Your privacy was at risk 10 years ago, now it's your rights. The government has been spying on us for a while and the only difference now is that it's becoming "okay".

Whether it's for a "good cause" or not, government spying and mass surveillance is a disgusting thing and the day it becomes acceptable is the day we lose the security and sacredness of our rights.

American civil war mk II when?

No, they are worse. The idea that some select people have the right to read inside your brain (they would do this if they had the tech) is absurd for a country that claims to be a democracy. Today people are *still* talking about whether crypto should be illegal. This is questioning whether it should be illegal to talk to your friend in the woods or in your house* or somewhere that the government doesn't have recording equipment.

*Of course, it's 2016, so everyone already has recording equipment such as phone, smart TV, smart this, smart that with them at all times.

There's not even any reason to consider what the NSA may or may not have done - the reasons state here are already enough that they should be removed.

From a purely ethical standpoint, they are as bad and worse than we all say they are. If you attempt and fail at murder, you are still a bad person.
From a practical standpoint, yes they are a threat. Perhaps not Ingsoc-tier just yet off topic, but does anybody remember whether it was Miniluv or Minitru that was in charge of spying? but they are working on it. Forone thing the americans have to pay even more for this bullshit. More importantly though, there is sorting software that can be used to locate certain phrases or files. If 9999 people are posting cats, and one person is posting sensitive Holohoax/Nuremberg files then it won't be worth monitering every individual's data for just 00.1% of the people. But with the right software they would be able to isolate the thought criminal so they can keep an eye on him.

The weakest part of any system is the user. You could have a secure system which spies on people but doesn't use the data, but the operator is going to be human. If that operator is your ex, or someone who you cut in front of in traffic, or had some other grudge against you, you're fucked. If that operator got slipped a few notes to get some data, you're extra fucked.
On top of that the data stays there. They could write laws and guarantees about how your data is safe and that they don't spy on you, but when that server changes hands you're fucked. New admin with less morals? You're fucked. New political party with no issue snooping through your data to see if you're an evil misogynist? You're fucked.
And this is assuming they won't edit the data to suit their needs. Why would someone let something like auditing get in the way of the truth they want to make?

OP, so many people are the same as you and its fucking infuriating. Would you give me all of your passwords and access to all information about your browsing history? Of course not, but when its the government you tell yourself its ok because its happening to everyone. The government only has your best interests at heart right? They wouldnt use it for anything bad would they? Surely only trustworthy people will be given access to your information, right?

Stop being so childish, this is the real world. People cut corners, people lie, people steal, people sell things they shouldnt. Do you honestly think the NSA is collecting these for achival purposes? That they will only look into you if you say the word bomb or others on their list of bad words? That they would create all of their infrastructure, backdooring hardware, building huge datacenters etc for you to slip past them by not being pants on head retarded and literally saying "im going to blow up x"?

Grow up OP

PRISM and everything Snowden released were planted for him to find.
They don't have the manpower, resources, or inclination to actually undertake this kind of project, but gosh it's nice for dumbfucks to flock into placebo and honeypots like Tor and BTC and so on.

Aside from what the NSA does with your data, also remember what others can do with it. According to some state officials the FBI routinely gets hacked. And when snowden took some documents they frightened, because they didn't even know what he took.
So it's not unrealistic that at some point data gets hacked, and then the question goes from "who cares if the NSA knows" to "who cares if anyone knows". It's not just about not trusting the NSA to do the right thing (though I don't trust them on that either), but also: everything that is stored can be leaked or hacked into.

Considering it can be done digitally this isnt an argument.

Again, not an argument. Pick any intelligence agency in the world and they are after as much intelligence as possible. Why would the NSA be any different?

Considering pedos use tor everyday its a rather shit honeypot if they havent caught them all yet. Tor was created to allow america to gather information from overseas. Its to their benefit for tor to be secure.

The Elites are pedos and drug dealers.
It requires manpower to actually make sense of all that data, and it takes lots of cash to keep server farms of that scale going.
They are all about spreading disinformation.
You don't know shit about the history of the Intelligence Sector.

"Digital" isn't a synonym for "feasable". If it is, feel free to crack every single person in the world and show us all how you did it. How do you expect the NSA to crack every single autist using adblockers, js-blockers, alternative operating systems, and so on considering that they're dependent on companies who use ads, js, and telemetry to sell them information? The answer is: they can't. And if they could, do you realize just how much storage they'd need for all of that? We're probably talking fucking yottabytes here. And how about time and processing power for that information to be properly indexed?
No. They want to collect as much information as possible without breaking budget. This requires prioritizing some of that data out of the equation,
The US government doesn't use Tor anymore, you retard. It has its own darknets and proxy servers that plebs can't access with a fucking publicly-available internet browser. Why should the government need Tor to be secure?

The PRISM leak was a demoralization ops. It's been the modus operandi for alphabet soup agencies to play up their own power to discourage their enemies from acting for a long time. The PRISM leak was the reason why people don't care about Win10 spying, because "oh well all my information was getting spied on anyway." The PRISM leak made millions of people install placebo "privacy" add-ons like NoScript and Ghostery that actually send telemetry out to corporations, resulting in more people getting spied on, not less. It's a logistical nightmare to collect all information from all people at all times, but it sure is convenient for everyone to believe in it.

reuters.com/article/us-usa-surveillance-watchdog-idUSBRE98Q14G20130927

This guy says it more clearly.

Plus, god damn son, read some Cold War history. MAD MAN DOCTRINE

Shouldn't this be detectable somehow? Last I heard people have looked, and the dodgiest thing you can say about it is the website has a malware ad that shows up to windows users.

Sage for implying that no javascript somehow results in less privacy.

Read up, OP.
theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jun/17/chilling-effect-nsa-surveillance-internet
huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/13/nsa-writers_n_4267716.html
washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2016/03/10/surprise-nsa-data-will-soon-routinely-be-used-for-domestic-policing-that-has-nothing-to-do-with-terrorism/
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi

You're skipping over the main argument which is whether NSA has the authority to surveill Americans. The answer is emphatically no.

Instead of blaming the victim, you should be asking how the US government has managed to violate consitutional rights for so long.

Even if you're personally ok with mass surveillance, how do you know you will never be a target? Or that causes you want to support may never come under suspicion?

Phrases to search for:

Turnkey tyranny
Chilling effect

Thomas Jefferson's answer would be

Read these books:
-IBM and the Holocaust
-1984

If you have nothing to hide then they don't have a reason to spy.

I don't know user, does violating constitutional rights and stabbing allies is bad ?
wikileaks.org/nsa-france/

The funny part is that it's still against the law for government to open your mail without your permission, but somehow they claim it's a-okay for them to wiretap fucking everything they do. People have a right to privacy, especially from their government. I don't agree with the logic that "I don't mind if big brother is watching me because I feel I can trust big brother."

We're turning into an increasingly orwellian state. We don't get drab dictates from speakers or live in a world of gray garbage, but that shit isn't needed. Big brother is watching you and his agenda gets passed off as news about the world. Your every move is being monitored now.

Give me the budget of the NSA and the people that seriously know their shit and ill give it a go.

If only there was a way in that didnt use these routes, maybe something built into the hardware of a computer.

The american government has a long history of being well ahead of what is available to plebs like you and me. There is every chance they are already working with quantum computers.As for actually storing all of that information, It wouldnt be very hard to turn everyones daily browsing into a string of numbers which takes up hardly any space. You would just need a key of what each number meant and youve cut a persons daily activities to a kilobyte or so. Even with billions of people you are only talking terabyte(s) a day.

Which is why what i mention above is almost a certainty. Do you honesly think theres a 1:1 ratio of what you do to what they record?

You might be right about them having their own darknet but at worst they use tor as a contingency. There is no way they dont have some fallback option for when their operatives cant access a secure method of communication. This is why they need tor to be secure. While i dont deny the government does lie about its ability to prevent people doing shit. For example, they are the origin of the myth that 25% of hackers are law enforcement. However when it comes to intelligence they do not fuck about. Not long after Snowden released his data the patriot act was being reviewed. The NSA not only didnt give a fuck about people protesting what they were doing, they doubled down and got MORE power. If they were going to leak this themselves they would not have done it at the only time when it could have possibly affected anything.

False security is worse than no security but the idea they would go to such lengths to get people to download "placebo privacy" apps just doesnt make sense. Why would they not just create some new method of offering privacy and get people to download it. Do you think people who were seriously concerned about privacy would not have already had systems of privacy in place? They would not have needed to download such simple things as noscript and ghostery. The only people they would have tricked is people who were just reacting to the leak which would not be their priority concern. They would have been better off letting these people carry on with their shit tier security and harvest their info the way they had been doing before

There are two problems that computer surveillance is going to cause and I can't really figure out why no one is talking about them. Maybe everyone is shortsighted?

1) Completely automated, algorithmic computer surveillance.

Hopefully this hasn't been implemented yet, but we're close. The problem here is akin to Minority Report (the movie). It already happens with the no fly list. Your public data will be crunched by machines. A secret and complex formula will be used to determine if you're a threat to the state. The formula itself might be calculated by computer and be so complex that no human could ever figure it out.

The problem here is that no human is ever in the chain to make a judgement. Whether or not you're a threat to the state will be completely determined by some computer. In some future hell, a computer will determine some high school kid is a threat to the state because of their Internet footprint and throw them in prison for the rest of their life.

How will you defend yourself against an algorithm? No seriously. If you request the data to defend yourself, the state may say you can't have it in the interest of national security. Second, the data could be so massive, that no human could ever understand it within their lifetime. Now what? The computer decides you're in prison for life and there's essentially no crime and no defense. Good luck.

2) Bad actors are going to take advantage of the complexity of the system. I guarantee there is a government whitelist that absolves all the elites of spying. They can do whatever they like, unlike the plebs. There are people somewhere who can erase evidence of wrongdoing for anyone else. Guarantee they will abuse that power. The reason this will happen is because there's no transparency. Computer surveillance is a tool the rulers will use to oppress the ruled. In fact, that's the whole idea.

They don't have to, they just tap the internet backbone directly (like what they did with Room 641A). If you read any of the leaks you would know this. This is why they worked hard on coming up with ways to attack SSL and what caused the massive push to use TLS after the leaks.

Post evidence of this or go and fuck your urethra with a soldering iron you faggot.

Consensus cracking.

I didn't read everyone that posted but here is what I've got.

1. The government could make retroactive laws making things you did in the past illegal and you could be charged for things in your past.

2. The government could use what they gather to blackmail you.

3. People/corporations/other governments could get hold of that info because the US is not 100% secure and use it against you or make money with it.

4. You should have privacy in general, having daddy government watch you is not ok.

The government has overstepped its bounds LONG ago, even before 9/11, I'm not sure exactly when but it definitely ramped up after the 1950's, I guess thinking about it, it kinda correlates heavily with the decreasing trust with the government.

It doesn't, but there are safer tools than NoScript. EG, uMatrix and simply disabling JS in the settings.

Yes it does. It's cheaper and SIMPLER, as in LESS EFFORT, to spook people into filtering their own traffic for you. Most people realize that these methods, tor, encryption techniques, are really a pain in the ass to use all the time. And yes, most people really are normies, so they will use those technical methods only for the stuff they are actually worried about hiding.
This is a way to get people to do your work for you. No server farms processing untold yottabytes of data from telecom companies.
No quantum computers. You just use the backdoor to those programs, and you're good, you have everything you wanted to see without having to read anything nonpertinent, which also saves resources if you are automating the process.
How easy was it to hire a schmuck based on psych eval and a job history, and leave a folder full of tall tales for him to spread?
Much cheaper than building server farms and paying the bills and maintenance on them to actually harvest and process all the data from everyone all day.
I really think you guys have never actually done any real surveillance work on a serious IRL target. It's a fucking pain in the ass, even just dealing with sorting through their personal information.

For a simple parallel: Is it more reasonable for the Government to force millions of people into being implanted with RFID chips, or is it easier to get them to buy a Smart Phone that has the same tech inside it, and watch them happily share all their thoughts with you as well as their location, all freely and by choice, and THEY EVEN PAY FOR THE PRIVILEGE?

Prove it.
gitweb.torproject.org/tor.git

Like this one?
theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/14/nsa-utah-data-facility

You tell me.

"There's no backdoors, that's a Tor Promise™ "

washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2013/09/06/the-feds-pays-for-60-percent-of-tors-development-can-users-trust-it/?utm_term=.ac2ed4203810

Source code is right there for anyone to review and many have. Where's your proof?

By that they mean science grants and the state department.
Funny, it's almost like the article is pushing an agenda.
Almost funnier when you look at NSA's capability matrix around that time, labelling Tor use as 'catastrophic.'
Great stuff as always. Glad our tax dollars are being put to good use by shitposting on imageboards.
Because you're either a retarded, roleplaying autist surviving on autismbux or a retarded autist who needs to gas himself by working towards mass surveillance.
Good luck with the helium bag, faggot.

Burden of proof is on those who claim the code is trustworthy, you tard.
See, that's what you should have said to begin with.

That's not how burden of proof works.
You came here claiming that there are backdoors.
Just go back to /g/, please. We don't want LARPers like you shitting up threads with your purported "vast experience" in mass surveillance.

They have for 10 years. Now it's your turn to back up your claim it's not.
The only provably safe software is used in medical devices etc. It costs millions of dollars to write. All you have to do is find one hole in the code.

You're talking to a different user. I'm just here to point out that in computer security, the default is to assume untrustworthy until proven otherwise. The burden of proof is on the one making the claim of no backdoors.

The claim is backed by providing the source code for anyone to check. So far, zero backdoors have been found.
If you want proof beyond doubt you should look elsewhere. There's no such thing for programs or for any science that isn't purely theoretical. There will always be some uncertainty, so learn to cope with it you autist.

Not how it works. See: Bash, OpenSSL.
I guess the seL4 kernel and the CompCert C compiler are just in my imagination then. Kindly stop talking shit about things you don't understand.

If you want to talk about provably safe designs, start a new thread. You'd have to begin with replacing every PC on the planet, tard.

sage isn't a downvote, leddit man

Neither Bash nor OpenSSL have been shown to contain backdoors. Bugs, sure, but everyone knows their /usr/lib is full of bugs.
As for formal proofs, they still have assumptions an autist can complain about. Where's the proof the specification is correct? How do you know the CPU will do only what it should? The answer to both is you don't.

It's similar to crypto: lots of people try to break it, if nobody says they can it means it's as safe as you can get until something better comes along or it turns out the NSA put a backdoor in the funny numbers in the algorithm nobody can quite explain.

What's stopping them? they have access to almost every router.

They don't need internet to do that to people.

They need the internet to do it to A LOT of people at once.

What is the difference between a remotely exploitable bug and a backdoor? One is accidental and the other is purposeful. The effect is identical though. How can you tell the difference after the fact? You can't.

No they don't, most of World War 2 was predicated on blaming large groups within a society for any number of unsubstantiated claims of villainy. It's nothing new whatsoever.
The internet makes it more detailed and efficient in some ways, and messier in others, depending on how the internet is implemented within that region [aka whether it's strictly controlled like China or loosely managed like USA]

Stasi was a thing

he's got you there, buckos

Also, this is how the FBI tracks stolen money: marked bills.
Bitcoin is eminently qualified to be the method for digitizing that effect.
The blockchain is openly a transaction record, for fuck's sake.
Mark the Money, see where it ends up

The difference is intent. I would (and do) use a browser with bugs (or I wouldn't be posting here), but would not use one with known backdoors.

So? The way you treat the product and the response are still the same.

I mean the response would be the same if a bug as serious as a backdoor was found. I'd wager you'd switch browsers ecksdee.

He sure does. I'll have to rephrase.
Here's the source code. Where is a serious bug or backdoor?
gitweb.torproject.org/tor.git

That is the wrong way to phrase it, because the burden of proof is on showing that there isn't a backdoor. Try "here is the review(s) that have been done by these independent parties, and no backdoors have been found". If nobody has actually examined the code in detail then having it be open source means absolutely nothing.

Your repeated claims it's my burden of proof don't make it any more true. See

There are 10 years of research papers on Tor. Look them up yourself.

And if you had started by referencing them instead of going "lolol backdoors dont exist unless you fine one!!1" then we wouldn't be having this conversation. How about independent reviews of Tor source code? The nitty gritty implementation details, not the overall design.

Not going to work for you this time. Thank you for playing.

By your twisted logic I could write a program with a hard to find backdoor, open source it, and then wave around a claim of "no backdoors!!!!" all day long with impunity. And yes, that's entirely possible. See: Underhanded C Contest. Retards like you just assuming that something is trustworthy instead of checking it first are why we ended up with shit like shellshock and heartbleed.

Why are you quoting yourself?

You're the fucking retard that's shitting up the thread claiming backdoors.
You can't prove a negative, you fucking retard. And even if we could, with a substantial audit, you could just fall back to a trusting trust attack.

You're here to shitpost, nothing more. What a lonely existence.

All this text and you're still being an utter dumb cunt. I'm not the user who claimed Tor has a backdoor. I'm the user that's correctly pointing out that assuming there aren't any backdoors, like you're insisting on doing, is bad security practice. Might as well just abandon the principle of least privilege while you're at it, because obviously the code is trustworthy. I mean, it's open source!!!11!

Again, that burden of proof is on you. No one assumed that it's impossible for there to be a backdoor in something like Tor. Until shown, however, we arrive at the conclusion that it's extremely unlikely.
No, dipshit, it's called having a threat model.

You have to go back.

On what basis? All you've been stating in this thread so far is that it's open source and the overall design has been well studied. When questioned on whether the code has actually been checked, "lol open source" is your response, despite that meaning precisely fuck all.

...

...

Ironic that you accuse anons of being the same person while also bitching about portraying the shitposting as the same person.
The assumption is that because it's free for anyone to take and audit, not just the overall design, it is extremely unlikely for their to be backdoors.
Where exactly have you fucking been for the past decade, anyways? It's not just the 'design' that have been scrutinized in hundreds of academic papers and disclosures, you fucking retard.

Your opinion is worth less than dogshit. Again, you are here to just shitpost.

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
-Fucking Dead Guy

The government exists to serve its people, they are hardly serving the public's interest in collecting information on all of us, what they are truly collecting is an unstoppable power over all of us, the ability to understand and control how all of us think. That is the true problem with the NSA.

jtrig.jpg

...

Yeah, I know. Sorry for making you and wade through the last half of that. The problem with shills is if they repeat their lies often enough, people start to believe it. I'll keep it short next time.

I guess we'll have to have several more heartbleeds and shellshocks before you stop being an utter dumb cunt.

Open source means the community has the implicit right to fix any problem that is found. Open source doesn't imply that the state of the art is equal to perfection (in any metric).

No, that would be free/libre software, which is different from open source. At least get the terminology right.
Correct. Which is why merely saying "open source" is nowhere near sufficient to reassure someone of a lack of backdoors (er, "remotely exploitable bugs"). Open source doesn't mean perfect and it doesn't even mean people are examining the source code.

Can I get a source on that? I heard of this many times, but I don't know how to search for it.

I know you're trying to distinguish between the philosophy of free software/open source development but in this case, you're making a distinction without a difference.

The open source movement exists as the ultimate method of developing software. The nature of the open source method implies that communities form around specific open source titles in order to make this development method happen. This implies that the community has the implicit right to fix any problem that is found, which is exactly what I wrote. You cannot have open source development without the implicit right to develop the title according to how the users need it. In this example the community exercises their right to fix a security bug under the open source development method.

The free software movement exists as a moral solution to oppose the social-political problem of proprietary software. The nature of this movement means that it is natural for communities to form around free software titles. When this development works according to the open source method of software development, then it's obvious that the software title is developed under open source. The nature of free software means that free software communities have the implicit right to fix any problem that is found.

In both cases of philosophy, the software communities always have the implicit right to fix any problem that is encountered. The difference in philosophy has no regard to this specific matter.

9/11
washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/30/AR2006093000282.html

If you beleive that the purpose of mass surveillance is to fight terrorism you are extremely naive. You don't search for a needle in a haystack by adding more hay. The data is collected for future use for whatever purpose. And the purpose is very rarely aligned with the will of the people.

Ministry of Truth, the Min of Love was in charge of breaking people down after they were caught

Here's a scenario for you:

You like turtles wearing tophats.
You look at turtles wearing tophats all the time.
NSA, or other government entity, logs it.
The people in charge decides that turtles in tophats is degeneracy, or they just disagree with it.
Now they can target any person who has shown interest in turtles with tophats.

Replace turtle in tophats with speaking out about a certain topic or person/party, and you might realize that this kind of data is a dangerous weapon in the hand of a totalitarin state or government.

They're an unconstitutional, ineffective government organization with basically no purpose other than siphoning tax dollars and increasing the federal debt to put food and drugs on the plates of a bunch of creepy fucks who have been caught abusing their positions multiple times.

consumer tier ps4s eluded the nsa's dragnet surveillance so what would you say?

The NSA will steal all your hentai. There.