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Whistleblower: NSA Has All of Your Email
mspohr writes with this excerpt from Democracy Now!: "National Security Agency whistleblower William Binney reveals he believes domestic surveillance has become more expansive under President Obama than President George W. Bush. He estimates the NSA has assembled 20 trillion 'transactions' — phone calls, emails and other forms of data — from Americans. This likely includes copies of almost all of the emails sent and received from most people living in the United States. Binney talks about Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act and challenges NSA Director Keith Alexander's assertion that the NSA is not intercepting information about U.S. citizens." The parts about National Security Letters in particular are chilling, even though the issue is not new.
if someone is - that would be shocking.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
... they got all the spam as well.
This is a problem whose solution has been known and available for over two decades, yet deployment is stagnant.
Palm trees and 8
Then they should have all those missing White House emails. ...oh, wait...
Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.
has 18 acres of mainframe computers underground. You're talking to your wife on the phone and you use the word "bomb", "president", "Allah", any of a hundred keywords, the computer recognizes it, automatically records it, red-flags it for analysis. That was 20 years ago.
Save the taxpayers' money.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Protest like they did in Canada. Send the Ministers and your government representatives including the White House everything. For days they CCed them on every email, posted what they are doing to their members twitter accounts. After several days of having the Parliamentary mail and web servers taken to their knees the bill they were trying to introduce was 'sent to committee' (killed). People can make a difference
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
Which is why you should be a huge fan of Ron Paul. Most people here are too smart (or dumb) for their own good. They'll bitch and complain for hours how the government is too big, gets into our lives, spies on us etc.. Then they'll turn around and complain that people need health insurance, schooling, and everything else under the moon and it's up to the government to do that. Yes, in a perfect world everyone would be taken care of and live happy, but that just isn't the case and never will be.
Consider the criticism on government for having failed to head off 9/11. Next consider the fact that the younger government employees will want to operate it in a 21st century way. Then, I think the logical extrapolation is to expect NSA to introduce the requirement that they can track communications retroactively.
Suppose some person X becomes suspicious. Then there will be an instant demand to examine all X's communications in recent years, together with those of X's contacts, and their contacts, N levels deep. NSA can't know in advance who X is, so they only way to meet that requirement is to intercept and archive everyone's communications all the time.
Consider the alternative. If they don't archive that stuff, and they could have, and if another 9/11 occurs, then the criticism will be wilting. They will be blamed for not doing everything possible to prevent it, They must do it as a matter of political self defense.
I posted something similar once before. Another slashdotter thought I was writing science fiction. I don't think so. I calculate that it could be done for 300 million Americans with only a dozen or so exabytes. Heck, pull out your Visa card and order an exabyte server from Oracle today. It is hardly beyond the capability of NSA.
I also believe that we privacy advocates also have to get our heads into the 21st century. It is time to shift focus from restricting government gathering of information to restricting government use of information already in their possession.
So if those of us who live outside the U.S. use an American service - any American service - like Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, Windows Messenger or perhaps mobile kit like an iPhone, are our messages thrown into the NSA Ueber-Surveillance-Database as well? If this is the case, the U.S. is breaking dozens and dozens of national/regional laws. Let me get this straight... You advertise a "free", supposedly "reliable" and also supposedly "private" service like say Gmail, and when I use it to communicate with my friends, acquaintances or business clients, all of my confidential messages get intercepted and funnelled into some huge NSA datacenter in Utah, or wherever it is that these spooks keep their pile of intercept-data. How can this be legal under any definition of any law? If my emails include confidential business documents - like confidential business strategy documents lets say - then "intercepting" and "evaluating" these messages is nothing short of "illicit industrial espionage". That's a serious crime that carries a prison-sentence in many countries. ------- More brave people need to come forward with what they know about clandestine "surveillance centers" being built by various governments, because if they don't, there will be no public outcry, and all these "regional efforts" will eventually be combined into one huge, powerful, global "surveillance grid" that nobody can escape from anymore.----- There is also International Law to consider. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, quoted in my signature, makes it very clear that it is illegal to arbitrarily invade someone's privacy. So these large-scale efforts to gather as many emails or phone conversations as possible, are actually a super-violation not just of regional or country laws, but of human rights treaties most countries signed years ago, and with that, a serious and eggregious violation of internation law. ----- Somebody needs to put a stop to all this nonsense. Not only do these snooping systems not contribute to a safer world in any serious capactiy, but they also threaten to create a future where everyone is watching by someone or some system in everything they do. What precisely are we supposed to tell future generations about this, for example? Are we supposed to tell them "We are sorry, but you will have to grow up and live in a world where everything you do is being watched and evaluated. We could have protested against this stuff when it first appeared on the world scene, but we were daft enough not to do that. Again, sorry for having to live in a f_cked future! Have a nice life..."
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
At what point will psychiatrists have to stop classifying people as paranoid simply because they believe the government is tracking them?
Some of us even recognize the difference between government resources used for spying and government resources used to provide health insurance, schools, etc.
I am not a criminal, but yes I do this on a daily basis. And I strongly suspect most people do. Not everything that's sensitive, is criminal in nature.
It's commonplace to communicate about business dealings by e-mail; also the sensitive ones. E-mail is just too convenient to stop using the moment something may be sensitive; actually that's a reason to not stop using it, as e-mail at least leaves a written record, allowing you to look back in discussions to see what was agreed upon (or not).
Let's be clear that this guy doesn't have access to any secret information. He's analyzing publicly available information and coming up with his own conclusions about the probable extent of the surveillance. He may well be right, but the summary makes it sound like he's the new Bradley Manning. Quoting:
The president has the power to veto any law congress has passed to limit his ability to deal with prisoners in Guantanamo. And he doesn't need congress' approval to move the 150+ detainees from Guantanamo to another facility - say Bagram, something he has already done to circumvent habeas - or give them due process or just *let them go*. The excuse, apparently, is that congress wont authorise special funds to deal with the prison and prisoners in the exact manner the president would like. But that is a far ways from keeping him from closing the camp. He could do so today.
46 & 2
No. This would be true if the Republican or Democrat party was acceptable, but both are highly unacceptable. When your two evils are vomit and diarrhea, choosing the lesser of two evils only hurts you. It doesn't help a damn thing.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
If you believe abortion is murder, you may pick Republicans as the lesser of two evils because in the event of a Court Appointee, you save a lot of lives. If you believe a woman's right to control her body is sacrosanct, you may pick Democrats as the lesser of two evils because otherwise you prevent a lot of intolerance.
Either way, you're voting for a government that kills people without trials, in terms of drone targeting. But that doesn't mean there's no difference.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!