Spy hard

Let's look at the latest on the NSA front...

Differing slide syndrome. This catch by Cryptome gets more interesting the closer one looks at it. Both the WP and the Guardian published the same "liberated" slide concerning Prism. But it's not really the same -- there are slight differences. See for yourself.

Are the differences significant? You tell me.

Obama's crackdown. Government employees are now supposed to fink on other employees who show certain signs of heading down Snowden road, even though this "profiling" approach may be based on pseudoscience and malarky. Apparently, we are reaching the point where any employee who refuses to shout "Goody Proctor is a witch!" may face charges.

“In past espionage cases, we find people saw things that may have helped identify a spy, but never reported it,” said Gene Barlow, a spokesman for the Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive, which oversees government efforts to detect threats like spies and computer hackers and is helping implement the Insider Threat Program.

Espionage? So far, I've seen no evidence that Snowden is a spy for some other country. If he's a spy, which service recruited him? Until someone gives me a damned good reason to think otherwise, I'm going to go with a face-value reading of this story: Snowden endangered his life to warn the American public about the ominous capabilities of the NSA and the threat to our privacy. Yet here comes Gene Barlow, telling government employees to look for such telltale signs as unexplained travel and financial troubles. Those are the signs of a spy, not of a whistleblower. Barlow has based his approach on a complete misreading of the case.

As the government of the U.S. morphs into the government of Oceania, you should expect to see more people of conscience stepping forward. Treating the next Ed Snowden as if he were an Ed Howard is inane.

Skype hunt. Microsoft has been playing boner-to-backside with the NSA all along, even helping the Agency break Microsoft's own encryption. Here's one detail that caused me to shout "A-HA!":

The company worked with the FBI this year to allow the NSA easier access via Prism to its cloud storage service SkyDrive, which now has more than 250 million users worldwide...

Did I not warn you? Did I not freakin' warn you? I told you people four years ago that cloud computing was a plot to let Uncle check your files and see what kind of book you're writing. I warned you all! And what was the result? Mad, they called me! My name was mocked and sullied by small-minded fools who confuse madness with genius! Well, NOW let's see who...

Sorry. I was lapsing into my Colin Clive impersonation. Instead of going down that path, let's talk about Skype, shall we?

In July last year, nine months after Microsoft bought Skype, the NSA boasted that a new capability had tripled the amount of Skype video calls being collected through Prism...

Yeah. About that. At the time of the purchase, a lot of people wondered: Just why did Microsoft buy Skype for $8.5 billion, anyways?

Last year, Skype had revenue of $860 million on which it posted an operating profit of $264 million. However, overall it made a small loss of $7 million, and had long-term debt of $686 million.

This was Microsoft's biggest purchase ever, and few could see how the company planned to make money. As Daniel Hopsicker likes to say: If a deal makes no business sense, it has to make some other kind of sense.

Now let's get back to the latest Guardian story on the NSA:

The NSA was able to start tasking Skype communications the following day, and collection began on 6 February. "Feedback indicated that a collected Skype call was very clear and the metadata looked complete," the document stated, praising the co-operation between NSA teams and the FBI. "Collaborative teamwork was the key to the successful addition of another provider to the Prism system."

ACLU technology expert Chris Soghoian said the revelations would surprise many Skype users. "In the past, Skype made affirmative promises to users about their inability to perform wiretaps," he said. "It's hard to square Microsoft's secret collaboration with the NSA with its high-profile efforts to compete on privacy with Google."

One can indeed make the argument that Microsoft is competing with Google on privacy, since both companies are working with the spooks to make privacy a thing of the past. Google's sordid history is the major point of this piece written four years ago.

Yes, that was the very blog post which caused petty-minded fools to label me, me, a madman, simply because my vision exceeded theirs! Well, now they'll see! The blind dolts and blinkered ninnies who laughed at me back at the academy -- finally, finally, they will see for themselves...

Sorry. I was doing it again, wasn't I?