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Innocent Or Not, the NSA Is Watching You
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Wired: "Under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world's communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails — parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital 'pocket litter.' It is, in some measure, the realization of the 'total information awareness' program created during the first term of the Bush administration — an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans' privacy."
It's time for the revolution. Kill the pigs in charge.
There are no innocent citizens in the modern police state.
Nobody's innocent anymore. There is too much information flowing about - we're all guilty of something. Even if you don't quite no what it is - it's not important. You're just guilty of something so it's important that somebody keep tags on you.
Just in case.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Privacy is evil, crypto is terrorism, stenography is child porn, and you are public enemy number 1.
The increase of backup capacity, and computing capacity makes the dream or nightmare of searching through the internet a reality.
Anybody being connected to anybody in a rather short chain of relations it's obvious that we are all at some level "persons of interest".
If you are a "bad guy" you are obviously "fair game", if you know the bad guy, you are reasonably suspect, if you know somebody who knows the bad guy, you might be needed to understand if you are not part of the support group of the bad guy.
Two level more of indirection and the whole humanity is in the dragnet.
No unfortunately there is not one unique "bad guy", so the probability of being more than N+2..N+3 of any bad guy is really low, even if you are a retired nun. (actually, in practice not such a good example).
So anybody can with some justification be "looked at", so it seems that the only way to alleviate the issue is to over broadcast everything, and hoping that the weighting algorithm finds you booring...
Guess it's too boring for me, I'll have to fish for friends in high places, ... so it's back to the "old regime" (as in before Louis Capet got his headache cured, actually not really fair for the guy, and the change where far from smooth, ... but somehow the end of privileges seemed a good idea, and now seems an idea whose time is past ....)
Sic transit gloria mundi...
I love that the magazine cover says "Deep in the Utah desert." It isn't. It is literally in the middle of the city growth centers. I've been watching them build this since they broke ground. It is a mere 15 minute drive from my house and I live in suburbia. The center sits less than 1 mile off I-15 between Salt Lake City and Utah County. BYU is 30 minutes away from it. There is a water park 10 minutes up the road. They aren't hiding this thing at all. It is in plain sight. It sits up on the side of the hill across the Jordan river valley. And yes, it is freaking massive.
For those interested, here is a google map of the location they are building this. http://maps.google.com/maps?q=40.430485,-111.934547&num=1&t=h&z=14
At least I don't have to back up my data anymore. Restoring it might be a problem...
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
Right, because unchecked corporate rule would never oppress the citizenry. Stop conflating social programs with police states, it just shows your political naivete.
A young libertarian is brought into a command center....... As you can see, my young apprentice, your friends have failed. Now witness the listening power of this fully OPERATIONAL listening station!
binary-thinking, much?
you CAN have both, in the right ways and when designed not to walk all over our assumed basic human rights.
"its A or B. choose!"
idiots...
life is rarely so binary. life is FULL of grey levels.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
From the summary:
Your "small-government" Republicans are just as much on board with this as the "big-government" Democrats.
I've come across a frighteningly high number of individuals who have a "nothing to hide nothing to fear" mindset. They support things like the Patriot Act without even thinking about.
Very, very disturbing. I really hope they're the minority.
If the Founding Fathers had meant to protect your email from search and seizure, they would have had Ben Franklin invent the OSI 7 layer model and SMTP and then mentioned them in the Fourth Amendment!
The US is building a vast system of paranoid security to protect... its vast security systems. Soon there will be nothing of much significance left but the military and its contractors. Then they might find out that they can't survive as a pure self-serving system. The shame is that they won't see until it's too late, stupid and arrogant as the military is (no matter which one), exercising their pompous and useless traditions, weaving flags and shooting in the air. Mankind should have known better since the first industrial war (WW1), but governments and systems have come and gone since then, the steel and cannon barons, however, have been staying in charge almost erverywhere...
Oh, the beautiful gloss of greality!
A number of northern European countries -- Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland -- provide state health care and pensions, but also respect individual liberties to an extent sometimes even beyond in the United States.
Denmark is #3 in the World Audit Civil Liberties rankings.
Finland is #1
Sweden is #2
Norway is #5
The United States is #15.
See here.
These are the classic "Third Way" democracies -- and they outnumber the Stalinist states (USSR, North Korea, Cuba) that are always put up as straw men. In short: Your argument sounds compelling, but, like Aristotle's reasonable-sounding assertion that heaver objects accelerate faster in freefall, it is not supported by empiricism.
OK, NSA. Which finger am I holding up?
Have gnu, will travel.
Surveillance of non-US Persons has never required a warrant, and never will. It has nothing to do with whether it's a group someone "hates" or "likes".
An intelligence service cannot be effective if its sources, methods, capabilities, and techniques are known to the adversary. Intelligence processes must be kept secret, even in an open society. This has been true for the history of our nation.
NSA is authorized to monitor foreign communications WITHIN THE US, and must be able to identify, discern, and target such communications within the sea of digital communications.
NSA lacks the authority to monitor American citizens without an individualized warrant. And the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 actually is more strict with respect to US Persons than previous law: a warrant is required to monitor the communications of a US Person anywhere on the globe. But what the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 also does is allow NSA to target and monitor FOREIGN communications within the US, without a warrant.
I know some people might be stunned to learn this, but the primary mission of the foreign intelligence agencies is FOREIGN intelligence. But what about "warrantless wiretapping", you ask?
In the immediate wake of 9/11, the administration claimed the the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) allowed them to target American citizens identified as having contact with the enemy and/or were active combatants. The current Attorney General also argues that the President has this intrinsic authority under Article II of the Constitution. This was the same justification used in the targeted killing of Anwar al-Awlaki.
Other examples are things like journalists embedded with military units having the communications allegedly monitored, which would happen under the guise of the Joint COMSEC Monitoring Activity. And then we have the court cases — all of which involved people or groups who were thought to be linked to terror groups, not just ordinary, everyday citizens.
Even the most egregious examples of "warrantless wiretapping" (as alleged in the leaks to the press, or documented in various court proceedings) in the wake of 9/11 targeted very specific people — and were justified by the Justice Department, secretly reported to Congress, and reauthorized every 45 days. And that program had long ended by the time the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 fixed the dismal state of foreign intelligence collection.
This excerpt (An 'Intel Gap': What We're Missing, Newsweek, Aug 6, 2007) sums up the issue:
Piffle.
The "ridiculous branches" are all accountable to politicians, who do indeed have the power to stop this. That they choose not to do so, and that the population choose not to become agitated over it, is a matter which is nothing to do with the size of the government. The fact that the USA has reached a political equilibrium centred around two large parties who differ on principles but are substantially similar in practice and implementation is symptomatic of your real core problem here, which is a system of government that is increasingly logjammed. Americans still aren't debating, as far as I can tell, the reasons for that problem and how it may be solved.
It's worth adding that the USA has the smallest government of any Western country, in terms of the proportion of GDP which is government spending. That's even allowing for the fact that the USA's multiple interwoven layers of government (federal, state, county, city, in some cases each with their own executive, legislative and judicial branches) are substantially more burdensome in terms of overall bureaucracy than most Western countries.
Wow. That was my first thought too. I tell my son all the time that this is not the country I was born into. I was a child in the 1940s. We did have the most free country in the world then. Then again 100% of the problems of the United States and the world can be summed up in four words. The root cause of ALL the world's problems is... Too Damned Many People!
Since when is "public safety" the root password to the Constitution?
Well, lets fill their data center up.
If everyone uses their free allocated bandwidth to send 1000000000000 billion random bytes to the ISP, or ;yourself;, then they have to log those contents.
So...
Send 1 byte per TCP packet, 1 per 48 bytes.
Send it to .... out your adsl to the NSA gateway.
So even if your ISP sees you sent 100MEG, its 4800MEG wasted space on NSA.
And if its 100% pure random, ie /dev/random and xor it with some other random data, just mix 10 algos together.
Now X that by 100 m screen savers, and watch their datacenter go empty, or they have to filter out pure random crap.
We must look the evil monster in the eye, and say, Fuck you mother fucker, you might have the dollars and cia behind you, but we have 100x more humans that can go crazy wild on you.
There IS NO ENEMY, other than the govt itself.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Evaporative cooling in a dry environment like the desert is actually a cheaper and more efficient method of cooling a data center. Outside temp doesn't matter so much.