[sudo-discuss] On the technical and legal aspects of security, transparency, and audibility of the NSA surveillance data.

There is debate about whether the NSA's PRISM program is related to Palantir's products. http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/06/23/1218189/-HBGary-Palantir-Prism-Fac… Whether they are related or not, it seems that the government's claims of transparency and audibility of the NSA's PRISM program is related (perhaps directly) to the claims of Palantir's. Search for "immutable auditing" below: http://www.palantir.com/wp-content/static/pg-analysis-blog/2009/07/Privacy-… It seems that even professor Lessig has bought into their marketing. http://lessig.tumblr.com/post/54268127504/on-the-freedom-to-speak (Palantir's product is the kind of thing that prof Lessig had always wanted, as you can read in his book "Code: and Other Laws of Cyberspce". In trying to strike a "balance" between copyright and privacy, prof Lessig proposes solutions that fail to prevent blanket government surveillance.) We need to scrutinize these technically incredible claims. I wager that for any given system that touts immutable audibility, there is a way to hack around it. As long as the NSA can tap the wires and record information in vast databases for cold storage, we are absolutely in risk. Technical/legal concepts that need to be scrutinized: * immutable audit log (see http://www.std.com/~cme/non-repudiation.htm) * non-repudiation * chain of custody - JaeKwon