Slashdot Mirror
Officials Say NSA Probed Fewer Than 300 Numbers - Broke Plots In 20 Nations
cold fjord writes "Yet more details about the controversy engulfing the NSA. From CNET: 'Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, explained how the program worked without violating individuals' civil rights. "We take the business records by a court order, and it's just phone numbers — no names, no addresses — put it in a lock box," Rogers told CBS News' "Face The Nation." "And if they get a foreign terrorist overseas that's dialing in to the United Sates, they take that phone number... they plug it into this big pile, if you will, of just phone numbers — it's like a phonebook without any names and any addresses with it — to see if there's a connection, a foreign terrorist connection to the United States." "When a number comes out of that lock box, it's just a phone number — no names, no addresses," he said. "If they think that's relevant to their counterterrorism investigation, they give that to the FBI. Then upon the FBI has to go out and meet all the legal standards to even get whose phone number that is."' From the AP: ' ... programs run by the National Security Agency thwarted potential terrorist plots in the U.S. and more than 20 other countries — and that gathered data is destroyed every five years. Last year, fewer than 300 phone numbers were checked against the database of millions of U.S. phone records ... the intelligence officials said in arguing that the programs are far less sweeping than their detractors allege.... both NSA programs are reviewed every 90 days by the secret court authorized by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Under the program, the records, showing things like time and length of call, can only be examined for suspected connections to terrorism, they said. The ... program helped the NSA stop a 2009 al-Qaida plot to blow up New York City subways.'"
That's not the problem. Just tell people what you're doing. Make sure that it's legal and ethical. Don't be shy of what you're doing. Then we might accept it.
Then upon the FBI has to go out and meet all the legal standards to even get whose phone number that is.
Unless they figure out that they can just run a check against the phone book. The scary thing is, this guy may be as stupid as he sounds.
Plain and simple. If this were at all true then each of these 20 incidences would have been widely touted in the media. They never would have had to give the source of their intelligence or at worst they could have \ would have said that inside information that was actionable was provided to their security forces.
Why would they need the names? There are lots of programs like 411 that can do a reverse look up on phone numbers.
If only the NSA had pulled 2 more phone numbers, adding the Tsarnaev brothers to their list of terrorists.
sudo make me a sandwich
Hmmmmm, just delicious. =)
Bull-fucking-shit.
"A government is a body of people usually -- notably -- ungoverned." -Shepherd Book
Letting us read your email stopped attacks. What attacks? Um, bad ones, real bad ones. No you don't need to know the details, just take our word for it.
How is it that we see 9000 requests in 6 months of 2012 being reported by SOME providers, and then this story of fewer than 300 phone numbers? There seems to be a disconnect. I recognize the difference in the nature of the requests, but when the numbers are off by an order of magnitude and more, one has to wonder
There are 2 possibilities, either it is true, that they only 'probed only 300 phones last year' or it is not true.
Assuming it is true, this does not answer the question whether those 300 phone numbers were CONSTITUTIONALLY 'probed', I would stay bullshit on that. They didn't get any court orders, they just 'probed' them.
Assuming it is true, this doesn't mean that what they are doing this year and will do next year will amount to 300 phone numbers.
Assuming it is true, this does not change the fact that they are violating Constitutional rights of people even then.
However I will not assume that it is true, they they only 'probed' 300 phone number (and if they did, that would be only because they didn't have enough people to probe 300,000,000 numbers, but I believe they are lying regardless).
They are lying, they are lying about the facts and about meaning of the facts that they are lying about.
Everything they do is unconstitutional from the very moment they put a 'prism' into that light beam that is transferring people's private information.
Everybody involved in this and I mean the entire government that is involved in this either 'wittingly' or 'unwittingly' should be dissolved, these NSA centers need to be demolished and people should take their freedoms back.
roman_mir
Ok.
Signature intentionally left blank.
First, the "we broke 20 plots" is bullshit. They have have used these tools in 20 investigations, so what? And what about the other 280 they admit to? And anyway, how many people's data was involved in each of these investigations? Dozens? Hundreds? Thousands?
In any case, we still come back to the basic problem: The police could certainly stop a few more crimes, if they were allowed unfettered access to people's homes. See someone suspicious? Walk in and search the house, no warrant required. The point is: This price is not worth paying.
Why? For many reasons, but here are the ones that leap immediately to mind:
(1) People need to feel they have personal privacy.
(2) Government bureaucrats are humans: some good, some bad, most just muddling along. Put this kind of power in their hands, and it will be abused. Whether for political ends, to get back at the ex after a nasty divorce, or whatever. Because they work for the government, they will not be punished. See the recent IRS scandals for a perfect example of this.
It is important to limit government power, because this is the only sure way to prevent abuses. You can't abuse power you don't have. If this makes police work a little more difficult, that is a price well worth paying. Convince a judge and get a warrant before spying on someone - this just isn't that hard.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
So they have a big elaborate system that allows them to enter a suspect phone number and get... Just that phone number back out...
For some reason I doubt that's all it does.
It's been established the US government does not want to disclose domestic surveillance programs. They said so in front of cameras, "national security, blah blah".
Now I need to evaluate the claims of a government official regarding domestic surveillance programs... hmmm. Not very comforting.
He seems to want to focus on the 300 "numbers only" they checked and not the big database of "phone records" that exists. But I'm sure the "database of millions of U.S. phone records" he refers to is at least as secure as the existence of the program itself. It's not doubt more secure but that doesn't mean it's safe. And many attackers would love to just get a handful of records (congressmen, judges, candidates, ceos, opposition party leaders).
Plus I've already heard quotes from politicians and other government officials that the database needs to be more widely shared. FBI and DHS need access now. I imagine the IRS could find a few things and "improve" tax collection if it was shared with them. We better not get used to being ok with the NSA having access to "numbers only". The nature of government is to expand and make "better" use of data, not to ignore a valuable resource because of privacy concerns. And also to protect those in power, so any 3rd party leader making progress better have a squeaky clean record. One place the 2 parties can agree is on attacking any opposition to their power.
in his formal speech, he's lying. Mostly... as in, they mostly just lie through their teeth.
Well then I guess that's settled. Nothing to see here. Move along citizen.
Once the word is out this database exists, other uses will be found for it, either by the NSA or by other organizations. History has proven that once data exists, people will use it any way they want to.
They can be almost as effective if they only start monitoring those phone numbers that are correlated to "terrorism" because they get dialed by a foreign terrorist. They'd miss "historical data" but I doubt the effectiveness of that will weigh up to the giant loss of privacy people suffer because their "metadata" gets stored.
Nobody has even proven the effectiveness of this sort of measures against terrorism, it costs billions and the elected government is spying on the people that elected them in the first place. If you, as a politician, don't trust the people that voted for you, your democracy as a country is in serious trouble.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
When a number comes out of that lock box, it's just a phone number — no names, no addresses," he said. "If they think that's relevant to their counterterrorism investigation, they give that to the FBI. Then upon the FBI has to go out and meet all the legal standards to even get whose phone number that is.
Because doing a reverse phone lookup isn't possible until they have a court order right?
http://www.whitepages.com/reverse_phone
What a joke.
For around 3 years I posted regularly that this was coming, I warned everyone I could about this. I explained why it was important. I was called tinfoil hat, I was humiliated, I was belittled and I was told I was a moron. I gave up. I dont care. Its too late and guess what.. it only takes the APPEARANCE of 51% of the sheep to keep this ball of hell chugging along. Screw every one of you who said "if youre not doing anything wrong.." and "there is no way they have that much control" and the myriad other excuses to get back to American Idol. Screw. You.
Nice how they left out that little fact. In many cases a simple Google search will already be enough. Where that fails, use the customer database of the phone service provider. I expect lifting the anonymity from a number will take significantly less than a minute, possibly less than a second.
This is classical lying by omission. It builds of the lack of understanding of the common person. De-anonymizing metadata is an easy and cheaply solvable and well understood problem.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
They didn't do it.
knowing there is a 'secret court' reviewing every 90 days....
An I.T. motto in the hands of an idiot is a dangerous thing...
Bet they cured cancer and helped a little old lady across the street too.
They claim to have a list of millions of phone numbers, against which they only checked 300 numbers last year.
I want to know what criteria they used to generate that list of millions of phone numbers.
More precisely, I want to know what criteria they used to build the training data sets to train the classifiers that filtered through all our communications metadata (and probably our communications content data as well) in order to generate that list.
What are they looking for? How do they say that a phone call goes into the training set or stays out? That's what I want to know; not the details of Snowden's sex life or whatever the media are pushing now.
Finding God in a Dog
But it still doesn't make it legal.
Do you have ESP?
We take the business records by a court order, and it's just phone numbers — no names, no addresses — put it in a lock box,
And who controls the key to this so called lock box? What accountable party keeps them from unauthorized use? The FISA court isn't accountable. Neither is the administration or congress since they do not publish their findings. By what method does the public find out about abuses of this system?
Last year, fewer than 300 phone numbers were checked against the database of millions of U.S. phone records .
Big deal. Nobody calls these days anyway. What about the rest of the phone meta-data? Emails? Text messages? Facebook? Twitter?
both NSA programs are reviewed every 90 days by the secret court authorized by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
So we have a secret program with secret directives reviewed by a secret court whose findings are secret. Gee, why am I not reassured? [/sarcasm]
...to gush loving, glowing praise over unchecked, jackbooted authority like a Twihard over (Edward/Jacob) once again.
You can't trust anything the NSA says at all. They have everything to gain by lying their asses off and nothing to lose. Assume they're intercepting and recording anything (which personally, I'm pretty sure they're doing) and don't assume that there are any limitations to their access to that info. If you buy any of the backpedaling that's been coming out in the last few days, much of it submitted to Slashdot by cold fjord...well I have a bridge you might be interested in.
Even if this article describes the access interface of some analyst at some agency...all the info is still there, your privacy was still violated.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
. . . it is not that these statements are false, they are just the least un-truthful statements that can be made about the program.
"On a mountain halfway between Reno and Rome, we have a machine in a plexiglas dome which listens an looks into everyone's home"
-Dr. Seuss
The point is not what the NSA has done with the information. The point is what they could do. Having "legally" (I use the term advisedly) obtained all this information on every American, they could now use it for any nefarious purpose. Having done so in secret, they hardly seem trustworthy.
I'm old enough to remember the days when we posted garbage at the end of messages for the "NSA line eater." Time to do that again.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
" the intelligence officials said in arguing that the programs are far less sweeping than their detractors allege"
Wait a second. So, they do hoover up every single phone record in the country, put it in a big database, and then run highly specific queries on it once they get a court order to do so?
Even if they have the most secure and careful setup imaginable, the fact remains that they are still collecting all that information in one gigantic pile, exactly in the sweeping invasion of privacy that has people so alarmed, and they did it without properly consulting people about whether it was okay for the government to do so. I appreciate that they've *tried* to make the access to it very narrow, but it's still a recipe for abuse, especially when it is trivial to get plenty of other information the moment you have someone's phone number even if you aren't in law enforcement.
They're basically doing something that collects all this data that is ripe for abuse, and then saying "trust us". That it is collected all in one spot is alarming.
I guess they do. Thanks for settling that. Now we can all get on with our lives. /sarc.
The ... program helped the NSA stop a 2009 al-Qaida plot to blow up New York City subways.
That is at best an extreme exaggeration of the value of the cell phone records. I'm sure his data was in the database, and was probably accessed after he was discovered, but his plot was discovered as a result of monitoring that was (or easily would have been) warranted.
Wikipedia: Operation Pathway:
On November 9 2009 The Telegraph reported that the operation produced the tip that lead American security officials to place Najibullah Zazi under investigation. British security officials were reported to have intercepted an email from a Pakistani planner to Najibullah Zazi containing instructions on how to conduct his attack.
The Telegraph: British Spies / Zazi:
The alleged plot was unmasked after an email address that was being monitored as part of the abortive Operation Pathway was suddenly reactivated.
Operation Pathway was investigating an alleged UK terrorist cell but went awry after the then Met Police counter-terrorism head Bob Quick was pictured walking into Downing Street displaying top secret documents.
Eleven Pakistani suspects were arrested immediately after the gaffe but later released without charge.
However, security staff continued to monitor the email address which eventually yielded results.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Officially they probed less than 300. In this one program. Which is all pointless if an agent can listen in on a conversation without a warrant and no alarm bells go off.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
...what is being said are the "least un-truthful" statements that can be made about the biggle ball program.
"on a mountain halfway between Reno and Rome we have a machine in a plexiglas dome which listens and looks into everyone's home"
-Dr. Seuss
Although (supposedly) only few hundred are listened to, I suspect that ALL conversations are recorded and stored (to be recalled if needed).
We should leave twitter off such a list - it's explicitly public anyway. Anyone on earth could create a database of tweets.
Well, to be fair, telling people what you're doing makes doing it pretty useless when "what you're doing" is covert surveillance.
Hardly. You and I are both well aware that our police regularly do covert surveillance of suspected criminals. The fact that they do so is public knowledge and we are fine with that. While it is sometimes necessary to temporarily hide the tactical details of a specific surveillance, it is not necessary to hide the existence of the program to do so or to hide the findings of such surveillance indefinitely. Furthermore the authorization for such surveillance is overseen by reasonably transparent judicial review, it typically limited in scope and time frame and the results of the surveillance are revealed to the public in due course.
The NSA on the other hand has a system where they have a secret program, with secret directives, overseen by a secret court, whose findings are kept secret. Though many suspected the NSA was conducting surveillance of some sort, the very existence of this program was kept secret from the public. At no point in this system does the public have any means by which to be notified of abuses of this system. The entire progress is treated as a secret and hidden effectively forever from public scrutiny. No reasonable person has a problem with the idea of our government looking for bad guys but the methods used matter greatly and not all methods are acceptable. This is EXACTLY like the end of the movie "A Few Good Men" where the government is screaming at us that we can't handle the truth and that they do not have to explain themselves to us. Cheesy as that sounds, it is a perfect analogy to what is going on here.
It's almost as if Representative Rogers doesn't realize that a phone number is, and has been for 20+ years, a better identifier than your social security number or home address even. Like he doesn't realize that having a telephone number is practically synonymous with having a name and address--not just for the NSA, who presumably has easy access to this information, but for anyone with an internet connection and basic Google skills.
I'm not sure which is scarier--if he's faking this ignorance and speaking deceptively to an uninformed public, or if he actually is so unknowledgeable about something he's the chairman of.
The government keeps ignoring the fundamental problems of the programs and keeps insisting, "but, but, but...it's working!"
The question has never been "does it work?", but "does it violate the rights guaranteed by the constitution."
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Nice claims...but zero trust...nothing to back it up with. FUD to the highest degree
It just seems wasteful to limit the data-use to counter-terrorism only. After all, far more people die from drunk driving than from terrorism. How long until the program is expanded to search for clues on would-be drunk-driving? "Hey, buddy, I had a few too many — can you pick me up? No? Oh, well, I guess, I'll make it..."
Well, may be, not right a way. But surely searching for child molesters would be a worthy application of this system, wouldn't it? And ye "good old" rapists and murderers? And tax-evaders?.. Voila, pre-emptively recording conversations (or just meta-data about them) it is as common a crime-fighting tool as fingerprints or DNA-samples, which are already taken pre-emptively too.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I do not understand how he can tout the uselessness of the number that pops out of the "lock box" and then gloss over how its relevance can be determined before the FBI seeks to learn anything more about it.
What do you mean they cut the power? How can they cut the power, man? They're animals!
So, all they have to say is: "no srsly guys, we didn't actually do that." And we say: "Oh ok. Don't worry everybody! it all checks out, they say they didn't do it!"
Common Sense (+1)
So we have a lot of people who are obsessed with privacy, even at the expense of "security".
So what happens then if you de-fang your security apparatus, when al-Qaeda and friends start successfully attacking -- and killing -- lots of Westerners. What happens then?
Who will suffer the consequences? Probably not America, which has a small and scared muslim minority, and the Atlantic Ocean tight borders keeping the Middle East/Africa out. We in Europe stand to suffer with a weak America.
"He who would trade liberty for security deserves neither" Benjamin Franklin
Illicit information gathering and wanton persecution. (Comment title field was too short, so I wrote this in full)
"(...)to see if there's a connection, (...)" (from the submitter's article above)
When the notion or idea of there being or ever possibly being a "connection" (read causal relation) between say a phone number on a list, with a phone number query to match up against that list of phone numbers, then two problems arise as I see it.
One being that the idea of a "connection" is something that can be attributed to the dichotomy guilty/innocent or suspected/irrelevant in being "connected", and then used as a rationale for even allowing someone to be investigated in the first place (an excuses in relation to an ongoing process).
The other problem is how an investigation could come about when the basis for an investigation is merely someone or something being suspicous on the merit of mere association (a motivation for initiating a so called investigation).
Thus, anyones activities being recorded, put on a list or otherwise being or becoming subject to information gathering for any USE in ANY form of criminal investigation, is basicly being treated as suspects, delinquent and a criminals enmasse before the fact.
Never voicing an intention for wanting to persecute in any case does in fact not offer a persecuter any moralily for his willfull involvement in an investigation, because knowing or having an awareness or idea beforehand of abusing one authority given by law cannot be subject to choice as an act of morality. In other words, there cannot possibly be a personal excuse or even the subscribing to an idea in which a person can/must invoke 'choice' at any point as a moral imperative. There is no 'right' or 'wrong' when wanting to ascribe personal motives as a justification itself, because that would be idiotic, thus there can be no excuse as if having a conscience about law; leaving 'good' and 'bad' as more interesting denominations that nonetheless also end up being idiocy as far as opinion making goes.
Then at last one would now end up with the notion of 'fascism' as a more pertinent idea in this generalization, for which reason has no place and in which a creed of law is in demand instead.
We couldn't find every kidnapped child in America if we gave the government unlimited power to search every home.
YOU say that, but the majority of the US, who these officials represent, serve, and are employed by, disagree with you. You can't really expect the government to stop doing these things when so many people support it.
Every damned one of these so-called polls that say the "majority" approves of this surveillance bullshit has come from a cherry-picked sample of people who are polled. I live in a city of 100K population and we had our own local poll where more than 35K people responded...that's over a third of the whole city's population. Of that, 97% disapprove and only 3% approve of this orwellian surveillance. With numbers like that, I claim that it's utterly impossible that the majority of the whole US likes this shit. I think this proves good evidence that these polls and the national media are being deliberately manipulated in a grand Joseph Goebbels fashion.
YOU say that, but the majority of the US, who these officials represent, serve, and are employed by, disagree with you. You can't really expect the government to stop doing these things when so many people support it.
Cute. Of course people respond wildly differently depending on exactly what question is being asked. "Do you support killing terrorists?" will get a much higher positive response than "Do you support violating your civil rights so that we can kill terrorists more easily?" I can find surveys with just slightly different phrasing of the questions that will have much different results. Don't get too excited by one survey with misleading results. Some people support using torture too but that doesn't make it acceptable.
The internet can be like an echo chamber...
That's a better than a Star Chamber. Plus just because a bunch of people are saying the same thing does not mean they are wrong. The NSA and by extension our elected officials have overstepped their authority and have tried to hide what they are doing. I do not trust them nor do I trust their explanations. They have clearly lied to us and in my opinion have violated the law. I don't think what they have done is legal nor should it be legal so long as everything is held as a secret.
The claim is that no conversations are recorded. If you believe that... But the assertion that they have to get court approval to actually access the database is meaningless. It's the FISA court, which has only denied a handful of requests (literally a handful) since its creation in 1978. If an agency asks permission, the FISA court grants it. And it doesn't even give slaps on the wrist when agents don't follow the FISA rules.
If what they say here is true, why the world weren't they more honest about what they were doing all along and in the first place? In Europe, government access to phone records is codified in law in such a way that protects the privacy of everybody who isn't a suspect in an investigation, and does so in broad daylight. There may be violations, but the persons whose privacy is invaded also have recourse there. They have no such recourse against the NSA that continues to argue, even as it releases details of this program, that it is "secret" and thus would compromise national security to reveal the details.
One more example of where honesty and truth-telling would be preferable to obfuscation and lies.
Who did what now?
300? Then getting proper warrants is not a big deal.
This explanation seems lame to me. Terrorist suspect X in Afghanistan calls number N, and they have to snarf down the metadata for every phone call Verizon makes to tell that N is a Verizon number? Note that the number blocks assigned to different phone companies are a matter of public record, so you could quickly look up which provider a number "belongs" to. Likewise, Verizon has an internal reverse number directory database, which the NSA could simply request access to, to find out who is assigned that number. No metadata is thus required even to get a name, much less the provider. If that's all that's going on, Congressman Rogers should hold hearings on this obvious waste of Government resources.
If we had heard that the NSA had requested access to every major phone provider's reverse number directory system, I don't think anyone would have been overly concerned. They don't need the data they collect to do this, which of course suggests that this is not what they do with it (or, at least, not the only thing they do with it).
How many exabytes of storage are you assuming they have?
The double speak is getting nauseating. This one in particular: "Last year, fewer than 300 phone numbers were checked against the database of millions of U.S. phone records gathered daily by the NSA in one of the programs". There are 4 programs, which program are they saying had on 300 checked. Which of the 4 is particularly used for tracking phone calls? How manyin total were there among all four programs? As for the FISA oversight, the Amended Act was so controversial that Obama himself said he would never vote to support it, but voted for it despite campaigning otherwise. That act sanctified the inability for citizens to sue the telcos and ISP's for infringing on our civil liberties. The oversite is a complete failure, and this smells like a lie hiding behind more wordplay. For example: Collection = reading the data not collecting.
We aren't spending 10 billion or whatever black box amount a year for a couple of NSA data collection centers the size of small cities for 300 addresses.
The comment covers one classified program the particulars of which cannot be reported on accurately as the are classified and not even implemented through open democratic means subject to checks and balances. The other national security initiative programs they are running are not even know and are not disclosed.
The fundamental fact of the thing that keeps getting glossed over:
Just because a thing is LEGAL doesn't mean it's RIGHT. All these conversations about this get to the point where they go to the FISA court and they lean, hard, on the legality of the thing without mentioning how the court was set up, how it's basically a rubber stamp for the investigative services and how all the records are sealed anyway. Not that I'd expect them to, it's a talking head with a let's-hope-nobody-notices vibe, but they may as well say "and then a miracle occurs and HEY LOOK! You're safe!"
Saying something is legal doesn't have the ameliorating effect it used to.
No, what happened was (from Buzzfed)
Another case cited by that wonderduo Feinstein and Rodgers is of Headley. who cased the Mumbai hotel. Rather that quote why the NSA program had little if anything to do with his arrest (note he was previously a prized drug enforment for the DEA), just read this.
Were I in the same situation, I'd say the same thing, true or not. It might not justify the program, but it might make people feel better about it.
If they want people to buy it, though, they'll need to proffer some proof. Not just some documentation, but something concrete that would be irrefutable. The NSA has the problem that they are coming from a position of weakness. They're in the business of being secretive, they've been caught in a position where they appear to have betrayed the nation's trust, and they'll need something extraordinary to restore that trust.
They should just lay all their cards on the table - declassify all of it. The ne'er-do-wells are already tipped off and working around it, so there's little more to lose if they'd been on the up-and-up. Clearly, if they weren't doing anything wrong, then there's nothing to hide.
It sounds like someone from the NSA had to use puppets to explain it to him and he's regurgitating that puppet show.
So the NSA is building multiple new data centers at a cost of nearly 3 billion dollars, and it's just to look at phone numbers? Right. I want my money back.
Even if they keep their data gathering techniques secret, why sneak/spy worth his/her salt would get tripped up?
There, fixed that for you. Seriously, isn't it obvious that even secret data gathering techniques are known by SOMEONE, and if there is a spy truly worth their salt, they'd know about it, or simply take precautions that are less than traceable (throw-away numbers, random dead drops, encoded classified ad messages, etc). That you go out and claim 'We have to trust the administrator' flies in the face of all the known abuses we've had within the US, within recent memory, and within organizations still in existence today (Hoover and the FBI, Nixon, McCarthy, and so on). Trust, but Verify. Secrets are great for specifics, but not for the fact they're doing it nor for the law on which they base their actions. We cannot live within the bounds of secret laws and still claim freedom.
If they have the terrorist phone number, they can track the numbers it calls, and presumably listen in. They dont need a database for that. by the way there is a great article on USA Today's front page of three former NSA officials who agree Snowden. One thinks Snowden will be 'rendered' if he is extradited.
Why would anyone up to no good use anything but a throw-away phone?
They repeat over and over that this database has no names, no addresses - just numbers, dates, times and locations - as if somehow a phone number is a standalone entity that cannot be connected to a name. Someone else made a decent analogy to license plate numbers. The number and date are all that's needed to bring up a name and address of the owner, exactly as is the case with a phone number.
I heard from a source who was not authorized to speak on the matter that according to NSA taps of the CCTV cameras in the afterlife, the late Patrick McGoohan was quite upset.
So were Benjamin Franklin and most of the rest of our founding fathers.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
If the phone spying program is so inconsequential, then what does the NSA plan to do with the $5.1B data data center they're building in Provo, UT? 300 numbers a year could be checked by one guy in one cubicle, and he'd still have lots of time to spend hanging around the water cooler.
Suppose that they put 10000 random persons in jail or directly killed, but 20 of them resulted to be killers. That would justify what they did?
They are stripping privacy everyone, not just people from US. And they probably will have false positives, or scapegoats, or just push an agenda using the information they gathered to extort/force someone to act in their interests. And as Snowden proved, even in the improbable case that they as institution had a justice as goal, the individuals working there could had used the information at their reach for their own goals (and the odds of misusing it increases as you get up in the organization)
riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight. Because NSA *never* lies.
"Officials Say"
You could have stopped writing right there.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
Keep your eyes on Hollywood, we'll be issuing our official press releases through that channel.
... that some people just make things up as they go along?
im not a libertarian, but i do get tired of these ignorant /.'ers trying to tell libertarians what they believe.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Trying to hide now that the light is on.
The fact that they've already been lying about this, that they've expressed specific interest in prosecuting the whistleblower and that they are now saying it's completely innocent totally ruins their creditability. The notion that this capability exists and yet is not used unscrupulously strains credulity. Does anybody believe that -even if the NSA itself only uses this data responsibly- its use will remain responsible given the kind of psychopathic crap coming out of washington these days?
Just as Obama assures us that "during his administration" Americans won't be indefinitely detained under the NDAA, obviously, whoever forced him to sign that law and request that section be placed into it in the first place anticipates it being used in the (near?) future. This person or group obviously is also responsible for the legally questionable practices outlined here and I don't believe for a second that the expected use has anything whatsoever to do with a so-called fantasy "war on terror". Clearly, those responsible for these policies are preparing to violently take over this country and enslave or kill many of its inhabitants. It is the only logical conclusion from their actions.
im not a libertarian, but i do get tired of these ignorant /.'ers trying to tell libertarians what they believe.
You get tired of other people having the right to free speech?
So what if ignorant /.ers are trying to tell libertarians what they believe? You don't have to listen to them. You can give them metaphorical finger back and tell them what they believe (the self-proclaimed libertarians I see online often accuse their opponents for being dictators, believing in slavery and violence, etc)
But you're right, you're not a libertarian.
Considering how concerned many people were about terrorism a decade ago, I am glad Congress went for the low hanging fruit, massive spying, since it also went for stupid nation building in Iraq and Afghanistan.
America gave up its privacy voluntarily. They post everything on Flickr, Facebook, and Google+, so I think they deserve massive NSA spying. Frankly, I'd rather the NSA have data on me than Facebook, which will monetize that data, or the IRS, whom can actually put people in jail for a long time. The IRS got, Al Capone, and many other mob bosses.
I'm reading about this, and they are saying that it costs around $20 million a year for the program, and that they only got the records because Verizon was going to delete them.
Ok, let's assume for a moment they are telling the truth.
Why couldn't they throw the $20 million a year at Verizon and say "Hey, build a data center for us, it'll be your property, and we'll pay for it. Archive all records there. When we need something, we'll come to you with a FISA warrant and get the info we need".
Then, you have NO rights being violated and I'm willing to bet that everyone wouldn't be in a big huff right now.
But since they did it this way, you can only come to two conclusions: They don't care about your rights and are grabbing power. OR, they are incompetent idiots. Either way, they don't deserve their jobs. Obama knew about this and accelerated the plan. He should resign as well as anyone involved in this program.
ug.. I keep misreading NSA as NASA. i was like, why do astronauts want metadata of my phone number??
NSA = National Security Administration.
NASA = National Air and Space Administration.
The NSA only broke the law just a little?
So.. according to this article.. this has been going on since at least 2009. Almost 4 years now. We are way, way, way down this road. Think of everyone you have emailed or phoned since 2009. Now think about all that being stored just in case it is needed to be used against you.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2013/06/16/snowden-whistleblower-nsa-officials-roundtable/2428809/
When a National Security Agency contractor revealed top-secret details this month on the government's collection of Americans' phone and Internet records, one select group of intelligence veterans breathed a sigh of relief.
Thomas Drake, William Binney and J. Kirk Wiebe belong to a select fraternity: the NSA officials who paved the way.
For years, the three whistle-blowers had told anyone who would listen that the NSA collects huge swaths of communications data from U.S. citizens. They had spent decades in the top ranks of the agency, designing and managing the very data-collection systems they say have been turned against Americans. ...
Jesselyn Radack: Not only did they go through multiple and all the proper internal channels and they failed, but more than that, it was turned against them. ... The inspector general was the one who gave their names to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution under the Espionage Act. And they were all targets of a federal criminal investigation, and Tom ended up being prosecuted â" and it was for blowing the whistle. ...
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
What might happen, or what already has: 1. Declaration of war upon something other than a sovereign nation to justify unregulated spending in the name of oil field conquest. 2. Fear mongering to justify a surveillance state, and throwing pork to defense contractors/gangsters to build and run it. 3. Two to the chest on the economy, to try and correct the general direction economically, big loans from fed directly affecting national deficit (to which we as a people are all responsible for), and sellout to continue to fund this behind a classified trade agreement with China who have now begun to underwrite pretty much everything here. Exactly where should the treason charges be placed? To what extent should a government be tolerated waging an info war against it's own citizens at their expense? Every day that passes with this crap going on, the third round put to our own foot advances, because when the economy fails bud, at the end of this road we are on not even government paychecks are going to cash. The threat of terrorist attack has always been there, it is just more pronounced now through media coverage and fear mongering.
Check the user ID on my account before assuming I'm a teenage asshat, bub.
--Fesh
Kill -9 'em all, let root@localhost sort 'em out.
I think it's reasonable to believe that some program that the NSA has some involvement in has played some role in the preventing some sort of "attack" in the U.S. and some subset of the approximately 200 countries around the world. I don't think it's reasonable to believe that has anything to do with the phone and data issues at hand.
As I recall, there are two issues here. One is the phone stuff and the other is the collection of internet data in collusion with MS, Google, Apple, etc. It seems to me that the latter revelation, the one involving internet data, is the more concerning of the two. It also seems they agree since they only want to talk about the former, the phone record stuff, and hope, I suppose, that stupid people will conflate the two.
put it in a lock box," Rogers told CBS News
I wonder if this is the same "lock box" the republicans ridiculed Gore over.
One final thought on all the "justification" going on:
"Equivocation is half way to lying and lying the whole way to hell."
[Penn]
Lay money: before the year is up, we will hear about an NSA employee (or more likely, one of the several thousand contractors with Top Secret clearance that is given out like tissue paper) using all this data against their ex or soon to be ex-spouse in a nasty divorce fight. Or for stalking the babysitter. Or insider trading. Or screwing over a shitty neighbor. Or...
And this, dear Frightened Compliant Snowflakes, are but a few reasons why this system is dangerous and deadly to democracy; NOBODY IS WATCHING THEM.
If what they are saying was true, they could do so with a modest size server, or even a high-end laptop these days. The fact that they built this:
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/
Is living proof they are not telling the truth.
I stole all of your money, but I've only spent $20 so far.
Feel comforted?
.....denied entrance to the airliner by the French, an "unknown" from the US State Department office ushered him past security?
Huh? Like I would believe anything former Bushie-now-Obama guy, DNI head, Gen. James "sure there's WMDs in Iraq, and as part of the Bush fabricated Iraqi intel group, I should know" Clapper, or Chambliss, that cracker neocon draftdodger from George?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=hnMPQmIPibE
You've left out a very big, very important detail - Where do the spooks get all these phone numbers? That's right. From a great big "phone book", built from the traffic of every phone in the country. You had no right to collect that data. Period. No..., it does not fucking matter that you aren't doing anything with my phone number, yet. Who I call, when I call, where I am when I call them, where they are when I call them, etc., is none of your fucking business unless you have reason to believe that I am, or one of the people in my circle is, up to no good. And no, Mr. President, it does not fucking matter that you aren't "actually listening to my phone calls". You don't need to do that to gather a rather astounding detailed profile of my life. And no, Mr. President, Congressman, and anyone from the mainstream media who is actually curious enough to understand this issue., I do not fucking care that you may have stopped "teh terrorists" from blowing up a subway. First of all, you can do what you've been doing without collecting all the data you've been collecting. Dig up the probable cause, get a warrant and then start collecting. But do not think, for one second, that I am willing to trade my precious rights to privacy for you to save a little detective work. I am not. And I vote. Whistle blowers are heroes. They deserve a national holiday.
If the claimed success at breaking terrorist plots were even remotely true, this should have especially been visible in Iraq. Forgotten by the rah-rah American media, Iraq has been suffering from steadily escalating violence, including a string of bombings just yesterday.
Fuck the NSA, and its masters.
This illustrates the differences between ideologies: You libertarians don't want any monitoring. We liberals want limited monitoring.
Speak for yourself.
Thank you, Edward Snowden.
"Arguments from authority are worthless." —Carl Sagan
The police can conduct covert surveillance through all sorts of methods not available to the NSA.
And the NSA can do all sorts of surveillance not available to the police. Big deal. You are missing the point. The precise techniques used are not important here. What is important is who is watching the watchmen. I don't give a damn THAT the NSA is listening and generally don't care much HOW. I do however care about WHO they are listening to and WHY and most importantly WHAT is preventing them from abusing their power. A secretive organization operating a secret program to to spy on unknown parties under secret directives which is overseen by a secret court that issues secret rulings is not what I would call accountable.
Quite frankly I have FAR more to fear from the NSA than I do from any terrorist. My government has a very recent history of torturing individuals, indefinite imprisonment without trial, targeted assassinations, justification of doing so again US citizens, "extraordinary rendition" and more.
The NSA is specifically targeting people overseas with this program, that has been clear
That is NOT even remotely clear. We don't know what the NSA is targeting. We know barely any meaningful details and none appear forthcoming. We also have no transparent oversight. The only thing that is clear is that we don't know very much and that is what is worrying. An unaccountable government agency is a very dangerous thing.
I remember reading an article about how in order to subvert email monitoring systems, the terrorists would open up a webmail account, write an email in the account but never send it, leaving it as a draft.
You do realize that is EXACTLY how David Petraus (the former head of the CIA) was caught cheating on his wife, right? If it is online, it can be seen. Only an idiot would think an unsent draft in a gmail account was somehow secure against anything.
If they admit they are monitoring communications like this, even at an extremely basic level and collecting the information described, then the whole system becomes worthless because the bad guys they're trying to capture will just not use the system, and then there's no point.
That is an incredibly naive view of how things work. If these bad guys truly are so dumb that they would only secure their communications if we admit we are listening to them then it should be very easy to find them. Some of them may be that stupid but any of them worth worrying about probably are not. They KNOW the NSA is listening and it's not hard to guess how they might be doing it. That does not however mean that the NSA has a right to hide that fact from the very people they are supposed to protect. NOTHING is gained by keeping the mere existence of this program secret and there MUST be some means by which the actions of the NSA are made accountable to the citizens.
This is no different than what the Allies did with Enigma and Magic
It is vastly different because the NSA is monitoring ME without probable cause. I don't give a crap if my 4th amendment rights are inconvenient for the NSA. They are there because power gets abused if left unchecked.
If there were provisions in the law which said any eveidence obtained, can't be used for ANY other purpose other than for finding terrorist and preventing terrorist acts, then I and most other people would be fine with it. BUT, there isn't a provision like that, and never will be.
Google "what country created al-Qaida' - Whenever you hear that fucking name mentioned a HUGE red flag should pop up in your mind. (or any sane thinker's mind)
al-Qaida is a CIA/NSA asset. What does that mean for you non-thinkers out there who salivate at CNN/MSNBC/Foxnews ? It means the CIA uses al-Qaida and it's "terrorism" (ie events propagated by the CIA and NSA through paybacks to their agents) as a Psyop into scaring you to give up your civil liberties for "freedom".. Freedom like the TSA, DHS, patriot acts, domestic drones, using domestic drones to kill someone labeled a "terrorist", and the latest farce collecting all of your personal data in order to defend us from "al-Qaida" - the CIA/NSA created, fictional, 9-11 was an inside job asset.
I do not give a FUCK if im modded down/flamebait - the truth needs to be spoken and the truth is this is all about MONEY
yes MONEY - keep a perpetual war machine going, you keep war contractors and the rulers of this Earth happy.
"but just tell people what your doing and I have no problem with it" - you are a fucking sheep who i hope is hit by a car this afternoon - I'm all about culling the population to 300 million people if it involves your dumbass hitting the gas chambers first.
I'd rather let them blow up the subway than see the loss of my liberties. While every man should put self-preservation first nobody as a whole should put the lives of a few ahead of ones liberties. Obviously what I'm suggesting would put my own life at risk. It is unlikely to cause my death however even if some lives will ultimately be lost in the process. We can't or shouldn't save everybody from there ultimate demise. We should maximize the saving of lives by redirecting our finances at medical research. Lets eliminate as many types of cancer as we can, aids, etc. Terrorists are the least threatening thing to us than just about any other risk.
Assertions without verifiable evidence do not rise above reasonable doubt. Trust is not given; it is earned. Therefore constitute lies promulgated by Federal Employees and Federal employees are without trust.
Cover story or accurate?
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
It doesn't matter if you are for privacy or not (although you probably should be). The NSA has proven that it can be compromised. Simply imagine if Snowden had released all email, phone records etc.. of everyone everywhere. With a little bit of work everything could be indexed and made easily available and searchable by anyone. The damage that this would have caused would have literally thrown the world apart (and kept divorce lawyers busy for decades). Heads would have literally fallen. Nobody can risk this kind of thing ever happening. That reason alone is justification alone not to have such a system.
From Wikipedia:
General writs of assistance played an important role in the increasing tensions that led to the American Revolution and the creation of the United States of America. In 1760, Great Britain began to enforce some of the provisions of the Navigation Acts by granting customs officers these writs. In New England, smuggling had become common. However, officers could not search a person's property without giving a reason. Colonists protested that the writs violated their rights as British subjects. The colonists had several problems with these writs. They were permanent and even transferable: the holder of a writ could assign it to another. Any place could be searched at the whim of the holder, and searchers were not responsible for any damage they caused. This put anyone who had such a writ above the law.
Does this not bear a resemblance to what is going on today?
Let us re-visit the 4th amendment:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
No True Libertarian would put up with such nonsense, either.
"The best way to take control over a people and control them utterly is to take a little bit of their freedom at a time, to erode rights by a thousand tiny and almost incremental reductions. In this way people will not see those rights being removed until past the point at which these changes cannot be reversed."
-Adolf Hitler
Was the storage not around 5 zetabytes?
Storing a callog, without any other info, for every single person around the world
64 bytes per call (16 bytes caller number, 16 bytes receiver number, 8 bytes timestamp call-started, 8 bytes call ended and 16 bytes for overhead for DB storage )
If each person is making a call every 5 minutes, 105120 calls per year. (this would result in every single person on earth making or receiving a call every 2.5 minutes..)
(105120*64*8000000000) / 10^21 = 0.0000538214 zettabyte
Lets add some more data into the logs...
All web-accesses...
4 bytes from IP, 4 bytes to IP, 255 bytes (average) URL, one access per minute.
( 263 * 8000000000 * 365 * 24 * 60 ) / 10^21 = 0.0011058624 zettabyte
So still not near enough to the storage they got...
So lets add some mails to the equation...
Every single person in the world sends a 1Mb mail every hour of every day of the year..
(1048576 * 8000000000 * 365 * 24 ) / 10^21 = 0.0734842060 zettabyte
My guess is that they are storing a hell of a lot more than just web/mail/phone-logs... From the above examples we only get 0.0746438898 zettabyte and with those exaggerated examples we still have 4.9253561102 zettabytes available...
So either they have really incompetent people designing their systems or they are not telling the whole truth...
So there is the possibility of front running for financial gain. Thankfully, a great deal of the work seems to have been carried out by private corporations so that limits the scope for such shenanigans.
They could stop every crime if they mounted a camera and GPS around everyone's neck and recorded it 24x7. Is that coming next?
Can't they at least pay for the internet if they are going to steal, i mean take, our data???? We get charged to use the internet and to have our data stolen?
It should be pointed out that the PRISM operation is not the only thing happening at the NSA. The NSA has many many programs and operations running simultaneously. True transparency would mean all them would have to be disclosed to the public. And I doubt the public would like what the NSA is doing. Not to mention every other nation on the planet.
So, let me get this straight. They *could* legally scour through personal effects, communications, papers, whatever you like, of every single person in the country, put it all in a gigantic warehouse somewhere, and as long as it was "metadata" about it (say, who the letters were "To:" and "From:") and they made only very specific requests for a few hundred people under the supervision of the court with a warrant demonstrating probable cause, that's all okay? No constitutional issue with that kind of "dragnet collecting *everybody* first, select a little bit later" process? Hard to believe.
Did they miss the part where warehousing all that stuff in the first place was a violation before they even got to the specific warrant that they're hiding behind? I mean, what the hell? They get data from mostly innocent people, but don't look at it, so it's okay to collect it all? Is this some kind of Schroedinger's cat metadata where it is legal if they don't look at it, but isn't legal if they did look at it, and until someone looks at it in an illegal way the fact that someone had stuffed a cat in a potentially deadly box doesn't matter at all?
Except for private Twitter accounts and deleted/redacted Tweets. Only the Library of Congress has the originals, in context.
What you see via the public, port 80 web interface to Twitter or via their API is nowhere near to the full Twitter data stream.
Given the total inability of NSA mouth-pieces to tell the truth, I think that what they are saying about numbers (of any kind), added with about $5 will buy you a nice cup of coffee at Starbucks!
ok, so they collected data from corporations, by "court order" without a reasonable suspicion. (And no, "something might possibly happen" isn't a reason). Then when a foreign suspect pops up (notice how they use the word "terrorist" but here a person is innocent until proven guilty, so they are at best a suspect) They then search ALL the data they illegally collected. This also sounds like an unreasonable search. Then and only then did they then "follow proper procedures" and laws. And that somehow makes it ok?
It is still unconstitutional. We have the right to be secure in our persons and our belongings. This meant we were secure.
All thanks to the boogey man.
It has private contractors to do that...
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
All "good Americans" should believe this and everything else the government tells us. This is top secret stuff and if they disclosed everything to the traitorous public, then there would have to be some executions taking place. They say it has stopped terrorists and you'd better believe it or else. By the way, if you know what's good for you, you won't discuss this on your telephone or via e-mail.
Bullshit
The General in charge of the NSA indicated to Congressional Super Duper Delegates that NSA Servileness could have prevent Judas from blackmailing Jesus and thus prevented the death of Jesus.
Congressional Super Duper Delegates' 'jaws dropped to the floor' of the Congress joint chamber.
Senator Mitch McConnell was quoted as saying "After hearing that I had to run out to the "mens' room to masturbate a while to clam my nerves and get a clear mind on this thang."
WHOOOO WEEEEE.
he's lying, folks. that's the plain and simple of it. they're all liars. we've confirmed that a thousand times in the past. why in the world wd we trust them now?
the rulers have lost their moral authority. half and better of us have known that for a long time. the Snowden thing is just the straw that has broken the camel's back and got us into the streets. all the liars have left is very stupid lies like the ones this simpleton is spewing. they're liars and they have no right to rule. end of discussion. we now need to start DOING things.
How do the drone attacks and assassinations come into this?
Do they violate the civil rights? How many people has Obama had killed? Do you even know?
Given that bitching about the public transport system is a perennial subject in every city that I've visited (even Seoul and Munich ! ), doesn't that make Al Quaeda the good guys and the NSA the bad guys?
OK, you'd have had to get them to carry out their re-development at breakfast time for Riyadh. But since the redevelopers would most likely have been Saudis, and being religious, they'd have been as thick as coagulated pigshit, then that shouldn't have been too difficult.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"