Thursday, March 04, 2010

So, if any of you still believe the Feds don't already have a file on each and every one of us here, especially if we've communicated by email or phone, this should dispell those notions pretty damn quickly.

Pastorius, I'll meet you in Buenos Aires. . .

Wall Street Journal:

Details of “Einstein” Cyber Shield Disclosed by White House
By Siobhan Gorman

The Obama administration lifted the veil Tuesday on a highly-secretive set of policies to defend the U.S. from cyber attacks.

It was an open secret that the National Security Agency was bolstering a Homeland Security program to detect and respond to cyber attacks on government systems, but a summary of that program declassified Tuesday provides more details of NSA’s role in a Homeland program known as Einstein.

The current version of the program is widely seen as providing meager protection against attack, but a new version being built will be more robust–largely because it’s rooted in NSA technology. The program is designed to look for indicators of cyber attacks by digging into all Internet communications, including the contents of emails, according to the declassified summary.

Homeland Security will then strip out identifying information and pass along data on new threats to NSA. It will also use threat information from NSA to better identify emerging cyber attacks.

NSA’s role is a careful balance because of the political battles that ensued over the agency’s role in domestic surveillance in the George W. Bush administration. Declassifying details of the NSA’s role, in a program initially developed during the Bush administration and continued in the Obama administration, will likely ignite new debates over privacy.

The White House’s new cyber-security chief, Howard Schmidt, announced the move to declassify the program in a speech at the RSA conference in San Francisco–his first major public address since assuming the post in January. He said addressing potential privacy concerns was one of the ten initial steps he planned to take. “We’re really paying attention, and we get it,” he said.

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Enemy of the State, from 1998



in this clip, start paying attention at 4:45

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Reminds me of another video:
Big Brother Pizza Service

*******

With the coming census, the govt will be looking for even more information to sharpen their cyber skills.
The Census Is Getting Personal

But rest assured,

Gov't offers new assurance census data is private

Anonymous said...

Pentagon approves hacker training for cyberwarriors... via Drudge

Feeling safe yet?

revereridesagain said...

Having been intimidated via email by a former let's call him "acquaintance" who has been linked to the NSA, I'm convinced there's nothing "paranoid" about this concern. (My question to those who know how these things work is, would he have had to be "watching" my email or just that of the third party I tried to contact? Because that was the only time something like this happened.)

midnight rider said...

They don't have to watch anything. It's all done by the machines and software.

Just at a civilian level -- if you see an outgoing email from this person and it mentions this that or the other word name phrase etc or if you see such a word in any email then send it or block it or copy so and so on it for review. Or if this person recieves an email from such and such etc.

It's being done with phone calls as well, at a civilian level. Shortly before I found myself less than gainfully employed my company was looking at Israeli software that would flag a call depending on the stress level or menace in the voice.

That's at a civilian level and there's even more advanced stuff than that available. What the gov't can probably do is frighteneing. Film two fleas humping from 600 miles up and catch the money shot in extreme close up and slo-mo. Then record the afterglo sigh and cigarette lighting. . .

(watch for it on Youtube)