Automattic, the company behind content management and blogging platform WordPress, has complained that it can't reveal the full extent of state intelligence agencies' requests to probe users' accounts.
The company's new National Security report reports that the company's recorded zero “national security requests” in 2015's first six months. But the report then offers this observation:
The post goes on to say “By preventing us from sharing a more precise number of requests, the current disclosure rules diminish the trust that our users place in us and our services. For now, we are disclosing the maximum amount of information allowed by law.”
Automattic's unhappy with that so has joined the Twitter-initiated effort (PDF) to get the US attorney-general to change the rules in order to allow more detailed reporting of intelligence agency requests.
That effort could take years to resolve, so until it does it seems safest to assume that even though companies list small quantities of intelligence agency action, the reality may be rather different. ®
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday July 29 2015, @02:26AM
"could take years to resolve"
It takes years to resolve a problem caused by government - but if you're behind on taxes, government resolves that quite quickly.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday July 29 2015, @02:48AM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @02:54AM
So why don't you run for President and win and personally abolish the NSA? Here's a catchy slogan for your campaign: "Read my ass, no more shit!"
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @03:05AM
careful spouting that anti-government rhetoric... you might come off as a libertarian and the sheeple will accuse you of being 'extremist'
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @04:45AM
Well, not so much an extremist as a complete fraud who would piss and shit themself once faced with the social darwinistic dystopia they clamour for. #cognitivedissonance
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @03:01AM
If the NSA or whatever 3 letter agency takes your company to court, they gunna have to spill more beans than you did so i doubt they would wanna go that road. also, can you imagine the response from other companies (not to mention the public) to such a case? "authoritarian" would appear in every newspaper.
Maybe they wouldn't take you to court... instead they just "disappear" key personnel working for you, or throw them in a cell at gitmo in the name of "fighting terrorism", but sooner or later the general populous has gotta realize that would basically equate the USA with the Soviet Union.
Something has to eventually give... either you accept the FUD and be a good little soviet, or you stand up for yourselves and expose the "intelligence" apparatus for what it is. I realize it is difficult for a company to accept the risk on its own, so maybe there should be some sort of alliance formed... if one company gets sued/threatened/charged, the entire alliance takes it as affecting them all and they all bring their collective capitalist powers to bear, kinda like the open source alliance against patent trolls.
(Score: 2) by pogostix on Wednesday July 29 2015, @03:23AM
Don't they have a special secret "court" they take you to? One that basically rubber stamps things?
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Wednesday July 29 2015, @03:56AM
Yes. They have a secret court with secret laws where they can basically do as they please.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by pogostix on Wednesday July 29 2015, @05:05AM
Sad. Such a great country. I'd love to move to the US and have free run of places like California. Live/work in Hawaii for a bit. Msg me for a sham greencard marriage you Americans!
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @03:18PM
Maybe they wouldn't take you to court... instead they just "disappear" key personnel working for you, or throw them in a cell at gitmo in the name of "fighting terrorism"
That's way too drastic. They would just infiltrate you with a plant that is going to give them the info they need. That way you don't know you're giving the info away and keep posting your canary giving everyone a happy squishy feeling inside AND they keep a valuable intelligence source running and providing them with the raw data.
It's been done before, it's happening now and it will happen in the future.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @03:02AM
Zero is actually a very precise number. So by saying that they are prevented from being more precise, doesn't that mean, what else could it mean? Now all we need to know if what state intelligence agency was doing this. I suspect Italy, North Korea, and Namibia, but that also is very imprecise.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @03:23AM
(Score: 3, Informative) by fishybell on Wednesday July 29 2015, @03:51AM
Them saying 0 is still being very precise even if it is inaccurate. </pedantic>
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Wednesday July 29 2015, @04:03AM
You misunderstand. They are not saying that they have received precisely zero requests, but that they have received imprecisely, somewhere around zero requests, more or less. What's a half dozen digits between friends, eh?
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 2) by Whoever on Wednesday July 29 2015, @04:28AM
Try RTFA, if you look at 2013, it says that they received between 0 and 249 requests between Jul 1 and Dec 31 of that year.
(Score: 4, Informative) by DECbot on Wednesday July 29 2015, @04:23AM
While it seems clear that some three-letter agency hit up Automattic, the question remains, what were they after? While it would seem automatic to ask for user account info and ip addresses for blogs hosted at wordpress.com, but Automattic is in a position to provide more. Say you host a wordpress blog on your own server. You rationally setup your apache server, lock down your php, and secure your MySQL server, download the wordpress installer and ensure that auto-updates are enabled, you even surveyed the post install tables and php files to make sure nothing fishy was going on.... but have you ever checked the automated update to ensure it doesn't pass along your SQL server user and password along to spook@fbi.gov while updating your files? Have you checked to see if it records IP addresses with posts and comments? Can you trust your wordpress install on your own server?
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @03:24PM
Well, WordPress *is* open source so I'm sure *somebody* checked the code... I mean, I thought you were doing that...
(Score: 2) by zugedneb on Wednesday July 29 2015, @04:26AM
...that the protectors, if they are as strong or stronger than the enemy, are as bad or worse than the enemy.
As Robert Jordan put it in one of his books: "...only a greater power can brake a power, and then, you are trapped again..."
old saying: "a troll is a window into the soul of humanity" + also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ajax
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @05:08AM
.only a greater power can brake a power
But isn't power-braking one of those Fast -n- Furiosa moves that makes your Family Truckster tumble down the blacktop? Where were we? Oh, yeah, distraction from government snooping!
(Score: 3, Funny) by zugedneb on Wednesday July 29 2015, @05:12AM
break... it is spelled break.
I hate this language.
I would like to take the english and ram it up in the ass of the french...
old saying: "a troll is a window into the soul of humanity" + also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ajax
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @10:17AM
I hear the Japanese refer to their own language as the "devil's language". English is even worse for idioms and irregular forms. And did you ever notice that it is only English speaking nations that have "spelling bees"? Contests over spelling? For most sane languages this would be ridiculous! But for a language that is a bastard spawn of some ancient Briton Celt, Latin, Anglo-Saxon-Jute, French bastardized by Normans, and the Spice Girls, well, it is par for the course. How in the hell did English end up being the default language of the internets? Can we blame India? Or Canada? Or Tasmania?
(Score: 2) by DECbot on Wednesday July 29 2015, @03:06PM
I think it's reasonable to blame the Brits. They were the first imperialistic English speaking empire.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 2) by Zinho on Wednesday July 29 2015, @04:30PM
And did you ever notice that it is only English speaking nations that have "spelling bees"?
This is not true: French-speaking countries have spelling bees as well.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
(Score: 2) by Yog-Yogguth on Saturday August 01 2015, @03:30PM
The Japanese do not say that about their own language as far as I know, it is said that it was described that way by some Portuguese monk in Japan back in the 16th century because Japanese language sort of reverses the sentence structure (if only it was that easy lol) and in Christian mythology “satanic speech” is sometimes said to be spoken backwards.
It might be true but one doesn't get that impression when reading about some of the Portuguese who went to Japan [wikipedia.org], then again I haven't read it all or studied it.
The same monks are also said to be thought to be a possible source/inspiration for parts of the folklore and mythology surrounding the Japanese Kappa creatures/monsters/yōkai, not just their hair style (a circular fringe/border of hair forming a hairless and possibly shiny “bowl” on top) but possibly also the “buggery” (i.e. the thing about Kappa removing your “soul” out through your anus). Lots of other attributes (true or not, good or bad) of Kappa [wikipedia.org] fit various “expected” behaviour of the monks and this is likely stuff that was merged into an existing mythology whose main purpose was to warn/scare children to be careful when it came to streams and rivers etc.
Foreigners weren't particularly popular (both for good and bad reasons) and one shouldn't ignore the possibility that a myth was intentionally expanded to make people associate at least some of the foreigners with monsters, pain, and death.
Kappa is also Japanese for raincoat and in this meaning the specific word 合羽 is said to be a direct loanword from the Portuguese “capa” but the name Kappa 河童 for the creature is different.
Bite harder Ouroboros, bite! tails.boum.org/ linux USB CD secure desktop IRC *crypt tor (not endorsements (XKeyScore))
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Wednesday July 29 2015, @03:59PM
I could see it going either way. "Brake a power" as in apply the brakes to it vs. "break a power" as in cripple its effectiveness.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 3, Interesting) by pendorbound on Wednesday July 29 2015, @01:38PM
I can't cite chapter & verse right now, but the regulations for reporting NSL's allow them to report in ranges, not specific numbers. The first range that they're allowed to report is from 0 to 1000. They're not actually allowed to say if it was zero or more than zero. The "By preventing us from sharing a more precise number..." bit was a clever lawyer's way of at least suggesting that they did in fact receive a number more than zero but less than 1000. The law prevents them from actually coming out & saying more than zero though. It could have been 999.
I'd be shocked if there wasn't a department of the various TLA's responsible for not going over 999 for any one company in a single reporting period.
+1 to WordPress for witty exploit of a legal loophole. -∞ to the Soviet^W US government for requiring this kind of doublespeak for reporting on the activities of "law enforcement".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @03:18PM
Why don't they defy the NSL and kill anyone that comes to arrest them?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @07:33PM
Sure. You just go ahead and try that sometime. Your next of kin can report back to us on how that went. Also, what the hell is the NSL? Do we have a new TLA terrorizing the populace now?
(Score: 2) by Yog-Yogguth on Saturday August 01 2015, @03:48PM
National Security Letter.
Here [wikipedia.org] is the “nice” and “legal” version.
On a tangent it has been over two years now since Snowden fled.
Bite harder Ouroboros, bite! tails.boum.org/ linux USB CD secure desktop IRC *crypt tor (not endorsements (XKeyScore))
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday July 29 2015, @07:38PM
Why don't they defy the NSL and spend 5 years getting the case in front of this Very 1st-friendly SCOTUS?
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @09:42PM
Doesn't work like that.