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WTWIV t1_j4f8kmb wrote

I love it when an article ends with a zinger!

> More broadly, the OIG seems to want the DOI to develop a security posture that's less fly-by-night crypto space fintech startup, and more federal government agency with an $18.1 billion dollar budget.

Also, in response to the next quoted section below: we could start by bringing in the manufacturing of all IT infrastructure “in-house” so there’s less risk of secret back doors to get through routers and firewalls.

> The US Department of the Interior's mission is to protect America's natural resources, but it might have a hard time doing so if its systems remain as unsecured as a recent Office of the Inspector General report uncovered.

>There's no better way to relay the conclusions than the report itself: "We found that the Department's management practices and password complexity requirements were not sufficient to prevent potential unauthorized access to its systems and data," the OIG said [PDF].

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tomistruth t1_j4fj56q wrote

Real title should be; "NSA asks Republican held congress to pass bill allowing unauthorized monitoring of US citizens and wants money to hire fulltime citizen spies."

Nothing to worry about. Go on folks. Watch Friends or The Office or Games of Thrones whatever. Democracy and privacy is not at stake. We are just realtime collecting all your emails and passwords.

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Captn-Bojangles t1_j4flk3m wrote

Nope! Don’t trust the NSA. Ed knew what they are doing to the citizens of the US.

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be-like-water-2022 t1_j4fpvgr wrote

Rights aren't rights if someone can take them away. They're privileges. That's all we've ever had in this country is a bill of temporary privileges. And if you read the news even badly, you know that every year, the list gets shorter and shorter and shorter.

George Carlin

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fellipec t1_j4ft3t8 wrote

Like they aren't doing that or would stop doing that

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Worsebetter t1_j4g3xbh wrote

They already do this. Look at the idaho murders. They somehow pulled his anonymous comments from a defunct social network when he was a teenager. How does that happen? And they did it fast.

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NoPossibility t1_j4go29m wrote

Don’t know about the OP’s topic, but I will say I’ll be surprised if they didn’t know who it was in the first day by cell phone data alone. He supposedly turned off his phone during the murders, but many cell phones still transmit when “off”. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if his location was shown as being in the house by non-essential transmissions while in an “off” mode, but the cops are keeping it quiet that they can track a phone this way.

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cryptoderpin t1_j4gqvkq wrote

All laws end at the barrel of a gun. Why stop at stealing everyone’s information and violating your fourth amendment right when there are no consequences from the people.

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Wwwweb t1_j4gsex6 wrote

OSINT is a thing.

A lot of stuff is on the internet archive, including tapatalk, and I'm sure that various projects have indexed that data by whatever identifying information there is. Email address, for example.

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rex8499 t1_j4gzvdm wrote

"please authorize us to do what we're already doing."

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Khalaio t1_j4h2jty wrote

The funny thing about this 1984 shit… no one wants to do the surveilling, just get the bonus, hold their power position, and enjoy their… redacted ;)

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gerberag t1_j4h429i wrote

That hasn't stopped.

They just want to be able to use and share the data with agencies outside the NSA.

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NoPossibility t1_j4h76bm wrote

It’s not some brain dead conspiracy theory. The NSA and CIA were using this kind of technology way back in 2004. Imagine what they can do today.

https://slate.com/technology/2013/07/nsa-can-reportedly-track-cellphones-even-when-they-re-turned-off.html

And it isnt just cellphones that could’ve given away the location. Health devices like step counters, headphones, etc can sometimes record location data that gets reincorporated to a device’s location history when the hub device like a cellphone is reconnected. There are many ways to piece together meta data from someone’s devices to paint a complete picture of who they are, where they are/went, and what they were doing (ie, stopped in front of a store display for 20 seconds facing west). Any number of these could be pieced together to identify who was likely in the house.

If he government wanted to hide their methods of discovery (which they’ve been known to do), they could easily piece together the map and say they found evidence of the car passing a banks cameras to justify their investigation pattern without revealing their true method of discovery.

When the San Bernardino shooter’s phone was capture, it was widely reported that they had a back door method to break into encrypted phones but didn’t want to reveal it. They pressured Apple to break open the phone for them and got rebuffed. Then soon after they revealed an Israeli company was able to do it for them, and they got the data they wanted. All of the legal pressure on Apple was an attempt to hide that they already were able to open it but didn’t want to admit it publicly. But they also didn’t have a solid legal/public way to have gotten their information and needed a cover story.

Same happened with Wi-Fi/cell signal hijacking. Government would set up fake cellular hot spots to hijack radio signals and rap lines and location data. https://theintercept.com/2020/07/31/protests-surveillance-stingrays-dirtboxes-phone-tracking/

Now this is extremely unlikely to have been used in a rural Idaho town with no recent murders. But it illustrates that the technology to track a device is very advanced, sometimes not documented or intended by the handset manufacturer, and the government often attempts to deceive the public to hide their methods so they can continue using it as long as they can without public outcry or the arms race of encryption and behavior changes among people who may conduct criminal acts.

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n3w4cc01_1nt t1_j4h78d9 wrote

as long as they promise the secret service and dhs don't go on a cat food and glue bender then have an animal house party in dc after killing 6 cops

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Gildenstern2u t1_j4hq2yj wrote

I’m gonna have to make sure I take more selfies of me grabbing my own nutsack.

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Aboxofphotons t1_j4hwoz8 wrote

When has any American authority ever given a fuck about the safety or privacy of it's people?

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FPOWorld t1_j4i9pbh wrote

The argument that they’re doing this to protect us from terrorists fell apart on Jan. 6th.

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nicuramar t1_j4ifwkx wrote

> Real title should be; “NSA asks Republican held congress to pass bill allowing unauthorized monitoring of US citizens and wants money to hire fulltime citizen spies.”

The real title should be neither that or what it is, since they are both clearly biased. Instead, it should state as plainly as possible, the facts. Opinions and analysis can follow, as long as it’s separated from facts.

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tomistruth t1_j4ih7d8 wrote

We are far past the point of no return of good journalism. Journalism is dead. We are at the "Please don't get worse." stage where damage control can only be done, if the forces fighting corruption are more vocal than those commiting crimes and corruption.

So yeah, fuck neutrality.

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Eurotrashie t1_j4ilv9i wrote

Seriously, like the NSA ever stopped. They did it before and they are doing it now.

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Sajun t1_j4iocgg wrote

as if they ever stopped

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zerosaved t1_j4izn7q wrote

And the government hires firms that specialize in being able to filter out noise from big data to find exactly what they’re looking for and all associated digital trails, for example, Palantir. They can pull all of your data and internet behaviors and patterns and create a timeline spanning years with granular access down to the seconds of each day. And they could do that all before even being given the go-ahead to access your “protected” data.

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trisul-108 t1_j4k6vak wrote

I think there is a huge public misunderstanding of the technology. Technologically, the only way to obtain data on terrorism and cyberwar attacks is to collect it all the time. How the data is processed is what needs to be regulated in a democracy.

Russia is collecting all the data they can get about us. Even TikTok is spying on our children and their parents. And somehow, no one is bothered that the Chinese military has this data about us. Slowly, China and possibly Russia are gaining an advantage over us, because we do not know how to regulate spooks in a democracy ... they don't need to regulate, they just collect everything they can.

When Russia starts using cyber attack to disconnect our civilian infrastructure: electricity, water, heating, communications, transport, traffic etc. it will be too late to start collecting data.

Yes, we need oversight, absolutely. But the proper agencies also need the data. Oversight needs to be setup on how it is used. As it is, civil society is saying "if they have no data, they cannot abuse it". This is no longer a viable strategy and China and Russia are preparing to wage war against us, a war that will initially be cyberwar, because everyone is nuclear.

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SoftwareMaven t1_j4omo7f wrote

I mean, if anything, that would be an argument that they really aren’t surveilling US people, which the NSA is (supposedly) not allowed to do. If they had warned us about it, it would be direct proof they were spying on us.

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