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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.'"
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.
Because sunlight is the best disinfectant.
Why would them hiding even more stuff make anyone trust them more?
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 vast majority of Verizon's (and any US carrier's) calls are from one US number to another US number. They could just have requested all phone calls from/to a short list of foreign numbers. Or at most they would have asked for all calls to/from a list of foreign countries. That's still a lot of calls but hundreds of times less than the full call database. Then, once they had identified a US number that seems associated with foreign terrorists, they could examine all calls to/from that number and tap the line.
The court order says every call. Why would a judge give them that level of access if all they wanted was calls to/from a handful of numbers? Bottom line, the story the Congressman is telling is completely at odds with what we now know about the extent of the information the NSA requested and received.
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?
Also, don't forget the government tendency to declare victory. I'm reminded of how it designates "all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants". How many of these plots would have even gone anywhere? They might've broken into someone's home who ordered some waffle mix overseas, declared him a "terrorist", shipped him off to Guantanamo Bay, then chalked up another point for the Good Guys(tm).
I tend to be a pessimist about things that happen in secret.
That poll is flawed.
If you ask Americans if they're okay with the government tapping the phones of Americans for national security, 56% say yes, but if you ask them if they're okay with the government tapping the phones of ORDINARY Americans for national security, that number flips to 58% opposing it.
The way it was worded and due to the weird ways people make assumptions about the authority of the people asking polls, most people assume that the feds were only tapping the phones of bad guys.
This. This is exactly how I almost turned my ultra-conservative, war-hawk, get-the-terrorists-at-any-price to stop defending the program. I just simply said, "what if the democrats had a full-blown, no-secret, Muslim run for president on the idea of diversity and part of their platform is that they would implement Sharia?"
"Well, no raghead would ever get elected."
"His Muslim friends will make cheap oil available and they will run on taxing the rich so that more people get handouts from the government. I mean, democrats already got 47%; how much harder would an additional 4% be with that?"
"Well, we'd rise up against the flagrant violations of the Constitution."
"And now, the administration calls you terrorists and starts monitoring who you call because someone else called you under the same guilt by association theory. And that is what they admit they do, they'd probably bug your phone too."
(dead silence, sound of rusty gears starting to turn again in his head) "Yeah.... They've gone too far. We've got to stop OBAMA. "
(I sigh because I got so close.)
An interesting note to that conversation is how much of that just went unchallenged because Fox News has convinced him that it is actually possible.