31 Years of the Digest ... founded August 21, 1981
Add this Digest to your personal
or 
The Telecom Digest for July 2, 2013
Volume 32 : Issue 143 : "text" Format
====== 31 years of TELECOM Digest -- Founded August 21, 1981 ======
|
Telecom and VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) Digest for the
Internet. All contents here are copyrighted by Bill Horne and
the individual writers/correspondents. Articles may be used in other
journals or newsgroups, provided the writer's name and the Digest are
included in the fair use quote. By using any name or email address
included herein for any reason other than responding to an article
herein, you agree to pay a hundred dollars to that person, or email address
owner.
Addresses herein are not to be added to any mailing list, nor to be
sold or given away without the explicit written consent of the owner of
that address. Chain letters, viruses, porn, spam, and miscellaneous junk
are definitely unwelcome.
We must fight spam for the same reason we fight crime: not because we
are naive enough to believe that we will ever stamp it out, but because
we do not want the kind of world that results when no one stands
against crime. - Geoffrey Welsh
See the bottom of this issue for subscription and archive details
and the name of our lawyer, and other stuff of interest.
|
Date: Mon, 1 Jul 2013 00:50:06 -0400
From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Job Title Key to Inner Access Held by Snowden
Message-ID: <p06240805cdf6ba9ab81a@[10.0.1.12]>
Job Title Key to Inner Access Held by Snowden
By SCOTT SHANE and DAVID E. SANGER
June 30, 2013
WASHINGTON - Intelligence officials refer to Edward J. Snowden's job
as a National Security Agency contractor as "systems administrator" -
a bland name for the specialists who keep the computers humming. But
his last job before leaking classified documents about N.S.A.
surveillance, he told the news organization The Guardian, was
actually "infrastructure analyst."
It is a title that officials have carefully avoided mentioning,
perhaps for fear of inviting questions about the agency's aggressive
tactics: an infrastructure analyst at the N.S.A., like a burglar
casing an apartment building, looks for new ways to break into
Internet and telephone traffic around the world.
That assignment helps explain how Mr. Snowden got hold of documents
laying bare the top-secret capabilities of the nation's largest
intelligence agency, setting off a far-reaching political and
diplomatic crisis for the Obama administration.
Even as some members of Congress have challenged the N.S.A.'s
collection of logs of nearly every phone call Americans make,
European officials furiously protested on Sunday after Mr. Snowden's
disclosure that the N.S.A. has bugged European Union offices in
Washington and Brussels and, with its British counterpart, has tapped
the Continent's major fiber-optic communications cables.
On Sunday evening, The Guardian posted an article saying documents
leaked by Mr. Snowden show 38 embassies and missions on a list of
United States electronic surveillance targets. Some of those offices
belong to allies like France, Italy, Japan and Mexico, The Guardian
said.
Mr. Snowden, who planned his leaks for at least a year, has said he
took the infrastructure analyst position with Booz Allen Hamilton in
Hawaii in March, evidently taking a pay cut, to gain access to a
fresh supply of documents.
...
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/01/us/job-title-key-to-inner-access-held-by-snowden.html?pagewanted=all
Date: Mon, 1 Jul 2013 00:57:46 -0400
From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Privacy in an age of publicity.
Message-ID: <p06240806cdf6bb94f2b6@[10.0.1.12]>
THE PRISM
Privacy in an age of publicity.
BY Jill Lepore
June 24, 2013
The New Yorker
An extraordinary fuss about eavesdropping started in the spring of
1844, when Giuseppe Mazzini, an Italian exile in London, became
convinced that the British government was opening his mail. Mazzini,
a revolutionary who'd been thrown in jail in Genoa, imprisoned in
Savona, sentenced to death in absentia, and arrested in Paris, was
plotting the unification of the kingdoms of Italy and the founding of
an Italian republic. He suspected that, in London, he'd been the
victim of what he called "post-office espionage": he believed that
the Home Secretary, Sir James Graham, had ordered his mail to be
opened, at the request of the Austrian Ambassador, who, like many
people, feared what Mazzini hoped-that an insurrection in Italy would
spark a series of revolutions across Europe. Mazzini knew how to find
out: he put poppy seeds, strands of hair, and grains of sand into
envelopes, sealed the envelopes with wax, and sent them, by post, to
himself. When the letters arrived-still sealed-they contained no
poppy seeds, no hair, and no grains of sand. Mazzini then had his
friend Thomas Duncombe, a Member of Parliament, submit a petition to
the House of Commons. Duncombe wanted to know if Graham really had
ordered the opening of Mazzini's mail. Was the British government in
the business of prying into people's private correspondence? Graham
said the answer to that question was a secret.
Questions raised this month about surveillance conducted by the
National Security Agency have been met, so far, with much the same
response that Duncombe got from Graham in 1844: the program is
classified. (This, a secret secret, is known as a double secret.)
Luckily, old secrets aren't secret; old secrets are history. The
Mazzini affair, as the historian David Vincent argued in "The Culture
of Secrecy," led to "the first modern attack on official secrecy." It
stirred a public uproar, and eventually the House of Commons
appointed a Committee of Secrecy "to inquire into the State of the
Law in respect of the Detaining and Opening of Letters at the General
Post-office, and into the Mode under which the Authority given for
such Detaining and Opening has been exercised." In August of 1844,
the committee issued a hundred-and-sixteen-page report on the goings
on at the post office. Fascinating to historians, it must have bored
Parliament silly. It includes a history of the delivery of the mail,
back to the sixteenth century. (The committee members had "showed so
much antiquarian research," Lord John Russell remarked, that he was
surprised they hadn't gone all the way back to "the case of Hamlet,
Prince of Denmark, who opened the letters which had been committed to
his charge, and got Rosencrantz and Guildenstern put to death instead
of himself.")
The report revealed that Mazzini's mail had indeed been opened and
that there existed something called the Secret Department of the Post
Office. Warrants had been issued for reading the mail of the king's
subjects for centuries. Before Mazzini and the poppy seeds, the
practice was scarcely questioned. It was not, however, widespread.
"The general average of Warrants issued during the present century,
does not much exceed 8 a-year," the investigation revealed. "This
number would comprehend, on an average, the Letters of about 16
persons annually." The Committee of Secrecy was relieved to report
that rumors that the Secret Department of the Post Office had, at
times, sent "entire mail-bags" to the Home Office were false: "None
but separate Letters or Packets are ever sent."
The entire episode was closely watched in the United States, where
the New-York Tribune condemned the opening of Mazzini's mail as "a
barbarian breach of honor and decency." After the Committee of
Secrecy issued its report, Mazzini published an essay called
"Letter-Opening at the Post-Office." Two months after the Mazzini
affair began, the Secret Department of the Post Office was abolished.
What replaced it, in the long run, was even sneakier: better-kept
secrets.
...
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/06/24/130624fa_fact_lepore?currentPage=all
Date: Sun, 30 Jun 2013 23:11:15 -0400
From: Matt Simpson <net-news69@jmatt.net>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: Walmart cellphone plans?
Message-ID: <net-news69-5A165A.23111430062013@news.eternal-september.org>
In article <1c6wh4qt1jgxk.blvl8borb2ob.dlg@40tude.net>,
tlvp <mPiOsUcB.EtLlLvEp@att.net> wrote:
> Another "off-brand carrier" (actually, MVNO) is Page Plus Cellular,
>
>
> https://www.pagepluscellular.com/
> ,
>
Their plans are good for people who talk a lot. Nobody sells plans for
introverted geeks like me that use lots of data but don't talk to
anybody. To get lots of data, I'd have to buy unlimited talk/text that
I'd never use.
Actually, my existing AT&T plan fits my needs nicely, but it's a
grandfathered plan that's not available any more. I get unlimited data,
100 minutes talk, no text, for about $40 ($38.25 plus the BS misc.
fees). With a couple of Google Voice apps, I can send texts and
make/receive VOIP calls using my unlimited data. Only downside is when
people send texts to my cell # instead of my GV number. I never get the
message and the sender doesn't get an error.
TELECOM Digest is an electronic journal devoted mostly to telecom-
munications topics. It is circulated anywhere there is email, in
addition to Usenet, where it appears as the moderated newsgroup
'comp.dcom.telecom'.
TELECOM Digest is a not-for-profit, mostly non-commercial educational
service offered to the Internet by Bill Horne. All the contents
of the Digest are compilation-copyrighted. You may reprint articles in
some other media on an occasional basis, but please attribute my work
and that of the original author.
The Telecom Digest is moderated by Bill Horne.
This Digest is the oldest continuing e-journal about telecomm-
unications on the Internet, having been founded in August, 1981 and
published continuously since then. Our archives are available for
your review/research. We believe we are the oldest e-zine/mailing list
on the internet in any category!
URL information: http://telecom-digest.org
Copyright (C) 2013 TELECOM Digest. All rights reserved.
Our attorney is Bill Levant, of Blue Bell, PA.
Finally, the Digest is funded by gifts from generous readers such as
yourself who provide funding in amounts deemed appropriate. Your help
is important and appreciated. A suggested donation of fifty dollars
per year per reader is considered appropriate. See our address above.
Please make at least a single donation to cover the cost of processing
your name to the mailing list.
All opinions expressed herein are deemed to be those of the
author. Any organizations listed are for identification purposes only
and messages should not be considered any official expression by the
organization.
End of The Telecom Digest (3 messages)
Return to Archives ** Older Issues