Google getting in bed with the NSA??!! ACLU action alert

[Extend a Hand]

https://secure.aclu.org/site/Advocacy?cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=1961

The Washington Post reported that Google is negotiating an information-sharing agreement with the National Security Agency (NSA) to help the company defend its networks.

The NSA is part of the military, and its primary mission is spying. It collects the equivalent of the contents of the Library of Congress every six to eight hours, every single day. And in the last decade, it turned its surveillance efforts inward on the American people -- in violation of the law and the Constitution.

The ramifications of companies like Google working with the NSA are frightening. Google and other private companies must figure out how to protect our sensitive information without giving the government access to it.

Tell Google CEO Eric Schmidt that you strongly object to any deal with the NSA.

This sounds pretty evil for a company with the motto "Don't be evil"

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

1. Why is this evil?

[Wilms]

3. It's a privacy thing.

Over your head.


Don't worry about it.


Aren't your friends outside playing?

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

6. Doesn't this just involve data that google already owns and can do what it wants with?

[Goldstein1984]

5. "...in violation of the law and the Constitution."

There's nothing evil about this if a person doesn't mind living in an Orwell novel.

Personally, I load up the Internet with as much conflicting and bogus information about myself as possible--noise that someone would have to sort through.

When the public learned that the Bush Administration was monitoring overseas emails, a Belgian friend and I started sending and resending multiple daily emails with Osama bin Laden's published statements pasted into them. We did this for over a year.

If everyone did this, we could turn the NSA data depositories into the digital equivalents of landfills.

[lsewpershad]

9. How exactly

to do this. I would like to do the same. Thanks

[Goldstein1984]

10. I just routinely provide misinformation, or conflicting information

When I go to the library to check out of book by Noam Chomsky, which I read, I also check out a book by Bill O'Riley, Ann Coulter, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, or another Conservative scumbag, which I wouldn't waste any time reading. When I buy a controvercial book, I just pay cash and leave no record.

During the endless opportunities to provide personal information (e.g. registering for new websites), provide false information anytime its' possible.

I just make a general habit of provided incorrect, inconsistent and conflicting information while online. One of my favorite practices is signing petitions for causes with which I disagree, which is easy for me to find in Alaska--some crazy guy named Thomas Jefferson who rents a room from Sarah Palin in Wasilla recently signed a petition that would support restrictions on abortion in Alaska.

Whenever I'm polled by telephone, I provide completely junk answers that follow no pattern (e.g., I might answer one question as a pacifist, the next as a hawk).

We live in an age when information is used against us. I just try to throw as much junk information into the mix as possible.

I don't know if it makes a difference in the end, but it's what I do.

[Alias Dictus Tyrant]

12. Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way.

"I don't know if it makes a difference in the end, but it's what I do."

I have a day job as an expert in the kinds of analysis you are worried about. The technology is sufficiently advanced that it can sift the signal from the noise no matter how you might try to randomize the results. What seems random to you and I is not random to a computer. Trying to spoof or chaff the system may make you feel better but it won't make a difference. You'll just be marked as someone who tries to chaff or spoof the system. :-)

These days you might as well be who you are. It is easier and nothing else you will do can make much difference anyway.

[Goldstein1984]

13. I've always assumed as much, but...

it isn't in my nature to just submit.

A fellow research associate is a retired naval intelligence officer who tells me that not all of my methods are completely futile. He's the one who suggested buying a used laptop with no paperwork trail to me, and using the wifi at the coffee shop for all of my controversial Googling.

[Alias Dictus Tyrant]

14. Yeah, it used to work that way.

These days, your identity can be fingerprinted from a surprising range of diffuse information sources, things you wouldn't think about. It can be defeated, but in a civilized country it requires such advanced knowledge that the only people that could reasonably pull it off are the people that design the systems in the first place. It isn't getting any easier.

And I totally get the never submitting as a matter of principle.

[LoZoccolo]

2. Yauba and Ixquick tend to be a lot more private.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

4. The NSA is "protecting" our freedoms by spying on us.

Sorta like stabbing yourself in the eye to prevent blindness.

[PufPuf23]

7. I follow geo-politics and am an internet-oriented person

over other media since pre-2000. First used internet with usenet in early 90's and Mosaic was first browser.

My internet explorations and purchases would indicate I am more extreme than I am in practice. The fringe entertains provides food for thought and for me is a non-competitive set of private interests. Some of "entertainment" is hard-core science and anthropology reflecting career, education, happenstance of birth, and personal moral lines in the silt. Others are playing with woo and observing outliars (sic).

Political discourse in the public commons of media and community discource commonly at DU is cognitively dissonant.

The military and National Security appartus is out of line and working against the general welfare, opinions, and values as stated by the foremost American Patriots, our Constituion and Bill of Rights and most of the populace from either extreme plus rational people --such as myself -- intelligent, informed, and not in psychological extremes.

The ability and actions of the National and Finanial Security States have gone far past the freedom and general welfare of the citizen. Our justice system is arbitrary, bought, and unfair.

I use and will continue to use Google passively. I am no threat being old and a drop-out of the rat race.

This type of shit is evil and is incomprehensive to those of us of age during the worst of the Nixon era.

[WonderGrunion]

8. What's wrong with getting in bed with NASA?

NASA missions are responsible for a lot of scientific breakthroughs and advances in technology. I would only think that Google would be interested in keeping up with the forefront of scientific discov.... What was that? The NSA?

Nevermind.

:yoiks:

[Alias Dictus Tyrant]

11. The NSA has two missions.

To attack foreign computer and communications networks and to defend domestic computer and communications networks.

The NSA has made many important public contributions over the decades to the computer software industry to harden computing systems against attack (e.g. fixing a hidden weakness in DES encryption and creating a new security model for Linux). Google is being attacked by the governments of foreign countries so the NSA has a role in analyzing the attacks for weaknesses and helping to harden the systems that are being targeted. It isn't that nefarious.