Comment on Just a hunch that most social media platforms run off government servers
masterofballs@wolfballs.com 2 years ago
Twitter runs on Amazon's servers. The government can do what ever it wants to Amazon's servers. Its not really a secret. Not just Amazon's servers. All major cloud infrastructure.
iamtanmay@wolfballs.com 2 years ago
Decade old PRISM leaks from Snowden was that NSA mirrors ALL US traffic in real time with an optical system tied to the main fibers, i.e. a literal Prism and Mirror. I find that borderline impossible considering the explosion in traffic and content in last 10 years. US govt would have to be the biggest hardware purchaser easily, since they would have to keep equal scale as rest of internet combined.
Cutting out the middle man and directly running AWS/Azure etc directly from NSA would be only reasonable way to keep up.
I implemented private + public cloud Infra for European stock exchanges... AWS/Azure had to jump through a million hoops to convince EU regulators to allow basic provisioning. Only last year did Azure native services get the green light. AWS not yet.
Soooo, either the EU regulators are morons, or the providers maintain separate NSA proof services for EU.
TLDR; this likely does not affect Europeans so much
squashkin@wolfballs.com 2 years ago
something I think about is even if all that content is being mirrored, how can they even sift through it meaningfully? there's enough info being generated by a handful of people, to keep people busy consuming content full time.
iamtanmay@wolfballs.com 2 years ago
They were able to hunt specific people and 2 degrees of separation, so friends of friends. That was what we know from Snowden, 10 years ago. Since then content has exploded by orders of magnitude, so its unlikely they can go to 3rd degree. Sources like Fbook, Big banks etc are easy for retrieving info on specific people. They had systems for such retrieval for 10 - 15 years. NSA likely have systems to feed this data and search via metadata or images.
Lauren Southern interviewed her ex-Aussie detective recently, who explained how they did this daily in Australia and other 5 eyes countries. Can find the link if you are interested. Should be on her Youtube channel from around the time of Convoy protests, so February I think.
squashkin@wolfballs.com 2 years ago
I am perhaps not communicating my point correctly or something.
There is more content being generated than they have the manpower to go through. I do not doubt they can retrieve stuff or sort through it. But they are unable to look at all of it. It seems like too much. But perhaps they have enough power to only look at a few people of interest.
mayonesa@wolfballs.com 2 years ago
Contact tracing, voice print, filtering for keywords, looking for patterns of behavior.
masterofballs@wolfballs.com 2 years ago
AI is really good. They know your next post before you do
squashkin@wolfballs.com 2 years ago
what i mean is no matter the ai, humans can only read maybe a summary of what is recorded, it may be impossible to sift through the data being generated beyond snippets of it
masterofballs@wolfballs.com 2 years ago
I know in France they require the physical server to be in France. USA still probably has ways to get their data.
The U.S. is building huge data centers in Utah to store everyone's data. Luke the whole worlds. But they can access Amazon's, IBMs, googles , Microsofts servers when ever they want. They can make physical modifications to the hardware and not allow any of those companies access while they are doing it. They make appointments for this. Its common practice.
They can use the post office to justify the funding. They just say its for scanning mail. Which they actually do, I get email copies of my mail. Pictures of the front. But that's not where all the money is going. No one in IT believes that of course but everyone else just says "whatever".
mayonesa@wolfballs.com 2 years ago
Echelon was the original program and it operates by sieving data not storing it.
My guess is that yes, the NSA runs its own servers, and no, Amazon is not part of that.
But, this dilemma has been known for decades...
"Hi, Mr. Local ISP! My name is Gary Owen and I'm an FBI agent. I need everything you have on this suspect...."
"I'm sorry, Mr. Owen, but we can't divulge customer data."
"OK, then I've got a warrant for confiscation of all your hard drives based on the possibility of you colluding with my suspect to do something illegal. You'll be out of business of course because it takes us two years to get the drives back to you..."
"OK, take whatever you want."
Every. Time.
masterofballs@wolfballs.com 2 years ago
I mean they do have direct access to Amazons servers. Ive worked for a cloud providers. The FBI , CIA make appointments. They get unrestricted physical access to the servers. They shut the doors and don't let anyone else in while they do their thing. No one is allowed to ask what they did. They also have contracts to run their software on those servers. So they are in every data center.