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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
This is classical 1984 stuff here. Newspeak excellence.
War is peace,
freedom is slavery,
Violation of privacy is protection of privacy.
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.
Wyden often distinguishes himself as a human being first and a politician second.
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...
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/
Get your agencies straight: the CIA spies on people outside the USA, the FBI spies on people inside the USA, the NSA spies on people anywhere on the planet, the NRO spies on everyone throughout the galaxy.
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.
Not yet all of them, but soon: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/
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?
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.
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.
That was the old way.
Now DHS spies on everyone and all agencies share the same intelligence channel.
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.
I personally would never click on a link that leads to a video or picture of a cat.
I would never click on a link that leads to a picture of a mans gaping anus, but we all make mistakes sometimes.
Then why not simply say "That's a question that cannot be reasonably answered due to [reasons A, B, C, D etc]." like my ISP would, instead of saying "We cannot tell you because we value your privacy."? Besides, it's a moot point; the fact remains they're collecting data on us, but they won't (or can't) tell us what it is. The end result is the same in either case; an agency is collecting data on us with no accountability.
As for TFA's quote: the contradiction seems super-obvious to us, but for a high level official to make that statement without seeing the same contradiction we do is pretty scary. What it means is this particular NSA leader has never even considered where his agency would fit in a privacy/no privacy Venn diagram. It has never occurred to him that their data collection could be a violation of privacy in the first place; they're orders of magnitude above such simple concerns.
To the NSA, data is like fruit on a vine they already own. They can pick this fruit whenever they choose, but that fruit is theirs whether they pick it or not.
I agree with you to a point; the NSA probably does not believe this is malicious, but if the NSA thinks the way they appear to, this is still wrong and completely out of touch with the privacy concerns we really have.
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."
I notice that there's no mention of Wyden's party affiliation in the article. Must be that liberal media trying to hide the good deeds of the Republicans again.
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
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
"...the NSA is the *only* intelligence agency that, as a group, gives a damn about our rights."
So, you're saying that to save the village they had to destroy it?
http://www.rootstrikers.org/