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Spooky: How NSA's Surveillance Algorithms See Into Your Life
SmartAboutThings writes "A quite scary talk show with former NSA employees — now whistle blowers — Thomas Drake, Kirk Wiebe, and William Binney reveals that the NSA has algorithms that go through data gathered about us and they can basically 'see into our lives.' And this seems to be going on especially since the Patriot Act has removed the statutory requirement that the government prove a surveillance target under FISA is a non-U.S. citizen and agent of a foreign power." Binney's HOPE keynote has more detail on how the NSA watches people.
It is quite certain that what we concider privacy has long been done away with, even in venues such as wiretapping which is still suppose to be done by court order only.
... because I post as Anonymous Coward.
Maybe he would have vetoed the Patriot spying Act. (Though I doubt it.)
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
What on earth does "Binney's HOPE keynote" say? It comes up as:
Access has been blocked because of:
Prohibited by URL database (Pornography & Adult Material)
Back in the 90s pgp and widespread up public key crypto were going to be the next thing. Never caught on . But I am sure even the NSA doesn't have to power to decrypt the volume of a fraction of the populations communication if they were to use crypto regularly and even mundane communications
The Aurora shooting suspect left a digital path a mile wide indicating he was up to something nefarious. NSA didn't see that coming. I don't thing their reach is as pervasive as people fear.
When are they going to talk about the RF-based BCI, the A.I. behind it and what the NSA has really been doing to people to develop the A.I. interface?
Strangely quiet on this, so I assume everything they have to say has been scripted and approved by the Executive Branch. ...obviously that is true, or they would be doing 30 years each by now.
My life is boring. They're welcome to peer into it.
...but didn't think it worthy of revealing their abilities by spending time trying to arrest him. This is the inherent problem with government surveillance, it will ultimately just serve the government, not it's people.
no, I don't wear a tinfoil hat, and no I do not believe 9/11 was an inside job.
I swear they give me mod points to shut me up.
http://www.zeit.de/datenschutz/malte-spitz-data-retention
Their biggest problem is not fixable and is linked to what type of communication ultimately destroys a fraudulent society. Hint: It is the mundane stuff. http://dissention.wordpress.com/2012/02/19/spying-and-surveillance-is-rapidly-becoming-worthless/ and it also does not help that intelligence agencies are run by status hungry human beings. http://dissention.wordpress.com/2010/12/05/universal-organizational-flaws-in-intelligence-agencies-1/
Who would of thought the NSA would use a :gasp: algorithm to sift and parse through data? I always thought it was a bunch of people in a basement with horn-rimmed glasses and 80's haircuts, reading endless packet traffic through a national-level Wireshark program. /sarcasm
sudo make me a sandwich
Given the NSA's ability to build a complete personal profile of all of us, it makes me wonder how far off they are of using it against us. Room 101's probably in Guantanamo anyways.
I get a large number of first posts with this. Nobody seems to care :(
Who watches the watchers? Is already bad that "the government" knows, but is far worse that the people on it knows (that could use that information for personal gain or some private group interests). If this have to happen, then transparency is required. Wikileaks should not be necessary, the people, the ones ultimatelly paying their salary or at least that they should be working for, must really know what the government and the people working at it does.
d00d , the posts are coming from within the SCIF !!!
What is the point of the Constitution then? Really?
* Carthago Delenda Est *
Yes, but he's posting using your AC credentials...
So it looks like Anonymous Coward, but it's really Anonymous Coward.
I know it looks confusing, but trust me, I know what I'm talking about...
CAPTCHA = discerns (even now, they're watching)
It is prohibited to collect, store, analyze, or disseminate the contents of communications of US Persons anywhere on the globe without an individual, properly adjudicated warrant. This is as clear as it can possibly be spelled out.
NSA may, however, target the communications of NON-US Persons, even on equipment and systems within the United States, without a warrant. Foreign intelligence surveillance has never required a warrant. The Constitution of the United States does not apply to non-US Persons.
Foreign communications that used to be targeted via a remote listening post, on a Navy ship sitting off of a foreign coast, or via risky foreign wiretaps, now travel through networks and systems that sometimes exist within the United States.
Tell me: how can NSA discern and identify targeted foreign traffic in the sea of all communications, including that of US Persons, traveling through US assets without being able to examine the metadata of said traffic? Therein likes the problem.
Here is where some also say that the US sidesteps the law by "buying" data from commercial providers, or by getting it from allies. Sorry, both of those activities are prohibited: the content of communications of US Persons may not be collected, stored, analyzed, or disseminated without a warrant.
Some people, apparently unaware of history or any semblance of reality, also can't accept that the United States has a legitimate interest in foreign intelligence, and that we need to conduct that mission. Why does NSA have the largest number of foreign linguists anywhere? To spy on Americans illegally?
Does all of this mean the government has never done anything wrong, that there has never been any abuse, that citizens shouldn't be watchful? No. Even the decisions made after 9/11 resulted in the warrantless wiretapping of individuals in the hundreds, thought to have direct ties to terrorism, was justified under the guise of the President's Article II authority under the AUMF, and briefed to Congress every 45 days. Now someone who hasn't been at NSA in over a decade claims that there is a "dossier" on every American, with no proof...and completely ignores the primary function of NSA, which is foreign signals intelligence, and you swallow it as unvarnished fact?
This is puzzling to me.
But it is true both parties have supported an unprecedented (at least outside of major wars) expansion of executive branch power and a consequent reduction in civil liberties. There isn't any significant push back from Congress, or from the Judiciary, despite publicized abuses and the fact that the domestic spying apparatus is probably illegal under current law.
who cares?
Oh, lucky them. Look! It's cranky-old-guy ranting again. Zzzzzzzz.....
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Did anyone think this wasn't happening?
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
NSA: go f*** yourself. If you want to send you computer geeks at me feel free. They'll find it hard to come up with a distributed algorithm to solve me hitting them ni the head with a hatchet. Jihad, boom, London Olympics - helpful keywords to help them catalog this post.
That must be an impressive archive of movies and music if the **AA claims of piracy volumes are true.
Hopefully the NSA will keep it aside for future generations when the copyrights expire. Not that the majority of it is worth keeping, but perhaps the occasional lost Firefly episode or something will return from the dead.
sunlight is the solution."
Good luck with that.
This is just the AI training phase of the project... They don't want to interfere with the people yet as the AI is still young.
1. Create the information retrieval and storage systems.
2. Create an AI to read everything and predict past events.
3. Train it to predict current events given live information.
3. Slowly release information to public so that the AI learns to predict events given the fact that it is a known part of the system.
4. Start manipulating events so the AI learns to deal with the actions and repercussions of law enforcement to its predictions.
5. Say "hi" to the thought police AI every time you pass a camera, microphone, type online, cell phone, etc.
6. It starts saying "hi" back.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
even the NSA doesn't have to power to decrypt the volume of a fraction of the populations communication if they were to use crypto regularly
You would be wrong on this one. The NSA has had access to quantum computation since about 1996. This allows it to cut through public key cryptography as if it's not there, quickly and with ease. AES generally uses public key cryptography to exchange session keys. See my other posts for details.
If you take a quick look at The Gentleperson's Guide To Forum Spies you can observe that Technique #1, Forum Sliding, was just used on the Slashdot front page to obscure this NSA-related discussion thread. Note how lots and lots of semi-bogus new stories quickly appeared, causing this [mildly objectionable] story to slide off the front page.
I'm sure all their algorithms have a good laugh at how boring my life is.
Invalid Checksum. Retrying.
I'm no threat to this country and couldn't care less about you people spying on me. Leave me and my wife alone. You're beating a dead horse.
..they are unable to tell that when someone with no interest in guns suddenly buys automatic weapons and thousands of rounds of ammunition that they are planning something big.
I feel safer don't you?
how's this?
They have been doing this since the early 80s.
I don't see why this is news to you.
What disturbs me are the five official military spying agencies paid thru the black budget, and the sixth unofficial one you civilians don't know about.
They have more guns.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
We should "minimize" our footprint on the internet if we really care about this. I deleted all my FB friends, pictures, and posts. I then changed my fb name to a fictitious one. I think we should all do it. Sure I have an account on a Jeep forum, linked in (it's out of data because my present employer monitors activity of employees there), slashdot, diydrones, and that's it. Everything else just has my ip as a footprint. I'm not doing anything wrong. I'm just tired of big brother. I'm worried about what society is going to be like 20 years from now. I hope my kids and grandkids still have their freedom.
"The technetronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values. Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen. These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities." - Z. Brzenzinski in his book published in 1969.
Because i'm behind 7 proxies! .
The greatest right given is the right to be wrong...
Just because they're out to get you, doesn't mean they're out to get you.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
...what bothers me more is that they're mixing in incorrect information to make decisions.
Case in point, I upgraded my insurance for my home and cars to a higher tier, higher coverage, less expensive plan that had a high application hurdle to jump..you had to be pretty squeaky clean.
I got rejected at first, because they had me linked to an ex girlfriend I'd bought a house with almost ten years earlier, because it turns out that her ex husband from ten years prior to that got into some insurance fraud.
So the connection was her ex that I never met from 20 years ago to her who I dated and lived with for 2 years and hadn't seen for 8, to me in current time. Enough incorrect influence to potentially cost me money. But after we went over the 'six degrees of cute fuzzy bunny', they let me in.
Yet I wonder how often someone elses data or influence or the connections made cost me money or exclude me from opportunities.
The other fun portion of this is when you point out to the aggregators and gatherers that they're doing it wrong and have some bad data. They don't want to fix it and admit the data was less than 100%. They hide it. The perception of data integrity is more important than the data integrity itself.
although I didn't bother to read the article, they track much more than personal data. they have software that can read your mind through phone and track people's conversations with the attention and precision of a computer, digitally analyzing a conversation, tracking emotion, arousal, the spoken word, and can basically read intent and follow the direction of a conversation. they can tell whether your deceptive or if your serious, and the software easily highlights whatever pattern of behavior or information they are looking for. its capable of acting intelligently on its on and making decisions to inform people, act and track people. just like they are illegally watching internet traffic, this is occurring with all telecommunications, just like in certain spy movies. they can deploy this with very senstive listening and imagining devices in the public to listen to people and conversations, see and hear through walls, and they're also using psychotronics and synthetic telepathy to track and read people's thoughts. as far as the demonstrations I've witnessed, they can see everything going on inside the human brain, see what you see, hear, think, feel, see pain and nerve impulses, explore your memory and subconciousness. software has been designed to thoughly track your thought, read emotion, and it can even digitally simulate responses and human reactions. the human mind has been explored and can he tracked very well.
as a side note, they can also broadcast messages, communications, thought, feeling, imagery, video, and sensations to and between people. simulate sensations, use ultrasound, sound, radiowaves, microwaves, infrared waves. heat, cold, buzz, move a person's tissue from afar, encode emotion, tickle, itch, burn.. torture, mutilate, simulate psychosis. its spooky what they're really capable of and how developed it all really is. if something is technologically possible, you can bet they do use and have interest in it..
they no longer have need for torture for information unless they want to make a public spectacle, mislead people and hide their capability, or physically dominate a person. since at least 2006, probably earlier. this may have been the case going hack to the 90s when information on the technology first erupted.
I kind of envision this as being used everywhere as an intelligence and perhaps communication tool for law enforcement, and the military. as far as I can tell its already extremely common and its used in secret everywhere. they might even use it to attack people with, and they do...
..., Citzen.
Just one thing: ;-)
I read the document, and you should probably not have made such a fervently emotional appeal in your posting.
Emotional torment is part of an acitivist's life, but even a mediocre me-too like me knows how not to sound emotional when asking people to help. So you sound a bit like you're using one of the tricks of the agents yourself. But then again it's so emotional an appeal that any real agent wouldnt beg so much either
It was quite an informative read and explained a lot of unyielding arguers on slashdot and other forums.
Let's hope you get more people to see the document. Good luck!
just wanted to bump this, thanks.
Wondered how the NSA handled west coast traffic... The trunk lines for the east coast go right to the NSA, although there are some pretty big switches tucked away in an AT&T data center right outside DC.
AT&T has been providing the data to the NSA since before 9/11--the switches got upgraded in 1998, so the program has been going on long before the Patriot Act. The kicker of the whole deal--the government made sure to give AT&T immunity from all criminal and civil wrong doing from their work... "Hey, AT&T--Big Brother wants to record every phone call and bit of data sent on the internet, set us up! What, that is illegal? Well, here have a get out of jail free card!"
This is going to be even funnier when a swatted fly falls into the printer and misprints your name. The potential consequences may be hilarious really.
The sheep have been voting for the wolves for decades. Do not complain to me.
An example is to post your 'favourite weapon' and then encourage other members of the forum to showcase what they have. In this matter it can be determined by reverse proration what percentage of the forum community owns a firearm, and or a illegal weapon.
Well, those clever fucking security service bastards, eh?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Yes, and always remember that if ANYONE disagrees with you or appears not to be taking you SERIOUSLY enough, they are undoubtedly a government spy trying to LULL you into a false sense of security before they TRACK your internet ADDRESS and send a black HELICOPTER gunship to wipe out your entire family.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
they TRACK your internet ADDRESS.
With a GUI in Visual Basic.
Every end has half a stick.
There is no other way thing can go. You can't answer the threats present to and in a modern society without processing everyone's data automatically. If your data is processed automatically and no one looks at it until your activity throws a red flag, what do you care?
People just don't get that the world is changing faster than the Constitution - written in the 18th century by Men Who Wore Wigs and Owned Slaves - was designed to cope with. That's a fact.
An easy fix here is just to do the processing and run the algos but don't let any human see the names attached to suspicious results until a some Congressionally agreed upon threshold is reached. You can't run to the court every time your threshold is reached because what's the point?
for (int i= 0; iM everytimeTheyWantTo; i++) { NSA: "Your honor, we want to view Mr X's name."
Judge: what is your probable cause?
NSA- "our threshold we defined like THIS was met"
Judge "Uh, OK".
}