Eben Moglen and I Talk about the NSA
Last week, Eben Moglen and I had a conversation about NSA surveillance. Audio and video are online.
EDITED TO ADD: The site seems to be down, so here’s a YouTube link.
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Last week, Eben Moglen and I had a conversation about NSA surveillance. Audio and video are online.
EDITED TO ADD: The site seems to be down, so here’s a YouTube link.
I just did an AMA on Reddit.
This New York Times story on the NSA is very good, and contains lots of little tidbits of new information gleaned from the Snowden documents.
The agency’s Dishfire database—nothing happens without a code word at the N.S.A.—stores years of text messages from around the world, just in case. Its Tracfin collection accumulates gigabytes of credit card purchases. The fellow pretending to send a text message at an Internet cafe in Jordan may be using an N.S.A. technique code-named Polarbreeze to tap into nearby computers. The Russian businessman who is socially active on the web might just become food for Snacks, the acronym-mad agency’s Social Network Analysis Collaboration Knowledge Services, which figures out the personnel hierarchies of organizations from texts.
EDITED TO ADD (11/5): This Guardian story is related. It looks like both the New York Times and the Guardian wrote separate stories about the same source material.
EDITED TO ADD (11/5): New York Times reporter Scott Shane gave a 20-minute interview on Democracy Now on the NSA and his reporting.
I was interviewed for Technology Review on the NSA and the Snowden documents.
I was interviewed by MinnPost.
Mikko Hypponen and I answered questions about PRISM on the TED website.
Another audio interview; this one is mostly about security and power.
Last week, I gave a talk at Google. It’s another talk about power and security, my continually evolving topic-of-the-moment that could very well become my next book. This installment is different than the previous talks and interviews, but not different enough that you should feel the need to watch it if you’ve seen the others.
There are things I got wrong. There are contradictions. There are questions I couldn’t answer. But that’s my process, and I’m okay with doing it semi-publicly. As always, I appreciate comments, criticisms, reading suggestions, and so on.
EDITED TO ADD (6/30): Two commentaries on the talk.
EDITED TO ADD (8/1): To date, 14,000 people have watched the talk.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.