NSA ’just days from taking over the internet’ warns Edward Snowden
The FISA 702 bill has been described by critics as a “dramatic and terrifying” expansion of the United States government’s surveillance powers.
The United States National Security Agency (NSA) is only days away from “taking over the internet” with a massive expansion of its surveillance powers, according to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.
In an April 16 post to X, Snowden drew attention to a thread originally posted by Elizabeth Goitein — the co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice — that warned of a new bill that could see the U.S. government surveillance powers amplified to new levels.
The bill in question reforms and extends a part of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) known as Section 702.
Currently, the NSA can force internet service providers such as Google and Verizon to hand over sensitive data concerning NSA targets.
However, Goitein claims that through an “innocuous change” to the definition of “electronic communications surveillance provider” in the FISA 702 bill, the U.S. government could go far beyond its current scope and force nearly every company and individual that provides any internet-related service to assist with NSA surveillance.
From my own personal experience they are just making it "legal" what they have already been doing covertly. What I discovered firsthand is that even grocery store surveillance cameras, etc, have already been identifying "anonymous" people who are not in the "beast system".
About three years ago I was arrested at a grocery store cafeteria for being "anonymous". These "law enforcement" officers in an unmarked black SUV handcuffed me and demanded to know who I was! There was no actual probable cause. They were going to haul me off to jail if I did not identify myself!
Due to my responsibilities in the real world I had to identify myself. About a year later I was targeted, which is another story in itself.
I had exposed my D.U.M.B. abduction thirty years ago where I saw US military personnel working side by side with alien "Grays". So I have been maintaining a low profile, using pen names, and literally being out of the "beast system" and remaining anonymous. Watch the movie "Anon" which visually reveals this surveillance system.
If this bill passes, will forums such as Project Avalon be required to spy on us?
16th April 2024 18:38
palehorse
Re: FISA 702 bill: NSA taking over internet?
Quote:
Posted by TrumanCash
..
If this bill passes, will forums such as Project Avalon be required to spy on us?
They already do, since the forum is public and uses the infrastructure that is NOT owned by us "the people", everything goes through their pipes.
Brazilian court ordered all major social media to handle data of certain people of interest (this includes a few congressman in the country), also ordered to shutdown innumerous accounts, all related to freedom of speech, which they claim is misinformation. Elon Musk is fighting back and declined the court order, but he is 1 doing it among many other that just comply with these court orders, but his behavior is not even close to solve the problem.
Unless we decentralize things. nothing will ever change, here is a few things that helps:
- use a mesh network interconnected with trusted private parties whenever is possible (but there is limitations, imagine an island of data not connected to the outside world).
- have your own source of information, your own data stored on your own drivers (we all should already downloaded everything that really matters in our very personal library).
- DNS systems are owned by big corpo, so it can be censored (domains can be deleted), educate people to access using direct IP address (when possible).
- use peer to peer systems for communication, avoid centralized servers, federated is good if you know who controls it (jabber).
- encrypt all your email with `gpg` or similar on top of the already provided encryption in your email (BTW https has a long term secret key which is typically the private key of the server, and guess what we don't own it), tell your counterparts to do the same, if they don't know how to do it, educate them, if they refuse to encrypt their communications, cease digital communication with them and only speak in person.
- access only websites you can trust, PA as example.
- there is countless examples on how we can make our lives better and their lives (NSA for instance) miserable, but people need education first.
just a fundamental example:
Bob live in Australia and Alice lives in US, they want to communicate with each other, in order to do that both need to connect to an ISP (corpo owned or state owned), which will connect to a point of presence that is connected to a backbone(s), more point of presences and finally connect to the service (application) in a server, so they can write a message to each other, in order to this exchange be safe, Bob and Alice MUST have their messages encrypted before it leaves their ends, and be sure the server where the application is running provides PFS (perfect forward secrecy) or FS(forward secrecy), PFS is important in case the TLS private key get compromised, PFS will basically generate a new ephemeral key pair for every new session, so it does not matter if previous sessions was compromised, the new session will have new key pairs. For chat services the ephemeral keys may change based on some other criteria like every 1 hour.. or key rotation at regular/random intervals during the session or based on data transferred or even on based on messages sent out, it really depends on each company.
But here is the trick part: Since PFS has the ability to generate new key pairs, it also has the ability to DECRYPT the message, not previous messages or future message, only the current ones happening at the moment during an active session, so the question is: do you own the ephemeral keys at the moment? nobody does, the server does (it created those keys) has the knowledge and most communication apps are closed source, so we have left with the trust only, technically speaking it is 100% possible to decrypt your message and store it unencrypted, BTW that is how the majority of the social apps that promote PFS works.
So folks, nothing is safe.
Regarding the question about Project Avalon, I believe Bill or anyone on the team would give a huge warning for us before it "officially" happens, so I am not worried about that because I trust the house, but if comes to that, I am sure there would be alternatives for Avalon still to exist without having to comply with these evils.
The FBI is watching you on YouTube. This isn’t shocking but it’s still upsetting. Forbes reports that Federal investigators ordered Google to provide information on all viewers of certain YouTube channels and videos, including their names, addresses, telephone numbers and user activity. A judge approved their requests but there is no proof that Google complied. Former State Department Cyber expert Michael Benz pointed out on Tucker Carlson’s X show recently that Google was started by the CIA so there is no reason to think that they would not continue to comply with their paymasters.
Devin Nunes says the FISA Process Needs Congressional Oversight:
Truth Social CEO Devin Nunes says FISA reform legislation needs to give Congress the authority to access any Justice Department and court documents related to the use of FISA tools. “If you’re going to be using the spy tools of the United Staes of America, it should be rare, it shouldn’t be done very often, and the legislative branch ought to have eyes on it,” says Nunes.
Ok the first video is a clickbait sort of thing, sorry for that, but I could not find the Snowden talk about pegasus.. you can watch he speaking about it toward the end of the video.
Vladimir Putin on Edward Snowden at press conference (I don't understand Russian, so I have no idea about the accuracy of the subtitles - this was published 10 years ago) 1:16m
I read these kinds of articles, or posts, and I have to laugh. Not because it isn't happening, or because I don't think it's serious, but because they're already doing it and I don't care. Spy all you like, NSA, I've got a certain finger I'd like you to see.
I have a very punk approach to this kind of thing. Oh, you don't want me to do something? You know all that does is make me want to do it all the more, right? It's a protest thing. Avalon is just the kind of place the NSA would dearly love to control, and they probably will someday, but I'll keep posting what I think about whatever I feel like and get kicked off, happily, proudly, and I hope everyone else on these forums will do the same. And when it does I'll fall back to the good old soap box on the street corner, with a cardboard sign that reads 'The end was nigh fifty years ago, where were you?'
That might have been a little too much. I don't know who lit a fire under me tonight, but that felt kind of good, so I'm not going to apologize.
