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NSA Claims It Would Violate Americans' Privacy To Say How Many of Us It Spied On
colinneagle writes "Would you believe the Inspector General from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said it would violate the privacy of Americans for the IG office to tell us how many people in the United States had their privacy violated via the NSA warrantless wiretap powers which were granted under the FISA Amendment Act of 2008? The Act is up for a five-year extension, but Senator Ron Wyden said he'd block FAA renewal until Congress received an answer from the NSA about how many 'people in the United States have their communications reviewed by the government' under FAA powers."
Violate their privacy, leak their documents.
it's around 310 million
All of them.
This is classical 1984 stuff here. Newspeak excellence.
War is peace,
freedom is slavery,
Violation of privacy is protection of privacy.
This has got to be a mistake, I thought it sounded like a Senator was looking out for the American people?
Ron Wyden is my senator, and although we agree on very little, today he is my hero.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Non the less pretty crass.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Private citizens aren't going to bankroll his campaign. Seems shady, what's he trying to do?
more likely the number, perhaps too numerous to count if one includes automated total voice stream processing and email word checks, violates our sanity and patience. Carl Sagan - biillllions and bilions. Or is it trillions, NSA?
It will violate the CIA's privacy when we know that they spy on everyone.
All communication, of all the people, all the time - in real time.
We obviously missed giving you your designated bribe...er, payoff...er, "contribution". We'll fix that right away. Or we'll disappear your family. Sincerely, Your friends at the NSA
BUT, the most funny thing is that they are actually right. LOL, USA, a country of absurd and funny truths. And the reason they are right is that once they say how many Americans are spied upon, the uproar will be so big that everybody would try to know who is actually spied, which will cause disclosing their names, and thus violating their right to stay anonymous......LOL, better ignorant and fracked, than (you guess what).
Seriously? If I say 200 or 2000 people had been investigated under warrantless wiretap powers, how exactly does that violate anybody's privacy?
Fine, if they can't give us an exact count, how about an order of magnitude? Or would that also violate privacy and/or security?
Come on. It's got to be between 1 person and 310 million or so. At least narrow it down a little.
Here at the NSA, we will NOT violate your privacy by telling you how many Americans privacy we have already violated.
Thank you, have a good day.
Here at the Catholic Church, we will NOT violate privacy by telling you which Priests violate children.
Thank you and god loves you, mainly little boys.
Be seeing you...
Could the writer of posts like this NOT overload common acronyms? FAA, damn!
... or, they don't know, because they filter out comms they know are with Americans. The do, however, know that this is nota 100% solution, and will have to actually do something to spy on Americans to figure out which comms are Americans. Yes, it makes sense, if you take off the tin foil and realize that the NSA is the *only* intelligence agency that, as a group, gives a damn about our rights.
I'm guessing that the answer is "everyone except the following....." and that list would immediately put those few dozen people under a spotlight, destroying their privacy.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
That's because if the answer isn't zero then Americans' privacy has been violated.
Anyone know?
Okay, I remember reading (probably on Wired) that the NSA has an unusual definition of "intercept" when it came to domestic telephone calls... An "intercept" for them was going back and analyzing their recordings, not the actual "making" of the recording.
If, for instance, I merely record raw packet data on the network and do not interpret it... then I've "captured the firehose", but I don't know what I've got until I analyze it.
If I have the budget to "capture the firehose" for the entire US telephone network, but I only need to analyze 10-20K "intercepts" per year, then I probably wouldn't have the equipment or staff to evaluate the details of all the data I have.
If that's the situation, then I'd probably respond similarly to Wyden's request. In order to answer his questions I'd have to analyze ALL the data I have, which I don't have the resources or budget to do... and even if I did, it'd expose the details of all comunications on the network... which would be an invasion of privacy.
Just rename the spying as OPERATION INFINITE FREEDOM EAGLE PATRIOT SUNLIGHT. Who would object to such a noble venture?
Here's an idea: the NSA coughs up _exactly_ what Congress wants, or Congress shuts them down. Zero. Gone. All employees immediately lose their clearance and get to look for other work.
If I refused to tell my boss something, he'd fire me.
If they want to hide the number of people they have wiretapped/surveilled, that number, in all likelihood, is very large. Could be a few hundred thousand. Could be a few million. Could be a few tens of millions. It could also be "everybody living within the borders of the United States, every day", if they have the digital infrastructure to handle that kind of workload in realtime. ---------- Besides, precisely what would the number tell you? The number of people surveilled by human operators? Or the number of people who have had their phone conversations/emails/web browsing flagged, because they used a "suspicious keyword" or two while communicating with someone else? --------- In any case, the fact that they refuse to reveal the "number" of people who have been surveilled suggests that this number is large, or perhaps even very large. --------- As for privacy, how do a few simple statistics violate the privacy of anyone? Or are they afraid that the numbers in play are so LARGE, that virtually everyone in America will feel they have "lost their privacy". Maybe that is the correct translation of what they are trying to say: "If we reveal the number of people surveilled, the number is so large that EVERYONE who reads about it will start to feel surveilled. --------------
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
Can you imagine Google having the balls to tell the FBI "Sorry, can't hand over anymore info. That would violate our customers' privacy."?
No, I can't either.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
my guess is they record everything, run it through speech recognition to convert to text, scan that for certain key words, then queue the recordings around those words for someone to listen to.
Spied-On List.
Yours In Peace,
K. Trout, PatRIOT
An "intercept" for them was going back and analyzing their recordings, not the actual "making" of the recording.
Combine that with a retroactive warrants and filtering software and it's basically a license to spy on everyone. I can make the recordings on everyone, filter them for keywords, and then read them--and, if I find something, I can get a retroactive warrant saying it was okay for me to listen to it.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
And, also, please realize that organizations like the NSA aren't free to discuss their techniques in a public forum... so they can't publicly tell Sen. Wyden why they don't have the capability to answer his questions.
You make me wish I had an account so I could mod you up. The privacy data the NSA has is a Schrödinger's cat. In order to know who's privacy they've "violated" they would actually have to analyze the data, thus actually violating it.
While this is a nice dodge there is one question they can still answer:
How many people have they "intercepted." No going back to analyze all captured data, just let us know how many people were "actively" voilated instead of just "passively" recorded.
It's easier to just assume they see everything that everyone does.
sudo make me a sandwich
(A (Campaign contributions) * B (number of years of service) ) + ( C (cost of jobs given to friends/relatives ) - D (their actual productivity) ) + E (speaking fees paid to the senator after the senator's retirement) = TCO Now subtract TCO from the gains from favorable legislation and you'll see that your average senator can be a real bargain. Collect them all!
bah.
i hope that there speech recognition engines is better than the one on Google voice that transcribes phone calls and messages. other wise you may be under the looking glass for its screw ups and it makes a lot of them
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
If you read the letter from the IG, all he says is that he can't answer the question in an *unclassified* letter. He then goes on to point the senators to classified reports that contain most of what they're looking for; basically that sometimes they collect information and learn afterwards that the person wasn't where they thought (inside the US, so the data shouldn't have been collected). Of course if you choose not to believe anything he says then there's no reason to RTFA anyway.
Without looking him up, I'm going to go out on a limb and guess which party Senator Wyden belongs to.
Both parties seem to support the violation of the basic civil rights of American citizens, but the few individuals who occasionally stand up against this surveillance regime seem to have something in common. Just as the politicians who want to make it harder for the poor, elderly, students and minorities to cast a vote have something in common.
I won't be more specific in the name of civility. I do always try to be civil.
You are welcome on my lawn.
That sounds frighteningly accurate.
From a different Wired article: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/nsa-whistleblower/
NSA can intercept millions of domestic communications and store them in a data center like Bluffdale and still be able to say it has not “intercepted” any domestic communications. This is because of its definition of the word. “Intercept,” in NSA’s lexicon, only takes place when the communications are “processed” “into an intelligible form intended for human inspection,” not as they pass through NSA listening posts and transferred to data warehouses.
So, the short, accurate answer to Wyden's question would be "We're spying on everyone. Literally. It would take too much work to even calculate the number of people we're spying on. Go away."
And to be able to get an even moderately accurate count (within an order of magnitude), I expect they would have to revisit much of the material that they have collected, not all of which may have led them to approach or convict a person who was actually guilty of anything. Revisiting all that material would be a violation of those people's privacy. Granted, these people's privacy was already violated, but that doesn't justify doing it over again just to answer a question about how many people they've done this to.
I would, to that end, assume that it numbers in the millions, perhaps even tens of millions.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
are you sure it's not one and the same thing?
I agree with the poster above. NSA probably spies on all electronic traffic by everyone on Earth, which includes all residents of North America. I'd like to take this occasion to remind people about ECHELON, the 'secret' signals intelligence gathering system whose existence was leaked to the public in 1996 by some very brave Aussies. This revelation included the detail that, since 'Five Eyes' (AUS CAN NZ UK US) foreign intelligence agencies were forbidden by charter from spying on their own citizens, they had worked out an arrangement to spy on each others' citizens and then swap data!
I also wish to take this opportunity to suggest to security-minded readers that NSA et al have advanced cryptanalysis tools at their disposal. While your first reaction might be "Duh!", please bear with me. In this message I actually disclose new non-public, non-official, hard-but-not-impossible-to-verify information. Specifically, I'd like to blow the whistle on the fact that they have probably had a working Quantum Computer system capable of cracking Public Key Cryptography since about 1996. Thus, even your encrypted data has been seen by NSA computers although, of course, that decrypted data set must be partitioned separately and used with extreme care, so as not to reveal its existence.
Science-oriented readers might wonder just what sort of QC could have been built a full 18 years ago, when current technology is just nearing the point of developing a useful QC. The answer is that they generated a 'teleportation/entanglement-based winner-take-all style recurrent topological quantum neural network', then trained it to emulate a Quantum Turing Machine that could run Shor's Algorithm. It exists in the physical form of a complex system composed of 'anyons' interacting with each other within a 'two dimensional electron gas'. Anyons can be generated by moving precision arrays of powerful electromagnets very near the surface of the 2DEG, like creating whirlpools in the bathtub with your hand. I strongly suspect the scientists involved discovered a rule, analogous to Rule 110, that operates directly on the physical system of anyons within a 2DEG. For the detailed scientific underpinnings I suggest you study the collected works of Stuart Kauffman, Steven Wolfram, David Deutsch, and Robert Laughlin. You have no reason to trust what I'm saying, and disinformation is entirely too common, but I want readers to understand that it is possible for a sufficiently determined and intelligent person to verify that what I just said is probably true, although certainly NOT just by Googling for it :-)
Readers should note that the new technology I describe is not limited to running Shor's algorithm and,in fact, is a powerful new general technology with various other uses. None of which matter much until this whole thing is declassified, so that civilian scientists will be able to study and publish on the topic. The NSA et al is keeping it secret to prevent everyone from knowing that PKI is no longer secure. IMHO this is insufficient reason to keep secret important new scientific knowledge.
Finally, lest someone complain that I might be harming National Security by making the above disclosure, I'd like to point out that China and Russia already have working QCs of their own that function on similar principles. This is an open secret within the Intelligence Community. Thus, I am disclosing new information to Slashdot readers and to the general public whom they might tell about it, but I am NOT telling international sp
Subject: ###-##-####
"Lack any significant social life. Commited to social news forums, online gaming, and ameteur and artsy pornography. Lack of significant other obvious from billing statements."
Threat Level: nonexistent
Summary Analysis: Spike his water line with anti-depressants necessary for him to get a LIFE!
About 310 million Americans after 9/11, did, well, nothing but mind their own business. Who ever the pin head in charge was, burned a hole lot of tax payer dollars on something the FBI has a charter and protocol to do the same thing with.
So,what could possible go wrong at the NSA? And whose personal wet dream was this?
"Unnamed sources at the NSA have said 30% of people in the United States have had at least some private information collected and stored by the NSA. This information includes web browsing history, e-mails, phone call recordings, and banking information." What are they going to do prove you wrong?
Okay, I remember reading (probably on Wired) that the NSA has an unusual definition of "intercept" when it came to domestic telephone calls... An "intercept" for them was going back and analyzing their recordings, not the actual "making" of the recording.
And you don't have any concerns with them building a new, huge multi-billion dollar data center in Utah?
You might be technically accurate but the most approximately correct answer would be "everyone".
It's pretty obvious. Every citizen communicating on a wire or wirelessly to a wire is being "spied" on. Data is being collected and mined by computers. Your research into how to grow pot, your fights with your girlfriend, your plotting to kill your boss, your child porn ring, even spamming a message forum with words like bomb airport jihad do not mean shit and no one cares. No humans are listening to your shit or reading your shit. The odds are extremely unlikely anything YOU have done, wrote, emailed, said, etc have ever flagged . What the NSA is doing is not much different than what Google and Facebook are doing. They just have access to all of the data instead of just the data people have given to them.
What do I have to hide?
I would tell the Inspector General what he is full of, but that would be insulting.
I routed all communications through a closet at AT&T and only stored the source and destination IPs of all internet traffic, then tracked the source IP back to the domestic ISP's accounts, so that I can see every IP you spoke to, then did DNS lookups on them and used that to establish a dossier on each person's interests?
Because that would be highly valuable information and would not require deep packet inspection. Depending on the sites you visit, it could indicate your lifestyle and interests, such as newegg.com, petsmart.com, bankofamerica.com, okcupid.com redtube.com, etc. They could learn a significant amount of information about you.
About the only thing that would mess that up is if you use torrents, but that can be screened out as you would likely not routinely hit the same IPs, whereas websites are rather static, and updated via DNS.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
I wonder if there are other uses for this technique:
"You were spotted leaving the scene of the crime! What have you stolen and hidden away, thief!?"
"I am unable to tell you or anybody else that information, officer, because it would violate the victims' privacy. I mean, what if I stole 14 dildos? Sick! But see? Then you'll know it's sick, and someone might be embarrassed about all those dildos I may or may not have taken from an alleged panty drawer. Of course, it's natural to assume I stole somewhere between 0 things and all the things ever, inclusive, but since you can't pin it to an exact number or even what kinds of things, let's just call it good. You can trust that the potential loss of items I may or may not have stolen won't be a problem for the possible previous owners."
"What the fuck are you talking about?"
"Privacy, of course. Shhhhhh..... whelp, anyways, we've clearly established there's nothing to see here, so I'll be moving along. I gotta go steal another indeterminate number and type of things now. Gonna be working tonight? Great! I may or may not have stolen the coffee I'll bring in for ya."
This is the most beautifully Orwellian response they could possibly have given.
"And, also, please realize that organizations like the NSA aren't free to discuss their techniques in a public forum... so they can't publicly tell Sen. Wyden why they don't have the capability to answer his questions."
So you're saying the NSA has no accountability? If that's the case it should be defunded and disbanded.
Sounds like the old "we had to burn the village in order to save it" defense.
I think the NSA thinks it's a security violation to even know what the letters 'NSA' stand for!
There's a reason NSA insiders joke that it means 'Never Say Anything'.
It won't tell anyone whether it spied on me. They really do care. I'm touched.
So who here has read the FISA act? How about we just go with what FISA even means. Anyone?
The foreign intelligence surveillance act specifics law for reporting on foreign actors which, last I checked, does not include US Persons. As opposed to the Fucking Idiots and Shitfurbrains act which also protects the rights of US Persons because most of them are such frigging morons it's considered a waste of taxpayer money to wiretap them. Seriously, READ THE FING LAW BEFORE YOU TALK ABOUT IT. Otherwise your just operating on assumptions and ya, you know how that ends.
As I say here: http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing.... There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all."
Ideas for helping the NSA and CIA transcend to a new paradigm: ..."
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-dealing-with-social-hurricanes.html
"This approximately 60 page document is a ramble about ways to ensure the CIA (as well as other big organizations) remains (or becomes) accountable to human needs and the needs of healthy, prosperous, joyful, secure, educated communities. The primarily suggestion is to encourage a paradigm shift away from scarcity thinking & competition thinking towards abundance thinking & cooperation thinking within the CIA and other organizations. I suggest that shift could be encouraged in part by providing publicly accessible free "intelligence" tools and other publicly accessible free information that all people (including in the CIA and elsewhere) can, if they want, use to better connect the dots about global issues and see those issues from multiple perspectives, to provide a better context for providing broad policy advice. It links that effort to bigger efforts to transform our global society into a place that works well for (almost) everyone that millions of people are engaged in. A central Haudenosaunee story-related theme is the transformation of Tadodaho through the efforts of the Peacemaker from someone who was evil and hurtful to someone who was good and helpful.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
It's time the American people clean house from top to bottom. Absolutely everyone in government and big business need to go. Prison, exile, whatever. They all just need to GTFO. Enough.
If not us, who? If not now, when?
Yes. Ask me another one.
Athy, athier, athiest.
The NSA is plikely correct in its declaration to Senator Widen. Whatever issues you have with the government, one thing tend to avoid like the plague is actually breaking the law. The penalties are severe and far-reaching and few bureaucrats would be willing to take such a significant risk. The act of counting would violate privacy. Given metadata's lack of protection, the NSA likely collects lots of metadata and its associated content (the text). It applies statistical models and then presents its findings to the FISA court which grants it a warrant to look at records that fall within the model. Only at this point (after the granting of a warrant) is the NSA actually able to determine the author/source of content. If this is, in fact true, Senator Widen should examine the possibility of approaching the FISA court or demanding the NSA approach the FISA court with such a request noting that this is in the interest of oversight.
My Dad works in the "cyber warfare" area of the NSA, and knows all about sigint on Americans. Here's his reply:
"I'm not going to raise the flag of "yellow journalism" ;-))), but you have to understand first, that just disclosing info that provides insight into that issue also provides insight to our targets as to our capabilities and tactics (in the trade, TT&P - tools, techniques and procedures, AKA sources and methods) which may make an adversary more able to avoid being targeted. I have no idea whether or not that's the real motivation on these statements, but that's a potential explanation.
On the "it would violate their privacy" argument, that can hold if you look at it from another viewpoint. The Agency is continually hammered on collecting intelligence (and loads of it from sources that are pushing more and more data around at a dizzyingly increasing rate) while being under legal responsibility and scrutiny not to violate the privacy of "US persons" - where that term (as I recall, I haven't taken my yearly refresher course on the subject recently) means a US citizen anywhere in the world or any person physically present in the US. In the Internet age, that's a tough requirement. It's the old Type 1 vs. Type 2 error issue. For an interesting case, how about data from and to foreign persons that traverses physical US space? Not easy to answer, eh?
So the requirement is that if you mistakenly collect something against these rules, you need to purge it - immediately. So you do. Fine.
Now someone asks you to produce statistics on the overall situation. Then you have to detail and aggregate statistics that you are not supposed to be keeping. Remember that this is often very subtle stuff, which is why it mistakenly got collected in the first place. So the general method is to destroy the info immediately after discovery of such a situation. So the two directives would be in direct conflict with each other.
Dad"
All of them.
Except Congressmen, of course.
And Presidents, well, the current one.
Nobody else, honest.
--
Thank god for the NSA wiretap program. We finally have a government that listens to its people