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Snowden's stream of leaked NSA secrets about classified surveillance programs shined the public spotlight on the clandestine government organization. Though the stream has now dissipated to a trickle, the impact to the intelligence community continues.
[...] Within NSA's Fort Meade, Maryland, headquarters, no one wants to face another Snowden. With NSA's widespread adoption of cloud computing, the spy agency may not have to.
NSA bet big on cloud computing as the solution to its data problem several years ago. [...] NSA's GovCloud - open-source software stacked on commodity hardware - creates a scalable environment for all NSA data. Soon, most everything NSA collects will end up in this ocean of information.
At first blush, that approach seems counterintuitive. In a post-Snowden world, is it really a good idea to put everything in one place -- to have analysts swimming around in an ocean of NSA secrets and data? It is, if that ocean actually controls what information analysts in the NSA GovCloud can access. That's analogous to how NSA handles security in its cloud.
NSA built the architecture of its cloud environment from scratch, allowing security to be baked in and automated rather than bolted on and carried out by manual processes. Any piece of data ingested by NSA systems over the last two years has been meta-tagged with bits of information, including where it came from and who is authorized to see it in preparation for the agency's cloud transition.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by JNCF on Monday April 13 2015, @08:02PM
Oh really? Has a court ruled that the NSA searching was 'reasonable', and not in violation of the constitution?
They probably will, eventually. They're just stalling so that the public has more time accept what's going on as "normal." I don't really care what a court says, the wording of the Fourth Amendment seems pretty-fucking-clear:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
They can make all the rulings they want, it won't change the fact that they violate the wording of the Constitution on a regular basis. The federal government is a criminal organization. If we act like a court ruling is the bar for legitimacy, we have to recognise their spying as legitimate as soon as they get a favorable ruling. They have the Eye of Sauron now, and I would be really surprised if the supreme court went against them.
I'm not really doubting that they could amend the constitution if necessary, but it is a much higher bar. This is the standard we should be asking for: if they want to act like we've had a national debate about whether or not the federal government can spy on us without a warrant, they need to amend the Constitution to make that explicitly clear. Blackmailing a majority of nine isn't good enough.
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(Score: 2, Disagree) by bob_super on Tuesday April 14 2015, @12:03AM
You haven't been paying enough attention.
1) Operative words in the Fourth: "searches and seizures"
2) Do you remember what was said earlier: the data in the NSA's database is not "collected" until an analyst searches through it. Raw data is just "ingested" (or something like that)
3) People keep arguing that copying media isn't theft in the usual sense, because the official "owner" is not deprived of it.
Put these together, and you get mass surveillance without infringing the Fourth: The NSA is just ingesting all data as potentially vital to protecting the country and the constitution... Nobody is being deprived of their data nor "searched".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 14 2015, @04:51AM
According to gun nuts, the wording of the second doesn't matter and anything which violates its spirit is unconstitutional, so this must mean that anything which violates the spirit of the fourth, regardless of whether it violates the letter, is also unconstitutional.
(Score: 2) by Leebert on Tuesday April 14 2015, @12:53PM
Huh? The wording of the second very much does matter, and "shall not be infringed" is pretty unambiguous. Certainly moreso than "unreasonable searches and seizures".
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Wednesday April 15 2015, @03:17PM
2) Do you remember what was said earlier: the data in the NSA's database is not "collected" until an analyst searches through it. Raw data is just "ingested" (or something like that)
I don't care whether the intelligence collecting my data is a brain or a microchip, and I don't see any distinction along these lines being made in the Constitution. If the data is being stored, it's obviously being seized (even if not directly by a human).
3) People keep arguing that copying media isn't theft in the usual sense, because the official "owner" is not deprived of it.
Now we're not talking about written laws, but rather what we would like the written law to be. I'm okay with that, just noting it. I see an important distinction between data that is intended to remain private and data that is intended to be distributed to the general public. I'm not saying that copying and distributing either type of data should be illegal, but I could see how somebody might argue for a law against intercepting data which is intended to be private.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday April 15 2015, @03:29PM
> If the data is being stored, it's obviously being seized
Says you, and you're not a lawyer for the NSA. My whole point is that they have publicly demonstrated that they play on words to go around restrictions.
If you still have it, was it really seized under the common understanding of the Founding Fathers? Lots of people are paid to argue that the answer is no (whatever they actually personally believe).