My question is who owns the software?

[JDPriestly]

The private company or the government?

And if it isn't the government, can the private company sell or lease it to some other party?

If the US stops using it, can the private company or private owner of the software, assuming it is privately owned, sell or lease or use it for other nosies?

That is a really, really, really scary thought.

And if one company has devised or created this software, you can be sure that others will too.

Essentially, we have no privacy in our communications on the phone or on the internet unless they are truly encrypted. And I doubt that we can be sure they are truly encrypted.

That is especially bad news for businesses that do a lot of their work and communication over the phone or via the internet.

[NoOneMan]

1. Why do you think encryption on internet gives you privacy? It doesn't

Any page that has javascript on it that will capture the contents of your page, your computer information, etc, and send them to a third party database (like Google Analytics) doesn't care if the connection is encrypted or not. These scripts can track your pathways, interests, etc, and segment you into tidy groups (likely to buy, likely to bomb, likely to vote Democrat).

[msongs]

3. yes but that's not spying according the supporters of the....spying lol nt

[NoOneMan]

5. Haha

And now we know the NSA can have dibs on all that innocent info...that "metadata" that effectively drives billions of dollars in commerce by locating likely buyers of whatever services and plastering them with ads.

Likely buyers...

Likely voters...

Likely bombers...

Likely anarchists...

Likely dissidents...

Future likely dissidents...

Potential future likely dissidents...

Cost-ineffective member of industrial society...

The possibilities are endless. But as long as the people in charge are our imaginary best friends, whats the problem?

[ManiacJoe]

4. It does give some privacy.

Mostly against "man in the middle" attacks.
What happens at the source and destination do need to be addressed separately.

[NoOneMan]

6. My concern about the middle wanes when the destination is an open book for government snooping.

[ManiacJoe]

9. Different problems usually require different solutions.

[ManiacJoe]

2. Needs context: What software are we talking about?

[wandy]

10. Agreed. There are many layers here.........

What OS?
What security mechanism is used?
What DB?
Could the Queries be considered software?
Could the Queries be generated 'on the fly' as in building a query from the results of other Queries?

Still and all, the OP poses a good question.

[ManiacJoe]

13. Many layers of what?

The question of "what software are we talking about" still needs to be answered.

[wandy]

21. Within a system, different software performs different functions..........

Connected to this keybord.....
Win 7 controls the whole shooting match.
IE 10 is the web interface.
Microsoft Security Essentials provides malware protection.
ASUS Ai Suit monitors the hardware.
Some very old applications, I might have written, may be used from time to time.

And so on and so forth.....
So the question is what software components is the NSA using.

[Catherina]

7. Who knows? The same people spying on us, are setting up an NSA for UAE (more profit)

It's no wonder the Carlyle Brigade is out in full force defending their cash cow.

Booz Allen sells surveillance secrets to United Arab Emirates. #McConnell sleaze #NSA

After Profits, Defense Contractor Faces the Pitfalls of Cybersecurity


Mike McConnell, vice chairman of Booz Allen Hamilton, was a director of national intelligence.

By DAVID E. SANGER and NICOLE PERLROTH
Published: June 15, 2013

WASHINGTON — When the United Arab Emirates wanted to create its own version of the National Security Agency, it turned to Booz Allen Hamilton to replicate the world’s largest and most powerful spy agency in the sands of Abu Dhabi.

It was a natural choice: The chief architect of Booz Allen’s cyberstrategy is Mike McConnell, who once led the N.S.A. and pushed the United States into a new era of big data espionage. It was Mr. McConnell who won the blessing of the American intelligence agencies to bolster the Persian Gulf sheikdom, which helps track the Iranians.

“They are teaching everything,” one Arab official familiar with the effort said. “Data mining, Web surveillance, all sorts of digital intelligence collection.”

Yet as Booz Allen profits handsomely from its worldwide expansion, Mr. McConnell and other executives of the government contractor — which sells itself as the gold standard in protecting classified computer systems and boasts that half its 25,000 employees have Top Secret clearances — have a lot of questions to answer.

....

Read more at
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/16/us/after-profits-defense-contractor-faces-the-pitfalls-of-cybersecurity.htm

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023027380

But Snowden and Greenwald are the traitors!

[wandy]

11. And another good question. Is the entire package for sail to the highest bidder?

[Catherina]

20. I have no idea what's really for sale, with their greed some of our information

could be up for sale too. To help them better track terrorists.

[wandy]

22. Just gets more and more worrisome, now doesn't it. nt

[Catherina]

26. I really does :( What if someone hacks into the NSA?

It's been done before but what if a foreign government gets into it? If Edward Snowden was able to do what he did so we knew, how many did the same thing, sold the information to foreign governments or worse yet, told them about vulnerabilities in the system.

And if no one has yet, out of over 1.4 million employees, what guarantees do we that our personal information, taken against our will, is safe?

[Tx4obama]

8. What computer program software are you referring to? n/t

[JDPriestly]

14. The Booz Allen software.

Apparently they have already sold it to the UAE.

Pretty soon the whole world will have copied it an be using it an no one will want to go on the internet.

We will go back to meeting in parks, the workplace, restaurants, churches and sports events and being spoonfed information on TV.

The internet will gradually become disused unless something is done to stop this software and the people like Booz Allen who own and control it.

How stupid of the US and NSA to use software for this purpose that does not belong, lock, stock and barrel to the US government.

Why didn't they buy it?

This reminds me of the sorcerer's apprentice.

I never joined Facebook because I could see the outcome.

[wandy]

29. I'm not making light of this, but ya know............

that thing about going back to meeting in parks, the workplace, restaurants, churches and sports events might not be all that too very unpleasant.

Yet another ill-conceived (Bush) mess. You should not be able to get near any of this stuff without signing you're life away.
In Blood!

Dam! Another nasty thought. The Hardware. Is that "off the shelf" or is it proporitory or worse "few of a kind".

[ManiacJoe]

30. The hardware is probably mostly off-the-shelf parts

assembled in a propriatary way with a few propriatary cards.

[ManiacJoe]

31. The fun part about ownership of the software

is that the agency can sell licenses to other agencies/governments and Booz can be contracted to install it and get it up and running.

[jberryhill]

12. The US government cannot claim copyright in its own works, btw

http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/105

17 USC § 105 - Subject matter of copyright: United States Government works

Copyright protection under this title is not available for any work of the United States Government, but the United States Government is not precluded from receiving and holding copyrights transferred to it by assignment, bequest, or otherwise.

[JDPriestly]

15. We should not allow this software to be used by private parties

or foreign governments. That is asking to be spied upon by other individuals and countries.

This program makes utterly no sense. It has its own failure mechanism written into it.

[DevonRex]

16. Why don't you demand access to every TSSI contract for your personal approval

prior to authorization? Jesus Christ. It's like people think they're inventing the motherfucking wheel.

[usGovOwesUs3Trillion]

17. The base tech is Open Source - http://hadoop.apache.org/

http://hadoop.apache.org/

[DevonRex]

18. LOL.

[JDPriestly]

19. That makes the program utterly insane.

If you can afford the memory and hardware and know computer programming, I assume you could create this program and use it.

You would have to have access to the right weakness in the internet, but that probably is not hard to find.

Oh, no. This is getting more and more interesting. It is beyond imagination.

[DevonRex]

24. Good god. D you see ANYTHING about NSA there? NO. LOL!!!!!

[usGovOwesUs3Trillion]

27. Yeah, the NSA has their logo everywhere

[usGovOwesUs3Trillion]

28. Yes, you would need to be a gov (rich one 2)

To afford anything like what the gov is doing.

Though I suppose some large multi-national corporations may be able to do something similar but on a smaller scale.

That is one of my biggest gripes with our gov program, huge waste of money to fight terrorism, but could be hugely profitable to the one percent if its scope is expanded for business inteligence.

[ManiacJoe]

23. Assuming standard contracts,

the software is owned by the agency that paid for it. The agency either wrote it in-house or contracted it or some combination.

There will be a database at the bottom.
A middle layer will contain premade queries and business rules.
The UI will do data input and gather parameters for queries. Some will probably allow users to directly write queries.

Any contracting agency that had a hand in writing the system most likely does not retain any copies of the software owned by their client, but they do have all the technical know-how to do it all again for another customer.

Encrypted data is certainly possible, if both the sender and receiver want to put the effort into it. Most parties are too lazy to do so.

[JDPriestly]

25. Thanks. Sounds sane.