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What Can You Find Out From Metadata?
cervesaebraciator writes "In the wake of recent revelations from Edward Snowden, apologists for the state security apparatus are predictably hitting the airwaves. Some are even 'glad' the NSA has been doing this. A major point they emphasize is that the content of calls have remained private and it is only the metadata that they're interested in. But given how much one can tell from interpersonal connections, does the surveillance only represent a 'modest encroachments on privacy?' It is easy enough to imagine how metadata on phone calls made to and from a medical specialist could be more revealing than we'd like. But social network analysis can reveal far more. Duke sociologist Kieran Healy, in a light-hearted but telling article, shows how one father of the American Revolution could have been identified using the simplest tools of social network analysis and only a limited dataset."
Unequal application of government power and laws is directly akin to removal or destruction of a person or organization's citizenship and rights. It is directly equivalent to the acts of a Slaver.
Slavery, or the forced removal/infringement of a person's civil rights for the pleasure or profit of another is considered to be an act of Hostis Humani Generis, or in other words, an Enemy Of All Mankind.
Everyone involved in this atrocity should be hanged after trial.
I'll know it is modest if the general public can get a dump of the meta data for every elected office holder as well as their staff members, and all judges. If they have nothing to hide then this shouldn't be a problem. If not then the NSA can fuck off.
Time to offend someone
I voted for Obama twice.
Anyone who serves as apologist for the NSA, the Whitehouse, and Congress on this proves himself an enemy of the Constitution and the American people. There is no justification for this. There is no gentle dismantling of the Constitution. It stands above this or any government in Washington, D.C. Anyone in Washington D.C. who assaults it like this means the destruction of our Republic and the subjugation of its people.
Obama must be impeached. The Congressmen and Senators who support his actions must be impeached. The courts who OK this must be removed. Washington D.C. must be burned to the ground and rebuilt if there are none there who will honor their oaths to defend and uphold the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
Why is it suddenly a big deal now?
NSA has massive database of Americans' phone calls
Updated 5/11/2006 10:38 AM ET
By Leslie Cauley, USA TODAY
"The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of the arrangement told USA TODAY.
The NSA program reaches into homes and businesses across the nation by amassing information about the calls of ordinary Americans â" most of whom aren't suspected of any crime. This program does not involve the NSA listening to or recording conversations. But the spy agency is using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity, sources said in separate interviews."
http://yahoo.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-05-10-nsa_x.htm
Its as if someone from the government physically followed you wherever you went and wrote down the places where you made a cell phone call and how long you talked on the phone. The also record when and where you send a text message. Almost everyone would find this unbelievably creepy.
Of course, no human actually does this for regular citizens, and no human looks at it — unless you are being investigated, which the government don't need probable cause to do (according to their interpretation of Section 215 of the PATRIOT act.) Then it really is as if someone had followed you and recorded all of this information.
...why keep the system so hush-hush?
Where is the outrage over this? It's amazing, Clinton gets a blow job from an intern and he gets impeached by the House! But yet this happens and... nothing. Oh, sure, the media is -talking- about it, people are -talking- about it, but where are the protests? Where is the action? Revolutions have been fought over less than this!
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
I voted for Obama twice.
Well, I found your problem.
Now, I can understand why some people would vote for him the first time, after all, his rhetoric wasn't bad! Ending the wars and closing Guantanamo Bay were good ideas, however, it should be clear by the end of his first term that he was nothing more than Bush part II.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
I'm guessing that's simply a function of limited technology, i.e., "today" that's just too much data to store. But in keeping with technologies amazing storage capacity growth, it's only a matter of time before the content is also recorded and archived. It's just too tempting not to.
We could do all that, but we'd be right back where we started. The fundamental problem is the American people, who have time and time again said that they simply don't care. The government listening to our calls? We don't care. Reading our emails? We don't care. Hiding disturbing truths about our perpetual wars? We couldn't care less.
Blame government officials all you want, but remember this: as a democracy we get the government we deserve.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
The government has long wanted better, meaning highly reliable means of conducting traffic analysis... who knows who, who talks to whom, etc. You can use this data for good or bad.. you can use it to break past the limits in typical "cells"... you can find the path/person who links from one cell to another..
My own take is there is a enough personal data and information in meta data that use of it deprives us of our rights to be secure in our home and in our papers.. our communications with others, Etc.
Back in the days of the Clipper chip, the chip had done into wide spread use it's use would have given the NSA, Etc nearly perfect traffic analysis since each chip would have it's own unique and cryptographically signed ID. Fast forward, everyone walking around with a cell phone has an unique ID, several in fact including their phone #, and that's the value of all the meta data.. it's often more important than what is being said, it is who is talking to whom...
Knowing everyone who talked to OBL in say 1995 or 1990 or 1985 would be helpful to find his network in 2001 or 2002, Etc. It can be helpful when tracking bad guys, but it can be used to track anyone for any reason and find their entire network of friends and family.
http://www.hawknest.com/
Why is it suddenly a big deal now?
Straw. Camel's back.
. . . to justify full voice recordings, if an NSA employee feels like it.
Or if a contractor with Booze Acid Ex-Stasi is bored, and wants some live realtime reality show.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
But Obama wasn't president then, so big brother was okay.
Oh yes, that makes me feel MUCH better. It concerns me that in the event I ever dialed a wrong number that I could end up on a terrorist watch list somewhere.
Because it is more than just phone calls now, its e-mails, Facebook, and all sorts of web traffic. Very little of my communication is done by cell phone voice, other than at work and the occasional call to a tech-challenged friend most of my communication is through e-mails, skype, IM, and various sites. There's a huge difference between simply logging phone numbers and intercepting communications online.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
You need content only to create initial suspicion. Metadata is quite enough to find out whom else to wiretap.
I do expect however that with the next NSA datacenter or at the latest the one after that they will try to go for full or nearly full voice data retention and analysis in the form for keword filters. I think this is approaching feasibility now. Then they can create initial suspicion from phone conversation contents. What they will also eventually want is full web browsing history, propably reduced to URIs, user-names and passwords. That one is a bit more tricky though, as it requires server-side cooperation for everything SSL, SSL interceptors are never truely invisible. Full email body retention and analysis are also certainly on that list and should be implemented shortly.
Just as a side-note let me remind everybody that all this has no preventative value against terrorism at all and servers only to identify politically undesirables early on and to create blackmail material for political use and similar applications. It may also serve to identify possible targets whenever the FBI needs to create a few more "terrorists", because there are not enough genuine ones.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Why is it suddenly a big deal now?
NSA has massive database of Americans' phone calls
Updated 5/11/2006 10:38 AM ET
By Leslie Cauley, USA TODAY
I'm just glad it's out at all. This is the same guy who, during his 1st presidential campaign, spoke of opposition to warrantless wiretaps, yet three days into his presidency decides it's ok after all. Obama Sides With Bush in Spy Case
Action in violation of the oath of office, and inaction to stop ongoing violations of the oath of office, is impeachable.
If all you have is metadata that shows, say, Representative Smith had numerous after-hours calls with, Mr. Jones, and Jones also had numerous conversations with a Mr. Black and a Mr. Brown, then you can't tell much.
However, if from other sources -- Facebook, for example, indicating that Black is openly gay, and ISP records that indicate Brown frequently downloads gay erotica from Youporn.com -- then you can make inferences that Jones might also be -- although perhaps not openly -- gay, and by extension so might be Representative Smith. Now if Smith is also known for lobbying against gay marriage, then odds are his contacts with Jones aren't about discussing gay rights, and there might be something about Smith that he'd rather not have generally known.
If congresscritters really understood this, I imagine they'd be up in arms about this data gathering too.
"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!"
-Benjamin Franklin
"... God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive.
"Laws that forbid the carrying of arms... disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes... Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man."
"No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms."
-Thomas Jefferson
"The jaws of power are always open to devour, and her arm is always stretched out, if possible, to destroy the freedom of thinking, speaking, and writing."
John Adams
"The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government."
-Patrick Henry
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is argument of tyrants. It is the creed of slaves."
-William Pitt
"If ever time should come, when vain and aspiring men shall possess the highest seats in Government, our country will stand in need of its experienced patriots to prevent its ruin."
Samuel Adams
"The liberties of a people never were, nor ever will be, secure, when the transactions of their rulers may be concealed from them."
Patrick Henry
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
I am a long-time bleeding-heart liberal type, and while I am aghast at what we’ve given up in the name of The War on Terrorism I can see the usefulness, and perhaps even the imperative, for the US to collect and analyze data of this sort. If, and a very important if, the use of the data is carefully monitored by third parties and there are clear guidelines for collection, protection, and use of the data. Back in the Good Old Days of the 20th Century enemies were spatially located (for the most part). Spy satellites and spy boots-on-the-ground could be and were used to keep track of what people who wanted to do us harm were up to (in theory, anyway). These could also be used on US citizens, and there were pretty clear rules about not doing so (rules that were, admittedly, overlooked or circumvented at times). These days, the people who need to be watched are all over the world and are best tracked via lines of communication, most importantly cell phone and internet technologies. That’s what this is all about, keeping track of what’s going on so there are few surprises like the 9/11 fiasco.
Now, can this be misused? You betcha it can. Faster than you can say Nixon (or your favorite Bad Guy’s name). However, to NOT collect and analyze these data is a bad idea as well. As always, there’s no perfect solution. I think those data need to be collected and analyzed to keep an eye on what’s happening, but we also need more transparency on the checks-and-balances put in place to make sure the data are used only for very clear purposes. Can this be done in today’s highly politicized, the-other-side-is-stupid, political environment? I don’t know, but I do think we need to try.
I'd just like to say that, as a Canadian, I expect to be afforded certain rights, not just by my government, but by all governments I happen to interact with. Any country that fails to preserve my rights, including my right to privacy, is barbaric scum I will do all I can to avoid in the future. The US Government has apparently had full access to all my US based cloud internet services, as well as (I'm extrapolating) all phone calls I've made that route through there.
Much of the debate in the US has been over exactly how much data of Americans the NSA has been snooping on. For us foreigners, the answer is simple: all of it.
I'm not sure what I thought was going on before; I had some vague idea that Google etc. only gave data through court orders. It's clear now that any FISA request that didn't deal with Americans (eg anything dealing with Canadians, for example) was let through. The only fog is over how quick that process was; could they just type in my name and get my gmail inbox? Or did some office full of $15/hr drones at GoogleHappyPlex have to skim the request first?
I'm a bit pissed off, and I'm intent on divesting myself of the cloud. Thankfully I have some old email accounts located in Canada. IMAP is good enough.
Does the post office or other government branch keep records of from to on regular old snail mail? Would that be acceptable if they did? Isn't that just meta data?
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
They can find out that you are a terrorist suspect: A dials a number, gets it wrong and calls you. You tell him that you are not the person he wanted to call. NSA records the call meta data without knowing what was said. Later A becomes a terrorist suspect and since NSA recorded that call, you become a terrorist suspect too.
Even better: A knows that his phone call meta data will be recorded and is indeed a prospective terrorist. He calls random people to create meta data. When the NSA learns that A is a terrorist everyone becomes a terrorist suspect by induction.
Summary:You are a terrorist and you can do nothing about it.
Just sayin'...as AC...(hey wait, is Slashdot in on this too????)
Yeah man, this so typical of these conservatard hypocrites like Glenn Greenwa ..oh.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
I think you have to be aware of the fact all this "metadata" talk is quite possibly just to focus the vast majority of the conversation around metadata. Why anyone would actually believe that at this point is beyond me. First everyone was like "we've never heard of this", then you have officials saying "okay yes, but you don't need to worry about it because...".
timestamp, owner_id, dst_id, location (by cell phone tower)
what does that amount to, over time?
A complete track record of your movements and associations, and the graph to others
No big deal, right?
...that pen traces required a warrant.
All this brouhaha about the government spying on metadata has been known by some of us for quite a while. This was known as "Total Information Awareness" a decade ago and Echelon before that (which didn't quite make the news because Echelon was *really* about looking at international traffic). People got all up in arms at the mere prospect of it and it went away in thle news, but it never really went away. Instead it got more funding. Companies like Facebook et alia claiming they don't participate are, quite frankly, lying.
And to hear the defense of it that "we're not looking at the content" as if metadata isn't as important as content, consider that Facebook's and all other social media's /money/ is made on metadata - who your friends are, what you like, etc. Without metadata, facebook, skype, etc, wouldn't be profitable.
I got disgusted with this shit in 2002, but talking about it back then just made people's eyes glaze over, at best (or thought you were a loonie conspiracist more likely) so I didn't talk much about it at all. And this is all I'm gonna say on this subject, because y'all are probably already tired of hearing of it on the news.
Just be aware that what you post here, and in other places, isn't private. It never was. Email is a postcard unless you encrypt (I wrote about this before).
Anyway, that's that.
--
BMO
(I wrote this elsewhere, but I think it sums up my thoughts well enough to re-use here)
China is probably tapping your emails as well.
Privacy is terrorism.
It may indeed seem a good thing to archive all this sort of meta-data in order to facilitate some sort of specific data-mining operation. Proper controls may indeed be in place so that appropriate warrants must be obtained to look through the data for any particular individual or group.
But all of this depends heavily on trust. Do you TRUST your government (and all future versions of such) to constrain themselves to appropriate usage of the data and indeed for the integrity of the data overall? If you cannot see yourself trusting your worst imaginable politically opposite cretin with such power, this really ought not to be something you'd support.
What in the world would prevent a government from altering the data as they see fit to crucify whoever they'd like? You'd need not have an ironclad case for conviction to destroy folk. Just sufficient "evidence" to link them with child-pornography, drug-lords, or whatever may be deemed reprehensible and let the media finish the tar-and-feather job.
Maybe the various service providers maintain their own copies of the data. Maybe not. But the "old" way of depending on CALEA to turn on a tap after a warrant seems far less susceptible to blatant abuse than a system where all the taps are supposedly taken ahead of time.
I expect that we'll see a trend of more and more services being hosted in freer jurisdictions than the US, especially for those who are privacy conscience.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
National Security: Information so vital, ensuring that Americans NOT know it is the issue at hand.
"What Can You Find Out From Metadata?"
A lot.
But social media will make it much easier to generate intel cause the users organize the information for them analysts. Why? Social media is centralized, where as current communications are distributed (peer to peer), which is why the agency collects so much data.
Did any of these people stop to consider that CPNI data is routinely sold by Verizon and all other carriers unless they specifically opt out?
How many Americans who are complaining about this have opted out of the CPNI sharing clause of their contracts?
You are already giving permission, by not opting out, to your wireless and landline carriers to sell your metadata to ANYONE for ANY REASON, including the government, who may buy it on the open market just like anyone else. This data is seldom anonymized, and when it is, you can still search for specific characteristics to find the information of a specific person. And, any entity willing to pay for the information may have it, and it can be bought through a third-party data aggregator who will de-anonymize it and bundle it with plenty of other interesting facts about YOU.
How many people have actually read their terms of service? Have they gone through the arcane process of opting out of the voluntary sharing of CPNI data? (Every year, for each carrier?) Will they now complain that no one warned them? Did they expect their politicians to keep them informed? If the politicians had tried, would they have listened? They didn't care when this became the norm 10 years ago, and now suddenly it's intrusive?
This is what happens when you don't pay attention.
"that the content of calls have remained private"
As Chevy Chase used to say: "As far as you know."
Doubt that the machines can be told to record conversations "of interest"? A week of MP3s doesn't take up much space.
"You must try to forget all you have learned. You must begin to dream." -- Sherwood Anderson
They've said over and over no one is "listening" to your calls, but they have never said they aren't being recorded or transcribed with a computer.
Soon you will not only be able to get a warrant to tap phones, but also to listen to every call they've made since this program has been started.
Also, given that its a secret program, I don't think they need a warrant. They didn't need a warrant to kill that 16 year-old kid, and they won't need a warrant to get all your info and ruin you. You only need warrants for judicial punishment, not extrajudicial punishment.
"How much you can get wrong from metadata?" is a better question. A mistyped phone call could put you in deep water.
Thats the same problem of using tools that identifies with "99% of accuracy" on everyone. You have 1% of mismatching the right person, and an unknown percent (usually, pretty high) of matching the wrong person.
You, or someone that you care about will get a collateral damage, and it will be pretty ugly. They just don't admit when they are wrong.
The U.S. government is extremely corrupt. The government helped Wall Street steal $2 trillion. No one was prosecuted. There are many, many other examples, like endless war, which is very profitable for many, and very destructive for the average citizen.
Here it is, right on this site, from six years ago.
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/07/10/14/1844209/verizon-wireless-opt-out-plan-for-customer-records
This goes for land line carriers as well.
I also love how Feinstein, when asked about this massive data collection, side stepped the question and claimed that this was all with congressional oversight. Very clever misdirection of the concern.
We never thought this was a rouge operation. The whole fucking problem is that it *IS* government policy.
Peace is easy to achieve, just surrender. Liberty is much harder get/keep.
The soap box didn't work
The ballot box has precious few attempts left...
I still haven't heard anything about the metadata bad enough to get me too scared, granted the most informative report on this I've seen was a 3 minute long interview with a government official. It sounds like another option for law enforcement that's intrusive enough to require court approval or whatever oversight there is. So long as there's decent judicial oversight, I'm not worried. If the judges can't be trusted, then we have bigger problems...
Which we do! For one, Congress hasn't passed a budget since 2009! From that fact alone, how can anyone be suddenly surprised that our government is being bad?
Sure it tells you a lot by itself, but might there be a deeper reason? And why do you need it in realtime rather than delayed?
Let's think about that.
I'm guessing it's due to some realities of data storage and the legalities of interception.
Apparently you can store full data from a bitstream that might have something of interest, but you can't look at it or analyze it without a warrant if it includes a US citizen, etc, etc.
The full data of everything would be like swallowing a whale, it's just too much to manage even for an agency with a huge budget.
But maybe you could store it for a very short time, provided after that you erased the vast majority of it and transferred the interesting stuff to long term storage. You then reuse your short term store for the next whale gulp. No warrant needed yet.
If you knew what data might be interesting you could do this. But, you have a chicken and egg problem. In order to extract the call information about what number/place/duration etc. you have to look at that data blob in short term store.
Now you have a problem. It might have things in it that require a warrant. In fact, most of it is between US citizens and so you need a warrant (maybe lots of warrant) just to figure out what part of it you want to keep.
But, what if you could get the call origination info, duration, etc under a lesser standard than is required for a full wiretap?
You'd know which of that data stream you should store and then could safely look at before you triggered the need for a warrant.
You'd only have to store the whole datastream for the time it takes you to process the metadata and do database lookups to see if a part of it's something you're interested in.
You'd save only the tiny part of the whale size data that you really cared about, and erase the rest all without needing a full warrant for content.
And, in fact, if you identify someone new involved in the call who might complicate the legality, the metadata identifies them or at least links them to someone of interest, so you can automatically request a warrant. (I'm guessing it's just that automated.)
So the metadata might be what makes this whole broad monitoring enterprise possible. Without that you have to get warrants beforehand for everything and everybody, and you have to store impossibly large amounts of data.
Now, with the interesting stuff that is covered by existing or newly requested warrants sifted out of the incoming stream, you can analyze, crack encryption, etc to your hearts content.
And, if you already had the metadata and just a suspicion that the data might be interesting at some point, you don't need to get a warrant as you're just storing it. You only cross that threshold when you start to analyze it. and that can be a year, two years, a decade down the road. Encryption from ten years ago is now easy meat comparatively on modern machines.
So, you've solved both the legal niceties and the problem of having to store mostly useless junk. Just by having a continuous stream of realtime metadata.
You don't even have to store all the metadata. Any that concerns something that isn't flagged can be pitched as you chucked that data anyway.
That would explain why the metadata was characterized as crucial. And it would explain why they might want to know that I called Aunt Mary last night. Not so they can tap it, but so they can yawn at it and pitch it into the bit bucket while keeping the call from the Sinaloa cartel to Al Shabab.
But in response to your post, there is some logic behind the "Love it or Leave it" argument. For example, there are many in America who want to make America like Europe, and work hard to transform it to that. It makes sense to ask these people, "Why don't you just move to Europe?" Here is why the logic works: If they were to move to Europe, they could line under a government that is exactly what they want. They'll be happy there. As a bonus, those of us who like things in America the way they are get to stay and live in under a government that is exactly what we want.
This assumes that "America" in 2013 is the product of some intentional design that people agreed to on assuming their citizenship, rather than the product of a few centuries of societal evolution. At this stage, nobody is entitled to America they way it is or the way that they want it to be. Everyone has the same right and responsibility to use America's institutions to shape the country as they see fit.
The fact that they sat right on the Internet backbones meant that this was merely a question of funding, not of intent or capability. The next step is DPI of every packet that flows through an NSA closet. And every law-and-order-type person is still going to argue that "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear".
Very little of my communication is done by cell phone voice, other than at work and the occasional call to a tech-challenged friend most of my communication is through e-mails, skype, IM, and various sites.
In essence, the "it didn't affect me then, so I didn't care" defense.
There's a huge difference between simply logging phone numbers and intercepting communications online.
Since all telephony migrated to IP-technology on the back-end around the mid 00s, there really never was.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Could any of you democrats PLEASE PLEASE I'M BEGGING YOU to TAKE Lindsey Graham and stick the Democrat tag on him. For the love of everything that is right and good in this world. We conservatives HATE THIS DOUCHEBAG.
We will take Ben Nelson in exchange, and vote for gay marriage in exchange.
Just a ++ for Using Metadata to Find Paul Revere
Please make time to read it. You wont regret it, which either side of thr argument your on.
Here's some more hypothetical scenarios of how a database of just telephone metadata could be abused...
1. A married woman is running for office and making strong headway against an entrenched incumbent. The incumbent doesn't want to lose his seat, and he has a lot of allies in Washington, so he calls in some favors and gets a friend of a friend to slip him a copy of his challenger's telephone metadata. He starts Googling all the numbers she's called over the last few years and finds that a couple years back while she was on the road, she made a bunch of calls to the advertised number for divorce attorney. He guesses that her marriage was in trouble back then, and that maybe her husband doesn't know she was thinking of leaving him. He has someone leak the information to the woman's husband, and suddenly her marriage is in trouble again, threatening her campaign's momentum.
2. A reporter who's in the closet gets a few leads on a possible government scandal. He starts to ask some questions and gets the attention of some people who would rather he not nose around. These individuals sweet talk a few contacts at the NSA and get a copy of the reporter's telephone metadata. They see that he's been making a lot of late night calls to a specific number. They then get the metadata on that number and see that this number regularly makes calls to gay 1-900 sex lines. They put two and two together and figure that the reporter's late night calls are to his gay boyfriend. They then have someone give the reporter a subtle hint that if he doesn't back off on the story, he'll be outed.
3. A man who's a father is falsely accused of a crime. The unscrupulous prosecutor doesn't have a lot of evidence, but a conviction would be good for his career, so he starts looking for any leverage he can find to pressure the defendant into a plea deal. He gets a hold of some friends in D.C. and get access to the defendants telephone metadata. He sees that the defendant has a family plan for his cell phone, and that one of the other phone numbers on the plan is used heavily in a nearby college town. The prosecutor knows the defendant's daughter is attending college there, so he deduces that this number must be hers. When he then looks at her metadata, he sees numerous calls to substance abuse hotlines and suicide help lines. The prosecutor then goes back to the father and pressure's him to make a plea, otherwise he'll send investigators to dig into and upset his daughter's already fragile life.
You should try being an American married to an Iranian, who goes home to visit her dad/mom, and speak with her on the phone long distance twice a week. I hang up the phone wondering if I'm going to get 'visited' by someone, every time.
And for those who say where were you in 2006 when they started doing this with phone calls, I was there, saying 'No!', but unfortunately it wasn't enough.
Its kind of humiliating actually, thinking that whatever I was saying to my wife, like I miss/love you, etc., was probably being listened to by TWO countries government employees.
"The future can only affect the present if there is room to write its influence off as a mistake." - Yakir Aharonov
Metadata is only the beginning. This is the very excuse they will use to install backdoors in every electronic device you own,
including your computer. Sure, we don't want the contents of the files on your computer, but we do want the timestamp,
checksum, file size, last date modified, etc...
Just harmless metadata indeed.
They are more interested in the connections between people than what they are saying to each other over open communications channels. Whether it is "right" or "wrong" to map and disrupt/dismantle these groups depends on what groups they are looking for (and what groups you belong to). Hoover did it in the 40's, McCarthy did it in the 50's, Nixon's "plumbers" did it in the 70's. No matter where and when you may live, the strategic imperative to "know thy enemy" has always been with us and always will be because "the whole constitution, legal framework, and morality" are imperfect representations of human nature.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Echelon. Carnivore. Prism.
These are the government names by which your privacy disappears.
Google. Facebook. AOL. Twitter. Microsoft.
These are the corporations by which your privacy disappears.
The constitution must be protected from foreign OR domestic threats. This man is a hero IMO For outing a domestic threat. I hope everyone who knew about this goes to jail and removed from office as well.
Jack of all trades,master of none
Don't have a cell, only use open networks, randomize my mac, use a random user agent and isolated browser for each site I visit, don't have any online accounts, etc. In fact, I set up fake accounts with false info that I manufacture and add to every day. I made up a face by morphing pictures of a few different people together (different angles even), and paste that image into random pictures I grab from social media sites. Oh, I'm social, but only in meatspace. Did I miss anything?
I went to MIT 82-86. Dr. Peter Elias let us (teenabers) look at his credit card bills. So we could figure him out. We could. What a forward thinker. The more things change... the more corrupt they get :-)
The White House (this and previous administrations) has claimed in court that their own metadata of who visited the WH is far too sensitive to release or even share with Congress http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2012/09/wh-releases-more-visitor-logs-forced-by-jw-lawsuit/a.
If White House vistor logs must be hidden for "national security" http://www.examiner.com/article/obama-stonewalls-release-of-white-house-visitor-logs then of course my metadata can be equally as worthy of protection.
I believe a lot can be gained from metadata analysis, however, I believe the linked article is a poor illustration of that, based on what I believe is a non-blinded dataset. We already know who the conspirators are, so reconstructing a dataset starting with that foreknowledge is already tainted. I would argue the article should have been written so that all names and groups were changed and then see what the study results yield. Otherwise this doesn't really add much legitimate fuel to the NSA fire IMHO.
...or if some terrorist dials you by accident. ...or, hell, in light of this news, perhaps they'll start calling people at random, using the U.S. government to provide the terror, rather than have to bother with building bombs.
Just, JUST, right after the scandal that China stole billions of IP from USA, this "scandal" takes place.
This person, ironically, is in HongKong, which is a China territory.
Is it just me, but it seems that China now controls media, and, even worse, can switch the public sentiment from anti-China to anti-USA Government. This is, from my point of view, a prove of the vast arsenal that China is deploying to keep stealing (IP from USA and Japan, raw materials from many countries in Africa, peace from Siria, and Libya, etc.).
What would Joe McCarthy have done with the type of data that the NSA is gathering? Most of his attacks were based on conjecture, circumstance, and association. Think of how his witch hunts would have been facilitated.
My old database systems instructor from college purported that had the East Germans been able to use relational data to store the informant data they would still be in power. Whole warehouses were found that had data about acquaintances, friends and family informing on each other.
I propose that all of us send in a freedom of information request for the contents of the PRISM database.
I read part of the Verizon license agreement and it appears (IANAL) the users give Verizon the OK to release non-identifying information to third parties. If I'm right about the license, isn't metadata technically non-identifying?
I also am not so naive as too think that companies are using deep mining algorithms (just like good'ol Uncle Sam) to turn the non-identifying data into my name and address so that Citi Bank can send me credit card applications (every freaking week)
Republicans (aka right wing / fascist) = supposedly prefers economic freedom; Democrats (aka left wing / socialist) = supposedly prefers personal freedom. Based on those descriptions, which extreme do you think would support wiretapping?
The root problem is that US Democrats are still considered fascist by the rest of the world, so it's really hard to tell the difference in Republicans and Democrats. As a result, most US voters assume anything they don't like came from the other party.
Here you've made the mistake of thinking that the party thats hypothetically more socialist than your party would want a member that's more fascist than you prefer. If you want to reduce the fascism, you should stop voting for fascists. It's that simple.
I've moved my stuff off Google,Hotmail and Yahoo. I never used Facebook or the others on the list. You should too. It's the simplest easiest way of removing PRISM rights from the NSA.
To take yourself off the phone graph, use multiple prepay phones (not just cards), use one for home/private use one for work/business use one for girlfriend etc. Don't mix them up and don't use them repeatedly in the same location. Leave each phone is a single location is the easiest method of breaking the location test.
The Internet surveillance is far more problematic. Watch what you say online, what for words that can be used against you. Be aware of people who try to take language to the extreme, they're no different than agent-provocateurs planting drugs on protestors. By adding extreme comments to this forum, they gave the NSA the right to dig into every Slashdot users mail as a potential terrorist. Be aware of that game and avoid joining in.
Not to be out done by the Hubbub about the NSA dirty secrets Janet Planet Napolitano dial up a Security Theater threat yet again against Southwest Airlines flight 2675.
When will the Airline learn that the 'Bomb Threats' come from Janet Napolitano's DHS desk phone !
Dah !
As the nation's largest employer of overweight 40 year old virgins, the NSA, through its tireless work, has brought meaning to the lives of thousands who would otherwise have been condemned to continue a depressing existence in their moms' basements, eating cheezies and fapping to low quality Internet porn.
muhammad jihad obama new york airplane bomb ricin yo momma
If you know about the wiretapping and it bothers you, why are using POTS? As long as you have computers and internet access on both sides, secure voice communications aren't that hard to setup (look for ZRTP support). The NSA would still likely know that you are talking to your wife and for how long, but they wouldn't get anything else.
Are we going to believe Clapper, who lied to congress and said "no" when asked if the system stored info about US citizens? Only the most naive apologist or the most blatantly disingenuous defenders of the PRISM and Boundless Violation systems claim that content isn't stored. Searchable content was the whole point of Poindexters's Total Information Awareness program, which is where all this began.
The spinmeisters are doing everything they can to misdirect toward Snowden's charges and the value of the NSA programs, but what needs to happen is that focus needs to be maintained on the question: Do the NSA programs violate the Fourth Amendment?
What economic opportunity and freedom are you talking about exactly? Please give relevant examples that are true today and not 50 years ago.
The US export economy is currently mostly about exporting genetically modified soy and weapons. While the main export product in terms of money spent obviously is war, the USA is doing this at a loss, so it doesn't count. Software and IT services are an export product, but the money made from that is rapidly decreasing and in fact, due to taxes, is not in fact made or stored in the USA and does not benefit it's economy.
The internal economy is mostly centred around flipping burgers in fast food restaurants, producing marijuana (most profitable crop in the USA), waitressing and lawsuits over copyrights. While tax brackets for high income are slightly favourable compared to a lot of other "first world countries" the chance of actually making that much money is much lower in the USA than in most other "first world" countries.
The USA is currently importing most of it's (high) tech, clothing and most other mass manufactured products apart from about half of it's food. They are spending more money on things going abroad than they are making selling stuff abroad. In terms of US dollar value that may not look bad, but if you look at the amount of foreign currency spent and made, the USA is getting poor rapidly. This may mean that at higher poverty rates some plans that wouldn't work in a rich country suddenly are feasible and may count as an "economic opportunity", but apart from a few exceptions, nobody in the USA will have a fighting chance to benefit from this.
The USA is actually rather low on most rankings of things like press freedom, human rights organizations and such. Also, the USA has one of the highest percentages of their population in a stereotypical location for the anti-definition of free, in jail. Your definition of free may very well be rather unique compared to that of the rest of the world, or you haven't yet looked at how your definition of free would hold up in other countries.
Typical freedom arguments like "the right to bear arms" apply to a lot more countries than most Americans are aware of and are in general not required if you have a government and law enforcement that you can actually trust.
There is one USA freedom that I would actually really would like to see happening in Europe: The right to be forgotten. With all my metadata being stored by the USA government, I really doubt that the USA is taking that right seriously themselves, so I guess the value of that right isn't what it used to be....
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
a big point about the illegal nsa, cia and fbi techniques is that you don't get the government you deserve.
in fact - that is the entire point of it.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
If what you can learn from the meta-data is useable for fighting terrorism, which is rare, it will be far more easily used for nefarious purposes which are common. If it is "not easy" to use against citizens it will be too hard to make it very useful against terrorism. Either my rights are infringed because of the data - or the program serves no purpose.
You took the words right off of my keyboard with the most inconvenient truth of this entire comment section.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
I'm sure they can request any certificate they want from US certificate authorities and make SSL intercepts completely invisible.
Crime gang.
Boss goes out to a regular haunt. Boss's GF's cell stays at home. 2iC's cell moves to near boss's house, makes a short call to boss's GF's cell, moves to the house, stays there about 30 mins, then leaves.
This is a regular pattern, twice a week.
Conclusion, 2iC is having an affair with boss's GF.
Captcha: polices
The meta-data of phone calls, which includes phone numbers, duration, and date can be used to tell a whole lot about a person.
Oh, Mr So and So, we see you call a psychologist once a week for 20 minutes. According to our gun registry database we see you own a firearm. You need to disclose your psychological records so that we can make sure you mentally competent to own a firearm. Failure to comply will see your firearms confiscated.
That would look even more suspicious.
For a moment a misread your post to say that knowing who Obama talked to back before his first election would be useful in finding his network today. Come on, Obama, if you've done nothing wrong and metadata is not an invasion of privacy, let's all see it. But I bet you'd rather us all not know who you owe your position today to. At the very least it would raise questions.. foreign powers, spooks, lobbyists, bankers.. who has this man been talking to and why? Come on, it's only metadata right?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUyB0Tsj6jE
But wait, there's more. The Supreme Court expressly stated that there is no expectation of privacy in pen registers, what,15 years ago? These issues were settled and these freedoms were taken away a very long time ago, and you're pissed because you just found out? Oh friggin' well. Try reading Wired.
Verizon's corporate partners can't abduct me in the middle of the night and imprison me indefinitely for years without trial in a third-world detainment camp, purely on suspicion of being an "enemy combatant".
The US Government can, and has, done this. That's a SIZABLE difference.
Slashdot, you should be ashamed of yourselves! Phone records are not metadata--these are DATA. Thank you, Dianne Feinstein, for now abusing one of tech's most important words, and using it as an attempt to whitewash what happened.
Metadata would be information about how those phone records are stored, such as a database schema, OO relational diagram, etc.
This is vital to the conversation--phone logs are DATA, and that DATA is subject to abuse. This is clearly an overreach.