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#15006402
You could already see the writing on the wall when Huawei's American lawyers thought they were so brilliant in pointing out that the USA already had backdoors into everything, basically admitting to the world that Huawei was a covert intelligence arm of the Chinese government, and it was their intention to copy the USA all along.
User avatar
By Rancid
#15006403
The Sabbaticus wrote:You could already see the writing on the wall when Huawei's American lawyers thought they were so brilliant in pointing out that the USA already had backdoors into everything,


I'm curious, which are these backdoors? In which specific products?

The only time I here people call out a specific backdoor is usually the BMC on computers. This technology was not pushed by the US government (or any government), but instead by the IT industry itself to allow for remote & side channel provisioning of devices and what not. It just so happens, that it's a potential place a backdoor can be put in by a government. Which is the same concern that exists for Huawei products.

Further it isn't so much that these side channel platform management chips will by default have malware on them, but that they may have some exploitable bug that can then be used by governments (or hackers).
By Atlantis
#15006443
JohnRawls wrote:I don't particularly care about Chinese propaganda and Chinese censorship but please do it to your own companies. European and US companies should have full protection for their IP rights and Chinese government has no business in partnering them with some Chinese companies to eventually copy the tech. Eventually people will decide what to believe in, be it Chinese propaganda or our European or US views. And if China doesn't like it then we need to start exluding them from the global trade system at least on our parts.


The problem is not Chinese propaganda. The problem is that people aren't capable of seeing through US/Western propaganda, in particular as far as IP is concerned.

The Chinese do respect IP. They would be foolish not to because the Chinese file more patents and utility models than anybody else. The problem is that they require foreign companies to enter into joint ventures with local companies, which usually involves a degree of technology transfer. But that is not particular to China, most emerging economies used this to catch up with developed economies. When the Japanese buy a new telecoms satellite, they will give the order to a Japanese conglomerate (Mitsubishi, Hitachi, etc.), which forms a joint venture with an American satellite manufacturer. That way, the Americans get to sell a satellite at above market price, while their Japanese joint venture partner gets American technology. When India or Turkey buy a fighter plane, they will require the foreigner supplier (Russia, US, France, etc.) to build part of it locally and transfer technology. The same applies for most big-ticket items and most countries practice it.

The difference is that the Chinese can succeed and actually compete with the US.
#15006447
Rancid wrote: What I'd like to see is more companies get into the fold and compete though. That is unlikely to happen. It's true there's a lot of money to be made with 5G, but it also takes a massive amount of capital investment. Which is precisely why there are only 3 main providers of the technology.

I think cutting Huawei out is a smart move. However, I wouldn't sweat Nokia and Ericsson that much. 5G will require many more transceivers, which will create a significant market opportunity for new entrants. One of the big changes in 5G architecture is the move to cloud radio access networks or C-RANs, which employ software-defined networking and network function virtualization (this is what I'm working on these days). So the data plane hardware is going to be controlled by a cloud-based control plane. It's also not just the transceivers, but the base station controller and mobile switching equipment.

Rancid wrote:However, technology these days is so complicated that it can be hard to reverse engineer something to the point where you can replicate it perfectly.

A lot of the software running 5G will be open source. For example, Linux, OpenStack, Open Daylight and Open vSwitch are all open source. It's the hardware and any embedded systems that we have to safeguard.

John Rawls wrote:Other projects are less complex.(5G)

Airplanes and telecommunications are apples and oranges. 5G is not trivial. A good chunk of the work I do right now is trying to make rollouts easier by noting all the finer points of deployments--being aware of NUMA nodes, DPDK, APIs of hardware vendors, and so forth. It's a big change for telcos, because the technicians are mostly network engineers--they aren't necessarily Linux savvy, and that's some of the big changes coming their way.

John Rawls wrote:Both sides stole from each other and the end of cold war saw US military leaching 80% of most advanced military tech from the collapsed parts of the USSR.

They did some things better than us--some rocket engine designs, etc. However, they were notoriously inefficient producers. Regrettably, one of the main things they got from the Soviet archives was how to manipulate public opinion, which is why American media today is worse than Pravda and Izvestia at their height.

The Sabbaticus wrote:Wasn't it recently mentioned that China was using Boeing/Airbus tech to build their own fleet of mid-range airplanes, to be delivered to Asian partners? And Airbus does have an assembly plant in China, and Boeing does as well.

They are beginning to find out what a huge mistake that was.

John Rawls wrote:I understand why China does it and i understand why we have tolerated it for such a long time.(We thought it isn't a big problem)

The defense apparatus of all states steal technology for the survival of the state. China's political philosophy is such that it doesn't believe in private property or intellectual property. It's one thing to manufacture T-shirts in China. It's another thing to manufacture electronics. Corporations were doing that for cheap labor and fat margins, and because there was no agreement between the EU and US on this stuff. The US passed MFN status for China in part on fears that the US would lose opportunities that the EU was pursuing. We face the same problem with states like Iran. Germany and France are there selling them centrifuges and then shrug when Iran starts using them to refine fissile material.

JohnRawls wrote:European and US companies should have full protection for their IP rights

Well, they can't do business with states that don't believe in private property or intellectual property. That's something that has to be addressed by legislatures in Western companies--do not trade with such countries, and close your markets off to those who do. I also do not feel that strongly about major companies like Google, Facebook or Twitter and their spying on Americans and imposing censorship. They have imbibed too much of the totalitarian ideology, and present a greater danger to our freedoms than foreign dictators at this point.

Nonsense wrote:So, what's the difference between a police state, dictatorship or a 'liberal' democracy?

I think there is much hypocrisy in the West between the different state system's, but which, in fact, vary little.

Yes, and most of what they learn about people is utterly useless information unless they are ready to violate people's rights, which increasingly they seem prepared to do.

Rancid wrote:I'm curious, which are these backdoors? In which specific products?

Linux, for example, is pretty secure. However, you have to consider things like emergency mode, particularly in view of cloud computing. You can get into the kernel in emergency mode and change the root password. In physical computing, you need physical access to the machine. BMCs can extend that to remote admins, which are typically onsite anyway. Cloud computing, by contrast, is intended to be operated remotely. So skilled hackers learn how to target systems in this way.

Rancid wrote:Further it isn't so much that these side channel platform management chips will by default have malware on them, but that they may have some exploitable bug that can then be used by governments (or hackers).

Hardware isn't always the backdoor. Embedded systems often have back doors. Automatic software updates have been used for that purpose. Just think Stuxnet. The US wants the ability to be able to shutdown communications networks in the states at the flick of a switch, but doesn't want China to be able to shut down US telecommunications at the flick of a switch. One of the things I routinely point out to people is that our politicians are mostly lawyers. They aren't technologists. Between their own avarice and their inability to understand what can be done to them if they develop the ability to control or manipulate others, they mandate the ability to trace and control. Microchips all have GUIDs on them now. Network devices have MAC addresses.
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By Rugoz
#15006462
Rancid wrote:That can be easily cracked if you have access to the network. Further, you can get a lot of information on people even if you don't crack the encryption. That said, it's not just about eavesdropping. In fact, eavesdropping should really be the least of your worries (it's the least of my worries). I'm sure it's at the bottom of the list of the worries of the US government too.


How so?

Rancid wrote:If you have access to the 5G core network. You can spread malware to all devices, you can control the network itself (i.e. China could shutdown the entire mobile network to black out communications and cause all sorts of economic disruptions). One insidious easy thing you could do is slow down financial transactions ever so slightly. You can control/influence driverless car networks. You can control/influence smart city sensors/controllers. It becomes easier to spread fake news. Etc. etc. There's all sorts of neat shit that could be done if you you have control of the infrastructure. Your imagination is the only limitation in this case.


The question is whether you need 100% Huawei-free infrastructure, or whether it's enough to limit it to 50% or whatever. Also, I bet there are ways to screen the hardware/software for backdoors etc. The burden of proof could be put on Huawei.

I don't buy into the idea that we need to outright ban Huawei products. At least I want it to hear from someone else than the United States.
User avatar
By Rancid
#15006493
Rugoz wrote:How so?


I already mentioned how so. You can create network disruptions of all kinds.

Rugoz wrote:The question is whether you need 100% Huawei-free infrastructure, or whether it's enough to limit it to 50% or whatever. Also, I bet there are ways to screen the hardware/software for backdoors etc. The burden of proof could be put on Huawei.

I don't buy into the idea that we need to outright ban Huawei products. At least I want it to hear from someone else than the United States.


Fair points.

blackjack21 wrote:A lot of the software running 5G will be open source. For example, Linux, OpenStack, Open Daylight and Open vSwitch are all open source. It's the hardware and any embedded systems that we have to safeguard.


Yea, there's also claims that you could add additional chips onto embedded or server boards to take control over hardware and what not. Could be missed by board verifiers and what not.

You working on OpenvSwitch? I've been using it lately as well.
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By JohnRawls
#15006514
@Atlantis

Yes, kind of. But that is a problem in itself. We never thought they will upscale the theft and reverse engineering to such huge degree. If they can compete then we will need to make sure they can't steal the tech anymore. If you can compete then it means that this stealing is just making us less competitive. We can't tolerate that. Proper competition is when you actually invent something new and not simply steal/reverse engineer. That is why Europe and US have no problem in this regard on a massive scale. We don't simply steal from each other, we innovate, we create something new etc. We try to sort out the issues between ourselves in this field. We can't allow China to continue piggy backing on our innovation forever.

@blackjack21

5g is less complicated than a plane, at least in my opinion. As an ecosystem 5g perhaps is as complicated but it is hard to view 5g as a sum of many, many parts and devices. But perhaps you are right that i am comparing 2 different things.

@Rugoz

Eavesdropping is relatively small scale and targeted. Even if you get all of the data on every individual, it is just that: Data. The problem with having control and access over infrastructure is that allows for more large scale and damaging attacks.

If you have control and access to core infrastructure then it means you have far more options on what you can do. Eavesdropping is basically reading data at its core. Control of the infrastructure allows you to change it, to send it to whoever you want that is connected to the network, to slow down the transmission of the data or to outright make sure it doesn't go through. As Rancid said, your imagination is the limit. You want financial services to stop? Well, just slow down the transaction speed a bit or inject some faulty data inside to screw around with the metrics. You want electricity to shut down? Well, send a command to shut down the power plants or overload them. These are not sci-fi scenarios. Want to spread some malware or viruses just for the shits and giggles? Sure, you are in the infrastructure already so you can mass send them to the devices if you mask them as a software update lets say.

This is not easy to do obviously but your capabilities get increases 100 fold and in general any kind of attack becomes much easier. Again, this has happened already in real life. Stuxnet that was used against Iran for example. Once it was inside the network that meant that their facilities got infected and then it took Iran ages to figure out why their turbines were malfunctioning.
#15006638
Rugoz wrote:I don't buy into the idea that we need to outright ban Huawei products. At least I want it to hear from someone else than the United States.

Everytime I prick a hole in my firewall on port 22, 99% of the brute force hacking attempts come from IP address blocs assigned to China. Heck, a big part of why I don't take Russiagate seriously is that Russian and Ukrainian hackers have been stealing billions from the US yearly for at least the last 15 years or so. Bush and Obama never did much of anything to stop it. I swear they are somehow skimming some of the loot. Yet, when I look at auth logs, on my servers, China is the bad actor almost invariably. Communists are just a band of thieves that took over a government. Hell, I once tracked a laptop of a San Francisco attorney (stolen in Oakland) to the banking district in Hanoi, Vietnam. It's just a bad idea to trust communists.

Rancid wrote:Yea, there's also claims that you could add additional chips onto embedded or server boards to take control over hardware and what not. Could be missed by board verifiers and what not.

Yeah. That's why old politicians really worry me. I'm just as leery of Mitch McConnell as I am of Nancy Pelosi in that vein. There's an array of smart NICs coming out now so that they can offload some networking functions to the NICs instead of burning up CPUs. The storage system I was working--in the upstream--has RDMA over Infiniband capability (and RoCE as well). That takes a lot of load off the CPU and helps deliver more available IOPS. I'm assuming I will start seeing a lot of that with DPDK as well.

Rancid wrote:You working on OpenvSwitch? I've been using it lately as well.

Yes. Just rewrote some live migration procedures for VMs running OVS with DPDK. The NUMA topology becomes relevant when migrating. Also, they didn't have any troubleshooting guidance, so I found all the state transitions in the code from something to "failure" or "error". Some of the stuff has to be pointed out very specifically--like the destination node has to be up and running and in the cluster in order to migrate something to it. Otherwise, we get escalations from network engineers that seem rather obvious to us, but aren't obvious to them, etc.

JohnRawls wrote:5g is less complicated than a plane, at least in my opinion. As an ecosystem 5g perhaps is as complicated but it is hard to view 5g as a sum of many, many parts and devices. But perhaps you are right that i am comparing 2 different things.

I don't know if I agree with that. If 5G fails, it's probably not going to kill you--until driverless cars rely on them anyway... he he. I still remember about 13 years ago, I was working on an anti-fraud project for Fannie Mae in DC and I was having lunch with one of the guys. His phone dropped a call, and he screams, "This fucking technology sucks." I laughed my ass off, and he could not understand why I was laughing. I used to work for W.C.Y. Lee at AirTouch back in the 1990s. MOBILE CELLULAR TELECOMMUNICATIONS BY W.C.Y.LEE Frankly, it's a fucking miracle this stuff works at all. People take technology for granted. So much has to go right for so many layers for anything to work. Just the OSI stack:

Image

Cell phones rely on sending digital signals over radio waves. Time division multiple access, for example, is very time sensitive. Have you ever noticed that if you set the clock on your microwave and your stove to the same time that after a few months they are minutes apart? That's called clock drift. Cellular networks could not function if they did not routinely correct for clock drift. Yet, server clocks throughout cellular networks drift too. I eventually sold my Rolex, because my cell phone clock is far more accurate. Cellular signals get converted into electric signals, laser light signals and even microwave signals across the backhaul networks. If the power were to go out at any leg of a cell phone call from San Francisco to London, for example, you couldn't make the call. Think of the complexity of a microprocessor. I guess with lots of microprocessors in planes, you could call them significantly more complex. However, the most technologically complex components on the first 737s were probably the radios and radars.

Passenger jet aircraft are conceptually fairly simple, but they are not easy to make. Turbofans are easily the most expensive component, and they are conceptually quite simple. However, they are not easy to make. Fan blades have to be very high quality--which is probably why the Chinese haven't been that good at making them yet. Mass produced aluminium is a 20th century invention due to the immense amount of electricity used in production. However, at a more basic level it is metal working. What makes planes so expensive is the amount of testing they must endure, the safety regulations, quality control throughout the supply chain, etc. If you are selling shitty aluminium rivets in an aircraft supply chain, you may very well get many people killed. If your cell phone stops working, it's frustrating. If you lose power on an aircraft or lose a control surface, the chances are that you are well and truly fucked. So the stakes are higher for aircraft, because you are literally risking your life to use them. That's why people are freaking out about the 737-Max when it only took two crashes to figure out the problem and fix it. It's the cost of development, the cost of quality control and regulation, and the potential for loss of life that makes the aircraft business so complex.

In working for banks, they always note that what they sell is "peace of mind." That's true for airlines too. They are not allowed to advertise "Fly Southwest, we don't have as many crashes as United." You can learn all about the physics of flight, but most passengers are unaware. The four physical forces on an aircraft are thrust, drag, gravity and lift. I guess I just tend to think of the whole stack when I think of technology, since the stuff I work on rarely leaves me at one layer of the stack. I find fuel and payload calcs pretty simple. Navigation and scheduling can be much more complicated.
User avatar
By Crantag
#15006644
Rancid wrote:Engineering talent is the one thing that China could "steal" by paying them lavishly I guess. But who wants to live in China for an extended period of time? There's a reason Chinese folks jump at the chance to move to the west. As good as things are getting in China, relatively more freedom is golden.

There are a shit ton of foreign engineers here in China.

America land of the free is a crock of shit. It is apocryphal given the incarceration rates. you have merely recited common propaganda points and America is damn good at propaganda.

Chinese by in large do have a common perspective on America: it's seen as a very dangerous country where everyone has a gun.

Many Chinese want to go abroad, sure. of them many additionally want to return to China after a time.

China is a decent place.
By Atlantis
#15006646
JohnRawls wrote:@Atlantis

Yes, kind of. But that is a problem in itself. We never thought they will upscale the theft and reverse engineering to such huge degree. If they can compete then we will need to make sure they can't steal the tech anymore. If you can compete then it means that this stealing is just making us less competitive. We can't tolerate that. Proper competition is when you actually invent something new and not simply steal/reverse engineer. That is why Europe and US have no problem in this regard on a massive scale. We don't simply steal from each other, we innovate, we create something new etc. We try to sort out the issues between ourselves in this field. We can't allow China to continue piggy backing on our innovation forever.


That's exactly the myth people in the West fall for. IP is meant to be "stolen", ie. spread. That's at the very basis of the modern patent system. The patentee gets a period of 20 years of exclusive commercial exploitation in exchange for publishing his patent so that others can "steal" or use it for improving on that invention. That's how we got to the rapid explosion of innovation in the last century. The inventor doesn't have to hide his invention, which prevents commercial exploitation and inhibits innovation in general. The inventor publishes his invention to allow others to invent in exchange for a patent, which is as good as money in the bank and which can't be stolen.

The problem is exactly that the Chinese have become so innovative that it poses a threat to Western dominance. People who just import technology without innovation will always end up with old technology because the competition already has the next generation technology in the drawers. The Chinese are a danger to Western domination because they have reached the state of the art in a number of fields and are about to overtake the West, for example in 5G technology.

Protectionism will only hurt the US/West. The only way to survive is to become more innovative.
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By Nonsense
#15006650
Hong Wu wrote:Image


Nonsense- :lol:

Rancid wrote:I'm curious, which are these backdoors? In which specific products?

The only time I here people call out a specific backdoor is usually the BMC on computers. This technology was not pushed by the US government (or any government), but instead by the IT industry itself to allow for remote & side channel provisioning of devices and what not. It just so happens, that it's a potential place a backdoor can be put in by a government. Which is the same concern that exists for Huawei products.

Further it isn't so much that these side channel platform management chips will by default have malware on them, but that they may have some exploitable bug that can then be used by governments (or hackers).


Nonsense-

To my knowledge any system with a storage chip is capable of being manipulated with a tiny hidden partition such as mad drives or memory chips.
Link that in to any alernate data stream injected software & it's not too difficult to send that data collected back to the controlling source without detection.

That's my take on it, reality may be different, but the way, along with the speed of change in computing is difficult to keep up with, yet alone tracking it's developing potential in the field of intrusion.

If I recall correctly, INTEL were required to insert such hardware into their new chips by the U.S gov't.

Every computer of whatever kind has an electronic signature for various hardware components, indeed, Microsoft use this information to automatically detect pirated copies of their Windows O.S or other software, which is the blocked from updates & the offender's are pursued in the courts.
User avatar
By Rugoz
#15006662
Rancid wrote:I already mentioned how so. You can create network disruptions of all kinds.


I meant that part, referring to encryption:
Rancid wrote:That can be easily cracked if you have access to the network.
User avatar
By Rancid
#15006669
Rugoz wrote:I meant that part, referring to encryption:


I'm no expert here. However, when you have access to the HW that containers the encryption keys. I'd imagine it's much easier to figure shit out.

blackjack21 wrote:Yes. Just rewrote some live migration procedures for VMs running OVS with DPDK. The NUMA topology becomes relevant when migrating. Also, they didn't have any troubleshooting guidance, so I found all the state transitions in the code from something to "failure" or "error". Some of the stuff has to be pointed out very specifically--like the destination node has to be up and running and in the cluster in order to migrate something to it. Otherwise, we get escalations from network engineers that seem rather obvious to us, but aren't obvious to them, etc.


Does your company see what's going on with huawei as an opportunity, or a real problem?

There will be some companies that come out as winners after all of this, I'd imagine.
User avatar
By blackjack21
#15006707
Rancid wrote:Does your company see what's going on with huawei as an opportunity, or a real problem?

I don't know if they get that political. When I was back in the Middle East a few weeks ago, Huawei was an integrator on a 5G project in a country I shall not name. I didn't meet with any of them, but it would not have been a problem if I did. Earlier this week I got word that we aren't to speak with them anymore based upon some regulatory change. Looking for the email today, I can't seem to find it. Not sure if it got pulled or what is going on. However, the gist of the message was that we were not supposed to answer any of their questions or participate on any calls or work with them.
User avatar
By Rancid
#15006710
blackjack21 wrote:However, the gist of the message was that we were not supposed to answer any of their questions or participate on any calls or work with them.


Yea, I received a similar message at my company.
By ccdan
#15007066
Rancid wrote:I'm curious, which are these backdoors? In which specific products?


Snowden: The NSA planted backdoors in Cisco products
https://www.infoworld.com/article/26081 ... ducts.html


Photos of an NSA “upgrade” factory show Cisco router getting implant

The NSA manager described the process:

Here’s how it works: shipments of computer network devices (servers, routers, etc,) being delivered to our targets throughout the world are intercepted. Next, they are redirected to a secret location where Tailored Access Operations/Access Operations (AO-S326) employees, with the support of the Remote Operations Center (S321), enable the installation of beacon implants directly into our targets’ electronic devices. These devices are then re-packaged and placed back into transit to the original destination. All of this happens with the support of Intelligence Community partners and the technical wizards in TAO.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/201 ... g-implant/


Microsoft handed the NSA access to encrypted messages

• Secret files show scale of Silicon Valley co-operation on Prism
Outlook.com encryption unlocked even before official launch
Skype worked to enable Prism collection of video calls
Company says it is legally compelled to comply
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/ ... -user-data

... just a few examples...
User avatar
By Rancid
#15007068
ccdan wrote:
Snowden: The NSA planted backdoors in Cisco products
https://www.infoworld.com/article/26081 ... ducts.html


Photos of an NSA “upgrade” factory show Cisco router getting implant

The NSA manager described the process:

Here’s how it works: shipments of computer network devices (servers, routers, etc,) being delivered to our targets throughout the world are intercepted. Next, they are redirected to a secret location where Tailored Access Operations/Access Operations (AO-S326) employees, with the support of the Remote Operations Center (S321), enable the installation of beacon implants directly into our targets’ electronic devices. These devices are then re-packaged and placed back into transit to the original destination. All of this happens with the support of Intelligence Community partners and the technical wizards in TAO.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/201 ... g-implant/


Microsoft handed the NSA access to encrypted messages

• Secret files show scale of Silicon Valley co-operation on Prism
Outlook.com encryption unlocked even before official launch
Skype worked to enable Prism collection of video calls
Company says it is legally compelled to comply
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/ ... -user-data

... just a few examples...




The Cisco one sounds like it's on targetted systems and not en Masse? Still, I'm not surprised companies would go along (same reason Huawei would do the same). You don't want to be on the wrong side of the government. Could be bad for business.

That said, has anyone (independent) actually opened up one of these compromised devices and shown "Look, the beacon is right here" Surely that would be easy to do, no?

Anyway, I always thought/believed that what the NSA is doing, is basically routing all North American internet traffic through their servers first. Then sniffing data that way. That's less intrusive and easier to do.

I was thinking, maybe there's a way to make money off this. Create ways to detect this sort of stuff, and give people instructions on how to remove them. With the email encryption, you could even create programs that directly encrypt the text so even if they decrypt the email, the text itself is still encrypted.

I need to think about this....

$$$$
By Sivad
#15007071
Rancid wrote:

Anyway, I always thought/believed that what the NSA is doing, is basically routing all North American internet traffic through their servers first. Then sniffing data that way. That's less intrusive and easier to do.



Are all telephone calls recorded and accessible to the US government?

Glenn Greenwald

The real capabilities and behavior of the US surveillance state are almost entirely unknown to the American public because, like most things of significance done by the US government, it operates behind an impenetrable wall of secrecy. But a seemingly spontaneous admission this week by a former FBI counterterrorism agent provides a rather startling acknowledgment of just how vast and invasive these surveillance activities are.

Over the past couple days, cable news tabloid shows such as CNN's Out Front with Erin Burnett have been excitingly focused on the possible involvement in the Boston Marathon attack of Katherine Russell, the 24-year-old American widow of the deceased suspect, Tamerlan Tsarnaev. As part of their relentless stream of leaks uncritically disseminated by our Adversarial Press Corps, anonymous government officials are claiming that they are now focused on telephone calls between Russell and Tsarnaev that took place both before and after the attack to determine if she had prior knowledge of the plot or participated in any way.

On Wednesday night, Burnett interviewed Tim Clemente, a former FBI counterterrorism agent, about whether the FBI would be able to discover the contents of past telephone conversations between the two. He quite clearly insisted that they could:

BURNETT: Tim, is there any way, obviously, there is a voice mail they can try to get the phone companies to give that up at this point. It's not a voice mail. It's just a conversation. There's no way they actually can find out what happened, right, unless she tells them?

CLEMENTE: "No, there is a way. We certainly have ways in national security investigations to find out exactly what was said in that conversation. It's not necessarily something that the FBI is going to want to present in court, but it may help lead the investigation and/or lead to questioning of her. We certainly can find that out.

BURNETT: "So they can actually get that? People are saying, look, that is incredible.

CLEMENTE: "No, welcome to America. All of that stuff is being captured as we speak whether we know it or like it or not."

"All of that stuff" - meaning every telephone conversation Americans have with one another on US soil, with or without a search warrant - "is being captured as we speak".

On Thursday night, Clemente again appeared on CNN, this time with host Carol Costello, and she asked him about those remarks. He reiterated what he said the night before but added expressly that "all digital communications in the past" are recorded and stored:



Let's repeat that last part: "no digital communication is secure", by which he means not that any communication is susceptible to government interception as it happens (although that is true), but far beyond that: all digital communications - meaning telephone calls, emails, online chats and the like - are automatically recorded and stored and accessible to the government after the fact. To describe that is to define what a ubiquitous, limitless Surveillance State is.

There have been some previous indications that this is true. Former AT&T engineer Mark Klein revealed that AT&T and other telecoms had built a special network that allowed the National Security Agency full and unfettered access to data about the telephone calls and the content of email communications for all of their customers. Specifically, Klein explained "that the NSA set up a system that vacuumed up Internet and phone-call data from ordinary Americans with the cooperation of AT&T" and that "contrary to the government's depiction of its surveillance program as aimed at overseas terrorists . . . much of the data sent through AT&T to the NSA was purely domestic." But his amazing revelations were mostly ignored and, when Congress retroactively immunized the nation's telecom giants for their participation in the illegal Bush spying programs, Klein's claims (by design) were prevented from being adjudicated in court.

That every single telephone call is recorded and stored would also explain this extraordinary revelation by the Washington Post in 2010:

Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications.

It would also help explain the revelations of former NSA official William Binney, who resigned from the agency in protest over its systemic spying on the domestic communications of US citizens, that the US government has "assembled on the order of 20 trillion transactions about US citizens with other US citizens" (which counts only communications transactions and not financial and other transactions), and that "the data that's being assembled is about everybody. And from that data, then they can target anyone they want."

Despite the extreme secrecy behind which these surveillance programs operate, there have been periodic reports of serious abuse. Two Democratic Senators, Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, have been warning for years that Americans would be "stunned" to learn what the US government is doing in terms of secret surveillance.

Strangely, back in 2002 - when hysteria over the 9/11 attacks (and thus acquiescence to government power) was at its peak - the Pentagon's attempt to implement what it called the "Total Information Awareness" program (TIA) sparked so much public controversy that it had to be official scrapped. But it has been incrementally re-instituted - without the creepy (though honest) name and all-seeing-eye logo - with little controversy or even notice.

Back in 2010, worldwide controversy erupted when the governments of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates banned the use of Blackberries because some communications were inaccessible to government intelligence agencies, and that could not be tolerated. The Obama administration condemned this move on the ground that it threatened core freedoms, only to turn around six weeks later and demand that all forms of digital communications allow the US government backdoor access to intercept them. Put another way, the US government embraced exactly the same rationale invoked by the UAE and Saudi agencies: that no communications can be off limits. Indeed, the UAE, when responding to condemnations from the Obama administration, noted that it was simply doing exactly that which the US government does:

"'In fact, the UAE is exercising its sovereign right and is asking for exactly the same regulatory compliance - and with the same principles of judicial and regulatory oversight - that Blackberry grants the US and other governments and nothing more,' [UAE Ambassador to the US Yousef Al] Otaiba said. 'Importantly, the UAE requires the same compliance as the US for the very same reasons: to protect national security and to assist in law enforcement.'"

That no human communications can be allowed to take place without the scrutinizing eye of the US government is indeed the animating principle of the US Surveillance State. Still, this revelation, made in passing on CNN, that every single telephone call made by and among Americans is recorded and stored is something which most people undoubtedly do not know, even if the small group of people who focus on surveillance issues believed it to be true (clearly, both Burnett and Costello were shocked to hear this).

Some new polling suggests that Americans, even after the Boston attack, are growing increasingly concerned about erosions of civil liberties in the name of Terrorism. Even those people who claim it does not matter instinctively understand the value of personal privacy: they put locks on their bedroom doors and vigilantly safeguard their email passwords. That's why the US government so desperately maintains a wall of secrecy around their surveillance capabilities: because they fear that people will find their behavior unacceptably intrusive and threatening, as they did even back in 2002 when John Poindexter's TIA was unveiled.

Mass surveillance is the hallmark of a tyrannical political culture. But whatever one's views on that, the more that is known about what the US government and its surveillance agencies are doing, the better. This admission by this former FBI agent on CNN gives a very good sense for just how limitless these activities are.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... fbi-boston
By ness31
#15007076
Atlantis wrote:That's exactly the myth people in the West fall for. IP is meant to be "stolen", ie. spread. That's at the very basis of the modern patent system. The patentee gets a period of 20 years of exclusive commercial exploitation in exchange for publishing his patent so that others can "steal" or use it for improving on that invention. That's how we got to the rapid explosion of innovation in the last century. The inventor doesn't have to hide his invention, which prevents commercial exploitation and inhibits innovation in general. The inventor publishes his invention to allow others to invent in exchange for a patent, which is as good as money in the bank and which can't be stolen.

The problem is exactly that the Chinese have become so innovative that it poses a threat to Western dominance. People who just import technology without innovation will always end up with old technology because the competition already has the next generation technology in the drawers. The Chinese are a danger to Western domination because they have reached the state of the art in a number of fields and are about to overtake the West, for example in 5G technology.

Protectionism will only hurt the US/West. The only way to survive is to become more innovative.


I’m sorry, but just because a literal corruption of the capitalist system has dominated unchecked, does not mean intellectual property is a myth. It’s a very solid and moral idea, and if it were allowed to be fostered would probably nurture better innovation than just this technological blathering we’ve all put up with for so long :|
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